"What Price Freedom?"

by Terrance Andrew Robinson: Ministerial Intern

January 20, 2008

"Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream." Amos 5:24

"Violence is anything that denies human integrity and leads to hopelessness or helplessness" Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

One old Hasidic rabbi asked his pupils how they could tell when the night had ended and the day had begun, for that is the time for certain holy prayers. "Is it," proposed the student, "when you can see an animal in the distance and tell whether it is a sheep of dog?" "No," answered the rabbi. "Is it when you can clearly see the lines on your own palm?"-"Is it when you can look at a tree in the distance and tell if it is a fig or a pear tree?" "No," answered the rabbi each time. "Then what is it?" the pupils demanded. "It is when you can look on the face of ANY man or woman and see that they are your sister or brother. Until then it is still NIGHT."

Today, we will explore some of the- often profound--- influences Unitarians and Universalists have had on the partial success of our Civil Rights Movement. This movement came to it's zenith in the 1960's. UU theologian James Luther Adams said, "The Holy thing in life is the participation in those processes that give body and form to universal justice." Our congregations are places where we can make that happen.

One of the most widely used metaphors for freedom from oppression comes from the Exodus story. The Israelites are enslaved in Egypt, and Moses leads them out of Egypt into the Promised Land, destroying the Egyptian army in the process. This story is used to reinterpret the Exodus as a source of freedom for all people. This is behind much of the spirit and rhetoric of the Civil Rights Movement and other human rights liberation movements. Here Biblical tradition functions as a prophetic critique of idolatrous people. It says to us today: Wherever you live, whatever the time, it is probably Egypt. People are being oppressed and are suffering. If you don't see it, you aren't looking hard enough. OR--, maybe YOU are Egypt.

Leo Tolstoy's "The Kingdom of God is Within You" was instrumental in transmitting the ideas of American pacifists, including Universalist Adin Ballou to the 20th century nonresistants, Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, JR. This theory, was then put into practice by them as the bedrock of their strategy to obtain civil rights and freedom for their people. The Universalists had been the first denomination to pass a resolution against the holding of slaves. It had passed at a Universalist convention in Philadelphia in 1790. One of the signers of the original compact of John Murray's Universalist Church in Gloucester was a freed slave, Gloster Dalton. Also, a number of marriages and funerals for freed slaves were performed there. King was often heard quoting Unitarian Minister Theodore Parker in saying, "the arc of the universe is long, but bends toward justice."

Since its consolidation in 1961, Unitarian Universalism has spoken out against discriminating and oppressing people because of their race/and ethnicity. One of the very first resolutions of the Association stated, "segregation and discrimination wherever practiced continue to be a matter of major national and international concern and reflect attitudes contrary to moral, religious and ethical commitments." In the years since that statement, Unitarian Universalists have worked against public school segregation and violence against people of color, for justice for indigenous peoples, against anti-Arab violence and for many other related racial justice issue.

Unitarian Universalism has a long history of racial justice work including notable abolitionists from the 18th and 19th centuries, members of color as early as 1785, the first ordained minister of color in the US, founders of the NAACP, leaders of the nineteen hundreds voting rights movement and more.

Dr. King never wanted to be the leader of the Civil Rights Movement. The call came via the movement coming to him. He was a new minister at the Dexter Avenue Baptist church and all he wanted to be was a good minister, husband, and father. By the luck of the draw (or Divine Intervention?) his church was chosen for a meeting among local pastors to discuss segregation on buses in Montgomery, Alabama. In the meeting, he was unanimously chosen as the spokesperson for the eventual bus boycott. He protested, but the ministers persisted and he finally accepted. The rest is history.

The main story I have to tell you started with Jimmie Lee Jackson. He was an African-American civil rights worker who died on February 26, 1965 after an Alabama state trooper shot him in the stomach at a voting rights march in his hometown of Marion. Jackson's murder inspired the march from Selma to the State Capitol in Montgomery that was brutally turned back by lawmen with dogs, fire-hoses, and clubs on March 7th ("Bloody Sunday") at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Yet, they refused to surrender to the forces of violence and hatred exemplified by the evil of racism. After the attack, King issued a call to clergy and citizens of all faiths to come to Selma to support the marchers. About 500 UU's including 1/5th of all UU ministers rushed to Selma. These brave women and men risked their lives to fulfill the promise of equality upon which our country was founded. They dared to imagine a future where ALL persons would be seen as children of God.

