A colleague of Dr. Martin Luther King during the civil rights movement, co-organizer of the Peace Corps at the behest of John F. Kennedy, U.S. senator and now co-chair of America's Promise: Alliance for Youth, Harris Wofford has devoted his life to citizen service. His primary inspiration? Mahatma Gandhi.
Harris Wofford's sense of purpose was set early. Ironically, his concern for minorities and the disadvantaged sprang from a grand tour that was a prerogative of the privileged. At the impressionable age of 12, as World War II was brewing, his grandmother took him around the world. During that trip Harris Wofford-who later became a co-organizer of the Peace Corps, a civil rights activist and a senator-formed opinions that colored his entire life. "It connected me with the world and alerted me to the fact that the world was being torn apart by Hitler and the Japanese imperialists."
He related this story recently in New Delhi, where a busy Wofford gave talks and visited NGOs. His own grandchild, 16-year-old Gabriel, was in tow, thoroughly enjoying himself. Young Harris Wofford saw Shanghai after its devastation by the Japanese, he saw Mussolini speak from a balcony. "As a little 12-year-old, I came back an interventionist. I thought we should be rallying with England to stop Hitler." India was on his itinerary as well. Although "I was not enlisted in the cause of nonviolence at the time," he says, while in India he glimpsed a man who would later influence him profoundly: "I saw Gandhi go through the streets of Bombay." A sore throat and fever prevented him from attending Gandhi's speech at Chow-patty Beach. "How I wish I had heard him," Wofford recalled, "because later when I got a fellowship to come to India to study Gandhi, we were hoping he would be here, and he was killed before we got here." Deeply interested in the Quit India Movement, Wofford, with his late wife Clare, wrote India Afire (1951), about the independence movement. In it they proposed a Gandhian strategy for the American civil rights movement. "Very early I was captured by Gandhi as a political artist, as a master of democratic politics, as a teacher of how to make democracy really work in a complex new century. And it wasn't just civil disobedience, it was also the constructive service side," Wofford said. After India, where he formed lasting bonds with freedom fighters such as Jayaprakash Narayan, Ram Manohar Lohia, Ashok Mehta and Yusaf Meher Ali, the Muslim mayor of Bombay, Wofford returned to America. He took law degrees at traditionally black Howard University-a daring choice in the segregated 1950s-and Yale Law School.
Wofford followed up India Afire with a series of papers "to make the case why we needed the Gandhian dimension in civil rights." The response from civil rights leaders was mixed, with many, including late Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall who led the civil rights litigation efforts, feeling that it was either a good idea or a very bad one that could backfire on the civil rights movement. Wofford described how a group including "one of the great Gandhi lovers, Stuart Nelson, who worked with Gandhi," requested Gandhi in 1935 to come to America. Gandhi said, "How I wish I could, but you must bear the privilege of the struggle in America because I have not made my message good in India, and it may be that you, the American Negro, may bring the unadulterated message of nonviolence to the world. That is almost a direct quote from Gandhi," Wofford said, adding, "Stuart Nelson had yearned for Americans to adopt Gandhi, and he wrote me this sad letter saying, I've sadly concluded after years of promoting this idea there is no Gandhi among us. Then within a few days of getting that and other letters, I read in the newspaper that a woman named Rosa Parks had said no." Fate and events took the ideal of Gandhian passive resistance out of the realm of discussion and into action when a young black woman in Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks, politely refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white man and was arrested in 1955. Wofford said, "The little group of civil rights champions in Montgomery, Alabama, went to this new, young prea-cher, a promising, well-educated, articulate young preacher, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and said would you chair a call for the boycott of the buses? King said yes. Rosa Parks said no and King said yes." The story of Rosa Parks and "this young preacher" who was leading the boycott in Montgomery made the front pages of the newspapers. "My heart leaped up," Wofford said. King had read one of Wofford's papers before the boycott, "and we started corresponding and then phoning and finally meeting."
Soon Wofford was working alongside Martin Luther King. He smiled at a memory of King: "He said I was the only lawyer who was working with him helping him go to jail instead of using all the tricks of the trade to keep him out," elaborating, "A good lawyer is supposed to keep someone out of jail. But being imbued with the Gandhian ideal that on occasion, the way you say no has to be all the way, and you say no peacefully, disobeying the law, but doing it respectfully and accepting the consequences."
What was King like? "King was thoughtful. You could almost see him thinking when he was presented with a challenge. He wasn't just quick and flashy, with a glib phrase. He thought very hard about not just the goal of what he called the "beloved community"-Gandhi would call it Rama Rajya. But above all, he thought about the ways and means of achieving it, whether what you do in struggling and in protest will actually bring results. It seems to me, King and Gandhi were interested in using nonviolence in ways that would persuade people, that would reach people, that would move people and would change things. It was that quality that I yearned for in the American civil rights movement. And one day along came Martin Luther King."
