WEEDS GROW THROUGH a rusted wash pail in a thicket beside the University of Georgia’s West Parking Deck in Athens, Ga. Littered with the detritus of college life — beer cans, a condom wrapper, Styrofoam containers — this area, unlike the otherwise pristine campus, is neglected and uninviting. Walk in anyway. Look under brambles to find a bent scrap of aluminum roofing, a green Coca-Cola bottle, a cooking pot, and a plastic toy rifle. These objects, buried under vines and rotting logs, form the understory of what used to be a working-class African American neighborhood called Linnentown. Children would swing from grapevines to get across the creek. Now college students, high-rise dorms, and cars swirl above the 22 acres of the erased community. This patch of land, mostly buried under concrete and steel, was stolen from the Cherokee and Creek people first, but the people who remember the second forced removal are still alive. They can’t get their land back, but there is a growing movement for redress for communities like Linnentown.

From 1962 to 1966, the city of Athens used eminent domain under the Urban Renewal Act to force Linnentown residents out of their homes so that the University of Georgia could build three dormitories and a parking lot for their growing, mostly white, student body.

The children of Linnentown are in their 70s and 80s now. As a child, Hattie Thomas Whitehead ran from yard to yard with her playmates and sometimes snatched pears from Ms. Susie Ray’s tree. Christine Davis Johnson enjoyed pears, apples, and pomegranates from the trees in her own yard. They both remember the bulldozers running in the middle of the night, the intentional fires, and the sense of outrage when their parents and neighbors were forced to accept a pittance for their homes and land.

“It was a warm place to live,” remembered Johnson, who was 20 in 1963 when she and her newly widowed mother had to move. Johnson bore double grief that year from her father’s death and the loss of her childhood home. “No hate. My mother didn’t teach me hate,” Johnson said, as she thought about how her tight-knit community was torn asunder. “It’s gone, it’s over, don’t go back,” her mother would say to her. Against her mother’s advice, Johnson would sometimes drive through what used to be her neighborhood, just to remember.

A public apology

SIXTY YEARS LATER, the grief of Linnentown residents is meeting some justice. Bolstered by the independent archival research of University of Georgia library staff member Joseph Carter, who approached descendants with his findings in 2019, Linnentown’s former residents used data to back up their painful memories. Carter and geographer Rachelle Berry worked with former residents to write a resolution presenting their grievances to Athens. In February 2021, Athens voted unanimously on the Linnentown resolution calling for remembrance and redress, and the city issued a public apology.

A 2022 report, commissioned by the city, calculated the financial property losses for Linnentown residents at $5 million. Because a section of the Georgia Constitution called the “gratuities clause” prevents direct payments to individuals, the city did not pay any descendants, but it agreed to invest $2.5 million and asked the University System of Georgia to cover the rest. (The University says it invests in the community in other ways.) The city is collaborating with the Justice and Memory Project, comprised mostly of Linnentown descendants, to allocate designated funds toward Athens’ first Black history museum and other services to improve the lives of Athens’ “historically impoverished communities.”

As the first official act of reparations in Georgia, Linnentown’s story made it to ESPN and The New York Times. Whitehead frequently speaks to groups about her memoir, Giving Voice to Linnentown, which will debut as a musical this April. Projects ranging from mosaics and quilts to curated exhibitions and an interactive mapping website are helping to preserve and amplify Linnentown’s story. Last fall, the city renamed a campus road Linnentown Lane.

Linnentown’s losses were just a drop in the bucket of what The Color of Law author Richard Rothstein describes as nationwide, government-sanctioned “de jure segregation,” robbing Black homeowners of generational wealth. Erased communities in Georgia and across the U.S. are looking to Linnentown descendants for inspiration and input.

As important as those strides are, a small group of people in Athens is seeking to do what the local government could not: Provide direct payments to displaced Linnentown descendants. Many reparations measures are between institutions, explained Alys Willman, a member of Oconee Street United Methodist Church (OSUMC) and an international development economist who consults for the World Bank. As co-chair of Athens Reparations Action (ARA), she wants to shatter the myth that direct payments to individuals are unprecedented. In 1988, the United States issued $20,000 payments to survivors of Japanese internment camps; in Evanston, Ill., residents who suffered under racially motivated housing discrimination are receiving $25,000, and cities such as San Francisco are developing similar plans.

