Willye Bryan moves through the world, in dark days and bright days, through storm and calm, with a quiet sense of purpose.
Bryan is an elder at Lansing’s First Presbyterian Church, a retired entomologist and a lifelong civil rights activist.
She is fascinated by mayflies, which only see the sun for one day of adult life, but she has devoted her life to a much longer game — the quest for justice and equity.
Most recently, she is the founder of the Justice League of Greater Lansing, a Lansing-based, grassroots organization that is building a reparations fund to help repair historic racial disparities in wealth, educational opportunity and economic advancement.
If reparations are a pipe dream, pass the pipe. Bryan and her colleagues have already turned it into reality.
In just three years, the League has built an endowment of $450,000 in pledges, mainly from local churches, owing largely to Bryan’s persistence, patience and power of persuasion.
“I would take Willye over a million-man army any day of the week,” Justice League President Prince Solace said.
Solace called Bryan a master of the “art of repair.”
“It’s done with courage and out of love, but there’s also some firmness in there,” Solace said.
Last August, scholarships of $5,000 each were awarded to 10 students in greater Lansing — the early fruit of a tree Bryan hopes will grow strong and tall, whichever way the cultural and political winds blow.
Bringing the Justice League into reality is the third (or fourth, or fifth) act in a life with plenty of twists, but a consistent clarity of purpose.
“I’ve wanted to be a change agent since I was a kid,” she said. “I wanted to see equality. This is kind of a culmination of that drive to see that change happen.”
Highways and houses
Vicious cycles of civil rights progress and backlash hold no terror for Bryan. She grew up in segregated Mississippi and has seen it all before.
Bryan, 80, was born and grew up in Leland, Mississippi, a small Mississippi Delta town on Highway 61, celebrated in song as the “blues highway” by musical greats like Honeyboy Edwards and Big Joe Williams. When she was 10 years old, her family moved to Chicago as part of the Great Migration of African-Americans from the South to the North, East and West to escape segregation and Jim Crow oppression.
Chicago schools weren’t segregated, but newly arrived students from the South were often assumed to be behind and held back a grade. Bryan should have entered sixth grade, but was kicked back to fifth grade.
It was a blessing in disguise.
“Heck, I already had fifth grade,” she said. “Boom, boom, boom, I could do it with my eyes closed.”
She finished her assigned work quickly and looked for something else to do. She picked up a book on entomology and discovered a family of insects called Ephemeridae — the mayflies.
“I was so fascinated at their life cycle,” she said. “I had not read anything like it before. Their immature stages are long-lived, leading up to only one day of adulthood. That hooked me.”
She wanted to go for a career in entomology, but that was too far out for her high school counselor, who advised her to get a degree in education.
When Bryan’s family moved back to Mississippi, she enrolled in Alcorn State University, the first historically Black land-grant college.
Recalling her counselor’s advice, she majored in social sciences and education but still nurtured a desire to go into entomology.
Teaching in Bolivar County, Mississippi, in the 1960s was no cakewalk. Although the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, the public schools were still largely segregated.
She stuck it out for four years. “I just left,” she said. “The school system was too depressing. All of the administrators in the district and the state were white. I was fighting all the time. It was really disheartening work.”
She found more rewarding work in rural Mississippi, where she helped establish and incorporate Freedom Village, a new community built to house sharecroppers who were fired and displaced from their homes for registering to vote.
“The landowner said, ‘If you go and vote, you have no place to live tonight,’” Bryan said. “They voted anyway. We built 20 homes for those folks.”
Last month, Bryan took part in panel discussion on the film “Fannie Lou Hamer’s America,” as part of MSU’s commemoration of Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
Hamer is a revered pioneer of the civil rights movement, founder of the Freedom Democratic Party in Mississippi and organizer of Freedom Summer, a 1964 push to register Black voters. She was also a board member of Freedom Village.
“I knew Fannie Lou and worked with her,” Bryan said.
“Many times, I would sit on her porch and listen to her stories and the ideas she had for a better America. She had an extraordinary grasp of the political landscape.”
