STORIES FROM UNITARIAN UNIVERSALIST BLACK HISTORY
A Sermon By The Rev. Susan Manker-Seale
February 20, 2005
Curtiss and I went to see the movie “Hitch” last week. It stars one of my favorite actors, Will Smith, who, I must confess, has been a favorite of mine even from his days on the sit-com “Fresh Prince of Bel Air.” He’s very handsome, very smart, very talented, and very funny, so it’s no wonder he is one of our biggest movie stars today.
We began Black History Month this year by breaking a record, or maybe it was a ceiling. An article in the Arizona Daily Star on February 2 proclaimed that for the first time in cinema history, two movies starring black actors have occupied the top two slots for box-office earnings in one week. Ice Cube and Samuel L. Jackson in “Are We There Yet?” and “Coach Carter,” respectively, pulled it off. The issues pointed out in the article are that seeing black actors in lead roles isn’t the “big deal” it was just ten years ago, and that there has been a culture change in America wherein Black culture “has become a part of American culture as a whole.” (“Black actors make history by topping box office,” by Adam Nichols) Well, it’s about time!
Seeing blacks in lead roles in society isn’t the big deal it was just a few decades ago, either. Having Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell in the news so much over this last presidential term has helped American people of all races absorb blacks as part of a powerful political family even as television shows and movies help people absorb people of different races into their imaginational family. Even if we still live in segregated neighborhoods, as so many of us do, our technology helps to keep us somewhat integrated.
The Unitarian Universalist Association is making history these past few years with our first black president, the Rev. William Sinkford. Finally, we have a very visible role model of an African American minister in our religious tradition. It may not seem like a big deal today, but it has been a long haul. In the same way, we celebrate Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell as being visible, but then again, neither one is the President. Step by step we take this path of integration. Step by step we evolve our sense of who can be accepted as leaders into whatever political or religious family we belong.
When I was young in the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Phoenix we had very few black role models in our congregation. Just a few black families attended, although there was a Methodist minister who served our congregation while my father was on sabbatical in 1971. I never got to hear him preach since I went on that sabbatical, too. Just as I had never consciously met a woman UU minister, neither had I ever met a black UU minister that I was aware of. I say that because I attended General Assemblies as a child and must have met some of both. Maybe.
As of 1983, the year I left teaching in Tucson to attend seminary in Berkeley, there were only 12 black UU ministers fellowshipped out of 1034. Half of those were not settled in parishes. One of the few ministers who was settled was the Rev. Dr. Mark Morrison-Reed. While he was at Meadville/Lombard Theological School, in Chicago, Illinois, earning his Doctorate in Ministry in the late seventies, he decided to research a thesis on African American Unitarian Universalist ministers. He had only just met one in 1976: David Eaton of All Souls Unitarian Church in Washington, D.C. With one and only one role model it was no wonder Mark was motivated to delve into our history and find out why? Why were there so few black UU ministers? His work became a book entitled Black Pioneers in a White Denomination, which also spurred the curriculum “How Open the Door?”
Not until the end of the book does Mark give us an image of how difficult it was for him to learn about Unitarian Universalist black history. He writes:
Outside, the gray, neo-gothic building that houses Meadville/Lombard Theological School loomed large, dark, silent, and ghostly, except for the light that shone from the window in the basement. On their way home my friends expected to see that light. They assumed that I was studying. What they didn’t know was that on some nights I simply buried my head in my arms and wept as the stories unfolded. Sometimes, beneath the bare light bulb of my study carrell, all academic distance was lost. I couldn’t believe the stories the documents revealed; I couldn’t understand how our religious movement could have done such things. I couldn’t even think about it. All I could do was curse and cry. The pain I felt for Ethelred Brown was a pain I would feel for others before finally realizing it was mine, as well. (p. 183)
Today, Mark Morrison-Reed is co-minister with his wife of the First Unitarian Congregation of Toronto, after having served nine years in Rochester, NY. He is a contemporary, but he is also a part, now, of our UU black history. The pain that he felt upon learning our history is a pain shared with us all who read or listen to those stories.
So, who was Ethelred Brown? What is this pain Mark mentions? And why are there so few black Unitarian Universalist ministers?
First, I’ll tell you a little of the story of Ethelred Brown. He was the first African American to be ordained a Unitarian minister, in 1912, although there were several others ordained as Universalists before him. About the time Mark republished his book in 1994, the Hymnbook Resources Commission which gave us our new hymnal named a tune after Ethelred Brown, in his honor. It is the hymn we sang, “I’m On My Way,” a traditional African American folk hymn, whose tune is now named “Ethelred.” It is a tiny way to try to make amends for the honor never given Ethelred as he struggled to start a black mission church in Jamaica in 1908.
Egbert Ethelred Brown was born in Falmouth, Jamaica, in 1875. He discovered Unitarianism one Easter Sunday and this is his wonderful accounting of it:
I was a choir boy of Montego Bay Episcopal Church when the first ray of light broke through my Trinitarianism. It was Easter Sunday. We did not as usual sing the Athanasian Creed: it was recited alternately by the priest and the congregation. The strangeness of the Trinitarian arithmetic struck me forcibly—so forcibly that I decided then and there to sever my connection with the church which enunciated so impossible a proposition….
