Never Too Desperate to Be Human

This article is a shortened version of a chapter from Peacemakers: Voices from the New Abolitionist Movement, edited by Jim Wallis. The book is an anthology of testimonies from Christian leaders concerning their faith journeys in a nuclear age. Peacemakers was published by Harper and Row in the spring of 1983. --The Editors

In the fall of 1953, when I began my sojourn there, Fort Dix, New Jersey, did not advertise itself as a place of awakening. Rather, in the ominous interregnum between the quieting of the war in Korea and the heating of the U.S. war in Vietnam, that sprawling army base served as a major reception center and training ground for tens of thousands of this country's draftees. I was among them, arriving at Dix late in the summer, coming out of Harlem and the South Bronx shortly after my 22nd birthday.

As I approached this new experience, I brought with me a mixed and sometimes tortured array of feelings. On the one hand, I had been deeply nourished by a church fellowship that encouraged its drafted young men to apply for non-combatant status. On the other hand, I had decided that I would move right into the infantry for several reasons. One was that I wanted to be opened to the mainstream military experience that was marking the lives of so many of my generation.

Secondly, I was filled with wanderlust, and considered the army a marvelous opportunity to see the world. Besides, I thought I wanted to be an officer, and 16 weeks of infantry basic training was the first requirement for anyone who chose to explore that option.

In the course of my experience with "basic," I repeatedly found myself stretched out flat on my belly, handling first a rifle, then a machine gun, learning to become reasonably accurate at hitting targets up to 500 yards away. I would not have chosen the penetrating cold of Fort Dix's early winter, or its chilling sandy soil, as the situation best suited to an awakening, but that is what I experienced.

For a time I was enjoying the firing range, thinking of what I was doing as a kind of sport, appreciating the power of the sun when it finally came out to warm us in those early mornings. Then--I'm not sure when or how--it occurred to me that the army was not expending money and ammunition to teach me some enjoyable sport; instead, what was really happening was that I was learning how to kill another human being without ever having to see his or her face.

The message began to penetrate like the winds that so often swept across the range. I was being forced to deal with issues that I had avoided, questions that had been pushed aside. Then, not long after, it all broke out into the open as we engaged in bayonet drill; there was no way that I could mistake this for sport. Here, the drill sergeant, following the traditions of bayonet training, was urging us to scream and roar and snarl like animals, as we learned how to maneuver ourselves and our deadly weapon into position to tear out the guts of another person.

Sometimes they said that the terrible sounds were meant to throw the opponent off guard, but we knew that we were being urged to become something wild and savage, something less than human, something that impelled us to deny our fundamental identity as children of the loving God, something that would make it possible for us to cut out the life of our brother, our sister, with one well-trained stroke, and then to accept the justifying prayers and sermons of those who were paid to bless our work.

Several of us were deeply disturbed by what we were doing, frightened at times by the army's campaign against our humanity, perhaps even more frightened by the capacities we saw within ourselves to cooperate, at least to submit. But we weren't sure what to do, or perhaps were sure that we didn't have the courage to do what was necessary: quit, resign, refuse to cooperate.

As a child of the church, I went to the chaplains. I needed to know what my riflery and bayonet skills had to do with the love of Christ for all people, with the teachings I had received at Victory Tabernacle in Harlem. I asked the military pastors how they, and I, might put together in one life the mission of the army to seek out the enemy and destroy them and the mission of the church, the mission of God's children, to be channels of love and service. I asked, sometimes with tears welling up, how I could, with bayonet in hand, be a follower of him who threw open his arms to his enemies.

But the chaplains could not help me. One who was black and a captain simply said that each of us had to work out such conflicts for ourselves. He had dealt with his conflicts--not without occasional questions, he admitted--and I must deal with mine, essentially alone. Obviously the army did not pay its pastors to counsel people out of the military.

If I had had courage and wisdom enough, I would have refused to continue service on such compromised terms and received a dishonorable discharge. Instead, for the rest of my two years, I stayed and worked my way out within the army, distanced myself as far as possible from its apparatus of death, created my own living space, vowed forever to oppose the way of the bayonet and seek the way of the open- arms.

