Willye Bryan is the founder of the Justice League of Greater Lansing, Michigan. The following interview was begun in 2023 and concluded in February, 2025.
Rev. Pat Jackson (He/him/his – Interwoven Congregations): Willye, thank you so much for joining us for this interview. Are you originally from Michigan?
Willye: Yeah. I worked with people in the Mississippi Delta who in fact had been displaced from their homes because they wanted to vote. And this was in the early seventies. They were sharecroppers, and the landowners said: “If you go [to vote], you will have no place to live tonight.” They went to register to vote, and they had no place to live that night. They were denied re-entry to their homes. Some community organizations provided tents for folks to live in and began to solicit funds to build houses for them. We were a part of a sweat equity project that built 20 homes for people who lived in tents until those homes were built.
Pat: And we're talking the 1970s?!
Willye: The1970s are like yesterday, right? A village was incorporated, and it stands today. It was named Freedom Village; you can Google it. It’s not thriving as it once was, but it still stands. Those 20 homes are still there. We set up adult basic education, teaching people to read and write, and job training centers around a nine-county area there in the Mississippi Delta. Freedom Village was the core of that. The programs were really very helpful to a lot of Black people in the Delta who were for the most part sharecroppers, uneducated, had no resources, and didn’t know how to apply for a job because they had always been on these plantations.
When I do presentations with the Justice League of Greater Lansing Michigan, the organization that I started here in Lansing, I give this history of sharecropping and Jim Crow laws as background for why we need reparations. Folks had nothing -- no background education or ancestral wealth in the aftermath of slavery. So, we started the program here in Lansing, which is not the Deep South. But all over the country we’re starting to acknowledge that reparations are warranted.
Pat: How did you come to launch the Justice League of Greater Lansing?
Willye: I left the Delta and moved to Michigan in 1997. I became a member of First Presbyterian Church of Lansing in 2000 which is a predominantly white church. From the beginning of my membership there, I started doing educational programs around racial justice. It was new for a lot of folks there to hear and talk about the aftermath of slavery, what is racism, what is white privilege? We did church book reads, a series around films, and started pairing with an African American church in the community.
I was starting to hear things like “What would be the next step? What can we do about social issues like this?” This was spurred on in 2020 with the murder of George Floyd. Coupled with that was the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. Black people were being decimated by the virus. African Americans are 14% of the population of the state of Michigan but 40% of the population that was dying from Covid in 2020. I knew this was because of the inequities that we see in health care, the lack of wealth accumulation, and overall disparities in marginalized communities. In January of 2021 I started teaching about reparations and I thought, “You know, I could do more than teach about this. Maybe we can have a project where we actually institute reparations for the community.” Many white churches have huge endowments. And what do they do with it? And so, I thought this would be an opportunity to right some wrongs. This would be an opportunity for Christians to live into Christianity, to actually create and become a part of the Beloved Community.
I wrote a paper to share with white pastors and white boards. It didn’t involve anyone opening up their purse and giving. We're talking about going to churches that have these huge endowments and in most cases these endowments were able to be accumulated because many predominately white denominations were complicit in slavery. Historically, many of these churches participated in the business of buying and selling their fellow human beings, chattel slavery. It is important to make the tie of how what we are experiencing right now is an aftermath of 246 years of enslavement -- and how white people benefit and how African Americans have been negatively disadvantaged by that system. I couched it in spirituality and the theological justification for approaching the subject. I was pleasantly surprised that these ministers were saying. “Wow, maybe that is something we could do.” So, it took off. I started with my own minister at First Presbyterian, Rev. Stanley Jenkins, and then extended to other Presbyterian churches. There was an Episcopal church and a United Church of Christ congregation that were also interested -- so we added to the coalition. We became a 501(c)(3) at the end of 2023.
Pat: What are the main goals for the Justice League initiative?
Willye: Our goal is to create a $1 million endowment and use the funds to support three pillars of educational scholarships, homeownership, and allow people to become entrepreneurs.
