Bridging Communities - Renewed Strength and Promise

by Rev. Nelson Johnson

Dec. 12, 2007

[The speech following was the keynote address to the Low-Income Immigrant Rights Conference held by the the National Immigration Law Center (NILC) and its partners in Arlington, Virginia. To watch online video of Rev. Johnson's speech please visit the Immigration Advocates Network.]

Thank you for your kind words of introduction.  Thanks to the National Immigration Law Center and the many partners and supporters for inviting us to come together and for challenging us to discuss new and creative ways to bridge our diverse communities.   I also want to acknowledge all the leaders who were announced here and all who are gathered on this most important occasion.

Let me begin by saying it is good to be here.  It is good to be with all of you.  It is good for all of us to be together in Washington, DC on this beautiful, snowy day.  It is both humbling and challenging for me to say some words of meaning to such a diverse and distinguished gathering.

It is my hope to provide a little context and a little inspiration for this most important and critical discussion on immigration.   On the one hand, the issues related to immigration have great potential to confuse, divide, embitter and pit us against each other.  On the other hand, the same issues have the potential to clarify global trends, inspire us, unite us, and help us believe that another world is possible.  So as we gather today, we will seek to actualize the latter potential.

Speaking of snowy days, we had a very powerful, compassionate and meaningful Workers Rights Hearing, sponsored by Jobs with Justice and others yesterday at the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church.  It was snowing really hard (at least by North Carolina standards) when we got out about 5:00 PM.  Several of us shared a cab over to this conference.  The cab driver was a very jovial and talkative person.  He was going on and on about the meaning of the first snow of the season and how Washington drivers slip and slide all over the place on the first snow.

Well, we finally got over here to the hotel, and he was still talking about how you have to navigate the slippery roads.  Just as we turned into the hotel driveway, the cab started to skid right into the brick wall at the entrance of the driveway.  This brother was in mid-sentence talking about slippery roads and Washington drivers, etc. as we slowly crashed right into the wall.   Luckily, the damage was minimal and no one was hurt.  We made our way safely into the hotel.

In a sense, the issues of immigration are a slippery road.  I am going to be doing a little talking over lunch to keep us moving and focused on bridging diverse communities.  So, stay with me or as we say in some religious circles “pray with me” that I don’t slip off the icy immigration road in this discussion.
Beloved, I come to you today as a child of the movement, as do many of you.  The movement has its high and glamorous moments.  It also has something of a checkered history of narrowness, rivalry, confusion, and fragmentation.  We all bring with us our deep convictions, our analysis, our frustrations, and often our disguised confusion.  For the next two days, I want to invite you to open up a little extra space for listening, thinking, feeling, sharing and seeking new ways to collaborate

I am convinced that one of the great imperatives of this hour in the movement is to build new bridges of human relationships, understanding, analysis, and coordination of work between diverse communities.  The success of this gathering will be measured to a great degree by how well we strengthen the foundation for collaboration, coordination, and joint work.  Indeed, our challenge is to continue to forge a powerful infrastructure for justice.

Let me share a little about my work.  I work with several organizations as I am sure most of you do.  Some of these include the Southern Faith, Labor and Community Alliance, Interfaith Worker Justice, the Word and World, to name a few.  The anchoring institutions for me, however, are the church and the organization we founded in 1991 called the Beloved Community Center of Greensboro.

The beloved community is a concept we borrowed from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.   Beloved community as Dr. King so often emphasized is rooted in love.  Dr. King reminded us that love is not some sentimental, mushy emotion.  Love is the key that opens the door to ultimate reality. At its core, beloved community is the notion that all humanity is bound together in a single fabric of mutuality.  We belong to each other, and at our best we enrich and help to complete each other.  This is the anchoring understanding that informs our mission. The logic of this position is that in order to stand for our own dignity and worth, we have to stand for the dignity, worth and indeed the enormous unrealized potential of all of God’s children.

So, we have taken up our work at the Beloved Community Center primarily with those on the margins of society including the homeless, the unemployed and destitute, the poor and working people and increasingly with immigrants--that is to say with our beloved brothers and sister who have journeyed from distant lands seeking an economic foundation for life often in hostile environments and wretched working conditions.

