uanita Craig, a lifelong resident of the Woodlawn neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side, remembers when Wadsworth Elementary School was closed.

In 2013, Rahm Emanuel, who was then the mayor, shuttered 50 public schools — the largest sweep of school closures in U.S. history — primarily on the South and West Sides, whose students were nearly 88 percent Black. Craig worked with the local workforce development nonprofit Woodlawn Preservation & Investment Corporation to try to have the empty building converted into a job training center for youth.

When nearly a decade later Mayor Lori Lightfoot abruptly announced the empty building would instead become a shelter for migrants seeking asylum in the U.S., Craig was incensed. “I felt neglected as a community resident. We’ve tried for many years to get the building from [Chicago Public Schools] to repurpose it for training,” she said. “I was not feeling really welcoming.”

Yet Dr. Kenneth Phelps, pastor of Concord Missionary Baptist Church, where Craig has been a member for decades, insisted that the congregation take on the work of welcoming their new neighbors, who were primarily from Central and South America, into the historically African American community. She was torn between a sense of betrayal and what her pastor was calling her to do. She remembered telling him, “You know how I feel about this. But I support you.” She added that “if God has spoken to you and you prayed about this,” then “I’m going to follow the leader.”

What began as a modest effort by a few members of a small congregation to reach out to migrants would evolve into a deep experiment in solidarity — one that would challenge the community to confront its stereotypes of immigrants and change the makeup and the mission of the church for good.

n 2022, when Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas began sending busloads of migrants from the Mexico-U.S. border to sanctuary cities as part of 

, Chicago was a primary target. The city struggled to find space to house the influx of new arrivals, many from Venezuela, who at the time did not have temporary protected status (which was granted in October 2023 and revoked in February 2025) or deep-rooted community ties to Chicago — unlike the nearly 30,000 Ukrainian refugees who had arrived following Russia’s invasion, most of whom settled in among the city’s long-established Ukrainian Village neighborhood.

In the desperate scramble, Wadsworth Elementary was made into a shelter virtually overnight, enraging local African American residents who witnessed the displacement that resulted from the school’s closure. Their resentment was leveled mostly at the migrants, a new presence in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood. City-run public forums addressing the controversy devolved into anti-immigrant rallies, with many residents calling for increased police patrols to combat the crime and violence they insisted migrants would bring.

Phelps, who recently celebrated his 30th anniversary as head of Concord, first noticed the migrants when they were walking along the highway in his predominantly Black suburban community of Olympia Fields, and he felt moved to support them. But with little connection to the population and not being a Spanish speaker, he was unsure what steps to take. When Wadsworth suddenly became the home for some 500 adults seeking asylum, it was his wife, Vaneeta, who said, “It’s in our backyard. What are you going to do?” The two of them began making regular trips to the shelter to introduce themselves to their new neighbors.

Kenneth D. Phelps, Senior Pastor of Concord Missionary Baptist Church.

“We’ve always had this infrastructure of sensing and serving, so I just applied it. I figured if it worked for the African American community, it would apply to this [other] community,” said Phelps. “I just put a blank sheet of paper and said, ‘Let me know how I can serve you.’ And that’s an invitation for you to be at the table.”

The Home Away From Home/Hogar Lejos del Hogar Center, the collaborative initiative the church created in response to these conversations, began with clothing and food drives. That helped provide migrants with what they were most immediately lacking, creating low-threshold opportunities not only to invite new neighbors into the church but also to recruit longstanding members of the congregation to be part of the welcoming effort. As more donations came in, Felicia Harvey, Natasha Jackson, and other congregants began organizing Love’s Corner, an ad hoc distribution hub at the church for passing out hygiene supplies to migrants after Sunday services.

Providing aid at the shelter led Phelps to connect with other local organizations involved in rapid responses to the crisis, including Chicago4All and First Presbyterian Church of Chicago. The coalition they ended up forming resulted in Concord co-hosting community dinners with other neighborhood churches, benefiting both longtime Black residents and recent arrivals in need and reinforcing the bonds among Woodlawn’s religious institutions.

Concord partnered with members of the Chicago Teachers Union to offer ESL classes before services and with Yolanda and David Cruz, pastors of Father’s Heart Church in the majority Latinx neighborhood of Belmont Cragin, to provide Spanish interpretation. Working with grants from the Chicago Department of Housing, a team of church volunteers sought out sympathetic landlords and secured apartments and rental assistance for some 75 migrants, mostly on the South Side.

Imelda Salazar, an organizer with the Southwest Organizing Project, a predominantly Latinx-serving organization based a few neighborhoods away, has led multiple know-your-rights trainings at the church since connecting with Phelps through the interfaith coalition. She explained that her work at Concord has been an opportunity for her organization not only to reach new audiences but also to expand its own efforts and analysis. She said that they needed “to create different know-your-rights presentations” so that both undocumented community members and citizens facing racial profiling by the police could learn their rights alongside one another.