That was the beginning for me. My search for a humanity-building alternative to nuclear war began at Fort Dix, that training ground for the waging of "conventional" war, when I was forced to recognize the fundamental contradiction between the bayonet and the cross. Of course, I could not know how much was opening then, but no matter; how often do we recognize new beginnings when they come?

And yet I did know some things. I knew I wanted to find a way of life consistent with the commitments I had made while still in the military. So when I left Fort Dix in 1955 and shortly thereafter found my way to Chicago, I was on pilgrimage: a hybrid academic, moving between the university's graduate history department and its theological faculties, serving as part-time lay minister for a small, black southside congregation. I was in search.
At the university I first discovered the life and witness of the 16th-century Anabaptist communities and their often radical commitment to the Christ of the open arms. They appealed to me. Their discipline, self-sacrificing love, defiance of the powers of kings and rulers who tried to turn them from the demands of their Master, their willingness to accept death rather than inflict suffering these things seemed somehow directly related to the awakening at Fort Dix.

So I was open to their 20th-century descendants when they came to me from Woodlawn Mennonite Church on Chicago's southside and asked if I would help in a team ministry that sought to apply the ways of peace to the racial conflicts of our time. Maintaining my status as a lay person, I joined the team in 1958.

As I moved into the world of the peace churches, the pacifist movement, and the teachers of nonviolent resistance to injustice, I came to Gandhi again. I remembered that at Victory Tabernacle Church in Harlem long ago, my pastor spoke proudly to us of Marcus Garvey and others, as well as of Gandhi, "that little brown man who has turned the British Empire upside down." Since then, he has remained a consistent presence, a teacher whose depths I have only begun to explore.

In the peace church context, I came, too, to Rosemarie Freeney of Georgia and Chicago. She had been part of the Mennonite setting before me, and had begun to explore the connections between the traditions of blackness and the traditions of peacemaking. Of course, at that very moment the issue was being joined with great energy and creativity in the South, and we were married in the year that the black student movement began to awaken the nation. In that same year, 1960, we went to one of the local churches and heard some of the southern student movement participants as they told their stories and sang their songs from the front lines. We had already experienced Martin Luther King, Jr. in a Chicago lecture, and I had met him in Montgomery.

Somehow, we could not escape the calling of these voices and these lives. Here, on our own soil, mounting numbers of men and women who were bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh were carrying on one of humankind's most crucial struggles. Not only were they defying the old order in search of racial justice and citizenship rights, but some of them were also bold enough, visionary enough to speak of "redeeming the soul of America," daring to see the power of nonviolence as a force for the transformation of the entire American nation.

For me, there was something that connected those southern campaigns with my own struggles of the soul at Fort Dix. For in the face of bayonets and their equivalent, these black men and women, with their songs of faith and courage, with their white allies in hope, had chosen to experiment with tough, disciplined, self-sacrificing love. Their call from the South seemed to be a call to us, so Rosemarie and I found ourselves in Atlanta before the end of 1961.

We were sponsored by the international service committee of the Mennonite churches, and one of our first tasks was to establish Mennonite House in Atlanta. Without model or precedent, it became a combination residence for an interracial team of local movement participants and social service volunteers, a house of refuge for field workers from the various movement organizations, an ecumenical community, and a base of operations for our own ministry of reconciliation.

It was from that base that we moved out to participate in freedom struggle activities throughout the South, but it was also from here that we engaged in our first anti-nuclear war demonstration. For several days in October, 1962, at the height of the U.S.-USSR impasse over Cuban missile installations, as John Kennedy threatened the use of nuclear weapons, some of us from Mennonite House joined other movement-oriented Atlantans and other concerned citizens across the country in a daily vigil of protest and hope.

During those perilous days, as we stood in a park area near the heart of the city, there was no division in our hearts. This action on behalf of humankind, this urgent calling of men away from their nuclear bayonets, seemed totally at one with the work we were doing in places like Albany, Georgia, Selma, Alabama, and Greenwood, Mississippi. Together, this black and white company of witnesses was proclaiming that the struggle was undivided.

