FOR's semiannual newsletter & annual report

About every six months, FOR publishes Witness, a newsletter for our active members and supporters. This year we have combined our 2008 annual report with the latest edition, so it’s an especially interesting read.

Click here to dowload a 1.8 MB PDF of the winter 2008 Witness.

Below is this issue’s welcome message from the Chair of FOR’s National Council, Paul Dekar on "Building King’s ‘World House’":

I am struck by a question as germane today as it was two thousand years ago. Asked, “Who is my neighbor?” Jesus re-focused the query and told the story of a man mugged and left for dead on the road between Jericho and Jerusalem. A priest and a Levite passed by the man on their way to religious services. Jesus pointed to the actions of a good Samaritan, a foreigner not expected to show sympathy to Jews.

How does a good neighbor think and behave? Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., reflected on this question on April 3, 1968. Dr. King was in Memphis, Tennessee, to support garbage collectors as they challenged the socio-economic foundations of white, male supremacy. Dr. King stressed the importance of their struggle: “Whenever men and women straighten their backs up, they are going somewhere, because a man can’t ride your back unless it is bent.”

To draw attention to the need for “a kind of dangerous unselfish- ness,” Dr. King turned to the story of the Good Samaritan and asked people to imagine why the two religious leaders failed to stop. He considered thoughts that might have stirred in the minds of the priest and Levite when they saw the man at the side of the road. Perhaps they were late for a church meeting. Perhaps they were on the way to organize a “Jericho Road Improvement Association” and felt it was better to deal with the problem from the causal root, rather than to get bogged down with an individual effort. Perhaps they felt that the man on the ground was merely faking.

Whatever the reason, the first question that went through their mind was this: “If I stop to help this man in need, what will hap- pen to me?” King re-framed the problem and asked, “If I do not stop to help the sanitation work- ers, what will happen to them?” Dr. King urged his audience to rise up with a greater determination to the challenge of building a culture of peace.

At the time, the slogan was not in use. Dr. King spoke rather of building a “beloved community” or “world house.” Developing the latter phrase in his 1964 Nobel Peace Prize lecture, Dr. King told of a widely separated family that inherits a house in which they have to live together. For Dr. King, this was a great new problem: “We have inherited a large house, a great world house in which we have to live together”” black and white, Easterner and Westerner, Gentile and Jew, Catholic and Protestant, Muslim and Hindu””a family unduly separated in ideas, culture and interest, who, because we can never again live apart, must learn somehow to live with each other in peace.” Dr. King called for “true compassion,” “a revolution of values,” “nonviolent coexis- tence” not violent co-annihilation, and interrelatedness as a moral imperative in every arena. “Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.”

Dr. King’s ideas reverberated throughout the nation. However, many who supported African Americans as they marched on Washington in 1963 to demand civil rights turned, in 1968, against the freedom movement when it demanded economic and social rights, not just for African Americans but also for poor whites, Hispanics, Vietnamese, and others. As Dr. King prepared to lead a second march on Wash- ington to demand an end to poverty, elimination of every ves- tige of racism, withdrawal from Vietnam, and control over science and technology, powerful forces resolved he had to die.

As much as any single twentieth-century figure can, Dr. King informs the ongoing work of FOR and inspires us to engage in his unfinished work. We must not simply elevate Dr. King to iconic status. Several decades after his death, Dr. King’s vision of a world house still has programmatic rel- evance for a human community not yet free of the triple axis of evil: racism, poverty, and war. His ideas still matter. His words still matter. It matters that FOR mem bers build a world house, a beloved community, a culture of peace.

Building King’s “World House”

FROM THE NATIONAL COUNCIL CHAIR,
PAUL R. DEKAR