FAITH LIKE A RIVER
A Tapestry of Faith Program for Adults
WORKSHOP 12: I'VE GOT TEARS LIKE THE RAINDROPS — FREEDOM
2011
BY JACKIE CLEMENT ALISON CORNISH
© Copyright 2011 Unitarian Universalist Association.
Published to the Web on 9/29/2014 11:03:55 PM PST.
This program and additional resources are available on the UUA.org web site at
www.uua.org/religiouseducation/curricula/tapestryfaith.
WORKSHOP OVERVIEW
INTRODUCTION
We can choose between hating our neighbors or feeling kindly toward them. We can avenge or forgive. We can participate in political life; we can also leave politics to the demagogues. We can help the suffering, the ill, the unfortunate; we can let them die. We can encourage the search for truth and free expression of ideas or we can join in the clamor for suppression of all with which we disagree. We can work toward a united world community, or we can work for American dominion or isolation. These are all fateful choices, and it is our duty to choose. — The Rev. Howard Brooks, Unitarian Service Committee staff, 1949.
Freedom is a value integral to the Unitarian Universalist tradition. As a people of faith, we have had many opportunities in history to represent this value in the wider world. Does valuing freedom primarily mean that we uphold the right to individual stances in religious, social, or political life? Or does it call us to movements of liberation for all who are oppressed? Unitarian and Universalist individuals and institutions played a variety of roles in many important social justice struggles within our faith communities and in the broader society. This workshop explores key moments in our history when questions of freedom and justice were in the forefront of our movement. It shines an honest light on ways our forebears sometimes contributed to oppression as well as worked for liberation.
Before leading this workshop, review the Accessibility Guidelines for Workshop Presenters in the program Introduction and make any preparations needed to accommodate individuals who may be in the group.
GOALS
This workshop will:
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
Participants will:
WORKSHOP-AT-A-GLANCE
Activity | Minutes |
Welcoming and Entering | 0 |
Opening | 5 |
Activity 1: Slavery and Antislavery | 25 |
Activity 2: How Is Freedom Achieved? | 25 |
Activity 3: Martha and Waitstill Sharp | 20 |
Activity 4: Litany of Allies | 30 |
Faith in Action: Our Congregation's Justice Work | |
Closing | 5 |
Alternate Activity 1: Working for Freedom | 30 |
SPIRITUAL PREPARATION
Take time to reflect on these questions:
You may wish to ask participants to engage in this same spiritual practice so that they, too, arrive at the workshop centered and ready to engage with the material and the group.
WORKSHOP PLAN
WELCOMING AND ENTERING
Materials for Activity
Preparation for Activity
Description of Activity
Welcome everyone to the workshop as they enter. Ask them to sign in, make (or pick up) name tags, and pick up the schedule and time line handouts from the welcome table. Point out the posted agenda for this workshop.
Including All Participants
Write the agenda in large, clear lettering and post it where it will be easily visible to all participants. Provide name tags large enough and markers bold enough so names will be easily visible.
OPENING (5 MINUTES)
Materials for Activity
Preparation for Activity
Description of Activity
Gather the group around the chalice. Light the chalice and invite participants to sing Hymn 156, "Oh, Freedom."
Including All Participants
If the group is more comfortable reading together than singing, lead, in unison, Reading 462 in Singing the Living Tradition.
ACTIVITY 1: SLAVERY AND ANTISLAVERY (25 MINUTES)
Materials for Activity
Preparation for Activity
Description of Activity
Read, or present in your own words, the contents of Leader Resource 1, Slavery and Antislavery. Explain that while much has been written and celebrated about Unitarian and Universalist abolitionists, we may forget there was a range of opinion about how freedom for those enslaved should be achieved. There were even those among our religious ancestors who supported the institution of slavery, passively or actively. Explain that in this activity, participants will hear some of these voices.
Pass the basket of quotes, inviting each participant to select a slip with a quote to read aloud. With a small group, invite participants to choose more than one. Remind participants they are welcome to "pass" or to ask someone else to read a quote they have picked.
After slips are chosen, invite each reader to identify the date of the quote so the group can read the quotes in chronological order. Have participants read each quote aloud and share the information on the slip about the person quoted.
Following the readings, lead a conversation about the quotes using some or all of these prompts:
ACTIVITY 2: HOW IS FREEDOM ACHIEVED? (25 MINUTES)
Materials for Activity
Preparation for Activity
Description of Activity
Introduce this activity in these words, or paraphrase. Pass around (or project) the portraits of Livermore and Brown as you speak about each woman.
