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Building The Beloved Community in the City
By Grace Lee Boggs
Seminary Consortium for Urban Pastoral Education
2006 Congress on Urban Ministry
Chicago, March 24, 2006
Thank you, Bill Wylie-Kellerman, for that thoughtful introduction
and for the years of struggle that you, Jeanie, Shea and I
have shared in Detroit.
This is the second time that I have spoken to a SCUPE
Congress. The first was eight years ago in 1998 when I was
82 years young. It is good to be back, somewhat less mobile,
with more powerful hearing aids and fewer teeth, but with
most of my marbles.
I am often asked why I remain so active and alert at
my age. I think it is because in the last 65 years I have
had the privilege of participating in most of the great
humanizing movements of the second half of the last
century – Labor, Civil Rights, Black Power, Women’s,
Asian American, Environmental Justice, Anti-War. Each
was a tremendously transformative experience for me,
expanding my understanding of what it means to be an
American and a human being, and challenging me to
keep deepening my thinking about how to bring about
radical social change.
However, I cannot recall any previous period when
the issues were so basic, so interconnected and so
demanding of everyone living in this country, regardless
of race, ethnicity, class, gender, age or national
origin. At this point in the continuing evolution of
our country and of the human race, we need to stop
thinking of ourselves as victims and to recognize
that we must each become a part of the solution
because we are each a part of the problem.
How are we going to make our livings in an age
when Hi-Tech and outsourcing have brought us to the
point where the number of workers needed to produce
goods and services is constantly diminishing? In a
society that is becoming increasingly jobless, where
will we get the imagination, the courage and the
determination to reconceptualize the meaning and
purpose of Work as something that is done to produce
use-values and develop our humanness, as distinguished
from a Job or Employment which is done in industrial
societies, capitalist or socialist, mainly for wages
or exchange values?
What is going to happen to cities like Detroit
that were once the arsenal of democracy? Now that
they’ve been abandoned by industry, are we just
going to throw them away? Or can we rebuild, redefine and
respirit them as models of 21st Century self-reliant,
sustainable multicultural communities? Who is going
to begin this new story?
How are we going to redefine Education so that
30-50% of inner city children do not drop out of
school, thus ensuring that large numbers will end
up in prison? Is it enough to call for “Education,
not Incarceration” as the Black Radical Congress
has done? Or does our “command and control” educational
system, created a hundred years ago to prepare the
majority for factory work, bear a large part of the
responsibility for this ongoing destruction of young
lives?
How are we going to build a 21st century America
in which people of all races and ethnicities live
together in harmony, and Euro-Americans in particular
embrace their new role as one among many minorities
constituting the new multi-ethnic majority?
What is going to motivate us to start caring
for our biosphere instead of using our mastery of
technology to increase the volume and speed at
which we are making our planet uninhabitable for
other species and eventually for ourselves? Can
we create new ways to live more simply so that
others can simply live?
And, especially since 9/11, how are we to
achieve reconciliation with the two-thirds of the
world that increasingly resents our economic,
military and cultural domination? Can we accept
their anger as a challenge rather than a threat?
Out of our new vulnerability can we recognize
that our safety now depends on our loving and
caring for the peoples of the world as we love
and care for our own families? Or can we
conceive of security only in terms of the
Patriot Act and exercising our formidable
military power?
When the chickens come home to roost for our
invasion of Iraq, as they are already doing, where
will we get the courage and the imagination to win
by losing? What will help us recognize that we have
brought on our defeats by our own arrogance, our
own irresponsibility and our own unwillingness,
as individuals and as a nation, to engage in
seeking radical solutions to the growing inequality
between the nations of the North and those of the
South? Can we create a new paradigm of our selfhood
and our nationhood? Or are we so locked into nationalism,
racism and determinism that we will be driven to seek
scapegoats for our frustrations and failures - as the
Germans did after World War I, thus aiding and abetting
the onset of Hitler and the Holocaust?
We live at a very dangerous time because these
questions are no longer abstractions. Our lives, the
lives of our children and future generations, and even
the survival of the planet depend on our willingness
to transform ourselves into active planetary and
global citizens who, as Martin Luther King Jr. put
it, “develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a
whole in order to preserve the best in their individual
society.”
