A sermon by the Rev. Susan Manker-Seale
December 9, 2001
My favorite line, and possibly the most famous line, of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s, "I Have A Dream" speech is when he said, "I have a dream my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character." My brothers and sister and I were the same age as King's children then, and still are. A generation has passed. We watch our own little children and ask ourselves whether and how we are all still being judged by the color of our skin, and if there will ever come a day when the dream will be fulfilled.
King's son, the Rev. Martin Luther King, III, said two weeks ago in Tucson that he feels the dream is still unrealized. He cited the huge numbers of children born into poverty every day, born without health insurance, and that every day, a young person under 25 dies of HIV. He reminded us that pay inequities remain: black Americans earn 58 cents to the white male earning dollar; women earn 79 cents to that dollar. The percentage of Blacks in prison far outweighs their percentage of the population. It is clear to me and to many that the dream is still in the dreaming. (Arizona Daily Star 1/11/02)
In the very early 1960's, when I was five or six or seven, I remember the times we sat around the campfire at our new UU camp in the San Bernardino mountains of California, de Benneville Pines. I remember the guitars and the strumming, and the soft singing of "This Land Is Your Land" and "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" and especially "We Shall Overcome." My parents, as well as most of the Unitarian Universalists there, involved themselves tirelessly in the work that Martin Luther King, Jr., was forging: the work for civil rights, for equality, for voting rights, for justice and for peace. The songs told me, as a little child, that there was a dream being dreamed, and I was a part of that dream.
Little children singing! Songs have been a powerful tool over the years for social change; much better than guns. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a pacifist. He encouraged children and teens to sing in the streets in Birmingham, Alabama, to fight for anti-segregation. That was 1963. Two months later, King had delivered his "I Have A Dream Speech" before more than 200,000 people in Washington, D.C.. His work both confronting and inspiring the people led to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and by the end of that year, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for peace.
Birmingham, Alabama, is where the Unitarian Universalist Ministers Association has chosen this year to hold their every-seven-year Convocation, not because of the civil rights history there, but because the convention center was affordable and big enough, and the city is considered to be easily accessible being in the middle of the country. I know because I'm on the planning committee for the convocation this March. But the civil rights history of Birmingham IS important to us as ministers, for many of the older ministers marched in the struggle with Martin Luther King, Jr. And one was killed.
In 1965, King led a march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, for voting-rights. Ministers across the continent were invited to join it, and many UU ministers did. I called my dad yesterday to get the details, because I was pretty sure he'd been there but I wasn't certain, being one of those little children grown who can't seem to get the family stories straight.
My father, Ray Manker, was minister of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Phoenix in 1965. He said that Martin Luther King, Jr., had gone to Selma to rally the people to register to vote, but they met with such tremendous resistance that King was arrested along with seven hundred others. King then wrote to the clergy, asking them to back them in the march. Many UU ministers responded, among them Orloff Miller, Jim Reeb, and Clark Olsen. Those three were waylaid on a street in Selma one night there by some white men and clubbed. Jim Reeb died.
Word of Jim's death reached the Unitarian Universalist Association in Boston during a UUA Board meeting. They decided to adjourn and fly to Selma where they resumed the meeting in the basement of Brown chapel which was the center of action. Our UUA president, Dana Greeley, met with the sheriff and took real leadership, as my dad put it.
As King started the march to cross the bridge out of Selma, there was a big confrontation. The Federal Government stepped in and provided National Guardsmen to protect the marchers, but only 300 marchers could go, so only a few of those were UU. They marched fifty miles in five days. As they approached Montgomery, Martin Luther King, Jr. asked as many people and ministers as could come to join them at the end. The UUA put out a request to the ministers to go, but to assemble in Birmingham as they expected 25,000 to attend the rally in Montgomery and there would be no place to stay. They would transport the ministers by bus to Montgomery. This was when my father decided to go.
He said they took their bedrolls to the Unitarian church in Birmingham, which began to receive bomb threats by the hour. Dana Greeley realized that if any went off, our UU ministry would be decimated, so they asked the members of the church to put up ministers in their homes, which they did graciously. My father, therefore, attended the last day of King's famous march on Selma, and the Unitarian Universalist ministry was inextricably woven into the fabric of the fight for civil rights (as it had been long before this and as it has continued to be in the years since).
My father told me this with tears in his voice.
It was a powerful time, and the dream is a powerful dream. I know that the ministers I've spoken with who were there, among them Orloff and Clark who survived the clubbing that killed Jim Reeb, can't speak of those times without tears. The tears are for memories, yes, and powerful acts that transformed not just society, but each of those who were there. I also know that the tears are for the telling, for the act of keeping the song, the dream, alive from father to child, from mentor to mentee, as the decades pass and the stories lie in danger of being forgotten.
In the years since, there have been many struggles for justice and peace. The civil rights struggles led back into a new configuration of the women's rights struggles, which overlapped with the Sanctuary and farm workers movements, and the struggles for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender rights. When Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered in 1968, he had begun to focus on economic conditions in areas like Chicago, tying that to civil rights. The work for justice leads in many directions, and it is clear to many that the work is far from done.
