A pastor in Evanston, Illinois, the first U.S. city to adopt a municipal initiative on reparations, told a gathering of faith leaders on July 22 that they can play a key role in moving a community toward action on the long-debated issue, even if it takes a while.
The Rev. Michael C.R. Nabors, pastor of Second Baptist Church and president of Evanston’s NAACP chapter, said it took more than two decades for his city to provide reparations.
“Faith leaders have been involved from the beginning,” he told Religion News Service after addressing a webinar hosted by Religions for Peace USA on “Reparations: A Moral and Spiritual Responsibility.”
The webinar, which was attended by about 100 representatives of faiths including Christianity, Buddhism, Sikhism and Zoroastrianism, followed a news conference on Capitol Hill where religious leaders from a range of faiths urged congressional passage of H.R. 40, a bill that would create a commission to study reparations for African Americans for inequities dating to the time of slavery.
The Washington event included Bishop Eugene Sutton, whose Episcopal Diocese of Maryland approved a $1 million “seed fund for reparations” in September 2020, and leaders of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, the Washington Interfaith Staff Community and the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference.
In March, the Evanston City Council approved reparations that initially will provide mortgage and other housing assistance to local Black residents to make amends for racially discriminatory housing practices.
Nabors said the council’s equity subcommittee was led by a pastor; a town hall meeting featuring actor Danny Glover, a reparations advocate, was held at a church; and an interfaith clergy group wrote letters supporting the initiative.
“I believe that it is a matter of justice, it’s a matter of equality, it’s a matter of doing the right thing,” Nabors told the webinar audience.
“And reparations, it seems to me, lies at the core of every single major faith in the world. It is all about how we can repair the damage to those among us who have been hurt because of past practices, generally because of discrimination.”
Evanston’s reparations money will come from a 3% tax on gross sales of cannabis.
“I thought it was an ingenious idea, because so many African Americans have been incarcerated because of cannabis and marijuana,” Nabors told the webinar audience. “We’re talking about a $10 million reparations program for 10 years.”
The Rev. Aundreia Alexander, associate general secretary of the National Council of Churches, said her organization has developed a list of resources to support H.R. 40, including scholarly articles, Bible verses about justice and “counterarguments to the objections.”
Imam Khalid Griggs, director of the Council for Social Justice of the Islamic Circle of North America, expressed support for reparations for Native American populations as well as people of African descent. “It is past time for us to deny acknowledging what is owed to those whose backs and whose property, the accumulated wealth of this nation, was built upon,” he said.
Bruce Knotts, the representative of the Unitarian Universalist Association to the United Nations, said he hopes reparations will not be restricted to financial approaches. “I think reparations needs to be comprehensive,” he said. “It has to do with education. It has to do with money. It has to do with changing our paradigm on how we view racist attitudes that we have in this country.”
Alexander said that the collective sense of purpose on reparations is still evolving.
“What’s happening right now is that we are so accustomed to where we are and how we have been, it’s difficult to even imagine what our world would be like if we actually did not feel like someone had to be higher or lower or better than or less than,” said Alexander. “What would the world be if we actually saw each other as fully human and made in the image of God?”