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The conversation I had with Vincent Harding ever after changed the way I think about our democratic

experiment. He was a leading figure in the Civil Rights Movement and he was wise about how the

Civil Rights vision might speak to 21st century realities. Just as importantly,

Vincent Harding pursued this by way of patient yet passionate, cross-cultural,

cross-generational relationship. The Civil Rights Movement, he reminded us, was spiritually as well

as politically vigorous. It aspired to a beloved community, not merely a tolerant integrated

society. Vincent Harding posed and lived a question that is freshly in our midst again.

Is America possible? How do we work together? How do we talk together in ways that will

open up our best capacities and our best gifts? My own feeling that I try to share again and again,

Christa, is that when it comes to creating a multiracial, multi-ethnic, multireligious democratic society,

we are still a developing nation. I'm Christa Tippett and this is on being.

Vincent Harding

Vincent Harding was professor emeritus of religion and social transformation at the

eyelift school of theology in Denver, Colorado. I interviewed him in 2011. He died at the age of 82

in 2014. Back in 1955, he was working towards his master's degree in history in Chicago when the

Montgomery bus boycott began. Eventually, he and a few friends, both black and white,

traveled south to see how they could be of use. Along the way, they paid a life-changing visit

to another young man in his late 20s, Martin Luther King Jr. Vincent Harding says that the phrase

civil rights never adequately described King's vision or the human transformation that it stirred.

...