We are all tied in a single garment of destiny

I grew up in a tiny university town in Southern India that was founded on Mahatma Gandhi's principles, where my mother was a community organizer and a social worker. It was also home to the Gandhigram Rural Institute, an academic institution that was founded as a center of learning and rural self-sufficiency in post-colonial India. While it was a remarkable place to grow up, I didn't really belong much with other kids in the town. Turns out, being raised by an independent, strong single mother who was estranged from her husband didn't really make you popular in 1980s conservative India. But there was one place in the university where I was readily accepted. 

The building was called the Martin Luther King Hall. 

It was built to accommodate all the African students who were coming to the university to study. I still have a vivid memory of this place. I spent hours hanging out with visiting students. They cooked me Ugali (a Kenyan staple), they told me stories from the places they were from, they engaged with an inquisitive 12-year-old. As a curious kid who never had the opportunity to leave our little town, MLK Hall filled me with awe and hope. I came to associate Blackness with beauty, love, and wonder.

I always thought the building was called Martin Luther King Hall because Dr. King was inspired by Gandhi, and the university wanted to acknowledge that by naming the building after him.

In 2015, I was somewhat randomly looking through Stanford's MLK, Jr. archives project, reading about Dr. King's travels in India in 1959. I was a little shocked and almost in disbelief when I saw an entry that said, "On February 20, 1959, King speaks at Shanti Sena rally; gives address at Gandhigram Rural Institute". Turns out one of the places where Dr. King had traveled to was my little university town. In the middle of nowhere. He had given a speech to a group of peace activists and petitioned that the university become a place for African students to study peace and activism. Three decades later, the place where he stood and addressed the gathering became MLK Hall.

I often reflect on that story. In this divisive era, we often think of our histories as separate and disconnected, and our struggles as our own. It was Dr. King who wrote in a letter from the Birmingham jail, "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly."

Our inescapable network of mutuality and the single garment of destiny mean that we are all connected, and it is incumbent upon all of us to root ourselves in the experiences of the Black community, particularly those experiences of struggle, justice, and hope. For us at Gary Community Ventures, we are rooted in this history. It gives voice, clarity, and direction to our work and mission. 

This is why, when we launched our pioneering Black homeownership fund, we named it after Dearfield, Colorado, the state’s largest Black homesteading settlement flourished in the 1920s until the Great Depression. The Dearfield Fund for Black Wealth continues on this same legacy of struggle and hope, by offering Black families a meaningful chance for homeownership and wealth building. The Fund has already supported 150 families with buying homes and helped generate more than $1.5MM in Black wealth in the Denver metro area, and just won the prestigious 2023 Ivory Prize for Housing Affordability.

Looking back, I have had an incredible journey, transcending opportunity and privilege in going from a 12-year-old in rural India to now leading a pioneering place-based philanthropic organization some 12,000 miles away. And as we commemorate Juneteenth and the liberation of enslaved people in the United States, I still sit in breathless wonder when I think about the beauty of how interconnected we are, as Dr. King said, “collectively tied in a single garment of destiny” as we fight for greater justice and love in the world. 

P.S. Stay tuned for Gary’s owning the wealth campaign which we are launching soon, aimed at bringing attention to the movement for bridging the racial wealth gap through ownership exemplified by models like the Dearfield Fund.