REPARATIONS in Athens, Georgia -- A Video Conversation

It started on a bus ride last summer as I was traveling with the delegation of the Georgia Poor People's Campaign for the 2024 March on Washington. At one point I sat next to Chaplain Cole Knapper who attends Ebenezer Baptist Church West in Athens, GA. Chaplain Cole told me just a bit of the story about how folks from Ebenezer West and Oconee Street United Methodist Church joined hands to undertake a reparations project aimed at a grave injustice in Athens. I wanted to hear more, and so Chaplain Cole arranged this conversation with Alys Willman and JoBeth Allen of Oconee Street UMC -- and partners in the entity they formed: Athens Reparations Action.

If you're wondering, here in 2025, whether reparations can be a practical strategy for racial justice and healing, or whether it's just some fantasy that has no serious hope for enactment, I invite you to pull up a chair. Listen as these three women unfold what they did, how they did it, and the impact it has had on the Athens community and them. I want to express my own personal gratitude to Chaplain Cole, Alys and JoBeth, along with the clergy and members of Ebenezer West and Oconee Street for this conversation. And to you, our readers, for your openess and continued hunger for racial justice and healing in our society today. Here's our conversation.

REPARATIONS -- A Conversation with Willye Bryan

Willye Bryan is the founder of the Justice League of Greater Lansing, Michigan. The following interview was begun in 2023 and concluded in February, 2025. 

Rev. Pat Jackson (He/him/his – Interwoven Congregations):  Willye, thank you so much for joining us for this interview.  Are you originally from Michigan? 

Willye:  Yeah.  I worked with people in the Mississippi Delta who in fact had been displaced from their homes because they wanted to vote. And this was in the early seventies. They were sharecroppers, and the landowners said: “If you go [to vote], you will have no place to live tonight.”  They went to register to vote, and they had no place to live that night. They were denied re-entry to their homes.  Some community organizations provided tents for folks to live in and began to solicit funds to build houses for them. We were a part of a sweat equity project that built 20 homes for people who lived in tents until those homes were built.

Willye Bryan visits Freedom Village in 2021.

Pat:   And we're talking the 1970s?!

Willye:  The1970s are like yesterday, right?  A village was incorporated, and it stands today.  It was named Freedom Village; you can Google it.  It’s not thriving as it once was, but it still stands. Those 20 homes are still there.  We set up adult basic education, teaching people to read and write, and job training centers around a nine-county area there in the Mississippi Delta. Freedom Village was the core of that.  The programs were really very helpful to a lot of Black people in the Delta who were for the most part sharecroppers, uneducated, had no resources, and didn’t know how to apply for a job because they had always been on these plantations.  

When I do presentations with the Justice League of Greater Lansing Michigan, the organization that I started here in Lansing, I give this history of sharecropping and Jim Crow laws as background for why we need reparations.  Folks had nothing -- no background education or ancestral wealth in the aftermath of slavery.  So, we started the program here in Lansing, which is not the Deep South.  But all over the country we’re starting to acknowledge that reparations are warranted.

Pat:   How did you come to launch the Justice League of Greater Lansing?  

Willye:  I left the Delta and moved to Michigan in 1997.  I became a member of First Presbyterian Church of Lansing in 2000 which is a predominantly white church.  From the beginning of my membership there, I started doing educational programs around racial justice.  It was new for a lot of folks there to hear and talk about the aftermath of slavery, what is racism, what is white privilege?  We did church book reads, a series around films, and started pairing with an African American church in the community. 

I was starting to hear things like “What would be the next step?   What can we do about social issues like this?”  This was spurred on in 2020 with the murder of George Floyd. Coupled with that was the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. Black people were being decimated by the virus. African Americans are 14% of the population of the state of Michigan but 40% of the population that was dying from Covid in 2020. I knew this was because of the inequities that we see in health care, the lack of wealth accumulation, and overall disparities in marginalized communities. In January of 2021 I started teaching about reparations and I thought, “You know, I could do more than teach about this. Maybe we can have a project where we actually institute reparations for the community.”  Many white churches have huge endowments.  And what do they do with it? And so, I thought this would be an opportunity to right some wrongs. This would be an opportunity for Christians to live into Christianity, to actually create and become a part of the Beloved Community.