Mennonite House itself was a gathering place for the forces of that multi-faceted community of struggle. Our daughter, Rachel Sojourner, was born into that peripatetic household of struggle and hope, and the quest for world peace and for justice and community in our sector of the world are joined in her. She was visibly present within Rosemarie as we stood out under the sky in Atlanta, refusing to hide from any missiles, knowing that our calling was to throw open our arms, seeking to draw forth the powers of peace on behalf of the unborn. She was with us as we marched in Birmingham. She was in her stroller as we picketed Hubert Humphrey for his contribution to the mounting war in Vietnam.

Nevertheless, in all of this, we were constantly aware of our own deepening need for peace, for unity, for re-creation, and our family left Atlanta near the end of 1964 in search of renewal. When we returned late in the spring of 1965, I had finally finished my doctorate and was scheduled to chair the department of history and sociology at Spelman College beginning that fall.

But first, something had to be dealt with. For reasons that I did not fully understand, the mounting American warfare against the Vietnamese had been tearing at me. I knew very little about the history of that conflict, but I had certain suspicions about U.S. intentions among the non-white, and I determined to learn as much as I could. So, on Hiroshima Day, 1965, I set aside all other preparations for teaching and committed myself to dig into the documents on the war until I could sense for myself what was going on.

What I learned was deeply disturbing, and I began to speak and write as widely as I could about what seemed to me the fundamental injustice involved in America's role in that situation, from our government's support of the French colonialists in the years right after World War II, to the terrifying and destructive situation that was then building as American troops poured onto the anguished peninsula.

Again, because I saw no separation between my engagement in the black struggle for freedom and new humanity in the U.S. and the movement for peace and justice and human liberation across the globe, one of my first concerns was to communicate my own convictions to some of my comrades in the freedom movement. Consequently, I sent a letter to the 1965 Southern Christian Leadership Conference convention in Birmingham, Alabama. It called for a prophetic word of judgment to be spoken concerning the nation's policies in Vietnam.

Certainly, my voice was not unique in the movement. The radicalized young people of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee had already proclaimed their uncompromising opposition to the war and the draft. Malcolm X had seen and spoken the truth of the situation before his death. Home folks in the black communities of Mississippi had begun to receive the boxes with the bodies of their sons, and they were raising the inevitable questions about the fight for Vietnamese freedom that our government was supposedly waging, when so much unfinished freedom business still remained in every single county of their state.

Of course, the unfinished business of America, the nation's rampant racism, its continued exploitation of its own non-white peoples were not confined to the South. Soon all its shame was exposed for the world to see as the flames of rebellion sprang from northern streets and northern hearts to reveal a racial scar extending across the length of the continent, from Harlem to Watts, and in many unexpected places along the way.

From within the life of the black movement, we saw these things as wide-ranging plebiscites of fire against the war in Vietnam. We translated the burning buildings and raging hearts into so many votes against the tremendous human waste involved in devoting so much money to the building of life-threatening nuclear arsenals. And there was no mistaking the new energy that was coming into the anti-war movement in the mid-'60s as people like Bob Moses, Stokeley Carmichael, Jim Bevel, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Martin Luther King, Jr. began to enter the fray.

The rise of the black power movement in the late 1960s brought another powerful element from the black community back into the struggle for a new, unthreatening world order. When Stokeley and others yelled, "Hell No, We Won't Go," he was witnessing to more than black opposition to the war, or refusal of the draft. Deeper still was a generations-old tradition of trenchant black criticism of American foreign policy, especially in relationship to non-white peoples.

So when I heard the protesters, I heard Paul Robeson and W.E.B. DuBois more than a decade earlier, sharply criticizing America's reactionary stand at the side of its colonialist allies, against the liberation struggles of the non-white world. Hearing them I heard again the black socialist at the end of the 19th century, watching his people being drawn into support for the American ventures in Cuba and the Philippines, saying, "The American Negro cannot become the ally of Imperialism without enslaving his own race."

And I thought of the black soldiers in that Spanish-Cuban-American war embarking from Florida to fight in Cuba, stuffed into the bottom decks of the ships (perhaps remembering an earlier ocean crossing by their foreparents, also below decks) while their counterparts enjoyed the run of the upper levels.

