First Parish Bedford UU

“Black Pioneers in a White Denomination”

A sermon by Rev. John E. Gibbons

delivered on Sunday, October 17, 2010

at The First Parish in Bedford, Massachusetts

A Thought to Ponder at the Beginning:

I was an inquisitive youngster and a truthful child.
I was disposed to ask questions.
I remember very distinctly the question which I asked
my teacher after the scripture lesson on the falling of the walls of Jericho.
“Why,” I asked, “did God waste so much time
when he could have brought down the walls on the first day?”
My teacher was horrified. So much for my inquisitiveness.
From accounts I heard later in life I have come to the conclusion
that as a child I told the truth instinctively,
or if you prefer the term, automatically.
These two characteristics – inquisitiveness and truthfulness –
had much to do with the choice I ultimately made
to enter the Unitarian ministry.

—The Rev. Egbert Ethelred Brown (1875-1956)

Opening Words

from Mark Morrison-Reed, “Let Me Die Laughing,” from Been In the Storm So Long

We are all dying, our lives always moving toward completion.

We need to learn to live with death, and to understand that death is not the worst of all events.

We need to fear not death, but life – empty lives, loveless lives, lives that do not build upon the gifts that each of us have been given, lives that are like living deaths, lives which we never take the time to savor and appreciate, lives in which we never pause to breathe deeply.

What we need to fear is not death, but squandering the lives we have been miraculously given.

So let me die laughing, savoring one of life's crazy moments.

Let me die holding the hand of one I love, and recalling that I tried to love and

was loved in return.

Let me die remembering that life has been good, and that I did what I could.

But today, just remind me that I am dying so that I can live, savor and love with all my heart.

Readings

from Mark Morrison-Reed, Black Pioneers in a White Denomination:

The Unitarian Universalist church and others like it will remain largely segregated until there is a twofold transformation: one in society, the other within the church. First, on a societal level, it is essential that Unitarian Universalists and other liberal religionists never forget that political and economic freedoms are the mainstay of intellectual freedom, and that inequities and injustice subsequently undermine all freedom. This realization presses us to take seriously the cliché that until all of us are free, none of us is truly free. It is a “moral imperative,” then, that we commit ourselves to the establishment of a just society. The result of this endeavor will be the evolution of a society potentially more responsive to Unitarian Universalist values. Second, within the liberal church, the transformation would begin with the strengthening of our spirituality through an enriched story—a story that exposes our commitment to freedom, shakes up our class bias, sensitizes us to the needs of others, strengthens our sense of human connectedness, and, finally, inspires us to struggle with others for freedom.

When we compare the dimensions of freedom in black religion and Unitarianism, we see that their order is reversed. Intellectual freedom dominates in liberal religion and holds only a limited, supportive role in black religion. Spiritual freedom is paramount in black religion, but leads to an ecstatic other-worldly escapism when it is not balanced by other concerns. Intellectual freedom, when it is overemphasized in Unitarianism, dissolves into dissociated intellectualism and esoteric escapism. In neither of these situations are the active qualities of the spiritual and the intellectual brought to bear upon the reality of this world. Political freedom often emerges as a strong force in both traditions. In Unitarianism political concerns occasionally take over at the expense of free dialogue, and in the black tradition political concerns have often meant forsaking God and church. In both traditions a small group of people has managed to hold these freedoms in symbiotic relationship. Finally, spirituality in both Unitarianism and black religion is manifested in a sense of connectedness. In black religion this connectedness is the source of an integrity and involves a vertical connection to God and a horizontal link with community and family. In Unitarianism this connectedness is more immanent, and its end is to lift individuals from their separation from the world. Herein, the individual is freed from the sense of isolation that middle-class life generates.

Sermon

I’m going to go stream of consciousness on you for the first part of this sermon.

