I spent Sunday morning, January 19, in a Sunday School class at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Charlotte. The topic for the morning was organizing, and especially organizing around housing justice. My work as an activist and a writer has focused on that topic, with The Redress Movement, QC Family Tree, and with the publication of Our Trespasses.
Agitation coursed through the room. We stood together anticipating Monday, January 20, the most American of days–the commemoration of the life and work of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., falling on the same day as the inauguration of a new American tyranny. Everyone wants to do something, but it is hard to know what to do. And it is easy to feel like one must do everything, especially as a campaign of shock and awe begins.
My subject, as it often is, was housing justice. We talked about our county’s recent report on housing and homelessness. The data seem pretty bleak, as though years of focused effort and hundreds of millions of dollars in investment have made little difference in the overall situation. Especially stunning in those data is the number of eviction filings in the year from July 2023 - June 2024: more 46,026. That’s 126 households per day, each day for one year.
I shared a recent story of organizing work. A coalition of tenants, activists, and organizers won some initial victories around code enforcement. Here’s a quick summary of the campaign: At Tanglewood Apartments in Charlotte, a landlord decided to evict all tenants and sell the property. The owner’s actions are consistent with a common strategy of exploitation, namely for a landlord to collect rent without upholding their contractual obligations. They bank on politically powerless people (tenants, especially working-class ones) being unable to counter this strategy with expensive attorneys and legal interventions. So, maintenance needs built at Tanglewood over years, despite dozens of code enforcement citations. Violations and fines became part of the cost of doing business, a cost cheaper than actually making repairs. Owners accumulated hefty fines, but they banked on the city not collecting. They finally sold, will refuse to pay fines, and the new owner then starts fresh, as the fines are attached to an entity or a person, not to the property itself.
Here’s where organizers came in: our city has tools in our housing code to compel landlords to raise conditions when they fall below minimum standards. City staff and electeds have the power to interrupt the corrupt business practices of places like Tanglewood Apartments, they just hadn’t done it. Not there, and as best we can tell, not ever.
As I described this scenario–open exploitation, bleak housing data, and so on, a woman named Susan shouted. In an Episcopal church! No words, just a cry from her gut. It was loud. It was lengthy. It was the in-breaking of the Spirit into the room, a tongue of fire descending for a people in longing.
I was reminded of a favorite passage from the book of Isaiah:
This passage is not about the United States, and we should be careful about making easy transferences from a prophet addressing ancient people to a modern nation-state. But the echoes are easy to hear: a group of powerful people, claiming a divine mandate, acts out wickedness rather than goodness. That is the condition we live under for the foreseeable future. From inside a similar politic moment, Isaiah counsels, “Shout out! Do not hold back!”
In the coming days, I intend to shout–alone, on the internet, in the company of others. Truth is under assault, our neighbors are under attack, everything is up for grabs. I will shout to remind myself that I am human. I won’t be alone–you won’t be either–as we shout from rage and grief, and one day, from joy.
The story from our Charlotte coalition is that we won some concessions. We acted together to get people’s immediate needs taken care of. We’re now involved in further talks that we think will bear long-term fruit for tenants facing neglect and exploitation from greedy landlords. That’s not bringing about the revolution, but we’re celebrating every step along the way.
I’m writing this down as a reminder that we are not powerless. This week is certain to feature a breathtaking amount of cruelty. The tyrant’s campaign will aim to make us feel overwhelmed and unable to respond. But we are not powerless and we are able to respond. Every small victory is a step to a larger one.
Remembering Dr. King: From Dr. King’s final book, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?
Loose and easy language about equality, resonant resolutions about brotherhood fall pleasantly on the ear, but there is a credibility gap Black Americans cannot overlook. They remember that with each modest advance the white population promptly raises the argument that [Black Americans] have come far enough. Each step forward accents an ever-present tendency to backlash.
This characterization is necessarily general. It would be grossly unfair to omit recognition of a minority of whites who genuinely want authentic equality. Their commitment is real, authentic, and expressed in a thousand deeds. But they are balanced at the other end of the pole by the unregenerated segregationists who have declared that democracy is not worth having if it involves equality. The segregationist goal is the total reversal of all reforms, with re-establishment of naked oppression and if need be a native form of facism. America had a master race in the antebellum South. Reestablishing it with a resurgent Klan and a totally disenfranchised lower class would realize the dream of too many extremists on the right.
The great majority of Americans are suspended between these opposing attitudes. They are uneasy with injustice but unwilling yet to pay a significant price to eradicate it.
Upcoming Talks and Book Discussions
Jan 23: Freedom Fete at Trinity Episcopal School, 3:30pm, with local Civil Rights legend Dorothy Counts-Scogins and civic leader Arthur Griffin.
Jan 26: Preaching at Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Charlotte, 11AM.
Jan 29: Keynote for the “Better Together” series at Harrison United Methodist Church, Pineville, 6pm.
Feb 2: Preaching at Harrison UMC, Pineville, NC, 9 and 11AM.
One More Note: From native North Carolinian Nina Simone, a shout as powerful now as ever: