I took a group of students to a service immersion trip in Nashville, Tennessee. It was quite an experience and these trips always open my eyes to the world in new ways. Being in the heart of the South and a place I don’t really know was especially daunting. We stayed in classroom converted “dorms” of the McKendree Methodist Church.
Immersion trips can be tricky as you navigate a city you don’t know and try your best to keep people together. On our last day we took the group to “Room at the Inn.” This was a café started by a priest many years ago. It provides for the basic needs of participants, serving free meals to the hungry and homeless, showers, lodging, and classes to nourish the best within people. We met some interesting characters there and it was a good way to introduce students to issues of physical poverty.
Being the South, there were some who were not necessarily welcoming of people of color and one participant talked about the deep-seated issues of the Civil War and the continuing divisions and disagreements between citizens of the north and south. My students, who are people of color, encountered racism as they served a few people. One participant was venting about how whites are superior to blacks. It was his way to reclaim his dignity, but his indecency hurt badly.
I was sad to hear the story. Though the house of hospitality welcomed us and invited us to serve lunch, we decided to stick to our plan and go to Fisk University, one of the first HBCU’s in the country. It was a trip we needed to take. During our debrief, we discussed why someone may have acted in that way. My take is that when you are physically poor, you grasp for anything you can to claim power. You will use anything or anyone at your disposal in order to claim dignity and sometimes this happens at the expense of others. One of my black students had enough decency to pray for that person and forgive his racism.
Each day we made our lunches and ate at the Farmer’s Market. This last day we instructed students to make an extra lunch for what is called “the plunge.” The plunge is a full immersion experience where students walk the city streets looking for opportunities to feed the hungry.
We started at the Farmer’s Market in Centennial Park and walked the loop. There was a slight rain and no one was out, so we decided to head back to the area by the convention center where “Room at the Inn” was located. We parked the car and found a few people wandering the streets that accepted the lunches with gratitude. We turned the corner of a building that happened to be the mission.
We didn’t know it was the mission at the time, as the sign said “Sacred Heart Academy, established by Katherine Drexel,” but we saw a few men who looked like they could use a meal. We talked with them and more men started to gather. Word got out we were there and we had no more lunches to give. Some people were angry at us. “Why would you do that?”
“Do what?” I asked.
“Come here and just give a few of us lunches and not everyone.”
We only had so many. We didn’t know where we were and that we would encounter so many people. He didn’t understand our perspective. He didn’t see that we were trying to help who we could with the limited resources we had. All he could see was that he was not getting his needs met and was not being treated fairly. Anger got the better of a few of the men and we could see it was time to go. There was no use explaining.
Sometimes we do what we can. The lessons are lost, but the lessons weren’t lost on our students. They knew what was up. They had an experience of seeing frustrations of limitation firsthand. They saw that the poor are relegated to certain parts of the city and the need is great and overwhelming. They saw that there is only so much we can do, but the little we do is something and should be respected. It’s hard to hold respect in your heart when you’ve been living hand to mouth. The struggle for dignity is real and works on you mentally, physically, emotionally and spiritually. This is why Mother Teresa said, “Poverty is the worst form of violence.”
When we were at Fisk University we walked the Esther and John Hope Franklin library that held some of the most prized writings of the greats like W.E.B Dubois and John Hope Franklin. The students became very quiet and it felt like we were in a church. A dizzy air of prosperity that consumes the ethers of darkness and hopelessness and offers the lightness of goodness of truth hung in its sanctuary. The large blue velvet Lincoln Bible that was given to the 16th president by black intellectuals was on display on the desk of the founding father of Fisk Ogden.
W.E.B. Dubois wrote in his seminal work “The Souls of Black Folk”, “The function of a university is to not simply to teach bread winning, or to furnish teachers for the public schools, or to be a center of polite society; it is, above all, to be the organ of that fine adjustment between real life and the growing knowledge of life, an adjustment which forms the secret of civilization.”
The students rose above the indiscretions of indecency and racism that du Bois wrote about and were able to glimpse the sanctity of his spirit that roams free with other geniuses in the spirit of Fisk. The play between the intellect and the heart is the true conqueror of ignorance and the racist beast of indecency.
spirit beat 