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Building a Movement
to Grow Our Souls
By Grace Lee Boggs
Bioneers Conference
Traverse City, October 16, 2004
I am delighted to be here this afternoon. Ever since I came
to Detroit to live 50 years ago, I’ve wanted to visit this beautiful
place. Now, finally, thanks to my old friend and Avalon Bakery
co-owner Jackie Victor, I've made it. At the age of 89 going on
90. I am, as you can see, a bit wobbly on my feet. As I like to say,
I have three pair of glasses, two hearing aids, very few teeth but,
fortunately, most of my marbles.
I can’t think of a better time to be speaking to a Bioneers
gathering because whether Kerry or Bush wins in the upcoming
election, our country urgently needs solution-oriented,
locally-grounded visionaries like yourselves to patiently explain to
other Americans that our defeat in Iraq is not only a disaster but an
opportunity to redefine and rebuild our relationships with each
other, to the Earth and to the rest of the world.
This is how I have arrived at this conviction.
Two weeks ago, over the October 1-3 weekend, I
participated in a small gathering of about 20 diverse individuals
from various Spirituality and Social Justice groups, brought
together at the Fetzer Institute in Kalamazoo by the Institute for
Democratic Renewal. The gathering began with a very loose
agenda because the facilitators, my old friends Margo Adair and
Bill Aal, of Tools for Change, were confident from their
knowledge of the invitees and the crisis in which our country was
engulfed that an agenda would emerge organically.
I wasn’t involved in the planning and hadn’t the vaguest
notion what to expect. I didn’t even know until a couple of days
before the gathering that the conveners had included in the
reading materials mailed out to participants two pieces by myself:
An article entitled: The Beloved Community of Martin Luther
King Jr. which appeared last spring in various magazines, and
Going Beyond Black and White, a speech I made back in 1998.
I also had no idea who would be there. To my delight and
astonishment the first person I saw on my arrival Thursday evening
was my old friend, Vincent Harding, who worked closely with
Martin Luther King Jr. and SNCC in the South during the 1960s
and in 1967 on King's historic Anti-Vietnam War speech at
Riverside Church.
Vincent is the author of this little pamphlet A Way of Faith,
A Time for Courage, and this little book, Martin Luther King: The
Inconvenient Hero, which has gone through six printings since it
was first published in 1966.
The next person who greeted me was John Maguire whom
I had never met but who, I soon learned, had attended Crozier
Theological Seminary with King in the 1950s and is now President
Emeritus of Claremont College.
Among other participants whom I was also meeting for the
first time were Shirley Strong,, the African-American executive
director of Project Change; Kathy Wan Povi Sanchez, an
extraordinary Native American scientist who has been active in
the anti-nuclear movement; Kevin Ramirez of the Central
Committee for Conscientious Objectors (who with Dan Edwards
opened Sunday morning with a great rap); Carlos Rafael Alices
Negros, who teaches at the Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High
School in the South Bronx; Claudia Castenada of the Women’s
Theological Center; and Dorsey Blake, Senior Pastor, Church for
Fellowship of All People.
At lunch on Friday, John Maguire and I discovered that we
shared with Vincent a profound belief in the timeliness of the ideas
that MLK had been developing in the last two years of his life,
especially his conviction that the only way to overcome the giant
triplets of racism, militarism and materialism was by making a
radical revolution in our values.
So we proposed that the gathering include a panel
discussion by Vincent, John and myself. During this discussion
which took place on Saturday morning Vincent voiced the
disquiet that many of us have been feeling because Kerry, like
Bush, believes that terrorism can be defeated by killing terrorists
and is asking for support from American voters on his promise to
be tougher and more effective in the killing.
After that, things just took off. Step by step participants
arrived at the idea of developing a message of concern,
tentatively entitled THESE ARE THE TIMES TO GROW OUR
SOULS, to be ready within a few weeks so that it can be
distributed widely after the election and especially at MLK
birthday celebrations in January 2005.
