“The Longest March”
Rev. Megan Lloyd Joiner
Unitarian Society of New Haven
March 24, 2019
Reading: excerpts from “Our God Is Marching On” Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Our reading this morning is comprised of excerpts from Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s address titled “Our God is Marching On,” delivered on the steps of the capitol building in Montgomery Alabama on March 25, 1965.
…to all of the freedom-loving people who have assembled here this afternoon from all over our nation and from all over the world: Last Sunday, more than eight thousand of us started on a mighty walk from Selma, Alabama. We have walked through desolate valleys and across the trying hills. We have walked on meandering highways and rested our bodies on rocky byways. Some of our faces are burned from the outpourings of the sweltering sun. Some have literally slept in the mud. We have been drenched by the rains. Our bodies are tired and our feet are somewhat sore.
…
They told us we wouldn’t get here. And there were those who said that we would get here only over their dead bodies, but all the world today knows that we are here and we are standing before the forces of power in the state of Alabama saying, “We ain’t goin’ let nobody turn us around.”
…
We are on the move now. The burning of our churches will not deter us. The bombing of our homes will not dissuade us. We are on the move now. The beating and killing of our clergymen and young people will not divert us. We are on the move now. The wanton release of their known murderers would not discourage us. We are on the move now. Like an idea whose time has come, not even the marching of mighty armies can halt us. We are moving to the land of freedom.
Let us therefore continue our triumphant march to the realization of the American dream. Let us march on segregated housing until every ghetto or social and economic depression dissolves, and Negroes and whites live side by side in decent, safe, and sanitary housing. Let us march on segregated schools until every vestige of segregated and inferior education becomes a thing of the past, and Negroes and whites study side-by-side in the socially-healing context of the classroom.
Let us march on poverty until no American parent has to skip a meal so that their children may eat. March on poverty until no starved man walks the streets of our cities and towns in search of jobs that do not exist. Let us march on poverty until wrinkled stomachs in Mississippi are filled, and the idle industries of Appalachia are realized and revitalized, and broken lives in sweltering ghettos are mended and remolded.
Let us march on ballot boxes, march on ballot boxes until race-baiters disappear from the political arena.
Let us march on ballot boxes until the salient misdeeds of bloodthirsty mobs will be transformed into the calculated good deeds of orderly citizens.
…
Let us march on ballot boxes until we send to our city councils, state legislatures, and the United States Congress, men who will not fear to do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with thy God.
Let us march on ballot boxes until brotherhood becomes more than a meaningless word in an opening prayer, but the order of the day on every legislative agenda.
Let us march on ballot boxes until all…God’s children will be able to walk the earth in decency and honor.
…
The battle is in our hands. And we can answer with creative nonviolence the call to higher ground to which the new directions of our struggle summons us. The road ahead is not altogether a smooth one. There are no broad highways that lead us easily and inevitably to quick solutions. But we must keep going.
Sermon: “The Longest March”
We must keep going.
It actually breaks my heart to hear the words of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. this morning, 54 years (nearly to the day) after he spoke them.
It breaks my heart because he could have spoken them earlier this week and they would have been as relevant and true and just as damning of the powers that be.
“Let us march on ballot boxes until race-baiters disappear from the political arena.”
We have a long way to go.
In many ways, racism has changed since 1965. But in many other ways, it has gone underground. It resurfaces with remarkable regularity and each time we are outraged and shocked.
But should we be?
White supremacists marching in Charlottesville, VA in 2017 or schools in the same town having to close this week because of a threat of “ethnic cleansing” via school shooting.
A white woman in East Haven spitting at a black couple and yelling racist slurs in front of her children in the supermarket.
White politicians around the world blaming Muslims for the horrific shooting in the mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.
Our president calling folks who cross the border from the South to seek asylum “invaders.”
These are examples of extreme racism that are easy to condemn from afar.
Easy to say: that’s not us. We would never act that way, say those things, hate like that.
We, Unitarian Universalists, have martyrs who were killed in Selma, for God’s sake. The “beating and killing of our clergymen” that King references is, in part, an allusion to the beating of James Reeb, a white Unitarian minister from Boston and his colleagues just after Bloody Sunday in 1965. Reeb died of his injuries on March 11 in a Birmingham hospital.
For the past fifty years, Unitarian Universalists have been telling the story of Reeb and Viola Luizzo, the white Unitarian woman who traveled to Selma from Michigan for the marches and was killed there by the KKK.
We honor their memory by telling their stories, as well we should, but at the same time, we run the risk of letting the stories of these two white people overshadow the sacrifices made by other marchers, by so many people of color during the Civil Rights Movement.
I’m thinking especially of Jimmy Lee Jackson, also a minister, also a civil rights activist, whose killing in Selma originally inspired the march from Selma to Montgomery.
