LESSONS IN HEARING HUMAN AND DIVINE DISCONTENT: THE BLACK MANIFESTO AND EPISCOPAL LEADERS AND CONGREGATIONS IN THE DETROIT AREA

The American religious establishment was surprised and confounded by the emergence of the Black Power Movement of the late 1960s. As part of the ideological shift away from nonviolent protests to self-determination and cultural nationalism, African American reparations demands were revived during those years, adding to the continuing stream of reparations movements among African American activists from earlier generations. Over the previous two centuries African Americans witnessed white Christians and Jews’ participation in and profiting from racial slavery, the international and domestic slave trade, as well as modern forms of labor exploitation. Black Power activists in the late 1960s demanded that predominantly white religious denominations and institutions atone for and help redeem themselves for their complicity in the centuries-long black oppression through the payment of monetary reparations. The reparations funds were to be used to support black-controlled economic institutions that would create jobs for black workers and whose profits would be used for further community development. The Rev. Gerald O’Grady, Jr. was the rector of the prestigious Christ Church Cranbrook, a predominantly white Episcopal church in the Detroit suburb of Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. Rev. O’Grady was drawn into the reparations debate in the summer of 1969, and became the first pastor in Michigan to confront the