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Democracy needs 'loving community'
By Melanie Zuercher Bethel CollegeNORTH NEWTON, Kan. — Although Vincent Harding had been invited to Bethel College to give the keynote address at a program honoring Martin Luther King Jr., his main purpose for being on campus Jan. 16-18, he said, was not to speak but to listen.
Pat Rogers responds to Vincent Harding’s question, borrowed from Martin Luther King Jr.’s words, “To what do we need to be maladjusted in 2010?” Behind her is a mural created by fifth graders in Reenie Fast’s class at Northridge Elementary School in Newton. — Photo by Vada Snider/Bethel College
At a dinner in Harding’s honor, sponsored by the Kansas Institute for Peace and Conflict Resolution, he said: “I have become almost obsessed with the conviction that for the future of this country, and especially the future of democracy in this country, we find out, and practice, how to talk to each other… .
“Martin Luther King and the other grassroots workers [in the Southern Freedom Movement] were wonderful teachers and learners. How can what they taught go on?”
He then invited attenders, mostly longtime associates of Harding and local community leaders and activists, to say whatever was on their minds. Fear seemed to be a consistent theme: fear that the hopes and dreams that followed the 2008 election were unrealistic; fear that there are “dangerous continuities between why we were in Vietnam and why we’re in Afghanistan”; fear that the African-American children of Newton are not learning their own stories and their people’s history and “don’t appreciate the price that was paid.”
“What power counters fear?” Harding said. “What comes to mind is [Psalm 23]: Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death… . I shall not fear.”
Decades ago, struggling for African-American civil rights as part of the Southern Freedom Movement, Harding said, “We were like crazy people, singing ‘We are not afraid’ when our knees were practically buckling and we knew we could be killed at any moment.
“What we meant was that we were afraid, but we were not going to let that stop us.
“What is stronger than fear? The power of people together. Democratic citizenship is a tough job. It takes work, struggle. Without that, there’s no hope. We’ll either look for a great leader who will solve everything, or we’ll give up.”
The struggle is one “that demands loving community,” Harding concluded. “We need to get together not because it’s politically correct, but because it’s necessary… . Recognize that it’s in coming together, whether [by virtue of] DNA or loving relationships, that we achieve our best selves.”
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