David Kirk (activist)

Father David Kirk (March 12, 1935 - May 23, 2007) was a civil rights and anti-poverty activist. He was reared a Baptist but converted to the Melkite Catholic Church , where he remained for most of his life. In 2004, however, Father Kirk joined the Eastern Orthodox Church.

Emmaus House

Father David established Emmaus House in the mid-1960s on East 116th Street in Harlem in Manhattan, New York. It was conceived not as a shelter but as a community for the city’s homeless men and women and was modeled on the Emmaus movement, begun in France by Abbe Pierre after World War II to aid the poor.

Ten years later, Emmaus House moved to 160 West 120th Street. From 1984 to 1986, Paul Selden worked with Father David, training the homeless of Emmaus to renovate the abandoned Charles Hotel at 2027 Lexington Avenue at 124th Street in Harlem. The 5-story building stretching half a block had long been known as a haven for drug dealers and prostitutes. In late 1996 the new Emmaus opened its doors to the homeless while still undergoing renovation.

Anne Troy worked with Father David from January 1987 to December 1994, expanding services at Emmaus House to provide long-term housing to 60 homeless men and women (who frequently had their children with them) and emergency shelter to an additional 35 men and women. Among its achievements, Emmaus:

• launched the first school in the US based in a shelter;
• launched the first housing program for homeless people with AIDS in Harlem;
• launched the first daily 12-steps meeting program open to the general public in Harlem.

In addition Emmaus provided:

• up to 15,000 meals per month to those on the streets;
• training in food management in its Community Kitchen;
• training in woodworking at Emmaus' 6,000 sq. ft. factory in the South Bronx;
• social services for the addicted, for homeless pregnant mothers (thus rescuing many babies from abortion and the foster care system) and others suffering from poverty and homelessness; and
• pantry and free clothing room, called "Blessingdales," helping thousands more five days a week.

Most of these services were actually run by the homeless residents, called Community Members, who were involved in a program of maintaining sobriety, daily work, school, community activities and optional prayer and mass in the House chapel. After undergoing six months of personal stabilization and growth, the Community Member was assisted in finding a job and ultimately, in moving into his or her own apartment to end the cycle of poverty and homelessness. Fr. Joachim Parr, an Orthodox priest who now leads Mercy House on the Lower East Side, was an invaluable servant of the poor at Emmaus from 1988 to 1993 as well as innumerable wonderfully dedicated staff and Community Members who helped Father David realize his vision of mercy and empowerment.

Since 2001, Emmaus House has been back at its former location on West 120th Street, which can house up to 15 people. With Father Kirk’s death, the fate of the house is uncertain, according to a member of its board.

Early years

David (his given name was Davey, which he despised) Kirk was born in Louisville, Mississippi and was a Baptist by upbringing. Aged 12, he befriended a black man named Clint who worked for his father, family members said. After Clint was accused of murdering his wife, David, believing in his friend’s innocence, brought food every day to the woods where Clint was hiding. Clint eventually escaped over the state line to Louisiana.

Later, as the editor of his high school paper in Mobile, Alabama David Kirk won permission to attend a local black high school for a month. He told the authorities he was researching an article about the education of black youth. What he really wanted to do, his family said, was to try to experience how the other half lived in the Jim Crow South. (He had asked to transfer to the school full-time, coming up with the cover story only after his request was denied.) “I came out of that school shocked and radicalized”, he later wrote in an unpublished narrative of his life.

Entering the University of Alabama in 1953, Kirk was drawn to the work of a Roman Catholic campus chaplain, Joseph Raya, who opposed segregation (Father Raya would later become an Archbishop in the Melkite Church). That year, Mr. Kirk converted to Melkite Catholicism. Melkite Catholics practice the Eastern Rite but, because they recognize the Pope, are considered part of the Roman Catholic Church. He earned a bachelor’s degree in social science in 1957, and a few years later moved to New York to work with Dorothy Day at the Catholic Worker House on the Bowery. He earned a master’s degree in social thought from Columbia University in 1964 and was ordained as a Melkite priest in Rome that year.

After ordination, Father Kirk went back to Alabama and the civil rights movement where he served as a bodyguard for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.. (He was jailed with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on at least one occasion.) Returning to New York, he planned to start a communal house for the homeless on the Lower East Side. Ms. Day, who died in 1980, told him to go instead to Harlem, where the need was greater, and Emmaus House was born.

In 1969 David Kirk produced the book Quotations from Chairman Jesus (via Templegate Publishers), which became a revolutionary best seller after its release. The book aims to show, by compiling a wide variety of Biblical and early Christian quotations, that Jesus' life and teachings, as well as early Christianity, were actually based upon a community-centered mindset. In the text, Kirk wrote, "Our present Christian community is not the church it ought to be... If this book has anything to say it is that the oppressed ought to come first in the Church which dares to follow Jesus Christ. If it suggests nothing more to you, let it say that money and property are meant to be common to everybody, and that he who shares power, property, and money with the poor, only returns what rightfully belongs to the poor."

Death

The Rev. Kirk, who had been in declining health with kidney trouble and other ailments, died in his sleep, aged 72.

At his request, he was buried near his longtime mentor, Dorothy Day, at Resurrection Cemetery in Staten Island.

External links

• http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/04/obituaries/04kirk.html?_r=1&ref=obituaries&oref=slogin

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Name	Kirk, David
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Date of birth	March 12, 1935
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Date of death	May 23, 2007
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