General Assembly, 1969
Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester UU Church
February 19, 2023
“I’m not saying that a demonstration is going to solve the problems…It’s going to take something much more than a demonstration, but at least the demonstration calls attention to it; at least the demonstration creates a kind of constructive crisis that causes a community to see the problem…The church must support this kind of demonstration.” (Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., “Don’t Sleep Through the Revolution,” the 1966 Ware Lecture, May 18, 1966.)
It was a time of demonstrations – of strikes – of marches. It made many people, especially people in power, very uncomfortable. And of course, that was the point: to call attention to a problem, to finally speak, not just with voices, but by using bodies as well, speaking with their feet. Because as Frederick Douglass put it so eloquently in a speech in 1857, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” (West India Emancipation speech, August 3, 1857.)
The Charleston South Carolina hospital strike that Shep has brought to us this morning with his tape recording was a two-month effort to get the Medical College Hospital to recognize that African-American employees were being paid lower wages, were experiencing verbal abuse and racial slurs, and were forced to segregate during breaks; for example, having to eat in boiler rooms or outdoors. Twelve African American employees asked to meet with the president of the hospital, and were promptly fired. African-American hospital workers walked off the job, and the strike lasted for two months. By late spring, the National Guard and armored vehicles arrived on the scene, and ultimately over 1000 people were arrested. Coretta Scott King, widowed for just a year, arrived and led a march, and the city began to realize that the tourism industry was losing revenue. Meanwhile, a federal investigation into the charges of discrimination resulted in 37 reports of discrimination, and the federal government threatened to withhold $12 million in funding from the hospital. An agreement was reached at the end of June reinstating jobs and raising wages. The strike was considered a success. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1969_Charleston_hospital_strike#:~:text=The%20Charleston%20hospital%20strike%20was,of%20African%20American%20hospital%20workers.)
It was a time of marches, of demonstrations. Perhaps some of you remember participating in them. And the new Unitarian Universalist Association – all of 8 years old at the time – was not immune from demands for more power. We struggled to wake up in time for the revolution, to respond to the demands being made of us by our African-American members. And so today, here is our story, edited to its essence for the sake of clarity.
According to the Reverend Mark Morrison-Reed, it was the march from Selma to Montgomery that marked a dramatic change in involvement in the Civil Rights movement for Unitarian Universalists. Prior to that we had never been in the forefront of the movement. The numbers of African-Americans in our congregations were small, and there had never been concerted efforts to grow their numbers, or to encourage Black clergy or leaders into powerful roles. Black people were welcome to join our churches, but on our terms, not on theirs. And so, in this time of national crisis, in the fall of 1967 a group of 150 UU’s, 37 of them Black, met at an Emergency Conference on the UU Response to the Black Rebellion. They began their work all together, but soon the Black attendees chose to caucus among themselves. Our of their meetings arose the Black Unitarian Universalist Caucus (BUUC). And the BUUC issued a demand: that the UUA create a Black Affairs Council and fund it with one million dollars over the next four years to be used to fund activities among the Black community. This was presented as non-negotiable.
Now, right away the UUA began to run into trouble. There was tremendous energy and support in favor of Black empowerment at the time, in the wake of the Selma to Montgomery march. And on the other hand, we as a denomination are devoted to our principle of the right of democratic process. This was a huge conundrum. To vote for the funding was to vote against our process. It was enough to make any good UU’s head explode.
The UUA Board of Trustees rejected the BUUC’s demand.
The next winter, in February of 1968, a National Conference of Black UU’s was held in Chicago, which created the Black Affairs Council. The BAC was invited to accept affiliate status with the UUA.
Then, of course, in less than two months Dr. King was assassinated. Emotions and tensions at the 1968 General Assembly were running very high, and GA delegates voted to fully fund the Black Affairs Council for $1 million over four years. The ink was barely dry on this vote when it was discovered that the UUA’s reserve funds were practically depleted. There was very little money to give the BAC. Remember, the UUA was a scant seven years old at this point. The UUA Board voted to fund the first $250,000, but no money after that. Tensions flared.
And that brings us to General Assembly of 1969, here in Boston. Tensions flared again when the BUUC realized that funding of the Black Affairs Council was scheduled last on the GA’s business agenda. And so they stepped forward, and commandeered the microphones. The agenda was brought to a standstill, but when business resumed the delegates rejected the demand to deal with funding BAC. And then the Black delegates to GA and their supporters walked out of General Assembly. The Black Power movement was brought right into the center of Unitarian Universalism.
