In his 2023 ICJS Manekin-Clark Lecture, Walter Fluker drew on the wisdom of his mentor Howard Thurman as he issued a call to go beyond personal fulfillment to reimagine democratic spaces where freedom can flourish.
“Thurman believed deeply that the practices of the inner life prepared individuals and collectives for transformative engagement in society—in the construction of what I’m calling ‘democratic space,’ ” Fluker told the gathering at Northside Baptist Church in Baltimore, as well as those listening on the live stream.
Thurman believed in the importance of “remembering and retelling and reliving our stories,” particularly in examining the traditions of our religious communities, as well as our social and political lives, Fluker said. But some traditions become tired, calcified and have to be reconsidered in order to move forward. “So I’m going to ask us tonight to remember, and to remember has to do with memory and history. To remember the past, to memorialize the past, and to correct it sometimes with history,” he said. “We go to the past and we come back, and we look for the future in vision.”
Breaking from the past is an act Fluker compared to escaping from slavery, pointing to the example of Harriet Tubman, the former slave who returned to lead others to freedom in the Underground Railroad. “More is expected of the runner than running away,” he said. “She must return, like Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass and all these other folks we know…must return and prophesy and publish the disenchanting yet hopeful news that freedom will take much longer than we thought and that it will not come by a magical hand of fate, but only because we continue to struggle, resist, reconstruct, and reimagine our futures as we run toward our destinies as sons and daughters of God.”
Fluker offered what he called a threefold method in carrying out this quest: congregating, conjuring, and conspiring in commons at the crossings. “Congregating signals gathering, binding,and coming together. It involves running away from and running to new imagined futures,” he said.
To conjure means to “take the materials that experience gives you and [to] refashion new tools to attend to the need at hand,” Fluker said. “What if we went back into these traditions and appropriated some things that still matter and configure them into tools of what Thurman called ‘spirit.’?”
And then, he said, we begin to conspire. “We conspire, not in a diabolical plot…but I’m talking about in the literal sense of in spirit with the other, conspiritus—breathing, literally, with the other. Can we find ourselves in a place that is so close to the other and to that which you call holy that you even breathe the same breath? To do as one, to swear an oath, make a covenant, to run together, in commons—I take Thurman’s common ground and I pluralize it.”
And then Fluker comes to the crossings, the place of transition, ambiguity, and contingency where all real change takes place. “One must be careful at crossings, for while they bring information, knowledge, and possibility, they are always fraught with dangers, perils and crucifixions. For we do not know who or what goes there and whether to set our feet on shifting grounds.”
Hear Dr. Fluker’s 2023 ICJS Manekin-Clark Lecture on the ICJS web site.