How is freedom best achieved? For people who are oppressed or marginalized to achieve equality and freedom, when is it most effective for people to work within existing structures of power? When is it most effective to work outside those structures? When is it most effective to work as a separatist movement? How forceful must demands be in order to be achieved? These questions have been played out through human history and extend into our own congregations. In struggles over issues from theology to administration, some people will break away while others will work within the existing structures.
In the second half of the 19th century, the rights of women became a topic of debate in society at large and in Unitarian and Universalist congregations. Should women vote? Take an equal part in the affairs of business and the nation? Have full participation in our churches as professional and lay leaders? Mary Livermore and the Rev. Olympia Brown agreed that women were capable of larger roles in society and in the churches. They disagreed over how such freedom was best achieved.
Mary Livermore, married to Universalist minister Daniel Parker Livermore, was a tireless worker for the rights of women. When she addressed the Universalist Centenary Assembly in 1870, she believed women were capable of great things, but that their work should be under the direction of the male leadership of the church. She would later come to work for women's right to the vote.
Universalist minister Olympia Brown was the first woman in the United States ordained by a denominational body. She believed women could (and should) work at an equal level with men, independent of male direction.
Distribute Handout 1, How Is Freedom Achieved? Invite the designated volunteers to read the words of Mary Livermore and Olympia Brown aloud. Then, ask for comments and observations, using these questions:
ACTIVITY 3: MARTHA AND WAITSTILL SHARP (20 MINUTES)
Materials for Activity
Preparation for Activity
I became acutely aware of the necessity for explicit commitment, in contrast to a vague sort of liberalism opposed to prejudices and promoting openness of mind. — James Luther Adams
Description of Activity
Read or tell the story "Righteous Among the Nations — Martha and Waitstill Sharp." and then invite questions or comments.
Say:
In 1935-36, Unitarian theologian James Luther Adams traveled to Nazi Germany to study. There he met many church leaders, including the minister of the largest Unitarian church in Germany, who accepted the Nazi philosophy in order to protect themselves and keep their churches open. Adams later wrote extensively of that time in Germany.
Display the prepared quote from James Luther Adams. Pause for a moment to allow people to gather their thoughts, then invite them to turn to a partner and share their responses to the quote and the story.
After five minutes, gather the large group. Invite participants to offer examples of ways Unitarian Universalists have demonstrated explicit commitment to freedom and justice for all people. Invite conversations about how your congregation makes explicit its commitment to social justice. How might that work be strengthened?
ACTIVITY 4: LITANY OF ALLIES (30 MINUTES)
Materials for Activity
Preparation for Activity
We would remember those in bonds as bound with them. — Russell Lant Carpenter, English Unitarian minister
Description of Activity
Introduce the activity with these or similar words:
As we have seen in the stories in this workshop, striving for freedom from oppression is rarely a solo enterprise. Unitarian Universalist minister David Pettee writes: "the work of justice making is never an individual passion. I've discovered that if our commitments are only on an individual basis and we fail to engage our religious communities in this work, we are unlikely to change the realities of systematic racism ... I believe it is only through the communal work of building the Beloved Community that we will find liberation."
The work of liberation is rooted in the lives of those who have experienced oppression, and also in the lives of those who serve as their allies. An ally is someone who takes on another's struggle as their own, and manifests that stance through both deeds and words. Every one of us needs allies at times, and every one of us can choose to be an ally for someone else. In this context, we will consider the choice to be an ally for people who are oppressed or marginalized by social, legal, or cultural structures and practices.
A litany is a set of readings that has a repeating response. We will create and read a Litany of Allies.
Distribute hymnbooks. Invite participants to read Reading 637, "A Litany of Atonement," in Singing the Living Tradition responsively with you—that is, you read the standard text, and the group responds by reading aloud the italicized text. Point out the structure of the reading: Not only does the refrain repeat, but the opening of each new phrase begins with the word, "for." The reading also includes action phrases such as "remaining silent," "struck out in anger," "falling short," and "losing sight" which help the reader embody or inhabit the words. Ask participants for any other observations they have about the reading, its structure, and its impact.
