Fifty Years Ago in Selma A sermon preached by the Rev. Lee Bluemel At the North Parish of North Andover, MA, Unitarian Universalist March 8, 2015 There are some things in our social system to which all of us ought to be maladjusted. Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Is anyone surprised that the U.S. Justice Department concluded this week that the police and city courts in Ferguson, Missouri consistently abused their power and discriminated against African-Americans? That the disparity is stark and unremitting and unconstitutional? And is anyone surprised that, at the same time, Officer Darren Wilson was cleared of civil rights violations in the shooting of Michael Brown? \ Is anyone surprised? In January, I shared with you the research of Michelle Alexander, author of the book the New Jim Crow, which looks at our country s system of mass incarceration and racism. Her response to the Justice Department report was this: (It shows) we re not crazy. There s a reason why the young people who took to the streets this past fall were saying We feel like we re living in occupied territory. She said- it is time to move from protest politics to long term strategic movement building for civil rights and racial justice. Guess what, my people? That s where the church comes in. Listen to those words: Long term. Strategic. Movement. Building. For civil rights and racial justice. That s our cue. There s an old saying from about 100 years ago. A Universalist leader was asked, What do Universalists stand for? He stand, Universalists don t stand at all. We move.
If some of you agree with me this morning that it s time to move-- and of course you always have the option to disagreewe might ask ourselves some questions: When, and how? When- that s pretty easy to answer, because why not today? It s as good a day to start as any. How? That s a bit trickier. As the Rev. Mark Morrison-Reed pointed out in his Keynote Address in Selma on Friday morning, how we get involved is a crucial question and I m hoping to channel him a bit this morning. Sometimes we need something more powerful than a righteous cause or ideology or values to get us to move even when we care deeply in our hearts. The people who went to Selma in 1965 were motivated to go despite the intense personal risk. What motivated them? Were they just more principled, more courageous, more ideologically bound than most of us? Rev. Morrison-Reed pointed out that what was happening in Alabama 50 years ago is what we today would call terrorism. It was terrorism aimed at keeping African Americans in place, and to keep Northerners from coming down. So let s look a little closer and see how and why some took the risk. I d like to share a story from one person who was in Alabama in the 60 s. This story is taken from a radio interview with a man named Charles Blackburn, a Unitarian minister and a Euro-American who served in Huntsville, Alabama. Rev. Blackburn was unusual- most clergy who went to Selma were from the North. There weren t too many Unitarian churches in Alabama at the time. Blackburn himself was a Southerner, a 4 th generation Floridian, married to another Southerner, the son of a Methodist minister. He became a Unitarian when he heard the preacher Dr. A. Powell Davies speak
on the McCarthy hearings. He also heard Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. speak in the Howard University Chapel, and decided to the Howard graduate school of religion in 1958 to 59, and was the only white guy there. He was fired from his job with a Florida Senator for going. But don t feel too badly for him. Due to powerful Unitarian connections, he quickly was re-hired. Blackburn was ordained and called to the Unitarian Church in Huntsville, Alabama. He and his wife moved there in July, 1964. Here s how he tells it: The fear started before we even got there. Driving there, we had to cross a corner of Mississippi. And we were told Do not get out of your car for any reason. We had CA license plates. We were suspect. It was the first summer of Freedom Schools in Mississippi. We drove for 100 miles across the corner of Mississippi just under 55 mph. The troopers followed us from the west border of the state to the east border. Then we got to Birmingham, spent the night with my uncle and aunt there. My aunt got hold of some picture albums from my car, and we had just attended a wedding in Detroit of black friends of mine from Howard. The next morning my aunt said to me, Charles, I love you, but I love my husband more. You will never again be welcome in our home. And she kept her word. So we began to learn what it would mean to be a Unitarian in Alabama at this time. Then I got to Huntsville and six weeks after arriving there, the end of Freedom Summer and early September in Macomb, Mississippi, there were a number of churches that were bombed and a number of houses that were torched, and as SNCC (the Southern Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) and Southern Christian Leadership Conference were trying to get some attention focused on the plight of the people of Macomb.