Hamer was already a civil rights icon. “I was in awe of her when we first met, but she had a way of making you feel like an old friend,” Bryan said. “I was the young one, ready to learn from her counsel, and she always made me feel at ease.”
One afternoon, Bryan drove to Hamer’s house, which was about 50 miles from the office, and found her at the laundromat.
“She had been there most of the day, because she always washed her clothing first on one side, and then she turned them inside out and washed them again,” Bryan recalled. “I stood watching in awe of the patience it took to do that, especially with all things she was involved in. I thought it was an amazing care and love she showed her family.”
At Freedom Village, Bryan coordinated basic education and GED programs to participants, many of whom were illiterate — “the kinds of needs that would literally introduce them into regular society, not just share-cropping,” Bryan said.
In 2021, Bryan revisited Freedom Village nearly half a century since she helped build it.
She spotted a group of people in a park, stopped the car, rolled down the window and asked if they knew the name Clay Miller, one of the village’s original residents.
“My name is Clay Miller,” a man said. “Clay Miller, Jr.”
“It was fantastic to run into descendants of the people we built those houses for,” Bryan said.
Purpose on the planet
After working at Freedom Village, Bryan charted a new course for herself, pursuing professional excellence while maintaining her zeal for civil rights.
“At the end of the time I worked with that project, I decided that I would retrain myself,” she said.
She got a master’s degree in entomology and went to work for the U.S. Agriculture Department’s Agricultural Research Service in Stoneville, Mississippi.
After thousands of long hours working as a research technician by day and studying by night, she got the degree and the research skills she needed.
The insect world is full of parasitoids (parasites who kill the insects they feed on) with life cycles every bit as fascinating as mayflies, if more horrifying.
In one project, Bryan researched the feasibility of unleashing a parasitic wasp (trichogramma petiosum, for the record) onto fields near Shaw, Mississippi, to control a plague of noctuid moths, or cutworms, that destroy billions of dollars in crops, orchards and gardens each year.
“I consider myself a researcher. That was always tops for me,” she said. “It was very satisfying to be a professional, interacting with professionals across the country.”
She couldn’t ignore the fact that the Agriculture Department’s Jamie Whitten Research Center, where she worked, was a nearly all-white institution in the heart of the Mississippi delta, which was more than 60 percent Black.
“When I went to work there, there were two African-American technicians, and that was it, except for two janitors,” she said.
She started doing outreach to nearby Black schools to attract Black student workers in summer.
In the early 1970s, she suggested to the director that they do a Black History event and reach out more to the community.
“His response was, ‘Why would we do that?’” Bryan recalled.
“Black people don’t even know what goes on here, and these are your neighbors, the people you share the space with,” she told him.
A key Bryan tactic is to talk to you as if you are better than you realize, leaving you no choice but to live up to it. What makes it work is that she sincerely believes you are better than you realize.
She gave her boss a few days to ruminate and went back to his office, drawing upon the logic, patience and persuasive power she now deploys in the service of promoting reparations to Lansing area churches, businesses and donors.
“You understand how important it is that you have respectful interaction with the community you share,” she told him.
He gave in, agreed to the idea and left Bryan in charge.
Bryan ran with the ball and invited a stellar series of guest speakers, including President Bill Clinton’s secretary of agriculture, Mike Espy, the first African American and the first person from the Deep South to hold the position. Another guest speaker was Bennie Thompson, a U.S. representative from Mississippi’s 2nd Congressional District, the first Democrat and the first African American to chair the House Homeland Security Committee.
“It just grew, and, I tell you, those programs continue to this day,” Bryan said. “It’s a popular event. Folks from D.C. come to it.”
Now Bryan had her cake — a career investigating bugs — and got to eat it, too, opening the profession to more Black researchers and scientists.
“Having that balance, keeping community activism alive and well in my life, and having my professional career, is wonderful,” she said. “It’s like a purpose on the planet kind of thing.”
A compelling mission
At a research conference in the 1980s, Bryan met a colleague, Gloria McCutcheon, who encouraged her to stick with her career, even though Bryan said McCutcheon was “the only other African American woman I knew in the field of entomology.”
