Justice Together: Praying, Planning, and Partly (but Not Yet Entirely) Pushed Aside in Wichita

[Cross-posted to Wichita Story]

Before Christmas, I had some complimentary things to say about Wichita’s city council. Here at the end of the year, though, my thoughts are more critical—though this is really a story about an organization of citizens here in Wichita, one that has pushed and challenged the city council, with some (but not total) success.

Justice Together, an association of nearly 1500 volunteers from nearly 40 Wichita-area congregations, synagogues, and other religious bodies, made local history several months ago, when, at a major public assembly, they pressed and received commitments from various elected leaders that certain positive steps would be taken to assist the homeless population of Wichita. Their well-researched calls for 1) more free bus passes for those with mental health needs, for 2) more staffing for on-call psychiatric assistance, for 3) a sustainable budget plan for completing and operating the planned Multi-Agency Center (MAC) which aims to bring together resources for homeless individuals, and for 4) a free municipal ID program, all remain on the table. But two weeks ago a proposed set of changes to how the city deals with homelessness threatened to derail the compassionate efforts that Justice Together, along with many other municipal organizations (Wichita’s Coalition to End Homelessness deserves much credit here), had pushed for.

Fortunately, Wichita’s city council was convinced (or pressured) to bypass the worst feature of these proposed changes, and the role JT played in that effort (in over two hours of public comment before the city council on December 17, 21 of the 24 speakers opposed the proposed changes, and more than a third of those were associated with Justice Together) deserves praise. Still, the fact that the other changes which passed through the council on a 4 to 3 vote will increase the ability of law enforcement to treat homeless individuals from a criminal rather than a compassionate perspective is evidence of how much more, and perhaps how much further, the kind of activism JT represents has to go.

As was pointed out by multiple speakers (as well as a couple of members of the council from the bench), the proposed changes in Wichita’s policies were less rooted in local changes (though Wichita’s homeless population has increased, as it has in cities both large and small across the country, for dozens of often intertwined reasons) than they were in national decisions. When the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its majority decision in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson last summer, making it clear that criminalizing “public camping”—a euphemism that we all know is ridiculous (“camping” is a voluntary recreational activity, while sleeping or residing outside without shelter in public places is practically never either of those) but seem doomed to use anyway—would not be considered an unconstitutional punishment someone for their condition, but would instead be considered a nominally constitutional punishment of an action, the door to more aggressive enforcement of anti-homelessness policies was kicked wide open. Honestly, those of us Wichitans who recognize both the increased costs as well as the lack of compassion which the further criminalizing homelessness entails should probably be grateful that the city’s proposals didn’t go any further than they did.

As someone who has been associated with Justice Together since its beginning in early 2023, I received word of the prayer meeting being planned for the day of the city council meeting. Multiple faith leaders set the tone for the dozens who gathered for the meeting by emphasizing that pushing back, in whatever peaceful way we can, against adding burdens to the lives of those suffering from whatever mix of causes—poverty, trauma, mental illness, drug or alcohol addiction, or all of the above—which had left them living without permanent shelter was a shared religious demand. As I’ve written before, JT is not a radical organization; rather, it is a serious, careful, realistic group of believers, who work in the tradition of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1) researching and proposing responsible plans premised upon compassion and justice, and then 2) presenting their plans before elected leaders in ways that create tension, thereby hopefully forcing action and progress. That was the plan a few weeks ago, with a summary of the changes Wichita’s government was proposing and an action plan laying out a bullet-pointed list of Justice Together’s primary concerns handed out beforehand. (The individuals in the photo above, from the Justice Together prayer meeting before the city council chambers on the morning of December 17, are, from left to right: Pastor Chad Langdon of Christ Lutheran Church; Deacon Lory Mills of St. Bartholomew’s and St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church; Justice Together Co-President Rabbi Andrew Pepperstone of Ahavath Achim Congregation; and Rev. Dr. Karen Robu of Plymouth Congregational Church.)

