Recent East Lansing High School graduate Olivia Burns’ upbringing was ripe with stark parallels.
As an African American child who was adopted by white parents, she wasn’t immune to the contrasts between her adoptive parents, who attended college on their parents’ dime and own their home, and her biological parents, who weren’t able to get much education and remain renters.
Burns traced her awareness of this juxtaposition this summer, when she penned an essay for a new scholarship established by the Justice League of Greater Lansing, a nonprofit racial justice organization founded in 2021. Applicants were descendants of enslaved African Americans who submitted 500-word essays examining racial and generational wealth gaps in the United States.
Her entry was selected as one of 10 winners in a ceremony Saturday at Lansing Church of God in Christ. She and her peers will receive $5,000 each from the Justice League’s $400,000 reparations fund, which is sourced from payments by local churches and individual donors.
Justice League President Prince Solace described the moment as “delivery.”
“Reparations is really this 400-year-old broken promise that we’re still trying to breathe new life into. How do you deliver on that promise? In a way, I feel like we are delivering this community from shame and from guilt through this course of education,” Solace said.
The inaugural scholarship disbursement came on the heels of a nearly three-year campaign by Solace, Justice League founder Willye Bryan and other allies as they worked to identify strategies for addressing the racial wealth gap in Lansing.
The seeds were sewn shortly after the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police in May 2020, a watershed event that prompted Bryan to approach Solace about launching a faith-based reparations program.
With many local churches boasting large endowments despite waning memberships, Bryan said it was the perfect time to fund the project.
“Many churches were complicit in slavery and even became rich because they bought and sold enslaved people,” Bryan explained. “So, it was very purposeful to take this to the churches, because it’s in their wheelhouse to talk about the sin of racism and how we can heal and repair the breach. Many of them were at a place where they were ready to listen.”
One of the first churches to participate was the primarily white First Presbyterian Church of Lansing, which Bryan and Solace attend. It pledged to give $100,000 from its endowment over 10 years, including $58,000 to date. Other substantial contributions included $173,260 from Edgewood United Church of Christ and $130,470 from All Saints Episcopal.
At first, Bryan said laying out the argument for reparations was “shocking for many people.”
“Reparations is a word that scares folks so bad. I wanted to demystify and normalize it, because once you talk about it, people start to realize that this is not so hard. We can sit down, put our heads together and work on fixing this,” she said.
Solace, 34, wasn’t raised in a formal church environment but said he has since reignited his own faith, in part, because of this activism.
“From a generational standpoint, people my age and younger may have negative connotations about the church. They think it may not be impactful or effective, or that it may even be hypocritical,” he said. “But while churches have benefited from the legacy of slavery, I also think the church is a place where transformation can happen when you have big minds at the table.”
Solace sees the scholarship program as the first of many ways to help Greater Lansing’s Black residents.
“Now that we’ve delivered in this area, we’re also focusing on housing and business entrepreneurship,” Solace said, noting that historically exclusionary housing policies have long prevented Black Americans from owning their own homes — a key component in establishing generational wealth.
“We take pride in not working in a silo. There’s a lot of community resources and people with experience who will help guide us in that area. In a way, it becomes a work of art as we continue fleshing everything out,” Solace added.
Evanston, Illinois, Amherst, Massachusetts, and Asheville, North Carolina, were among the first cities to establish reparation funds in 2020 and 2021, while San Francisco approved a $5 million plan last year. Closer to home, Ann Arbor’s City Council voted in June to explore the possibility of reparation payments.
Despite these outliers, Solace and his team are essentially working off a road map of their own design. It’s been successful enough to prompt groups from Louisiana, Ohio and Virginia to contact the Justice League to ask how they might be able to duplicate its model.
“We’re open to that, because we don’t just want to hold this to ourselves,” Solace said. “We want to expand on this within a theological framework and also make an impact at the state level on up.”
He believes the Justice League’s faith-based, bottom-up approach can translate into widespread, top-down reform down the road. For now, the organization’s leaders can take solace in knowing they’ve helped 10 recent high school graduates achieve their dreams.
Burns will apply her $5,000 toward attending Michigan State University, where she’ll study psychology with honors starting this fall. She was among dozens of Greater Lansing students who submitted scholarship essays, but her grades and formal interview helped separate her from the pack.
“A lot of times, when you look for advice on writing scholarships, it’ll tell you to fluff it up and be as likeable as possible. Trying to think about all of those things made me really nervous, but then I remembered I have a cool story and that I know a lot about this. Even if I didn’t win, my thought was to just be as honest as I could,” Burns said.
Burns found out she made the cut in a call from Bryan a few days before Saturday’s ceremony.
“It feels really unbelievable, honestly,” she said. “To know that these churches and organizations are taking accountability, recognizing the hardships and giving us an opportunity to come together and celebrate our heritage by giving to this cause, that means a lot to my community and to me.”
— TYLER SCHNEIDER
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