At the height of the anti-racism protests following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, the idea of reparations for Black Americans for the long shadow of slavery gained traction. State and city leaders, as well as religious leaders began to consider how to compensate those whose unpaid work had made them what they are today.
In Virginia, the Episcopal Church’s history of slavery made this quest especially significant. “I mean, it’s the state of the Confederacy,” said the Rev. Kelly Brown Douglas, a Harvard Divinity School professor who served on the neighboring Episcopal Diocese of Washington’s reparations committee. “If there is a diocese that could actually model and lead the way in this regard, it would be a diocese like that of Virginia.”
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