[Diocese of Michigan] Three years after Michigan’s largest Episcopal diocese created a spirituality and race mission, Bishop Bonnie A. Perry is calling for its congregations to embark on a new phase of confronting the United States’ history of racism with a goal of raising money for reparations programs.
“We as a diocese have slowly, morning by morning as the psalmist writes, been exploring the legacy of slavery. I invite us now to enter into a period of deeper learning and greater engagement with this original sin of our country,” Perry said.
“My longing is that eventually the people, the congregations and the institutions of the Episcopal Diocese of Michigan come together to make a significant financial contribution that enables us to create pathways of hope and healing in our broken and divided world.”
Perry did not specify a dollar amount or lay out a timetable for the reparations work. She said it will take several years for the majority-white diocese to determine how it wants to address the issue.
The Diocese of Michigan consists of 76 worshipping communities and more than 14,000 baptized members in the southeastern and south-central regions of Michigan, stretching from Detroit to Lansing and south to the Ohio border.
The Detroit-based Diocese of Michigan joins a growing number of Episcopal dioceses around the United States in studying and funding reparations programs, including Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Texas, Virginia and Washington.
To facilitate the work, the Rev. Veronica Dunbar, the Diocese of Michigan’s missioner for spirituality and race, said a reparations task force will hold listening sessions across the diocese to gather input on people’s opinions about reparations.
“We also need to continue to listen to those affected by racialized injustice,” Dunbar said. “We need to keep learning together, to continue the conversation around our history and our lived experiences.”
That includes events like the Civil Rights pilgrimage to historic sites in Alabama, which the diocese launched last year. This year’s trip, which will take place in February, has been expanded to include high school students and a trip to honor the 60th anniversary of the voting rights march across the Edmond Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama.
There has already been some reparations work in the diocese. In 2023, All Saints Episcopal Church in East Lansing committed to donating at least $130,000 to a group working to reduce the disparities caused by slavery and racial discrimination.
To help lay the foundation for the next step, the theme of the diocese’s convention last fall was “Repairing the Breach.” Speakers included retired the Rt. Rev. Eugene Taylor Sutton, who created a racial reparations fund when he was bishop of the Baltimore-based Diocese of Maryland.
During a workshop at the convention, Sutton shared his experience and insight in spending 12 years to develop the Diocese of Maryland’s racial reparations fund with $1 million in seed money.
Sutton cautioned against giving in to critics who see reparations only as “white people writing checks to Black people.”
“Reparations is not about white guilt,” he said. “It’s about this generation finally taking responsibility for repaying a debt owed to a group of people who were never compensated for their work, and then subjected to legal and social structures that denied them justice and equity with white people.
“We asked ourselves ‘What would Jesus do?’ if Jesus was speaking to our diocese today, having enriched itself in no small part on the backs of Black and Brown bodies, and did not compensate them for centuries of their labor,” he said.
Although both Maryland and Michigan are majority-white dioceses, Sutton said the Diocese of Michigan should expect to chart a path of reparations that is different from a mid-Atlantic state where agriculture formed a lot of its racial history.
“There is industrial slavery,” he said, “and there is economic slavery, all based on the color of people’s skin. You can name it several things, but it still has the same effect of denying humanity to some people, making sure they stay put in certain areas, and having access to only certain jobs. Collectively, we all have a responsibility to repair the breach that centuries of racial injustice have caused.”