Afterthoughts
BUUC Member
I was an eager participant in the Black Unitarian Universalist
Caucus. Although I was not at the Cleveland General Assembly, nor did
I know anything was going to happen there, as soon as I heard of BUUC,
I joined. At that time, I was a doctoral student at Brandeis
University in the Florence Heller School in Waltham, MA. I was already
communicating with Black students around the country regarding their
demands and was the Communications person for the Black student
movement. Thus, I received, analyzed and disseminated information from
African American student groups around the country. I understood the
reasons and processes of the students' demands. Ideologies were
swirling around and those that BUUC embraced were ones I agreed with.
I believed that we could make a difference by supporting
community-based organizations seeking to bring about change.
I recall the meeting held at my house in Medford, MA, as we worked
on the BUUC position on educational policy. In the Boston chapter, our
focus was on community control rather than integration. This was
interesting, because busing and White people, particularly South
Boston White folks, hotly contested desegregation. Louise Day Hicks
became their darling. But we, along with a number of other Black
leaders, had disagreed with busing and "racial balance" as the
solution. First, we didn't think it was necessary for our kids to sit
next to White kids in order to be able to learn, as tended to be the
general attitude. But more than that, we felt it was very important
that neighborhoods and parents have control over their schools. (Now
of course, people beg for parents to be involved with the schools.) On
the other hand, we were aware of the importance of integration to our
Southern sisters and brothers. Thus our final policy recognized and
supported their efforts. Naturally, those opposed to busing were also
opposed to community control.
I also made speeches to congregations attempting to explain the
BUUC position and the position of those in the Black Nationalist
movement. I remember the speech that I gave to a
Unitarian-Universalist Congregation in New Hampshire on March 5, 1969.
I explained that many Black people were no longer interested in
integration, and that we were about self-determination. Using Lerone
Bennett's definition of the Conscious Negro from his 1964 book, The
Negro Mood, I asserted that we were no longer White Negroes, that
we were interested in building a collective system of Black action and
that we were interested in redistributing power. The reception was
very cold. Such speeches usually were greeted this way. Perhaps the
concepts were so new to White people, vis-à-vis Black people, that
they did not know how to respond.
The activity that I enjoyed the most was my work with a group of
junior high school students called "The Soul Cousins." We went from
church to church putting on a program to explain the Black experience
using music, dance and literature from slavery to that time in the
'60s. The program had emanated from a talent show at Ferry Beach where
I had taken my children while serving as a counselor. On the last
night at the camp I had led a group of children in explaining the
Black experience using performance. (At that time I was teaching the
Black experience through Black Music at Brandeis University.) It was
so popular that I was asked by several of the ministers who were also
at Ferry Beach if I could bring this to their churches. After we left
camp, the youngsters who participated were not available, so I
organized a group consisting of my children and their cousins, thus
"The Soul Cousins." The son of the minister of the Braintree church
traveled with us since he played the part of a White overseer, but the
other children liked him and considered him as part of our extended
family. We traveled by my Volkswagen and my brother-in-law's car to
churches all over New England and even in New York, carrying
instruments, costumes and food. The forty-five minute program, which
started with slave dances, included "shouts" and spirituals, the poem
by Paul Lawrence Dunbar "We Wear the Masks," and literature from
Langston Hughes. We gave examples of jive talk and jive behavior and
explained the "double entendre" through making up words of our own. We
danced the Charleston, played some jazz, imitated music from James
Brown and ended with the song "Amen." I also carried soul food, which
I had cooked at home, generally collard greens, sweet potatoes and
pork. Our reputation spread and when we were invited to the First
Unitarian Church in Philadelphia, I felt that we had had enough. I
couldn't make it in the Volkswagen and Philadelphia seemed a far
distance from Boston in those times. Furthermore, I was getting ready
to write my dissertation and didn't have the time for traveling so
much.
Not everyone in BUUC was pleased with this performance. After all,
it was very popular, and it was not threatening. Some people thought
that the singing and dancing was too stereotypical. But when Henry
Hampton saw it, he thought it had a great message and was very
encouraging. Sometimes when he gave a speech on behalf of BUUC, he
would invite us to join him.