Jhovanny (asylum seekers’ last names are omitted for their safety) has been a Concord member for almost two years. An educator in Araure, Venezuela, he fled to the U.S. after being targeted for organizing protests with the teachers union that were critical of the government. He told me, “The solidarity that the African American community of the church has shown [asylum seekers] has been a great protection and blessing. They have given us unconditional support and helped us integrate into the city, so that we can actually contribute, fulfill our purpose, and keep moving forward together.”

Yet the solidarity Jhovanny describes took time and effort to foster. In the beginning, not all congregants were happy about the Home Away From Home Center, and around 10 longtime members left in protest — a significant number for a congregation of less than 100. The pastor was called an Uncle Tom by some detractors online, and the first day the church began offering services to migrants, a group of local Black residents showed up to block the entrances and disrupt the bilingual ceremony. “I have to admit that the way many African Americans responded to the presence of the migrants shocked me,” Phelps said. “I just assumed that our own lived experience would make us more empathetic toward others.”

Deacon Elder Jonathan Mitchell, who has been attending Concord since the late 1970s, acknowledges that he was one of the members who was uneasy about the shift: “It was a little hesitation, because of the way [we] may have thought, 

We have a new culture coming in. We’re gonna be left out! Who’s going to care for us when we’ve been here all this time?

 There are [Black] people that need housing assistance and need shelter, too.”

hen Wadsworth was converted into a shelter for migrants, I lived in an apartment just around the corner, and while I understood my neighbors’ justified anger over a site that was already a source of pain being repurposed without community input, I was also dismayed by much of their anti-immigrant rhetoric.

I first encountered Phelps when I was walking past the building one day. With the help of an interpreter, he was speaking to a group of new arrivals in the courtyard, inviting them to take advantage of the church’s resources. I was optimistic — if a little wary — that someone in the neighborhood was working to reach out to the shelter’s residents. As a Black queer person, I have my own complicated history with the church, and as a South Sider, I’ve seen many religious leaders take advantage of crises to bolster their own popularity and profits. Still, as a proficient Spanish speaker, I saw a clear opportunity to support Concord’s efforts. I began showing up to Sunday services to offer help with interpretation and act as a go-between for the church’s leadership and new arrivals. It wasn’t long before I became a regular member.

Bilingual services at Concord Missionary Baptist Church.

As part of the Unity in the Community series that Concord has been hosting since 2023, I led a workshop on linking anti-Black and anti-immigrant racism that I’ve been facilitating for local organizations for years. We began each session by listing examples of anti-Black rhetoric we’ve heard parroted by our families, local media, elected officials, and others. Participants of all backgrounds easily named common anti-Black tropes and stereotypes — that Black communities are violent, criminal, and a drain on public resources. We then repeated the exercise for anti-immigrant rhetoric while acknowledging that some people and communities experience both forms of racism, proving how inseparable they are.

Then we compared the two lists. Participants were able to see how so many of the same narratives dog both communities and are strategically deployed to justify violence against them. And the differences between the two lists were telling, with immigrants perpetually blamed for stealing jobs and Black communities accused of laziness. What became clear was that the powerful use both anti-Black and anti-immigrant racism to scapegoat vulnerable communities, and neither group benefits from participating in that scapegoating. Repeating any of this rhetoric reinforces the structures that will inevitably be turned against us, too.

We closed the workshops by listing the resources that all our communities need and identifying support networks that can serve everyone. Instead of the standard ratchet of law enforcement and surveillance — demands regularly made at the city’s public forums — multilingual education, free public transit, mental health care, and mentorship programs were among the services participants wanted to see in the neighborhood. Rather than denying resources to other vulnerable groups or angrily calling for them to be policed, we focused on the kinds of investments that benefit us all.

“I think racial solidarity is organic when we are able to get closer together,” said Phelps. “And I think that’s the power of the workshop. When you ask, ‘What do you need and what do I need?’ and you see the lists are almost identical, that creates the opportunity for us to be closer and work together.”

Members of Concord Missionary Baptist Church.

Juanita Craig has been surprised by how her relationships with the recent arrivals have grown stronger and says the church’s programs were essential in creating the shift. “I realized they’re not taking anything from us,” she said. “You’re judging someone out of ignorance. But spending time, breaking bread, the worship services, the workshops — this is where you’re spending quality time. We’re not different; we have so many similarities.”