Willye Bryan and Justice League President Prince Solace making a presentation.

I wrote a paper to share with white pastors and white boards. It didn’t involve anyone opening up their purse and giving. We're talking about going to churches that have these huge endowments and in most cases these endowments were able to be accumulated because many predominately white denominations were complicit in slavery. Historically, many of these churches participated in the business of buying and selling their fellow human beings, chattel slavery. It is important to make the tie of how what we are experiencing right now is an aftermath of 246 years of enslavement -- and how white people benefit and how African Americans have been negatively disadvantaged by that system. I couched it in spirituality and the theological justification for approaching the subject.  I was pleasantly surprised that these ministers were saying. “Wow, maybe that is something we could do.”  So, it took off. I started with my own minister at First Presbyterian, Rev. Stanley Jenkins, and then extended to other Presbyterian churches. There was an Episcopal church and a United Church of Christ congregation that were also interested -- so we added to the coalition.  We became a 501(c)(3) at the end of 2023.  

Pat:   What are the main goals for the Justice League initiative?

Willye:  Our goal is to create a $1 million endowment and use the funds to support three pillars of educational scholarships, homeownership, and allow people to become entrepreneurs.

Pat:  Can you talk more about how this effort took shape inside First Presbyterian Church?  Was everyone on board, or did you have a small group of champions?  What were the dynamics?

Willye:   In February 2021 I initiated a couple of book reads: William Darity Jr. and Kirsten Mullen’s From Here to Equality and a book about Ida B. Wells, Passionate about Justice, by Dr. Catherine Meeks and Rev. Nibs Stroub.  Then as I said, I wrote a paper. (That can be found on our website: www.justiceleagueglm.org.) I started at First Presbyterian with the Rev. Stanley Jenkins and the social justice committee that I was leading. We had five to six forums.  Sometimes there were only five or six people in attendance.  Then I said to Stan that I’d like to come to the session and explain this approach where our church would share our endowment with the African American community.

Pat:   What was their reaction?

Willye:  I think it was one of those dynamic events where the right people were in the room, and the right members of the session said, "That would be great if we could affect that kind of change!" The motion was made that the church contribute $100,000 to the Justice League for reparations in the Greater Lansing community. The session passed it, and we were overjoyed.  That was May 2022.  Then the session went on summer break.

Prince Solace, Willye Bryan and Rev. Stanley Jenkins of First Presbyterian Church Lansing State Journal photo

Pat:  Then what happened?

Willye:  In September the session was back and that meeting went like: “Ah, wait a minute. I wasn't here when that happened.  Who passed that?”  I was invited to the session meeting to talk about how that came about.  Some folks in the room were saying “I'm not so sure.”

Pat:  What were the objections?

Willye:  It was new, churches tend to be very possessive, and not everyone was on board with the idea that you would actually take $100,000 from your endowment and distribute it to the African American community.  But nobody was trying to rescind the vote, so a sub-committee was developed that worked hard to figure out how to dispense the money correctly. Then we had a congregational meeting that answered a lot of those questions and laid out the plan for the accomplishment of disbursing the $100,000 to the Justice League.

Pat:  I believe I read that there's an Advisory Council of African American leaders who help to make these decisions, is that right?

Willye:  We have an Advisory Council composed of all African Americans from across different sectors in the community -- ministers, college historians, workers, people from private industry and economic development boards.  It's a nine-panel council that is really engaged.   

Pat:  So here we’re sitting in January 2025.  What’s been the progress and impact of the reparations program for the Justice League?    

Willye Bryan and Prince Solace speaking about reparations in a Public Television interview.