I want to share a few of our experiences at the Beloved Community Center that might be useful for our time together.  Let me say that I have set our work at the Beloved Community Center in a moral/ethical framework.  I hesitate to say religious although I am a pastor and many at the Beloved Community Center have definite religious affiliations; I hesitate to say religious because religion can convey quite a narrow and distorted picture of what we are about.  There are some at the Beloved Community Center who claim no religious affiliation at all but are deeply committed to the spiritual, moral and ethical principles on which our organization is founded.  The point here is to seek a framing that is most inclusive without compromising essential principles.

A Community Story:

At one of our local high schools in Greensboro there is a large and growing Latino and Asian population.  A little over a year ago a fight broke out there between an African American and a Latino Student.  The fight between the African American male and a Latino male started over a young lady in whom they had mutual interest.  The Principal of the high school, who was an African American male, came down pretty hard on the Latinos, at least it seemed that way to the Latino community and to some of us.  Through a relationship with a Latino sister, who was also a community organizer, several of us at the Beloved Community Center, who were African American, attended a Latino parent meeting and heard in some detail their concerns.

The issues that arose in that meeting were broad and had almost nothing to do with the fight over the young lady.  In fact, I could never quite get the details of that fight straight.  The issues that surfaced in the meeting, however, included:

1. Not being allowed to speak in their native tongue while waiting to be picked up by the bus from school after classes were completed.
2. There was no handbook in Spanish, although the promise for such a book had been made by high school officials.
3. The Latino parents felt disrespected and ignored by school officials.
4. Great fear of retaliation was expressed for standing up and speaking out by Latino parents.
5. The principal did not speak Spanish, and there was no one in the principal’s office who spoke Spanish.

 A Teacher would have to be called from one of the classrooms to interpret whenever a Spanish speaking parent came for consultation.

We organized a meeting between the Latino parents, some African American leaders, and the school Principal and his staff at the Church.  In fact, the Latino parents were unwilling to meet at the school.  The issues I just mentioned were shared through discussion with the Principal.  It was a challenging meeting with a lot of back and forth.  The Principal was somewhat defensive, but black leaders hung in there with him, encouraging and not condemning.  Together, we got a plan to work through most of the issues.

We had another meeting, a little more of a celebration. The children came, and the Latino Parents prepared a wonderful meal.   The principal, who earlier seemed not the most sociable person, loosened up a little (what can you do with pretty little children running around), and we made more progress.    This effort to build bridges wasn’t related to labor but it was about building community.  It was about standing with people when they are isolated, misunderstood and mistreated.  We sought to stand with them in such a way that we stood for the best interest of the whole community.  As black folk in the south, it should not have been hard for us to appreciate the predicament of the Latino parents, for it was not long ago- and even now-that we shared the same reality.

Two Labor Stories:

While the example I have just given is about a local education issue, most of us in this room would agreed that the engine driving the current influx of immigrants  in relationship to this country and on a world scale is globalization, that is, the economic interests of large multi-national corporations.  The various free trade agreements, as in the likes of NAFTA, have resulted in:

1. Undercutting and undermining sustainable economies in country after county.
2. People not having work to do and getting pushed off the land in their native countries, which leads to millions of displaced people, people who migrate to other nations in search of work and economic substance.
3. Resources in third world countries being depleted and very little being reinvested in their local economies, resulting in these nations becoming less and less able to meet the needs of their people.

This is an over simplified but broader context in which we must understand and engage the issues of immigration.  You know and I know that this context is sorely missing among the general population.  Without a relatively truthful anchoring context, only more confusion, anger and division will be generated by our “much talking” about immigration.  There are thousands, in fact, hundreds of thousands of discussions every day in barber and beauty shops, in schools, homes, churches and on the streets related to immigration where there is mainly the “Lou Dobbs” context, i.e. the government is not doing enough to protect us from this massive “problem causing” invasion of immigrants.   Such a context is an invitation for more confusion, division, and bitterness.

About a year and a half ago I was in a meeting in High Point, North Carolina, the furniture capital of the country.  High Point is about 15 minutes from Greensboro where I live.  Folks from these two adjoining towns in the same county often discuss issues together.  We were talking about the high school suspension rate of black students in the county school system when a brother just blurted out in the meeting, “on the way over here every construction site I passed I didn’t see nothing but Mexicans working.”