Topping the list of those concerns was that the city, in the wake of Grants Pass, intended to “remove a requirement that a shelter bed be available for anyone displaced by an encampment removal”—in other words, to no longer oblige law enforcement to confirm that there are beds available at public shelters before enforcing anti-“camping” rules and forcing a homeless person to move from whatever location of rest they’d found for themselves. This central issue was highlighted by Rabbi Andrew Pepperstone, the co-president of Justice Together, when he stood to speak before the city council (two other speakers, Revs. Travis Smith McKee of the Disciples of Christ and Jacob L. Poindexter of the United Church of Christ, later underscored Rabbi Pepperstone’s demand): the “removal of bed space verification” from those tasked with the often ugly task of disrupting the attempt of the homeless to find a secure corner or underpass somewhere in public space has, in his words, “no compassionate rationale that I can conceive of.” He challenged the city council to strip that policy change from the proposal, which resulted in some city leaders playing hot potato, suggesting that this odious proposal was really just a matter of police protocol. But thankfully, whomever ultimately owns this obligation, the result was a positive one. The policy changes voted on ended up preserving this restriction, thus making it at least still slightly difficult for those experiencing homelessness to be forced to move and to abandon many of their possessions like herd animals and not human beings.

Justice Together also opposed, along with other groups, expanding the number of city workers who could wield that kind of police power against the homeless, another proposed change which the city council was convinced to drop. Unfortunately, though, the other priority of JT—opposing “a change to shorten the notice to vacate period before an encampment is removed, from 72 hours to 48 hours, and in some cases, allow removal without notice”—went through. Perhaps that’s unsurprising; the city staff made it clear in their presentation to the council that there was, functionally speaking, only two elements of the proposed changes which they considered truly substantive: getting rid of the bed requirement, and allowing for the more immediate removal of homeless persons and the clean-up of their sleeping locations. Despite complaints that went far beyond the religiously motivated—there were speakers who challenged the proposed ordinances from libertarian perspectives on human rights, and conservative speakers who pointed out all the additional costs which ramping up enforcement requires—Wichita will, beginning probably in mid-January, join the host of American cities that are responding to the increase of the homeless population with even more criminalization, even if conjoining that with some additional compassion.

That additional compassion is obviously vital. Justice Together’s slogan for their (in retrospect, only partly successful) action was “Invest in a Fully Funded MAC, not Criminalization of Homelessness,” and there was much discussion of how to move forward with finding the funds necessary to keeping the plans for the MAC on track, and many supportive words from city council members for doing so. (There was an update on plans for the free municipal ID as well, which still seems to me likely the most important single non-structural action Wichita could take to assist the city’s homeless.) Ultimately, though, those who have dedicated so much time and effort to Justice Together must now consider their next steps.

Do they accept this defeat and continue to focus on pushing our elected leaders on the social justice issues which they have not foreclosed? That seems most likely; what JT’s volunteers are best at is speaking practically about policy options and researching how other cities have funded programs or dealt with changes in the legal landscape is the kind of action that appeals to their skill set best. But there is also the possibility of reconsidering what kind of, and how much, tension they can productively generate—perhaps while looking towards this year’s municipal elections, with the aim of changing one of those 4 yes votes. Becoming an interest group which actively promotes or opposes candidates would give Justice Together a very different and much more contentious vibe, yet political challenges are part of the toolkit of any successful advocacy organization, whether they’re used or not. (Sometimes, simply the knowledge that an organization could organize their forces—in this case, many hundreds of mostly middle or upper-middle class Wichitans in dozens of well-established religious congregations, the great majority of which are likely voters—can be persuasive enough.)

Justice Together has worked with and through the religious faith of thousands of Wichitans over the past 2 years to advance the conversation about social justice in our city. As a supporter, I am curious to see how its leadership will continue to try to advance our shared ideals, even as the opposition to some of what has been labored over pushes back. As in so many other ways, 2025 will be a very telling year.

20 Years of In Medias Res

Remember this image? Of course you do. Everyone does. Especially those of us who had already been blogging for years (in my case, five of them) by the time it appeared in February 2008.

Like millions of other American bloggers, I'd been reading blogs--though I don't recall if I called them that--for years (all through graduate school in the late 1990s, specifically) before the Iraq War tipped me over into actually publishing one myself. It's easy to reconstruct my blogging career, such as it is, partly in reference to the content of my writing way back then; I've done it before, and the details haven't changed, though obviously my assessment of it all has. Talk about being wrong! All those posts during my first month of blogging, in March of 2003--"liberal internationalism," "the Anglosphere," Blair, Bush, blah, blah, blah. There are intellectual elements to the way I was drawn into tentative but nonetheless undeniable support of America's utterly unwarranted and overwhelmingly ruinous invasion of Iraq that I can, and sometimes still do, reconstruct into a more theoretically nuanced and therefore defensible political posture towards nationality and sovereignty and all the rest, but that doesn't excuse being wrong about the question of the moment. And it wasn't the only time, for certain; over the past two decades of blogging, I've had to eat crow over stuff as momentous as same-sex marriage, stuff as unimportant as Deathly Hallows, and lots of stuff in between. But this is getting me into talking about content, which I didn't want to do. Rather, I feel like I should say something about why I'm still typing away, however rarely these days, on this here blog--yes, still using Blogger!--because maybe that will say something that I need to hear myself say about where I stand and where I'm going, looking forward towards the last third of my life.