In 1991, Bryan decided to go for a Ph.D. in entomology.
McCutcheon told her about a unique fellowship at Virginia Tech that would allow her to spend six months of the year working in Stoneville and six months studying in Blacksburg.
By 1996, Bryan was almost finished with her doctoral work and married her partner, Michael, also an entomologist, who lived in Michigan and worked for the USDA.
But now her life was going in too many directions at once. The stress of working, studying for her Ph.D., taking care of ill family members and sustaining a commuter marriage for four years led her to take early retirement in 1997 to move to Niles, Michigan.
A new life in a new location gave her a fresh sense of focus. She worked in private industry for a while, and then settled in as manager of the Pesticides Alternatives Laboratory at MSU, where researchers look for ways to control insect pests in tree fruits without using pesticides.
Prince Jerrold Solace met Bryan when both of them attended a meeting at the Library of Michigan on the history of the Black neighborhood wiped out by Interstate 496.
They shared a common interest in Black history, especially local history, and a passion for community service. Solace told Bryan about his 13 years as coordinator of the Lansing Black College tour.
Three years later, to his surprise, Solace got a phone call from Bryan, asking him to join a new, faith-based reparations project. Despite their fleeting encounter, she remembered his energy and seriousness and wanted him on board. The pair formed an intergenerational bond and potent advocacy team that became the heart of the Justice League.
“I was out of work at the time, and this was volunteer work, but I said yes, because it was just so compelling a mission,” Solace said. “I really trusted Willye’s leadership.”
They often describe their meeting and collaboration as “providential,” and not with tongue in cheek.
But neither of them had any illusions about the uphill push they were facing.
“I knew, going in, that the community needed a lot of education,” Bryan said. “Just the word ‘reparations’ gets many folks apprehensive.”
She often calls Justice League events “informational meetings,” downplaying the potential emotional charge and, like the scientist she is, patiently going through the math.
“We don’t start with demanding reparations,” Bryan said. “We talk about the inequities that plague our communities. People can see what’s around them, but many times, they don’t know how we got here. That’s where we come in.”
In the United States, racial disparities in every basic indicator of quality of life are persistent, pervasive and well known. The average Black household earns about half as much as the average white household and owns only about 15% to 20% as much wealth, according to an October 2021 report from the Federal Reserve, and the gap has “widened notably over the past few decades.” The Centers for Disease Control reports a breathtaking range of disparities in health outcomes. The difference in standardized test scores between Black and white students, while narrowing, is still equivalent to about two years of schooling, according to a 2022 report from Stanford University.
In meeting after meeting, Bryan traced the long, heavy, yet often invisible (to white people, anyway) chains of cause and effect that have rigged the game of success against African Americans to the present day, from slavery to Jim Crow and segregation to redlining, banking discrimination, misguided urban renewal and other injustices.
At one presentation, a member of the audience told Bryan she had just sold a home, inherited from her parents, for $500,000.
“She understood that many of her Black counterparts did not enjoy that generational wealth,” Bryan said.
But Bryan is always careful not to make it a blame and shame game.
“We make it clear that this was a dynamic that was already put in place and it’s not possible to catch up on your own,” she said.
At the crux of the Justice League’s faith-based approach is the sad fact that churches have long profited from this cruel calculus. “Some of them have 10, 15-million-dollar endowments that have accumulated because of their complicity with slavery, Jim Crow laws and the rest,” Bryan said. “What better place to go, to talk about correcting sinful action, than to the church?”
The churches have been listening.
“They’ve been looking for a way to remedy this,” Bryan said. “We have eight pledged churches — and I just talked to the ninth, who already pledged $70,000.”
First Presbyterian Senior Minister Stanley Jenkins has enjoyed a front row seat to this awakening.
“Step by step, Willye scheduled a bunch of events where people could come together, people from the community, not just our church,” Jenkins said. “She’s helped transform a white congregation into an outward-looking community seeking racial justice, equity and healing.”
On Feb. 9, First Presbyterian presented the League with a check for $22,000, bringing the church’s total payments up to 80 percent of the $100,000 pledge it made in 2022.
