Krista Tippett: Were you raised Mennonite?

Vincent Harding: No, no. I had the marvelous fortune, gift, blessing of being raised by a mother who, shortly after I was born, became a single mother and who had just great hopes for me. And one of the things that my mother wisely did was that she joined a fascinating little church in Harlem called Victory Tabernacle Seventh-Day Christian Church. These were magnificent women and men, a mixture of working class, professional class, all kinds of class. And they loved me, held me, recognized that I had possibilities that I didn’t recognize myself at the outset.

I had to leave them after a while because I’d come to different conclusions than they did. But even after I left, what I found out over the years was that love trumps doctrine every time. And I’m still deeply connected to some of the folks that I grew up with in that church 60, 70 years ago.

Tippett: So I want to spend most of our time talking about the present day. And I want you to bring the fullness of your moral imagination and spiritual imagination that emerged from all your experiences, including, of course, that and the Civil Rights Movement.

For example, one of the words that’s getting tossed around a lot is “civility” and “civil.” And I noticed that you’ve said — you’ve stated very emphatically that you think to call that movement, that transformation that you were part of in the 1960s, to reduce it to “civil rights” — [laughs] that “civility” in that case is not a big enough word. What I’m hearing as I have in this conversation now is, a lot of people feel like “civility” is not a big enough word for us right now, either. So talk to me about that. Do you have any thoughts about that?

Harding: Yes, I think that there are many things that have come to my mind, Krista, during this discussion that’s going on. And interestingly enough, I hadn’t quite made the connection that you are making now with my own thought, but that’s wonderful. That’s why we need each other. I have felt increasingly that what we are really talking about is not how we can have more civil conversation, but what we’re talking about in the context of our society, for one thing, is how we can learn how to have a democratic conversation. That is what we need.

We are absolutely amateurs at this matter of building a democratic nation made up of many, many peoples of many kinds, from many connections and convictions and from many experiences. And to know how, after all the pain that we have caused each other, how to carry on democratic conversation that in a sense invites us to hear each other’s best arguments and best contributions so that we can then figure out, how do we put these things together to create a more perfect union?

Tippett: I found that that way you keep pointing — for years, for decades — that asking about how to be democratic is really taking seriously that question of living into a more perfect union. I find that helpful as a way to open that word up, open the imagination.

Harding: And for me, Krista, it also opens up the question of what does it mean to be truly human? Democracy is simply another way of speaking about that question. Religion is another way of speaking about that question. What is our purpose in this world, and is that purpose related to our responsibilities to each other and to the world itself? All of that seems to me to be a variety of languages getting at the same reality.

Tippett: Right, and you very strongly make the link in your telling of the story of the Civil Rights Movement — the healing link between religion and democratic transformation. Would you talk to me about that a little bit, about what we’ve forgotten about the spiritual and religious dimensions of that?

Harding: Let’s remember, Krista, that that community that helped to create King and that he then helped to nurture was a community deeply grounded in the life of religion and spirituality. This was their way of being. For instance, everyone near him knew that he took very seriously this traditional, beautiful terminology when he said that what he was seeking for was not simply equality or rights, but what he was seeking for was the creation of the beloved community; that he saw everything that crushed against our best human development and our best communal development — like segregation, like white supremacy.

When he moved to break down those laws, those practices, he was doing it not simply as an act of civil action, but a deep spiritual responsibility. Seeing our best possibilities, like my church community saw in me, he saw it in this nation. People like Jimmy Baldwin and others, Malcolm for a certain time, couldn’t imagine how Martin could see those possibilities. But I think he was seeing it because he was looking with an eye that was deeply filled by love and compassion, and that eye opens us up to see many things that might otherwise be missed.

[music: “Woke Up This Morning” by John Legend]

Tippett: I’m Krista Tippett, and this is On Being — today, summoning the wisdom for now of the late civil rights elder Vincent Harding.

In the decades after the 1960s, Vincent Harding wrote a seminal book, Hope and History: Why We Must Share the Story of the Movement. And he began to bring young people together with elders of the movement. He founded the Veterans of Hope Project at the Iliff School of Theology in Denver to institutionalize this work in creative ways. Most riveting and instructive for the young, as Vincent Harding told it, are stories of how civil rights leaders have worked on society while at the same time constantly working on themselves.

[music: “Woke Up This Morning” by John Legend]

This idea of storytelling and the importance of stories in — the importance of stories just for human beings in general, but in a moment like this, in particular, comes up so much. And yet, I feel like we don’t — I don’t know if we don’t have the forms for it in this culture, or if it’s happening under the surface and not being pointed at. I mean, you are doing this.

Harding: My own sense, Krista, is that there is something deeply built into us that needs story itself — that story is a source of nurture; that we cannot become really true human beings for ourselves and for each other without story, and to find ways in which to tell it, to share it, to create it, to encourage younger people to create their own story.