As a personality, Wofford said of King, "He was very human. No one would think of Martin Luther King, in dealing with him, as a saint. He was very much a collaborator. It was wonderful to be in a brainstorming group with him. He didn't care about hierarchy, if somebody had a good idea. He listened at least as much as he talked. I'd say he listened more than he talked. Which is why I think of him as someone who you could see thinking, because he's partly listening and partly reflecting. He didn't have the gaiety, the almost comic spirit that I sense in Gandhi." During his India fellowship, Wofford said, "I had a wonderful session with Gandhi's most perceptive son, Devdas, the year after his father was killed. He, like others, said the most notable thing about Gandhi was his hearty laugh, his real sense of comedy and the human condition, including the comedy of the little man in the dhoti standing up to the great leviathan of the British empire. Gandhi, when he went to Europe, put Charlie Chaplain at the top of the list of whom he wanted to meet because, Gandhi said, I'm trying to do on the political stage what Charlie Chaplain did in the film, take on the great machine, modern society, and expose it. King definitely had a sense of humor, but very different. He was a preacher. Gandhi took that year of silence when he came back to India. I'm not sure Martin Luther King would have ever taken a year of silence. (Laughs). It isn't like Jessie Jackson or Hubert Humphrey, that he wanted to talk all the time, but a year of silence, that would have been hard for King."
Martin Luther King adopted Gandhian peaceful resistance and civil disobedience as his principal tool in the civil rights struggle. A month-long visit King made to India in 1959 was like a seminar for him, as he met chief leaders of the independence movement and had a four-hour session with Nehru. (In his 1980 book Of Kennedys and Kings, Wofford quotes King's words upon arrival in New Delhi: "To other countries I may go as a tourist, but to India I come as a pilgrim. This is because India to me means Mahatma Gandhi.") King had already read Gandhi's works when he met Wofford. "At the time I was at his side trying to help, he was trying to think through how you apply active forms of nonviolence to win the right to vote and end public segregation, and to go on from that to begin creating the kind of community that would be good for everyone," Wofford said. He added, "And it's quite amazing that in 10 years, basically-if you take it to the end of his life, 13 years-the two goals he set out to focus on, winning the right to vote and ending public segregation were both achieved." Wofford drew another comparison, "He, like Gandhi, was pointing to the much more complex problems of how you, in education and economic institutions, create a just community, and all the social invention that would be needed in that. And that the mountains ahead, before there was any chance of reaching a promised land, were maybe even harder to climb than just acting against the scandal of denying the right to vote by race, or denying people a cup of water by race." King and Robert Kennedy, with whom Wofford also worked, were both killed in the same spring of 1968. Wofford reflected, "It's very hard to think about. It's painful to think what might have happened if that high spirit had carried forward, rather than the great depression of the spirit that came. And it came in part, not just the assassinations but in a very significant part because of the Vietnam War, which I think most Americans now agree was a tragic mistake. We got deeper and deeper in, and our resources went in, and the War on Poverty got emasculated."
The War on Poverty, launched in 1964 by President Lyndon Johnson, was an idea which had its inception during the Kennedy years, when the Peace Corps was founded to deliver American aid and expertise abroad in a very personal way. Volunteers of all ages, but mostly young idealists, were sent for two-year stints in developing countries where there was the need and the invitation. They taught in schools, started village health care programs, worked to develop more efficient farming methods. The other purpose of the Peace Corps was to let young Americans broaden their horizons through experience, to form a leadership that ultimately could develop informed, responsible foreign policy. Harris Wofford worked with Sargent Shriver to organize the Peace Corps at the request of President Kennedy in 1961. Thanks to B.K. Nehru, then Indian Ambassador to the U.S., who conveyed an invitation to them to visit India, Shriver and Wofford organized a Peace Corps public relations trip in the Third World. In Of Kennedys and Kings Woff-ord wrote "India was the hardest and most critical test of the trip." There he and Shriver toured villages in rural Punjab and tried to convince leaders that the Peace Corps was not a "neocolonial enterprise." Prime Minister Nehru's response to Shriver, as recorded by Wofford, was mild: "I am sure young Americans would learn a good deal in this country and it could be an important experience for them. The government of the Punjab and the minister for community development apparently want some of your volunteers, and we will be happy to receive a few of them-perhaps 20 to 25. But I hope you and they will not be too disappointed if the Punjab, when they leave, is more or less the same as it was before they came." More than 40 years later, sitting at Claridges Hotel in Delhi, Wofford mused, "By the end of the 1960s the Peace Corps was almost 1,000 strong in India. Nehru had talked about it being very small, and very valuable for young Americans to learn about India, but the more they worked in the Punjab and the Green Revolution, the more governments in the states and institutions were asking for Peace Corps workers." Although Peace Corps volunteers contributed to the Green Revolution, the rise of the swadeshi movement and a tilt toward the Soviet Union resulted in the Peace Corps being asked to leave India.
