This interview is part of The Reconstruct, a weekly newsletter from Sojourners. In a world where so much needs to change, Mitchell Atencio and Josiah R. Daniels interview people who have faith in a new future and are working toward repair. Subscribe here.
Recently, I got to visit Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, a historic site where the National Park Service presents a lecture on the church’s history and impact in the city. A key figure in the presentation is Martin Luther King Sr., a Civil Rights leader even before his son became the better known MLK.
I loved the presentation, but something kept gnawing at me as I left. The park ranger who gave the presentation would often pause to interject on the greatness of Rev. King — praise he deserves — but at times he would slip into a sort of deification. King lost his wife and his namesake son to assassinations, and he managed to publicly proclaim love and forgiveness for their killers. The ranger seemed under the impression this came out of a superhuman reserve of grace that he and the rest of us could never achieve. While I understood the point, I wondered if Daddy King (as he was called) would have agreed.
King’s commitment to love came out of his faith in Jesus and a spiritual discipline that he was willing to dedicate himself to. No doubt it was hard, and no doubt it was extraordinary. But was it beyond us or superhuman? I hope not.
For Rachel E. Harding, the extraordinary people of the Civil Rights Movement were an ordinary part of her childhood. Her parents, Vincent Harding and Rosemarie Freeney Harding, were educators and leaders in Atlanta and close friends of many Civil Rights leaders, including the Kings. Rachel Harding recalled in our interview that their home regularly hosted revered figures who, to her, were just as human as everyone else.
As she grew older, she came to see why these people were so extraordinary. A professor of ethnic studies, she also leads the Veterans of Hope project, which her parents began in 1997. The project seeks to understand how those revered figures did the work they did — from the Civil Rights leaders to farm workers to LGBTQ+ rights activists. Her work, whether in the academy or as a writer and poet, addresses the cultural and religious traditions that, as she put it, help people “maintain their humanity … and not turn into the worst of what’s been impugned to them.”
In our conversation, we talked about the tension in finding inspiration from the extraordinary, Black mysticism, and her parents’ love for music.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Mitchell Atencio: How do you describe the work that you do?
Rachel Harding: I just recently retired from the University of Colorado Denver, where I was chair of the ethnic studies department and a professor for about 16 years. I still consider myself very much a teacher, a historian, and a writer.
At the heart of the work I do is something that I hope I inherited from my parents, which is essentially a ministry of encouragement. Looking for those people, places, and opportunities to encourage folks, especially in this country but not exclusively, to maintain our faith and belief in the possibilities of a healthy, multiracial democracy.
To look at places in our history where we have come through difficult moments and held to that vision and used that vision to reshape the places where we’ve lived. And looking at the religious and cultural resources, particularly within communities of people of African descent in the U.S. and Brazil — that’s the scholarly work that I do.
I’m also interested in that as a person and as an artist. How is it that people who have been through so many generations of assault have created cultural and religious ritual traditions that have allowed them to maintain their humanity in the face of that assault and not turn into the worst of what’s been impugned to them?
What does it look like to hold together that encouragement with the seriousness of our situation?
I go back to my study of history and my experience with my family. My parents were also historians and teachers. One of the things I continue to appreciate most about both of them is that they had this amazing ability to look the history of our country very squarely in the face without a saccharine or Pollyanna perspective — not whitewashing or simplifying the many horrors that we have lived through.
My dad was a scholar of African American history. My mom did a lot of that work with him and also studied African American women’s history. They knew what our folks had been through here. At the same time, they were absolutely convinced that there is more to us as Black people, as human beings, and to us as this society we are living in now, than the horrors. And there are ways to move through those horrors with some sense of vision, with some sense of connectedness to the struggles that have come before us. There’s a way to do that by staying grounded in the history of the people who have come before us.
We could speak specifically about African American experience, but I would say in the experience of all kinds of marginalized peoples in this country, there are examples of folks who had another vision of what the country could be and held onto that.