After finishing my dissertation and earning my doctorate in 1971, I
went to the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, as an assistant
professor. Although the Urbana congregation had had a Black minister,
who later became one of the leaders in BUUC, he had left the area, and
my participation in BUUC became mainly that of an onlooker. To this
day, however, I include something about BUUC/BAC in my speeches to
Unitarian-Universalist groups and speak of it as an opportunity lost
for the UUA. We were not concerned about ourselves or whether the
church sang the right songs or had the right curriculum. We were
concerned about the community and social justice. We wanted to support
programs based in Black communities. Clearly we were before our time.
Because of our approach, I still believe we could have made a big
difference had we lasted.
FULLBAC
Supporter
Late in 1967 I returned to the United States after completing a
five-year ministry to the Unitarian Church in Cape Town, South Africa.
During that time I had become involved with organizations dealing
directly and indirectly with the effects of apartheid upon the African
and "colored" peoples of South Africa (one of these organizations was
banned by the government). I had also been contacted by and been
encouraged to become an informer for the United States Central
Intelligence Agency. The invitation was declined.
As a result of my South African experience, I became deeply aware
of the workings of a highly centralized nationalistic government, its
efforts to maintain its policies of racist oppression, and its
attempts to enlist the cooperation of foreign nationals.
In South Africa I followed the work of Martin Luther King, Jr., and
the Civil Rights movement, while at the same time reading the work of
Malcolm X, Franz Fanon and others who were voicing a vigorous critique
of the integrationist movement, charging it as a subtle attempt to
maintain White control and direction of that movement.
The beginning of my ministry to the First Church in Philadelphia
(January 1968) coincided with the beginnings of the Black Affairs
Council and the Black Empowerment Movement within UUism. It appeared
to me that the Black leadership of our movement was providing the
denomination with an opportunity to confront the assumptions and to
break out of the restrictions imposed by the White-sanctioned and
-approved "integrationist" agenda.
In retrospect, I believe there were two reasons for my support of
the agenda of the Black UU Caucus (formed in October 1967): my South
African experience had made me suspicious of White attempts to address
the issues of Black empowerment—efforts that seemed at best
condescending and, at worst, a form of White supremacy. In addition my
geographic remove from our denomination's direct involvement in the
Civil Rights struggle as enacted in Selma, Alabama, had prevented me
from developing the emotional commitment to an integrationist model as
the most effective way to address racial conditions in this country.
The organization of FULLBAC (i.e., full funding for the Black
Affairs Council) at the beginning of 1968 appeared to be the most
appropriate vehicle by which I, a White UU, could support this new
phase (and I perceived it as a new phase rather than a contradiction
of) the Civil Rights movement. What I had not anticipated was the
degree to which it would deepen and confirm my commitment to the
struggle for an antiracist society. It appeared to me that the Black
leadership of our movement was providing the denomination with an
opportunity to confront the assumptions and to break out of the
restrictions imposed by the White-sanctioned and -approved
"integrationist" agenda.
While I was not among the leaders of FULLBAC, I was a full
participant in its struggles in support of BAC (including my
participation in the "walkout" during the UUA General Assembly in
Boston in 1969). My concern for this period and the issues which it
raised led me to deliver four lectures on the topic "The Black
Empowerment Controversy and the UUA" under the auspices of the Minns
Foundation in 1983.
FULLBAC
Member
When, in September 1967, I arrived in Los Angeles to serve as
Associate Minister of the First Unitarian Church, after having been a
student at Starr King School for the Ministry and simultaneously the
intern minister at the First Unitarian Church of Berkeley, I soon
learned that there was a group there that called their organization
BURR—Black Unitarians for Radical Reform. The group had formed in
August and included Black Unitarians from several churches in Los
Angeles County. Among the members were Jules Ramey, Lou Gothard (who
had suggested the name), Sue Williams, Carrie Thomas, Bob Wicker,
Althea Alexander—and others whose names I never knew or have
forgotten.
I became acquainted with several of the BURR members and, when a
notice came from the UUA Boston headquarters that there would be an
Emergency Conference on the Unitarian Universalist Response to the
Black Rebellion, to be held in New York City on October 6-8, 1967, I
suggested to my Black friends that there surely ought to be
participation by Black UUs in the conference. I also delivered a
sermon on October 1, my first at the Los Angeles church, called
"Conflict: Function and Dysfunction," which was originally intended to
be concerned with the Black Rebellion which was resulting in riots in
cities across the United States—including in the Watts area of Los
Angeles. But instead, my focus became the problem of separation vs.
integration and separation vs. segregation in race relations,
particularly as the concepts applied in our liberal churches.
