Selma and UU

Chris Jimmerson
January 18, 2015

As we as UUs continue the struggle for racial justice, it is important that we know from whence we come.

Call to Worship
Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

It really boils down to this: that all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. We are made to live together because of the interrelated structure of reality. This is the way our universe is structured, this is its interrelated quality.

Reading
Rev Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., from his Eulogy for Rev. James Reeb

So I can say to you this afternoon, my friends, that in spite of the tensions and uncertainties of this period, something profoundly meaningful is taking place. Old systems of exploitation and oppression are passing away. Out of the wombs of a frail world, new systems of justice and equality are being born. Doors of opportunity are gradually being opened. Those at the bottom of society, shirtless and barefoot people of the land, are developing a new sense of somebody-ness, carving a tunnel of hope through the dark mountain of despair. “People who stand in darkness have seen a great light.” Here and there an individual or group dares to love and rises to the majestic heights of moral maturity.

Sermon

Bloody Sunday, March 7, 1965, Selma, Alabama. In reaction to the footage you just watched being broadcast on the evening news, people across America were horrified. Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Junior dispatched a telegram calling on clergy of all faiths to join him in the struggle in Selma.

And religious people, both clergy and lay people, from all around the country responded. They went to Selma, and they stood in witness and solidarity, following the leadership of the African Americans in whose struggle they had joined. Eventually, 500 Unitarian Universalist lay people and 250 of our ministers would march with Dr. King.

And doing so changed them. It transformed them.

As Rev. Mark Morrison-Reed puts it in his new book, The Selma Awakening, they experienced in a visceral, emotional way the melding of their espoused religious values with their values in practice.

Rev. James Reeb was among the first Unitarian Universalist ministers to arrive in Selma, and he participated in the next March across that very same bridge you saw in the opening video. This time, Dr. King himself led the march. They started from the Selma African Methodist Episcopal Brown Chapel where they had gathered. When they reached the other side of the bridge, they kneeled to pray, and then Dr. King surprised everyone by leading them back to the chapel. He later explained that a judge had temporarily put a restraining order on the march, and that he feared for the lives of his followers if they continued the march without a court order to protect them. He pleaded with those gathered to stay a few days until the judge might rule in favor of allowing the march to go forward. Most of them did.

That evening, Reeb and two other UU ministers, Orloff Miller and Clark Olsen, had dined at Walker’s Cafe, an African American establishment because they had been told wouldn’t be safe at a whites only restaurant. As they left the cafe to walk back to Brown Chapel, they were attacked by a group of four or five white locals, at least one of whom was carrying a large club of some kind. He struck James Reeb on the head with it, knocking him to the ground. Eventually, they had all three ministers on the ground, kicking them and screaming, “You want to know what it’s like to be a nigger around here?”

Soon afterwards, James Reeb fell into an unconscious state from which he never awoke. Two days later, on March 11, 1965, Marie Reeb, his wife, made the painful and difficult decision to turn off the artificial support that was the only thing keeping his body alive.

The murder of this white minister galvanized white Americans and Unitarian Universalists even further. It did so in a way that the shooting of Jimmy Lee Jackson, the young black man who had been shot by an Alabama state trooper a few days earlier had not.

President Lyndon Johnson called Reeb’s widow. The Unitarian Universalist Association board adjourned a meeting it was holding so board members could journey to Selma to attend Reeb’s memorial service held at Brown Chapel on March 15. Dr. King delivered the eulogy.

That same evening, President Johnson appeared before a joint session of Congress and introduced the bill that would in a few months become the Voting Rights Act. In doing so, he spoke of the suffering endured by the peaceful protestors in Selma. He said, “Many were brutally assaulted, one good man, a man of God, was killed.”

A few days later, the judge ruled the march could go forward and ordered government protection for it. On March 21 the march began, protected by troops sent by President Johnson.

No doubt, Dr. King’s and his leadership’s organizing and rhetorical skills were the primary factors that brought about these changes. Still there is an irony in the fact that, as Rev. Bill Sinkford, former president of the Unitarian Universalist Association has written, ” …racism was at work even in the way the victory in Selma was achieved. The death of Jimmy Lee Jackson, a black man, did not receive widespread press attention. It did not result in hundreds of white clergy coming to stand in solidarity. It did not produce support from the federal government or the president. It took the death of James Reeb, a white man, to do that”.

In The Selma Awakening, Mark Morrison-Reed notes that the clergy and the lay folks who had been viscerally and emotionally awakened by their experiences in Selma returned to churches and a religious denomination ill prepared to move beyond an intellectual commitment to religious values such as equal opportunity, integration and facial justice, all rooted in a belief in universal brotherhood (such was the male-centered language of their time).

They returned to encounter fellow Unitarian Universalists who could not understand what those who had gone to Selma now did – that true integration could not entail assimilation – that what was needed was a melding among equals, and that this required black empowerment. A few years, what has become known as the “Black Empowerment Controversy” would erupt within Unitarian Universalism. And that could be and has been the topic for a whole other sermon.

Reed notes that for both the Universalists and the Unitarians before the merger, as well as after they merged in 1961, there was a disconnect between these espoused religious values and their values in practice. He cites the following as evidence of this dichotomy:

– Worship devoid of hymns and liturgy reflecting the African American experience and their desire for more emotive, embodied spirituality.

– Religious education materials that very rarely reflected African Americans at all.

