Repairing the redlined body of Christ

In the basement of the church I pastor is a room with a dehumidifier that is always running. The archive room is not glamorous, but through the patient work of volunteers the voluminous, sometimes difficult history of my congregation has been organized into easy-to-find folders. Inside you will find pew rental records, newsletters, photographs, correspondence, and much more. You will find the record of a congregation that has a wound at its center: in 1882, the Black members of First Baptist Church in Evanston, Illinois, left to form Second Baptist Church. There they found safe harbor from the White supremacy that had relegated them to my church’s balcony and asked them to contribute to the construction of buildings that were built by them but never for them. You will also find a history of a congregation alternately avoiding that wound and seeking redemption.

My congregation has been aware of this wound for some time, but when Robin Rue Simmons, then an alderwoman, proposed the nation’s first-of-its-kind municipal reparations program in Evanston, archival exploration of this wound took on a new urgency. As a congregation, we saw firsthand how our city was being called to address the harms that it had caused, and we knew that the story of our congregation was part of those harms. Simply put, the archives of the city and its churches have provided something that no single person can: a key to the past. If there is one thing that we learned in Evanston, it’s that reparations are impossible without knowing history—and that history is unknowable without the raw material used to make coherent accounts. The archives are critical.

There’s no clearer place to see this in action than in the color-coded maps, produced in the 1930s by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, that ranked neighborhoods based on investment quality from “best” to “hazardous.” Regardless of how popular a neighborhood was, Black neighborhoods were always ranked as hazardous, a designation that painted that neighborhood red on the map. That is where the term “redlining”—which refers to the systematic refusal of loans, insurance, and other services to people residing in those neighborhoods the HOLC deemed to be hazardous—comes from. Because the primary way that American families build wealth is through homeownership, the maps authorized by the federal government have served to systematically steal wealth from Black Americans. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, the average White household now has six times the wealth of the average Black household, a reality rooted in homeownership and the denial of it.