[A version of this piece has appeared in Kansas Reflector and Religious Socialism.]
Back on May 9, something remarkable happened in Wichita, something similar to other remarkable things which have happened in recent years in Lawrence, Topeka, and elsewhere across Kansas.
At the Century II building in downtown Wichita, elected and agency leaders—specifically Wichita Mayor Lily Wu, Sedgwick County Commission Chairperson Ryan Baty, the managers of both Wichita and Sedgwick County, and leading representatives from COMCARE, and the Kansas Department of Aging and Disability Services—stood in front of over 1300 people and committed to take certain specific local policy actions to address homelessness and mental health crises. At least one of the commitments they made—supporting the creation of a municipal “Air Capital” ID card--will be controversial, and may already be in the process of being walked back slightly by Mayor Wu. Still, you don’t often see such public support for social justice actions coming from city and county leaders in Kansas, so applause—and encouragement!--for those who brought them to the stage is much deserved.
The group which brought them
together and laid out the commitments which gained their assent is called Justice Together, a group I’m proud
to have been a participant in from the beginning, though I play no
organizational role in it. In early 2023, Rabbi Andrew Pepperstone, a friend
and occasional interlocutor from the Ahavath Achim Congregation here in
Wichita, told me about an interfaith group that was coming together to try to
move social justice issues forward in Sedgwick County; I’m not a leader in my
religious congregation, but I started to attend out of curiosity. At the very
first meeting, I was gratified to find Louis Goseland, a Wichita-born community
organizer that I remember from Sunflower Community Action and other
justice-related associations from more than a decade before. He was back in
Wichita as a regional coordinator from the Direct Action and Research Training
Center or DART, an umbrella organization that has been working with church
congregations and other community groups to help them apply the best lessons of
religious activism to motivate their members towards specific social justice
goals.
DART started in Florida in 1982,
working primarily with church ministries that served the interests of senior
citizens; since that time, it been able to help build over 30 additional
interfaith movements across the country, including several here in Kansas. DART
was instrumental in the formation of Justice Matters in Lawrence,
which has raised millions of dollars for a locally managed Affordable Housing
Trust Fund, and JUMP (Justice,
Unity, and Ministry Project) in Topeka, which is working to bring a mental
health crisis intervention program to Shawnee County. Similar interfaith
organizations, representing dozens of different churches and faith-related
groups, have been formed with the assistance of DART in Wyandotte and Johnson
counties.
In Wichita, Justice Together
includes nearly 40 denominations—mostly mainline Protestant, but with Catholic,
Mennonite, Unitarian, Baha’i, and Jewish synagogues part of the effort as well.
Over the past 14 months, they have worked through their church groups to
develop specific plans to assist those struggling with mental health (funding
to provide free bus passes to those in crisis and to pay for staffing for 24/7
on-call psychiatric help) and homelessness (sustainable funding plans for an
integrated agency center, and the aforementioned municipal IDs). It is those
plans they asked all these local leaders to support, and which all of them
committed to do so.
This is DART’s method, one that
they’ve adapted from the history of activism in so many of the churches which
they work through, as well as directly from the history of civil protest.
Months of research, parishioner outreach, and consensus-building culminates in
what they call a “Nehemiah assembly,” an idea taken directly from chapter 5 of the
book of Nehemiah in the Bible—specifically Nehemiah
5:12, where the prophet Nehemiah, having heard the cries of the people for
justice, presented their pleas to the nobles, rulers, and priests, and “took an oath of them to do as they had promised.”
Justice
Together’s strategy, following those of dozens of other similar church-based
DART organizations across the country, isn’t directly confrontational; their
goal is explicitly not to generate walks-outs and protests. But it does
aim to generate tension: to make a well-researched and achievable case, and
then publicly, in front of hundreds of newly activated religious
citizens (the great majority of whom are, crucially, registered and informed voters!),
demand action. This is the kind of tension central to Reverend Martin Luther
King’s position, which
Justice Together explicitly cites: to raise just enough heat that “a
community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the
issue.”
It's true that the plans Justice
Together developed don’t involve structural change. Their call for more free
bus passes for those with mental health needs, more staffing for on-call
psychiatric assistance, and a sustainable budget plan for a Multi-Agency Center
to bring together resources for homeless individuals are all needed and important,
but not radical; nearly all of these involve projects that the city of Wichita,
or the county, or COMCARE already have in front of them. But the fact that
Justice Together managed to elicit public support for a free municipal ID
program? That is a genuinely transformative step.
Having a reliable form of ID is
desperately needed by many in recovery or on the streets when it comes to
accessing welfare, getting housing, applying for jobs, and so much more. And it
is also something which Republican leaders in Topeka have repeatedly attacked
as a backdoor to legalization for undocumented immigrants, leaving aside the
complication that access to state services often depends on a simple form of
reliable identification. Wyandotte County introduced
municipal IDs in 2022, and former Wichita Mayor Brandon Whipple had pushed
for his city to do the same; both such efforts, as well as those being
contemplated by other cities seeking to address this genuine need on behalf of
their poorer and unhoused residents, were knee-capped by the Republican
majority in the legislature, leaving this small, crucial reform very much in
limbo. Mayor
Wu’s comments after the commitment-making assembly, during which she said her
affirmation “was really a commitment that we will sit together between [the] city
and county to talk about this,” reflects the political disagreements which lay
ahead.
Thus, a real test confronts Justice Together: will they find a way to publicly hold city and county leaders accountable to their promises. Will they be able to push the negotiations that will have to take place in such a way that the municipal ID goal, which everyone in the movement has extracted a commitment towards, doesn’t get killed by elected and appointed leaders fearful of blowback from ideologues who share the paranoia about illegal immigrants that is unfortunately common among Kansas Republicans? Time, as always, will tell. Whatever their ultimate success, though, the fact of this group’s existence is a reminder of the long history in America of people of faith organizing public support on behalf of specific social justice actions.
To me, their presence here in Wichita is a blessing in itself.