– Resistance to training, fellowshipping and calling African American ministers.

– Congregations and fellowships that tended to be fervidly intellectual, individualistic, and humanistic. And that most often located themselves in suburban areas, away from black population centers – often at the end of dead end streets where it would be hard for anyone not specifically invited to find them.

– Very few African Americans serving on governing bodies, both at the denominational and individual church levels.

And, yes, some of these continue to be a struggle for us. Though we have made great strides, our march out of Selma continues even today.

Another Unitarian Universalist also did not come back from Selma. However, she was not honored or lionized in the way that James Reeb was. For many years her story was rarely if ever told, because (a) she was a woman and (b) she was a woman. That this is so is another example of values in practice failing to uphold our espoused values.

Viola Liuzzo was a member of the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Detroit and worked with the NAACP. She was married and had five children. She answered the call to Selma by getting in her car and driving there against the objections of her family.

On the day that the march triumphantly entered Montgomery to end in a joyous rally at the Alabama state capital, she was helping by driving marchers back to Selma. On a return trip to Montgomery, a car full of Ku Klux Klansmen pulled up beside her and fired shots directly at her, hitting her twice in the head, killing her instantly. Her car careened into a ditch and came to a stop when it struck a fence.

One of her sons later spoke of how his fathers hair turned from black to gray seemingly overnight; of how, after her death, her family endured crosses being burnt in their front yard; of how he and his siblings were beaten up at school and told their mother deserved what she got because, as a white woman, she had no business being there in the first place.

I am pleased to say that today, she is honored in a memorial at our new Unitarian Universalist headquarters building, alongside the males who also died at Selma.

All white juries in Alabama acquitted the Klansmen who killed Viola Liuzzo of murder charges.

Likewise, all white juries acquitted the men who murdered James Reeb.

A grand jury failed to even indict the state trooper who murdered Jimmy Lee Jackson. In 2007, charges against the trooper, James Fowler, were revived. He pled guilty to manslaughter and spent a whole five months in jail.

And these failures within our criminal justice system seem a little too much like what we have seen across our country in the past months. I want to show you another video.

Not 1965 Alabama. 2014, the streets of cities across America. And though much HAS changed, still, we live in a time when the prosecutor in the Michael Brown shooting allows grand jury testimony from an eyewitness that’s key to backing up the story of the officer who shot him, even though the prosecutor knows that the witness has made racist statements and likely was not even at the site of the shooting when it occurred. And there was no indictment.

We live in a time when the coroner rules Eric Garner’s death a homicide, and yet a grand jury fails to indict the officer we have all seen holding Garner in a chokehold as he cries, “I can’t breathe”.

We live in a time when police shoot and kill a 12 year old African American boy for holding a pellet gun in a city park, and a 22 year old African American young man for holding a toy rifle in a Walmart, and yet white, open carry advocates can roam the aisles of our stores and parade through our streets carrying actual semi-automatic weapons and absolutely nothing happens to them.

We live in a time when even son1e peaceful protests have been met with military equipment, billy clubs and tear gas.

We live in a time where our criminal justice system is much more likely to search, arrest, charge, convict and sentence to prison people of color than white people who commit the very same crimes. Then, once convicted of a felony, we live in a system that often prevents these same people of color from being able to access federal benefits, find employment and housing, and, yes, often bars them from voting.

We live in a time when the Supreme Court has gutted a key element of that very same Voting Rights Act that people in Selma struggled, suffered and sometimes died for.

We live in a time when states across the country are passing laws clearly intended to disproportionately prevent people of color from voting.

We live in a time when lynching and Jim Crow have never completely left us. They’ve just morphed into new institutional forms.

I think that we Unitarian Universalists, we are receiving telegrams beckoning us to rejoin and redouble our efforts in the struggle again. And like those Unitarian Universalists that went to Selma, we are being called to show up, to put our espoused religious values into living practice. I believe this congregation has the means and a mission that requires us to do so.

On Sunday, March 8 of this year, Unitarian Universalists from around the country will cross that bridge in Selma again to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the original march. I hope a sizable contingent from this church will be able to be with them.

If you are not already participating, the church has a number of social action and interfaith activities related to combatting racism. I hope you’ll consider visiting the social action table today to find out how you can get involved.

Over the coming months, we will have several opportunities to participate in religious education and discussions about multiculturalism and working against racism and oppression. Please, join in!

I believe that ultimately we are called to do this because engaging together as allies in the struggle for racial equity is part of how we, all of us, can be transformed. Systems of oppression and silos of “otherness” prevent us all from realizing our full human potentiality. Breaking them down is how we can know fully the interconnectedness and love and unbridled community that are luring us toward a world that is more life giving and loving. It is how we reach for our greatest creative possibilities.

Benediction

“We are bound together in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a singly garment of destiny”.

Martin Luther King’s words still ring true and powerful today. And that means that even as we leave this sanctuary today, our work together as a beloved community goes on as we do justice that can transform both the lives of others and our own.

Likewise, the courage, community and compassion we experience here go with us also.

Go in peace. Go in love. Blessed be.

Podcasts of this and other sermons are also available for free on iTunes. You can find them here.

Most sermons delivered at the First UU Church of Austin during the past 15 years are available online through this website. You will find links to them in the right sidebar menu labeled Sermons. The Indexes link leads to tables of all sermons for each year listed by date (newest to oldest) with topic and speaker. Click on the topic to go to a sermon.