Those in the Shadows ©
Reverend Janet Parsons
Gloucester UU Church
January 15, 2023
Those “honor-driven activists.” We ‘find memory beneath their doors, and taste the blessings of their midwifery.’ (Sonia Sanchez, “Progress Report”)
Today we pause and look back, and pay our respects to all those honor-driven activists, the many who laid the groundwork long before the public events of the Civil Rights Movement. While we always honor Dr. Martin Luther King, and always will, for his vision and inspiration and courage, we know that Dr. King could never have accomplished all that he did without a tremendous amount of help.
And so today we are going to tell the stories of some of the people who remained in Dr. King’s shadow. And you probably have heard of most of them, but it can be surprising to discover just how important they were, and also, to look honestly at the forces of society that kept the spotlight from shining on them.
And as we name these people whose names can easily be forgotten, we also must name the need, in every era, in every country, for the people who show up, who make small contributions, because:
“it starts when you say We and know who you mean,
and each day you mean one more.”
Ella Baker
She was raised in rural North Carolina, and grew up hearing the stories her grandmother told about life as an enslaved person. One story that stood out for the young girl was that of how her grandmother was beaten and whipped for refusing to marry the man that her enslaver had chosen for her.
She was Ella Baker, and from that beginning she went on to graduate as the valedictorian from Shaw College in Raleigh. Ella’s early career took her to work for the young NAACP, beginning in the late 1930’s, and into voter registration efforts throughout the South. The seeds of the Civil Rights movement were being planted and watered by all the networks and relationships that people like Ms. Baker created, unseen, fully 20 years before the Montgomery bus boycott.
Pat: ”You didn’t see me on television, you didn’t see news stories about me. The kind of role that I tried to play was to pick up pieces or put together pieces out of which I hoped organization might come. My theory is, strong people don’t need strong leaders.”
Grass-roots organizing, with 20 years of effort, and more. In 1956, the Black churches began to plan a religious-based movement for racial justice, to be led by clergy. The name they chose was the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Their goal was to register black voters in the South. The effort languished, until Dr. King was convinced by others to hire Ms. Baker to lead the organization and the voting rights effort. Dr. King was apparently very reluctant. He was concerned that Ms. Baker could not be effective, because she was neither a minister, nor a man. But as Taylor Branch recounts in his history of the Civil Rights Movement, Parting the Waters, Ella Baker arrived in Atlanta and began without even a telephone or a typewriter. A month later she had organized 21 events to kick off the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s voter drive.
Despite this clear organizational prowess, Ella Baker was never hired permanently. She was named as an ‘acting’ director. Eventually a male minister was hired as an Executive Director. When he proved ineffective, Ella was returned, once again, as an ‘interim’ director, until she was once again replaced by a man in 1960. Ella then went on to play an important role in the founding of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, (SNCC), which grew to play an important part in actions such as the marches from Selma to Montgomery. Often the late John Lewis’s name is mentioned in recounting the work of SNCC. But who ever mentions Ella Baker?
Bayard Rustin
Bayard Rustin was born in Pennsylvania in 1912, raised by his grandparents. His sense of himself was completely upended when he discovered at the age of 11 that one of his older sisters was in fact his mother. In high school, he played football, and once, while traveling to a game, the team stopped for a meal, and Mr. Rustin was refused service.
Pat: ”I sat there quite a long time,” he recalled years later, ”and was eventually thrown out bodily. From that point on, I had the conviction that I would not accept segregation.” (New York Times, obituary, August 25, 1987.)
Bayard Rustin played a role throughout the 1930’s and 1940’s with numerous organizations working for peace and justice. He became a Quaker and was primarily motivated by pacifism. He led a colorful life, somewhat itinerant, as he moved between organizations and movements. When he met Martin Luther King during the Montgomery bus boycott, he brought with him both a great deal of experience in leading movements, as well as a broad worldview based on his travels over the years. He was strongly influenced by Mohandas Gandhi.
Pat: ”The principal factors which influenced my life are 1) nonviolent tactics; 2) constitutional means; 3) democratic procedures; 4) respect for human personality; 5) a belief that all people are one.” — Bayard Rustin.
Bayard Rustin organized the first Freedom Ride, in 1947, and also organized the 1963 March on Washington. Yet he was kept carefully in the background because he was a gay man. This was open knowledge in some circles, and in fact, J. Edgar Hoover had the FBI surveilling Rustin and tried to catch him in possibly compromising situations with Martin Luther King. And so, Rustin was marginalized, pushed out of the center, despite his brilliance, his skills, and his education and knowledge. He lived a shadowed life, both influential and limited, both impactful and hidden.
Juanita Abernathy
Pat: “Ralph, they have bombed our home. But I am all right and so is the baby.” (Parting the Waters, Taylor Branch, p. 199.)
In the early morning hours of January 10, 1957, bombs began to explode in Montgomery, Alabama. By morning, four black churches and two homes had been bombed. One of those homes was that of Reverend Ralph Abernathy, and his wife Juanita. Ralph Abernathy was staying at the King home in Atlanta, and was awakened at 2:30 a.m. by a phone call from his badly shaken wife.
