Turning Points
France Griggs Sloat
SOCIAL JUSTICE FOR ALL It’s mid-morning on July 14. Katie Heins slips on a T-shirt and shorts, grabs her large, hand-lettered banner and heads out from her apartment onto the steamy streets of Over-the-Rhine. Passing by Washington Park, she casts a sympathetic eye toward the crack addicts and homeless men bedded down on trampled grass and benches, then makes her way to the Drop-Inn Center Shelter House, where many of Cincinnati’s homeless residents seek refuge.
Usually she goes to visit a fellow Xavier student who works there. But today is different. Heins is participating in her first real civil action, a protest and demonstration orchestrated by groups advocating for the homeless and fair housing. Their target is an empty building in the low-income neighborhood.
Raising her banner—a bed sheet on poles that spells out “Housing Now” in bright red letters—Heins and several dozen protesters make their way to a large brick building with boarded-up windows and doors. A group tears off the boards and enters the building while Heins stays outside, listening to speeches and waiting for police to arrest the trespassers.
But the police don’t come, so the protesters decide to march on City Hall, where they win an audience with Mayor Charlie Luken. They demand the city give them the vacant building so they can convert it into livable housing. To their surprise, and with the TV cameras rolling, Luken agrees. Heins is floored.
“The sit-in was a turning point for me because I saw people with a well thought-out plan who won,” she says, recalling the 1989 housing protest. Today, formerly homeless tenants still live in the house. “It was a real civil rights movement of people deeply committed to their cause. This showed me that people who are activists can do these things and win.”
The experience led Heins, a senior at the time, to commit herself to a life of social justice work—at a women’s shelter after graduation, then as director of the anti-poverty Contact Center for 12 years, and last year leading the successful Ohio campaign by Let Justice Roll to raise the minimum wage.
But Heins isn’t alone. Such a path is increasingly embraced by college students both at Xavier and nationwide. According to a 2006 report by the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California, the value of “helping others” is the highest it’s been in 20 years and was the third highest common value held by incoming students. At Xavier, more than 500 students participated in service work in the last 25 years through the peace and justice programs, and nearly 30 members of the 2007 graduating class chose service-related positions with non-profit groups for their first jobs.
What motivates students to bypass the path to the corner office and follow their hearts into the service life? The work can be grinding and gritty and the financial rewards slim. Alumni like Heins say it’s the human connections they make—and the chance to make a difference in the world. But they also give Xavier a lot of the credit.
Ben Urmston, S.J., knows the pattern well. He founded Xavier’s peace and justice programs in 1982, and many alums today say his Faith and Justice theology class and rural and urban plunge programs were what opened their eyes and triggered their transformation into advocates for social change. Others say it was theology professor Paul Knitter, often remembered for quipping, “The Jesuits ruined me for life,” for inspiring them to go out and live the Xavier mission.
“With my students,” says Urmston, “I’m trying to get across the dignity of each human person, that we can love and be loved, we can understand and be understood, we can love so much that we are willing to try to change any structure that’s oppressing any person.”
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