After discharge from the Army, I had been a student of economics at
the University of California at Berkeley (1946-1952), had been an
officer in a local union of the American Federation of Teachers,
served as economist for the United Rubber Workers and, before entering
Starr King, as a research economist for the AFL-CIO in Washington,
D.C. With Dr. Charles Gulick and J. Raymond Wallace, I had published a
book, History and Theories of Workingclass Movements—A Select
Bibliography and I had published a number of articles, mostly in
the union press. To quote from the sermon: "Because of my experiences
in the union movement and because of my longtime interest in the
history and theories of working class movements everywhere—and
everywhen—I think I see some similarities between working class union
movements and recent trends in the Black Freedom movement. "
Particularly I had in mind the fact that workers had not been
successful in organizing an institution which would represent their
unique interests until the American Federation of Labor was formed
in1881—and membership was restricted to working men and women. Prior
to that time, "labor" organizations had included, as full members,
liberal and socialist middle class businessmen, lawyers, clergymen and
others who sympathized with the conditions of workers. It seemed to me
that most "Black" organizations suffered from the same handicap.
Workers had not been able to formulate their own needs, policies and
programs in integrated organizations and Blacks were not able to
formulate their own needs, policies and programs in integrated
organizations. What was needed in both instances was separation into
organizations of people living and sharing the same circumstances—not
forced segregation, even as subordinates in "their" organizations. To
the Whites, I suggested we form a study group to search for
understanding and that we call the group WURR—White Universalists for
Radical Readjustment.
I was scheduled to attend a new ministers' conference in Boston and
was able to stop in New York and attend the Emergency Conference. BURR
had scrambled and located Black UUs all over the United States, urging
them to attend, and the Los Angeles church raised funds to send three
BURR members. Most of the Black UUs, led by the three BURR delegates
(Jules Ramey, Lou Gothard and Carrie Thomas), formed an exclusive
Black Caucus. And the conference became a traumatic event for people
who believed passionately in ideal racial integration, but who did not
realize that, as of that time, it almost always resulted in tokenism
and/or virtual invisibility.
My "Conflict" sermon was distributed among the Black Caucus
members, who drew up a program which they demanded be sent to the UUA
Board without change. They proposed that there be a UUA Black Affairs
Council with the members chosen jointly by the Black Caucus and the
UUA Board. After considerable soul-searching and agonized debate, the
Emergency Conference voted to do as the Black Caucus asked.
Sometime later, when Jules and Lou returned from meeting with the
UUA Board, they addressed a meeting at the Los Angeles church and the
group immediately formed the Supporters of BURR—SOBURR. The UUA Board
had rejected the proposal for BAC, and WURR asked me to draft a
resolution for adoption by our church, to be sent to all societies in
the denomination.
On January 28, 1968, I delivered a sermon I called "Black Is the
Color" which supplemented the earlier sermon and detailed the history
of the period since the Emergency Conference. In February, 200 Black
UUs met in Chicago. They changed the name to Black Unitarian
Universalist Caucus—BUUC—and decided to proceed with forming the Black
Affairs Council despite the negative action by the UUA Board. I was
asked to be a member of BAC—and refused. Hayward Henry came to Los
Angeles to persuade me. I told him it seemed to me that BAC should be
all Black. He replied that BUUC had decided to have nine members on
BAC—six Blacks and three Whites, and they wanted me to be one of the
members because of my union experience. I agreed, but said I would
serve only one year.
The nine selected by BUUC were attorney Sam Beecher of Terre Haute,
Indiana; Dr. James Clark of UC Berkeley; Lou Gothard (who had become
associate director of an inter religious foundation in New York); BUUC
chairman Hayward Henry of Boston; Chester Lewis of Wichita, Kansas (a
leader of the NAACP "Young Turks"); the Reverend Jack Mendelsohn of
Arlington Street Church in Boston; nuclear chemist Ben Scott of
Boston; educator and community consultant Dick Traylor of
Philadelphia; and me—Roy Ockert of First Church-LA. Althea Alexander
of the Los Angeles church was elected an alternate.