When Reeb and Luizzo were killed, it was shocking to the nation that white people would be beaten and shot the way they were. It was in, so many ways, expected that black people would be.
Today we heard a first-hand history of the final leg of the march from Selma to Montgomery.
John shared his memory of that time, his response to King’s call, the experience of being spat upon and vilified, and the unity he felt standing arm and arm with other marchers of all races. He told us what it felt like to be a part of the movement, a part of that powerful moment.
The story of the march from Selma to Montgomery that led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act has become a sacred text for Unitarian Universalists, as has the Civil Rights Movement itself.
These stories have sustained us for decades. They have become part of our defining narrative.
They are vital to how we think of ourselves, of our faith, of our congregations and our lay people and our ministers. Because of our denomination’s involvement in the Civil Rights Movement – and, really, all the way back to Unitarian and Universalist involvement in the abolition movement as well, we think of ourselves as being on the right side of the history of race and racial conflict in this country.
We often forget that the lay people and ministers who committed themselves to abolition and civil rights were often shunned by their fellow Unitarian and Universalists. They were stripped of membership; lost their pulpits.
Instead, we lift up those who refused to be turned around and claim their dedication as our legacy. This is preferable, of course, if a little less than honest. We have, in a way, preserved in amber our positive involvement in these movements.
As definitive to our mission as this history has been, we need now to challenge ourselves to build on those stories, to transcend our own cannon, as it were.
Faced with the current racial climate in the United States and the world, we can no longer afford to remember the specks in the eyes of the racist white southerners of fifty years ago without examining and removing the logs of racial bias, prejudice, and racism from our own eyes.
We can no longer afford to point fingers toward others and declare that they are the problem without examining the structure and culture and practices of the institutions of which we are a part – including our congregations – and looking at the ways white supremacy shows up, unbidden and unexamined.
I’ve said this before, but again, we are not just talking about torch-bearing white supremacists when we define and discuss white supremacy. White supremacy is a pattern of behavior and cultural assumptions that stem from an understanding of white people as normative and people of color as deviant from that norm.
Robin D’Angelo, a white scholar of whiteness in America and author of White Fragility writes that race scholars “use the term [white supremacy] to refer to a socio-political economic system of domination based on racial categories that benefit those defined and perceived as white.”
“This system,” she says, “rests on the historical and current accumulation of structural power that privileges, centralizes, and elevates white people as a group.”
“White supremacy culture” is another way to talk about this.
“White supremacy culture is the idea (ideology) that white people and the ideas, thoughts, beliefs, and actions of white people are superior to People of Color and their ideas, thoughts, beliefs, and actions.”
We are fish swimming in the water of white supremacy. Many of us, most of us in this room, are white fish swimming in the water of white supremacy. We have been socialized in a society that considers white as “normal,” white as “central” and yes, even white as “superior.” And those cultural assumptions have been absorbed, most often unconsciously, into our bloodstream – whether we like it or not.
The first part of our work is understanding this fact – learning to see the water.
It is excruciatingly difficult for anyone, anywhere in the world, to “see” their own culture, let alone understand it. This is particularly true for those of us living in dominant culture whose identity matches what is considered “normal” or the “best way to be,” those of us who are white in a white-dominated culture, cis-gendered in a gender-normative culture, male in a male-dominated culture, the list goes on.
Allow me to demonstrate with a rather silly example:
Have you ever played “trains” with a little kid?
Well, how many chuggas?
How many chuggas do you say before the choo-choo?
I’m a two-chugga kind of gal.
A recent post on Facebook featured a two-chugga parent struggling with their child’s insistence that there were three chuggas and the child’s pre-school teacher’s insistence that there should be only one “chugga” before the “choo-choo.”
A blogger picked up on this and wrote a fabulous article about the ways that we are “awash in firm opinions we didn’t actually realize we had.”
We consider ourselves highly rational people, and often believe that we have chosen all our opinions – or arrived at them through a rational, highly-intellectual thought process.
But in fact, this author says, we are “surrounded by a whirlwind of subliminal opinions that have wormed their way into [our] judgment. There are things that seem right, and things that seem wrong to [us].”
This idea of unconscious opinions is pretty innocuous when we are talking about the number of chuggas before a choo-choo. Folks who have different opinions on harmless things don’t often offend us. Oh, we very well might think that they are wrong as all get out, and we may even think a little less of them, if we are honest, but, still, relatively harmless. It becomes more serious, a life-and-death matter in some cases, when we are talking about racism and other oppressions.
An example from the blog I referenced above. The author writes:
“It’s sort of like the way black kids are more likely to get arrested or shot by cops because at some point an opinion made [its] way into the cops’ bloodstream that young men with black skin
are more threatening than young men with white skin.
