Pastor to walk to D.C. for reparations
A Baltimore pastor is planning on walking 40 miles from his house of worship to Washington on Presidents Day to advocate for exploring reparations for slavery.
The Rev. Robert Turner — still relatively new as leader of the Empowerment Temple AME Church in West Baltimore — plans to begin the grueling journey at 3 a.m., walking most of the way to his destination along U.S. Route 1, and arrive at the front gates of the White House 12 to 14 hours later.
There, he plans to join a group of other activists from across the country to urge President Joe Biden to issue an executive order that would establish a commission to study the effects of slavery on African Americans over the past 400 years and explore ways in which the U.S. government might compensate for the damage done.
“America had 16 presidents who presided over slavery,” the 40-year-old pastor said in an interview with The Baltimore Sun on Friday. “Thirty presidents later, President Biden has the opportunity, and an obligation, to make right on what America has gotten so badly wrong since 1776, her mistreatment of Black people.”
Turner said his quest is his way of pressing for action on HR 40, a bill sponsored by Texas Democratic Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee — and backed by nearly 200 cosponsors — that proposes creating such a commission.
The bill, a political hot potato given the intense debate over reparations, was introduced before the House Judiciary Committee in January 2021 but has not been taken to the House floor for a vote.
With the new Republican majority in Congress, Turner says he sees the
possibility of the bill being taken up and passed as “almost nil” at this stage, but Biden has the opportunity to act on the matter unilaterally.
Turner argues that the U.S. has provided compensation for other oppressed groups in the past. He cited the Indian Claims Commission Act of 1946, which provided some $1.3 billion in reparations to Native Americans; the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which issued an apology for the internment camps of World War II and provided restitution for 60,000 Japanese Americans who had survived them, and the JUST Act of 2018, which formalized the nation’s support for securing compensation for victims of the Holocaust.
Turner said he supports all those efforts, however financially insufficient they may have been, but said it’s “long past time” for African Americans to be considered for similar repayment given the atrocities of slavery and the generations of systemic racism that followed.
“We’ve never had a president even apologize for slavery, let alone offer reparations, to African Americans,” he said. “We can do it for all these other groups, why not for Black folks?”
Ron Daniels is facilitator
for the HR-40 Strategy Group, a coalition of progressive organizations that support passage of the bill, either through the legislative process or by presidential executive order.
Daniels said after the group learned of Turner’s plan, it has helped with mapping and other logistics for his walk, which they view as a “very, very courageous moral act” that could turn the tide in the debate over reparations.
“This could be the act that galvanizes the imagination of enough people that it could end up getting done,” Daniels said. “It would be President Biden’s equivalent of signing an emancipation proclamation.”
Turner’s walk Monday will mark the fifth time he has made the trek as leader of Empowerment Temple, a predominantly African American congregation. He completed it for the first time on Indigenous People’s Day in October and repeated it on Thanksgiving, Christmas and Martin Luther King Jr. Day, each time connecting the themes of those holidays to reparations.
Before moving to Baltimore in late 2021, Turner served as senior pastor of Historic Vernon AME
Church in Tulsa, where for two years he answered what he describes as a call from God by spending Wednesday evenings on the steps of city hall calling on the “city, state and nation” to recognize their part in the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, a tragedy that left hundreds of African Americans dead, thousands injured and some 10,000 homeless. Obscure at first, the campaign eventually drew national and global news coverage.
Turner said he received a similar call to make the reparation walks not long after moving to Baltimore, when he looked at a map and realized the distance to Washington is about 40 miles — a number that reminded him of the 40 acres and a mule once promised to formerly enslaved people but never delivered.
On Monday he’ll carry a wreath of 400 roses, to commemorate the years since slavery began in the U.S., as he makes his way along the busy traffic on Route 1 to the nation’s capital.
Representatives of the National African American Reparations Commission, the National Council of Churches, the Japanese American Citizens League and about 20 other groups in favor of the bill have committed to meeting Turner at the White House.
Known for his booming voice in the pulpit, the 6-foot-6-inch Turner is self-deprecating when it comes to the walks, which he says always consume at least one pair of sneakers and for which he has never trained.
“I’m the last person you’d think would do something like this; I eat too many cheeseburgers,” he said with a laugh. “But God sustains me along the way. I’m going to keep doing it until he tells me to stop.”