So they go the National Council of Churches to help them get ministers to come for a voter registration drive in Macomb. I was the only Southern minister who came. There were 17 Northern rabbis and ministers. We arrived, we took blacks to register to vote. I had a 94 year old black Baptist minister and his wife. We were arrested for trespassing on the court house grounds, thrown in jail. The holding cell for the minister and I was stacked with filthy mattresses, with roaches on the ceiling of the cell. But they were horrified to discover an hour later that they had integrated their own jail! A little humor in all this. We were in jail for 48 hours. Fortunately, Drew Pearson, the syndicated columnist, was focusing attention on Macomb and Magnolia at that time. So he called the Senators of the Northern ministers who were in jail. And they called J. Edgar Hoover who very reluctantly sent two FBI agents to interview us in the jail. And as a result, we were released after 48 hours. But it was more frightening when we were let out than when we were in. Blackburn was asked if he felt he had to watch out after that. He said, It turns out one of my neighbors in Huntsville was the daughter of the sheriff of Magnolia, Mississippi, and she tried to burn a cross on our lawn to welcome me back. So that was the signal- We ve got the bead on your target - for the next two years. After the March 25 th march into Montgomery, my picture appeared on the front page of the Huntsville Times and it was sort-of a target: get this guy. And that night, the church was stoned, the windows were shattered in the church school.
There were 250 obscene and threatening phone calls while my wife was sitting home with a ten month old daughter. The Klan re-organized in Huntsville and had a rally a block form our house. We had heavy wire mesh screens over the windows, floodlights on the corners of the house, and checked for bombs under the hood of the car, and this went on for months. Blackburn was asked how his wife did. He said, She was supportive but scared to death. I was involved, I had adrenaline going, I wasn t nearly as frightened as she was at home. She nearly lost her mind. After two years we had to move to New York. The toll was steep- even for this couple, who were white and had the resources to move, unlike so many others. One might even ask, why didn t they move earlier, given what they faced simply as white allies the harassment, terrorism and state-sanctioned police brutality? What motivated them to go, and to stay for even just two years? Rev. Morrison-Reed, who has written a book called The Selma Awakening, suggests that Unitarians went to Selma not because the cause was righteous, not because of their political or religious ideology. They went because this struggle was about their friends. As we heard, Charles Blackburn had attended Howard University, a predominantly black school, and made close friends there. Other whites who went also had very close black friends. James Reeb lived in Dorchester, and was completely immersed in the black community; he sent his 4 kids to black schools. Orloff Miller had a black roommate at Boston University. Clark Olsen had been a student minister with Bill Jones, a black Unitarian.
Fred Lipp- who was told going might cost him his church jobhad attended Tuskegee Institute for his Junior year of college. Homer Jack was one of first Euro-Americans to go to south to support the Montgomery bus boycott and had a relationship with Dr. King. As for Unitarian laywoman Viola Liuzzo- her best friend was African-American. As Rev. Morrison-Reed so eloquently put it the other morning, what took these people to Selma was relationships. He said, This wasn t about somebody else, somebody else s friend. This was actually about their friends. That s a whole different thing. There s something completely compelling about that. It s not a big choice. Clark Olsen will say simply, I decided to go - of course he decided to go! This was about having a significant human relationship to people who were being oppressed. Morrison-Reed continued: Placing the cause first will lead you astray. Ideological commitments will certainly lead you astray, because this places right belief before right relationship It is all about connection. It is all about love because when you re in love, you take any risk that is necessary, when you are compelled and consumed by love. That s us, right?! So Morrison-Reed had some questions for all of us to consider, especially those of us who are white: With whom are you in relationship? With whom do you socialize? Are there differences in class, culture, ethnicity? If not, what is getting in the way of your making such relationships? With whom are you in a relationship that would compel you to take risks? Who might call you up and say Hey, this just happened- there s a rally, a march, a gathering. Shall we go?
One of our primary tasks as a congregation over the next several years may be this simple: widening our circle of friends, placing ourselves in situations where we are NOT in charge, but where new friendships can evolve, interfaith friendships, inter-cultural friendships, friendships across lines of class, suburb and city. I can preach about this until I m blue in the face but until I and you start doing it, nothing much is going to happen. Some of this we can do with each other, but some of it has to happen out there. Some of you are already on the move- and I say pour it on! Invite the rest of us. Keep bringing your experience back to this congregation to share it with us. There are quite a lot of Unitarian Universalist congregations and individuals that, of late, have taken part in the Black Lives Matter movement. I think of the people in Kirkwood, Missouri, just 18 miles from Ferguson but in other ways a world away. They decided to hold a silent vigil every Tuesday night outside their churchjust people standing in their yellow love t-shirts and their Standing on the Side of Love signs and Black Lives Matter signs. They kept at it for 17 weeks, and when they tweeted photos of their vigil to the young black organizers in Ferguson, those images were re-tweeted to thousands of followers. They could see they were not alone in caring about black lives. But that s not all. The congregation is engaging in trainings about white privilegeand I d like the thanks our own Cara Forcino for starting that conversation here in her diversity workshops. They are engaging in legislative lobbying- and I d like to thank our own Fred Nothnagel and Marie Bourgeois for their work with the Merrimack Valley Project, which organizes legislative actions here.
