Grassroots Reparations Campaign
Our Vision
We envision a world that is accountable for past harms, including slavery, colonialism, genocide, and other material and moral abuses. These past harms create the current conditions in which we live and impact our future. We seek to create a world where reconciliation is possible because racism is no more.
Our Mission
We uplift faith-based and ethically-centered frameworks that demand accountability for the history and current world conditions that slavery, colonialism, genocide, and other material and moral abuses created. We have set out to create a culture of reparations that emerges from spiritual practice, transformative education, and action.
Our Values
Pan Africanism | Political Autonomy| Collective Struggle and Accountability | Indigeneity | Intersectionality | Black Feminism Feminism | Decoloniality | Human Dignity | Peace | Internationalism
“Reparations is a spiritual practice. Reparations is the midpoint between truth and reconciliation.” –Dr. David Ragland and Dr. Melinda Salazar, Co-Founders of The Truth Telling Project
The Campaign
The Grassroots Reparations Campaign is a program of The Truth Telling Project that launched in 2019. Working from the outset with those who have been doing reparations work for decades before us, we are partnered with the following faith-based and ethically-oriented social justice organizations: the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (N’COBRA), Fellowship of Reconciliation Atlanta, Community of Living Traditions, Psychoanalysis for Social Responsibility, Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth, Interfaith Movement for Human Integrity, Center for Jubilee, Reconciliation and Healing, Racial Justice Rising , Coming to the Table, and Coming to the Table Virginia. We are committed to inviting a broad coalition of faith-based institutions, faith communities, and ethically-centered organizations to be part of an awakening to direct or indirect complicity in upholding systems of white supremacy. With other Black-led organizations, we invite ethically-centered organizations and congregations from various religious traditions to atone for and/or heal from participation in white supremacist culture, practices, and policies. (E.g. Click here for a Statement of Apology from Racial Justice Rising).
“Reparationists are the abolitionists of our time.” –Woullard Lett, Grassroots Reparations Campaign Partner and Male Co-Chair of the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (N’COBRA)
In 2017, The Truth Telling Project, Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth and Fellowship of Reconciliation began thinking about reparations as a way to accomplish racial healing and justice. This effort was led by Senior Bayard Rustin Fellow, Dr. David Ragland, International Fellowship of Reconciliation (IFOR) International Coordinator Reverend Lucas Johnson, and Chrissi Jackson, Co-founder and former Co-Director of the Truth Telling Project. Together they created the “FOR National Grassroots Truth and Reparations Campaign,” a program that, with the Truth Telling Project, emphasized the need to speak and hear the truth about the original sins of genocide, slavery, and post-slavery forms of systemic racism. The Grassroots Reparations Campaign, which is who we are today, incepted in 2019. Arguing that reparations is the midpoint between truth and reconciliation, we engage in interfaith consciousness raising about the need for reparations and have built a coalition of leaders from congregations, faith-based organizations, and ethically centered organizations. Our ultimate goal, in addition to encouraging critical reflection, is for white-dominated organizations to form reparative relationships with Black-led grassroots organizations that will define what reparations looks like for them.
The Sacred Reparative Season begins on Juneteenth and ends with Reparations Sabbath (or Saturday) and Sunday events held throughout Black August and the first through the third of December.
Juneteenth (June 19th) is a sacred day within the living theology of Black liberation. On and well beyond this day, we encourage our communities to seek education and learn more about the history of this nation.
July 3rd is the day Abolitionist Frederick Douglass gave his most famous speech, “What to the Slaves is the Fourth of July?” July 4th is a day for reconsidering history that remains largely unquestioned. The 1619 Project and decoloniality literature interrogate the presumptive, untroubled waters that leave out the brutal violence of enslavement and colonization against African and Indigenous peoples and their homelands and neglect to consider the heavy impact of this history on us today.
Black August originated following the murder of George Jackson in honor of political prisoners and Black freedom fighters. Throughout this month, with which we close out the Sacred Reparative Season, we encourage religious, faith-based, spiritual, healing, and ethically-centered communities to choose a date for #ReparationSabbath, #ReparationSaturday, and/or #ReparationSunday and adapt either their usual service to include the theme of reparations, hold an event outside of their usual service, or host a special event on a designated day.
We invite communities to hold Reparations Sabbath (or Saturday) and Sunday events on December 1st, 2nd, or 3rd, as well. The 2nd marks the UN International Day for the Abolition of Slavery and the start of a Jubilee Season commemorating General William Tecumseh Sherman’s 1865 issuance of Field Order 15 to grant 40 acres and a mule to newly freed Africans and African Americans in the U.S.
Reparations Sabbath, Saturday, and Sunday entail more than a service for a congregation or a special event for an organization. With these and other commemorative days, our Sacred Reparative Season encourages reflection, reconsideration, and movement toward reparative action. We invite you and your community to use this season as a time to reflect on our freedom dreams, heal from our collective trauma, and engage in education about our shared history with spiritual writings and teachings that prepare us for reparations in our personal, spiritual, and political lives.