The late Representative John Lewis described Juanita Abernathy as ‘his sister on the front lines.’ We have all heard often about the Montgomery bus boycott, but who organized it? According to her obituary, Mrs. Abernathy’s son reminisced that she was instrumental in typing up flyers to hand out to urge Black residents to boycott the buses. “She got out her trusty Royal typewriter from college and carbon paper,” her son said. “She said that if she typed with a heavy hand, she could make seven copies at once.” Starting from there, Mrs. Abernathy also took on organizing complicated car pools to help people get to and from work without using the bus system. Apparently funeral homes donated the use of their vehicles to ferry people around the city.
Raised in a farming family in Alabama, Juanita attended college and taught high school business courses. Once the family moved to Atlanta, she was instrumental, along with the Kings, in working to desegregate the public schools there.
Following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Juanita Abernathy stepped back from the Civil Rights movement. Instead, she rose high in the Mary Kay cosmetic company, including being awarded pink Cadillacs. Still, she maintained her activism. In 1972 she led a peace march for women in Northern Ireland, and was shot at with rubber bullets. She lived long enough to campaign for Barack Obama, and to attend his first inauguration.
And yet, we hear so little of her contributions. The hard work of organizing the bus boycott, pounding on a typewriter at night at the kitchen table in Montgomery. The sense of mission that enabled her to continue to contribute to the work, despite death threats and bombs. “I am all right, and so is the baby.” And there was another baby on the way.
Pat: “It goes on one at a time,
it starts when you care to act,
it starts when you do it again and they said no,
it starts when you say We and know who you mean,
and each day you mean one more.”
Coretta Scott King
When she was born, she was delivered at home, by her great-grandmother, who had been born into slavery. Though her parents were landowners, they were not wealthy, and the family, including the children, picked cotton to earn extra money.
Despite that humble beginning, Coretta Scott King rose to international prominence. She studied singing at the New England Conservatory, and was introduced to Martin while he was pursuing his doctorate at Boston University. Their relationship and their ties to Boston were honored just the other day by the unveiling of a new statue, named “Embrace”, dedicated to them.
But in the early days of the Civil Rights movement, Coretta Scott King was expected to be simply a minister’s wife, a mother and housewife. Dr. King was very traditional, and their courtship at times proceeded more like a job interview. She had to prove that she could cook to his liking, and she was pressed to say whether she could be polite to the older and less educated members of a congregation. Somehow she not only passed all these tests, but didn’t flee the scene, and the Kings went on to have four children, even as the Civil Rights movement burst forth around them.
Pat: “Martin was a very strong person, and in many ways had very traditional ideas about women,” (Mrs. King) told The New York Times Magazine in 1972.
She added: “He’d say, ‘I have no choice, I have to do this, but you haven’t been called.’ And I said, ‘Can’t you understand? You know I have an urge to serve just like you have.’ “
And serve she did: through death threats, attempts on her husband’s life, including a stabbing, and a bombing of their home, when their first child was 10 weeks old.
It was after Dr. King’s assassination in 1968 that Coretta Scott King emerged as a leader. She was called, and she found her voice. And she worked tirelessly for the rest of her life for justice, not just in the United States, but internationally as well. Just two months after King’s death she appeared at the Poor People’s Campaign rally in Washington, and delivered a speech. She was instrumental in creating the national holiday that we celebrate tomorrow. And she created the King Center for Non-Violent Change to continue his work and legacy.
Pat: “I didn’t learn my commitment from Martin,” she told an interviewer. “We just converged at a certain time.”
Over time, Coretta Scott King broadened her husband’s vision, and took up many causes, including justice for women and for LGBTQ people. She actively opposed apartheid and traveled to South Africa.
Pat: “I still hear people say that I should not be talking about the rights of lesbian and gay people, and I should stick to the issue of racial justice. … But I hasten to remind them that Martin Luther King, Jr., said, ‘Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.’ … I appeal to everyone who believes in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, dream to make room at the table of brotherhood and sisterhood for lesbian and gay people.” (Wikipedia)
Out from the shadows she stepped, first tentatively, and then more frequently and more boldly, until her life was devoted, not just to carrying on her husband’s work, but to expanding it beyond his vision.
Today, from the shadows, have emerged a small number of heroes, talented and committed people who served the Civil Rights movement in ways large and small, but were too often hidden from view. They were kept from the center of the movement by the rampant sexism and the homophobia of the time. But like the movement they served, they could not be held back, held in the shadows, but found their ways into the center, valued and valuable, honored in the end.
“What does honor taste like?
Does honor have a long memory?
What is the color of honor? …
I turn the corner of these honor-driven activists,
Find memory beneath their doors,
Taste the blessings of their midwifery,
Their miracle songs giving birth to un-ghosted wounds,
Their words coming to us glittering like silver stars,
And I catch them in mid-flight,
Swallow them whole…” (Sonia Sanchez, “Progress Report”)
Today we honor these heroes. We honor them, and we name the need for all of them, and for all of us, throughout history, throughout all the movements for peace and justice. There is need for us all. Where are we in the movement toward justice?
It starts when we say I.
