THE FIRST UNITARIAN CHURCH OF HONOLULU
A Unitarian Universalist Congregation
"What to Remember, What to Forget"
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day Sermon by Rev. Mike Young
Preached January 20, 2002, at the First Unitarian Church of Honolulu
When I was in theological school my wife and I drove from where we were living just outside Boston down through the South en route to Los Angeles. I knew there were some things going on in the South at that time but didn't think anything about it. While driving our Volkswagen "bug" with Massachusetts license plates, we started to pull up to a very small country store to buy some groceries for breakfast and lunch. The black gentleman standing on the stoop of the small country store was waving us, "Go on by! Go on by! Don't stop here!" Suddenly we realized we were in the middle of an adventure, as my 10-year-old terms them. We were lucky and did not have any further experience of the problem, but this was the summer of the "Freedom Rides," of students going down to register people to vote. It was really the beginning of the big push in civil rights to change the law, the practice, the habits, the attitudes of this culture.That I could be blithely unaware of what was going on around us is a testimony to the degree to which very few people realized at that time just how unprecedented, how unusual, and how dramatic our experience for the next couple of years was going to be.
Tomorrow we celebrate Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr's birthday. This morning I want to celebrate a somewhat unusual aspect of that. There are two pieces of it that strike me as profound and motivate me to suggest that a time has come for us to shift our response to that whole period of American history. The first is the bank shot.
Ralph Waldo Emerson's mommy went to India. While she was in India she met with the Unitarian group in New Delhi, India. Amongst the folk that she met there was a young man named Ramun Roy. Ramun Roy had been Cambridge-educated and was a regular attender with the mostly British group of Unitarians there in New Delhi. When she came back she started a correspondence with Ramun Roy. Amongst the things that she sent to Ramun Roy were writings of her son, Ralph Waldo Emerson. She also sent him Henry David Thoreau's essay called "On Civil Disobedience." Ramun Roy was quite taken with the stuff she sent him and an additional correspondence erupted between Ralph Waldo Emerson and Ramun Roy. It is out of this conversation that we get one of the essays in Emerson's collected works about the "over-soul," for that is taken directly out of his conversations with Ramun Roy.
Ramun Roy went on to become the beginner of an organization called Brahmo Somaj. In some ways it is to Hinduism what Unitarianism is to Christianity. Many years later a young man was raised in South Africa in the religious tradition known as Brahmo Somaj.
That young man raised in South Africa as Brahmo Somaj went on to be... anybody want to guess? ... Mohandas Gandhi.
In the 1930's a young black minister named Howard Thurman went to India and spent several months with Gandhi. He was very much taken with Gandhi's philosophy. Howard Thurman came back to the U.S. to be the Dean of the Chapel, first, at Morehouse College and then at Boston University. One of his students, both at Morehouse and at Boston University School of Theology, was one Martin Luther King, Jr.
Howard Thurman was in many ways the chaplain to the whole civil rights movement. And yet, he never marched in a demonstration, never took part in a parade; but over his kitchen table, James Farmer, Yvonne Delk, Martin Luther King, Jr.--a long list of names, some more and some less familiar to us--plotted and strategized much of the civil rights movement. From Walden Pond to New Delhi, back to Boston and to Birmingham, Alabama, "On Civil Disobedience" traveled.
If you have an idea, be careful where you sow those seeds. They can travel incredible distances.
When I was minister in Tampa, Florida, I was involved in a number of things in the community. In January of 1991, at a special event that was held annually, I was presented with the Dr. Martin Luther King Drum Major for Justice Award, "in grateful recognition for outstanding community service and commitment to keeping the dream alive for the citizens of Tampa and Hillsborough County." This is the award I am most proud of receiving, because this award was from the black community of Tampa and Hillsborough County.
It was an absolutely hilarious experience. They kept it a secret from me; but several of my friends kept querying me, "What have you done? What activities, what things have you...?" When it came time in the ceremony to make the presentation, the presenter hemmed and hawed about what it is that this person had done to earn this award. Because the truth was that I had done nothing out of the ordinary, nothing unusual. I was identified as the recipient of this award because, for so many years, I had been around, urging this, encouraging that, doing stuff behind the scenes. But I had never done anything outstanding except be there -- for ten years.
Shortly after receiving this award I came home to my house in Tampa to find my foster daughter Suwanna (that's my adopted son's Thai-Amerasian birth mother) sitting in the front room with a handful of her school peers. There were two Puerto Rican girls, a Latino young man and a young black man; all five of them sitting there in my front room. As I walked in, Suwanna turned to me and said, "Daddy, didn't there used to be separate drinking fountains and toilets for blacks?"
I said, "Yeah."
She said, "He said there never were," pointing to the young black man.
The young black man said, "Hey, it couldn't be. Nobody would put up with it."
I became righteously indignant. Somebody had failed to tell this young man his own history. Somebody had failed entirely cluing him in on the rich heritage that he and that community were a part of. And in mid-rant I realized, wait a minute, something's wrong here. Not with him, with me.