My very first awareness of racial difference occurred on a Sunday when I was 5 or 6, maybe 7 years old. I was in the car (ours was a Chevy family) and my mother was driving us –she and I - the 30 minutes from our house in the suburb of Elmhurst to the Third Unitarian Church on the west side of Chicago.

Every Sunday, on my father’s instructions, my mother and I stopped for gas and a car wash on Lake Street in, I think, Maywood. (My father didn’t go to church except possibly when food was being served. He stayed home Sunday mornings, allegedly to “soften the water”…some of you may remember those contraptions that you put salt pellets into that softened the hard water. A lame excuse for not going to church.)

Anyway my mother and I would stop at a particular place where the car wash was free with a fill-up. The gas station attendant (isn’t that a quaint word?) came to pump the gas and one Sunday morning, as I saw him stretch the hose to the tank, I glimpsed his hands and exclaimed to my mother, “That man’s hands are really dirty!” Instantly and firmly my mother told me to never again say such a thing: the man was a Negro. It was not dirt, she said; it was the color of his skin.

This memory has always embarrassed me for my lack of awareness and juvenile racism, and my implicit apparent assumption that all people are white.

It has been only recently, however, as I periodically turn that memory over in my mind (I imagine you also have odd ancient memories that you play and replay in your minds?), only recently have I wondered whether that black man’s hands might actually have been dirty! If so, then the true meaning of that memory may be, not my white privilege and racist naiveté, but my mother’s anxiety about racial difference and her incorrect assumption that I was referring to the color of his skin. By either interpretation, though, our racial memories are often layered, sometimes shameful, and emotionally charged.

Now I fast forward to a memory from when I was about 13, the year about 1965. This time I was with my UU minister, Edwin T. (he was called ET) Buehrer whom I recall as intellectual and highly respected, and with other white and black church people we were a little further down that same Lake Street in Oak Park, Illinois, outside a real estate office for a fair housing demonstration.

Some of you of a certain age will recall that it used to be common practice for realtors to “red-line” – to arbitrarily determine where people of color could and could not buy homes. In the Chicago area, there was a very real but moving color line.

Holding picket signs, denouncing the racist practices of the realtor and demonstrating made a huge impression on me. Then and there I realized that being religious in a Unitarian Universalist way did not always mean sitting politely in church listening to high-minded speakers (as we are doing today); our way of being religious is not only about pondering or meditating upon or illuminating or celebrating or mourning life’s mysteries, joys and sorrows, but that our way of being religious is to change ourselves and to change the world, to affect and shape the very environment in which we live. It has less to do with beliefs and more to do with action and how we live our lives.

This realization shaped my vision of what being a church and being a minister is all about. I am here and we are here – today and always – to change ourselves and the world, to affect and shape our environment.

That same year – 1965 – was, by the way, perhaps the most important year in the history of the young Unitarian Universalist Association for it was then that, hearing the call from Martin Luther King, Jr. for people of faith to go to Selma, Alabama to join civil rights demonstrations there, 1 in 5 of all UU ministers did so (including James Reeb who was killed there). The entire UUA Board of Trustees, which had been meeting in Boston, adjourned to reconvene en masse in Selma. It was a heroic outpouring for justice.

And now a third memory, also involving church, from June of 1969 when, as a youth delegate from Chicago, I came to Boston to attend my first UUA General Assembly. The history is more complex than I can now summarize but it was a painfully polarized era of the so-called Black Empowerment Controversy. It was also the high-water mark of African-American participation in our churches.

Nonetheless, many well-meaning white Unitarian Universalists, some of whom had devoted their lives to racial integration, were deeply offended by black UU’s who caucused separately and, with many white allies, demanded that the UUA do more to address racism within both church and society.

When it appeared the Assembly would not address their concerns and many people of color, hurt and angry, began to leave the floor, our minister emeritus Jack Mendelsohn – then minister at Arlington Street Church - took the podium, announced that he too would leave to commiserate with his sisters and brothers. To consider future options, Jack also invited others to join him at the church.

