"Bending the Arc"

Rev. Bruce Russell-Jayne
January 17, 2010

Reading            Affirming Beauty in Darkness (slightly abridged)
In our culture, white is esteemed, "superior," and associated with such states as heavenly, sun-like, clean, pure, immaculate, innocent, and beautiful.  At the same time, our language portrays the word "black" as generally negative, associating it with sin, evil, wicked, gloomy,
depressing, angry, and sullen.  Ascribing negative and positive values, respectively, to the
colors black and white enhances the institutionalization of racist values. A children's book, Black Misery says:
Misery is when you first realize; so many things bad; have black in them; like black cats, black arts, blackball.
And I add to that list: blacklist, blackmail, black mark, black magic, black market, black mass, black Monday, black-hearted, black plague, black mood, black sheep. Good guys wear white, bad guys wear black; we fear black cats; we talk about the Dark Continent. However, it's okay to tell a white lie; lily-white hands are coveted; angels and brides wear white. Devil's food cake is chocolate; angel's food cake is white!

We shape language, and language shapes us. Our use of light and dark language and imagery shapes our attitudes about persons of color. Our sloppy use of the terms white and black, dark and light, assumes the proportions of overt racial significance. If we are ever to be free of racism, we must understand the many ways that racism is manifested in our society.  Language is one of them.  A common misconception in America is that racism no longer exists, that it ended sometime in the late sixties or early seventies. Let's be clear about one thing. Racism is as alive today, though today it is often manifested in more subtle ways.

Language not only influences how white people view persons of color, it also influences how persons of color see themselves. Unremitting negative racial associations have a subliminal effect. Researchers have found that two-thirds of the black children participating in a recent study prefer white dolls to black ones. This same study also indicates that, in American society, children associated being white with success, popularity, and beauty.

There are negative connotations to white.  Light can be blinding, bleaching, ghostly, pale.  We must acknowledge that in darkness there is power and beauty, that darkness has a redemptive character. We should welcome darkness, not fear it or deny it.  The Reverend Fred Wooden reminds us that “Darkness is a time for solitude, quiet, sleep, intimacy.  Imagine the power and the beauty of darkness: children in the womb, seeds in the
ground, sleeping and dreaming, rest and peace, eyes closed while listening to music.  Darkness is the fertile earth which receives all in death and brings forth life from its dark womb.”

The words black and dark don't need to be destroyed or ignored, only balanced and reclaimed in their wholeness.  The words white and light don't need to be destroyed or ignored, only balanced and reclaimed in their wholeness.  Imagine a world that had only light-or a world that had only dark.  Life could not exist in either.  Imagine, if you can, a world where everyone looked and acted just the same. We need to revalue both light and dark; they are both necessary to our continued survival.

What does all this have to with religion, and with Unitarian Universalism in particular?  The impulse toward inclusive language is rooted in religious ground. The use of inclusive language is a discipline of consciousness-raising that claims by redefinition the vision of Universalism.  Such consciousness roots our actions in the richest soil of our Unitarian Universalist heritage.  This is a discipline that each of us is capable of undertaking.

Often, when faced with situations of human injustice, we feel powerless to change the economic, social, and political conditions that are at the root of such injustice.  If we can begin with something as simple and yet as powerful as language, our language as a  religious people can constantly reaffirm the equal worth and beauty of all people. An advertisement once displayed in Boston’s subway trains read:  “Words hit as hard as a fist.  Watch what you say.”  Let’s all take that advice to heart.  Let's remember that what we say has the power to hurt-or to heal.

Sermon            Bending the Arc              Rev. Bruce Russell-Jayne
Today we celebrate with a national holiday the life, accomplishments and message of the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr. who was assassinated in Memphis 42 years ago.    He had studied theology and history – especially the history of the social gospel and the social justice movements.  He knew how long the fight for equality and the end of oppression of peoples had gone on, and he knew the work would not be completed in his lifetime.  Reverend King often characterized the great work of civil rights as “bending the long moral arc of the universe toward justice.”  Nonetheless, he held out hope that some day the goal of human rights for everyone was possible.  He said, “When we see social relationships controlled everywhere by the principles which Jesus illustrated in life-trust, love, mercy, and altruism-then we shall know that the kingdom of God is here.”