“The workshops have changed many people’s perspectives and ways of thinking on the racism that we see all over the U.S.” says Oscar, another Venezuelan asylum seeker and a fixture at the Unity in the Community series. “But even more than that, they’ve been places for us to see each other, listen to each other, and confront our issues with respect to immigration.”

Oscar has been coming to Concord since it first opened its doors to recent arrivals two years ago. Fleeing threats of extortion after the Venezuelan National Guard targeted his small cleaning business in Valencia, he wound up at the shelter in Woodlawn. Under current Mayor Brandon Johnson, Wadsworth closed and its residents were relocated to other shelters in May 2024. The church initially struggled with the transition, but it was able to maintain close contact with migrant congregants via WhatsApp and began a bus ministry to help transport families to Sunday services.

Oscar makes the trip every Sunday from the apartment on the far South Side that the Home Away From Home team helped him secure. He was baptized at Concord in July 2024 and said, “In Venezuela I was Catholic, so this change was rather dramatic. But I’ve learned that what matters is finding a place where you feel comfortable, where you can be communicative with God, and even more than that, where you find people that love and care for you and you for them.”

“The migrants coming in, it’s a really joyous time for me,” said Mother Bessie Walker, a church elder and member for more than 50 years. “I learn more — I’m trying to learn Spanish more,” she added. “I think that’s a blessing for us, and I hope and pray they continue to come every Sunday. They’re helping [us] also; that’s a blessing to me.”

On a national scale, as the passage of the Trump administration’s domestic policy bill in July pledges to raise the budget for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to a record-breaking high, popular uprisings against abductions and deportations have sparked hope but also drawn ire. Tensions between Black and brown communities have again been stirred up, with some insinuating that the Black community isn’t doing enough to support these protests, while others claim attacks on immigrants are not the responsibility of African Americans, who overwhelmingly supported Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election. The way such arguments continue to erase both the disproportionate targeting of Black migrants by ICE and the Democratic Party’s long history of anti-immigrant violence proves how necessary the work happening at Concord Baptist is — both to build relationships of support between populations equally in danger of state repression and to overcome the manufactured divisions that only give more fodder to fascism.

A court ruling granting ICE agents expanded powers to conduct raids on places of worship raises the question of what comes next for the community at Concord. In late spring, the church held a town hall with the Southwest Organizing Project and the United African Organization, a coalition representing African migrants and refugees in Illinois, to discuss the evolving needs of migrants, many of them now arriving from African and Caribbean countries.

Phelps said that expanding local networks not only makes a wider range of resources available but also strengthens community defense, adding, “We need to make sure our communication is tight, so that in the event that there are attacks, we are able to respond accordingly.”

“There is no other way if we only stay in our own community. We really are stronger if we build coalitions,” said Imelda Salazar. “We cannot do this by ourselves.”

s a longtime organizer, I have found the work taking place at Concord Missionary Baptist Church both deeply healing and rigorously challenging. It has been inspiring to see multiracial, working-class communities in hypersegregated Chicago come together out of a sheer desire to be good neighbors and ease one another’s suffering. But it has been hard at times to work in a diverse, multigenerational setting where my ideals as a Black queer abolitionist aren’t universally shared. Yet it is precisely the factors that make the work at Concord difficult that also create so much hope. Building local networks of support, learning to rely on those who are different from us — in direct defiance of the forces intent on dividing us — is the exact kind of infrastructure we need to defeat fascism.

Becoming a Concord member means I have had to reflect on the ways my own organizing efforts have been siloed; my own ability to effect political shifts was limited by my refusal to work with people who didn’t already share my commitments. The members at Concord may not call themselves organizers, but they exemplify how community care is direct action and one of the most powerful tools we have to broaden the capacity of our movements. For it is precisely through the act of learning together, praying together, and fighting for one another that our worldviews are shifted, our empathy grows, and our values come into deeper alignment. Nothing threatens the white nationalist project more than that.

“We’re learning how to handle the opposition. So that’s a plus to me, especially right now,” said Mitchell. “Because there’s opposition against our migrant brothers and there’s opposition against our [Black] brothers. So we’re in this together. Separate, we’re like fingers. But together, we make a fist.”

Left to right: Priscilla Molina, a University of Chicago medical student and interpreter; Oscar, a Venezuelan asylum seeker; and Benji Hart, a translator and member of Concord Missionary Baptist Church in Chicago’s Woodlawn neighborhood, attend bilingual services as part of Senior Pastor Kenneth D. Phelps’s ongoing effort to welcome former shelter residents, mostly Venezuelan migrants who have since become part of the church’s growing, diverse congregation. Photographs by Carlos Javier Ortiz for Hammer & Hope.

Hammer&Hope

Benji Hart

@benjifemini

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Venezuelan Migrants, a Black Church, and an Experiment in Solidarity

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