The time is already very late and we have a long
way to go to meet these challenges. Over the decades of
economic expansion that began with the so-called
American Century after World War II, tens of millions
of Americans have become increasingly self-centered
and materialistic, more concerned with our possessions
and individual careers than with the state of our
neighborhoods,
cities, country and planet , closing our eyes and hearts
to the many forms of violence that have been exploding
in our inner cities and in powder kegs all over the rest
of the world – both because the problems have seemed so
insurmountable and because just struggling for our own
survival has consumed so much of our time and energy.
At the same time the various identity struggles,
while remediating to some degree the great wrongs
that have been done to workers, African Americans,
Native Americans and other people of color, women,
gays and lesbians, and the disabled, and while
helping to humanize our society overall, have also
had a shadow side in the sense that they have
encouraged us to think of ourselves more as
determined than as self-determining, more as
victims of “isms” ( racism, sexism, capitalism)
than as human beings who have the power of choice
and who for our own survival must assume individual and
collective responsibility for creating a new
nation that is loved rather than feared and that
does not have to bribe and bully other nations to
win support.
These are the times to grow our souls. Each
of us needs to undergo a tremendous philosophical
and spiritual transformation. Each of us needs to
be awakened to a personal and compassionate
recognition of the inseparable interconnection
between our minds, hearts, and bodies, between
our physical and psychical well-being, and
between our selves and all the other selves
in our country and in the world. Each of us needs
to stop being a passive observer of the suffering
that we know is going on in the world and start
identifying with the sufferers. Each of us needs
to make a leap that is both practical and
philosophical, beyond determinism to self-determination.
Each of us has to be true to and enhance our own
humanity by embracing and practicing the conviction
that as human beings we have Free Will; that despite
the powers and principalities that are bent on objectifying and
commodifying us and all our human relationships,
the interlocking crises of our time require that
we exercise the power within us to make principled
choices in our ongoing daily and political lives,
choices that will eventually although not inevitably
(there are no guarantees), make a difference.
How are we going to bring about these
transformations? Politics as usual, debate and
argument, even voting, are no longer sufficient.
Our system of representative democracy, which was
created by a great revolution, no longer engages
the hearts and minds of the great majority of
Americans. Vast numbers of people no longer bother
to go to the polls, either because they don’t care
what happens to the country or the world, or because
they don’t believe that voting will make a difference
on the profound and inter- connected issues that really
matter. Even organizing or joining massive protests against
disastrous policies and demanding more progressive
policies fall short because although they may demonstrate
that we are on the right side politically, they do not
provide a transformative vision of the changed world
and the changed human beings that are now both necessary
and possible. What we urgently need in this period are
the kinds of self-transforming and structure-transforming
direct actions moving us towards the radical revolution
in values advocated by Martin Luther King in the last
three years of his life, when he was faced on the one
hand, with the reality that our government had become
the greatest purveyor of violence in today’s world and
on the other, with the escalating violence of angry and
desperate blacks in our northern ghettos.
In Gandhi’s words, we must be the change we
want to see in the world. Thankfully, that is what
people coming from many different backgrounds in
countless and widely scattered places in this
country and around the world, are beginning to
recognize, not because of what Mahatma Gandhi or
Martin Luther King Jr. said, but because, as we
enter the 21st century, present and impending
disasters in our relations with one another, to
the Earth, to other species and to other peoples
of the world are encouraging this kind of cultural
creativity.
For example, Paul Hawken of the Natural
Capital Institute estimates that at least
130,000 self-healing civic groups of various
sizes have emerged in response to globalization
in countries around the world. Most are in the
two-thirds of the world that we used to call the
“Third World.” But they also exist in this country.
