The eminent Vincent Harding passed away on May 19, 2014 at the age of 84. He is a legendary figure in the U.S. Black Freedom Movement and also lent his energies to struggles for justice and human rights around the globe. To those who heard him speak, read his books, or read about him in other people's books, he was a larger than life persona. To many of those who knew and loved him he was a most gentle, caring and compassionate person and a loyal friend and mentor.
Vincent Harding was a historian, a theologian, writer, and an outspoken activist for most of his life. After receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, Vincent traveled south and became a participant in the growing Civil Rights Movement, and an ally and advisor to its most visible icon, the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Vincent influence Martin and vice versa. Most significantly it was Vincent Harding who penned the historic 1967 Riverside Church speech in which Dr. King condemned the escalating war in Vietnam, a stance that cost him many liberal supporters. It was a difficult stand for King to take at that moment, Vincent later reflected, but it was the right stand. Vincent took many difficult but principled stands throughout his life. He was an ardent opponent of wars of any kind. His own stint in the military had made him a pacifist. Born in Harlem, Vincent was a devout Mennonite and proponent of black liberation theology, grounded in the Black American experience and struggle, he was also an internationalist. In the 1980s he traveled to Nicaragua in a solidarity delegation and in 2012 he was a part of a Civil and Human Rights African Heritage delegation to Palestine organized by the Dorothy Cotton Institute and Interfaith Peace-Builders.
As a scholar activist Vincent taught at Spelman College, Temple University and Denver's Iliff School of Theology. He authored four books, most notably There is a River and Hope and History. He was also one of the founders of the Institute for the Black World in Atlanta which described itself in 1969 as “a gathering of black intellectual who are convinced that the gifts of their minds are meant to be fully used in the service of the black community. It is therefore an experiment with scholarship in the context of struggle.”Footnote 1 Vincent Harding was a brilliant thinker and an eloquent champion of justice and compassion. In his life and work ethics and scholarship were intimately related.
In the weeks before his death I was in communication with Vincent about our request for him to participate in the Freedom Dreams/ Freedom Now conference held at University of Illinois at Chicago to mark the 50th anniversary of Freedom Summer. He could not be with us in person but he was determined to offer skyped greetings at the opening session. In preparation he was eager to know all about who would be in attendance, what did we hope to accomplish and how could he “be of use.” What a kind and generous and patient soul he was throughout all the years I knew him.
Vincent was upset and insulted by the ways in which Dr. King's legacy of activism was sanitized and distorted. The greatest tribute we can pay to Vincent Harding's legacy is to honor him in the fullness and complexity of who he was and to read and remember his words. I can still remember his very distinctive and calibrated way of speaking. One of Vincent's most powerful messages to the next generation of activists was written in Sojourners Magazine in 2012 and it reads as follows: “We simply have to recognize that we are wrestling with something that is powerful. The gift of that is that we now have the opportunity to see how much power there is in our lives to deal with it, if we submit ourselves to the magnificent calling: that we have to take our lives away from the foolishness that the society wants us to be wrapped up in and to focus ourselves on the building of a new world.”Footnote 2
Notes
“The Institute of the Black World Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Center Atlanta, Georgia, Statement of Purpose and Program Fall, 1969,” The Massachusetts Review 10(1969): 713–717. www.jstor.org/stable/25087919
Vincent Harding, “Do Not Grow Weary or Lose Heart,” Sojourners March (2012). www.sojo.net/magazine/2012/03/do-not-grow-weary-or-lose-heart