Harding, Rosemarie Freeney (1931-2004)

Mennonite Weekly Review obituary: 2004 Apr 12 p. 6

Birth date: 1931

text of obituary:

Leader who worked for racial justice dies at 73

By Robert Rhodes
Mennonite Weekly Review

Rosemary [sic Rosemarie] Freeney Harding, a longtime activist for peace and racial equality, who with her husband made an important contribution to the Anabaptist witness during the civil rights era, died march 3 in Denver. She was 73.

Harding, a native of Chicago, died of complications from diabetes.

Harding and her husband, Vincent, moved to Atlanta in 1961, where they oversaw Mennonite House, an outreach sponsored by Mennonite Central Committee where many active in the Southern freedom movement often gathered.

Though the Hardings later left the Mennonite church, their legacy continues to be felt and acknowledged.

"They really do have kind of an Olympian presence for those of us who live and work here in Atlanta," said Jonathan Larson, former pastor of Atlanta's Berea Mennonite Church. "But that ought not to keep us from taking very seriously the hard things they've said."

A 1955 graduate of Goshen (Ind.) College, Rosemarie Freeney was an elementary school teacher and running a social work program when she met her husband, according to a recent profile in Sojourners. They married at Chicago's Woodlawn Mennonite Church in 1960.

Drawn to witness amid the racial upheaval in the South, the Hardings worked closely with Martin Luther King Jr. and other leaders of the freedom movement, and helped attract other Anabaptists to address race concerns.

Delmar and Marjorie Yoder were among the Mennonites who followed the Hardings south.

"They were perhaps the most instrumental people . . . in dragging the issue of equality for African-Americans onto the agenda of the Mennonite church, in its broadest sense, and forcing many of us to change the way we thought and lived," said Delmar Yoder, of Epworth, Ga. "Without their influence, we no doubt would have stayed in the Midwest and pursued a much different path than what we have. . . . And I knew many others at that time who could have said the same."

The Hardings returned to Chicago in 1964 and lived at Reba Place Fellowship, a Mennonite-affiliated intentional community, before Vincent Harding joined the history and sociology faculty at Spelman College in Atlanta the following year.

In 1968, after King's assassination, the Hardings helped found what would later become the King Center in Atlanta.

After moving to Denver in 1981, where Vincent Harding is a professor of religion and social transformation at Iliff School of Theology, Rosemarie Harding taught classes with her husband on nonviolence and related issues, according to Sojourners.

She also traveled to India in the early 1990s to study Tibetan Buddhism and its nonviolent philosophies with the Dalai Lama, and to learn from the life and work of the late Mohandas K. Gandhi.

According to Sojourners, Harding also took an interest in Afro-Brazilian religion and society, and in traditional medicine i West Africa, where her great-great-grandfather, an oft-cited role model, was born before being brought to North America as a slave.

With her husband, Harding was a founder of the Veterans of Hope Project at Iliff. The project promotes healing-based community building by drawing on the experiences of activists, historians, artists and others who have devoted their lives to a variety of causes.

The Hardings raised two children, Rachel — now director of the Veterans of Hope Project — and Jonathan.

More recently, Larson said Rosemarie Harding had been concerned about the plight of children and young people adrift in modern society.

"She said: 'If I were starting over again, for me the cause would be children,'" Larson recalled. "She felt very deeply in these later years that our society has become uncongenial, even toxic, for children. . . . I found that so arresting to hear her say that."