Dispatches from the Quiet Revolution: Oakpark
Oakland, California
In 1996, a young Chinese American graduate student named Russell Jeung, who had read Perkins's memoir Let Justice Roll Down in an Intervarsity Student Group, moved into an Oakland housing project to build community with Cambodian and Bosnian refugees.
"If you enter Oak Park apartments," Jeung explains, "you'd immediately feel like you're in a developing country. The smells of Cambodian soups waft through the air. Latina women hang their laundry on lines hung between trees as cart vendors hawk tamales and ice cream. Families with three to nine kids live in one bedroom apartments which all border a dirt courtyard. There, dozens of barefoot brown kids, like flocks of little chicks, skirt to and fro. Actual chicks also wander the courtyard, as well as assorted little pets."
With two degrees in sociology from Stanford and a Ph.D. from Berkeley, Jeung declined numerous job offers at prestigious universities to "share the love of Jesus" and "organize for power" among the poor. In partnership with members of the community, Jeung and eight other college friends established a weekly tutoring program, ESL classes, and discipleship groups, and they also organized a tenant's association.
"All our neighbors are poor people of color who inhabit some of the worst housing in the Bay Area. The majority of adults don't have high school degrees and either lives off of welfare or occasional day labor. Our ceilings leak, our walls are poisoned with lead paint and asbestos, and our floorboards are infested with roaches and mice.
"We've come with the intent to care for the poor, but what we've learned is far deeper. God's shown us His heart and His kingdom values."
Oakland, the Cambodian refugees, survivors of the killing fields, find themselves locked out of many jobs because they can not speak English. Seeking to insulate themselves from the violence and racial hatred around them, they retreat to fearful lives inside the apartment complex. Their children assimilate into the social patterns of the urban underclass—drugs, gangs, and street crime. Domestic abuse in Oak Park is not uncommon. Neither are the drunkenness, the gambling, and the other manifestations of anger and resentment. And Jeung has become accustomed to stolen computers, car break-ins, and the threats of drug dealers.
"So I've come to understand how we who live in poor areas hunger and thirst for righteousness and justice, the marks of God's Kingdom. We fervently pray daily, 'Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done' because we see Satan's work all around."
In 1998, the Christians living in community with Muslims and Buddhists in Oak Park organized a tenant lawsuit involving 200 of the residents and demanded repairs from a slumlord who had ignored frequent reports of mildewing apartments, crumbling staircases, sewage backups, deteriorating roofs and vermin infestations.i After a four-year struggle, the Oak Park tenants won a million dollar cash settlement that enabled them to convert the complex to permanent affordable housing and create an endowment fund for the residents; each of the families in the apartments also received payments of $20,000. Jeung and the Christians used their money to purchase a building next to the apartments where a preschool, daycare center and after-school program were housed. In addition, the Christians began reaching out to the neighbors beyond the Oak Park complex through neighborhood clean-up campaigns, door-to-door requests for prayer needs and cross-cultural block parties. The lawsuit reminded Jeung that effective community building sometimes requires the courage to confront and contest. Still, as Dr. King had emphasized at the end of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Jeung believes that the goal of social protest should never be to humiliate the other but (as he says) to bring glory to God and to embody the Kingdom of God on earth.
"The battle at Oak Park is never-ending. But one day at a time, we pick up our crosses, deny ourselves and follow Jesus. When I am merciful to others, I'm fulfilling the potential that God has granted to humans. He told us to be compassionate because God is compassionate. Our acts of mercy are the end products of His creation and re-creation of us.
"Although I want justice now, justice doesn't always come about. But God's been showing us at Oak Park that His Kingdom isn't about our success or failures; it's about God's movement in this world. We must learn to simply join in, wait, and hope."
Notes
i Laura Counts, "Oak Park Tenants Invest in Housing," Oakland Tribune, August 13, 2001.