Members of Boston’s black community are taking their quest to force white people to pay them reparations for slavery in a new direction by confronting churches and claiming they need to pay up for past slights.
Community organizers in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood called a news conference at the Resurrection Lutheran Church to blast churches over the trans-Atlantic slave trade that ended more than two hundred years ago for a practice that cost America more than 600,000 deaths by the end of our Civil War, according to the Boston Globe.
The leaders are calling on “white churches” to pony up and to provide reparations for the black community.
They also want the City of Boston to sink an incredible $15 billion into reparations.
“We call sincerely and with a heart filled with faith and Christian love for our white churches to join us and not be silent around this issue of racism and slavery and commit to reparations,” activist Rev. Kevin Peterson said.
“We are coming to get our check.”
Black churches demand reparations from White churches.
It’s all so tiresome. pic.twitter.com/fDUn66hSve
— iamyesyouareno (@iamyesyouareno) March 25, 2024
“We point to them in Christian love to publicly atone for the sins of slavery, and we ask them to publicly commit to a process of reparations where they will extend their great wealth — tens of millions of dollars among some of those churches — into the black community,” Peterson added.
Peterson is also demanding that the Catholic Church step up and support reparations in Boston.
Are reparations a good idea?
“They unfortunately assisted in sustaining institutionalized racism across the city,” Peterson accused. “Not only are we looking at the period of slavery, we’re looking at three centuries of institutionalized anti-black racism and the Catholic Church is inclusive of the churches we want to engage.”
Peterson was one of 16 clergy members in Boston who signed the letter from the Boston People’s Reparations Commission demanding that the city back the “financial and economic institutions in black Boston.”
The supposed “white churches” the black activists targeted include King’s Chapel, Arlington Street Church, Trinity Church, and Old South Church — all of which were founded in the 17th and 18th centuries.
At least one of those “white churches,” Arlington Street, is led by a left-wing activist, Rev. John E. Gibbons, who has been outspoken about his church’s — and others — supposed connections to slavery.
“Beginning in the 17th century, all of our colonial churches were founded on the profits of slavery. Colonial ministers were among the most likely to have enslaved servants,” Gibbons said, according to WHDH.
King’s Church is also jumping into the act of placating slavery reparations activists by supposedly creating a “memorial” to enslaved persons and raising a charitable fund to support so-called “social justice” efforts, the Globe reported.
For its part, Old South Church officials praised these efforts to pander to the black community.
Boston officials have already jumped into the reparations game by launching the Task Force on Reparations in 2022. The city started its office by hiring researchers to document the city’s ties to the slave trade. The office is also charged with the task of making recommendations of a reparations program.
Danielle Williams, director of the far-left social justice group Prophetic Resistance Boston, railed that blacks have been “washing the feet” of their oppressors for hundreds of years.
“Black people, the descendants of slavery have been washing the feet of our oppressors for well over 400 years,” Williams bloviated. “Now it’s time for you to wash our feet. The descendants of slavery, we want our reparations. We want it now.”
The outrageousness of this all is that Christian churches are at the heart of the movements that ended slavery, not just in the U.S., but across the Western world.
Men like American abolitionist and journalist William Lloyd Garrison, American Presbyterian minister John Rankin, British politicians and activists William Wilberforce and John Barton, and others led the Western world in ending the slave trade in the West. And Christianity was the heart of their argument against the practice.
But, it’s all just another way for the left-wing activists to make a grab for the money.
