LANSING — A Lansing church made good on a commitment to raise money as financial amends for the Black community as “repentance, reconciliation and reparations” on Sunday.

The First Presbyterian Church of Lansing gathered about $80,000 in donations, with another $20,000 coming from a church capital fund, and presented a check to the Justice League of Greater Lansing.

Church leadership voted previously to raise money and send it to the Justice League, a group whose mission is to collect reparations for Greater Lansing’s African American community members.

The congregation intends to add to the total with income from the church’s endowment for up to 10 years. Sunday’s contribution meets a $100,000 pledge the church made to the reparations effort about two years ago.

Willye Bryan, a member of the church who founded the Justice League in 2021, previously said she had asked churches that want to make financial amends to transfer those funds to the Black community in the spirit of “repentance, reconciliation and reparations” that would be used to help start and fund Black businesses, mortgages and education.

“The vision of the Justice League is to gain reparations for the (thousands of) African Americans living within the capital area region,” Prince Solace, president of the league, told the State Journal in 2022.

The league’s all-Black board is be responsible for allocating reparations and hoped to have $1 million collected by the end of 2023, she said at the time.

“Churches have been just as complicit in slavery as any other group in the country and sometimes even more so,” Bryan said.

The Rev. Stanley Jenkins, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church at 510 W Ottawa St., said in the statement that his church had previously focused on examining privilege and had partnered with a predominantly Black congregation.

“Church members have long studied topics of white privilege and fragility, and have intentionally nurtured a relationship with another church that has a predominately Black congregation,” he said.

“But it was the death of George Floyd that acted as an immediate galvanizing force. We could not turn away or hide our heads in the sand. We took steps to do more: We publicly confessed our complicity and actively sought, and continue to seek, to repair what has been broken through slavery and its legacy.  

Reparations elsewhere

Legislators and community leaders across the nation have been addressing the topic of reparations. California became the first state with a reparations task force that, in 2022, called for extensive reforms in housing, education and the justice system. Detroit has launched a reparations task force aimed at issuing recommendations to help housing and economic development programs that address historical discrimination against the city’s Black community.

Contact Mike Ellis at mellis@lsj.com or 517-267-0415

This article originally appeared on Lansing State Journal: Lansing church pays $100,000 to Black community. Here’s why