That sounds terribly pretentious, I suppose (also not a new thing for me). But I'm 55, and I've been wondering on and off all summer what sort of aims and intentions should shape the remaining 15 or 20--or less, or more--intellectually and professionally productive years I have left. And just as the the medium is the message, I suppose to one degree or another, the platform is the person--or the publicly thinking and writing persona, at least.

When I started that first blog in March 2003, I was less than two years out of graduate school and still had aspirations to publish my dissertation as a book; I was going to the sort of political theorist who thought and wrote heavily about the sort of issues and ideas--identity, recognition, revelation, community, language, truth--that the German Romantic and Counter-Enlightenment traditions, and the particular sort of communitarianism which I saw deeply indebted to it, put front and center. Hence the name of my first blog: "Wäldchen vom Philosophenweg," a phrase of my own invention (though heavily indebted to Johann Gottfried Herder's Kritische Wälder) that basically meant something like "the twisted, wooded path through philosophy." Yes, it was terrible. And by the summer of 2004, I knew that. By then I also knew that the way I'd leaned hard into thinking about global politics in light of all the aforementioned issues and ideas was, while not worthless by any means, part and parcel to how I'd convinced myself of something that was very, very wrong. So I had this idea: I needed to back away from my heady, grad-school-inspired approach to framing what I saw as my own intellectual contributions to online discourse, and get more humble. (My inability to follow through on my plans to turn my dissertation into a book was pretty humbling too.) I spelled out some of this in my final post on that old blog, and then 20 years ago today, on August 13, 2004, I started this baby, In Medias Res, "in the midst of things," complete with a tagline stolen from a comment my dissertation advisor once made on one of my papers, with two posts: one, a reflection about my life at the time as a visiting assistant professor at Arkansas State University (a position I'd hold for one more year, before the most stressful year of my professional life, which ended with my surprising job offer here at Friends University), and two, a celebration of Melissa's and my 11th wedding anniversary (31st this year!). And, well, here I still am.

Over the past two decades I've thought dozens of times--as the position of blogging in the media ecosystems around us radically changed, as the technology our homes and my offices upgraded, and, I think most importantly, as smart phones undermined, sucked up, and/or re-wired nearly all of the discursive habits that had made the blogsophere a thing in the first place--of dumping IMR. Or revamping it through Wordpress, or moving it to Reclaim Hosting, or any number of other strategies. After moving here to Wichita, KS, and beginning teaching at Friends, and landing on the idea of taking my intellectual interests in community and turning that towards a consideration of the urban and rural divide, and of the politics and economy and physical environment of urban communities of a middling size--like Wichita--I continued to experiment. Once I launched a different blog, then later a substack (now called Wichita and the Mittelpolitan; you can read my justification for that effort here) to replace that second blog. I moved posts from In Medias Res over to the first one and then later to the second one, all in the hopes of eventually finding, through the architecture of how I was arranging and thereby thinking about my own engagements with both my scholarly interests as well as the constant flow of information all around me, some way to make my contributions more constructive (and maybe even write a book!). It hasn't happened yet, and now I wonder if it ever will. 

And would that be so bad? In the grand scheme things--especially since I, thankfully, landed at an institution that prioritizes teaching and different types of service, both to the school and to the community, over pure research (though of course we're supposed to be doing that as well)--maybe not. And yet, I haven't taken down the substack, have I? Nor this blog. So apparently I still have some sort of aspiration to keep my thinking and writing, if not truly organized and intentional, than it least occupying a space, and possessing a direction. I may not understand myself and my own limited grasping of the world as the hacking through of philosophical thickets any longer, but I do still believe, or at least aspire to believe, that in the midst of things, some constructive pattern can be drawn out. Ideally by me! But, maybe not? I'm not sure. Melissa always says that over the past 20 years on this blog, I've written hundreds of thousands of words; a large portion of that has been about family and local politics and pop music and philosophical tributes and movies and geek culture, true, but surely at least some of it could be shaped into some kind of genuine scholarly work, right? Sometimes I can see a way to do that; other times I can't. But as long as I think there might be some value to all these ruminations, whether or not that value manifests in the form of some goal I can aim to make the final third (more more) of my professional add up to, I figure it's a good thing I never got rid of In Medias Res and all that has spun off from it. Being thrown into the midst of things means finding some kind of stability in the midst of the flow; maybe this blog, whether I use it much or not, and however my thinking about that use has changed (and will likely continue to change) over time, has been mine. And given my unwillingness to pull the trigger after two decades, presumably will remain so until Blogger goes bankrupt (knock on wood!).

