Learning New Languages
-by Nijmie Dzurinko


“There are millions of poor people in this country who have very little, or even nothing, to lose. If they can be helped to take action together, they will do so with a freedom and a power that will be a new and unsettling force in our complacent national life.”
-from MLK’s Christmas Sermon on Peace.

This trip is centered around the 40th anniversary of the Poor people’s Campaign, which I never learned about in any of my formal schooling. This campaign rarely gets talked about when remembering MLK.

The Poverty Initiative at Union Theological Seminary is working diligently to raise up new generations of religious leaders who are prepared to tackle the question of poverty from the perspective of helping to build a movement of the poor. The Media Mobilizing Project has a strong relationship to the Poverty Initiative, and each year some of us participate in the immersion courses the Initiative holds.

This year brings us to Tennessee and Mississippi. I come on this trip to learn lessons. To listen to people’s stories. To become grounded in what my calling is in the course of this work. To understand the connections between what is happening in different parts of the country, and to come out of the urban bubble in which I live in the Northeast. Talking about changing this country means really knowing something about this country, it means coming out of our comfort zones and the people we get used to being around, the settings we get used to being in. I think this is a critical perspective for people on the “left”.

The Poor People’s Campaign (PPC) brought poor people of all colors and identities to live in shantytowns and demonstrate daily in Washington, D.C. from May 14 to June 24, 1968. Although MLK conceived of the PPC, he didn’t get the chance to carry it out. He was murdered on April 4, 1968 while campaigning with striking garbage workers in Memphis Tennessee. The Poor People’s Campaign was to have 3 phases: the first, a highly visible shantytown with daily demonstrations and a mass march, bringing the realities of poverty in the U.S. directly to the seat of political and economic power. The second and third phases, which never came to fruition, were: mass arrests throughout the capital, and a national economic boycott of America’s most
powerful corporations.

Forty years later, we are attempting to understand history so that we can learn its lessons, so that we will be able to make an accurate diagnosis of the problem, instead of just its multiple symptoms. Our lives depend on our ability to do this.

In Nashville the group split into two parts, housing/homelessness and worker rights. I opted for the housing tour. We looked at the conditions of homelessness in Nashville with Homeless Power, which is led by homeless and formerly homeless people from Nashville. We toured a park across from the public library that was once filled with large old shade trees and benches. Because homeless people would congregate in the park for relief from the hot summer sun, the city removed the benches, redesigned the park, dug up all the old shade trees and replaced them with little starter trees. Billboards for luxury condos advertising elite lifestyles were plastered all over the landscape. In Nashville, as in Philadelphia, concentrated resources from government and business can forcibly create new ‘spaces’ in order to push unwanted populations further from view. Of course I would never have understood the significance of this park unless I had been guided by Homeless Power. As cities struggle to attract capital in the neo-liberal economic
environment, the production of space takes precedence over the significance of place.

Three thousand public housing units in Nashville have been replaced by 600-700 units. Most of the families who lived in the old housing have not been able to return to the newly de-densified low rise units. There are 2,000 families on the waiting list for Section 8. There are 50,000 families paying more than 50% of their income toward housing costs.

Although I didn’t participate in the ‘new labor’ tour, I was able to learn a bit about the victorious struggle of low-wage workers at Vanderbilt University to achieve a wage of $10 per hour. The combination of worker and student organizing efforts that used innovative tactics and highlighted Vanderbilt’s $3 billion endowment and its 1.3 million dollar a year chancellor won this fight.

We traveled in mini-vans over 7 hours to Columbia MS to meet with Jesus People Against Pollution (JPAP) and Evangelist Charlotte Keys, as she calls herself. Columbia has been poisoned by the Riko Chemical Company, a subsidiary of a Japanese company, that operated a plant in Columbia in the 1970’s in which they produced Agent Orange for use in the Vietnam War.

There was a toxic explosion at the plant in 1977 that released large quantities of toxics directly into the air and land. At some point after that the plant was closed and the chemicals were disposed of in drums that were buried in city and county landfills. Eight years later in 1984, the ground would catch fire in the summer time. That year the site on which the plant had operated was declared a Superfund site. Although the site covered over 100 acres, only 81 acres were fenced in with a chain link fence. When workers in Hazmat suits came to clean up the site, the residents wondered why a chain link fence was the only barrier separating the site from the community, where of course everyone went about their daily business in regular clothes. JPAP was born in 1992. Health impacts from the poisoning include cancer, respiratory illness, birth defects, retardation, learning disabilities, skin rashes, reproductive problems, tumors and cysts.

JPAP has been working for years to get approximately 150 families relocated. We went to Columbia on a rainy day. Columbia is crisscrossed with multiple creeks that are above and below ground at various points. As we walked around the site, my eyes and nostrils started to burn. We visited families that can reach out the back windows of their houses and literally touch the chain link fence that houses the Superfund site. Charlotte talked about the need for a media infrastructure that reports and is accountable to people in struggles like JPAP’s.

This work is a struggle to get past the misconceptions and preconceptions I have about this country in which I live. It is a struggle to get beyond sight, as Willie Baptist (scholar in residence at the Poverty Initiative) says, and achieve vision. It’s about the struggle to be my highest and best self. It’s about getting myself in spiritual and psychological and theoretical and
strategic shape for this ongoing process that is surely my life’s work.

America is a religious country. Many progressives look down on people with strongly held religious beliefs. Over the past three years of doing these immersion trips with seminary students as we visit places steeped in religiosity, I have been challenging myself to be able to move in these situations.

So the faith of the people I am meeting, to me is also an expression of faith in the idea that things can change. This is a profound thing, that many progressives I know are lacking.

I can’t always identify with the specifics of religious belief. But just as I try to learn the language of a country or region before I visit, I must become more fluent in the language of religion (and specifically Christianity) that is spoken across this country.

Where I am at this moment is understanding there are many messages of that language. The impulse of people of faith that I’ve found here is an impulse to be part of something larger that themselves, to believe in the idea of hope and in a future that is better. The impulse to believe in the idea of love and to be moved to think about the idea of justice. The impulse to feel called to do this work. Faith can be a corrective for the oppressive shame of being poor. It is through faith that people realize that they are equal in the eyes of God. The language of faith is a powerful language with many dialects and interpretations. I have struggled not to reduce or belittle it in my own thinking.

I am only able to provide a small slice of what I have been seeing and experiencing here. I have tried to ground this communication in the real words, stories and experiences that I’ve had here. I have been called on to be a vehicle to transmit the stories I have heard here to others. The sharing of stories can help us to see each other more clearly. I am hoping that we can use this new year, 2008, the 40th anniversary of the Poor People’s Campaign, to begin to hear the stories that have been overlooked, forgotten, or suppressed. All aboard the Mule Train!!