Invite participants to form groups of two or three. Distribute paper, pens and markers and invite them to focus on one way in which people experience oppression today—for example, oppression based on race, gender, social class, religion, physical or mental ability, sexual orientation, or age. When each small group has identified a focus, invite them to brainstorm words that relate to that oppression, as well as words that relate to liberation and freedom. If useful, suggest examples from this workshop such as freedom, commitment, harmony, order, self-interest, conflict, power, privilege, and reconciliation.
Once they have brainstormed some words, invite each pair or triad to write a short litany, using as a refrain the Russell Carpenter words you have posted. Allow 15 minutes for groups to work. If you have provided percussion instruments, point them out, telling participants they are welcome to accompany their words with rhythm if they so choose.
Re-gather the large group and invite each small group, in turn, to present their litany, with the whole group responding with the common refrain.
CLOSING (5 MINUTES)
Materials for Activity
Preparation for Activity
Description of Activity
Distribute Taking It Home. Announce the date, time, and place of the next workshop and any other "housekeeping" information. Request or remind volunteers if you want participants to read material aloud or perform other roles at the next meeting.
Invite participants to gather around the chalice. Extinguish the chalice with these words, adapted from Francis Ellen Watkins Harper, as the chalice is extinguished:
We want more soul, a higher cultivation of our spiritual faculties
We need more unselfishness, earnestness and integrity of high and lofty enthusiasm and beacons of light and hope,
People ready and willing to lay time, talent and money on the altar of freedom.
FAITH IN ACTION: OUR CONGREGATION'S JUSTICE WORK
Preparation for Activity
Description of Activity
Even our younger congregations may include members who personally remember, for example, the work of Martha and Waitstill Sharp during World War II or who attended a General Assembly when resolutions concerning LGBTQ were passed. Some, older congregations cherish stories of individuals or actions in support of abolition of slavery, rights for African Americans, or women's rights.
Invite your minister, religious educator, congregational historian, or longtime members to visit your workshop to discuss ways one of the issues explored in this workshop touched your congregation. Has your congregation done research to identify connections to slavery and/or the abolition movement, the movement for marriage equality, or the fight against discrimination on the basis of gender or sexual orientation? Is there something left incomplete in the work your congregation has participated in? What is there to celebrate? Is there something for which to atone?
LEADER REFLECTION AND PLANNING
After the workshop, co-leaders should talk together to evaluate this workshop and plan future workshops. Use these questions to guide your shared reflection and planning:
TAKING IT HOME
We can choose between hating our neighbors or feeling kindly toward them. We can avenge or forgive. We can participate in political life; we can also leave politics to the demagogues. We can help the suffering, the ill, the unfortunate; we can let them die. We can encourage the search for truth and free expression of ideas or we can join in the clamor for suppression of all with which we disagree. We can work toward a united world community, or we can work for American dominion or isolation. These are all fateful choices, and it is our duty to choose. — The Rev. Howard Brooks, Unitarian Service Committee staff, 1949
Pick one of the issues covered in this workshop to journal about. Try to enter a time period of struggle for the issue you've chosen. Using these words from James Luther Adams as a starting point, think and write about what might have stopped someone at the time from taking a stand or acting for freedom. Adams wrote:
I became acutely aware of the necessity for explicit commitment, in contrast to a vague sort of liberalism opposed to prejudices and promoting openness of mind.
You might try writing this as an "excuse note," explaining the reasons. Then, reflect on what might have caused a person to act on behalf of freedom and justice under the same circumstances.
ALTERNATE ACTIVITY 1: WORKING FOR FREEDOM (30 MINUTES)
Materials for Activity
Preparation for Activity
Description of Activity
Introduce the activity with these or similar words:
Movements in support of liberation and freedom by and for those who have experienced discrimination, oppression, and other violations of their human and civil rights often require a long time to come to fruition. The road to freedom can be rocky, full of pitfalls and, detours, setbacks, and even unexpected successes. No matter how determined a group might be to effect change, every social justice effort is subject to the larger forces of society, including politics, counter-activists, cultural and social trends, epidemics, and wars. This activity invites you to share your own stories of working for freedom or liberation, either as part of a congregational group or as part of a political or social movement.
Invite participants to form groups of three to share their own stories, one at a time, using the posted questions as a guide. Allow 15 minutes for small groups to meet, then re-gather the large group and lead a conversation using these questions:
FAITH LIKE A RIVER: WORKSHOP 12:
STORY: RIGHTEOUS AMONG THE NATIONS — MARTHA AND WAITSTILL SHARP
Working through the night, Martha and Waitstill Sharp burned all their notes and papers. After this they would keep no records of the refugees they smuggled out of Nazi-occupied Europe. For their own safety and for the safety of those they were assisting, nothing could be written. A simple church mission had turned into a dangerous cloak-and-dagger proposition.