For instance, in the work that we do with the Veterans of Hope, we also encourage the younger people to find the elders, to find the veterans — not the celebrities, not the TV stars, but those folks who nobody else knows have lived such magnificent lives. Find them, and then sit with them and learn how to ask the right questions so that the opening can take place. I think that this country cannot become its best self until we find ways more effectively of institutionalizing that process of sharing the stories of the elders.

Tippett: When you say that we as human beings have a built-in need for stories, what your work shows is that we human beings also know what to do with stories, so that as you say, the young people you work with know to take those stories as tools and pieces of empowerment in this day, this year.

Harding: For their own best work, because now it’s a powerful time in this country for young people and others to be asking the question, “And what are we for?” Do we exist for some reason other than competing with China or finding the best possible technological advances? Are there some things that are even deeper that we are meant for, meant to be, meant to do, meant to achieve? Jimmy Baldwin used to like to talk about us achieving ourselves — finding who we are, what we’re for, and making that possible for each other.

And so you’re right about — you know, the story — just as you were speaking, what I was thinking about, Krista, was when the mother with the baby at her bosom starts telling stories. It is clearly not just to pass on information. And what I find is that even in some of the strangest situations, most often where I go, where I speak, where I share, I start out by asking people to tell a little of their stories. And it is amazing what people discover of themselves, of their connections, of their community, and it’s wonderful.

Tippett: You know, I’ve learned that, too. To ask someone even to tell a little of their story is to give them a gift, because we don’t get asked that question. And we do learn as much as we tell.

You wrote a very important book, Hope and History. 1990, I believe?

Harding: Yeah, I think that was about the time.

Tippett: You must have been writing it in the ’80s. There’s a story you tell that, again, I felt offered up a really practical image for now. It was about your conversation, encounter you were having in a hard neighborhood in Boston, and a young man named Darryl. Would you tell that story about signposts — his image of signposts?

Harding: What I remember from that story was that a dear young friend of mine, Eugene Rivers — young at that time. I guess Gene’s going to feel old.

Tippett: Still busy in Boston.

Harding: Still busy in Boston. That, by the way, is one of the characteristics of many of the elders that we have interviewed in the Veterans Project — that people are persistent; that they go on and on and on, something that is not appreciated in this sound-bite society. If you don’t get it told, done, accomplished in ten minutes or ten days or even ten years, then you surely give up and turn away. But people like Gene and others — Grace Boggs is one of the great women, who came out of a Chinese ancestry, first generation in this country, married eventually a Black man from Alabama who was a union organizer in Detroit. And the two of them, Grace and Jimmy Boggs, became a tremendous team until Jimmy died some years ago. Grace is now 95. And in Detroit, she is one of the primary encouragers of the young people there not to be swept away by all of the talk about the end of Detroit, about the failures of Detroit. But she is working with young people to help them to become those who build again, create again.

Well, all of that takes us away from the story, but also illustrates a story.

Tippett: [laughs] It does, yeah.

Harding: I met this young man in Eugene’s apartment, and this young man came up just to sit next to me because he wanted to talk in a more personal way. It turned out that he was one of the leaders of the drug-running folks at the time. But what he said to me was that he really felt that one of the reasons why he had gone in the way that he had gone, not trying in any way to excuse himself, was the fact that he, like many other young people, were operating in a situation where they felt it was just very, very dark all around them. And what they needed were, as he put it, some signposts, some lights that would, in other peoples’ lives, help them…

Tippett: “Live human signposts,” you wrote.

Harding: Yes, yes — that would help them to see the possibilities for themselves.

And I’ve always felt that one of the things that we do badly in our educational process, especially working with so-called marginalized young people, is that we educate them to figure out how quickly they can get out of the darkness and get into some much more pleasant situation, when what is needed again and again are more and more people like Gene who will stand in that darkness, who will not run away from those deeply hurt communities and will open up possibilities that other people can’t see in any other way except seeing it through human beings who care about them. And if we teach young people to run away from the darkness rather than to open up the light in the darkness — to be the candles, the signposts — then we are doing great harm to them and the communities that they have come out of.

Tippett: I think this word “signpost” and this image of signposts is really important. I think it’s an important piece of practical vocabulary. You said a minute ago about elders that what you also tell young people is that they have to find the elders, right? I’ve thought a lot over the years about the teaching in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, and I think it has resonance across the traditions, of developing eyes to see and ears to hear. I think of that as almost a spiritual discipline that the 21st century makes more necessary.

Harding: That whole idea of discipline is one that clearly we have cast aside except when we’re talking about technological development or military development. And it seems to me that we need, again, to recognize that to develop the best humanity, the best spirit, the best community, there needs to be discipline; practices of exploring.

How do you do that? How do we work together? How — to go back to our conversation — how do we talk together in ways that will open up our best capacities and our best gifts?