On March 7, 1965, more than 500 marchers began walking east of Selma on U.S. 80 towards Montgomery.  They made it only six blocks to the Edmund Pettus bridge where Alabama State troopers and local police attacked them with billy clubs and tear gas, turning back the marchers and sending 17 to the hospital.  On March 9, 1965, Dr. King led a second symbolic march to Edmund Pettus bridge.  That evening segregationists beat three ministers who had joined the march including the Rev. James Reeb, a Unitarian Universalist minister, who died two days later.  On March 25, 1965, having completed the third march to Montgomery, the city that gave birth to the civil rights movement, Dr. King spoke these words on the steps of the Alabama State Capitol:
"I know you are asking today, "How long will it take?".... 
"I come to say to you this afternoon, however difficult the moment, however frustrating the hour, it will not be long, because truth crushed to earth will rise again.
"How long?  Not long, because no lie can live forever. 
"How long? Not long, because you shall reap what you sow.... 
"How long? Not long, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."
 “Dr. King's words echo those of the 19th-century Unitarian minister Theodore Parker.  An abolitionist, Parker secretly raised money for John Brown's assault on Harper's Ferry and sheltered runaway slaves, even writing some sermons with a loaded pistol at his desk to protect the fugitives in his care.  In his 1853 sermon on "Justice and the Conscience," Parker declared:
“I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience.  And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.”

As Unitarian Universalists, and as Americans, we have much to be proud of when it comes to our progress toward ending racism in our country.    I would venture to say most Unitarian Universalists harbor little or no personal feelings of hatred toward African Americans, Native Americans or people of any other race.  When we examine our own hearts, there may be lingering fears and ideas we learned about race that cause us concern, but we have learned to act with good will toward our neighbors – no matter their race.  But, the facts on the ground confront us every day we drive up Springfield Pike – many African Americans are still poor and all our efforts have so far not been enough to rectify the damage done to them by centuries of slavery, Jim Crow, and institutionalized oppression.  It has been a long struggle, and the work continues.

In April of 2008, then Senator Barack Obama said:  “The great need of this hour is much the same as it was when Dr. King delivered his sermon in Memphis. We have to recognize that while we each have a different past, we all share the same hopes for the future – that we'll be able to find a job that pays a decent wage, that there will be affordable health care when we get sick, that we'll be able to send our kids to college, and that after a lifetime of hard work, we'll be able to retire with security. They’re common hopes, modest dreams.  And they’re at the heart of the struggle for freedom, dignity, and humanity that Dr. King began, and that it is our task to complete.  You know, Dr. King once said that the arc of the moral universe is long, but that it bends toward justice.  But what he also knew was that it doesn't bend on its own.  It bends because each of us puts our hands on that arc and bends it in the direction of justice.”
:::
UUs are name droppers; we’re always telling people about famous Unitarian and Universalists.  I’ve already done it this morning by mentioning my hero, the Reverend Theodore Parker, and I’ll also tell you Martin Luther King spoke at a UU General Assembly.  Both Coretta King and Martin attended Unitarian Universalist churches and his liberal theology came very close to ours.  We can almost claim them as UUs. ; )  Name dropping casts a favorable light on our history, but it tends to leave out important parts of our story.  Yes, Unitarians and Universalists have fought oppression in many ways, but we have a checkered history when it comes to eliminating racism.