Pat: Can you talk more about how this effort took shape inside First Presbyterian Church? Was everyone on board, or did you have a small group of champions? What were the dynamics?
Willye: In February 2021 I initiated a couple of book reads: William Darity Jr. and Kirsten Mullen’s From Here to Equality and a book about Ida B. Wells, Passionate about Justice, by Dr. Catherine Meeks and Rev. Nibs Stroub. Then as I said, I wrote a paper. (That can be found on our website: www.justiceleagueglm.org.) I started at First Presbyterian with the Rev. Stanley Jenkins and the social justice committee that I was leading. We had five to six forums. Sometimes there were only five or six people in attendance. Then I said to Stan that I’d like to come to the session and explain this approach where our church would share our endowment with the African American community.
Pat: What was their reaction?
Willye: I think it was one of those dynamic events where the right people were in the room, and the right members of the session said, "That would be great if we could affect that kind of change!" The motion was made that the church contribute $100,000 to the Justice League for reparations in the Greater Lansing community. The session passed it, and we were overjoyed. That was May 2022. Then the session went on summer break.
Pat: Then what happened?
Willye: In September the session was back and that meeting went like: “Ah, wait a minute. I wasn't here when that happened. Who passed that?” I was invited to the session meeting to talk about how that came about. Some folks in the room were saying “I'm not so sure.”
Pat: What were the objections?
Willye: It was new, churches tend to be very possessive, and not everyone was on board with the idea that you would actually take $100,000 from your endowment and distribute it to the African American community. But nobody was trying to rescind the vote, so a sub-committee was developed that worked hard to figure out how to dispense the money correctly. Then we had a congregational meeting that answered a lot of those questions and laid out the plan for the accomplishment of disbursing the $100,000 to the Justice League.
Pat: I believe I read that there's an Advisory Council of African American leaders who help to make these decisions, is that right?
Willye: We have an Advisory Council composed of all African Americans from across different sectors in the community -- ministers, college historians, workers, people from private industry and economic development boards. It's a nine-panel council that is really engaged.
Pat: So here we’re sitting in January 2025. What’s been the progress and impact of the reparations program for the Justice League?
Willye: We have made tremendous progress during 2024! We have done over 70 presentations throughout the community in churches and other organizations such as financial institutions, college and universities, and community organizations. We have had over 20 printed articles in local and state newspapers and articles in 10+ national newspapers and other publications. I’m very proud to say that we have been featured in several public radio programs including our local NPR station, WKAR; State Side on Michigan Public Radio, and NPR’s national program All Things Considered. It has been a special pleasure to be featured in 10+ publications of the African American press, such as the Atlantic Voice, Houston Defender, and the Michigan Chronicle.
Our most exciting news is that we have distributed reparations that have been paid by the predominantly white houses of worship in the greater Lansing area, wonderful individuals, and corporate donors in the community. We were able to award ten educational scholarships of $5,000 each to 10 high school seniors heading off to college -- $50,000 in scholarships!
We have done great anniversary celebrations in the fall of 2023 and 2024. We are planning to enter our housing initiative this year by supporting a house build for an African American family who has not been a previous homeowner. On January 24, 2025, we began an exhibit at the Michigan State University Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum which will highlight the Justice League and stay at the museum for seven months. We are still doing presentations and educational sessions all around the community as well as other parts of the state and have received over $450,000 in reparations payments. Much success!
Pat: That’s impressive! As we settle in to the second Trump Administration, what are your feelings about the prospects for ongoing reparations work there locally in Lansing and nationally?
Willye: I am not excited about another Trump administration. I am really concerned that the conservative lean we are seeing will put a damper on attitudes. Although, I have to say that we saw an encouraging event at our fall celebration in November. A donor called up on November 6, 2024, and transferred stock to the Justice League! I was excited that someone woke up after the election and purposefully decided to pay reparations! Hopefully, that is a good omen. Saying that, there are enough good people out there who will continue to do the right thing and we will see the establishment of what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called the Beloved Community in our lifetime.
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