The American Academy of Political and Social Science : Installation of 2006 Fellows : Felton Earls: Mahatma Gandhi Fellow

Installation of 2006 Fellows

Felton Earls: Mahatma Gandhi Fellow

"During the early the 1960s ... Martin Luther King, Jr., came three or four times a year to the chapel at Howard University [where I was an undergraduate] and preached or spoke. I don’t think I ever missed one of those events. During those years leading up to the March on Washington, you could feel the power of a social movement taking place. The options to be in it or out of it were growing less and less; I mean you had to be somehow counted as part of that incredible movement, or you would be forgotten ... I don’t remember an event where King spoke that he did not in one way or another reference the idea of truth and nonviolence, and passive resistance and social resistance, and social movement, [referencing] Gandhi’s work in South Africa in the 1914 -1919 period of time ... When I got out of medical school ... and went off to be a neurobiologist at the University of Wisconsin, within 18 months of being ensconced … in doing electrophysiology on various species, Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed. And I just happened to be locked away in a laboratory when King was killed. Finally it all came to me: Am I going to spend my life in the laboratory locked away from the realities of the 1960s, or am I going to rejoin what had started as a civil rights movement, but became a world-wide, international movement of peace and justice and non-violence. . . .

"Thirty-five years later, my colleagues Rob Sampson, Stephen Raudenbush, and I published a paper on violence and neighborhoods in Chicago and it was a hopeful paper. It said that, despite the fact that there’s lots of disorganization and lots of poverty in a place like Chicago, that in many cases across that city, neighborhoods work. And they may be working despite racism; they may be working despite levels of poverty. Where that’s happening, where those neighborhoods are working, there’s less violence. We went on to show that not only was there less violence, there was less asthma, less low birth weight, fewer school drop outs. Something working in the atmosphere in the social relations of people in neighborhoods was having this tremendous social, medical, psychological, and economic benefit. It’s been really wonderful in some ways to publish a paper that has resonated with so many different kinds of issues. We thought the paper was relevant to community policing; but over the years I’ve been invited to give keynote addresses at the annual conventions of librarians, urban librarians in particular. People all over the world, interested in urban gardening, write us to thank us for proving something, or at least producing evidence, that they had a hunch was right: Gardens bring generations together in cities to grow things. And that from those gardens collective advocacy is strengthened."

The Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods

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