In the midst of its 75th anniversary celebration, Stony Point Center hosts a Social Justice Summit

LOUISVILLE — As keynoter for Saturday’s Social Justice Summit held online and at Stony Point Center, the Rev. West McNeill, director of the Labor-Religion Coalition of New York, said they hope the day together “can help us plant and nurture seeds of solidarity that can continue to bear fruit in this period.”

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With McNeill serving both as an organizer and a minister, “our mission is to unite labor, faith and community … for social and moral justice.” Early this year, the Labor-Religion Coalition became a program of the Kairos Center for Religion, Rights and Social Justice “after many years of working together,” McNeill said. The related Poor People’s Campaign, founded by the Rev. Dr. William Barber II and the leader of the Kairos Center, the Rev. Dr. Liz Theoharis, a PC(USA) pastor, began in 2018, 50 years after the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. launched the inaugural Poor People’s Campaign.

King’s example “is still so relevant,” McNeill said. The year before, on April 4, 1967, the civil rights leader had delivered his “Beyond Vietnam” speech to more than 3,000 people at the Riverside Church in New York City. That speech “was one some friends and allies did not want him to give. They thought it would provide a backlash,” which it did, McNeill noted. “There was a heavy cost Dr. King made to tell the truth about Vietnam. He did it because he knew there was no other choice. As a Christian, he could be silent about U.S. actions in Vietnam.”

In his speech, King cited the “giant triplets” of racism, militarism and materialism. “Hearing those words 58 years later, we have to ask, how much farther has the nation traveled down the road to spiritual death?” McNeill asked.

McNeill grew up in the 1980s and 1990s, when “the narrative said poor people lived too well on the taxpayer’s dime,” they said. In 1996, President Clinton signed the welfare reform bill that “helped eliminate benefits and added more strings to the ones that remained” attached to welfare programs, McNeill said.

Meanwhile, the wealth and income of the nation’s very richest people “have exploded,” McNeill said. The U.S. is now home to more than 800 billionaires, while almost 140 million of the nation’s 347.3 million residents are low income.

King’s “triple evils lead to destruction and death, and cause a spiritual death as well,” according to McNeill. “That leaves people lonely and isolated and fighting each other to survive.”

Just weeks before King was assassinated on April 4, 1968, he told a multiracial group of leaders he had a dream where people came together and recognized the problems they faced. “This dream — that the poor and marginalized of the nation would come together and realize our common problems — has never been fully realized,” McNeill said.

The work of strengthening the fabric of society is among the most challenging we face, McNeill said. “Our people and our communities are hurting, and we can expect conditions are about to get worse.” But “we can also expect more and more people will be compelled to act.”

On the Saturday McNeill spoke, Hands Off! protests were being held in about 1,200 communities across the country. McNeill noted that colleagues at the Kairos Center have just published “A Matter of Survival: Organizing to Meet Unmet Needs and Build Power in Times of Crisis.” Drawing on insights from more than 40 leaders and 35 grassroots organizations, the report points to the example of the Underground Railroad, “where everyday people offered what they could to facilitate their fellow human beings’ passage to freedom,” McNeill said. “It helped topple the slaveholding aristocracy.”

That’s not unlike what we face today, they said.

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“People are coming together around common problems. Some are in the streets protesting. Some are stocking shelves in a neighborhood food pantry. Some are hiding an immigrant student activist from ICE agents,” McNeill said. “Each of you is a part of an organization or project that in some way is helping bring people together.”

By the end of Saturday’s summit, McNeill said they’d heard “great insights and experiences I will take with me.”

As a student at Union Theological Seminary, McNeill and others used to wear sweatshirts bearing a quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer: “Action springs not from thought, but from a readiness for responsibility.”

At the time, McNeill thought, “Is this the best Bonhoeffer quote you could find?”

“Now I think it is a question for these times,” McNeill said. “I think it’s time for us to ask, are we ready and willing to take responsibility for what comes next? From what I have heard from folks today, many of you are wanting to say yes.”

McNeill quoted King in his final book, “Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?”: “When people are mired in oppression, they realize deliverance when they have accumulated the power to enforce change … The call to prepare programs distracts us excessively from our basic and primary task … We are, in fact, being counseled to put the cart before the horse. Our nettlesome task is to discover how to organize our strength into compelling power so that government cannot elude our demands.”

“It’s going to take millions of people taking actions together to do what needs to be done,” McNeill said. That calls for what the Kairos Center has labeled “permanently organized communities,” including congregations.

“It’s people who are sticking together not because of an election cycle, but people sticking together for the long haul,” McNeill said. “We need these organized communities to develop a set of values and vision for the world.”

The second part is “believing that it is possible,” according to McNeill.

“It’s not possible to continue going the way we are going now,” McNeill said. “If we believe all that’s possible is incremental tweaks, that’s the most we can hope for. … There is a better world possible, and it’s incumbent on us to do what we can to bring it about. The core of that is staying connected.”

Read previous reporting from Presbyterian News Service about Stony Point Center’s 75th anniversary here and here.