Chalice Art by Selma Blackburn
Rev. Bob Klein
UUCLR February 6, 2005
A CELEBRATION OF BLACK HISTORY
Black History Month: People we ought to know about and History we too easily forget.
When Hank Aaron retired from baseball in 1976, he held the world record of 755 homeruns, after having broken Babe Ruth’s record of 714 on April 8th, 1974. Along the way, Aaron also surpassed Willie Mays, another amazing baseball player, who retired in 1973 with 660 homeruns, 3,283 hits, and a lifetime batting average of .302. Both Aaron and Mays followed in the footsteps of Jackie Robinson, who in 1947, was the first black major leaguer, playing for the Brooklyn Dodgers and earning the Rookie of the Year award that year. Today it is common to see blacks on every major sports team, just check it out if you watch the Super Bowl later. In 1936, when U.S. runner Jesse Owens won 4 gold metals at the Berlin Olympics, it struck a blow against Hitler’s Aryan ideal. When Joe Louis knocked out German boxer Max Schmeling in 1938, it was a blow to white supremacy in Nazi Germany and the U.S.
Some of the most visible African Americans in the United States in recent decades have been sports figures and musicians, Michael Jordan, Shaquille O’Neal, Kobe Bryant, Tiger Woods, Tina Turner, and Whitney Houston to name just a few. There have also been other cultural and political leaders who have left their marks on American society such as Oprah Winfrey, Spike Lee, Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice, and Cornell West. Bill Cosby, who studied psychology at Temple and holds a Doctorate in Education from the University of Massachusetts, has left his mark as a comic and an actor. The Rev. Jessie Jackson remains a significant spiritual force.
As the 20th century opened, pianist Scott Joplin, the King of Ragtime, was making his mark. By the late 1920’s, jazz horn player and scat-singing vocalist, Louis Armstrong was making a mark in music and by mid-century he was a star, having appeared in over fifty films. In the 1930’s, jazz vocalist Billie Holiday was one of the most sought after singers in Harlem’s clubs, an amazing talent but also a heroin addict, she died at age 44 in 1959. Lena Horne has been called the first black female star. Beautiful, poised, and politically active, the sultry singer was a World War II pinup girl, a movie star, and a symbol of success for black women. In the 1930’s Duke Ellington became the king of swing; renowned jazz bandleader, composer, and pianist, Ellington left his mark on American music over 5 decades. Another great jazz musician, pianist and vocalist, Nat King Cole, had made his mark by the mid-1940’s. Jazz trumpeter, Miles Davis gave birth to the cool, reaching his most productive period in the 1950’s, but continuing to develop into the 1970’s. Each of these amazing women and men left their mark on the world. Each of them fought their way to the top even in the midst of prejudice, outright racism, and sometimes drugs and violence.
By the latter part of the 20th century, blacks had made significant contributions to virtually every field of endeavor. Even before these modern icons came into view, blacks had played many significant roles in the history of our nation. Millions of blacks served as slaves and indentured servants in the history of developing America. Few of the names of the black voices who cried out for freedom and justice during the era of slavery are remembered today. But even our UU hymnal recalls dozens of the songs that were sung in the black churches and out in the fields, the spirituals that kept hope alive and gave voice to the need for change.
Frederick Douglass is the one former slave whose name is widely remembered across the United States. He taught himself to read, escaped from slavery, became an influential speaker in the abolitionist movement, edited his own black newspaper in Rochester, New York, and became and advisor to Lincoln and several succeeding Presidents. At great risk to himself, he told his story and published his autobiography, eventually writing two more volumes as his life situation and perspective changed. His 2nd autobiography, “My Bondage and My Freedom” (from which this material is derived) is now a Barnes & Noble Classic.
Other voices well worthy of our remembrance include many men and women who left their marks on our nation and the world. With many thanks to the University of Georgia African American Studies website, hear a few brief profiles:
Sojourner Truth was born Isabella Baumfree in 1797, a slave in Hurley, New York. Sold, resold, denied her choice of husband, and treated cruelly by her masters, she ran away in 1826 leaving all but one of her children behind. Her freedom purchased for $25, she moved to New York City in 1829 becoming a member of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. After the death of her son, she took the name Sojourner Truth as she traveled to tell the truth about slavery, she became nationally known as a speaker on human rights for slaves and women. She set out on June 1, 1843, stopping to stay where she was offered lodging, speaking to any audience about the evils of slavery and injustice toward women. In 1864, President Lincoln invited her to the White House. She later served as a counselor for the National Freedmen’s Relief Association, retiring in 1875 to Battle Creek, Michigan. She died in 1883. (UGA African American Studies.htm)
Heralded as the “Moses” of her people, Underground Railroad conductor Harriet Tubman became a legend during her lifetime, leading approximately 300 slaves to freedom during a decade of freedom work. Denied any childhood or education, she labored as a woodcutter, field hand, and loader of barrels of flour. In 1844 she married John Tubman, a freeman, and in the summer of 1849 she decided to escape from slavery. Her husband refused to go with her, but she set out anyway, heading north to Pennsylvania. A year later she returned to Baltimore to rescue her sister.