One of the ministers was James Reeb, a UU community minister from Massachusetts who had a wife and 4 children. On March 9th, he was attacked (possibly with a baseball bat) while leaving an African-American owned restaurant with 2 fellow ministers. He had been there less than a day. He died of his injuries on March 11. Viola Liuzzo , a UU lay person from the Detroit UU Church, was shot to death March 25 by Ku Klux Klansmen after the Selma to Montgomery march was finally completed and became the only white woman to die in the Civil Rights Struggle. All three are immortalized in a sculptured memorial in Eliot Hall at UUA headquarters in Boston. There is also one memorial to the 2 UU martyrs located in Selma. Rev Clark Olsen (along with Rev Orloff Miller) were with Reeb at the time he was attacked. They went with him to the hospital where he died. Rev. Ray Manker (of the Paradise Valley UU Congregation) was also there and related a story to me that took place when he was in Selma. Apparently, the UUA was afraid-with good reason-for the safety of our religious movements' future. If a bomb went off where so many of them were concentrated, they might all be killed at once. Ray said that one night he was carving up turkey to feed the mass of ministers bivwacked in the local UU church. The phone rang, and a parishioner answered it and then said "well, you'll just have to get in line". Ray asked the person what had prompted her reply. She said "Oh, just another bomb threat."

Rev Olsen recalls: "Five days after Reeb's death the president addressed the nation and Congress to urge passage of the Voting Rights Bill. President Lyndon Johnson singled out Reeb by stating: 'In Selma, last week, one good man, a man of God, was killed.' In the campaign for a voting rights law to remedy gross racial injustices, apparently something had to be the final straw politically, and Jim Reeb was that symbol. Passage of the Voting Rights Act is probably the most powerful legislation that, long-term, will move this country to justice for all. So many of us can be proud to have been in Selma and we grieve that that change required a last straw. We also celebrate the courage of many-known and to unknown-who moved this nation toward the democratic vision of justice and equality." It should also be noted that our own Rev. Dr. Charles Gaines was present on the last day of the march to Montgomery.

Johnson had invited King to attend the joint session of Congress to introduce the Voting Rights Act which took place 4 days after Reeb's death. King refused, opting instead to offer Reeb's eulogy in Brown Chapel in Selma that same day. What follows is an abridged version of this profound and eloquent tribute to Reeb. It had almost disappeared from public awareness, but has recently resurfaced. His words also speak to this moment in our nation's history, when violence and justice, struggle and compassion, yet again beacon for our united attention.

"A Witness to the Truth" by M.L.King,Jr.

And if he should die,

Take his body, and cut it into little stars.

He will make the face of heaven so fine

That all the world will be in love with light. Shakespeare

These beautiful words from Romeo and Juliet so eloquently describe the radiant life of James Reeb. He entered the stage of history 38 years ago, and in the brief years that he was privileged to act on this mortal stage, he played his part exceedingly well, James Reeb was martyred in the Judeo-Christian faith that all me are brothers. His death was a result of a sensitive religious spirit. His crime that he dared to live his faith; he placed himself alongside the disinherited black brethren of this community.

The world is aroused over the murder of James Reeb for he symbolizes the forces of good will in our nation. He demonstrated the conscience of the nation. He was an attorney for the defense of the innocent in the court of world opinion. He was a witness to the truth that men of different races and classes might live, eat, and work together as brothers.

James Reeb could not be accused of being only concerned about justice for Negroes away from home. He and his family live in Roxbury, MA, a predominantly Negro community. They devoted their lives to aiding families in low-income housing areas. Again, we must ask the question: Why must good men die doing good? "O Jerusalem, why did you murder the prophets and persecute those who come to preach your salvation?" So the Rev. James Reeb has something to say to all of us in his death.

Naturally, we are compelled to ask the question, who killed James Reeb? The answer is simple and rather limited, when we think of the who. He was murdered by a few sick, demented, and misguided men who have the strange notion that you express dissent through murder. There is another haunting, poignant, desperate question we are forced to ask this afternoon, that I asked a few days ago when we funeralized James Jackson. It is the question, What killed James Reeb? When we move from the who to the what, the blame is wide and the responsibility grows.

James Reeb was murdered by the indifference of every minister of the gospel who has remained silent behind the safe security of stained glass windows. He was murdered by the irrelevancy of a church that will stand amid social evil and serve as a taillight rather than a headlight, an echo rather than a voice. He was murdered by the brutality of every sheriff and law enforcement agent who practices lawlessness in the name of the law. He was murdered by the timidity of a federal government that can spend millions of dollars a day to keep troops in South Vietnam, yet cannot protect the lives of its own citizens seeking constitutional rights. Yes, he was even murdered by the cowardice of every Negro who tacitly accepts the evil system of segregation, who stands on the sidelines in the midst of a mighty struggle for justice.

So in his death, James Reeb says something to each of us, black and white alike-says that we must substitute courage for caution, says to us that we must be concerned not merely about who murdered him, but about the system, the way of life, the philosophy which produced the murder. His death says to us that we must work passionately, unrelentingly, to make the American dream a reality, so he did not die in vain.

God still has a way of bringing out evil. History has proven over and over again that unmerited suffering is redemptive. The innocent blood of this fine servant of God may well serve as the redemptive force that will bring new light to the dark state. This tragic death may lead our nation to substitute aristocracy of character for aristocracy of color. James Reeb may cause the whole citizenry of Alabama to transform the negative extremes of a dark past into the positive extremes of a bright future. Indeed, this tragic event may cause the white South to come to terms with its conscience.

