Search

Antiracism

Evanston Congregations Support Community Reparations

Fundraising report planned for Martin Luther King weekend interfaith service

On Sunday, 18 faith communities in Evanston—including people from St. Mark’s, St. Matthew’s, and St. Luke’s Episcopal churches—will gather for a Martin Luther King Jr. weekend interfaith worship service. At the event, they will report to the Reparations Stakeholders Authority of Evanston the initial results of their effort to raise money for the Evanston Reparations Community Fund. The service takes place at 3 p.m. at Faith Temple COGIC and will be livestreamed.

The congregations first gathered in June to pledge their support for reparations in the form of education and atonement about structural racism; education in religious communities about racism and their communal history of racism; education about the reparations efforts in Evanston; and raising money to support reparations in Evanston, including establishing the fund. St. Luke’s was part of the group that organized the effort, which is separate from a city-sponsored housing reparations program that has recently faced criticism.

“There’s a pretty robust interfaith community in Evanston that has been gathering for years on issues of justice and protest,” the Rev. Kat Banakis, rector of St. Luke’s, said. “When the concept of reparations came up, there was a whole history of years and years of working together. Sometime last winter, we started talking about, ‘oh you’re doing something about it, so am I, so is this person — could we do something bigger and better as an interfaith community?’ That resulted in the pledge commitment … with the expectation from one another that we would report on our results together on MLK day of 2023.

For its part, members of St. Luke’s dug into the congregation’s archives to see what had been done at key points in history, specifically the summer of 1919, known as Red Summer, and during the Civil Rights Movement. During the Great Migration, they learned, a Black Episcopal church was started in Evanston. Congregation members wondered what contemporaneous vestry minutes or newsletters might have reported about the new congregation, but discovered very little was said. “An important part of our learning is about having been silent at key moments in our country and our church’s history,” Banakis said,

As the research was underway, Banakis issued a challenge to St. Luke’s members from the pulpit to raise $70,000 for the reparations community fund. Half the funds came from money set aside for outreach from a previous capital campaign, and individual members of the congregation contributed the rest.

A key aspect of the fundraising, she said, was that the Black community in Evanston, from which the board of reparations fund at the Community Foundation is drawn—not the people of St. Luke’s—will determine how the money is used.

“There was some pushback, of course. But, for the most part, there was a lot more energy and enthusiasm than there was pushback. And the fact that we were one of 18 congregations working together made a huge difference,” Banakis said. She credits author Jennifer Harvey with helping the congregation understand their efforts in theological terms. “If churches actually want to be people of the resurrection and who care about being a resurrected people, then we have to care about reparations and the material aspect of this kind of racism.”

At the service on Sunday, the interfaith community will announce bus tours intended to continue the reparations effort by building relationships and common understanding among their congregations. One will tour Evanston, and another will take participants to Chicago’s National Public Housing Museum and the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Living Memorial.

“For us as a historically white congregation, participating in reparations is to come to the table to try for relationship building, knowing that we can never undo the past; that whatever we can raise as a congregation is so minimal in terms of what is due in national reparations,” Banakis said. “We are well aware that this is not what is due, what is acceptable, what is honorable. It is what we can do right now, and what we are trying to do in good faith to be part of moving forward as a country.”