[sixties-l] freedoms sacred dance

From: radman (resist@best.com)
Date: Thu Feb 15 2001 - 19:11:00 EST

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    freedom's sacred dance

    <http://www.futurenet.org/16culture/harding.htm>

    by Vincent Harding and Rosemarie Freeney Harding

    Nearly 40 years have passed since the summer of 1961, when we left Chicago
    to enter the powerful and transformative world of the southern Freedom
    Movement. We had just celebrated our first wedding anniversary. Rosemarie,
    who was born in Chicago, was working as an elementary school teacher and
    church-based social worker when we met. Vincent had come to Chicago from
    New York to study history at the University of Chicago and to serve as
    interim lay pastor at a small, southside Protestant congregation.
    As representatives to the movement from the Mennonite Churches of America,
    we moved to Atlanta, where we served as founders and co-directors of an
    interracial movement center called Mennonite House. From there we traveled
    throughout the South, participating in this spiritually grounded people's
    movement.
    All during that period, our children, Rachel and Jonathan, were with us.
    They were often in our arms or on our backs during the marches. They slept
    through the long meetings, but not before they had been greeted by our
    friends and co-workers who became their uncles and aunts along the way. And
    everywhere in the South they shared with us the marvelous hospitality of
    black and white homes. They eventually grew old enough to participate in
    such activities as leafletting on behalf of the first African-American
    mayor of Atlanta. Deeply embedded in them were the songs of the movement
    and the spirit to which those songs gave witness.
    This movement for the expansion of democracy, the breaking of the long-held
    power of legal segregation and white supremacy, and the reconciliation of a
    shattered human community cannot adequately be encompassed in the term
    "Civil Rights." It reached far deeper than any legalistic category, taking
    its participants into an amazing human adventure that opened the way to a
    transformation of persons, communities, a region, and a nation.
     From our earliest days in that struggle, we realized that the world of
    deep religious seeking and the world of expansive democracy-building were
    one world, grounded in the grandest hope and possibilities of the human
    spirit. Indeed, for many of those active in the Freedom Movement, the
    motivation to enter the struggle, the courage to move relentlessly forward
    as nonviolent soldiers against the terror of the white status quo, and the
    vision of a new, desegregated social order were all fueled by great
    spiritual and religious resources.
    So when some leaders, like our friend Martin King, identified a central
    goal of the movement in terms of "the beloved community," and others, like
    our friend Ella Baker, envisioned and modeled a participatory, expanding
    democracy, we knew that politics and spirituality belonged together, two
    manifestations of the same empowering reality.
    Everywhere we went, this dialectic of hope, this sacred dance between the
    spiritual and political, appeared at the heart of the movement. In the
    jails, where songs and prayers overcame moans and shrieks of pain; in the
    church-based mass meetings, where action reports and sophisticated
    strategizing melded into freedom songs, fervent prayers, and testimony
    sessions; on streets and roads, where protest marches became spiritual
    pilgrimages "moving on to freedom land," the dance continued.
    During the system-changing march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965, John
    Lewis, whose life had already been profoundly changed, experienced "a great
    sense of community," not only with his fellow marchers, but with the black
    men, women, and children who dared to break from the roadsides with food
    and drinks for the marchers, sharing a movable communion feast with
    Protestants, Catholics, atheists, and other divine dancers.
    And at the close of one day's march, Rabbi Abraham Heschel could testify
    that "I felt as if my legs were praying."
    In the closing years of the 1960s, many movement participants began to
    speak and act as if spirituality and democratic political action were
    opposed to each other. But we knew that we were called to another vision.
    In classes, retreats, and onferences, and in published writings and private
    conversations, we encouraged our movement sisters and brothers and others
    to nurture the healing interplay between religion and democratic
    transformation.
    We were encouraged in this dance not only through encounters with southern
    movement veterans such as Bob Moses, but with other veterans of hope, such
    as His Holiness, the Dalai Lama; Julia Esquivel, the Guatemalan poet and
    pro-democracy worker; Grace and James Boggs, the Detroit-based political
    philosophers and organizers; Delores Huerta, the powerful farm worker
    organizer;
    Howard Thurman, the African-American mystic and visionary; Jim Wallis of
    Sojourners; Sulak Sivaraksa, the lay Buddhist pro-democracy leader from
    Thailand; and our longtime friend, the poet Sonia Sanchez.
    In the late 1970s, we spent two years on the staff of Pendle Hill, a
    Quaker-sponsored study and retreat center near Philadelphia. Then in the
    1980s and 1990s we began teaching at the Iliff School of Theology in
    Denver. Throughout that time, we considered it our calling to gather
    together veterans of the southern movement and other spiritually based
    peace and justice workers, artists, teachers, and healers from this country
    and overseas. We encouraged these carriers of hope to share their stories