Because of their visibility, Kirkwood UUs were asked to host Mother2Mother, a panel of African-American moms who explain to Euro-American moms the talk that they have with their sons about police. And they are sharing stories like the one about the Kirkwood mom with a bi-racial daughter who stopped to tell them they had driven by twice to honk and wave. Tearfully this mom said that her daughter had been very depressed, since it seemed that only black people were protesting Michael Brown s killing. The church had given her hope. That s making a connection; that s Being Love. In this very hour, people are worshipping in Selma, Alabama, preparing to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge this afternoon. They are there not just to recall one day, but to remember all those involved in a long term, strategic movement, and to commit to the same. 50 years ago, you may not know this-- there was a march the day before Bloody Sunday. On Saturday March 6 th, 77 white Alabamians marched on the courthouse in Selma. That march was organized by a local Lutheran minister who called his colleague, the Rev. Charles Blackburn whom we heard about earlier. Blackburn came and brought 15 members of the Huntsville Unitarian Church, who joined with 20 other UUs there. The next day was Bloody Sunday March 7 th, 1965 when 600 citizens and civil rights leaders tried to cross that bridge and were mercilessly beaten. At 4:57 a.m. the next day, March 8th, Rev. King sent a telegram to the leaders of many denominations, including Rev. Dana McClean Greeley, head of the American Unitarian Association and father of our former member Penny Elwell. Greeley wrote in the margins of the telegram Call out our men,
and the AUA staff started making phone calls. They called their friends in ministry. And when a friend calls you and asks you to go, you go. Some ministers were told by their Boards and churches that they were going, and given money for the ticket. Others risked their jobs to go. On Tuesday March 9 th ; about half of the 2,000 marchers were white and a third of them clergy of all denominations. That march became known as Turnaround Tuesday. As we heard from the Rev. Clark Olsen last October, that was the same night he, Orloff Miller and James Reeb were attacked, and Reeb was hurt so badly he later died. He was 38 years old. Next there were two marches in the capital city of Montgomery. Then, finally, the successful march from Selma to Montgomery took place from March 21 st to March 25 th. There were 25,000 people who joined the rally in Montgomery. But despite the success, another tragedy awaited. That night Unitarian Viola Liuzzo was shot and killed by a Klansman. She was 39. So Selma gave us two Unitarian martyrs 50 years ago. In death, Reeb was accused of being an intentional martyr - this idea that he had gone to Selma to die. Viola s character was maligned in the press. But this past Friday night in Selma, the families of Jimmy Lee Jackson, Rev. James Reeb and Viola Liuzzo were given awards by the UUA called Courageous Love awards. In Selma this weekend, truth has been spoken, history revisited, songs sung, and most of all, relationships created and honored and renewed. In our own little Merrimack Valley, in the months ahead, may we do likewise, and become a people on the move. Amen.
First reading: A Candle for Michael Brown, et al by Chip Roush This morning, I will also light another candle. If we had the space, I would light ten candles, or a thousand. I light a candle for Michael Brown, shot down in the street and left to die without comfort. I light a candle for Officer Darren Wilson whose tragic mistake killed Brown and changed his own life forever; I light a candle for Michael s mother, sobbing over her son s corpse. I light a candle for all the black mothers whose sons have been taken too early from them; I light candles for the black males who are killed every 28 hours in this country by law enforcement or vigilantes; I light candles for all the people whose lives are lived in fear, whose first instinct is to load their weapon, to don riot gear, to climb onto military vehicles and confront the neighbors whom they fear so greatly. I light a candle for all those who are unable to see that institutional racism is part of what creates that fear. I light candles for our nation. I light a different candle hundreds of millions of candles for human cousins in whom fear, or shame, or guilt or anger have built walls which separate us. I light a candle
for our human impulse to blame to push away and disown the horror, which only creates more separation. I light a candle for the chasm of grief that stretches between us and I light a candle for all of our human cousins who keep hope alive, who are laboring right now, at this very moment to build a bridge across the separation and into other human hearts. I light a candle for all those who breathe in suffering and breathe out compassion. I light millions of candles in this one candle. May its light guide us in the days to come.