The people in the meeting were mainly African Americans, progressive for the most part.  They didn’t want to just come down on Latinos and I knew they didn’t want to say much in public.  In fact, they may not have had much to say.   So the meeting went on and again the brother spoke up saying the same thing, “On the way over here every construction site I passed I didn’t see nothing but Mexicans working.”
I realized that he intended to be heard.  I asked, “What road did you take to High Point?” He responded, “I came right down Lee Street on Route 6.”   I said, “I came the same way.  I saw the same thing you saw on the way over here.  You and I we are looking at the same thing.  I also know that the dropout rate of black students and the fact that our jails and prisons are bulging with young black men is directly related to the fact that there are not enough good paying jobs for people to do.  So I hear you.  The issue for you and me is not that we are seeing different things.  I saw the same thing you saw.  The question is how we understand what we are looking at.”

I explained, “I don’t know the particularly way the Latino brothers or sisters working on those jobs got there. You and I know they were not here 20 years ago.  I don’t know exactly how they got there.  I imagine that some are there because they have some kind of legal work arrangement to be in this country; some are no doubt citizens.  But I’ve got a feeling that many of them staggered through the hot southwest dessert; some put their lives at risk in the back of a hot truck.  Some took great risks and endured enormous hardships to work and be underpaid in this country. I am convinced, however, that they came here because they are desperately trying to make ends meet.   Some are sending back money to feed their children and family.  They are trying to survive.  Should we get mad with another group of poor people who have been forced into a desperate situation and are just trying to survive?  That’s the question!”  We had a fairly good discussion at that meeting, but it was just a beginning.

The truth is that we have been set-up to be in a big fight with each other that will not ultimately help either one of us.  African American and Latinos are like two long freight trains on the same track speeding straight towards each other.   There are great economic interests that have turned us in the direction of this great clash between us, and those very same economic interests will benefit from our fighting with each other.  Two groups of poor people should not be each other’s main problem.  Together, however, we can become each other’s solution, if we can refocus our energies.  We have to build new bridges between us.  We have to forge new and powerful coalitions.   We have to evolve structures that allow us to work together to the mutual benefit of both groups. 

The track we are on now is a disaster; it is a downward crash to the bottom.  We must change our course.  To paraphrase the words of the Prophet Isaiah, we have to find a way to exalt the valleys of hardship and despair and to make the mountains of scandalous wealth low.  We have to find a way to lift up the bottom and bring the top down. Our challenge is to work together so that all might have a living wage as we build bridges to transform our communities such that we all are treated with the dignity and respect that all deserve.

Now, most of you know that the Smithfield meat processing company has a massive hog producing plant in rural North Carolina.  North Carolina has chosen to change its laws to make it legal for that company to have a vertically integrated economic structure such that Smithfield owns or controls the hogs from birth all the way to the grocery store.  Under this arrangement Smithfield has over eight million hogs under its control crowded into Eastern North Carolina.  Hog waste in the form of huge lagoons is:

1. Producing foul odors in huge areas, mainly in poor and African American communities. Any of you who have ever been around a hog pen know what I am talking about. 
2. Chocking streams and rivers, killing off fish
3. Sucking up clean fresh water in order to process over 32,000 hogs a day, increasingly leaving a shortage of fresh usable water in the area.  Incidentally, Smithfield is seeking to raise the level of hogs killed each day by seven thousand up to 39,000 per day.

Those of us at the Jobs with Justice hearings yesterday heard from the worker at Smithfield.  They spoke of how they are being treated with over 600 being fired in the midst of a union drive campaign because of the “Social Security no-match letters.”  Well, the work of the Beloved Community Center was expanded when we played the leading role in founding the Southern Faith, Labor and Community Alliance (SFLCA) as an organization to figure out how to get the people in general, but especially the African American Church, more fully engaged in this struggle and related struggles.   Without going into the details of the Justice at Smithfield Campaign in which we are fully involved, I want to share an experience from that front of struggle that is directly related to the immigration question.

The SFLCA co-sponsored with the Word and World a three and a half day Prophetic Witness-Economic Justice Seminary, or religious school, in Parkston, NC, a few miles away from the giant Smithfield hog killing and processing plant.  The idea was to bring together religious, labor and community leaders and blacks, whites, and Latinos for three days of intense study and reflection to work through together what our faith mandates and our own sense of justice requires us to do in situations like Smithfield.   The School went very well.  We need more occasions like that.  We reached capacity, which was 80 people, down at that Methodist Camp in the woods near Fort Bragg Military Camp. 