That very afternoon—mind you, that very Sunday afternoon—I visited my uncle and there on a table were the words The Lord our God is one God. It turned out to have been a copy of Channing’s memorable sermon preached in Baltimore on the ordination of Jared Sparks. My uncle was a Unitarian, but he was not carried away with the idea of a possible youthful convert, and so it was only after much beseeching that he gave me the sermon. I took it home and read it and discovered that in America there were Christians who did not believe in the Athanasian Creed. A few days after my uncle sent me with a note to a physician, and in his study there was a library of Unitarian books including a hymn book which he gave me…. I followed up by reading other Unitarian literature and as a result I became a Unitarian without a church. (p. 36)
Ethelred Brown spent some years without a church, and then was drafted to be the organist of first one and then another Trinitarian congregation. It wasn’t until around 1900, as he wrestled with his call to the ministry that he decided to write a letter. He addressed it “To Any Unitarian Minister in New York City.” It found its way, amazingly, to the Secretary of the Unitarian Fellowship committee who passed it on to President Southworth of Meadville Theological School. Brown describes his reply in these words, “[He] informed me that the school did not conduct a correspondence course, and that therefore I would have to come to Meadville. And that as there was no Unitarian Church in America for colored people, and that as white Unitarians required a white minister he was unable to predict what my future would be at the conclusion of my training.” (p. 37-38) After corresponding for some time, he was accepted into the school as a “special two-year student.” He would have to leave his wife and children dependent on his father’s help and that of a small fellowship he received.
His first attempt to reach the United States ended in deportation because he had contracted to work as an accountant while there, so immigration declared him a “contracted alien” and sent him home not to return for at least one year. During that time, Brown started a Unitarian Lay Center in Montego Bay. He endured a “storm of pulpit criticism and newspaper controversy” from the Methodists for whom he had previously worked and other religious groups. He finally arrived in Meadville in September 1910, and became the seventh black to attend there. He loved his two years there, feeling accepted overall and encouraged in his studies.
In spite of Meadville President Southworth’s commitment to “solving the race problem,” Unitarian churches and the American Unitarian Association turned out to be the major obstacles in placing black ministers in congregations. Acting for the Montego Bay Unitarian group, Meadville Unitarian Church ordained Ethelred Brown in June 1912. In July, he sailed home with some little funds he had collected from visiting some of the larger Unitarian churches to started his work in Montego Bay as a “Unitarian Missionary,” and then in Kingston where he was transferred after two years by the AUA. (p. 43) His work was being supported in part by both the American and Foreign Unitarian Associations, so they sent out a retired minister, Rev. Bygrave, to evaluate how things were going. His reflections show some of the problems Brown had to work under, both in his homeland and in the eyes of the American Unitarian Association:
The Rev. E. E. Brown is pronouncedly black, which is somewhat of a handicap to him in his work, since those of his race who are fortunate enough to approach absolute whiteness are too proud “to sit under” any minister save “a white gentleman.” He is fairly well educated, seems endowed with tact and great common sense, and is a speaker of considerable eloquence and force. (p. 44)
Bygrave described a congregation of ten to twenty-five who would gather in Brown’s house and the tiny Sunday School. He urged supporting the group with money for a building, but eliminating support for Brown’s ministry itself over the next three years.
Ethelred Brown’s ministry in Jamaica was a struggle, hampered for many reasons not the least of which was poverty, especially after the grant was discontinued in 1914. Brown was good at appealing for funds, but eventually became perceived as an irritant in the eyes of the association. He went to Boston to appeal for the grant to be reinstated and in the process, felt he had made an enemy of the President of the AUA, Samuel Eliot. The grant was approved, then discontinued the next year in 1917. He finally gave up the Jamaican mission in 1920, deciding he had to move to the United States to get out from under the terrible financial burdens he had accumulated.
Brown and his family came to Harlem during the Harlem Renaissance and started the Harlem Unitarian Church. The passion of his ministry is expressed in these words of his: “The Negro…has too much of the wrong kind of religion…. [What is needed is] a religion of the present and the practical profoundly concerned with this world…. The virtue of discontentment is a necessary preliminary to making this earth a place wherein dwell justice and peace and love… [Every one must] shoulder [their] own responsibility [and] …work out [their] own salvation.” (p. 84) He became a leader in his community, involved in many social issues, but poverty never released its hold on him, and his ministry was always difficult because of this and the never-ending struggles associated with racial prejudice. The Rev. Ethelred Brown died in 1956.
Brown was one of only 23 black men and women fellowshipped as Unitarians or Universalists between 1889 and 1993. According to Mark Morrison-Reed, our experience as an association isn’t different from other mainline denominations. He writes that “in fact, 80-85 percent of all black churchgoers belong to black denominations.” (p. xiii) His answer to the question of why there are so few black UU ministers, or black UU’s at all, is that we are still “class and culture bound.” (p. xvii) On the other hand, he points out that what we do have in common between the African American religious tradition and Unitarian Universalism is a common concern with freedom. Intellectual, political and spiritual freedoms are valued, but black religions list spiritual freedom as higher while UU’s list intellectual freedom as the most prized, although Mark reminds us that Emerson uplifted spiritual freedom for us all.
I didn’t get to tell you about Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, a Unitarian African American writer and poet of the nineteenth century who worked tirelessly for freedom and civil rights. There were lay black Unitarians and Universalists to learn about. And I didn’t get to tell you about the Black Empowerment Controversy of 1968-9, and a whole history that affected us deeply for decades as an association. But one story is a beginning. Actually, two, for Mark Morrison-Reed’s story is important as well. He says there are two changes we must make if we are to overcome being a “class-bound, culturally captive religion”: We must commit ourselves to establishing a just society, and we must strengthen our spirituality by telling stories that expose our commitment to freedom, shake up class bias, sensitize us to others’ needs, strengthen human connectedness, and inspire us to work together for freedom. May it be so.
Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Northwest Tucson