For example, Detroit, my home town, was once
the shining example of the success of American capitalism,
encouraging and reinforcing the conventional wisdom
that technological progress is the key to social
progress. Over the last thirty years, however, it
has become a wasteland, a symbol of the coming collapse
of American urban civilization. A population which
reached two million in the l950s when I came to the
city now hovers around 900,000. Physically the city
is more devastated than Dresden, Berlin and Tokyo
after the massive bombings of World War II. Buildings
that were once architectural marvels, like the Statler
Hilton and the Book Cadillac hotels, Union Station and
the Michigan Theatre, lie in ruins, earmarks like the
Roman Colosseum of the decline of an empire. On city
planning maps white spaces now outnumber black ones,
reminders of the hundreds of thousands of housing units
that have vanished in the last thirty years. Many of
the institutional structures that remain are fenced
in, and in most neighborhoods people live behind
triple locked doors and barred windows. Our public
school system is in shambles. Almost 50% of teenagers
drop out or are pushed out before graduation, many of
them drifting into lives of crime and incarceration.
Because each dropout represents a loss of early $7000
in state funding, schools are being closed down and
teachers laid off.
Under these circumstances, it would be easy to
abandon all hope for Detroit's future - or to be satisfied
with pseudo-solutions like casinos and luxury sports
stadia. Yet precisely because physical devastation on
such a huge scale boggles the mind, it also frees the
imagination, especially of activists/artists/artisans,
to perceive reality anew; to see vacant lots not as
eyesores but as empty spaces inviting the viewer to
fill them in with other forms, other structures that
presage a new kind of city that will embody and
nurture new life-affirming values in sharp contrast
to the Materialism, Individualism and Competition that
have brought us to this denouement.
This new kind of city can't be built overnight.
To create it is going to take time and struggle,
including political struggles over opposing policies
and directions. It can't be built from the top down
by politicians reacting to crises or by developers
seizing opportunities to make megaprofits. It must
emerge organically from the initiative, imagination,
commitment, passions and cooperation of a lot of
different people with diverse skills and gifts,
putting their hearts, heads and hands together
to make a difference.
That is what has been happening since the
mid-1980s when crack came to Detroit and with it
a tremendous increase in violence. In the summer
of 1986 47 kids under 16 were killed and 365 wounded.
The problem, according to Coleman Young, our first
black mayor, was an economic one, the lack of jobs
Therefore his solution was also economic: a casino
industry that would provide 50,000 jobs. To defeat
him we joined Detroiters Uniting,a broad coalition
including blue and white collar workers, cultural
workers, clergy, political leaders and professionals.
However, in the course of the struggle (which we won)
he called us “naysayers” and demanded that we come up
with an alternative.
Recognizing the legitimacy of Young’s challenge,
my late husband, Jimmy Boggs, made a speech entitled
REBUILDING DETROIT; AN ALTERNATIVE TO CASINO GAMBLING
(see boggscenter.org) in which he pointed out that our
concerns were not only with the economy but with “how
our city has been deteriorating socially, politically,
morally and ethically.” Therefore we need to envision a
new kind of city in which Detroit citizens “take
responsibility for creating the local enterprises
that would ensure our livelihoods, instead of continuing
to depend on and beg corporations with no loyalty to
the city or its residents to provide us with jobs.”
To give a sense of how that new kind of city could
be built, in 1992 we founded Detroit Summer, a multicultural,
intergenerational youth program to rebuild, redefine
and respirit Detroit from the ground up. Since1992 Detroit
Summer has been involving young people in a variety of
activities: planting community gardens, painting public
murals, rehabbing houses and creating Back Alley Bikes,
while also expanding their minds and imaginations through
workshops and intergenerational dialogues.
Detroit Summer’s community gardening brought us into
immediate contact with the “Gardening Angels,” a loose
network of elders, many of them born and raised in the
South, who were already planting gardens on vacant lots.
They were doing this, they explained, not only to produce
food but to prevent crime and give youth born and raised
in a pushbutton world a sense of process.
I cannot overstate the significance of this gardening.
As we enter the 21st century the conviction is growing,
especially in the generation born before World War II,
that we must bring the country back into the city in
order to heal ourselves from the psychological, ecological and
philosophical effects of four centuries of Western
industrialization and urbanization.
