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WHEN REPARATIONS GROW FROM THE GRASSROOTS Until federal reparations happen, local organizations across the country are stepping up. Ray Levy Uyeda
ILLUSTRATION BY GRACE O'NEILL/YES! MAGAZINE
n 2019, Joseph Thompson, the director of multicultural ministries and assistant professor of race and ethnicity studies at the Virginia Theological Seminary, signed on to a team of faculty and staff that would coordinate the institution’s reparations program. He understood two things: The payments would never account for the harm and legacy of enslavement, and the work wasn’t primarily about the money. “How can you determine how much money would really make amends?” Thompson asks. “It’s not just about the money. It’s about, for one thing, telling the truth about the seminary’s history … [and] it’s about developing a true and authentic and equitable enough relationship with the families and the descendants.” The seminary’s team of researchers has begun to make disbursements to 12 families, between 30 and 35 people, whom Thompson refers to as shareholders. The goal is to work with the generation most closely linked with individuals the seminary enslaved as blacksmiths, carpenters, or bricklayers, as well as those who held similar positions during the Jim Crow era. As part of the program, researchers will document oral histories of the descendants of those who were enslaved and collaborate with the shareholders to decide how the reparations should be disbursed. “Hopefully [through this work], people will realize that the seminary belongs as much to the descendants of the [enslaved] people as it belongs to the white people that everybody always thought the seminary belonged, to because they are an integral part of the story,” Thompson says. The seminary’s Office of Multicultural Ministries is just one team of many around the country, including those at educational institutions in Virginia, cities like Evanston, Illinois, and in the state of California, working to make amends for the harms of slavery and its many legacies. Demands for these kinds of reparative payments have been around since the practice of enslavement was legal in the United States, but today they’re gaining new traction on a national scale, offering a vision for a just and equitable future that feels more achievable than at any time in history.
yes ! winter
2022 ::
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