Motoring Around D-Town

I have amazing news for you. Man is not alone on this planet. He is part of a community, upon which he depends absolutely.
Daniel Quinn, Ishmael: An Adventure of Mind & Spirit

Being holy does not mean being perfect but being whole; it does not mean being exceptionally religious or being religious at all; it means being liberated from religiosity and religious pietism of any sort; it does not mean being morally better, it meas being exemplary; it does not mean being godly, but rather being truly human.
William Stringfellow, A Keeper of the Word: Selected Readings

Growing up in the early 90s in white bread Orange County, I loved Public Enemy's "911 is A Joke In Our Town," but certainly did not get the joke. Fast forward a couple of decades and we find ourselves in Detroit, where clearly, 911 is a joke. The average response rate for Detroit Police is 58 minutes and most of the city's ambulances are out of commission.

Neighborhoods all over the city report numerous street lights out as potholes remain unfilled. One-third of the entire city has been abandoned or burned and the Republican governor and legislature has mandated an Emergency Manager for the city of Detroit, giving him dictator powers over nearly every decision for the future of the city, while the elected officials have been stripped of all power, except--laughably--the power to pound the gavel to begin and end council meetings.

As white families and corporations have caught the wave out of the city core into the suburbs, baby boomer radicals like Jim Perkinson, Lily Mendoza & Bill Wylie-Kellermann remain firmly planted in D-Town, creatively and consistently fighting for socio-economic justice through non-violent resistance. Kellermann got arrested at a recent city council meeting after interrupting the "business" with nearly 90 minutes of singing. These leaders have been taking the church service into the streets for decades. For them, it makes no sense singing "We Will Not Be Moved" confined to a pew. After all, the first generation of Jesus followers were known as those "turning the whole world upside down." These prophets are taking that vocation literally and seriously.

Kellermann, a long-time pastor at St. Peter's United Methodist Church, confessed to us in a conversation just steps away from his backyard garden that he stopped counting how many times he got arrested after about 50. He also confessed that he unwittingly caused a stir at a recent United Methodist annual conference for spray painting some political additions to a "We Love Detroit" mural on the sidewalk leading up to the church hosting the meetings. We found it absolutely legendary that Pastor Bill was (1) unaware that, although the mural had the look of spray paint graffiti, it was actually chalk and (2) upon finding the mural he didn't think twice about heading straight to his car where he always keeps spray paint cans just in case (one of his spiritual practices is redeeming military, sexist and, more recently & urgently, emergency management billboards with his own personal touch).

Perkinson, a professor at Detroit's Ecumenical Theological Seminary and Oakland University, grew up in Cincinnati playing sports with boys a lot bigger, stronger and older than he was. Time after time, he was the source of bullying and beating. From his early days, he got just a taste of what it was like to be hated and despised and oppressed by the mainstream. It wasn't until he was in college that he became compelled by and called to the African-American neighborhoods of Detroit. With the exception of a couple of timeouts for graduate study (Univ of Chicago) and teaching (Univ of Denver), since the late 60s, Perkinson has been actively organizing for a host of justice issues in the very heart of Detroit, with her 83% African-American population. But the blue-eyed and grey-haired poneytailed Perkinson blends right in, flipping the script with his rare blend of scholarly theological work exposing white supremacy and his gift of spoken word poetry (at our prompting, he performed two epic poems for us before he bid us good-bye).

At the very core of everything that Jim, and his marriage partner Lily (also a tenured track professor at Oakland U.), do is a courageous expose of the deep effects of colonialism and the ongoing catastrophe of unacknowledged white privilege. Without this deeper systemic analysis it's just too damn easy to go on living a "nice" existence while unmindfully living on the side of the conquistadors (or on the side of Pharoah if biblical reference is necessitated). But everything Jim and Lily do is local. They are fully committed to learning (in word and deed) their beloved, adopted hometown, as Ched Myers consistently echoes:

We won't save places we don't love.
We can't love places we don't know.
We don't know places we haven't learned.

