Poverty Law and Legal Activism by Adam Gearey

Author:Adam Gearey [Gearey, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Social History, Law, General, Civil Rights, Ethics & Professional Responsibility, Housing & Urban Development, Jurisprudence, Legal History, Legal Profession
ISBN: 9781351364935
Google: 3WJgDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-06-14T01:32:53+00:00

Home exists in the estrangement and negation of home. A home that is not a home. Home is, first of all, the home of others. All those others who had occupied the tenement before Stringfellow. Pondering the question of the others who have come before him leads to the final strophe of this opening sequence. This apartment is also a symbol of all the others for whom “this or something worse” was home. The final twist is this epiphany that brings the narrator home. But how? In one sense he is unlike the others on whom he is meditating. He has chosen to come to “Number 18, 342 East 100th Street Manhattan” to be with the poor (Stringfellow, 2005, p.2). After all, he is a Harvard-educated lawyer. Those who are forced to live in cockroach-infested tenements, or something worse, are in an entirely different situation. Is Stringfellow setting up some bogus identification between “them” and him? Or, is there an entirely different meaning that leaves this notion of home radically open? To be at home, in the sense that Stringfellow wants to elaborate, is precisely to ask this question of others. To be at home is to be estranged from oneself in asking the question of oneself that necessitates addressing all the others: to be at home is to be uncomfortable.

This is how Stringfellow’s resolute commitment expresses itself. The book begins with this biographical fragment and then effectively works backwards to provide an answer to the question as to why Stringfellow made the decision that takes him to the tenement in Harlem. We could read this as the authentic claim to the meaning of one’s life, the coincidence of a past, a present and a future. The biographical structure of the book presupposes that life is not simply a set of events experienced in time. There is a pattern or even a secret to inner life that can be brought to light and used to explain the decisions that one has made. This is linked to the idea of freedom – more precisely the “extraordinary freedom” – of the Christian (Stringfellow, 2005, p.32). We can begin to understand the meaning of Stringfellow’s decision. We need to see how his biography is bound up with this peculiar understanding of freedom as “integrity” and ultimately the question of what it means to be with the poor (Stringfellow, 2005, p.25).

Stringfellow gives us a very good sense of the way in which freedom requires us to assert ourselves against received wisdom and rituals. The freedom of the Christian is not at all conventional. This is made clear in the section of the book entitled “Acceptance”, which we can read as a particular appropriation of the meaning of being in the world, of living with others. From a more conventional idea of freedom, practising law in Harlem was what Stringfellow was free to do. It was a choice that presented itself. He was free to choose between a number of options: working with a “large

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