Thus, within walking distance of my house on
the city’s east side, Brother Rick from the Capuchin
Monastery has created Earthworks to produce food for
WIC mothers. Approximately five miles west, the Catherine
Ferguson Academy, a public high school for teenage
mothers, not only provides a nursery for the students’
infants and toddlers but engages the mothers in
life-affirming activities like gardening, growing a
fruit orchard, building a barn and caring for farm
animals. As a result, 80% of these students go on to
college.
All kinds of people, urban planners, architects,
journalists, filmmakers come from around the world to
study how Detroit is grappling with deindustrialization.
Hundreds of students from neighboring universities,
especially the University of Michigan, participate in
community-service learning programs in the city or
spend a week or summer or their Alternative Spring
break on our rebuilding projects. Every year a few students
decide to settle in the city after graduation because
it offers them a unique opportunity to participate
in creating the future.
As a result, we now have a well-organized Detroit
Agricultural Network which not only provides training
in gardening and food preparation skills but organizes
neighborhood cluster groups. Every August the Detroit
Agricultural Network organizes a tour to visit community
gardens. Three years ago we needed two buses to transport
about 80 people on the tour. Last year we needed eight buses.
An increasing number of schools are also planting
gardens to introduce children to life-affirming activities.
For example, Rahiel Housey, a teacher at the Holbrook
School in Hamtramck (a small municipality inside the
boundaries of Detroit where immigrant families from
the Mideast have settled) decided to build a school
community garden because she was sick and tired of
the children walking across a vacant lot full of dead
cats, discarded tires and old mattresses to get to school.
Her efforts were rewarded one day when a little girl
who was suspected of being a mute because she had never
uttered a word, suddenly held up a radish and said,
“Mrs. Housey, this is a radish.”
One of the most exciting aspects of our work in
Detroit is the synergy that has developed between the
community and the university. An example of this is
the Adamah vision created by students in the
Architectural Department of the University of Detroit
Mercy, under the leadership of visiting architect Kyong
Park and department head Steve Vogel. Adamah, which means
“of the earth” in Hebrew, is a vision, inspired by what
was already going on in Detroit, for rebuilding a 2-1/2
square mile area in one of the city’s most devastated
on the east side of Detroit close to the Boggs Center.
The vision begins with unearthing Bloody Run Creek
which had been covered over and absorbed into the
city’s sewer system around the turn of the century
and turning it into a canal for both recreation and
irrigation. It includes greenhouses, grazing land
and a dairy, a tree farm and lumber mill, a community
center, community gardens, a shrimp farm and windmills
to generate electricity and living and work spaces in
the former Packard auto plant.
The meaning of what we are doing in Detroit can
be summed up in the slogan of the 1999 National Black
Farmers Conference: “We can’t free ourselves until we
feed ourselves.” Or as my friend Michelle Brown puts
it: “It is only by providing for our most basic needs
that we are empowered to make our own choices.”
I was reminded of these truths when two weeks
ago Shea Howell and I participated in a two day
training session of Growing Power, a two acre urban
farm on the northwest side of Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
It was an unforgettable experience for us and
the approximately seventy other participants who
included youngsters and oldsters from all over the
country and from many different backgrounds.
For example, I was in a project planning workshop
with Wesley, a 13-year old African American middle
schooler from the neighborhood, and Hank, a
middle-aged Puerto Rican psychiatrist interested
in organizing a similar urban farm in his Rochester,
New York neighborhood.
Growing Power is the realization of the
imagination of 6’7” Will Allen, the first African
American to play basketball with the University of Miami.
Raised on a farm in Maryland, Will never forgot the
sense of extended family and community that he
experienced as a child because his family always
had plenty of food and took it for granted that
they should share with those in need. So, after
a pro basketball career and working in sales and
sales technology with Proctor & Gamble, he decided
in the early 1990s to buy a two acre plot in
“Greenhouse Alley,” a stretch of small farms that
fed Milwaukee in the early decades of the 20th century.
Will began with a Vision – a Vision of Independence,
independence from poverty, independence from chemicals,
independence from far-off food sources, independence from
farming techniques that are no longer viable given our
ever dwindling supply of farmland and fossil fuels,
and also independence from the illusion that community
can exist without individuals accepting responsibility.