So in spite of the darkness of this hour, we must not despair. As preceding speakers have said so eloquently, we must not become bitter nor must we harbor the desire to retaliate with violence; we must not lose faith in our white brothers who happen to be misguided. Somehow we must still believe that the most misguided among them will learn to respect the dignity and worth of ALL human personalities (sound familiar to you UU's?--- this is basically our First Principle).

One day the history of this great period of social change will be written in all of its completeness. On that bright day our nation will recognize its real heroes. They will be thousands of dedicated men and women with a noble sense of purpose that enables them to face fury and hostile mobs with the agonizing loneliness that characterizes the life of the pioneers. They will be faceless, anonymous, relentless young people, black and white, who have temporarily left behind the towers of learning to storm the barricades of violence. They will be old, oppressed, battered Negro women, symbolized in a 72-year-old Negro woman in Montgomery, Alabama, who rose up with a sense of dignity, and with the people decided not to ride the segregated busses; who responded with ungrammatical profundity to one who inquired about her weariness, "My feets is tired, but my soul is rested." They will be ministers of the gospel, priests, rabbis, and nuns, who are willing to march for freedom, to go to jail for conscience' sake. One day the South will know from these dedicated children of God courageously protesting segregation, they were in reality standing up for the best in the American dream, standing up with the most sacred values in our Judeo-Christian heritage, thereby carrying our whole nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding Fathers in the formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. When the glorious story is written, the name of James Reeb will stand as a shining example of manhood at its best……………

(In the interest of time, I will cut out a fair amount of the eulogy and just include the following……….But, I strongly recommend you Google and read the entire remarkable document which demonstrates both the full depth of King's command of the English language AND the great esteem with which he held James Reeb as well as the utmost importance Reeb's murder was to the movement at just the right time.)

………I say, in conclusion, the greatest tribute that we can play to James Reeb this afternoon is to continue the work he so nobly started but could not finish because his life---like the Schubert "Unfinished Symphony"-- was cut off at an early age. We have the challenge and charge to continue. We must work right here in Alabama, and all over the USA, till men everywhere will respect the dignity and worth of all personalities. We must work with all our hearts to establish a society where men will believe that "out of one blood God made all men to dwell upon the face of the earth." "Justice will roll down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream." We must work right here, where "every valley shall be exalted, every mountain and hill shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain and the crooked places straight.

The glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together." We must work to make the Declaration of Independence real in our everyday lives.

If we will do this, we will be able- right here in Alabama, right here in the deep south, right here in the USA- to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. We will be able to speed up the day when ALL of God's children, black men, and white men, Jews, Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands in unity and brotherhood to bring about the bright day of the brotherhood of man under the guidance of the fatherhood of God.

So we thank God for the life of James Reeb. We thank God for his goodness. We thank God that he was willing to lay down his life in order to redeem the soul of our nation. So I say-as Horatio said as he stood over the dead body of Hamlet- "Good night sweet prince: may the flight of angles take thee to thy eternal rest."

My own history of involvement in the Civil Rights Movement started in 1967 when my new land lord in Oklahoma City turned out to be a black female with long standing membership in the Urban League (headed by another UU). She was VERY involved with local protests and actions on behalf The Movement and I became as actively involved as my crushing schedule at Medical school would permit. When they plant me in the VA cemetery, the head stone will say: His proudest achievement in life was his active part in the Civil Rights Struggle" It was one of those very few moments in life when the choice was a stark right versus wrong. A Genuine Black versus White choice. Barb and I became UU's in 1968 and we both continued with the movement. I can remember one time we were at a prayer protest on the State Capitol steps that didn't have a permit. Had we been arrested, we could have been expelled from graduate school-especially me as I was an out of state student. We were completely surrounded by Oklahoma State Troopers and one behind us was slapping his nightstick in his hand when I heard him say to his partner-"I can't wait till the governor let's us lose on these Nigger Lovers". Thank God, the governor never did.

3 years ago, Barb and I took the first 8 day "Civil Rights Tour of the South" organized by UU minister and Selma March survivor Rev. Dr. Gordon Gibson and his wife Judy. He was minister of our Jackson, MS UU church taking over after the previous minister had been shot and told if he didn't leave the state he would be killed. This tour is now given yearly by Meadville-Lombard UU Seminary as a course. We were exposed to the actual people that partook in these historic events at the places they occurred. These people are now succumbing to the inevitability or humankind's mortality and slow deterioration before the inevitable end. I have included in the Order of service a blurb and phone # you can contact to go on this unique exposure to living history. There is also another similar tour leaving from Atlanta sponsored by the UUSC which you can contact via the UUA. Barb and I both highly recommend either of these to any or you. Time is of the essence….

As Carl Shulz has said:

"If you want to be free, there is but one way; it is to guarantee an equally full measure of liberty to all your neighbors. There is no other."

Blessed Be and Amen