Birmingham Is A World House

Birmingham Is A World House: A 2007 Paraphrase of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s

World House Chapter in Where Do We Go From Here?

The great new problem of Birmingham is that we have inherited a large house, a great world house. We now have to live together in this large house; black and white, brown, yellow and red. We have to live together; African, Asian and European; Jew, Christian, Moslem, Hindu and Buddhist; Latino and Arab.  We must learn to live together in peace.

African Americans are still caught in the struggle to be at home in Birmingham, Alabama and their homeland of these United States; however the world house that we now live in cannot be ignored.  Equality of Black and White will not solve the problem of Blacks or Whites if it means living in a city and state where racism and economic exploitation causes any other members of our world house to live in poverty or under violence.

This world house has been brought into being by the modern scientific and technological revolutions. These revolutions are not reversible and will continue to have a growing, unpredictable and enormous significance in bringing us closer together in the world house.  With this reality of the world house we are challenged to work with an unshakable determination to wipe out the last vestiges of racism.

And when we look around the world house that is Birmingham we see that most of the people who do not share in the abundance of American technology are people of color. It is an almost inescapable conclusion that this condition and their exploitation are somehow connected to their skin color and the white racism that is so dominate in Birmingham, Alabama.

Racism is the corrosive evil that continues to bring down the curtain on Birmingham. If Birmingham and all our metropolitan area does not now respond constructively to the challenge to banish racism; White racism against Blacks, Black racism against Brown, Black and White racism against Arabs, we will have to say that Birmingham died because it lacked the soul and commitment to make justice a reality for all in our world house city.

The main sign of the lack of justice in Birmingham is the presence of a suffocating poverty. If we are to live creatively in our world house city we must solve the problem of poverty.  Over twenty five percent of the people in the City of Birmingham, 60,000 – 70,000 people live below the government-designated poverty level.  Many thousands go to bed hungry at night; they are under nourished, ill housed, or not housed at all, and shabbily clad.  The only bed many have is the sidewalk or the floor of an abandoned building. Many of these children of God don’t have access to health care.

Why should there be hunger, privation and homelessness in a city like Birmingham with so many resources and such wealth.  There is no deficit in human resources; the deficit is in human will, we lack the political will to creatively address this issue.  The well off and secure are too often indifferent and oblivious to the poverty and exploitation in our midst, and more often than not blame the victims for their suffering.

The first step to address the issue of poverty is a passionate commitment. The commitment I am talking about is not using our resources to relocate the poor and homeless and to control them.  We don’t need a new paternalism.  The poor need access to the resources and relationships that will empower them to be fully human, responsible and free residents of their own home.  True compassion is more than giving a dollar to a homeless person.  True compassion understands that a system that produces and manages homelessness must be restructured.

We have to remember that 40 years ago the White power structure, churches, synagogues and businesses in Birmingham controlled people of color with Jim
Crow laws of segregation and violence.  The infection of this remaining deadly recalcitrant virus must be removed from the lifeblood of Birmingham.

The real reason that we must use our resources to eliminate all racism and poverty goes beyond material concerns to the quality of our mind and heart.  Deeply woven into the fabric of the religious traditions of the world house is the conviction that all people are created in the image of God; that all people are souls of infinite metaphysical value. If we accept this as a profound moral fact, we cannot be content to see people hungry, homeless, victims of addiction and ill health while we have the means to help them. In the final analysis, the rich in the world house of Birmingham must not ignore the poor because both rich and poor are tied together.  We entered the same mysterious gateway of human birth, into the same adventure of mortal life.

 The agony of the poor and homeless impoverishes the rich; the betterment of the poor and homeless enriches the rich.  We must let nothing keep us from remodeling Birmingham’s recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a livable home for all people.  Our only hope lies in our ability to recapture the American Revolutionary Spirit of freedom and justice for all people and go out into a sometimes-hostile world declaring eternal opposition to racism, poverty and violence.  Birmingham must now develop an overriding loyalty to humanity as a whole in order to flourish.

This is a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all people.  This call for love is now an absolute necessity for the survival of our city.  When I speak of love, I am speaking of that force which all the great religious traditions of the world house have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life.  This Hindu-Moslem-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist principle about supreme reality is beautifully summed up in the First Epistle of John:

 “Let us love one another; for love is of God and every one that loves is born of God and knows God.  The one that dose not love does not know God; for God is love--- If we love one another, God lives in us and his love is perfected in us.”

 We can no longer afford to worship the God of Hate or bow before the altar of retaliation and abandonment of the poor and stranger in our world house.  It is not too late. Birmingham still has a choice today.  May we choose to live in a world house where every person has access to the resources and relationships they need to live a full and meaningful life.  We can choose community over chaos!

R. Lawton Higgs, Sr. 11/04/07