Therewith, a few hundred distraught delegates – myself at age 17 among them – with tears streaking our faces, walked out. One minister spit in Jack’s face and said, had he a gun, he would have shot him. The events of that assembly were a trauma, the anguish of which is still felt. Many African-Americans, including Bill Sinkford who would later return and became UUA President, left our faith – many never to return.

Our member Ron Cordes, you should know, several years ago produced a video documentary, titled Wilderness Journey, with first-hand accounts by many who were part of these events, including Jack and me. It is required viewing for our seminarians and, really, for all of us. The video is available on loan and has recently, remarkably, been included in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Museum.

This is a sermon about our racial memories and about recovering memories and stories long-dormant and nearly forgotten. Yes, I am eagerly anticipating Mark Morrison-Reed being with us next Saturday and Sunday. Though I’m not sure that his sermon will specifically address racial issues, on Saturday evening at his book reading, he will reflect on the research he’s done about African-Americans in Unitarian Universalist churches as well as his own experience growing up black and UU, straddling in-between both black and white worlds.

Mark is an important UU minister and I encourage you to hear him Saturday night, Sunday morning and also if you can Sunday afternoon when he will speak to the UU Urban Ministry in Roxbury.

This morning I will tell you just a bit about Mark and the stories he has uncovered, but I also hope that we may begin to uncover and tell one another, not just stories of our own racial awakenings, perplexities and perversities, but also stories about the racial history of Bedford and this church. I am convinced that there are many important stories we do not yet know.

For example, Barbara and Willis Davis are long-time African-American members of this church – rarely seen on Sundays but who identify with us nonetheless. Recently, Willis told me that their loyalty to this church came largely as a result of the ministry of Robert Henry Holmes who served here from 1957-1965. When I heard this, I thought, this is interesting because actually Bob Holmes was not all that popular here and he was indeed encouraged to leave. Willis went on to explain, however, that Bob Holmes was one who – as minister of this church - led the fight for fair housing in Bedford and did much to help people of color feel welcome here.

Many among us were leaders in the fair housing movement and have memories of that era –Lois Pulliam, Emily King, Dot Ellis, Nancy Forrest and others – and we need to hear and record them.

Last week I sat with town historians Bob Slechta and Don Corey who responded to my request to tell me some of what they know of Bedford’s racial history, including that of early slaves and slave holders, as well as freedmen who fought in the Revolutionary War. Bob and Don have gathered much information but it remains fragmentary and they too know much remains to be uncovered and told.

Census data shows few if any blacks living in Bedford in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s…not until 1930 when the Douglas Family bought a house and 30 acres on Crosby Road. Priscilla Bowen, who would marry Joseph Douglas, had come north from Georgia in a horse and buggy in the early 1900’s and, on the way north, she remembered (we) “came upon three black men hanging from a tree, and they were riddled with bullets.” Nor was it easy being the only black family here in the 40’s, 50’s and into the 60’s. “It was really rough at times,” an article about Priscilla quotes her as saying, “especially for my children. You know, there can be a lot of hatred in a small town.”

Her son Bill Douglas still lives around here, in Chelmsford I think, and he used to work on my and many of your cars when he had his auto repair business on the Great Road.

Terry Parker is another African-American who grew up in Bedford and lives here now. He’s an attorney and his mother Irene established the METCO program here. I well remember Irene here one Sunday morning, her skin dark, delightedly telling us of her proud Irish heritage! We pigeonhole so easily: you’re black; you’re white; you’re Irish; you’re whatever…when the reality is likelier more mixed, nuanced and complicated. The Parker’s are African-American and Irish!

Terry recently told me that in the 1970’s when one member of his family was harassed for the crime of driving while black his father complained to Bedford’s police chief. In the chief’s office on the wall was a map of Bedford with the location of every black family circled in ink. Somehow Terry’s father even managed to take a photo of that map. I expect that police chief would be surprised and maybe chagrined to know that Bedford now has an African-American police chief.

