After 400 years, we have to face the wounds of slavery. Is this Ky. project a start?
One August evening at the Newtown Christian Church, Pastor William Reilly asked a deceptively simple question:
“When was the last time you saw that someone’s race or ethnicity mattered?”
The crowd of about 50, both black and white, stayed mostly silent. Then Rev. Rodney Mason, a black pastor who heads Wesley United Methodist Church, brought up the hiring of a black woman principal at Scott County High School, and how both her gender and race affected how people in Scott County perceived her leadership style. The conversation soon evolved into larger issues of race and education in largely white Scott County, which is exactly what Mason and the other organizers wanted to happen.
“This is bringing attention to reality of the society we live in,” Mason said. “This is starting to bring awareness to the reality that racism still exists in a variety of ways.”
“This” is The Angela Project, the brainchild of Rev. Kevin Cosby, who heads both Simmons College of Kentucky, the historically black college in Louisville and St. Stephen Baptist Church, one of the largest black churches in the state.
Four years ago, Cosby realized he’d heard nothing about plans to commemorate the 400th anniversary of 1619, the year the first group of enslaved people disembarked at Jamestown, Va., including an African woman who was recorded as Angelo or Angela. It was the start of the fledgling America’s original sin, which has led us in more ways than we are willing to admit, to this painful point in our history. It is crucial to understanding our history, and yet as Cosby noted, too many white people in America still don’t understand the tentacles that still emanate from it.
He started a weekly forum with white and black ministers from around Louisville to start a conversation about race. “Even the most progressive ministers did not understand what racism and white supremacy was all about,” he said. “White supremacy and racism for us is the disproportionate amount of power, wealth, real estate and resources that whites have that blacks have been locked out of, that whites use for the advantage of other whites and white institutions.”
The Angela Project has spawned a series of events in Louisville and elsewhere, including Georgetown, where a group of ministers and residents have been working on the book “40 Days of Prayer: For the Liberation of American Descendants of Slavery.” The book by Cosby’s colleague Cherie Mills, tries to address the spiritual aspect of our original sin. One of the closing prayers, for example, is: “Offer a closing prayer to God, and as you pray... Consider the prayers of the enslaved as they lay on the slave ship, stored chained together and stored like cargo for months on an unknown journey that was thousands of miles long. The bodies of the enslaved who died in the Middle Passage were thrown in the Atlantic Ocean.”
“God used my passion for racial justice, for racial reconciliation and passion for prayer to produce that book,” Mills said. “I wanted to focus on the humanity of the enslaved and the silence on the other end.”
The Angela Project will culminate on Aug. 20, believed to be the day Angela arrived in Jamestown, with an all-day forum on the topic, with a host of speakers and a religious service at St. Stephen Church. The group in Georgetown will hold a similar service in Georgetown at 6:30 p.m. at Faith Baptist Church.
“We have refused to face the painful parts of history, but we hope to start now,” Cosby said.
A Painful History
As students of history know, slavery was replaced for a brief, shining moment with Reconstruction, policies and politics that would have started to make economic amends to the newly freed, but was quickly replaced by a resurgence of white power that took back what few rights black citizens had been given, including the right to vote, hold office and own property. That white power was held in place with violence and economic policies such as Jim Crow laws, sharecropping, redlining, separate, unequal schools, stolen farms and a total lack of access to capital.
When the Federal Housing Administration was created in 1934, it refused to give home loans to blacks; the Social Security Act of 1935 excluded agricultural and domestic workers, which excluded a large percentage of black workers in the South. These policies were building blocks of wealth for white families after the Great Depression and World War II, and blacks were shut out.
This is more than academic — today, the typical black family has only 10 cents for every dollar held by the typical white family, according to the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finance.
Today, that oppression continues with police brutality, which many whites would not believe until the advent of phone cameras and YouTube, and our criminal justice system, which jails black citizens at much higher rates than whites.
The weekly lunches were meant to open the eyes of those who’d never been taught these causalities. Rev. Joe Phelps, the retired minister of Highland Baptist Church, saw himself as an educated progressive who’d dedicated his ministry to social justice.
“Yet I did not fully see how black America was in such an economic hole compared to white America at any point in the journey in the telling of our nation’s journey, from slavery to the present moment,” Phelps said. “We’ve heard the terms, but we haven’t appropriated the terms into our consciousness.”
Jason Crosby, the pastor of Crescent Hill Baptist Church, also identified himself as a progressive.
“Thanks to reading and conversations and relationships with people like Dr. Cosby, my perspective and understanding on the lingering effects of slavery, like Jim Crow, and the way it continues to affect the world has been permanently changed,” he said. “Personally and spiritually, it has changed the ground and footing upon which I stood.”
The Case for Reparations
Crosby said he’s now working with his congregation on the economic divides between East End and West End Louisville, looking at the ways that reparations for slavery can happen in small ways in individual communities.
But Cosby also wants the focus to shift to national reparations, a conversation that’s now taking place in Congress and the Democratic candidate debates.
“Reparations is about economics and education, giving the descendants of enslaved people the education and opportunities that were denied them because they’re black,” Cosby said.
The issue has moved from total silence to debate at the Democratic presidential debates and a hearing on Capitol Hill, where writers and activists such as Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of “The Case for Reparations,” spoke. For many, the first step would be the passage of H.R. 40, which would form a task force to study the issue.
Americans are clearly divided on this issue. But what we have to understand is that much of our country’s wealth, in the north and south, was built on the backs of one group of its citizens, a wrong that continues to this day. It’s not too late to understand, and it’s not too late to heal and amend for our greatest pathology.
That understanding is what the Angela Project is designed to bring.
Mark Thomas is a white Baptist pastor in training in Georgetown, who helped start the meetings there. He says that people are still convinced that black oppression ended with the Civil War, and in our racially politicized atmosphere, refuse to look deeper.
“The lingering effects of slavery are still very much present with us in America, in many different ways, they’re still affecting Americans in terms of justice and struggle, but there’s much that is unsaid and not talked about,” he said. “So the idea of the 40 days of prayer, was to raise our consciousness and conversation, to break down barriers that usually keep us separate, to bring genuine and lasting and substantial dialogue and allow real healing to take place.”
Linda Blackford writes columns and commentary for the Herald-Leader.
This story was originally published August 16, 2019 at 10:42 AM with the headline "After 400 years, we have to face the wounds of slavery. Is this Ky. project a start?."