The Sharps, who had degrees from Harvard and Radcliffe and two beautiful young children, had left behind a life of comfort and privilege in Wellesley Hills, Massachusetts, where Waitstill served as minister of the Unitarian church. Now they found themselves secretly burning documents in an office in Prague, Czechoslovakia, on the night of March 14, 1939. What had led them to that moment?
In September of 1938, the Munich Pact ceded the Sudetenland, the border regions of Czechoslovakia, to the Nazis in exchange for a promise of peace. The flow of refugees to Prague's Unitarian church increased as Jews, political dissidents, intellectuals, and others targeted by the Nazis fled the Sudetenland following the Nazi annexation. The American Unitarian Association (AUA) asked Rev. Waitstill Sharp to visit Czechoslovakia and coordinate relief work there. The Sharps left for Europe in February, 1939, leaving their children, ages 3 and 6, in the care of close friends from the congregation. When they accepted that mission they did not know what lay ahead.
At first, the Sharps' work in Prague included setting up a network of volunteers to obtain visas, passage, education, and employment for refugees. However, the situation for refugees rapidly deteriorated. When it became clear that the Nazis were approaching the Sharps, instead of returning home, burned their records and vowed to continue their work. The following day, the Nazis marched into Prague.
That same day, Martha guided a top resistance leader to asylum at the British embassy. Stopped by Nazi guards three times, Martha used her American passport to get both of them safely through each checkpoint. A few days later, Waitstill arranged for a member of the Czech parliament to be smuggled from a hospital morgue in a body bag.
The Gestapo would not allow the work of people like the Sharps to continue. In July their office was closed and the furniture thrown into the street. Still they stayed on in Prague. In August, Waitstill attended a conference in Switzerland and was not allowed to re-enter occupied Czechoslovakia. Under threat of imminent arrest by the Gestapo, Martha fled Prague alone. The Sharps reunited in Paris, and sailed for home.
In May of 1940, Frederick May Eliot, president of the AUA, asked the Sharps to return to Europe as representatives of the newly formed Unitarian Service Committee (USC). With much of Europe now under Nazi occupation they worked from Marseilles in Free France and in Lisbon, Portugal, the last port of hope for many refugees from Nazi-occupied lands.
Among those helped were Nobel laureate physicist Otto Meyerhof and writers Heinrich Mann, Franz Werfel, and Lion Feuchtwanger. Smuggling Feuchtwanger out of Europe posed particular problems as he was on the Nazi's "most wanted" list. Dressed as a French peasant woman, Martha accompanied Feuchtwanger by train from Marseilles to the Spanish border where she distracted the guards so they would not discover him. When no extra tickets were available, Martha gave up her own ticket so that Feuchtwanger and his wife could sail to New York with Waitstill.
But not all of those the Sharps helped were famous. Martha worked tirelessly to find ways to break through the anti-Semitic United States immigration bureaucracy to allow Jewish children to come to the United States. In 1940, Marianne Scheckler was 12 years old, one of triplet sisters who had fled Vienna with their parents just steps ahead of the Nazis. Now a resident of Laguna Hills, California, Marianne Scheckler-Feder still remembers that day and Martha Sharp: "I remember a figure. She was a very, very elegant lady. Kind of serious and very concerned. You looked up to her... What she did for us was outstanding. It will never be forgotten."
What Martha Sharp did, she did for many, but she did not do it alone. The Sharps worked with others from the Unitarian Service Committee and other agencies. One of their closest associates was Varian Fry from the Emergency Rescue Committee. Varian Fry was the first American to be honored by Israel's Yad Vashem ("Hand of God," the state Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority) as one of the Righteous Among the Nations, a list that includes Oskar Schindler and Raoul Wallenberg. Martha and Waitstill Sharp are the second and third Americans so honored.
In addition to being honored by Yad Vashem in 2006, the Sharps have been recognized by The United States Holocaust Museum and the United States House of Representatives. But more importantly, their work is recognized by more than 2,000 adults and children that the Unitarian Service Committee helped rescue from Nazi persecution.
FAITH LIKE A RIVER: WORKSHOP 12:
HANDOUT 1: HOW IS FREEDOM ACHIEVED?
