Krista Tippett: Hello again, to this third round of Hope Is a Muscle. A warm welcome back. Crack open your Hope Is a Muscle journal. I return, as we begin, to a phrase I used early in this series.

“Live Human Signposts.”

That phrase was a gift to me from Vincent Harding, who also embodied it. Vincent Harding, who died in 2014, was himself one of those powerful, humble people who was never a celebrity, but who shifted history with his presence and is shifting it still.

A little bit of his story — back in 1955, he was working towards his master’s degree in history when he became riveted by the Montgomery Bus Boycott. And eventually, he and a few friends, both Black and white, traveled south to see how they could be of use. Along the way, they paid a visit to another young man in his late 20s, named Martin Luther King, Jr., and King was intrigued by Vincent Harding’s work with the Mennonites, which is one of the original peace churches. By the early 1960s, Vincent Harding and his late wife, Rosemarie, had moved to Atlanta, just around the corner from the Kings. They founded the Mennonite center there, and this was a key force helping the Civil Rights Movement develop the philosophy and practice of
nonviolence.

One of the things Vincent Harding liked to point out — in fact, insisted on pointing out — is that the phrase “civil rights” never adequately described the movement he was part of. Breaking down laws, changing lives and practices — this was not done simply as civil action but out of a sense of deep spiritual responsibility. And it was at its heart motivated by some biblical language of creating the “beloved community.”

Later in life, after those active years of the Civil Rights Movement, Vincent Harding took it upon himself to carry that work forward by loving young people. And he brought together other elders of the movement, and he called them “veterans of hope.” He actually created a Veterans of Hope Project at the Iliff School of Theology in Denver. He told me that one of the things that was most riveting and instructive for young people in coming into relationship with civil rights elders, veterans of hope, were the stories of how these human beings had worked on society while at the same time constantly working on themselves.

I knew Vincent for several years in this lifetime, and he has been a companion to me across time and space. I experience his eye, his touch, his voice, the aftereffects of his mentoring, all over the place, as still vivid and growing. I would say that he created evolutionary clusters and critical yeast wherever he went.

So in this part of the conversation with him that you’re going to hear, I had posed a question to him that I was hearing float around the world at that time, which was a sense that we are living in an age that has some resemblance to the 1960s, but the question was also about the absence of hope. The question was that there was incredible tumult and violence in that decade, as there has been in this decade we’re in now, but at the very same time, it was a period of intense hope, and there was an assumption that people could see that they were also moving towards goals. So I asked Vincent Harding, who was an actor in that time, what did he think about that analysis? And the first thing he said to me is that I needed to understand that he spends his life going into situations where people are choosing to operate out of a sense of hope and possibility, he said, in their local situations, whether it be Detroit or Atlanta or a campus or a church community in Philadelphia — that he sees human beings of every age operating out of hope.

Vincent Harding: 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 were dressed 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 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]

Tippett: I’m so aware, listening to this now again, of how prescient Vincent was when he resists the question of whether we are seeing places of hope versus places of no hope. He says, no, we have places that are operating out of uncertainty. And uncertainty can steal the ground from hope. It can send people into their fearful impulses, the fear places in our brains and bodies. He was prescient when he talked about the crisis of whiteness, which is now so much more vividly upon us.

Also, I hear Vincent describing how at the worst of times, there are these pockets of hope operating all over the place, but somewhat separately from each other. And that is an important and instructive analysis of this generative narrative of our time, which is real but not connected up, and so doesn’t always experience itself and isn’t always visible from the outside as a coherent landscape.

I hear Vincent Harding’s insistence that the only question big enough to live into is can we build a beloved community, a beloved nation? Why don’t we try, as he says? And the invitation here is to say yes.

If Vincent Harding says this America is possible, I must say yes and throw my life behind that yes. It’s so critical, too, to take in this observation or this underlying assumption that runs through Vincent’s vision, that stitching the generative narrative together — making it cohere as a visible, viable reality — includes stitching the generations together.

This question of having all the generations in the room and in relationship is a kind of diversity question that we rarely ask but that Vincent Harding would call and invite us to. Because the work ahead must be generational in scope, we must accompany each other across the span of our life experiences, our wisdoms, and our energies. So in Part 2 we will sit with some words of Vincent Harding about calling ourselves and others to our best capacities and our best gifts and doing that within the work of being citizens. And in Part 3 you will have the distinct pleasure of experiencing more of the magnificent human and teacher, Vincent Harding, as he was and remains.