“We should just cut checks for people,” Willman insisted, “with no strings attached.” Whitehead worked with ARA to develop their plan and identify the first descendants of the 11 homeowners who were pushed out of Linnentown. ARA is seeking to raise enough to give $10,000 to each displaced household. The dollar amounts are small compared to their losses — Whitehead’s parents divorced and her family split up after being pushed from their newly built home into public housing. Still, she appreciates that ARA’s plan is “doable and practical” and hopes other communities will learn from it.

‘The language of survivors’

ON A WEDNESDAY evening last November, 13 people gathered in the back room of Athentic Brewing Company, less than 2 miles from the newly named Linnentown Lane. “You could be anywhere right now, but you chose to be here,” said chaplain Cole Knapper, co-chair of ARA, to the group, which included college students, writers, artists, social workers, activists, and retired educators.

People explained what brought them. A few shared how 2020 was a turning point in their personal and spiritual lives, recognizing their need to find communities invested in anti-racism work. Others in the room had been working for racial and economic justice for years, while some came to learn more. ARA meets monthly for business, and last fall it hosted monthly public “reparations conversations.” The group, which emerged from a book study, knows that actionable ideas can grow from good conversations.

Athens City Commissioner Russell Edwards was invited to talk about the Georgia gratuities clause, cited as the reason local governments cannot pay direct reparations. Before Edwards addressed that question, an attendee asked him about his own change of thinking.

“When I first read the Linnentown resolution, the words ‘white terrorism’ and ‘white supremacy’ just jumped off the page,” explained Edwards, who is white. “The immediate thought that came to my mind was: This is going to be something many folks will read and just dismiss.” He wondered if different words would keep more people engaged. But the more he learned about the specific ways Linnentown residents had been wronged, the more he realized the truth of those words. For example, the city did not improve roads or install sewers, thus degrading the neighborhood in the years leading up to its demolition. Nearby white neighborhoods were also bought out, but Black homeowners received 230 percent less for similar properties. “Over time, it became clear to me that this was the language of the survivors,” Edwards observed. He was among the Athens city commissioners who voted to pass the resolution in 2021.

Edwards explained how the gratuities clause was designed to prevent favors and nepotism. But for Linnentown and other displaced communities it is not about added payment but fair restitution. “There’s an argument to be made, especially after the research, [that] this person was underpaid by the government,” Edwards shared with the group. “We are making this person whole for a fraudulent transaction. This was the government acting in bad faith.”

It would take a change in the law or a robust reinterpretation of the law for states such as Georgia to begin issuing direct reparations payments. And it may take some time. In 1989, Rep. John Conyers of Michigan introduced a bill for considering federal reparations for African American descendants of slaves; Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas picked up the mantle, naming it HB40 (after the unfulfilled promise of 40 acres and a mule for people newly emancipated from slavery at the close of the Civil War).

“Reparations should be from the U.S., state, and local governments,” explained ARA secretary JoBeth Allen, “but they aren’t going to be in the foreseeable future. There are people living right now who are my age, in their 70s, who won’t be around if we just wait for a reparations act to be passed in Congress.” Although HB40 passed out of committee in 2021, it remains stalled.

People of faith do not have to wait for governments to act before they can develop creative, local solutions. As Linnentown was gaining local and national attention, some Athens church members saw an opportunity for a direct response. “We saw that as a unique place where citizens of Athens, faith communities of Athens, could step into what seemed like an intractable gap and do something about it by raising funds to go directly to the families,” Allen said.

From study to action

IN 2020, members of OSUMC, a predominately white congregation with a strong commitment to activism, started some book groups focusing on Jesus’ great commandment: Love your neighbor. About 50 people participated in eight small groups, focusing on ways their church and lives had been complicit in white supremacy.

The church then partnered with Ebenezer Baptist Church West, a historically Black church that is also Whitehead and Knapper’s home church, to read Let the Oppressed Go Free: Exploring Theologies of Liberation, by Rev. Marvin A. McMickle. Participants met over Zoom in intentionally interracial study groups with leaders and participants from both churches.

“None of us are seminarians,” explained Knapper, who led one of the groups. “Even to me as a chaplain, some of the material was dense.” So, the leaders created study guides. “Liberation Theology puts Jesus squarely among the poor and marginalized,” the facilitator guide states. The group discussed questions such as what it means on individual and congregational levels “to set the oppressed free from race-based oppression.”

