This summer has been a season of learning, movement, and putting my gifts to work in new ways. In early August, I traveled by bus to Chicago with other organizers and faith leaders for the 60th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Marquette Park. The 1966 march was part of the Chicago Freedom Movement’s fight against segregation and housing discrimination, and this year’s gathering brought people together to remember that history while connecting it to the struggles for racial, economic, and immigrant justice that continue today.
On our way to Chicago, we also stopped in Indiana for a vigil outside an ICE detention center. That stop was a powerful reminder that the history we were honoring isn’t simply history – it is a call to continue showing up for people who are experiencing injustice right now.
A couple of weeks later, I spent a week in Philadelphia for a movement-art training growing out of the Kairos Center’s Survival Revival. The purpose of the training was to learn how artists can use our creative gifts as part of organizing – not simply to make things that look good, but to help movements tell their stories, build relationships, communicate a vision, and move people to action.
I focused my artwork for the Philly training on the upcoming National Day of Action for Medicaid on September 19. The Alabama Poor People’s Campaign and Alabama Arise are participating in the action, which will connect Alabama’s fight for healthcare and economic justice to a larger national movement. They are still determining whether the Alabama action will take place in Birmingham or Montgomery.
For me, these experiences are all connected. I’m an agnostic, so I don’t necessarily think about God in a traditional sense. But I’ve come to think of God as “Good Orderly Direction” – the force that moves us toward greater love, justice, connection, and care for one another. I see that Good Orderly Direction in people getting on a bus together to remember a movement’s history, stopping to stand with people facing detention, artists using their gifts in service of justice, and communities organizing to make sure their neighbors can access healthcare.
That’s why I believe art and music are integral to organizing. They help us imagine, communicate, grieve, celebrate, and hope together. They remind us that we are part of something bigger than ourselves. For me, art is one of the ways I can participate in that Good Orderly Direction.
The Survival Revival didn’t feel like an ending to me. It gave me new language and tools for recognizing the sacred work that is already happening all around us – and for understanding my own gifts as an artist as one way I can participate in that work.
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