Part I
History is being corrupted by those in power. Black history is being distorted and deleted. Not only whitewashed, but sand-blasted away. Deformed and disappeared. Explicitly and insistently by those in power. By executive order and by those obeying and complying.
About a month ago, in St. Petersburg, Florida, a Black History Matters mural, painted on the street in front of the Woodsen African American Museum, was destroyed. You can see the mural in the upper picture on the screen – it was painted on the asphalt road in front of the museum. The demolition, led by the city, was scheduled for the middle of the night – as if that isn’t shady in and of itself.
Two clergy – a Christian pastor, Andy Oliver, and a Unitarian Universalist minister, Rev. Ben Atherton-Zeman, both white men, knew this was wrong. In accountable relationship with Black community members, they used their privilege as white men to resist. They placed their bodies in the way of demolition crews. They prayed over this worthy message, this righteous truth. The police arrested them, removing their bodies, so that the mural could be destroyed.
And yet, instead of the nighttime hiding their dastardly deed, this act of civil disobedience brought more attention to this erasure. There has been an increase in the visible celebration of Black history and culture in St. Pete’s. There has been an upsurge in outrage and resistance.
Black History Matters – even when municipal workers in league with law enforcement remove a mural that declares this truth. At this time when history books and museums and websites are being scoured for facts and accurate interpretations that make some white people uncomfortable, we must embrace all the true histories, protect them from being disappeared, raise them up as worthy. We are all bound up together.
Which is just one reasons that this morning’s service is focused on Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. Which is just one of the reasons we will name just a few of the powerful Black women and femmes in our Unitarian Universalist Universe, because we raise up our history: whether worthy of praise or requiring reckoning.
Hear the voice of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, these words spoken in 1891 and yet relevant today:
“A government which can protect and defend its citizens from wrong and outrage and does not is vicious. A government which would do it and cannot is weak; and where human life is insecure through either weakness or viciousness in the administration of law, there [is] a lack of justice ….”
For more than two years, I have been planning this sermon on this Sunday – wanting to mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, of a Black woman abolitionist who, while raised in the African Methodist Episcopal tradition, was a member of First Unitarian Church of Philadelphia for the last forty years of her life.
During slavery, she was born free, in Baltimore. She was one of the earliest Black women whose writing was published in the United States – her first book was a collection of poems, published in 1845 when she was only 20 years old. She spent her life both writing and speaking, often on the causes of abolition, voting enfranchisement, and the systemic exclusion of Black folks within American society.
While she was a strong visionary, wrote powerful words, or spoke forcefully in public, she was also a woman of action. A half century before Rosa Parks was even born, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper refused to give up her seat on horse-drawn trolleys in Philadelphia. Multiple times.
A presence and a power who campaigned and advocated ceaselessly for the emancipation of those who were enslaved and the full enfranchisement of all people of all races and all genders, including facing head-on the racism exhibited by white suffragists, Watkins Harper famously critiquing them with these words, “You white women speak here of rights. I speak of wrongs.”
Not only was her writing well-received, she was a sought-after speaker on the various circuits popular in that era. The Maine Anti-Slavery Society hired her as a “lecturing agent.” Since she went as far west as Michigan, I can’t help but wonder if in her travels, she came to Vermont.
I loved learning that Frances Ellen Watkins Harper corresponded with the fiery abolitionist John Brown, after he was imprisoned for his violent taking of Harper’s Ferry in hopes of fomenting a revolution to bring an end to slavery. She also spent extended time with Brown’s soon-to-be widow. In that waiting time, Watkins Harper wrote these words to him:
. . . We may earnestly hope that your fate will not be a vain lesson, that it will intensify our hatred of Slavery and love of Freedom, and that your martyr grave will be a sacred altar upon which men will record their vows of undying hatred to that system which tramples on man and bids defiance to God.
I ask you to notice this connection to John Brown, in part because on the first Sunday in December this year, near the anniversary date of his funeral, I will tell the story of how the minister serving this congregation officiated that rite of passage.