Mary Livermore, in addresses to the Women's Centenary Aid Society and the mass meeting of the Centennial Assembly of Universalists in Gloucester, Massachusetts, 1870 said:
I long for the women of our church to come up to their birthright, to take their places. I do not mean by this that I have any thought that they shall oust men from any place they occupy, that they shall crowd themselves in officiously where men desire to stand; I only mean by this, that whenever they find a chance to help the cause of Universalism or advance this glorious faith, I long to have them do it.
So I want all the women to work together for our church. Be not content with doing a little; let us do all we can; and when this centenary year closes, let us all reorganize, fall into line, and be ready, when the leaders tell us what to do, to obey. Let us learn one thing, which Universalist men and women have been slow to learn. Let us learn to obey orders, to stand in our rank, in every place, and to do what we are told to do, whether we like to do it or not, and not hang back, and haggle, and palter.
This, then, ladies and gentlemen, is my parting word. We part here, but we women are coming together again, the heart of the denomination, better instructed, larger, warmer, grander, more glowing, and then we are to stand by the side of our brothers, instructed by them, aided by them; for I do not believe in any divorce of the men and the women, all the way through, only we will take our stand by the side of them.
Olympia Brown wrote in "The Higher Education of Women" (1874):
Woman must from the streams of knowledge which come seething from the brains of the wise, forge for herself an armor in which to do battle with the world. There can be for her no great victories without conflict. He is no true soldier who expects to bear off the honors, while he sits on cushioned chairs in luxurious parlors and simply reads books of military tactics. He only is worthy of the name of soldier, who has been the hero of a hundred fights, whose noble scars bear witness of his valor on the field of battle, and whose muscles have been trained to endurance by long and perilous marches and the strict discipline of the camp. So woman must earn her title to valuable attainments, not by merely memorizing bits of information, but by brave and faithful service on the world's great battlefield.
Just the experience in the business of the world which develops character in men, women need to make them self-reliant, brave and true... (It) is only by an experience in the great world of business that woman's knowledge can be ripened, and her character matured. If boys after leaving school went home to be supported, and devoted themselves to needle-work and novels, we should look for no noble manhood, and only when girls cease to do this and seek some business of life whereby to independently support themselves, and benefit society can we look for the truest womanhood. But, says some objector, women will no longer be angels when brought in contact with the rude world. Alas! the United States of America in 1874 is not a favorable place for angels, nor are the men of the nineteenth century suitable companions for them. An angel in American society at the present time, would be sadly out of place and very uncomfortable.
FAITH LIKE A RIVER: WORKSHOP 12:
LEADER RESOURCE 1: SLAVERY AND ANTISLAVERY
The debate about slavery in the United States proved contentious within both Unitarianism and Universalism. While some of the country's leading abolitionists were women and men who identified as Unitarian or Universalist, each of the young denominations struggled to articulate a unified stand. Churches in the Southern states felt the stresses acutely, because their congregational membership was drawn from both the North and the South and their ministers were most often Northerners. In the North, too, Unitarians and Universalists took a variety of positions on slavery, and some prominent Unitarians and Universalists debated on the national stage. For example, John Quincy Adams, a Unitarian, stood up against the agreement that kept Congress from debating slavery. In 1850, another Unitarian, President Millard Fillmore, signed the Fugitive Slave Law, reviled by most Unitarians in the North. Unitarian John C. Calhoun, Vice President under both John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson, defended slavery, predicting chaos and hardship for both black and white people in the South, were slavery to end. The debate stretched over decades and generations as people changed their stances.
Elhanan Winchester, an American Universalist, spoke out against slavery in Virginia and published an anti-slavery address in 1787 in England, However, the first denominational action on antislavery came in 1790 when the Universalist Convention in Philadelphia adopted an antislavery resolution by the well-regarded Universalist Benjamin Rush, a signator of the Declaration of Independence.
As the 19th century opened different approaches to the abolition, accommodation, and critique of slavery emerged in both denominations. Conrad Wright has suggested that most Unitarians fell into one of three groups: those influenced by the prominent abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, who acted for the immediate cessation of slavery; those who sought a gradual end to the institution of slavery, so as to minimize disruption of the social, economic, and political order; and those who opposed slavery on moral grounds, but resisted making a political commitment to end it. An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans, written by Unitarian Lydia Maria Child, firmly established the "Garrison" perspective within Unitarianism. Her work also greatly influenced William Ellery Channing.
