About 100 members of various faith communities in Philly spent four days on exactly that topic last week, as part of an intensive course run by the Mayor’s Commission on Faith-based and Interfaith Affairs and The Truth Telling Project.

More than 80 participants will begin a course that thoroughly studies reparations and discusses how Philadelphia congregations can pay them.

“Reparations offer transgenerational healing and release our White ancestors from the myths we have trapped them in. Perhaps we can reverse the harm perpetrated across our lineages. I long to invite our Quaker ancestors’ ghosts to become teaching spirits.” - Lucy Duncan

Lucy Duncan and Rob Peagler from reparation.Works discuss the questions that help guide their work.

Lucy & Rob share insights from Quaker abolitionist Benjamin Lay’s life and how they consider reparations a tool to accomplish much of what Benjamin Lay wanted to accomplish in terms of disrupting white supremacy and moving toward healing and repair. This was the inaugural Benjamin Lay Lecture.

A condensed version of Lucy & Rob’s Benjamin Lay Lecture

An op ed in the Philadelphia Inquirer in support of the newly established city reparations task force, detailing some of the faith-based reparations work that Lucy & Rob have been helping to organize, and making a case for the spiritual transformation that can arise from reparations.

A conversation between Beverly Ward and Lucy & Rob for Quaker Earthcare Witness. “We are aiming for healing and repair and it needs to happen on the level of spirit, relationship, and resources.” - Rob Peagler

Green Street Friends is starting with a series of legal clinics to help preserve the wealth of Black homeowners.

Green Street Monthly Meeting plans to spend $50,000 per year on reparations in Germantown for the next ten years.

The Mayor’s Commission on Faith-based and Interfaith Affairs hosted this event in Dec, 2021 inviting Black and white (and non-Black) people of faith to examine reparations as a deep faith commitment of spiritual repair and redress for intergenerational harms arising from slavery and its afterlives.

A conversation between Rev. Naomi Washington Leapheart, Lucy Duncan, and Lisa Sharon Harper, author of Fortune: How Race broke my family and the world and how to repair it all.

On June 20th, 2022 the Truth Telling Project, Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, and the Mayor’s Commission for Faith-based and Interfaith Affairs hosted a revival featuring local faith leaders in which the Philly case for reparations was made, calls to confession and demands for reparations were offered, and testimony from faith leaders working within their congregations on reparations were shared. This revival including spoken word, powerful music, and an uplifting call for repair.

An article in The Philadelphia Inquirer about the June 20th revival, “Rise up for Reparations.”

“We are daily becoming reparations people,” said the Rev. Naomi Washington-Leapheart, the director of the mayor’s commission. “We are here to kick off a faith-based moral movement for reparations, right here in the city of Philadelphia.”

Rev. Naomi Washington-Leapheart

WHYY explores the topic of reparations and ideas of how various plans and concepts could lead to eliminating systemic racism within Black lives and communities in this three part series. Lucy was interviewed and is included in the episodes.

$4 billion. That’s the estimated economic value of the four million enslaved people held in 1860. Despite their enormous impact on the United States economy, African American people were never paid for their contributions. For this nation to truly heal, we must rectify our original sin of slavery.

On Weds. June 22 FCNL hosted a conversation featuring Lucy Duncan and Abibat Rahman-Davies to discuss how Quakers and friends are advocating for reparations in public policy and engaging in reparations projects in local communities.

“I tell the stories of early Quaker relationships to slavery because slavery was never really abolished. If we can reckon with the full truth of our connection to slavery and its afterlives, perhaps we can begin the healing necessary to fulfill the promise of the Religious Society of Friends of Truth.”

“Civility is no substitute for morality. Belief in peace doesn’t mean naively expecting everyone to get along. Being quiet and polite is often all that’s needed to perpetuate white supremacy.”

A four session e-course for white people of faith to deepen their embodied work for racial justice. Engage in deep, embodied learning and practice with other white people of faith working to end white supremacy. In this course, build the skills to show up fully, follow BIPOC leadership, speak effectively, and engage in direct action.

“Friends Niyonu Spann and Lucy Duncan partnered in mythic and personal storytelling that brought us face to face with the pain and healing that come from working through the “generational trauma” of racism and white supremacy among us. “So much of our truth,” Niyonu and Lucy told us, “is locked in ‘inappropriate’ stories to share” — yet without confronting one another boldly in truth, we are doomed to festering wounds and spreading injustice. “We must go through the pain of recognizing so we can be a whole community.”