In early April 1968, a national organization was formed in
Philadelphia. It was called "For FULL Recognition and Funding of the
Black Affairs Council"—and known as FULLBAC. Leona Light of the
Westwood church in Los Angeles, who had been a founder of SOBURR, was
a founder and elected co-chair of FULLBAC. In May 1968, the
largest-ever gathering at a UUA General Assembly voted 836 to 337 to
recognize and fund the UUA Black Affairs Council.
On October 6, 1968, I delivered a "Report on the Black Affairs
Council" to the Los Angeles congregation. I served the year as a proud
member of BAC and attended all meetings except the last in May 1969,
when I was scheduled to perform a wedding ceremony, which was canceled
too late for me to attend what I had intended would be my last meeting
with BAC.
The two sermons and the pulpit editorial detail what I knew of the
origins of the Unitarian Universalist Black Empowerment movement in
Los Angeles in 1967 and 1968. At a BAC meeting, I was told that
excerpts of the two sermons were used in a New York Times
advertisement, but I have never seen it. I plan to edit the three
items, correcting typos but not changing the text, and to add a
foreword and an afterword. Six former BUUC members and six former
FULLBAC members met at Starr King on January 17-20, 2001, and
expressed a profound desire for the compilation and distribution of
the history of that time and those organizations. We also expressed
the hope that as many Black and White perspectives as possible be made
available. The Black effort to tell the story from the
African-American perspective has barely begun. My sermons and report
relate some of the earliest history and perhaps will assist others to
tell the story from their perspectives. I would especially like to see
a version written by an early member of BURR.
BUUC
Member
When my children were babies, I made a very conscious decision, and
that decision was that during the Black Power movement, I figured it
would become a very important part of our history, and I did not want
my children to ask me when they got old, What was I doing during this
period? So I organized the Detroit Black Caucus of Unitarian
Universalism. One of the first things I recognized was that I began to
understand that I was no longer a victim of racism, that Whites were
the victims of their own racism. And as I realized this, I made a
conscious decision that I was not going to help Whites to deal with
their racism. That if indeed they wanted to talk to me about racism,
they had to come to me first and say, "I am a racist and I'm trying to
deal with it." And since I made that decision, there have been many
Whites who have come to me and said, "Joe, I'm a racist. What can I do
about this?" And I simply just tell them, "Hey, you got to live with
it. This is something that was created by your race, and you've got to
understand it, and once you understand it, then you can make it on
your own."
I then got involved in the Unitarian Black Caucus and one of the
first things I realized was that this was the first time that Blacks
could get together and talk about their destiny without the influence
of White folks. But one of the things that had happened prior to the
Black Power movement was the fact that any time Blacks wanted to deal
with racism or separatism, that they had to include Whites, and Whites
had to be involved in determining their destiny. I found this a very
provocative step in terms of Blacks getting together and saying, "Hey,
we can decide our own destiny."
During that period, I was fairly active as a militant. I was
chairperson of the Michigan community organization. We had funded
Black militant groups with church money, and also I traveled about the
country urging Black folks to get together to determine their own
destiny. I have now come to a point in my life where I firmly believe
the real victims in our society really are poor Whites. I believe this
because I think the system is really totally fighting against them. If
you look at the vote that went down in Florida, it was not only a
disparagement against Blacks, but it's also a disparagement against
poor Whites. One of the things I firmly believe is that we have not
seen a revolution in this country until poor Whites discover what the
system is doing against them.
There is one other thing I would like to impart, and that is this
whole question of diversity. I think that diversity is a code word.
Diversity means one thing to Latin Americans, it means another thing
to Arabs, it means something else to Blacks, and I firmly believe that
until we as Unitarian Universalists really define what the hell it is
we mean about diversity and what it is we really want to happen—. Let
me say this. I believe that once Unitarian Universalists develop some
kind of strategy to attract poor White folks, then I will say that you
really believe in true diversity. I don't think that diversity—for me,
diversity does not mean involving Asians, Latin Americans, Black folks
and so forth and so on. Diversity to me means that you are including
everybody. Are you trying to relate to everybody? And I just don't see
this right now in the Unitarian Universalist Church.
Thank you.
