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  • Biography, Democracy And Spirit An Interview with Vincent Harding
  • Vincent Harding (bio) and Rachel E. Harding (bio)

Vincent Gordon Harding is a historian, writer and activist who, with his wife, Rosemarie Freeney-Harding, has worked as an organizer and consultant in movements for democratic change for over thirty-five years. Harding was born in 1931 in Harlem. He attended the City College of New York, Columbia University, and earned a doctorate in American History at the University of Chicago.

Presently, he is professor of Religion and Social Transformation at the Iliff School of Theology in Denver, Colorado. Harding is perhaps best known for his history of African-American resistance in ante-bellum America, There is a River (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981) and his numerous writings on the Black Freedom Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. He was senior advisor to the acclaimed PBS television series Eyes on the Prize. His most recent books are Martin Luther King: The Inconvenient Hero (Orbis, 1996), a collection of essays on the last years of King’s life, and We Changed the World: African Americans, 1945–1970, a textbook history co-authored with Robin Kelley and Earl Lewis for the Oxford University Press African-American history series for young adults (1997).

In this conversation, I talk with my father about his childhood and the development of his concern for American democracy, his involvement in the Freedom Movement, the establishment of the Institute of the Black World, his working partnership with my mother, Rosemarie Freeney-Harding, and reflections on his activism and alliances. The interview took place over the course of an afternoon on March 9, 1997.

R. HARDING

One of your ongoing concerns over the past 30 years or so has been for the development of greater democracy and stronger structures of democracy in American society. How did you come by this concern and where do you find it leading you?

V. HARDING

I’m not sure that I can speak with great accuracy to that question. One of the background experiences that leads me to an appreciation of democracy, especially for democracy as expressed in the variety of human participants in the American experience, was my own growing-up in New York City.

This was at a time when the city still had a public school system that, in some of its parts, was basically very multiracial and multicultural, especially as far as integration of the student body was concerned. More the student body than the faculty. I remember how much I enjoyed and appreciated the variety of people that I was with, the variety of my fellow students. Both while I was living through the experience and [End Page 682] since that time I have reflected on what it meant to be in a setting where I was in constant engagement with people from Italian, Irish, Armenian, Jewish, Portuguese, Puerto Rican as well as African-American and a half-dozen other kinds of racial and ethnic backgrounds. There was something simply very rich and exciting and engaging for me about that. Something lovely about it, to use a better word. And I think that the desire to see a nation develop its capacity to bring that kind of engagement into being was probably part of the concern.

The other thing I should say is that part of the background might be called religious or spiritual. One of the things that I am most drawn to, in many religious traditions, is the teaching, the practice that within the human being there is tremendous capacity for greatness, for beauty, for creativity. That kind of religious insight or offering is a very powerful grounding for democratic society. Because if we really believe that there is within us all the capacity for creative work, for remarkable contribution, then that encourages the development of processes and spaces where people can open up and nurture that capacity as we build together new and renewing communities.

R. HARDING

Does the spiritual or religious grounding within your concern for democracy come from your particular experience of growing up in a black church setting in New York, and from the other forms that spirituality and religiosity have taken in your life...

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