Those who walked out ended up gathering at the Arlington Street Church down the street, led by its minister, the Reverend Jack Mendelson. And eventually, after intense negotiations, they were brought back together.
Immediately following GA the UUA had to cut $1 million out of its budget in order to stay solvent, which was 40% of the annual budget at the time. They tried to honor the payments to the Black Affairs Council by spreading them over five years, but in 1970 General Assembly voted to stop the payments. As a result, many Black UU’s left the denomination, including, for a time, eventual UUA president William Sinkford. At a time full of grief over Dr. King’s death, and rising racial tension, the age-old message of “Wait; wait until the right time; we’ll make it up to you when we have the money” simply was not an adequate response. And of course, there was urgency for Black folks in focusing their attention on activism within the Black community.
We’ve been largely stuck since 1969. This overwhelmingly European-American denomination really has not known how to move forward, how to make amends, how to rebuild trust. And as Mark Morrison-Reed pointed out in his book Darkening the Doorways, there were no truly bad actors here. He calls what happened in 1968 and 1969 a tragedy – people doing the best they could, and coming up short. We have had to live with that failure. We have had to grapple with the understanding that despite good intentions, we were not able to live into the demands of the time for shared power. And everyone retreated. And became stuck.
There have been attempts over the years to move forward as an institution, to live into our Principles and our values. But it is really only in the past seven years that sustained change has taken place. Two events drove change. First, following the killings of Trayvon Martin in 2012 and Michael Brown in 2014, the Movement for Black Lives was created. Out of that has emerged Black Lives of Unitarian Universalism, which is a non-profit corporation that works to create spiritual community and organizing assistance for Black people. BLUU has been funding largely through contributions from the UUA and member congregations.
And then, secondly, in 2017 the UUA experienced a hiring crisis, when we were forced to confront that our hiring practices did more to reinforce white supremacy culture than to further the full inclusion of people of color in our boardrooms, our pulpits, and our religious education classrooms. UUA staff took on the challenge of leveling the playing field, of making sure that qualified candidates of color were brought into positions of authority within the UUA. The change is visible: when you attend General Assembly now, for example, you see many more people of color not only in the room, but at the podium. We look very different.
We did not become unstuck overnight, nor without a great deal of pain and soul-searching. We have had to grapple with the understanding that our UUA participated in practices that perpetuated systemic racism. That is a terribly difficult thing for well-meaning white liberals to confront. We have had to change hiring policies, had to experience many resignations and retirements. And more change is coming.
Over the past couple of years there has been a strong movement to add an 8th principle to our familiar 7. This principle would call us to create Beloved Community by dismantling racism and oppression. It’s been surprisingly controversial. And now, the UUA is recommending a total revision of Article 2 of our Association’s Bylaws. Article 2 is our Covenant, and it contains our purposes and principles. It was last revised in 1987. A new Article 2 will expand our vision of Beloved Community, and if adopted will set forth our values including Justice, Transformation, and Equity, grounded in our core value of Love. The language in the draft Article 2 includes these words:
“Love is the power that holds us together and is at the center of our shared values. We are accountable to one another for doing the work of living our shared values through the spiritual discipline of Love.”
You might have heard me comment over the years that my chief concern with our 7 UU principles is that they never mention love. A new Article 2 changes everything.
My friends, we Unitarian Universalists have carried a burden of failure to meet a moment for over 50 years now. This has held us in place, slowed us down from being truly anti-racist and anti-oppressive. We have always called ourselves a Living Tradition, and in many ways we have continued to grow and evolve, especially spiritually. But there has always been this additional demand: to live into our values expressed by our 7 Principles: the inherent worth and dignity of all people, and justice, equity and compassion in human relations, to name just two. We are now being called to step beyond those Principles, to reach for new values. To finally, after all these years, name Love as our center.
In the coming months, I will be offering more information about Article 2, and what it means for Unitarian Universalism. But here today, we needed to begin this work by returning to 1969, to that tumultuous era, to see where we went wrong, and how we are still working to set ourselves on the right path. We begin with that, with a look back at our own history. May we move forward now, unstuck at last, to do the work that history demands of us. Let us not forget the words of Martin Luther King, who told us in 1966 that churches needed to be awake for the revolution.
Amen.
Blessed Be.
