Related articles and links |  1 of 5

I was supposed to be in Americus, Georgia, to build houses. But Millard Fuller, the cofounder of Habitat for Humanity, is a moving target.

"Alabama is having a hearing tomorrow in Montgomery on the death penalty," Fuller told me. "The legislature wants to change from the electric chair to lethal injection. There's another amendment to declare a moratorium. I'm going over there to speak against the death penalty. I'm not going as a representative of Habitat for Humanity but as an individual. Do you want to come along?"

Fuller lives in Americus, in Sumter County, where Habitat for Humanity is headquartered, and where he wants to achieve the new goal for Habitat: the elimination of poverty housing. Six hundred homes have been built in this place next door to Jimmy Carter's Plains. Over the last several years, the local Habitat affiliates have used Holy Week for blitz builds (erecting multiple homes in a short time). In 1999 they built 25 houses for Holy Week. But next year, Y2K will bring 100 new homes and the elimination of substandard housing in Sumter County.

"You've got to understand," one Southern friend tells me, "in the South, substandard means black. Whites do not live in substandard housing."

Imagine that Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Birmingham march was sponsored by AT&T. Picture Dorothy Day feeding striking workers with staff and food donated by the McDonald's corporation. This is the nature of Millard Fuller's accomplishment. He has taken a radical Christian vision (building homes for poor people), inspired in the midst of a radical Christian community (Clarence Jordan's Koinonia Farm), and sold it to corporate and mainstream America. And they bought it.

So far, Habitat has built 26,000 homes in the U.S. and over 45,000 homes internationally. Oprah has sponsored homes. Congress has sponsored homes. Housewives have sponsored and built homes. Banks and Fortune 500 companies have sponsored homes.

And why does Habitat build homes? "Because of Jesus," says Fuller. "We are putting God's love into action."

* * *

Fuller is six-five, thin as a rail, always on the move, with eyes that seem focused on three moves ahead of where you are—which is not very comforting when you are riding in the passenger's seat (for six hours).

"When you do word associations and you say Jesus, what words come to mind?" he asks me, warming up for the hearings and press conference. "Does the word revenge come to mind? You know that book, In His Steps? If you think about what Jesus would do, there's no way you're going to come up with the answer 'Jesus would want us to kill this so-and-so because he killed my daughter.'

"It's interesting. I've tried several murder cases as a lawyer, and when you question jurors prior to the trial, you hardly will ever find a black person in the South that supports the death penalty. When you ask, 'Why do you oppose the death sentence?' they will typically give you one of two answers: 'Because I'm a Baptist and the Bible teaches "Thou shalt not kill"' or 'Two wrongs don't make a right.' "

Fuller was not born a radical; he was born an entrepreneur. When his father gave him a pig, he fed it and sold it at a profit. At Auburn University, he was the youngest program director of Junior Achievement in the nation. At the University of Alabama law school, he met his future business partner, Morris Dees. "Our goal was not to solve some great problem of society. We had a burning desire to be fabulously rich. "We made bookends, lamps, got into selling holly wreaths, doormats; we bought land; we renovated apartments. We were making $50,000 a year by the time we graduated from law school. Then we went down to Montgomery, Alabama, and opened up a law office. Again, the point of practicing law was to make money: get the cases that would produce the most money. No interest in how we could right some wrong.

next page... |  1 of 5

June 14 1999, Vol. 43, No. 7