During that season of intense study and dialogue, looking at biblical and historical calls for reparation, OSUMC formed a reparations action committee. Allen said they formed with the mentality of “How do we do something about it?” rather than “Let’s study this some more.” The committee discussed raising funds for home loans, but after hiring Whitehead as a consultant, they changed tack. She urged them to consider that Linnentown descendants were still living with the consequences of their families’ underpayment. Recognizing the power of cross-cultural leadership and dialogue beyond Christian faith communities, members of OSUMC and Ebenezer formed ARA as a secular nonprofit organization to raise money for local reparations.

Last summer Rev. McMickle visited Athens. Knapper shared how moving it was to hear him express how he had not seen a group of people engage his text in such “an intentional, interracial, Christian way.” He spoke to them with hope and gratitude, Knapper recalls, “because of the issues that our country is dealing with in the movement toward white Christian nationalism, and that we are in the South in a space that has been known as the cradle of the Confederacy.”

Being honest about history

OCONEE STREET METHODIST CHURCH, an LGBTQ-affirming congregation with a commitment to immigrant rights and economic and racial justice, is known for its justice work, but its history is like that of most Southern white churches. Founded by the Methodist Episcopal Church, South — a branch that splintered in the 1840s in defense of slavery — one of its first Sunday school teachers was a Confederate Army captain. When the Ku Klux Klan’s second resurgence sprang from Georgia, OSUMC was not immune. ARA secretary Allen cross-referenced 1920s Klan roles with church roles and found an overlap of at least seven OSUMC members. Rather than try to cover up this history, the church recently installed a sign acknowledging that they have benefited from “white supremacy and the dehumanization of our neighbors.”

Maxine Easom, a fourth-generation member who co-wrote Across the River: The People, Places, and Culture of East Athens, believes God was working in previous generations in ways that brought people to a deeper understanding of God’s love. “We work, and we learn, and we study, and we talk together as Christians and we come around to ‘This is not love,’” Easom said. “What we are doing is not [love]. So, here’s the way we are going to change that.” For Easom, one form of repair is seeing God enact positive change through individuals and institutions over generations. “To watch people have their faith change them into what Jesus would have us do and be is what faith is about,” Easom said.

As of January, ARA had raised nearly $70,000 toward its $110,000 goal and will issue checks in June 2024. “We want people to get this money while they are still alive,” Willman said. Descendants designated recipients if they should pass before the funds are distributed. OSUMC is tithing its annual budget toward this fund and the rest is coming from donations. ARA sent letters to local congregations and faith groups, including those who are more conservative politically and theologically, asking for an opportunity to talk about Linnentown and reparations. ARA’s letter mentions First Parish Unitarian Universalist in Cambridge Mass., the U.S. Jesuits, and Memorial Episcopal Church in Baltimore as examples of communities doing similar work.

“I would love to see more people be able to move from the idea of individual atonement to communal atonement,” Allen said. “A way of looking at atonement, repair, and the power that doing that on a communal level can do within a congregation might be something very appealing and powerful for congregations who have not engaged that in the past.”

Working together has opened paths of honest communication between ARA team members. After witnessing an interaction that left ARA co-chair Willman feeling “rankled” by what seemed like obvious “whitesplaining” and “mansplaining,” Willman couldn’t understand why Whitehead wasn’t pushing back directly to a man Willman perceived as disrespectful. She later called Whitehead on the phone, feeling discouraged. “Remember, I was born on this road,” Whitehead told Willman. “You just got here.” The road Whitehead was referring to was not just a bulldozed road in Linnentown but the long, rocky road of living with and fighting racism in the U.S. “I know I can make one call and they’ll show up,” Whitehead said about her newfound partners in the struggle.

“I’ve got to tell you,” Knapper emphasized in a phone interview, “this is a sliver of reparations, a tiny little idea. And part of what I struggle with is, I don’t want white people, in particular, to think that this is all that reparations is: Like, ‘Hey, we gave these 11 families a little piece of money, and that’s it. That’s reparations.’ Reparations encompasses so much more. I have big dreams personally about what reparations looks like in the South and in this country more broadly. But, baby steps.”

For Christine Davis Johnson, who now lives in Atlanta and is recently widowed, the efforts of ARA are “like a godsend,” especially since she is seeking safe and affordable housing. Ten thousand dollars can’t buy a home in today’s economy, but it will improve her quality of life. “It’s not about the money,” she insisted. “It’s the acknowledgment, letting people know there was a thriving Black neighborhood there.”