My primary guide--and sometimes primary goad--throughout all of this has been the wonderfully meandering musings of Alan Jacobs, a scholar I've never met in person, but whom I've read productively and sometimes engaged with for over 15 years. He not only planted the seed which inspired my original--more than a decade old!--vision of engaging with what I later named "mittelpolitan" places, but his whole, always evolving, always self-reflecting, presence on the internet--his main blog, his micro-blog, his Buy Me a Coffee community--continually inspires (as well as intimidates) me. I've never been, and likely never will be, either disciplined enough or productive enough--or just plain write quickly enough--to make habitual any of the practices which I see his own experimentation as pointing out options for, but I love imagining finding some version of them in my own online writing nonetheless. He recently commented:

[A] blog is an ideal venue for what I want to do, which is preservation and transmission...[even though] a blog is probably the least cool way to communicate with people. It doesn’t have old-school cred or state-of-the-art shine; it falls into a kind of uncanny valley. To be a blogger is sort of like being that Japanese guy who makes paintings with Excel. But that suits me.

Suits me too. (And, if you're one of the, I suppose, 14 occasional readers of this blog, maybe you as well!)

Thinking about Music, Age, and Being Politically Surprised by Summer

I stopped by Wichita’s main library the other day, looking to pick up some cheap media from the summer clearance sale, because I still use the sorts of media—CDs, DVDs, even VHS tapes—which the library had available. For 50 cents I picked up a copy of a great album that I’d had on cassette for years, but which had finally broken down: Gerry Rafferty’s wonderful City to City. I popped it into the CD player (because, yes, our 2014 Nissan Pathfinder has one) as soon as I left the library, and it made me think.

It was a hot day, and while running some errands—dropping off our recycling at an independent processing center in south Wichita, picking up some kimchi at a Korean market on the city’s east side—before making my way back to our home on Wichita’s west side, I was found myself drawn to the street scenes all around me. People in cars, on bikes, or just walking, down sidewalks or through parks or cutting across the streets, with everyone and everything seeming to move more slowly than usual. But of course that would be the case, right? It was late July, the “dog days” of summer, or at least that’s what seemed obvious to me, especially when Rafferty’s “Baker Street” came on, a song that I have, for decades, weirdly associated with the not-quite-end of summer, with those hot tired days when you’re back from whatever vacation you’d looked forward to and you’re kind of getting tired of the heat and you know school will start soon—but you still have a week or two or three left, before the routines of real life return. It’s a bittersweet time, with the end last days of summer worrying you, but also knowing that you have some dull, mindless, empty summer days left to enjoy yet.

Before my family and I moved to Kansas, 18 years ago next month, summer wasn’t my favorite season. As a perpetual student, then graduate student, and then college professor, summer vacations were always an important part of my internal calendar, and of course summer activities were fun. But when I compared the bright sun of June and July and August with flowers in the spring, or foliage in the fall, or snow in the winter, summer just didn’t impress me.

Coming to Kansas, the Sunflower State, changed all that. People complain about the heat, humidity, and wind here in Wichita and throughout the state, but I found it all quite wonderful. As a bicycle commuter, getting on my bike and hitting the long, straight city and county roads during the summer months changed my outlook. As always, it is music, the soundtrack playing in my head, which guided me here, specifically John Denver’s “Matthew,” the version on An Evening with John Denver, recorded 50 years ago this August, being the recording that I always go back to: “gold is just a windy Kansas wheat field / blue is just a Kansas summer sky.”

I got out there on my bike, riding to my office at Friends University, but also out and around Sedgwick County and beyond, and what I saw were just that: golden wheat fields, plus rolling green pastures, all of it framed by a broad and blue horizon that stretched out before me, with sunflowers along the way. It was beautiful, and still is. It made me a firm fan of Kansas summers.

Falling in love with Kansas summers, though, did involve some adjustments. Among other things, the dog days changed, a change that affected me not just as someone living--as every human being in temperate climates does--in the midst of seasons, but as a scholar of politics as well.

