gathered chairs around his bed and made a “wonderful first connection.” Harding recalled being impressed by King’s “tremendous sense of humor.” “He kept congratulating us on the great feat of being able to get through Mississippi alive.” Harding said they talked about what King was trying to do in Montgomery and what they were trying to do in Chicago. They asked King about his hope for the South as a whole. After about two hours, the men were leaving when King looked at Harding and his friend Ed Riddick and said: “You guys are Mennonites; you know about this matter of nonviolence. We need you. You ought to come down here and work with us sometime.”
ON TO KOINONIA Clarence Jordan’s interracial and controversial farm outside of Americus, Ga., was a certain destination for the wandering Mennonites — though Harding doesn’t recall how they first learned of Koinonia Farm. “Clarence and Koinonia represented the same kind of commitment to Christian brotherhood and sisterhood — and we would find a welcome place there,” said Harding. So they pointed the station wagon toward Southwest Georgia. “Sometime after we left Montgomery, it may have been our next stop … we got to Koinonia and got to meet Clarence,” said Harding. “As you can imagine, we had many wonderful conversations.” Also memorable, Harding said, was being assigned to a house near the entrance to Koinonia — where evidence of bullets having been fired into the house remained on the wall just above his bed. For Harding, that initial visit in 1958 “was the beginning of a long relationship with Clarence and Koinonia.”
OFF TO ATLANTA A couple of years after his southern adventure with friends, Harding and his new bride Rosemarie moved to Atlanta as representatives of the Mennonite Service Committee. With the Georgia capital as their base, they would travel all over the South and relate to a variety of individuals and organizations to further the cause of freedom. Their commitment, said Harding, was to find “where the way of love can take us in the midst of social struggle.” A real estate agent helped them find a 12-room residence that would become the Mennonite House in which the Hardings would provide hospitality and out of which they would
Vincent Harding: ‘Keeper of a Story’ By John Pierce ATLANTA — Vincent Harding is revered for both his work as a civil rights activist and his excellent writings on the subject including biographies of his friend Martin Luther King Jr. Students of the freedom movement know that he drafted “A Time to Break Silence,” King’s famous speech in opposition to the Vietnam War, delivered at Riverside Church in New York City in 1967. Born in Harlem, Harding attended New York Public Schools and earned a history degree from the City College of New York in 1952. The following year he graduated from Columbia University with a master’s degree in journalism. He served in the U.S. Army from 19531955 before earning an M.A. in history at the University of Chicago in 1956. After his sojourn to the South, he received his Ph.D. in history from the University of Chicago in 1965. His long and distinguished teaching career included Iliff School of Theology in Denver where he taught from 1981 until his retirement in 2004. He is currently doing research and teaching at Morehouse College in Atlanta. Yet Morehouse students who are privileged to hear Harding today are in for more than a strict history lesson. Harding resists the traditional language of the civil rights era, he said, because he doesn’t want them to assume the struggle is over. “I refer to what we were going through at that time as part of the ongoing, neverceasing struggle for the expansion of democracy in America,” said Harding in a March interview with Baptists Today.
carry out their mission. Unknown to them at the time, Martin and Coretta King lived just around the corner. Their friendships with the Kings grew. Harding said King asked the young Mennonite couple to help in various efforts of the freedom movement. Two specific requests were to be involved in non-violence training and to identify white persons who were sympathetic to the freedom cause but might fear making direct contact with King or local movements. Desegregation efforts in Albany, Ga., were of particular interest at that time. So Vincent and Rosemarie gladly took the
At age 81, and with many participants in and eyewitnesses to the struggles of the ’50s and ’60s no longer around, Harding said “there is clearly a sense of being a keeper of a story.” But he wants to do more than share historical facts. “My deepest intention is not simply to pass on the story of that which took place before they were born,” said Harding, “but to encourage them to understand why they need to know that story in the light of what they are planning for their own lives in the future.” He reminds young students that it’s only been about 60 years that this country has been committed to building a multiracial democracy — and that “when it comes to building a democracy, we are still a developing nation.” So there is a bigger question to be considered, he said: “How do you help train and nurture and develop younger people to become the experts on the building of a multiracial, compassionate democracy that can call on the resources of the Kings and the Clarences and the Fanny Lou Hamers to help them to understand that this is an ongoing work — and that nothing was completed in 1960 or 1970 or whenever, but that the work continues?” Helping young people who have always enjoyed so many rights and privileges to see their roles in the ongoing struggle for freedom and equality is not easy, he confessed. “That’s so hard for young people of this generation who are used to having things up and out and finished,” he said. “I enjoy the struggle with them — but it is a struggle.” So Harding just keeps recalling the old African American song that says: “Freedom is a Constant Struggle.” BT
charge whereby a “strange black Mennonite couple” would talk with white southerners “especially on the grounds of their Christian faith” — and encourage them to take a stand based on faith rather than politics. Harding said the struggle was “not just the cause of black people, but the cause of justice and democracy — and, of course, the cause of a Christian way of life.”
MORE CLARENCE “Whenever we were operating in South Georgia, we wanted to spend some time with Clarence at Koinonia,” said Harding, who Feature | 5