And I think most of those cops, if they gave an honest answer, would deny the idea that they’re racist. But when they’re chasing after someone, [the] idea that ‘black kids mature faster’ or ‘black people feel less pain’ triggers, and they act in a way that comes to a racist conclusion
even if none of their conscious mindsets went for that at all.”
The truth is, some of the opinions we hold are racist
and some are sexist
and some are ageist
and some are homophobic
and some are transphobic
and these opinions prevent us from being the people – and the community –
we say we want to be and often, say we are.
When it comes to congregational life, these unconscious opinions that make up the water we swim in have consequences we might not realize.
Because here’s the thing: as Unitarian Universalists, we hold ourselves and our congregations up as staunch defenders of tolerance. And even beyond tolerance, we proclaim to celebrate diversity in all its forms. We want this to be true. And yet, we can be very stuck in our ways.
When folks come to USNH who are different than what we consider “the norm,” this is can be challenging for many of us. We try our best, but sometimes our “opinions” about gender and race and class have ways of sneaking out, often when we least expect it.
These opinions run the gamut, from seemingly inconsequential slights, to serious lapses of compassion and empathy. Everyone of us, at one time or another, has fallen into a well-worn cultural groove or pattern that we very likely did not see coming in time to avoid it.
Like for instance when we think, or say:
• People of color might not fully understand our Unitarian Universalist tradition.
• It’s grammatically incorrect to refer to an individual as “they,” so I won’t.
• Or, you can’t worship here if you are a Republican, or if you love God or Jesus.
• Young people are transient and non-committal, so we might as well not invest in them as members, or as leaders.
• Small children are meant to be seen and not heard – especially in worship.
And before you know it, we have inadvertently and most often unconsciously broadcast these opinions to the first-time visitor or the new member, and instead of feeling welcome into a beloved community, they see or feel, that our community’s culture has specific ideas of what “normal” is, or should be, and they might not, or probably do not, and will not, cannot, fit into it.
We are left wondering why we don’t see these folks again; and they are left feeling rejected by the very place that claimed to want to welcome them.
So what do we do about this?
Well, we have already begun.
By examining our opinions, our deeply held beliefs, and the things we were never taught, but rather absorbed, about what is “normal” and “acceptable” and “rational,” from our families, from the schools we attended, in our neighborhoods, and in our congregations.
By looking closely and repeatedly at “the way we’ve always done things” and
By asking and honestly answering whether that is the way we want to continue doing things.
We must repeatedly ask ourselves, does the “way we’ve always done it” make space for new voices, for different voices, for leadership that looks different and makes different choices
and might lead in new directions?
Above all, we keep on moving forward.
As Dr. King said, the road ahead is not an altogether smooth one, but if we fall into step with our partners in justice, our siblings in faith, we will all make it to the other side.
So, we keep marching.
I wish it weren’t true, but I don’t think we can eradicate hate.
I do think we can side with love.
And we can understand the ways we unconsciously and inadvertently uphold patterns of white supremacy culture in the places we live and work and love and worship.
And we can work to undo them, systematically and methodically.
Step by step, we keep going.
Because we must.
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https://www.theroot.com/charlottesville-schools-close-after-online-threat-of-et-1833488852
https://www.nhregister.com/news/article/Hamden-school-employee-fired-afer-using-racial-13693835.php
https://www.thecut.com/2019/03/senator-fraser-anning-blames-mosque-massacre-on-islam.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/03/17/trump-sees-immigrants-invaders-white-nationalist-terrorists-do-too/?utm_term=.991ded739f3f
Charles Follen was fired from his job at Harvard for refusing to back down and be quiet about his abolitionist views. And no other pulpit in Lexington would allow him to speak (including the Unitarian First Parish) and so he and his fellow abolitionists raised money to found and build Follen Church. But then he died before he could preach in the sanctuary. https://follen.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Charles-Follen-the-East-Village-and-Abolitionism.pdf
Joshua Young claimed he was pushed out for officiating at John Brown’s funeral and comparing Brown to St. Paul. The congregation doesn’t agree with that version of the story. He was an Underground RR conductor with his wife. 1862. http://uudb.org/articles/joshuayoung.html?fbclid=IwAR2a4kUA-nNwrlqSV-DG87tsj0jSh8RVpQXL4y1Bef47FlWnt7wkpq8Oayk
https://www.yesmagazine.org/people-power/no-i-wont-stop-saying-white-supremacy-20170630
http://www.dismantlingracism.org/white-supremacy-culture.html
The Decisions We Don’t Realize We’re Making: On Chugga Chugga Choo-Choos and White Nationalism