FULLBAC
Member
During the 1960s my husband George and I were active members of the
First Unitarian Church of Chicago. George went with other UUs to Selma
for the protests and the March to Montgomery. During the summer of
1966, when Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., came to Chicago, we
participated in weekly demonstrations and continued working with the
Chicago Freedom movement during the ensuing months. George was chosen
by our minister, the Rev. Jack Kent, to be one of two lay
representatives from our church to the 1967 "Emergency Conference on
the Unitarian Universalist Response to the Black Rebellion." The other
person, Lee Reed, an African American, had long been involved in
racial justice work.
George and Lee brought back from the conference their stories: the
story of the necessity for Black people to separate for a time to
focus on their own identity and on what the Black community needed to
be doing, and the story that White Americans must not impede that
separation, for to do so would again assert White control over
non-Whites. Lee Reed immediately set about building a Chicago area
Black UU Caucus, and George set about helping White people understand
the necessity of the Black Empowerment movement.
I was a partner in this latter work. We carried the news to our own
congregation and to Chicago area UU churches through area Council
gatherings. We also became active in the continental FULLBAC group
that was working to support the efforts of the Black UU Caucus to
establish, with funding from the UUA, the Black Affairs Council, which
would focus on Black economic development and self-determination. I
attended a FULLBAC conference in Philadelphia in 1968 and another in
Brooklyn a little later.
Our FULLBAC group worked with Chicago area UUs on explaining the
need for Black empowerment and on developing an antiracist agenda for
White people. In fact, we had a strong Chicago area FULLBAC group that
was well represented at the 1969 UUA General Assembly in Boston. We
participated in the walkout at the General Assembly and the several
days of meeting with those of like persuasion at the Arlington Street
Church. After that General Assembly, our group became the Chicago Area
Fellowship for Renewal (CAFFR), a group that provided antiracist and
anti-repression programs at churches throughout the Central Midwest
District. We also ran a workshop at the Lake Geneva Summer Assembly
(called "The Whole Ball of Wax") from 1971 to 1974. In April 1971
CAFFR held a continental conference in Chicago, which was attended by
people from around the continent.
Those days were quite important for me. I began to see African
Americans in a new light. There were many opportunities for discussion
of and confrontation over the issues of the day and much to be learned
about oneself and the world. I know that some still feel that all that
happened in our movement in those days was destructive. In our church
that was not true. Those of us who struggled through the issues have
been bound together in what is still today a rich Beloved Community.
FULLBAC
Member
My greatest moment as a Unitarian Universalist—the two
denominations had consolidated to form the Unitarian Universalist
Association in the early sixties—occurred during my Philadelphia
ministry when, at the Cleveland General Assembly in 1968, the UUA,
after months of soul searching, partisan maneuvering, and
denomination-wide debate, voted a million dollars for the Black
Affairs Council, an independent, biracial program agency created the
year before by the Black Unitarian Universalist Caucus to implement
the association's commitment to racial justice.
In response to America's racial crisis, marked by the burning of
downtown Los Angeles, Detroit, Newark, and other cities, Black
Unitarian Universalists met in caucus, as Blacks, for the first time
in history. At the time, and since, members of the Black Caucus gave
voice to their feelings of awe, gratitude, and liberation that now, at
last, after decades and centuries of slavery, segregation, and
structural inequality, they were meeting face-to-face as Black sisters
and brothers, alone together. Some White religious liberals, committed
to a policy of integration, cried foul. You can't meet as a Black
Caucus, they said of the Black Unitarian Universalists, several of
them from Philadelphia-area churches, because our denomination is
inclusive, and you can't hold a meeting from which I as a White
Unitarian Universalist am excluded.
Well, the Black Caucus kept on meeting. Realizing that the Black
Caucus could not carry the day alone, some of us organized FULLBAC, a
White support group committed to full funding of the Black Affairs
Council. The proposal to fund the Black Affairs Council was adopted by
a 72 per cent majority at the Cleveland General Assembly.
I have never felt prouder of my church than I did on May the 26th
in 1968 when our overwhelmingly White denomination said Yes to its
militant Black minority. Yes, we said, we embrace you as Unitarian
Universalists. Yes, we stand with you in your pain and rage as Black
Americans. Yes, we accept your vision of a nation and a denomination
led out of bondage by those having a direct experience of oppression.
Yes, we trust you with the million dollars. Yes, we know what other
programs will suffer, but we are willing to do with less because you
have done with less for so long. When, I ask, have Unitarian
Universalists, Black and White together, stood so tall? Not in my
lifetime. Perhaps not ever.
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