They are deeply distressed by the white flight and corporate maneuvering. They recognize and call out--because they have studied the back stories and lived out the front stories--that Detroit has been raped and pillaged by corporate interests who profited greatly by structurally readjusting 3rd World countries the century before. Detroit's labor and resources were used up by auto factories and other manufacturing endeavors for decades of the 20th century, but now, stripped of the ability to compete during this age of uber-globalization, Detroit has been rendered helpless by the very design of those corporations and banks, which have now turned to finance and debt to make their billions.

Jim and Lily live in a co-op near the historic African-American neighborhood of Black Bottom, which was pulverized by the creation of freeways in the 50s and 60s. Lily is always sparkling with color and jewelry which match her vibrant spirit and tie her to her indigenous roots which she (and Jim) have been on a deeply personal journey to recover from the colonial project. We learned from Lily and Jim that this project, along with devastating land and culture, to differing extents, has separated us all from our truest indigenous selves. Lily's poetic expression of this journey spoke deeply to our own spirits.

Over a dinner of beer and pizza, Jim asked us a simple question: "What's your passion?" He LOVES detroit. And even if he and his fellow activists and artists and agricultural bandits can't change the structures over night he is thoroughly committed to this place. He is convinced that Detroit will save white poeple, not the other way around, citing his own experience of being "rearranged" by black culture decades ago, a process he would say continues to this day.

On Tuesday morning, we got the Perkinson tour of Detroit, routing us through neighborhoods in his 1997 Subaru. We met up at Avalon bakery, an indie cafe started in the early-90s by a lesbian couple participating in the Detroit Summer movement.

We stopped at what remains of the oldest auto factory in the world.

We took in scenes like this ALL over the city...burned out, abandoned, overgrown, etc:

But families, neighborhoods, churches and co-ops are literally digging in to bring redemption to this post-industrial brokenness. Here's a community garden started by a Monastery on the eastside:

And then we came across this:

Two decades ago, Tyree Guyton started gathering the "junk" (records, stuffed animals, dolls, shoes, etc etc etc) lying around his neighborhood and turning it into beautiful artwork. As houses were abandoned and burned, Tyree would take bright colors and give them a fresh coat, polka dotting them all up. The neighbors and the city initially responded by bulldozing his creations, but eventually everyone has been converted due to the overwhelming adoration bestowed on his work. Today, the Heidelberg Project receives more than 200,000 out-of-town visitors every year.

A rendition of Noah's Ark:

Burying the military industrial complex...finally and forever:

And a memorial to Holocaust victims:

After our tour with Jim, we met up with the good folks from the Jeanie Wylie community on Detroit's westside. This group of 6, named after the late wife of Bill and mother of Lydia (and Lucy) & rooted in the Catholic Worker tradition of peace, hospitality and nonviolent resistance, is committed to participating in the urban agriculture revolution sprouting up all over Detroit. Lydia & Erinn (and their 4 month old son, Isaac!), Luke and Joan, and Vicente and Erika make up the core of membership. We also met Marty, who moved to Detroit this summer with her girlfriend Hannah to participate with the JW community. They join together for common meals, prayer and Scripture reading, community gardening and, of course, political activism at all sorts of venues throughout the city.

Here we are in the Wylie-Kellermann backyard garden started back in the mid-90s:

Lydia & Erinn pray that Isaac will grow up in a world in which he was never aware of a time his parents did not have full dignity among people and equal rights under the law:

Luke orchestrated the creation of this community garden a few years ago just a few blocks away from the Jeanie-Wylie community. They do not own the land...but they aren't asking permission to plant! The neighbors love it:

There was so much to take away and process from our short Time here. These leaders of the nonviolent revolution in Detroit (otherwise known as "discipleship to Jesus") are, quite simply, committed to what Perkinson refers to as "living into it." Like St. Francis of Assisi, they "at all times preach the gospel and when necessary use words." But more than anything, they let their actions speak for themselves. And these actions have had a powerful impact on us.