    of struggle, transformation, and healing with students, colleagues, and
    community members.
    At the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, we led a series of
    intergenerational summer workshops in Colorado. The retreats brought
    together veterans of earlier movements for democratic social change
    (especially in the southern struggle) with younger people. The young people
    were just beginning their careers as change-makers, and they were seeking
    to understand the role of religion and spirituality in their work and to
    connect to the earlier struggles for change. Afterward, both younger and
    older participants expressed a deep desire for continued opportunities to
    gather in retreats and workshops for healing, refreshment, and the renewal
    of hope.
    The Veterans of Hope Project is a response to these urgent calls. The
    Project began in 1997 as an experiment in education for humane,
    spirit-grounded social change. Based at the Iliff School of Theology, we
    sponsor courses, a series of videotaped interviews, lectures, retreats, and
    other programs that address the links between religion and social
    transformation.
    The first series of the edited videos includes conversations with men and
    women, almost all of whom remain deeply engaged in hard, demanding work for
    change:
                   ^ James Lawson, the United Methodist pastor whose teaching
    of nonviolent action and commitment to the poor were so vital to the rise
    of the southern student movement and to Martin King's own development.
    After retiring from 50 years in ordained Methodist ministry, Jim found time
    this summer to be arrested in Los Angeles and Cleveland, first for
    sitting-in with the Janitors for Justice and then standing with the
    beleaguered community of gay and lesbian sisters and brothers in his own
    national Methodist denomination.
                   ^ Bernice Johnson Reagon, the founder of "Sweet Honey in the
    Rock" who began her singing career first in church and then in southern
    jails, on marching lines, and in movement mass meetings, and was
    fundamentally transformed by the experience. Bernice continues to teach
    for democratic change in classrooms and on concert stages.
                   ^ Ruby Sales, who almost lost her life in 1965 when her
    friend and co-worker, Jonathan Daniels, a white seminarian, was murdered
    during their voter registration work in Alabama. Ruby, a women's movement
    and community organizer, recently completed her seminary degree and is now
    directing a church-based community center in Washington, DC.
                   ^ Zoharah Simmons, whose pilgrimage took her from a Memphis
    Baptist childhood through Black movement leadership to the completion this
    year of a long-sought doctoral degree. Zoharah all the while maintained her
    own highly disciplined spiritual life and her commitment to justice and
    peace, and is now a Sufi-based university professor of Islamic Studies at
    the University of Florida.
                   ^ Andrew Young, an ordained United Church of Christ
    minister, has taken his sense of religious calling into a fascinating
    variety of local, national and international political and economic venues.
    Andrew commutes between the United States and Africa in a never-ceasing
    commitment to the economic development of that continent.
    But two of our favorite Veterans of Hope are Rachel Noel of Denver and
    Grace Lee Boggs of Detroit. Having entered their 80s, these two women model
    the advice of the late Fannie Lou Hamer: "Keep on Keeping On!" Doing so,
    they remind us that the dance toward the more perfect union has always
    depended on veterans like Noel and Boggs, who continue to put their arms
    around the young folks and move on in loving determination, manifesting in
    their lives the title of Grace's memoir, Living for Change.
    In addition to these veterans, we have interviewed artists, teachers,
    scholars, religious leaders, and activists (and some who combine all these
    descriptions in their lives) whose spiritually grounded lives have focused
    on transformative creativity. We have sat with sisters and brothers from
    Thailand, Vietnam, Guatemala, and South Africa who have worked for
    democratic social change. In each case the interviews have been part of a
    larger process of nurturing hope and healing. Indeed, these engagements
    with such committed and humane women and men have deepened our own
    determination to continue and expand the working dance of healing our
    friends, our family, our nation, and our world.
    In the months and years ahead, our Veterans of Hope project will continue
    to gather and share the sacred stories. We will offer intergenerational
    retreats, focusing on the renewal and healing of those who work for
    compassionate democratic change in this country and overseas. We will
    continue to encourage younger artists, activists, and spiritual seekers to
    engage with their older counterparts to nurture the work and the spirit of
    one another, moving across lines of race, class, religion, and nationality.
    And we will work with those who are also seeking to create living
    connections between the search for "the beloved community" and the movement
    toward "a more perfect union."
    Such are the people who keep us going, and we know that our work is for
    them and their great ----grandchildren. The dance belongs to us all.

    ----
    Vincent Harding and Rosemarie Freeney Harding, themselves veterans of the 
    southern Freedom Movement, are co-founders and co-chairs of the Veterans of 
    Hope Project. Contact the Project at 2201South University Blvd., Denver, 
    Colorado, 80210, tel: 303/765-3194. 
    



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