My own feeling that I try to share again and again, Krista, is that when it comes to creating a multiracial, multiethnic, multi-religious democratic society, we are still a developing nation. We’ve only been really thinking about this for about half a century. But my own deep, deep conviction is that the knowledge, like all knowledge, is available to us if we seek it.

The older I get, the more I am convinced that that magnificent madman Jesus was really talking about something very truthful and powerful when he said, if you allow yourself to really hunger and thirst after the right way, then, if you will not back off from that hunger and that thirst, if you will just keep after it, then you will find the way. You will be filled. The way will find you.

And I think that that determination to find a truly democratic society and to create the truly beloved community, those are things that can be available to us if we’re willing to work with each other and work with the universe on developing them. They don’t come free and easy. They are tough, tough tasks for us to take on.

Tippett: I was listening to the BBC in the recent weeks, and they’re watching us from afar. And they were interviewing a journalist about this moment in American history, which seems very tumultuous, and the question was, is it really more violent and more despairing than it’s been before or does this happen repeatedly? And the comparison was made with the 1960s. And they said, look, there was a lot of social turmoil then. There were assassinations, right — I mean, many assassinations. But this journalist said — and I just want to know what you think — he said that he thought the difference between the 1960s and now was that even though there was incredible tumult and violence, it was at the very same time a period of intense hope, and people could see that they were moving towards goals, and that that’s missing now. What do you think about that analysis?

Harding: Krista, I think that that is such a complicated kind of issue that I can only pick at it and tease it out and play with it, in the best sense of play. I think that what I see now is the fact that all over this country, wherever I go — and of course, where I go tends to be sort of self-selective, because I am most often going into situations where people are operating out of a sense of hope and possibility, where in their local situations, whether it be Detroit or Atlanta or a campus someplace or a church community in Philadelphia, that there are women and men and young people who are operating out of hope.

My sense is that in the ‘60s there was probably a larger kind of canopy of hope that we could see and we could identify and that people could name and focus on. Now we are in particular spots, locations, sometimes seemingly isolated. But I feel that there are points, focal situations, where that is still available and where people are operating from that. So I think that it is not simply the matter of hope or no hope.

I have a feeling that one of the deeper transformations that’s going on now is that for the white community of America, there is this uncertainty growing about its own role, its own control, its own capacity to name the realities — that it has moved into a realm of uncertainty that it did not allow itself to face before.

And I think that that’s the place that we are in, and that’s even more the reason why we’ve got to figure out, what was King talking about when he was seeing the possibility of a beloved community and recognized that maybe, for some of us, that cannot come until some of us realize that we must give up what we thought was only ours, in the building of a beloved nation? Can there be a beloved nation? Why don’t we try and see?

Tippett: There’s a question that you pose in your writing, that you’ve posed in recent years —“Is America possible?” — which kind of echoes back to your assertion that we need more than civil discourse now. We need to more fully realize what it means to be a democracy. And I just wonder, when you answer that question, “Is America possible?”, what people come to mind? What answers come to mind in the form of the hope that you see embodied?

Harding: One of the great benefits of living almost to my 80th birthday is the great privilege of being able to meet and be with all kinds of marvelous people. I spend a lot of my time in places like Philadelphia, where on the northwest side I’ve been deeply involved with a church community there, a Methodist church led by a magnificent woman pastor who has embraced the young people of the community in ways that churches often do not. Young people who were considered marginalized have become the heart of her work, and they have seen their own possibilities.

I remember when a group of them came out to visit us at our project in Denver. They were true Philadelphians. They would dress from the Philadelphia streets, they moved like Philadelphians, and they ran into some very interesting encounters in Denver. But at one point two of them, one young man, one young woman, took me aside and said, “Could we talk to you for just a minute?” And they had started to call me Uncle Vincent. And they said to me, “Uncle Vincent, why do you love us so?” And what I saw was that they had this great capacity to know that they were being loved, to feel it in their being, and, through later conversation that we had, to recognize that that meant they had power and responsibility to do something for their community that had not been done for them.

I see young people like that all over this country, and I know that they exist. I know some of the adults who work with them in places like Greensboro, North Carolina, in Detroit, Michigan, on the reservations in New Mexico, out in the LA area — we’ve got working connections with young people and their adult nurturers in all of those kinds of situations.

And because I see that, feel that, receive their returning love, I know they are capable of building the beloved community. And so it is that kind of constant engagement with people who have been considered hopeless, useless, purposeless — just like I saw them in the Deep South, people who were considered backward, unable to do anything, became the creators of a new possibility for the whole nation.

And when I think about Tiananmen Square and Prague, I realize that those folks in Mississippi and Alabama who were considered useless were able to speak to the world. I see that again and again and again right in this country — see it with young people, see it with those who are loving them into new possibilities. And so that’s why, for me, the only answer that I can give to the question that I raise is yes — as we make it possible, yes. Yes.

[music]