(7 of 10)
Full Circle has a spiritual mystique that is rare in religious urban reform efforts. As a result of Fox's work as archdiocesan coordinator of New York's Spanish Community Action, Full Circle has established affiliates and projects in most of the city's marginal or ghetto areas. The object, says Fox, is not to push through neighborhood improvement projects, but "to show others the riches in themselves"—to inspire the poor to become aware of their own resources and the potential beauty of the urban setting. That process has inspired some notable neighborhood renewals.
The title of Fox's group derives from his conviction that "when you help others, you grow yourself—and you find the need to grow and develop further." His almost mystical approach has been criticized as unrealistic by a good friend. Father Harry Browne, a Manhattan pastor who has made his own considerable imprint on urban redevelopment mainly through political methods. Browne, for ten years president of the Stryckers Bay Neighborhood Council redevelopment project on the West Side, now heads St. Gregory's parish in the same neighborhood, where he has mobilized voter-power to get better housing, schools and police protection.
Others who share Bob Fox's earnestness and creativity are carving out unusual ministries in a number of related fislds. In Louisiana, Roman Catholic Priest Albert McKnight. 45, a Brooklyn-born black, has had remarkable success with a rural redevelopment enterprise called the Southern Consumer's Cooperative. It has opened, among other things, a farmers' cooperative, a prosperous fruitcake bakery and a cut-rat; supermarket, and has given local Negroes a strong motivation to join Father McKnight's literacy program. (A former sharecropper, illiterate two years ago, is now the co-op's farm marketing expert.) In Philadelphia, American Baptist Minister Leon Sullivan, another Negro, has pursued the self-help goal on an even larger scale. He is credited with starting dozens of job-training centers across the country. The Rev. Jesse Jackson's "Operation Breadbasket," on Chicago's South Side, is nationally famous for its community action.
Black clergymen, in fact, have seemed to enjoy a confident tradition of "open ministry" that puts them in the forefront of church action. Pentacostalist Minister Frederick Douglass Kirkpatrick, 33, a member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, believes — and earnestly preaches — that all races can live together better than they can separately. His principal ministry these days is folk songs, which he delivers in a rich Leadbelly bass, often on marches for peace in Washington or New York, and this month on a tour of some 20 colleges and universities through the South. Though a robustly spiritual man, Kirkpatrick suggests that more black ministers might use their spe cial independence more fruitfully if they could abandon the pie-in-the-sky preaching inherited from slavery days and "get down to the problems right here."