The details of that School are another story for another time.  The particular experience I want to share is related to recruiting for the School.   I went to an African American ministers meeting in Raleigh.  I shared extensively about the larger context and how Blacks and Latinos were being pitted against each other.  We talked about the tragedy of the “no match letters.”  I did my best in that discussion to paint a picture of the overall situation and how the Black clergy in particular are socially positioned to play an invaluable role.

When I finished one of the senior ministers spoke up and said, “you know we hear all of what you have said but there is one thing you don’t seem to understand. “  He continued, “Black folk have been here longer that all the different groups of immigrants.   We were brought here in chains in the 1600s.  We were here before all the great immigrant waves.  He said that “every immigrant group that comes to this country, it is not long before they get in the line ahead of us and I don’t think it’s going to be any different with the people you are talking about, and that is a real problem.”

I could not refute what this minister was saying because it is the history of racism in our nation.  But, I urged him to come to the School anyhow.  We preachers have a way of saying “anyhow” when we don’t have much else to say right at the moment.   I shared with him that the past is indeed a testimony of our inhumanity and human failing.  In the case of black folk, it is a cruel and tragic past.  Certainly slavery, lynch law, Jim Crowism and the deep continued role of racism in our story cannot be denied. I stressed that while our past is never irrelevant, we must maintain that our future is OPEN.   We cannot allow our past, whatever it has been, to totally dictate our future, for then we have no future because our past becomes our future.  If we believe our own book of faith that the “Spirit makes all things new,” then we are pulled by the new possibilities of tomorrow and not immobilized by tragedies and disappointments of yesterday.  That’s what I was trying to say by urging him to come “anyhow.” 

So, the Raleigh ministers came.  Together we engaged in deep discussion and prayer. We went to the Smithfield Plant gate and attempted to speak truth to power.  We visited together the overcrowded and substandard immigrant farm work camps in the fields of eastern North Carolina.   We affirmed afresh that “all things are possible” when we as believers break the back of cynicism and despair and call each other to our highest humanity.  It is then that we can reach across the disasters, divisions, and disappointments of our yesterdays to forge new possibilities for our tomorrows.  So, we joined hands and linked hearts with our Latino brothers and sisters struggling and walking together towards our new humanity.

Yes, the giant Smithfield Company is still there on that long, desolate stretch of rural North Carolina highway.   Smithfield is still mistreating its workers.  There is still no union there. In fact, Smithfield has brought a lawsuit charging the union (and by implication all of us) with racketeering.  But in spite of it all, we have begun to build some new relationships.  Born of a vision of new possibilities, certified in the crucible of struggle in the fields and on the side of a rural North Carolina road under a hot July sun, bridges are built! 

I was overjoyed when we, a delegation of some of these same African American clergy, respectfully made the case to Reynolds American Tobacco Company just last Tuesday that the Farm Workers Organizing Committee (FLOC) and our immigrant brothers and sisters  who labor in the tobacco fields and all the other fields in this country are our brothers and sisters beloved.  We intend to stand with them in their struggle until Justice comes!

I am happy to report that we are in the early stages of planning some city wide black/brown conferences in several key cities in North Carolina.  These conferences can be of enormous value in building bridges between us. We must engage in a more profound way the meaning of the immigration questions facing us, not only in our city and state but indeed all over the nation and the world.  Racism and the declining state of black folk on the bottom cannot be ignored or skimmed over.  Yet, we cannot and we must not allow black and brown people to be pitted against each other in a painful spiral to the bottom.  That’s why we want to organize joint conferences with Latinos, Blacks, whites and others to work out together the road forward.  We must build these bridges, for when people cannot work with each other even though they share deep mutual interests, it opens the door for a small privileged group to make decisions that are not in our interest.

Brothers and Sisters, I am convinced that one of the great challenges facing us today is the need for all of us to build new, creative infrastructures for justice and transformation.  We need structures of collaboration, cooperation, and coordination. Let the lawyers do their work; let the labor unions do their work; let the students do their work; let the community leaders and religious leaders do their work.  But, let us find a way that all of our work is “working together for good.” Let us work in such a way that everyone’s work is value added to everyone else’s work.  The structures I envision must bridge the division and fragmentation in the movement and between our various communities. 

