Building the Beloved Community

We at W&M celebrated our third annual Martin Luther King, Jr. Weekend of Education and Social Justice in Petersburg, VA this month.  The weekend unfolds with a series of tours, dialogues, visits, service projects, reflections and is wrapped up by attending a moving performance of The Words of Dr. King at Petersburg’s performance theater, Sycamore Rouge.

This year, for the first time, we were joined on Sunday afternoon by Rev. Grady Powell.  Rev. Powell has lived in Petersburg for decades going back to the civil rights era.  In the 1950’s and 60’s, Petersburg was a center of civil rights activity – a point of justifiable pride for its current residents – and Rev. Powell was participant in and witness to many of the courageous acts that ultimately led to desegregation there.

After we had toured the downtown era and learned about Petersburg’s history spanning from the Old Dominion days to the 60’s when Dr. King spoke at Virginia State University, we returned to Pathways – the nonprofit that hosted us – to hear Rev. Powell’s stories and toss questions his way.  As a long-time resident of Atlanta, I’ve been privileged to hear John Lewis, Andrew Young, Coretta Scott King and other paragons of the Movement speak, but I’d never had the chance to sit across a table from them and ask questions.  The afternoon with Rev. Powell was uniquely inspiring for that reason.

He told us about the day he took a younger friend to register to vote, and that friend was not registered because he couldn’t define “folio,” a word the registrar chose randomly from the dictionary.  He described the inner conflict he felt in retrospect, having chosen to enroll his African-American children in the previously all-white school, his six and eight year old testing the limits of the hatred and fear of his white neighbors.  With a chuckle, he recalled taking his wife and young child to The Rebel café, taking his wife’s photograph as she stood under the Confederate flag out front, defying the bold-faced if implicit message of unwelcome.

Like many of us who get that energizing charge from community service, I can’t even recall every project I’ve participated in: the leaf-raking, painting and cement-mixing all start to blur together after a while.  One of the things that I’ve found as I’ve grown up in the community engagement world, though, is that context (what we in alternative breaks call education, orientation and training) enlivens our engagement with new communities by making wall-painting more about pitching in as part of a social movement than simply spiffing up someone’s place.

As it happened, I was on the cooking crew for Monday’s service projects.  With a hearty team of four others, I chopped onions, opened cans and improvised seasoning for veggie chili for our hungry crowd of sixty volunteers.  Those rich moments with Dr. Powell, along with our discussions about the meaning of social justice and interactions with Youth Build students at Pathways, transformed our onion-chopping station into a salon of sorts, where the conversation allowed space for discussing how to authentically honor Dr. King’s legacy.

Mixing cement and raking leaves for and with others have their place, and certainly provide tangible benefit.  Inevitably, though, those things alone are not enough.  More leaves fall and more homes are needed.  But when we are tuned-in enough to hear the stories that often resonate through decades, stories of people taking bold steps to build community and justice among themselves, engaging with communities outside our respective bubbles allows us to tap into something greater than our amateur attempts at physical labor.  We are tuned into, and now a part of, something greater than ourselves.  We are dipping our toes into what Dr. King famously called the Beloved Community.  The question is: after the shovels are cleaned and the vans are parked back in the Hall Lot, can we take what we learn and what we love, and be an active and committed part of that Community’s continued creation?