Willye: We have made tremendous progress during 2024!  We have done over 70 presentations throughout the community in churches and other organizations such as financial institutions, college and universities, and community organizations. We have had over 20 printed articles in local and state newspapers and articles in 10+ national newspapers and other publications. I’m very proud to say that we have been featured in several public radio programs including our local NPR station, WKAR;  State Side  on Michigan Public Radio, and NPR’s national program All Things Considered. It has been a special pleasure to be featured in 10+ publications of the African American press, such as the Atlantic Voice, Houston Defender, and the Michigan Chronicle.  

Our most exciting news is that we have distributed reparations that have been paid by the predominantly white houses of worship in the greater Lansing area, wonderful individuals, and corporate donors in the community. We were able to award ten educational scholarships of $5,000 each to 10 high school seniors heading off to college -- $50,000 in scholarships!

Recipients of reparations scholarships from the Justice League.

We have done great anniversary celebrations in the fall of 2023 and 2024. We are planning to enter our housing initiative this year by supporting a house build for an African American family who has not been a previous homeowner.  On January 24, 2025, we began an exhibit at the Michigan State University Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum which will highlight the Justice League and stay at the museum for seven months.  We are still doing presentations and educational sessions all around the community as well as other parts of the state and have received over $450,000 in reparations payments. Much success!

Willye Bryan and Prince Solace presenting a scholarship.

Pat:  That’s impressive!  As we settle in to the second Trump Administration, what are your feelings about the prospects for ongoing reparations work there locally in Lansing and nationally? 

Willye: I am not excited about another Trump administration. I am really concerned that the conservative lean we are seeing will put a damper on attitudes. Although, I have to say that we saw an encouraging event at our fall celebration in November. A donor called up on November 6, 2024, and transferred stock to the Justice League! I was excited that someone woke up after the election and purposefully decided to pay reparations! Hopefully, that is a good omen. Saying that, there are enough good people out there who will continue to do the right thing and we will see the establishment of what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called the Beloved Community in our lifetime.

REPARATIONS -- Interwoven Quarterly Issue

Woullard Lett is former national male co-chair of N’COBRA (The National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America) and presently the male co-chair for the New England Regional Chapter.  We began this conversation in 2023 and resumed it in January 2025. 

Pat Jackson (He/him/his – Interwoven Congregations):  Welcome Woullard, and thank you for joining us for this interview. Could you describe the mission and legacy of N’COBRA for our readers?

Woullard Lett, N'COBRA

Woullard (He/him/his):  N’COBRA is a coalition of organizations and individuals whose mission is to win full repair, reparations, for the descendants of Africans enslaved in the U.S., full stop. N’COBRA was started in 1987 at which time reparations was not a familiar concept at all.  So much of the work initially was focused on raising awareness to create a community-based movement advocating for reparations.  One of those strategies was advocating for a federal reparations bill, House Resolution 40.  N’COBRA has an annual convention, community coalition events, and we started something several years ago called the Ndaba.  The Ndaba is an African term that conveys this sense of a major meeting, where we pull together leading organizations within the community of African Descent, to discuss and decide how to promote this movement towards reparations. We brought the NAACP to the table with the Nation of Islam, and any number of organizations in between. At one time, N’COBRA was a big fish in a little pond. Now, over the last few years, the awareness and the energy around reparations has grown significantly, so much so that even Interwoven Congregations is doing a series on it!  N’COBRA was on what I call the bleeding edge, not the leading edge. We were the forerunners, the people who used to get laughed at.  “What are you talking about?  Reparations? It'll never happen. We don't want to waste our time.”  Many of the elders who started the organization are no longer with us.  Those of us now involved in the organization continue to hold the flag; it has not touched the ground. 

Pat:  How do you approach the process of reparations?

Woullard:  When we're talking about reparations, we're not talking about a broken labor contract where you owe some money because you cheated someone. We're talking about a broken human covenant where people were not only deprived but  dehumanized.  Reparations means repair.  So that's what we're trying to do, to mend this broken human covenant. If we're not approaching it from that perspective, then we're not doing the work; we're not doing enough.  In order to have the repair that is required, we have to have full repair.  So it’s acknowledgment, accountability, and atonement -- that's the process.

Pat:  Where would you just place the reparations movement today?

Woullard: I would place it on a precipice.   