Eunice Kennedy, Sargent Shriver's wife and founder of Special Olympics, was keen on a domestic version of the Peace Corps. She talked with her brothers John and Robert about it. VISTA (Volunteers in Service to Ame-rica) and Head Start programs finally emerged as part of the War on Poverty in 1964. Wofford, who served as U.S. senator from Pennsylvania from 1991 to 1994, has devoted much of his career to making citizen service a common experience for all Americans. His current role as head of the Corporation for National and Community Service and co-chair of America's Pro-mise: The Alliance for Youth, is a natural one for him, after decades of creating such programs. VISTA was a precursor of Americorps and America's Promise. The latter was founded in 1997 to give people the chance to serve their community. It is a bipartisan effort. Its first chairperson was General Colin Powell, and when he became Secretary of State, his wife Alma Powell agreed to co-chair with Harris Wofford. Defining its aims, Wofford said, "America's Promise is trying to show that in this complex modern world, you can achieve great goals, for children and youth, by a form of collaboration that brings all levels of government together with the corporate world, with the education community, with the religious communities, with youth-serving organiza- tions, with nongovernmental organizations in a collaboration around specific goals in the community." The five goals of America's Promise are that "Every young person should have a caring adult in their life, a mentor or a coach. Second, everyone should have structured activities in safe places in non-school hours. Third, every young person should have a healthy start-the mother should have prenatal care and health education and immunization and access to health care. Fourth, children should have an effective education. Extra tutoring should be provided for children who can't read independently by the end of grade three. Finally, every young person should have not only opportunities to serve and give back, but should be asked and challenged to work in the community on hard problems, and learn citizenship by doing it."
Communities, schools and various organizations collaborate on these efforts, which are targeted at the poorest young people. "There are some 800 partners of America's Promise nationally, of whom about 400 are corporate partners and another 400 are nongovernmental organizations," Wofford says. Large youth organizations such as Boys and Girls Clubs, Girls Scouts, YMCAs, Big Brothers and Big Sisters are partners. The Red Cross and other community services organizations also participate. Besides disadvantaged youngsters, the program focuses on "the 15 million kids who are not getting af-ter-school programs and tutoring and need a mentor in their lives. All young people need these promises," Wofford maintains. They also need to "become active duty citizens," and give back to the community.
But people often see citizen service as a time-intensive endeavor requiring the dedication of a Gandhi or a King. Wofford's view is uncompromising: "We all, in different ways, should be little Gandhis and little Martin Luther Kings. Not expecting to enter the world stage, anymore than young people who discover the excitement of sports and have role models who became world stars and multimillionaires should think that if they pursue sports they are going to be world stars and multimillionaires. But having that as a challenge is a good thing." He adds, unsurprisingly, given his own track record, "I am on the side of very high expectations, even at the risk of tension and strain in the gap between the ideal and the reality. And American history at its best has set-for example in the Declaration of Independence-the high goal of liberty and justice for all, stating as a 'self evident truth that all men are created equal and endowed by the Creator with certain inalienable rights.' Seeing that as a self-evident truth when it was obviously then, and now, very controversial, I think was a great thing." Wofford acknowledges the danger in the gap between the goal and its accomplishment, "But I favor living dangerously. I guess the much greater frustration for me is not that we have too high expectations and we don't live up to them, but there is too great a sense that there is nothing you can do about it, and you can't control anything. So I would like people to be educated to believe that they can change things. And if they become heavily strained in trying to do it and being disappointed, it's better than the valuelessness that comes in saying, well, we can't do anything about that." ¨
"The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy." -Martin Luther King, Jr.
Forty years ago, on August 28, 1963, more than 200,000 people converged on the Capitol Mall in Washington, D.C., in a peaceful demonstration to demand legislation ensuring civil rights for African Americans and other minorities. The March on Washington was a watershed. It was there that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., made his historic "I Have a Dream" speech. The following year the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson, and the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965. From the Supreme Court Brown vs. Board of Education ruling of 1954, which declared segregation in public schools unconstitutional, through 10 years of attempts to make desegregation a reality, the laws that improved the status of blacks, women and other minorities were dearly won. As King observed, these laws were "written in the streets." Civil rights remains an important issue today. ¨