My colleague, the Reverend Dan Schatz, in researching his sermon to honor this bicentennial celebration of her birth, which he gave last Sunday, discovered a phrase of hers that resounds in modern Unitarian Universalism. In 1857, she wrote an essay on Christianity in which she used the phrase “dignity and worth” which, while it is traced to Immanuel Kant a full century before, became one of Unitarian Universalism’s core principles and values, kept relevant across the centuries. She is with us today.
Earlier this year, the UU World, the magazine of our Association, published an article about Watkins Harper, sharing more highlights about this religious forebear of ours. I commend it to you and will include a link in the eNews next week. In reading that article, I learned that in 1992, “several Black UUs gathered …to honor Harper’s memory by replacing her headstone at Eden Cemetery, the oldest public Black-owned cemetery in the United States.” And that in 2011, on the 100th anniversary of her death, First Unitarian Church of Philadelphia hosted a celebration of her life and legacy.
At the top of the order of service today, we have printed a quote from Watkins Harper, the perhaps most well-known of hers.
We are all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity, and society cannot trample on the weakest and feeblest of its members without receiving a curse in its own soul.
May we take as real as real can be the wisdom of these words, the truth of what one of our religious forebears spoke to us 159 years ago yet still speaks to us today. May we be the antidote to that curse.
Part II
The second part of this sermon, this celebration of the river of Black struggle that rolls and roils within Unitarian Universalism, with a focus on Black women, the power and the presence they have brought and continue to bring, flowing in the legacy of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper. In this part, we want to raise up to you three additional Black femmes.
And I say Black femmes, not women, because while two of the people we want us to tell you about identify as women, one of them, the one we are going to hear about first, identified as non-binary in the last few years of their life.
So why include them in this list? Well, we’re following the wisdom I recently learned:
some thems present as femmes
Let us meet the late “E” or Elandria Williams.
When Elandria Williams died at 41 years of age, five years ago this week, the Reverend Mr. Barb Greve, who had served as Co-Moderator of the Unitarian Universalist Association with Elandria, said this:
“E lived an intersectional life. E was African American, E lived with disabilities, and I don’t know how Elandria defined E’s gender but certainly not cis. E moved in and out of those communities reminding us that people could live multiple truths simultaneously.…In each relationship and setting, Elandria was known by different nicknames and pronouns, a true reflection of the beautiful ways Our Beloved moved through life and community.”
E was a lifelong UU and a member of the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church in Knoxville, Tennessee where E grew up. It was said of E that they attracted people from all walks of life – when E showed up at UUA headquarters in Boston, everyone from the janitor to the president would line up to hang out.
Elandria was a youth leader with Young Religious Unitarian Universalists (YRUU) and later, in 2007, as a young adult, she received the Outstanding Antiracist Activist & Leadership Award from DRUUMM – Diverse and Revolutionary UU Multicultural Ministries. E was a founding member of Black Lives of UU. In E was elected to the UUA Board of Trustees in 2016 and soon thereafter, when Unitarian Universalism had one of our reckonings around race and racism in the spring of 2017, E became Co-Moderator.
Outside of Unitarian Universalism proper, E worked for 11 years at the highly-respected Highlander Research and Education Center in Tennessee (that’s the place where Rosa Parks went for strategic training before she refused to get off the bus). At the time of their death, E was the Executive Director of the PeoplesHub, an online popular education school for activists grounded in solidarity economy and disability justice principles.
Hear again a small part of this morning’s call to worship, written by Elandria. As you listen, see if you can hear that Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s message that we are all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity.
We are worthy
Not because of what we produce
But because of who we are
We are divine bodies of light and darkness
You are not worthy because of
what you offer,
not because of
what is in your mind,
not for the support you give others,
not for what you give at all
We are worthy and are whole
just because
[…]
Imagine what we could create
if we were not always in the struggle.
Imagine what we could envision
if we could just […] go there.
[…]
You are the visionary
You are the hope
You are our ancestors’ dreams.