The Transcendental movement, with its emphasis on self-culture and moral growth that required human freedom, added energy to the antislavery movement. In 1841, Theodore Parker preached powerfully, calling slavery "the great national sin" and ably linking his theology with his politics. In the 1840s, collective antislavery action intensified in both denominations. In 1841, the Universalists held their first Anti-Slavery Convention in Lynn, Massachusetts, followed by annual conferences that declared slavery inconsistent with Universalism. In 1845, when 173 Unitarian ministers signed A Protest Against American Slavery they mentioned the foundational documents of the country, saying to "constantly to profess one thing and constantly to practice another must destroy the sinews of national virtue."
By the end of the 1840s, the positions either promoting or discouraging antislavery action were well framed. Although most were opposed to slavery itself, not all Unitarians or Universalists supported the abolitionist position. Some preffered a more gradual approach to abolition, one that would assure financial compensation for those who had invested in the purchase of slaves and avoid major economic and social disorder. Many involved in churches and other traditional institutions believed continued prosperity and stability relied on social order and the tactics of many abolitionists were simply too radical and disruptive. Many Unitarians and Universalists, reluctant to condemn all slaveholders as sinners, acknowledged mitigating circumstances such as treating slaves in a manner co-religionists could deem "kind." In addition, some Unitarians had a large stake in the economic engines of the North—mills, banks, and shipping—and were reluctant to take actions that would threaten their own financial interests. Many who were willing to engage slavery as a moral and religious issue resisisted engaging it as a political issue: Their consciences fully appreciated the immorality of slavery, but they realizedrespect for law and order and feared the risk to the nation's unity.
The issues surrounding slavery brought the potential for conflict wherever they were aired. Ministers and congregations sometimes opposed one another, as did factions within congregations.
A significant turning point came in September, 1850 when Congress passed, and President Millard Fillmore signed into law, the Fugitive Slave Act. The law required the return of fugitive slaves to their masters in the South and required private citizens in the North to assist in their capture. Fillmore's aim in signing the bill into law was the protection of personal property and the Union. He wrote to Daniel Webster, "God knows I detest slavery, but . . . we must endure it and give it such protection as is guaranteed by the Constitution till we can get rid of it without destroying the last hope of free government in the world." However, the Fugitive Slave Act went too far for even some of the antislavery gradualists, and energized those already impatient for slavery to end. The growing presence of abolitionist forces in Unitarianism, made the survival of fledgling Unitarian congregations in the South nearly impossible.
The story of Unitarianism, Universalism, and slavery continued beyond the Fugitive Slave Law, the Civil War, and Reconstruction of the South. In our own time, Unitarian Universalist minister David Pettee discovered that one of his white ancestors had been a slave trader and that enslaved Africans had lived in another ancestor's home. The discovery set Pettee on a search to uncover his familial roots to slavery, a search that led from Rhode Island to Ghana to Jamaica, New York, where he made contact with descendents of people who had been enslaved by his ancestors. Pettee's story is just one reminder that the legacy of slavery is with us still.
FAITH LIKE A RIVER: WORKSHOP 12:
LEADER RESOURCE 2: SLAVERY AND ANTISLAVERY QUOTES
1. The 1790 Universalist Convention, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania passed this resolution, On Holding Slaves, written by Benjamin Rush, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence:
We believe it is to be inconsistent with the union of the human race in a common Savior, and the obligations to mutual and universal love, which flow from that union, 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 (sic) in our country, and for the instruction and education of their children in English literature, and in the principles of the Gospel.
2. In 1833, Unitarian Lydia Maria Child wrote in An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans:
In a community where all the labor is done by one class, there must of course be another class, who live in indolence; and we all know how much people that have nothing to do are tempted by what the world calls pleasures; the result is, that slave-holding states and colonies are proverbial for dissipation. Hence too the contempt for industry, which prevails in such a state of society. Where none work but slaves, usefulness becomes degradation.
3. In 1835, Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing wrote, in Slavery:
He who cannot see a brother, a child of God, a man possessing all the rights of humanity, under a skin darker than his own, wants the vision of a Christian. He worships the outward. The spirit is not yet revealed to him. To look unmoved on the degradation and wrongs of a fellow-creature, because burned by a fiercer sun, proves us strangers to justice and love, in those universal forms which characterize Christianity.
