Last week, an email arrived that I keep returning to: a photograph of a smiling family on the day they closed on their home, the first recipients of a $10,000 grant for Black first-time homebuyers in Germantown. One family, one closing, one set of keys: a small thing and an enormous thing at once.
That grant came from Green Street Friends Meeting’s annual $50,000 reparations redistribution for Black Germantown neighbors through the organization birdSEED, and it is one small piece of a far larger effort. Through the Rise Up for Reparations campaign and reparationWorks, 20 congregations across this city have committed to substantive reparations, accountable not to their own comfort but to Black-led grassroots organizations. Our goal is 100 majority-white congregations, and we are a fifth of the way there.
These communities practice what we call the alchemy of reparations: real repair happening across three dimensions at once, namely relationship, Spirit, and resources. They reckon honestly with their own histories of complicity, change their internal cultures, build solidarity with Black-led organizations, and move resources including money, guided by the people most harmed rather than deciding among themselves what counts as enough.
The results are not abstract. Green Street’s free legal clinic, run on a budget of roughly $25,000, helped stabilize $11 million in Black housing wealth in Germantown by untangling contested property titles. Other congregational efforts have redistributed $100,000 to a grassroots economic justice organization, $40,000 to the Black Music Preservation Project, and more than $30,000 to a Black Quaker congregation and peace center. This is not charity. It is the beginning of return.
For some congregations, this has become inseparable from faith itself. At Tabernacle United Church in West Philadelphia, a community led by queer staff and shaped by the Social Gospel tradition, the pastor, the Reverend Katie Aikins, puts it plainly: “It’s all about faith, because reparations is, in a deep way, about our ability to repent and to be people who are willing to face harms that we’ve done and look at ways to repair. And to me, that is the absolute heart of the gospel.”
As our city prepares to retell the nation’s founding story, we have the chance to write the chapter that has gone unwritten for 250 years, the one where we remake our city and country into a space of justice rooted in repair and care.
Verona Stern, a Black member of Tabernacle who serves on its reparations committee, found her own conviction deepened at a conference organized by reparationWorks at Pendle Hill last summer. It “allowed me to see that there are other people and other congregations like ours that are committed to this work,” she says, “who feel that this work is important, and feel like this is what God is asking us to do.”
As Tabernacle prepares to sell its longtime building, its members are discerning how a percentage of the proceeds of that sale might themselves become an act of repair, a decision that could reshape the church’s relationship with its neighborhood for generations.
Imagine what 100 congregations could do.
It would be easy to read these as isolated acts of generosity. They are something else: small repayments on a debt this country has never settled. In this season of marking the country’s 250th anniversary, I keep returning to Frederick Douglass’s 1852 speech, “What to the Slave Is the 4th of July?” He said:
“What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour…”
Reading this today, it sounds deeply familiar, not just as history but as a mirror held up to the present. Chattel slavery was a horror of a distinctive kind, and yet its logic keeps mutating, finding new forms. What Saidiya Hartman calls the afterlife of slavery is all around us: the skewed life chances, incarceration, and impoverishment she catalogued, and newer forms too, like ICE agents hunting people as the slave catchers once did. During Reconstruction, a different world briefly flickered into view. Field Order 15, which called for the formerly enslaved to receive 40 acres, was briefly enacted; Black legislators were elected in record numbers; the fragile architecture of justice was for a moment realized. But in 1865, Andrew Johnson reversed Field Order 15 and restored the land to the pre-war white enslavers. Then came sharecropping and Jim Crow, slavery dressed in new clothes, and the cycle of oppression found yet another form.
The March 2026 United Nations declaration that named the trafficking of enslaved Africans and racialized chattel slavery the “gravest crime against humanity,” and that called for reparatory justice for affected peoples, echoes the clarion call in Douglass’s speech. The United States was one of only three countries, alongside Israel and Argentina, to vote against the declaration, which passed 123 to 3. What we have not yet faced is shaping our present in terrifying ways, and it is far past time to open our hearts, and our conception of ourselves, to find our way toward repair and toward the vision of a society built on liberation for all people.
The early abolitionists had believed that slavery could not truly be abolished without abolishing the United States as it was. They softened that argument, pivoting to say instead that slavery was simply inconsistent with who this nation claimed to be. It seemed to work. And yet I think they were onto something essential. The insane logics upon which this nation was built keep reasserting themselves, wearing new clothes, and they will continue to perpetuate themselves until we go deeper than the discontinuation of a practice and remake the very foundations.
It is far past time to open our hearts, and our conception of ourselves, to find our way toward repair and toward the vision of a society built on liberation for all people.
Reparations is one of the most powerful tools we have for that remaking. Grassroots reparations especially holds a particular promise, rising not from legislation alone, but from relationships, from congregations, from the intimacy of neighborhoods where we are known to one another. Angela Davis, in a 2022 conversation with Patrisse Cullors, asserted that “reparations have to be about revolutionizing our society, not just about money, but rather about retooling the society …” That work of transformation begins, I believe, in moving what we have among ourselves, in authentic relationships of solidarity, bringing to fruition a repair that no policy alone can deliver.
That is the invitation we are extending this Juneteenth. On Saturday, June 13, the Rise Up for Reparations campaign and reparationWorks hosted a multi-faith revival called “At 250 Years, It’s Time for Reparations.“ Through story, song, ritual, and prayer, and with the voices of leaders like the Reverend Greg Holston, Rabbi Julie Greenberg, the Quaker minister ,O., and Imrul Mazid, with stirring music by Aleigha Johnson and Karen Smith, we drew on the reparative teachings of many faith traditions and sent one another back out to do this deep and hopeful work. The atmosphere was determined and joyful. Participants left with concrete next steps including an invitation to a taster session to learn more about the Rise Up for Reparations Campaign on Saturday, August 15 from 4 to 8pm at Kol Tzedek, 5300 Whitby Avenue in West Philadelphia.
To people of faith across the Philadelphia area, I invite you to join us. To all Philadelphians of every creed and none, I invite you to support this work, and to tell your elected officials you expect them to meet it with action of their own including support of the Philadelphia Reparations Task Force’s process and report.
A revival is meant to wake people up. As our city prepares to retell the nation’s founding story, we have the chance to write the chapter that has gone unwritten for 250 years, the one where we remake our city and country into a space of justice rooted in repair and care. Douglass knew the difference between a celebration and a reckoning. That work is not built by governments alone, and it is not built all at once. It is built congregation by congregation, relationship by relationship, one set of keys at a time.
At 250 years, the time is now.
Lucy Duncan is co-director of reparationWorks, a member of Green Street Friends Meeting, and clerk of their Reparations Committee. Learn more or register for the August 15th Taster Session at reparation.works.
The Citizen welcomes guest commentary from community members who represent that it is their own work and their own opinion based on true facts that they know firsthand.
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