Paula Cole Jones is widely known for her stewardship of the 8th Principle Project, a grassroots movement within Unitarian Universalism to raise up our religious commitment to the dismantling of systemic oppressions as one of our core principles (our 8th when only 7 had been officially adopted). She was its co-author back in 2013 and when our Association shifted to a focus on Values, she was part of the Article II Commission that assured the language of the 8th Principle was embedded throughout the new Values with Love at the center.
In 2019, she gave the annual Sophia Fahs lecture, given by an individual whose life and work has shown a commitment and understanding of the meaning, the depth, and the challenges of religious education in Unitarian Universalism. In that lecture, she spoke of her provocative and creative conceptualization of congregational life not according to traditional organizational charts, but as “communities of communities.”
A member of All Souls Unitarian in Washington DC, she has received award after award for her service to our faith movement. The latest came this past June, at General Assembly when she received the Award for Distinguished Service to the Cause of Unitarian Universalism, one of the most prestigious awards given by the Unitarian Universalist Association.
That award is given to a person who has strengthened the institutions of our Unitarian Universalist denomination or clarified our message in an extraordinary way. The person who receives this award is understood to exemplify what Unitarian Universalism stands for.
Referencing a story Paula Cole Jones often tells about Miles Davis, Reverend Tracy Robinson-Harris said this of her just before she accepted the award at the closing ceremony at GA:
[Paula] challenges us to play above what we know, to do something different from what we do all the time. She helps us understand where we are, how we got here, and what keeps us here. She encourages us to be more imaginative, more innovative, to take more risks. Think of the eighth principle project and how it informs our values including justice, transformation, equity, all centered in love. Thank you, Paula, for your faithful insistence that our community of faith
can become what we aspire to be.
So much of Paula Cole Jones’ ministry, as a lay person, reflects that message:
we are all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity
Finally, I want to raise up one more powerful Black UU woman in our present-day Association: Rev. Kimberly Quinn Johnson. As with the other images we have shown throughout this morning’s service, you can see, on the right, what Rev. Kimberly looks like now.
On the left, well, those are two much younger ministers, one of whom is Rev. Kimberly. The other…well…
Rev. Kimberly was elected to be one of two Co-Moderators of the Unitarian Universalist Association, alongside Co-Moderator Bill Young. She also serves as minister of the UU Congregation of the South Fork on the far end of Long Island. Though her curricula vita can comprehensively detail the long list of positions she has held in service of making both Unitarian Universalism and her local community a better space, I cannot because she has done nearly everything: the board of the UU Service Committee; of the UU Women’s Federation; of Black Lives of UU; of the St. Lawrence Foundation for Theological Education; of the UU Class Conversations. There’s more. There’s just not enough time to list them all.
Before becoming a minister, she was a union organizer. She has been an adjunct professor teaching Women’s and Gender Studies – with a focus on diversity and difference, though as her friend, I hope that she has put that on hold during the six-year term as Co-Moderator.
Rev. Kimberly is actually coming to visit First UU – she won’t be in the pulpit but she will be hanging around here on October 19th, singing with us as we explore the new UU Virtual Hymnal that morning, as well as attending the third and final Growing Our Bravery session that takes place at noon that Sunday.
Shifting gears and heading towards closing, I want to offer a last word about how we are all bound up together, in one great bundle of humanity. It is also a shout about a local project, called the Vibrant Lives Project, with local poet, Rajnii Eddins as a primary organizer. It connects local youth, primarily youth of color, with elders across an age span, also local, to conduct oral histories so that their stories, contributions, presence, is not lost.
One of the ways we will be known, is not only by the company we keep now, but the company we keep in how we tell our histories – whose history matters, whose lives are recorded and remembered and integrated into the Great Turning that is upon us. For how we tell our history, whose stories we include, how we resist the erasure of those marginalized, that reveals what seeds we are sowing for the future. Let us not be cursed in our soul but affirm this diverse and great bundle of humanity.