And I remembered the black soldiers going off in 1917 and 1918 to "Make the World Safe for Democracy," while the screams of massacred black men, women, and children rang out from places like East St. Louis, Illinois. And I was buried with the rebellious black soldiers in Houston, Texas, who finally rose up in 1917 against the brutality of the white community and found themselves secretly courtmartialed, secretly executed, and secretly interred, with army vehicles running over their burial place, as the authorities sought to ensure that the contagion of their commitment to freedom would not be set loose among the war-bond buying, Europe-marching black community. Nor could I forget those who came home from World War II to be lynched with their uniforms still on.

Seeing life from the bottom up, watching developments from the black side, perhaps we saw something that too many others missed. Surely DuBois and Robeson had seen it: on one level the American nuclear arsenal was simply another set of weapons being used by the nation to push forward a foreign policy that was essentially flawed and corrupted by its racist, anti-communist, and anti-liberationist commitments. Indeed, it may be that our non-white experience in the United States continually forced us to a key insight: there can be no significant future for an anti-nuclear weapons movement that does not face up to the fundamental injustice in the nation's dealings with the poor and non-white world. From the perspective of our experiences, that set of relationships is at least as important as the more publicized stand-off with the Soviet Union. At least that is how it appeared to me as I delved into our history and moved toward our future. Ultimately, America's nuclear arsenal must be disarmed and disposed of in the context of a broader movement for radical humanization of the nation.

For me, that vision has been consistently linked to the hopes of other embattled men and women in other lands who seek to break out into breathing, working space for themselves and their people. At every point, my purpose has been to apprehend the universality of the movements for human liberation, to seek and explore points of linkage, to recognize and give witness to the fact that we have a common commitment to the survival of the earth and the continuing human evolution of its people. In a sense, this is the positive vision that forms the other side of my Fort Dix commitment against the way of the bayonet.

And whenever that stand means positioning myself against the official policies of this nation, I am prepared to remember all the men and women of our century who stood firmly against their own national government in order to act in solidarity with humankind's best interests, from Bonhoeffer to Martin Luther King to Bishop Romero.

While I and my family were visiting recently at Tougaloo College, just outside Jackson, Mississippi, I was asked to make a presentation before a forum that met on Friday evenings in one of the local black lounges in Jackson. It was a fascinating setting, under the dim lights, with my audience stretched out from one end of the bar to the other and out into the booths that lined both sides of the long room. I had known some of the men and women from their younger Mississippi movement days in the 1960s. Now, my essential message was a call for us, for them and other black people, to recognize how crucial has been our role in the humanizing of the United States, and to grasp the importance of the continuing challenge now facing us.

Among other things, I suggested that we need to openly and creatively oppose the forces that are poisoning and destroying our air and water and earth, that we must take on the larger questions of why so many of all peoples are unemployed, that we are needed in the leadership of those who stand against the militarism and commitment to violence that threatens humankind with nuclear extinction. It was amazing how much engagement we were able to experience in such a setting, and one of the constant themes raised by several persons was "black folks don't have time to deal with things like ecology or nuclear threat or world economy now; we're doing all we can just to survive."

I tried to remind them that from our earliest days on these shores, when sheer survival was a very precarious matter, we have always addressed ourselves to more than physical survival. We have challenged the nation's concept of freedom, we have created songs which raised fundamental issues of ethics and spirituality, we have envisioned new possibilities for black and white cohabitation and cocreation of this nation--all while living with our backs against the wall.

So I insisted in the lounge in Jackson, and believe deeply within my soul, that a challenge like the fate of the earth is ours to grapple with. In the past, we black folk have never been too desperate to be human. Now our future depends upon our willingness to embrace that great humanizing tradition of our fore-parents, joining with all those who share a common vision of a new humanity, actively shaping and participating in the leadership of the hard, long struggle for a new American reality. That is the ultimate context of any serious fight against nuclear destruction. Essentially, it is a struggle for Mother Earth, for the honor of our foreparents, for the life of our children. To opt out of that struggle is to opt out of life. We have never been too desperate to be human.

Vincent Harding was professor of religion and social transformation at Iliff School of Religion in Denver, Colorado when this article appeared. He is a contributing editor of Sojourners.