How many of you know Oscar dePriest or have him as your dentist? He has a great reputation and a distinguished military career, and he too is African-American. His office is just across the street and I’ve often noticed his sign, “Oscar S. dePriest IV.” The fourth? What’s that about?

And then I learned about Oscar Stanton dePriest, the first: “Oscar Stanton De Priest (born to former slaves in 1871, died in 1951) was an American lawmaker and civil rights advocate who served as a U.S. Representative from Illinois from 1929 to 1935.” Shrewd, smart and street-savvy he was the first African American to be elected to Congress in the 20th century, since Reconstruction. What a legacy! No wonder the dentist is the IVth! That family remembers!

Well, this sermon has turned out far differently than I imagined. Let me at least whet your appetite for more from Mark Morrison-Reed. Mark is about my age and he too grew up in Chicago. When the black empowerment controversy was erupting and while I was part of the notorious walk-out from General Assembly in 1969, Mark was away at boarding school in, of all places, Switzerland.

When Mark went to theological school, he wondered why there were so few African-American UU ministers. Mark ended up marrying a white Canadian UU minister, Donna Morrison, and together they have served as co-ministers of UU congregations for more than 25 years, most recently in Toronto where they continue to live.

In his research, Mark has uncovered many stories: Joseph Jordan, the first African-American Universalist minister who established a church in Norfolk, Virginia in the late 1800’s.

Egbert Ethelred Brown who established Unitarian churches, first in Jamaica and then in Harlem in the 1920’s amidst the Harlem Renaissance, a church that was a magnet for thinkers, doers and dreamers. Brown persevered unbelievably: Unitarian authorities told him that white Unitarians would never accept a black minister and so he started his own churches. Three times, attempting to come to the US to study at our Meadville seminary, he was turned back by immigration authorities. Even after he became a Unitarian minister, he was dropped from fellowship but reinstated when, with help from the ACLU, he threatened to sue the denomination.

Lewis McGee was a mailman who in the 1940’s, in his bag of mail, came upon Unitarian publications and decided that he, too, was a Unitarian. When he told Unitarian authorities of his vocation, he too was condescendingly told that he’d have to “bring his own church with him.” After serving various assistanceships, in 1961 at the age of 68, he became the first African-American to serve a predominantly white congregation in Chico, California.

Subsequent to the publication of his book Black Pioneers in a White Denomination, Mark has heard and unearthed many more stories of black pioneers, many of which are tragic and dispiriting accounts of missed opportunities.

Much of Mark’s critique has to do with the middle class individualism of Unitarian Universalism. I had us sing, Faith of the Free, for example, because Mark notes that there is a double-meaning in its words: “Is Unitarianism the ‘faith of the free,’ meaning the church of the free – that is, the church that celebrates the free mind and individual conscience? Or is Unitarianism the faith of those who are free – that is, those who are both politically free and free from economic oppression, such as the middle class.”

Mark also describes us as, essentially, an ethnic church – our ethnicity largely defined by our education: in UU churches, the average education level is 17.2 years…something a bit beyond college. Mark is skeptical of our various diversity strategies. Our congregations will change, Mark says, whether “we work for it, wait for it or resist it.” The percentage of black ministers, he says, exactly parallels the number of black Americans receiving bachelor’s degrees.

What this means is that we should continue and redouble our creative efforts at insuring that every child has access to a liberating education and higher degrees. We should continue and redouble our efforts at creating a society where all American have access to the middle class. ⁱ

Over the summer, I read Mark’s book In-Between: Memoir of an Integration Baby at the same time that I read The Bridge, David Remnick’s biography of Barack Obama. I recommend them both. Both are troubling, inspiring and thought-provoking.

So I think I’ve done all I can to encourage you to come, hear Mark next Saturday and Sunday. Come, let us share all our memories and stories, our apprehensions and our hopes.

Amen.