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LIVING FOR CHANGE

MLK and Redeeming our Cities

By Grace Lee Boggs

Michigan Citizen, April 27-May 3, 2008

Last week I was the Honorary Co-Chair and keynoter for the 2008 Congress on Urban Ministry which met in Chicago to explore “how to create redemptive communities, release prophetic imagination and engage in justice, reconciliation and restoration” in our cities.

Over my years of community activism I’ve worked with a number of urban pastors. In the 1950s, at my request, the Revs. C.L. Franklin (New Bethel). A.A. Banks (Second Baptist), Henry Hitt Crane (Central Methodist), Horace White (Plymouth Congregational et al declared January 30, 1955 Kenya Sunday in order to alert Detroiters to the significance of the struggles of the Kenya people for independence. In the1960s I was active in the Black Power movement in Detroit, led by the Rev. Albert Cleage (Jaramogi ). In 1988 I was the vice-president of Detroiters Uniting to struggle against Casino Gambling, led by the Revs. Eddie Cobbin ( Freedom Baptist) and William Quick (United Methodist).

So I appreciate the important role that the church can play in community struggles and community building.

But I had problems with this gathering.

On the one hand, I was impressed by thoughtful and moving speakers like Rev. Otis Moore II1 (replacing retiring Rev. Jeremiah Wright at Trinity United Church of Christ) and Rev, Alexia Salvatierra, executive director of Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice in Los Angeles.

I also learned a lot from the lively and far-ranging discussion by the 30-40 participants in “From Beloved Communities to Cities of Hope. ” the workshop on Detroit led by Bill Wylie-Kellerman, Ron Scott and Rich Feldman.

But I was repelled by the workshop on “How the Urban Church Can Rebuild Urban America: Faith–based Development” in which former real estate developer Tracy Brown and his partner James Middleton not only promised “tons of money” to church leaders who employed them as consultants but also referred uncritically to right-wing partners like the Family Research Council,

I had a similar reaction to the workshop on “Islam in America: Reaching Diaspora Muslims through the Local Church,” in which Rev. Mark Hausfeld, former pastor of a Chicago church, boasted of his success in converting drug-addicted Pakistanis (in Pakistan!) to Christianity as a way of freeing them from their addiction.

What puzzled me most about the Congress was that there was no workshop on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and I heard no mention or discussion of the visionary ideas to redeem our cities that MLK.was developing during the last three years of his life.

I raised the question in my speech, given towards the end of the third day. Is it because church leaders do not know that these visionary ideas came out of MLK’s search for answers not only to the violence in Vietnam but to the uprisings in what he called “our dying cities”? Or is it because they are willing to engage in the familiar struggle against poverty but not in the much more challenging “radical revolution against racism, materialism and militarism” that King was calling for?

“The war in Vietnam,” King insisted,” is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit.”

‘We have come to value things more than people. Our technological development has outrun our spiritual development. We have lost our sense of community, of interconnection and participation.”

In order to regain our humanity, he said, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values against the giant triplets of racism. materialism and militarism.

King linked the despair and violence in the urban ghettos with the alienation which young people experience in today’s world.

“The source of this alienation is that our society has made material growth and technological advance an end in itself, robbing people of participation, so that human beings becomes smaller while their works become bigger.”

“The young people who joined the civil rights movement put on overalls to work in the isolated rural South because they felt the need for more direct ways of learning that would strengthen both society and themselves.”

What we need now” in our dying cities,” King said, are ways to provide young people with similar opportunities to engage in self-transforming and structure-transforming direct action.

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