I can illustrate both some of the good and some of the not so good with our own Northern Hills Fellowship history.  Northern Hills minister, the Rev. Morris Hudgins,  made the cover of the UU World magazine in May of 2002.     Some of you know the event pictured here well, because you were there, but I want our newer members to know it, too.   I am extremely proud to tell this heartwarming Northern Hills story; the efforts to recognize the Reverend W.H.G. Carter, however belatedly, were important to his family – to the Cincinnati area UU churches, and to our UU Association.  However, the title of this article, “A Step Toward Racial Reconciliation” tells us the story didn’t start off so wonderfully.

In the Spring of 1997, near the end of the Reverend Sharon Dittmar’s year as Interim Minister at Northern Hills, she gave a sermon on African American experience in Unitarian Universalism.  In that sermon, she told of an African-American church formed in Cincinnati in 1918 called the Church of the Unitarian Brotherhood and how other Unitarians in Cincinnati at the time turned their backs on it and its minister, the Rev. W.H.G. Carter.  And I now quote briefly from the UU World article:
“They made no effort to forge personal connections, and offered no material support to the struggling congregation beyond a box or two of old hymnals. For two decades no one even bothered to inform the American Unitarian Association in Boston of its existence.  When the AUA finally did find out, in 1938, it sent the Rev. Lon Ray Call to investigate. Call's official report captured perfectly the tone and substance of mainstream Unitarian attitudes at the time toward blacks.  It described Carter as “a kindly man, quite intelligent.”  It noted, however, that the neighborhood surrounding his storefront church was “poor and characterized by rowdiness” and that two local Unitarian ministers (one from First Church) who had spoken there agreed that the response they received was “not very intelligent.” Call's conclusion: “I do not recommend Unitarian fellowship for Mr. Carter, or subsidy for his movement.” Shortly afterwards the Church of the Unitarian Brotherhood closed down and it’s sixty or so members dispersed.  Race and class trumped a genuine spiritual bond.
Many who heard Dittmar's sermon were powerfully affected, but none more than Leslie Edwards, [then] a member of the Northern Hills board.  Edwards says that before joining Northern Hills he spent two decades searching for a spiritual home, a place where “if I needed to express myself in any way about how I truly felt, I would not have any problem whatsoever.” But until that Sunday in May 1998, he had no inkling that the roots of his quest were buried deep in family history.  “That's my grandfather you were talking about,” Edwards said to a hushed congregation during the discussion period after the sermon. “I never thought I'd hear his name mentioned in a Unitarian church.”
It was “a moment of grace and awe,” says Dittmar…It sparked an extraordinary act of reconciliation involving two mostly white UU congregations, five generations of a remarkable African-American family, a city scarred by recent incidents of police brutality and race riots, and a liberal religious movement struggling to live up to the promise of its principles and purposes. And while it would be saccharin to suggest that this story holds the cure for racial and economic dis-ease within Unitarian Universalism, much less the wider world, there's hope in it, absolutely. It represents, says UU Reverend Mark Morrison-Reed, “a great model of what's possible.”
 The article goes on to describe how the Rev. Dittmar’s sermon sparked a remarkable journey bringing together Leslie Edward’s family and Cincinnati area UUs, culminating in the activities of “Racial Reconciliation Weekend” in January 2001.   I encourage you to read about it on the UUWorld website or pick up a copy from our information shelf in the foyer. 
:::
Throughout Unitarian Universalist history there have been many attempts by well-meaning people to end the oppression of African Americans, to make amends for the past, and to bring the races together in peace.  Many Unitarians and Universalists were Abolitionists and UUs stood up for Civil Rights.  But also many Unitarians and Universalists profited from slavery and others were timid in the face of the evidence of human suffering it caused and took too long to speak out against it.  UU antiracism efforts since the Civil Rights era have similarly resulted in a mixed record of good intentions bringing only partial successes.  Rev. Dr. Mark Morison Reed, who in 1980 wrote Black Pioneers in a White Denomination observes, “We do not stand above the social attitudes of our times, as we are prone to believe, but rather, flounder about in their midst with everyone else.”

