The transformation of Millard Fuller began on the road to Selma.
“I was on the wrong side, from a moral standpoint,” the 62-year-old Fuller says of his early career as a lawyer-entrepreneur in Montgomery, Ala., consumed with making money, speaking at Ku Klux Klan rallies on behalf of a segregationist attorney general, providing legal counsel to reactionary clients.
“Martin Luther King was organizing his Selma to Montgomery march and two ministers from Pennsylvania with the United Church of Christ called me up.
They were in town and wanted to march, but they were stuck at the old Jeff Davis Hotel and couldn’t get to Selma. No taxi would take them. They heard I was a member of the church and asked if I would give them a ride.”
It was Fuller’s first brush with the challenge that Christian revolutionaries were mounting against ingrained Southern customs and deeply rooted racism, a zeal that is reflected today in Habitat for Humanity International, the unique housing ministry that Fuller founded and still heads.
He remains a little known figure, this man who took a charitable impulse and turned it into a non-profit empire that has built 60,000 new homes for 300,000 poor people over the last 21 years.
Obscured by the very public participation of former President Jimmy Carter in Habitat — Carter is often mistakenly credited as its creator — Fuller has quietly focused his spiritual energies and entrepreneurial drive on his good works.
The grandson of a sharecropper, he grew up poor in Alabama cotton country. But he dared to think big, even in the early days, when his fledgling organization was headquartered in a chicken shed.
Today, Millard Fuller’s habitat spans the nation.
But in the spring of 1965, Fuller was feeling more scared than daring. He and his partner, Morris Dees, had warily agreed to drive the pair of ministers across the embattled 40 miles of blacktop to Selma, a strip where Viola Liuzzo would later die when her own car ferrying civil rights demonstrators was ambushed by night riders.
“We passed through a line of state troopers with shotguns and cameras, taking pictures of all the marchers,” Fuller recalls. “They took pictures of us, on the other side, and the next morning, word was all over town. My neighbors cursed me. We lost all our local business.”
Fuller calls the experience a “defining moment.” It was followed by another, a few months later, when his wife left him because of his preoccupation with Fuller & Dees Marketing, a direct mail business selling cookbooks and knicknacks. He sold his interest to Dees for $1 million and gave the money to church-related charities.
After that dramatic gift, he reunited with his wife, Linda, and they embarked on a series of Christian ventures that eventually led them to establish Habitat.
It has become one of the nation’s fastest-growing non-profit organizations.
Conceived in a remote section of southwest Georgia, where the landscape was blighted by primitive shacks, their idea was to tap the sweat-equity of the faithful and build houses for the poor.
Aided by publicity generated by Carter, a native Georgian who spends one week a year at a Habitat construction project, the organization has affiliates in 1,400 communities and is expanding overseas.
From the beginning, Fuller had sweeping ambitions.
“If you read the minutes of that first meeting, you’ll see our goal was to build 100,000 homes for 1 million people. That goal will be realized by the year 2000,” he said.
He grew up in the poor, cotton mill country of eastern Alabama. Once, when asked the location of his “family place,” Fuller said, “I started crying. We never had a place. My grandfather was a sharecropper, we were always shifting around. That’s why I think interest in housing is so deep in my psyche.”
Fuller’s link to life outside Alabama was the United Church of Christ. Because of its earlier association with the Abolitionist movement in New England, the denomination had few congregations in the South, but Fuller belonged to one of them. After he attended a youth convention in New Haven, Fuller came home to report “the church up north is decadent. They not only have dancing; blacks and whites dance together.” But he never broke with his faith.
To his spirituality was joined an acute business sense. Fuller says he always had “a flair for business.” He met Dees at the University of Alabama Law School and they went into partnership in Montgomery.
After 1965, Dees underwent dramatic change, too. He used his direct mail talents to raise millions for George McGovern’s presidential campaign in 1972 and Carter’s race in 1976. Dees now runs the Southern Poverty Law Center, and his lawsuits have bankrupted several Klan groups.
After rejoining his wife, Fuller began working on behalf of Tougaloo College, a black, church-sponsored school in Mississippi.
During the Christmas season of 1965, the Fullers were driving through southwest Georgia when they decided to track down a friend named Al Henry, who had been dismissed from a Birmingham pastorate for preaching racial reconciliation. They learned he was living at a biracial farm commune called Koinonia. Their visit, planned to take two hours, lasted a month.
Koinonia was a pacifist enclave in Sumter County. Led by a charismatic visionary, Clarence Jordan, about 100 blacks and whites dwelled in a settlement together, raising peanuts and pecans and braving the wrath of the local establishment.
“After their produce stands were blown up on the highway,” Linda Fuller said, “they started selling pecans out of state. They had a sticker on the boxes that said `Help us ship the nuts out of Georgia.’ “
Jimmy Carter was a rising young politician at the time, living in Plains, a few miles away. He shunned Koinonia. But after serving as missionaries in Africa, the Fullers and their children moved to Koinonia in 1968.
“I think the Lord sent us there,” Fuller says. He developed a “theology of the hammer” in Koinonia, a philosophy in which people from different backgrounds “agree on a hammer and drive nails to demonstrate God’s love.”
The first Habitat house was built there, a plain cinder-block building that gave a family its first shelter with a bathroom and electricity.
Attention was focused on Sumter County that year, but for different reasons. Carter was in the midst of a victorious presidential race, and thousands of curious visitors were descending on Plains. The Fullers, meanwhile, were setting up Habitat offices in Americus, the county seat.
From its humble beginning, the program grew modestly. Its breakthrough occurred after Carter returned home. Fuller believed the former president, in transition from politics to unconventional social missions, could be persuaded to support Habitat.
Carter agreed to address their annual meeting in 1982, and spoke publicly for the first time of Sumter County’s unusual heritage. “I am proud to be a neighbor of Koinonia,” he told the group. “To have seen, from perhaps too great a distance, the profound impact of Clarence Jordan…. I think I will be a better Christian because of Clarence Jordan, Koinonia, and Habitat. And I hope to grow the rest of my life with you.”
Fuller solicited a greater commitment. The former president asked for a memo listing ways he might help. “Don’t be bashful,” Carter said.
Fuller responded with a 15-point letter seeking Carter’s service as a director, a financial supporter, and a volunteer. He also asked for his prayers. A month later, Carter spent his first day as a carpenter at a Habitat project in Americus.
Fuller said Habitat carries an appeal “across a theological and political spectrum. Conservatives like it because it involves self-help. Liberals like it simply because it helps.”