I knew the sermon; I knew the tune; I new the lyrics; I was well into singing that song at him and could preach that sermon here this morning. But he had said to me, "No one would have put up with it." He knew about my award. He didn't know what it was for, either. He had included me in that "no one would have put up with it;" included me! And I began to repent my righteous indignation.
He was wrong, of course. There were then and still are many who would put up with it; passive, acquiescent, at least. Enthusiastic support, in some cases. The proof was that we had put up with it for an excruciatingly, embarrassingly, painful long time. However, wasn't this, his insistence--no, his assumption--that no one would put up with it; wasn't this exactly what we had been trying to produce ? Not the preservation of white guilt, nor the endless maintenance of the heritage of black victimization, but the spontaneous assumption that such a thing was "not put up with-able."
I still want to retain the regular celebration of the heroism of the civil rights movement. When you stop and think about what that group of black clergy and lay people did, in retrospect it is astounding. They made several absolutely unwarranted assumptions. The first is that a whole nation could change a 400-year habit of mind. That indeed many would rally to their support and make it happen, and many did.
Gene Bridges, a previous minister of this congregation, went to Selma, Alabama. It is quite rightly one of the proudest moments of his Unitarian Universalist ministry. Stand up and take a bow, Gene !
But the assumption that he would come, that others like him from the North, from the West, from within the South itself, would come and stand shoulder-to-shoulder with those people -- what an incredible assumption! Nothing that had happened in our history justified that assumption. We had turned our heads and tolerated those "goings-on" for years and years and years.
I want to keep that celebration of the heroism of the civil rights movement. We can still use it to keep extending that concept into every nook and cranny of the human penchant for categorical thinking. Xenophobia, the fear of anything different from us, is that deeply engraved in the human psyche. Its price in terms of the waste of human resources if for no other reason makes it of value for us to keep that process alive. But I also want to celebrate that young man because I have come to believe that he is indeed what it's all about.
There, in the contradiction between the reminder of the civil rights movement, of slavery and of Jim Crow laws on the one hand, and the assumption that no one would put up with that, is our hope.
For, you see, that young man in my living room did not see himself as a victim, but saw himself as a part of a power group, perhaps the most powerful power group, the group that included "no one who would put up with that."
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s vision was not of a future in which black and white perpetuated the heritage of victimization but of a future in which that heritage had become a quaint embarrassment in our history, a future in which it is assumed that no one would put up with that.
At the time I received my award, January 19, 1991, there were many who were far more appropriate recipients of the Dr. Martin Luther King Drum Major for Justice Award. They had done dramatic things. The chair, president of the Urban League, was the one I would have given the award to that year. But there were many who had consistently over a long period of time done dramatic things in that community. And yet, to no credit to me, it was appropriate that year that somebody that nobody could think of a good reason for giving the award to should receive it; someone whose only claim to any kind of award worthiness was that I'd been there with them, behind the scenes most of the time, working at the painful, slow, incremental changes in a community's attitude toward itself over time.
One of the things that we organized in those days was "Cool It Squads." Again, I was only an incidental part of it. At the time, I was president of the Human Rights Council and we had created an interesting institution in the County of Hillsborough. We had recruited and trained three or four people in every neighborhood in the whole community. When we gathered all those folk together there were about 250. They were set up so that a telephone call would spill them into the streets in whatever neighborhood the problem was occurring.
I happened to get there shortly after one of those emergencies in a housing project once. There, standing in the intersection in the middle of the housing project was a 70-year-old gramma, one of our Cool It Squad members. She was standing in the middle of the street saying, "Joe, you get back in the house. You know your mamma wouldn't want you out here for this kind of nonsense. Fred, you get back in the house; you stay off the streets." She cleared the streets in about ten minutes. The police riot squad, which was on the fringes ready to attack, came in with their truncheons and their tear gas, ready to do battle . . . and they couldn't find anybody.
There was a beach in Tampa. A small group of people had landed a small sailboat on the beach and pulled it up on the shore to have a picnic. When they started to get back into the small sailboat to sail off, a half-dozen local kids came running up wanting to take a ride in the sailboat. Sadly, they were possessive of their sailboat and declined to give this small group of kids rides. Some racial epithets were thrown back and forth and the rumor went out all across the community: "On Saturday we're going to take back our beach." And the Cool It Squad showed up. I happened to be amongst them that day and I stood in the parking lot, watching this most incredible event. Grammas worked the crowd, going from beach blanket to beach blanket introducing people to each other. They never said a word about "race riot." All they did was introduce people to each other; white folk to black folk, black folk to white folk.
For the most radical thing that you can do is to introduce people to each other.
What is it about the human species that makes us so efficient at finding, discovering, inventing lines to draw between this group and that group, this characteristic and that characteristic? Every one of those lines exist only to the extent you and I are willing to put up with them. May the day come when that young black man in my front room in 1991, Tampa, Florida, will have accurately predicted the future when "No one will put up with it."