Quaker Congregation Helps Black Families Purchase Homes As Part Of Its Reparations Program

A Quaker congregation in Philadelphia has launched a reparations-based grant program to help Black families become first-time homeowners, part of a broader effort by the group to address its own historical ties to slavery and racial injustice.

Quakers supporting Black communities in Philadelphia

As the Philadelphia Inquirer recently reported, Charmira and Quincy Pilgrim, a Black couple in Philadelphia, were recently able to purchase their first home with the assistance of a $10,000 grant provided to them by the Green Street Friends Meeting, a congregation of Quakers in the Germantown area of Philadelphia. The money provided to the Pilgrim family came as one of five grants for the same amount provided by the Green Street Quakers to Black families in the Philadelphia area. The Quaker congregation launched the homebuyer grant program earlier this year, explicitly framing it as a form of reparations. When Green Street announced the homebuyer grants in March, it said it sees the grants as reparations. The Green Street Friends Meeting stated that the grants are meant to help provide “economic and spiritual repair for the intergenerational harms of slavery, Jim Crow, and their afterlives.” The grants are “intended to address the theft and pillaging of Black wealth,” the Quaker statement read.

This reparations program has been implemented as a partnership between the Green Street Friends Meeting and the Washington, D.C. based nonprofit BirdSEED, which is dedicated to addressing racial wealth disparities in both Washington, D.C. and Philadelphia. BirdSEED provides first-time homebuyer grants ranging from $5,000 to $20,000. In addition to its work with BirdSEED providing housing grants, the Green Street Friends Meeting has also provided legal assistance to Black homeowners in order to help sort out sometimes complicated property rights; this assistance has helped to keep millions of dollars in property in the hands of dozens of Black homeowners. Green Street has also provided a variety of other benefits and services in Philadelphia, including help with estate planning for Black Philadelphians and providing financial support for Black midwives and for music education for young Black people.

Quakers pursue racial justice as secular efforts see both success and challenges

The work by the Green Street Friends Meeting to promote racial justice matches a long history of social activism by Quakers. Initially, as was the case with most majority-white Christian denominations in the United States, a number of Quakers participated in slavery during the colonial and early independence eras of the country. However, anti-slavery sentiments arose early among Quakers, who became one of the main driving forces of the early stages of the abolitionist movement. Quaker philanthropy contributed to the founding of Pennsylvania’s Cheyney University, the first HBCU in the United States, in 1837. Modern-day Quaker efforts toward reparations and racial justice go far beyond Pennsylvania or even the United States; Quakers in Britain have sought to address their participation in slavery and have recently worked with delegates from Jamaica as that nation presents a petition for reparations to King Charles.

The Quakers’ work on identifying their own past involvement in slavery and crafting reparations policies comes as secular movements toward reparations have seen both progress and setbacks. Across the United States, reparations programs have been explored by a number of city and state-level governments. California continues to move forward with a variety of programmatic-based approaches to addressing the legacy of anti-Black racism in that state as part of a years-long reparations effort. The city of Evanston, Illinois, enacted the nation’s first cash reparations program for Black residents in 2021. Despite the seeming success of that program, the Trump administration is now seeking to block that program from going forward, claiming that it is discriminatory against non-Black residents.

With the Trump administration’s hostility toward public programs to address racial discrimination, private actors may play an increasingly important role in efforts to fight racial injustices. Members and congregations of the Quakers, including the Green Street Friends Meeting, are already doing their part to recognize their own past involvement in slavery and anti-Black racism and to take concrete steps to tackle lingering racial disparities.

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