Forward Toward the Dawn

We have seen the many faces of hope. It has met us along the way in a fascinating variety of sizes and colors. Giftlike and breathtaking, it has emerged with singing and dancing from many unknown and unexpected places. It has taken us through some very hard and bleak valleys in the years of our lives. And everywhere, almost always, the bearers of hope have been men and women, and children, too; some are still here now, others are gone, long gone, and yet still here.

When we hear the ancient testimony, "Our hope is in God," we know what that means. We have seen and heard and felt that God's hope has come into our lives through God's children, especially those who have lived, worked, prevailed, died, and lived on in the midst of magnificent struggles to create and receive a new life, a new community, a new hope.

We have found hope in Gandhi, in his humor, creativity, stubborn persistence, and disciplined search, in his commitment to the many levels of human liberation. Through him we are constantly challenged, inspired, called to unleash the miracle of our own lives.

Clarence Jordan was also a bearer of hope to us, walking directly from southwestern Georgia into our Georgia/Harlem/Chicago-shaped lives, encouraging us by the commitment of his life, patiently loving us, even when we were not ready to respond to his invitation to share life in Koinonia. Now he continues to be present to us, sometimes through the gracious ministry of Florence Jordan, often more directly still.

Only in our dreams and on our tapes do we hear Paul Robeson singing now, but those songs from that courageous sojourner are enough for us. He sang of love for the poorest and least-valued among us. He sang hope for Welsh miners, for African freedom fighters, for the children of Little Rock. One of us vaguely remembers his coming to an isolated black housing project on the South Side of Chicago, daring to share with us his songs of hope, his audacious courage in the face of anti-communist persecution, and his visions of an emerging new world. Even though he did not know it, his life of dedication to peace and justice, whatever the personal costs, sang hope to us. We shall hear him forever, this deep river man, and we shall live forever in the depths of his river of hope.

In her own very similar and yet very different way, Fannie Lou Hamer was talking, shouting, and singing hope. On into the caldron of Mississippi's black religion, starting life anew in her mid-40s, she refused to be overcome by the worst that her beloved state's rulers could hurl against her. Unflinchingly challenging injustice at every level of American life, she was still tender in her love. She held us and many others in its folds and encouraged us with word and song. Even though we attended her funeral in 1977, in a Mississippi being reborn, still we hear, see, and feel her often. We are awash with hope, illumined by her great little shining light.

We are not certain if Howard Thurman and sister Fannie Lou ever met, but they coinhabit our lives. Howard Thurman breathed hope. In every prayer, in every deep and body-shaking gust of laughter, in every letter and phone call, in each precious moment we had together, he encompassed us with unsentimental, loving hope. And when on rare occasions we followed him even part way into all the deep inner spaces of his vast life, hope filled and surrounded us, and became like an atmosphere both deeply perfumed and charged with the clearest, sharpest breaths of air. We still breathe that air, imbibe that perfume, and live intoxicated and sobered by such hope.

Sometimes entire communities have worn the face of hope. More than 20 years ago, down in Albany, Georgia, which was the first community in the Southern movement to mount major freedom marches and participate in large-scale civil disobedience, we saw crime in the black community drop virtually to zero levels, where it stayed while the Albany movement was vital and strong. We were filled with an unforgettable vision of the new possibilities that humanizing struggles bring to the most difficult and restricted human lives. It was there that we encountered Marian and Slater King, among the first indigenous Southern black movement folks to turn East and search homeward for the face of God in meditation and fasting. They continually fed and nurtured us, even after Slater's early death. Thich Nhat Hanh came from the East, and his face was radiant with hope. Emerging from great trials and tribulations, his saffron robe washed in the blood of the generations-long freedom struggles of his Vietnamese people, our Buddhist brother in the way of peace looked at us, loved us, and urged us to "struggle with patience." He admonished us never to separate those two necessary elements of hope: patience and struggle.

Four women knew this all along. Somehow they carried within themselves all of hope's elements. Even though they did not often have time to be together, and though Ruby Doris died all too soon, we think of them as a marvelous movement quartet: Ella Baker and Anne Braden from one generation, Ruby Doris Smith and Diane Nash Bevel from the next. Their strength and integrity, their fierce determination to be free and set free, their gentle toughness in the most dangerous hours of our struggle: all these fill us like a never-ending song, whose substance and theme are hope. For we see and hear in them other lives returned and rehearsed: Harriet Tubman, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Angelina Grimke, Sojourner Truth. Somehow we are convinced that such hope will be reborn, recreated, renewed, and will live again and again.

Indeed, we have been witnesses to rebirths in many places, some of them deep in our own lives. We would be faithless to deny the hope of these. We also saw hope beyond us and for us in the lives of our brothers Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, both magnificent bearers of hope. Repeatedly, against many internal and external barricades and through the ardor and commitment of their own lives, they entered into courageous struggles to become new persons and open the way for others. From within those inner movements toward integrity, they gained the strength to speak truth to power and try to live out their hope, even at the ultimate risk. Grasping visions of rebirth within themselves, they dared to hope for the recreation of this nation. Splendid hope from their lives has filled our lives many times.

Now the daughters of Malcolm and Martin are working together, sharing their hopes, and seeking to create new dreams. To see their work helps us to know that this was what their beautiful fathers had wanted in their own time, for their own lives, in the most mature and loving recesses of their hearts. Watching the sometime heirs and co-workers of Martin and Malcolm—Jesse Jackson and minister Louis Farrakan—standing, walking, preaching, teaching, and organizing together in the struggle for the transformation of
this nation, we are consumed by hope. In the face of such amazing grace, surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, how could we not live facing the dawn?

Indeed, hope urges us forward, and we go. Bearing the blessings of the past, anticipating the revolutionary, humanizing transformation of these United States and of our own needy lives, we move forward toward the dawn with all who dare to hope, with all who see God in the faces of the human family.

We hold hands, we link arms with our children Rachel and Jonathan, with Fred Clifton and Sudarshan Kapur, with Charles Freeney, with Vivek Pinto and Molly Rush, with Dan and Phil Berrigan, with Dean Hammer, with Tran Van Dinh, with Bob and Janet Moses, with Chris and Pensel McCray, with the continuing IBW Network, with Dennis Banks and Sun Bear, with Jimmy and Grace Boggs, and NOAR, with Aaron Gray and Kevin Johnson, with the Sojourners folks and the Bruderhof family, with Lorraine Garcia and Kalamu Ya Salaam, with those whose names would fill an entire issue.

Then we join with Thomas Banyaca, who looked at us and told us of the ancient Hopi prophecy: that dark children of the sun, children of the East, lovers of the dawn, would come across the ocean to help release this land to live out its highest destiny. Children of the East, children of the sun, companions with all lovers of God, we live and dance toward the dawn, moving among the many faces of hope, strengthened, encouraged, renewed for the struggles, the surprising gifts, and all the amazing grace that lies ahead.

Rosemarie and Vincent Harding were based in Denver, Colorado, when this article appeared. Rosemarie was developing a practice in nutritional healing and Vincent was a professor of religion and social transformation at the Iliff School of Theology.