Under the Fugitive Slave laws, rewards offered by slave owners for her capture totaled $40,000. During the Civil War she was sent south to spy for the Union Army. After the war she returned to Auburn, New York where she married a Union Soldier and supported suffrage and other causes. Born a slave in 1821, Harriet died in 1913.
(UGA African American Studies.htm)
Born into slavery in 1856, Booker T. Washington was the most prominent spokesperson for African Americans after the death of Frederick Douglass. He sought social betterment for African Americans through economic progress. Working in the coal mines as a youth, he attended school when he could, and entered the Hampton Institute in Virginia in 1871, graduating in 1875. He taught in West Virginia before entering Wayland Seminary. In 1881 he founded the Tuskegee Normal School in Alabama. When he died in 1915, the school had 1500 students and 180 faculty members.
(UGA African American Studies.htm)
Without reminders, it is too easy to forget slavery and our Civil War, and Jim Crow laws and “separate but equal”. So this month we are taking time to remember Black history, and the African Americans, who have contributed to our national history.
The first 20 Black slaves came to the colony at Jamestown in 1619, long before most of our families came to the new world. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of African men, women, and children were captured, enslaved, and brought to America to work for their white owners. There is no part of the story of slavery that is fair or just, no matter how many good and decent owners there may have been who treated their slaves as valuable servants and human beings. To be taken from freedom and sold into lifelong captivity, to have all rights taken away is horrible injustice. To be sold away from family at any time and to have little or no hope of ever gaining freedom is unbelievably cruel and inhuman. And yet, this was the law and practice of our nation, with protections for slave owners and slave holding states lasting until the Civil War. Allowed by the Constitution and Federal laws, Slaves were property.
The first organized convention of Universalists, meeting in Philadephia in 1790, passed a resolution opposing slavery, declaring that “We believe it to be inconsistent with the union of the human race…to hold any part of our fellow-creatures in bondage. We therefore recommend a total refraining from the African trade, and the adoption of prudent measures for the gradual abolition of the slavery of the negroes in our country, and for the instruction and education of their children…”
(The Larger Faith, Charles A. Howe, Skinner 1993)
Eminent Unitarian Minister, William Ellery Channing, spoke out against slavery in his treatise, Slavery, in 1835 and in his address at Lenox in 1842. By the time of the latter address he offered a blistering denunciation of slavery which he had come to see as America’s great national evil. (William Ellery Channing)
In 1851, Unitarian, Theodore Parker addressed his colleagues on the evils of the Fugitive Slave Law which required northerners to turn slaves over to the government for return to their masters. Parker admitted to offering sanctuary to fugitive slaves and declared that he had had to arm himself, writing sermons with a loaded pistol on his desk in order to “defend the innocent members of {his} own church.” (Thodore Parker)
Even after the Emancipation Proclamation by Abraham Lincoln, and the bloodshed of the Civil War, the freedom of Blacks was only relatively better than it had been. Voting, access to education and jobs, ownership of property, and the right to participate in life on an equal footing with whites was still a distant dream. Justice for blacks was an oxymoron. Blacks were not welcome in white stores or neighborhoods or even churches. Jim Crow laws proclaimed equality via separation, and separation surely remained. Only equality and justice never seemed to catch up with the separation.