Pat:  Why would you say that? 

Woullard:   Today you'll see that much of the conversation is being shaped around this idea that the repair that's required because of  the dehumanization of African personality in the European imagination is compensation.  Just give us the money and everything is good.  But as I said, this is not about a broken labor contract, it's about a broken human covenant.  Too often when people think about reparations, they only think about a transactional process. But the repair required  has to be relational.

Our Zoom conversation

Pat:  What's the corrective that you would like to see in the effort?

Woullard:  I'm not laboring under an illusion. They did the human genome project to establish that we're all human, but that really hasn't made a difference.  And the same thing could very well happen with reparations, with people making apologies and maybe even kicking in a little bit of money. But you'll still have disparate outcomes in terms of health, education, all of these other things.  This internalized idea of [white] superiority and [black] inferiority will continue.  That's my major concern.   Both parties, both the injurer and the injured, need repair.  We're talking about repairing society.   

I think that we must match the remedy to the injury.  The international community has identified five remedies:

·       One is restitution, to restore a people to their former state as much as possible. 

·       Another is rehabilitation -- both mental and physical rehabilitation.

·       Then there IS compensation -- compensating people for their losses to the extent that it can be established.  Compensation may be necessary, but by itself it is insufficient to make the repairs necessary to build this relational, human covenant.  

·       There is cessation and the guarantee of non-repeat. 

·       And finally there is satisfaction.  Satisfaction is actually acknowledging what has happened, making it a part of the public sphere and including it in history. It is also engaging with the harmed community and allowing them to determine what's needed in order to right the wrong. 

Pat:   We’re talking here in January 2025, a week after the second inauguration of President Donald Trump.  Would you say we’re in a new world now in terms of reparations?

Woullard:   I would suggest that we're not in a  new world. In fact, we're living in the old country that is centered around white supremacy.  What we're seeing now is more of the same.    The current administration has railed against DEI efforts, and people are saying ‘We want to get rid of this stuff, because we don't want to talk about our past’ and ‘You can't talk about slavery because it might hurt my children’s feelings.’

Pat:  Would you say that's where we are today? In a state of denial?

Woullard: Not just today -- all along.  You say we’re in a state of denial today -- and we weren't in a state of denial in the 1990s when they were talking about young African American males as ‘super predators?’  Would we say we weren't in denial when there was segregation?   All along, European Americans have been in denial about their behavior.   Thomas Jefferson had to be in denial to sit down and write the Declaration of Independence and assert that ‘all men are created equal’ while he had Sally Hemings over on the side while holding her kin in chattel enslavement.  

Pat:   Can we even be thinking about reparations today when we're in the midst of shutting down DEI programs?  

Woullard:  30 years ago, I came  to New Hampshire and reparations was not on the horizon.   I said “People supporting reparations, or Reparationists, are the ‘New Abolitionists.’”   When the abolitionists were on the scene back in the 1700s & 1800s and  raised the issue of  abolition, people would tell them, “What are you talking about?  You're crazy!  Slavery is the economic engine of the country. How can we afford to end it?  Anyway, it’s legal. So, it is acceptable.  Plus I don’t personally own any slaves.”   We get the same arguments today about reparations.   “We can't afford to make good on what is owed economically, financially to this community.   Plus, slavery was legal at the time.   And, my ancestors didn’t personally own any slaves.”   It's the same basic situation that we faced all along, the same denial, the same obfuscation of the issue, he same dehumanization of the African personality in the European imagination.

Pat:   What is your call to action for people? 

Woullard:   Our call is to do something.  Do something. Call your representatives and inquire about H.R. 40.  Talk to your local representatives , state and municipal. What are they doing?  But it’s a mistake to put all your chips on legislation. We have to do all the work.   What corporations should be held accountable? We need to be dealing with institutions, whether colleges or churches.  And we need to deal with individuals who have benefited from African chattel enslavement. Euro-Americans require repair from the moral injury of complicity. They have to transform their ghosts of guilt and shame into ancestors.  We’re talking about our collective humanity as the human family.  [END]

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