The guy you’re studying, Clarence Jordan, I think in many ways is an example of someone who came from a tradition that might be considered mainstream — Southern Baptist, he had Klan members in his family — but there was something in his experience of the South, his relationship to the land, his relationship to the Black people who lived around him as he was growing up, that he found a way to connect to his Christian understandings of what it is to be a human being. He was willing to stand, often, in opposition to the powers that be, because of that sense of connectedness that he had to this lineage of people. He understood — whether it was the prophets or Jesus as part of a lineage that he was able to step into and to claim in some meaningful way in his life.
Whether you’re looking at him as an example of a radical white Christian, or you’re looking at hundreds of thousands of Black people, who over the course of our history have done that same kind of thing, it’s possible as a human being to align yourself with another kind of understanding of what it is to be a human being.
Can you tell me a little bit about the history and the goals of the Veterans of Hope project?
So, the Veterans of Hope is a project that my folks started in the ’90s at the Iliff School of Theology out in Denver. It was essentially a project that built on their more-than-40-year history in spiritually based social justice organizing work.
And the heart of the project, while my parents were living, was to gather the stories of elders who had been involved in the Southern Freedom Movement, [also known as] the Civil Rights Movement, and other movements for radical social justice that emerged in the second half of the 20th century and up to the early 21st century. That would include everything from the Chicano Rights Movement and American Indian Movement to gay and lesbian organizing to anti-war and feminist struggles.
They were fortunate in the sense that they did so much of their work in collaboration. To use the language that people may be familiar with now, in a very intersectional way.
They began to interview some of these people. The questions the interviews focus on are: What are those resources of, spirit, of culture, of family, of community that enabled people like Bernice Johnson Reagon, James Lawson, Ruby Sales, or Ann Braden to stay on the battlefield for 30, 40, 50, sometimes 60 years of their life? What were those resources that they were pulling on? What of those might be available to a younger generation of people who also have a vision for another kind of America?
When I was most recently in Atlanta, I got to visit Ebenezer Baptist Church for the first time. I got to hear the national park presentation on the history of the church. It was wonderful. The only thing that I disliked about it was that the presenter kept saying how Martin Luther King Sr. [senior pastor at Ebenezer from 1931-1975] was superhuman. That King Sr., who held on to nonviolence despite losing his sons and his wife, was better than any of us ever could have been. I don’t know if Martin Luther King Sr. would’ve said that he was superhuman. I think he saw himself as having a spiritual discipline and a supernatural God that helped him along.
When you’re helping people study these movements, how do we learn from veterans of hope without idolizing them? What does it look like to take them seriously as people in the contexts they were in?
I’m in my early sixties. I grew up with many of these people who were central to the Southern Freedom Movement and many of the other social justice movements that my parents were a part of. When I was young, growing up, I didn’t idolize them, because they were just friends of my family.
They were folks who would drink or smoke or cuss or whatever. As I got older and started to study the movement, I have to say, Mitchell, not that I agree with the presenter, but I have to say that I have known some extraordinary people in my life. People who have sacrificed a great deal and who — these are my words, and they may have said it differently — in their tremendous love for this country did some extraordinary work transforming our society.
The present [presidential] administration is doing what it’s doing because of the work of those folks in the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s. It was so powerful and was really turning the country in another direction, showing people that it was possible for us to try to be a healthy, multiracial nation.
I agree with you; it’s not about putting people on a pedestal. But at the same time, I do think it’s important to recognize how hard people worked to help us as a nation live into our potential.
I totally agree. The thing that came to mind for me was that I don’t want those extraordinary acts of love to feel inaccessible to my life. I want to feel like God can work through any one of us as it did through them.
I go back to the example of my mom. Whenever she would teach, she would always say what you’ve just said, Mitchell. All of this was done by the movement. Activism was done by ordinary people. Yes, they’re extraordinary, but that’s the beauty — all of us are ordinary and extraordinary. All of us have that capacity.