As a result, Growing Power has blossomed into a
model food system concentrated in five greenhouses on
two acres which now includes An aquaphonic system in
which mosquito size fishlings enter a tank at one end
of the greenhouse and emerge as 2-1/2 pounders at the
other. 10,000 pounds of compost, produced weekly through
combining redworms with food waste, to remediate the
soil of Growing Power and other gardens.
A Rainbow Coalition of African American, EuroAmerican
and Hmong farmers who supply local restaurants and
families with weekly Market Baskets. A Youth Corps
Farm program which starts kids out when they are eight
or nine and works with them until they go to college.
This program gives kids what the schools don’t but
should provide. They work hard, learn how to think on
their feet, and are challenged to solve problems instead
of giving up and complaining when something doesn’t
work out immediately. To save our public schools and
our young people I am convinced (as I point out in this
pamphlet “Freedom Schooling: :Bringing the Neighbor
back into the ‘hood”, compiled from my weekly columns
in the Michigan Citizen) that this is the kind of
education our children need from K-12. It is also the
kind of self-and structure-transforming project
education that in the last three years of his life
Martin Luther King was advocating for young people
“in our dying cities.” We’re not just growing food,
the folks at Growing Power say. We are growing community.
These examples from Detroit and Milwaukee are two
glimpses of the future that are springing up in the United
States.. As members of Beloved Communities
Shea Howell, Nelson Johnson
and I are seeking out and connecting other examples of
people growing community. They are mostly local, small,
unconnected, and unrecognized, but as organizational
consultant Margaret Wheatley explains in her book
LEADERSHIP AND MODERN SCIENCE ( p.44): “From a Newtonian
perspective, our efforts often seem too small, and we
doubt that our actions will contribute incrementally
to large-scale change. Step by step, system by system
we aspire to develop enough mass or force to alter the
larger system. “But a quantum view explains the success
of small efforts quite differently.“Acting locally allows
us to be inside the movement and flow of the system,
participating in all those complex events occurring
simultaneously. We are more likely to be sensitive to
the dynamics of this system, and thus more effective.
However, changes in small places also affect the global
system, not through incrementalism, but because every
small system participates in an unbroken wholeness.
Activities in one part of the whole create effects
that appear in distant places. Because of these
unseen connections, there is potential value in
working anywhere in the system. We never know how
our small activities will affect others through the
invisible fabric of our connectedness. I have learned
that in this exquisitely connected world, it’s never
a question of ‘critical mass.’ It’s always about
critical connections.”
In Detroit and Milwaukee we are making these
critical connections. We are viewing the crises
in our communities in our schools and in our city
not only as a danger but as an opportunity. We
have taken very seriously MLK’s recognition in
the last three years of his life of our need
for a radical revolution in values, not only
against racism but against materialism and
militarism, and his advocacy of self-transforming
and structure-transforming projects for young
people “in our dying cities.” Last night when
Shea Howell and I arrived at the hotel, we ran
into Ed Rowe, our good friend who pastors Central
Methodist Church in downtown Detroit. In the course
of our discussion we concluded that it is very
difficult to turn around a huge educational-industrial
complex like the public school system but that at
this stage pastors in every city can begin to
accelerate that turnaround by creating after school
and summer programs in which school children and
youth engage in community-building activities like
maintaining neighborhood streets, planting community
gardens, recycling waste, painting public murals –
and thus, almost overnight, begin making our neighborhoods
safer, livelier and healthier.
In 1954, Martin Luther King Jr. was only 25
years old when he became pastor of Dexter Avenue
Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, armed with
his faith in Christianity, the dialectical ideas
of Hegel ( who was his favorite philosopher),
and the example of Gandhi’s leadership in the
struggle to liberate India from British colonialism.
One year later, he was leading the Montgomery Bus
Boycott , the struggle which inspired the great
human identity and ecological movements of the
last century because it was rooted in the concept
of two-sided transformation, of ourselves and our
society.
That is the kind of conviction and commitment
it is going to take to build beloved communities
in our cities.
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