Where I grew up in Washington state in the 1970s and 1980s, the public school year ended in mid-June, and began again after Labor Day. August was thus the tired, tail-end of summer, the time when everyone mentally checked out, after all the summer camps and vacations and trips to the lake all through July. I carried that assumption into my professional life, beginning with graduate school in Washington DC. Living and studying there at Catholic University of America in the 1990s and 2000s, I heard August regularly complained about or mocked or disregarded or embraced with a kind of exhausted acceptance. Many who lived in DC delighted in the humorous call to abolish it, and would forward it to everyone they knew, year after year. August, in short, was when the all the political parties and interest groups and government agencies seemed to be just mopping up unfinished business, if they worked at all, as they waited for politics to re-ignite in the fall. That’s what I took with me as I became a college professor, and despite encountering differences in every university I taught at, my mental calendar remained locked in.

But then we arrived in Wichita, Kansas, and settled in to raise our kids and stay. Kansas’s approach to the calendar had historically followed agricultural patterns distinct from any that I’d experienced before in my childhood or young adulthood. With the wheat harvest complete before the end of July, schools and governments throughout the Sunflower State had tended to look to August as a time to get back to shake of the business—the work and the play—of summer and return to a normal routine. And so, as the past nearly two decades have gone by, I’ve had to accustom myself to treating late July, rather than August, as that particular lazy, doggy time to truly tune out and reset one’s internal clock.

In thinking through all this though, I realize that this year, late July of 2024 has provided—and is still providing—some serious push-back against my assumptions. Specifically, I have in mine a presentation I gave at a local civic group just a few days ago. It wasn’t anything special; as a local political commentator and political observer, I’ve given dozens of these presentations over the years. But on this day—another hot, late July day—I found myself surrounded by older folks, activists who had dedicated years—decades really--of their lives to understanding and promoting the causes and candidates they believed in. It struck me how odd, how incongruous, it was to find these folks—nearly all of them in their 50s, 60s, 70s, or older--spending this summer day packed into a small room, rather than laying down outside in a hammock, taking it easy. But no—they were fired up, anxious and ready and engaged, filled with questions and challenges and concerns.

Their attitude surprised me, though it shouldn’t have. They, like all of us, are swamped by talk about the presidential election. More importantly, in only a little over a week, they’d had to process the news of the attempted assassination of former President Trump, and then the withdrawal from the presidential contest of President Biden, and then rapid (far more rapidly, I think, than even many of those who had been calling for it ever since Biden’s terrible debate performance in June) coalescing of the fractious Democratic Party around Vice President Kamala Harris as the new presumptive nominee. Far from the summer political calendar closing its eyes and taking a nap in the fallow period surrounding the predictable coronations which the Republican and Democratic conventions were assumed to provide, suddenly everything was turbo-charged and dramatic, the news terrible and shocking and inspiring and unexpected. And I, being the willing talking head I’ve always been, suddenly was receiving almost daily calls from different local and regional news organizations; as I joked to some other journalists upon my second late-night visit to a local television station in a less than 8 days, I’m used to this around October and November, not before Labor Day.

Of course, this has been an unusually, and unusually dramatic, ten days or so, even by the standards of American presidential politics. But given that the horrible news of the attempted shooting of a former president was quickly superseded by other news, and then more news after that, perhaps the unusual thing is my determination to hold onto my old mental calendar. The fact is, July is rushing into August, here in Kansas and everywhere in the country, and it’s happening with breakneck speed, with primary elections and possibly even brokered conventions looming. The consequences of all this, even in a quite thoroughly Republican state like Kansas, could well have reverberations—in terms of voter turn-out, campaign themes, and more—that impact even some of the most local legislative races across our state.

In a political culture supposedly built upon democratic debate, with people taking the time to test different political options carefully, that kind of speed isn’t good. I certainly don’t like it—but then, I’m a Luddite wanna-be, someone who rides his bike to the office and still uses a flip-phone (and, of course, listens to music on CDs. Since I think it is highly unlikely we’ll all learn to turn off our phones and act as though not everything always needs to be treated as a desperate emergency, instead we’ll have to make the best of our hurried reality, applying whatever limited breaks we can find as we must. The summer heat is still with us, but maybe not the dog days of old, unfortunately. Thank goodness Gerry Rafferty endures.

Justice Together: Pushing for Justice one City and one Step at a Time

[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.