Hear a few more profiles:
W.E.B. Du Bois was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts in 1868. He became the most respected and effective spokesperson for the full rights of African Americans in the decades before World War II. In 1888, Du Bois had earned an A.B. at Fiske University, then earned his M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard, with 2 years of study at the University of Berlin in between. He taught at Wilberforce University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Atlanta University. Du Bois combined an illustrious academic career with his work for full rights for African Americans. He worked to found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1909. In 1934 he resigned from the NAACP to protest their goal of accommodation with white society. Increasingly disillusioned with life in the United States, he visited Europe and the Soviet Union. In 1961, he announced that he had joined the Communist Party and emigrated in Accra, Ghana, where he died in 1963 at age 95. (UGA African American Studies.htm)
Mary McLeoad Bethune was one of the most widely known African American women of the 20th Century. Born in 1875, a graduate of the Scotia Seminary in 1895, she taught at the Haines Institute in Augusta, Georgia, then at Kendall Institute in Sumter, South Carolina, where she met and married Albertus Bethune. In October 1904, she founded the Daytona Normal and Industrial Institute for Negro Girls in a small rented cabin. When white hospitals denied service to black patients and training for black nurses and residents, Bethune founded McLeod Hospital. The school grew into Bethune-Cookman College.
Bethune also founded the Circle of Negro War Relief in New York City during World War I, was Vice-President of the Commission on Interracial Cooperation, and served two terms as President of the National Association of Colored Women, advising the Coolidge and Hoover administrations on African American issues. In 1935, Bethune founded the National Council of Negro Women, which she served as President until 1949. She died in 1955 after receiving 12 honorary degrees. (UGA African American Studies.htm)
James Langston Hughes was one of the original writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Born in Joplin, Missouri in 1902, he began studies at Columbia in 1921, leaving after a year to work to work on a freighter and traveling to Africa and living in Paris and Rome. Returning to the U.S., he graduated from Lincoln University in 1926, publishing his first book of poetry, The Weary Blues, the same year. He also published the essay, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” which became a defining piece for the Harlem Renaissance movement. During the next four decades, Hughes, wrote novels, poetry, short stories, plays, autobiography, and nonfiction works. Known for hearty humor as well as bitter criticism, he died in 1967. (UGA African American Studies.htm)
Charles Drew pioneered the modern process for preserving blood for transfusions. Born in 1904 in Washington, D.C., Drew won a scholarship to Amherst where he starred in football, track and academics. He attended McGill University medical school, where he became interested in research about blood transfusions. He did his residency at Montreal General Hospital, then joined the faculty of Howard University where he later was appointed head of surgery. Appointed head of the National Blood Bank during World War II, he furiously resigned over the government mandate that white’s and black’s blood be given only to their respective races. In 1944 he became chief of Surgery at Freedmen’s Hospital in Washington, D.C, where he encouraged African Americans to enter the field of medicine. He died in a car crash in 1950. (UGA African American Studies.htm)
These and so many other Americans who happened to be black have contributed richly to our society and to the level of scientific knowledge, politics, religious life, and every field of endeavor. In the face of racism, fear, and ignorance, black women and men have made huge impacts on society and continue to do so. We would be so much the worse without them, we would be so much the better if we fully recognized and honored their accomplishments.
Another important African-American figure in 20th century history is Paul Robeson. Born in Princeton, New Jersey in 1898, a graduate of Somerville High School and Rutgers University, Robeson was a talented actor, an amazing singer, and a champion of civil rights for blacks. Settling in London, he won international acclaim in the 1930s.
A supporter of unions and a board member of several African American organizations, he was ostracized over communist sympathies during the McCarthy era. His passport lifted by the state department, he was unable to travel for many years. Robeson devoted much of his intellectual effort to civil rights, but died virtually forgotten in 1976.
The Civil Rights movement under The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., brought about more real change faster than the massive efforts of the preceding 100 years. Today Blacks and other persons of color are again losing ground as whites hold onto positions of power and privilege as if they had some divine right. The turbulence of the 1950s and 1960s around the country and here at Central High did lead to real progress in equality through integration of education, college admissions, and neighborhoods and in the spirit of our nation. Today the racism of neo-Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan, and Aryan Nation religions and political organizations, as well as the maintenance of privileged positions by ordinary whites is hampering efforts to bring real equality. The struggle for civil rights goes on.
When will we live in a diverse and multi-cultural rainbow world where justice and acceptance are the norm? Perhaps not this year, nor even in our lifetimes, but the acceptance of all others that we practice, the honoring of their inherent worth cannot help but make a difference. We Unitarian Universalists must never step back from our belief in the inherent worth and dignity of each individual, for this alone marks our commitment to true justice and real compassion. May we always practice acceptance toward all persons, opening our doors to all persons of good will without giving any thought to race, creed, sex or sexual preference, judging the actions of individuals solely on the character of the action and its impact. May we never forget the evil perpetrated on blacks, Indians, women, and other minorities as we seek to build a nation and influence a world with freedom, justice, and opportunities for all.
So may it be! Shalom, Salaam, Blessed Be, and Amen!