Jenkins loves to watch Bryan win over skeptics at meetings with white churches and community events at the downtown library, the Socialight Bookstore at the Lansing Mall and dozens of other places.
“Sometimes you can see it in the frowns on their faces or the eyebrows going like this,” Jenkins said, wrinkling his brow. “Willye is very good at connecting the dots, to show that the racial wealth gap is a direct result of slavery and specific policies.”
In Solace’s view, Bryan’s patience, persuasiveness and respect for skeptics and opponents come from a clearly identifiable source.
“At her core, she’s an educator,” Solace said. “An educator goes the extra mile to help people comprehend the most complex thoughts or concepts, and that’s what she does. She works with the person in front of her and leads them to a reckoning with themselves.”
Erecting the pillars
Not long ago, Bryan, Solace and the Justice League’s 50-odd volunteer members envisioned an ambitious endgame in which state and federal government would embrace the reparations model they’ve pioneered in Lansing.
The results of the recent election, and the accompanying wave of backlash against any acknowledgment that present inequalities are the fruit of past injustices, haven’t shaken their resolve one bit.
On the morning of Nov. 6, 2024, a donor called Bryan and transferred her stock to the Justice League.
“I was excited that someone woke up after the election and decided to pay reparations,” Bryan said. “Hopefully, that’s a good omen.”
Like Bryan, Solace is keeping his eyes forward, and he likes what he sees.
When things get tough and he needs a boost, he untucks a letter Bryan wrote to him in 2022. “You energize and lead the ideals of the Justice League in a way that gives me great peace,” she wrote. “I’m really elated you said yes to my request a year ago.”
A postscript reads: “I’m sharing because I want you to feel appreciated.”
Solace has absorbed Bryan’s lifelong faith and persistence and added his own youthful energy to the mix.
“We were born to do this,” Solace said. “Despite the national narrative of prolonging or suppressing the subject of reparations, we’ve experienced growing momentum in the past two and a half years. More and more communities are showing interest in the model Willye has developed.”
Groups based in Kalamazoo and New Orleans have contacted the League “to duplicate the model in the history and context of their community,” Solace said.
“It has been a wonderful undertaking for me, to bring the idea to the community and have it received as it has been,” Bryan said.
A proud moment arrived in August 2024, when the Justice League allocated reparations, for the first time, to “ten descendants of enslaved Africa-Americans from the greater Lansing region” in the form of $5,000 scholarships.
“We have three students at MSU, two at Howard University and one each at LCC, the University of Michigan, the Chicago Arts Institute, Siena Heights and Central Michigan University,” Bryan said.
But the short-term success hasn’t taken Bryan’s eye from the long game.
“I fashioned the program, took it to groups that could change things, and it worked,” she said. “Now we have to continue to grow it. It’s the same with many projects I’ve worked at. It needs to have a life of its own.”
The next step is to tackle housing inequality. A new community partner, the East Side Action Community Center in the Potter-Walsh neighborhood, led by pastor Stanley Parker, has joined the League to get things started.
“Dr. Parker has united community partners to get funding for a house to be built for an African-American senior,” Solace said. The Justice League will join the Ingham County Trust Fund, the Capitol Region Community Foundation and other community agencies and nonprofits to get the house built by early spring.
“That’s two of our three pillars, within a short time —first education, then housing,” Solace said. “Now, in 2025, we’ll start fleshing out the business and entrepreneurial arm of things.”
Byran’s goal for the League is growth, not mere survival. The nonprofit is still all-volunteer, but she hopes to grow it to the point where the director will be paid.
“We are establishing an endowment fund that will last in perpetuity,” she said.
As practitioners of the “art of repair” meet with indifference and even hostility from Washington, Bryan sees local action as the only solid path to progress.
“I expect that as we continue to see the horrible rollback of social justice gains that have been accomplished over the last 60 years, we will see equal pushback from the segment of the populace that do think for themselves,” she said. “I hold out hope that there are enough good people out there who will continue to do the right thing.”
Her own plans for the future are simple and unwavering.
“I will continue to work tirelessly to see the establishment of what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called the Beloved Community — in my lifetime,” she said.
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