I’m not at all a biblical scholar, but I remember certain passages and certain examples. One of them is this idea of Jesus saying, “Greater things will you do.” Even he is asking people to recognize, “You see me doing this reconciling work, this healing work, this community building work. Everybody is capable of doing that. You are all capable of doing that.”
That’s one of the beautiful things about the Southern Freedom Movement. You have very day-to-day — “drylongso people,” as they say — just regular folks who found and nurtured and encouraged in each other great capacities for leadership, great capacities for courage, and it came from their work as a collective.
We can do so much more when we are doing it in community, when we’re doing it together, when we are not feeling like we are the only one or there’s nobody else who has our back.
Bernice Johnson Reagon used to talk about how music would change the atmosphere. Music would actually help people feel a courage that they didn’t necessarily have before spending one, two, sometimes three or four hours singing, calling up the energy of the music.
Ruby Sales explained many times: The songs of the movement were actually songs that had been created in slavery. They were songs that were based on spirituals, and they already had ancestral strength in them. When people were singing them in the 1960s, they were drawing on energy from the 1840s and 1850s and 1860s to strengthen themselves.
It’s still available to us. And you don’t have to be Black to call on that energy, because those folks are all of our ancestors. Especially if you’re somebody who has a vision for a more just, democratic, multiracial nation. Those Black folks who were fighting for that in the 19th century are your ancestors too.
What did mysticism offer your mom as a Black woman in the Southern Freedom Movement?
I would say my definition of mysticism was replete in that movement and that my mother was one of many who connected to that understanding. I understand mysticism simply as an intimacy with spirit. That can manifest in a lot of ways, through what people in traditional Black church settings might call getting the Spirit — having a physical experience of intimacy with God.
My mom really believed that all of us are connected to each other. All of us, here on this planet, on this earth. And not only all of us humans, but all of us who carry life in any form — animals, plants, water, spirit, we’re all related in some kind of way.
This understanding of there being a very profound interconnectedness among all life forms, that’s something that I see in Indigenous traditions all over the world, certainly in the ones that I study in Brazil and Cuba and Haiti.
I don’t know necessarily that my mom would even have called it mysticism, but I will say that she knew that we were all connected and that all of us belonged to God, and we all belong to each other. And that’s how she lived her life.
We talked a little bit about growing up the way you did, the things that you got to see people in the ordinariness of their lives. What were some of your parents’ hobbies? What did they do for fun?
The first thing that comes to my mind is music. My dad had this big collection of jazz albums. He loved John Coltrane — that’s probably his favorite. He also liked Paul Robeson and Nina Simone.
My mom and dad would sing a lot together. My dad had a tenor voice. My mom was a soprano, and they liked to sing hymns, spirituals, and folk songs. I had a cousin, Charles Freeney, who had a beautiful voice. Whenever he would visit — he was in SNCC and lived with us for a while in Atlanta — the three of them would just sing. It was just gorgeous.
My mom loved to dance. We would put on Aretha Franklin or the Jackson 5. Me and my brother liked the Jackson 5, and she’d danced with us to that.
They both had big libraries and loved to read — my dad, mostly history. My mom liked books about contemplative spiritual traditions across the range as well as history and physics. She liked reading about quantum physics and philosophy.
They liked to have people to the house and be hospitable. That was something they enjoyed. Just having folks around and talking and laughing and eating.
We started this interview talking about encouragement. What’s encouraging you lately?
I’m here in Portland, Maine, at the moment. Two days ago, I was out with millions of people around the country, in the against what’s coming out of Washington, D.C.
Yesterday, I was walking in downtown Portland, and I came across a New Orleans style brass band — in Portland, Maine! They’re called the Ideal Maine. And they were wonderful. They were performing and processing through the streets with an organization that was doing Purim in the Streets, with puppets and with community theater. It’s centered around how we remain in solidarity with each other in the face of the devastations and atrocities of this administration.
That was exciting to me, just to hang out with them for a while and in a joyful way remember that we always have the capacity to be something better, something more fully human, here in this country.
We can do it. We can do it.
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