Black involvement in UU churches reached its peak in 1968 at somewhat less than 1% of membership.  At the 1968 General Assembly, there was much controversy and debate over  whether to back those who advocated black self-empowerment or to just continue supporting those committed to cultural assimilation. In the larger culture, this issue was called black pride or black power vs. integration.  The General Assembly split over the issue, and over the next few years, many if not most blacks left our churches.  This period became known as the Black Empowerment Controversy.  It took many years before real healing over that divide was able to happen.  Since that time, we have learned that the model of racial assimilation – that is asking people of cultures different from the dominant Euro-American model to conform to it – is inadequate to the needs of people who need to retain their history and ethnicity to maintain a sense of well-being.  But we were blind to that concept back then.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the UUA audited attitudes and institutional practices, and resolved to eliminate structural racism in our churches and staff organizations.  The UUA’s  Commission on Appraisal revisited the Black Empowerment Controversy, and established a Black Concerns Working Group which monitored improvements in religious education, ministerial development, and communications.  In 1989 the UUA published Morrison-Reed’s adult curriculum, How Open the Door?: Afro-Americans’ Experience in Unitarian Universalism, and unveiled the Welcoming Congregation program to affirm lesbian, gay and bisexual people.  I apologize for going too fast here; I am summarizing 40 years of UU racial history in a few paragraphs.  A much more detailed story is contained in this just published book, The Arc of the Universe is Long: Unitarian Universalists, Anti-Racism, and the Journey from Calgary.

Beginning in the mid 1990s, workshops on reducing racism were offered to congregations.  The curriculum, which took as its starting point a discussion of white privilege and personal racism, turned out to be controversial and sparked several years of debate and revision.  When we elected Bill Sinkford president of the UUA in 2001, the first African American to head a mostly white church, many hoped he would fix our anti-racism program.  In his eight years as president, Sinkford empowered UU staff, seminaries, and affiliated organizations to rejuvenate our programs which we now call Anti-Racism, Anti-Oppression, and Multiculturalism.  Every staff member, professor and minister now takes anti-racism seriously.  This book is one example of the work that is underway, and another is the new initiative we call “Standing on the Side of Love,” which is meant to make our pro-diversity stance known to people outside UUism.  As you came in this morning did you notice the banner out front just in time for Martin Luther King day?
:::
As I said, we are making great positive strides, but there is much left to do.  For example, Bruce Beisner, as part of a class he took in preparation for UU ministry, researched the history of his church, to fill in some details of St. Johns’ racial story.  I hope we can do the same for Northern Hills as we prepare to celebrate our 50th anniversary in September 2011.  After the work began on the Carter family reconciliation project, Leslie Edwards discovered the graves of his grandmother and grandfather Beulah and W.H.G. Carter right next door to Northern Hills in Beech Grove Cemetery.  Leslie tells me the work of reconciliation within the family continues.  They have added a grave stone to their plot and he would like us to create and place a historical marker about the Carters here on our land.  I think it would be great if Northern Hills made a connection to our local African American community and helped beautify Beech Grove Cemetery.  Maybe these are small things, like learning to be careful with black and white when we speak, but each small step we take tends to bend the arc toward justice.
“The arc of the moral universe is long.  When Theodore Parker first spoke of the arc of the moral universe bending towards justice 155 years ago, he did so to share a dream of a nation that few then held.  When Martin Luther King echoed these words four decades ago, he did so to comfort and encourage those who were dedicated to making that dream a reality.  When Barack Obama used these same words, he did so as a call to action to perfect that nation.”

I conclude with Obama’s words:
“So on this day – of all days – let's each do our part to bend that arc.
Let's bend that arc toward justice.
Let's bend that arc toward opportunity.
Let's bend that arc toward prosperity for all.
And if we can do that and march together – as one nation, and one people – then we won't just be keeping faith with what Dr. King lived and died for, we'll be making real the words of Amos that he invoked so often, and “let justice roll down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”