This infrastructure for justice and transformation must expand the knowledge base so that we don’t think in terms of those “selfish,” “mean,” or “lesser people.”  Instead, we must help each other see with clarity that we are dealing with huge global economic forces that have displaced over 200 million people now migrating all over the world.  These giant economic forces insure that some wallow in the obscenity of unearned and unnecessary wealth while others are left to scratch out a living in ever declining circumstances or, worse yet, to be criminalized and imprisoned when their main crime is struggling to break the death grip of poverty.

The infrastructure for justice I envision must provide new spaces and cultivate a milieu for quality interaction and relationship building.  At the end of the day, there is no adequate replacement for having some quality relationships with those defined as the “other.”  Most importantly, this infrastructure for justice must evolve creative, grounded strategies on the local and state levels that complement national and international strategies – all of which should move us towards more just societies in a more peaceful world.

Finally, Let me emphasize that we must expose and dismantle the massive scapegoating mechanism that is being used to exploit immigrants, while blinding and misleading millions of people into believing that the problems in this country are caused primarily by immigrants.  Too many in the media, in politics, and even in religious institutions have joined in an unholy alliance to blame the ills of this nation on immigrants, more specifically on Latino people.

1. High taxes are blamed on immigrants instead of on the billions of dollars spent every day on an unpopular war that has no end and, seemingly, no purpose of enduring meaning.
2. When the issue of crime arises we are urged to look at the Latinos and immigrants as the culprits.
3. When population growth becomes an issue our minds and eyes are trained towards   immigrants as the primary source.
4. Terrorism is being increasingly framed as an immigrant problem.  We are told that we must build walls to prevent terrorists – hidden among immigrants – from entering our nation.

And so it goes, on and on, disguising real causes while blaming the weak and vulnerable. This effectively scapegoats a group of people who are already victims of our international treaties and now increasingly the victims of our domestic policies of racism, denial, and blaming.

Beloved, let the day be gone when we can draw a line on God’s earth and on one side of that line people have a few rights and are treated with some respect, while on the other side people are treated as animals, chased, hunted and imprisoned because they have become commodities in a profit driven world-wide economic system – a system  where they cannot find work in their native country and are forced to migrate to this  country where they are exploited and scapegoated – even as they  work for lower wages in inferior conditions.   This is wrong.

If you will allow me to be a preacher for a few minutes, I must declare that I serve a God who is “no respecter of persons.”  Everybody is an important somebody. I serve a God who proclaims that the whole” earth is the lord’s, and the fullness thereof; the world they that dwell therein.”  Truth and justice demand that we expose and dismantle the immigrant scapegoat system.

Yes, we face great challenges as it relates to the immigration question and the larger question of transforming ourselves and our communities.  But those very challenges are also a great opportunity.  So let us recommit ourselves to the long, difficult, but beautiful struggle to wrestle out of the jungles of this world, a new world:  

1. A world where all are paid adequately for their work wherever they are and no matter where they come from.
2. A world where all are treated with dignity and respect at their workplace.
3. A world where all are protected equally by the laws of this land no matter their citizenship status.
4. Ultimately, we seek a world in which all are acknowledged as brothers and sisters and treated as part of the universal beloved community.

With such a vision to focus us, let us work together building bridges so that soon and very soon everyone will be able to “sit under our own fig tree and vine and none will be afraid.”

With such a vision we will be able to come back from the “far countries” of isolation, fragmentation and bitterness to gather around a welcome table of brotherhood and sisterhood,  celebrating the beauty of our diversity.

Nurtured by such a vision, I can hear the voices of the ancestors saying PRESS ON because no matter how difficult the journey there is a ”BRIGHT SIDE SOMEWHERE!”

I can hear them saying press on until the walls of injustice come tumbling down!

Press on until we receive our birthright set forth in the founding document of this republic that ALL men and women are created equal and, therefore, have certain  inalienable rights, including the right to life, the right to liberty, and the right to pursue happiness – which certainly include the right to work.

Press on until “the wicked cease from troubling and the righteous are at rest!”

Press on until the dawning of a New Day!

Yes, trouble might endure for a night but joy comes in the morning.  So press on until joy washes over the clouds of despair!  Press on!  Press on until victory comes! To God be the glory!

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