The statement is still being finalized. Basically it calls
upon Americans of every walk of life and of all political
persuasions to come together in formal and informal conversations
in our families, neighborhoods, workplaces, churches, synagogues,
temples, schools and universities, with our relatives, neighbors,
co-workers, classmates and teachers, doctors and patients
_1 to explore the non-violent approach of Dr. Martin
Luther King as an alternative to the use of military
force and his projection of the Beloved Community
in order to reverse the polarization between anti-war
and pro-war Americans that threatens to be even
more divisive and dangerous than the polarization
between anti-Vietnam War and pro-Vietnam War
protagonists.
_2 to explore ways by which we can grow our souls to
keep pace with our technological development,
especially transforming our relationships with one
another, with the Earth, and with other peoples in
the world.
The statement especially urges participants in these conversations
to
_1 Listen patiently and respectfully to one another,
especially those with whom we disagree, because our
aim is not to win arguments but to create the beloved
community and a country that we will all be proud to
call our own. We need to be very conscious, as
radicals rarely are, that those with whom we disagree
will not disappear off the face of the earth but will
continue to be our neighbors, fellow workers,
classmates, etc.
_2 Explore how to transform ourselves, our relationships
with one another, to our institutions and to Mother
Earth...
_3 Organize actions that do not assail opponents but rather
demonstrate positive changes that will benefit the entire
community.
_4 Celebrate and support our visionaries who give us
music, dance, poetry, film, laughter, tears and new ways
of seeing ourselves and our world
_5 Create places and events where people of different
generations, backgrounds, beliefs and experiences can
come together to share stories and hopes, developing
new ways of thinking and being together
_6 Hold close to our hearts and minds the imagination,
passion and energy of young people who have the
greatest stake in the future.
_7 Read and probe the works of Dr. King, especially those
in which he warns that our technological power has
outrun our spiritual powers..
_8 Organize events for Martin Luther King Day in January
2005 that emphasize not only MLK's dreams of
yesterday but his challenges for today.
Whatever the outcome of the November 2nd election, the
work of healing our people and our country is beginning. By
joining with those around us to explore the importance of
MLKîs ideas on Non-violence and the Beloved Community in our
present crisis, we can work together to create the ways of living
and being that will give birth to a new, more loving, more
productive, and life-affirming country that all of us will be proud
to call our own.
Our sense is that at this painful and dangerous moment in
the continuing development of our country; there is not only a
need but a hunger for this kind of dialogue in many very diverse
individuals and groups throughout this country, and that therefore
we have an extraordinary opportunity to help give birth to a great
movement that ties together all the basic and interconnected issues
now confronting us.
Over the last 60 years I have had the enormous privilege of
participating in most of the great humanizing movements of the
second half of the last century: labor, civil rights, black power,
womenís, Asian American, environmental justice, antiwar. Each
was a tremendously transformative experience, 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.
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?
How are we going to make our livings in an age when
Hi-Tech and the export of jobs overseas have brought us to the
point where the number of workers needed to produce goods and
services is constantly diminishing? Where will we get the
imagination, the courage and the determination to reconceptualize
the meaning and purpose of Work in a society that is becoming
increasingly jobless?
What is going to happen to cities like Detroit that were
once the arsenal of democracy? Now that theyíve 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" Or does our topdown educational
system, created a hundred years ago to prepare an immigrant
population for factory work, bear a large part of the responsibility
for the escalation in incarceration?
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?
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?
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, ìdevelop an
overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the
best in their individual society.
But this time of great danger is also a time of great
opportunity. Over the last year and a half, by meeting violence
with violence, by resorting to military means to eliminate the threat
of terrorism, we have ruined or ended the lives of thousands of our
young people and tens of thousands of Iraqi children women and
men, Yet we have only made the world more dangerous for
ourselves, our children and everyone else. At the same time our
inevitable defeat in Iraq is creating a situation here at home where
those who have supported the administrationís war in Iraq are
likely to seek scapegoats for their frustrations and anger, as the
Germans did after World War, thus aiding and abetting the onset of
Hitler and the Holocaust.
So it is not only idealism but realism that calls upon us to
seize this opportunity to engage Americans in widespread and
wide-ranging conversations to explore the ideas of Dr. King to help
us redefine what it means to be an American in the 21st century.
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