Malcolm X and Manna House

Malcolm X and Manna House

He stood next to the line that had formed at the front of Manna House for getting on the list for showers and for socks and hygiene.  I had just come out the front door to “take the list.” 

“I need a shower today” he immediately said to me.

He was new to Manna House, or at least I didn’t recognize him.  He was an African American man, well built, tall, with an edge in his voice and a tired scowl on his face.

I could feel the anxiety of everyone in the line waiting to get on the list, and my own.  On some mornings there is a tension about the order in the line that erupts first into verbal conflicts and then into more physical altercations.

“To get you on the list I need you to be in the line” I said to the man.

“I’ll wait” was his response.  He continued to stand just to the right of me as I took the names of everyone in line.  Eventually there was no one left.  He told me his name and I wrote it down.  I told him he would be the seventeenth person to shower that morning, and I thanked him for his patience.

After we opened, Byron (who like me is white) began to “call the list.”  Since we’re in the backyard these days, this means he comes onto the back porch and calls out names.  Guests whose names are called proceed to the front door to enter the house for their shower or for socks and hygiene.

The man who had stood on the porch now stood in the backyard.  There he waited for his name to be called for his shower. He faced the porch, just beyond where the coffee is served.  He stood there for the hour and a half it took before his name was called. 

Periodically he would ask, “When you going to call my name?”  Once he asked, “Why are all these people going ahead of me?  I thought I was number seventeen on the list?”  I explained that both the showers and the socks and hygiene lists were being called, so a lot of the names are for socks and hygiene. 

Like most mornings, most of the volunteers at Manna House are white, and most of the guests are black.  Manna House is not somehow magically removed from the history and present realities of racism in the United States.  All of us, whether guest or volunteer, white or black, bear in our souls the ways that racism shapes and deforms our relationships with one another.  The black man standing waiting for his name to be called didn’t trust the white man who took the list, and the other white man calling the list, to treat him justly. 

And there’s really no reason for him to trust us white men.  Nor is there any reason to judge him for his skepticism.  It was Malcolm X’s birthday this past week and I’ve been reading and reflecting on his life.  One of his insights was, “The American Negro never can be blamed for his racial animosities - he is only reacting to 400 years of the conscious racism of the American whites.”

Which is to say, it was whites who set up the categories “whiteness” and “blackness” and used the distinction to create a system of slavery and then of Jim Crow and today of “New Jim Crow.”  That is simply a statement of history, and of current institutional realities that include our economic and political systems, along with the dominant cultural values and norms.

            There is a lot to learn from Malcolm X.  This week I wondered what I might learn of Malcolm X from the African American guests at Manna House.  So I asked, “What does Malcolm X mean to you?”  The men I talked with were quick to offer their thoughts and teach me about Malcolm X.

“He lived without fear; a man committed to telling it like it is.”

“I tell kids, ‘You need to know who Malcolm X was.’   Look him up and learn what he said and what he stood for.  He’s still important as a truth teller.”

“He was a powerful man.  He didn’t back down from saying what had to be said.”

 “He lives today in whoever tells the truth, even at great risk.”

“What kind of truth did he tell?” I asked.

“He told the truth that we still need know.  We sure could use him these days.  Things haven’t changed that much.  Black people still being hated, disrespected, and killed; still kept down, still too passive.”

“He told the truth about how this country is set up for the whites.  Blacks lives have not mattered.”

“Yes,” another guest said, “and he was always searching, always learning.  He knew adversity and he learned from it.  He said ‘There is no better than adversity. Every defeat, every heartbreak, every loss, contains its own seed, its own lesson on how to improve your performance the next time.’ He traveled to Africa and Mecca and he learned from it.  He came to see that being human was the basic condition we share.  We need to see that we’re in this together.”

            Telling hard truths about this racist society, the guests at Manna House taught me, was Malcolm X’s way.  Hard truths are hard because they are hard to hear and they demand hard change.  And as another guest indicated, Malcolm X also said another hard truth, “I believe in human beings, and that all human beings should be respected as such, regardless of their color.”  The hard truth is that the way forward, for all human beings to be respected, is to begin with those whose lives are still not respected. 

Jesus said a similar hard truth, “Whatever you do to the least of these, you do to me” (Matthew 25:40).  Imagine if white Christians consistently said and practiced in every area of life, “Whatever I do to Black people is what I do to Christ.”  Perhaps there would not be a need for a Manna House and a shower line because the racism that creates so much poverty and homelessness would not exist.