It was only a few years ago that the ministers at General Assembly held a workshop on racism. The presenter asked all four hundred or so of the ministers that were there if any had ever been pulled over by the police for no apparent reason. Those who raised their hands were asked to stand. They were almost all African-American. Then the presenter asked them to keep standing if this had happened more than once, twice, three times. The ministers remained standing. Then they were asked to tell their stories. Plainly, they had been targeted by police in these incidents precisely because of the color of their skin rather than the content of their character.
This is happening all the time. We in Arizona have our own struggles confronting the Border Patrol for targeting Hispanic drivers in Southern Arizona and pulling them over for no apparent reason other than suspicion that they are illegal aliens. We are all still being judged by the color of our skin, though racism looks different now than it did in the sixties, embedded still in certain organizations and structures of society. The legacy of slavery, prejudice, and poverty have kept many people of color from advancing toward sustainable living conditions, not to mention getting ahead.
I look at my children, though, and wonder what society looks like to them. When I was little, I remember seeing a black newscaster on TV for the first time, and pointing it out to my dad, for it was a strange thing. Today, my teenagers can watch shows that are composed almost entirely of African-American actors, and there are even shows like "The Proud Family" which are focused on Black pride. My children can relate to these roles, see themselves as those African American characters just as we do with characters in a book. They can identify with them. They can look up to African Americans in parent and teacher roles. Their sense of the world family of which they are a part is expanded hugely.
By the way, whites in those shows, as my son pointed out, are often playing the single part of the buffoon, the role the single black actor played two decades ago. I tell Ben that though reverse discrimination is wrong, in these shows it is, in a way, a balance for deeds past, in my opinion, and can be forgiven. The latest struggle in entertainment, I have heard, is to get Asian women into acceptable roles. And I agree with Omar Shahin of the Islamic Center that Arabs are portrayed almost universally in movies and shows as the bad guys. Some of you might hear a little voice inside saying sarcastically "I wonder why?!!" That's the struggle of stereotyping a race of people for the deeds of a few.
The world looks very different to my children, to our children. The world isn't just white, or just black and white. To say "the color of our skin" is to say something very different today than in the sixties. We aren't just Black or White or Brown or Yellow or Red. Color is no longer related to a single race. Even the census department is catching up, and there is an alternative, I believe, if I'm remembering correctly, to choosing Anglo, Hispanic, African-American, Asian, Native American, etc. There is "other." "Other" is liberating us from the mindset that there is only a single color for each race. "Other" is recognizing that many, many of us are mixed race, blended families, interconnected in ways that confound the census takers. And "others" are starting to set policy for our communities, for our nation.
It isn't strange to my children to see African Americans on television, or Asians, or openly gay and lesbian roles. Their experience of world is enlarged by television so that those who appear different from our little nuclear family are not seen as strangers. They are familiar, a word related to "family," because they are seen every day, even if not directly interacted with. Children of all races can see at least a story version of what life is like for those who are different from them, as well as stories of what their own races can experience here in America. Or even in other parts of the world. We are influenced in our sense of community not just by neighbors we may or may not know or interact with, but by the world exposed, real or fictional, on television and in movies and on the internet. The identity of "we," when speaking of our communities, is so much broader than just us and the folks across the street, or in our congregations.
Speaking of congregations, the changing of group identity is probably one of the most difficult obstacles keeping religious communities segregated. If the community is predominantly a single race, the identity follows that particular cultural heritage. There is a checklist that goes with one of the anti-racism programs of the UUA, it might be "Journey Toward Wholeness," but I'm not sure. One of the questions asks what race the dolls are in the nursery. Another asks what faces are shown in posters on the walls of the church. What topics the pamphlets address. Who it is that is welcoming visitors at the door. In a sense, it is asking what is the color of the skin we uphold and share in our nursery, on our walls, at our doors.
It is very hard to be the only one of a race attending, not to mention visiting, a congregation that is predominantly another race. It becomes a struggle to get "critical mass" so that people don't feel exposed or isolated or singled out. Racially segregated groups, such as all-black churches, are more collectively supportive of their own race issues and that is why, I have heard, that so many are willing to put up with a theology that is less than desirable. People are drawn to the familiar, making it hard to integrate a group that already has a particular, strong identity.
We here at Northwest UU are slowly changing in diversity. We can look around and see folks of different colors among the sea of apparently white faces, but don't let those white faces fool you into judging us by the color of our skin. Many are married to people of color, and/or have children of color, and/or grandchildren of color. And some are mixed races without visible sign of it. And some are purely white and have been working for civil rights since forever. There is more sympathy and more involvement with the work for justice and rights for all people here than might appear with a glance from the front door. We hope people will continue to join us, people of all races, people who are "other," people of different sexual orientations and physical abilities. We hope to be strength to each other in our struggles for acceptance and respect, to be a place of sustenance in those struggles.
If we must be judged, let it by the content of our character. There is much work to be done, and there are still hands reaching out for help in the struggle for justice. It takes a radical love to pry ourselves out of complacency, to be with people hurting from inequities and prejudice, to take up the songs for justice and to dedicate our time to the dream. May we practice such radical love, the love that sings out the proclamation that we are all ONE at a deep level, interconnected on this Earth, interdependent, responsible to and for one another. May we value our differences and learn from each other and cherish all the myriad colors of earth's creation.
Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Northwest Tucson