4. In 1838, Theodore Clapp, Unitarian minister of the Independent Unitarian Society, New Orleans wrote:
I would say to every slave in the United States, 'You should realize that a wise, kind, and merciful Providence has appointed for you your condition in life; and, all things considered, you could not be more eligibly situated. The burden of your care, toils and responsibilities is much lighter than that, which God has imposed on your Master. The most enlightened philanthropists, with unlimited resources, could not place you in a situation more favorable to your present and everlasting welfare than that which you now occupy...'
5. In 1844, Unitarian Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote:
Slavery is no scholar, no improver; it does not love the whistle of the railroad; it does not love the newspaper, the mailbag, a college, a book or a preacher who has the absurd whim of saying what he thinks; it does not increase the white population; it does not improve the soil; everything goes to decay.
6. "A Protest Against Slavery, by One Hundred and Seventy-Three Unitarian Ministers," published in 1845, stated:
... by our political, commercial and social relations with the South, by the long silence of Northern Christians and Churches, but the fact that Northern men, gong to the South, often become Slaveholders and apologists for Slavery, we have given the Slaveholders reason to believe that it is only the accident of our position which prevents us from engaging in this system as fully as themselves. Our silence therefore is upholding Slavery, and we must speak against it in order not to speak in its support... We contend for mental freedom; shall we not denounce the system which fetters both mind and body? We have declared righteousness to be the essence of Christianity; shall we not oppose that system which is the sum of all wrong? We claim for all men the right of brotherhood before a universal Father; ought we not to testify against that which tramples so many of our brethren under foot?...
7. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a Unitarian minister, wrote and published this hymn, "The Nation's Sin," in 1846 while he was a student at Harvard Divinity School:
The land our fathers left to us
Is foul with hateful sin:
When shall, O Lord, this sorrow end,
And hope and joy begin?
What good, though growing might and wealth
Shall stretch from shore to shore,
If thus the fatal poison-taint
Be only spread the more?
Wipe out, O God, the nation's sin,
Then swell the nation's power;
But build not high our yearning hopes,
To wither in an hour!
No outward show nor fancied strength
From Thy stern justice saves;
There is no liberty for them
Who make their brethren slaves!
8. In 1851, Theodore Parker wrote in a sermon "On the Fugitive Slave Law:"
I have in my church black men, fugitive slaves. They are the crown of my apostleship, the seal of my ministry. It becomes me to look after their bodies in order to 'save their souls.' This law has brought us into the most intimate connection with the sin of slavery. I have been obliged to take my own parishioners into my house to keep them out of the clutches of the kidnapper. Yes, gentlemen, I have been obliged to do that; and then to keep my doors guarded by day as well as by night. Yes, I have had to arm myself. I have written my sermons with a pistol in my desk, - loaded, with a cap on the nipple, and ready for action. Yea, with a drawn sword within reach of my right hand. This I have done in Boston; in the middle of the nineteenth century; have been obliged to do it to defend the innocent members of my own church, women as well as men!...
9. Orville Dewey, a Unitarian minister, who was Channing's assistant, and later served congregations in Massachusetts and New York City, wrote in 1851:
(If a fugitive came to me, professed his divine right to be free, and asked for help, I would reply): your right to be free is not absolute, unqualified, irrespective of all consequences. If my espousal of your claim is likely to involve your race and mine together in disasters infinitely greater than your personal servitude, then you ought not to be free. In such a case personal rights ought to be sacrificed to the general good. You yourself ought to see this, and to be wiling to suffer for a while — one for many. If I were in your situation I should take this ground ...
10. Dr. Richard Dennis Arnold, mayor of Savannah, Georgia, and a lay leader of Unitarian Congregation, Savannah, wrote in 1851:
Servitude is happiness to the negro; liberty is a means of happiness to the Anglo-Saxon, and the present relative condition of both races is the best security for the prosperity and well being of the whole community... It has worked well, and would have worked well forever if left alone.
11. In 1854 Samuel Atkins Eliot, vestryman and warden of the King's Chapel, Boston, wrote:
Great as are the moral and political wrongs and evils of slavery, they are probably not so great as those of anti-slavery agitation.
12. In 1860, Caroline Howard Gilman, author and the wife of Samuel Gilman, minister of Archdale Street Unitarian Church, Charleston, South Carolina, wrote in "Letters of a Confederate Mother:"
... the old thirteen states made laws together, called a constitution, and promised to keep them. One of the laws was that runaway slaves should be returned to their owners. The North has broken the law, encourages the slaves to run away, and sends them to Canada. They do not take them home and make ladies and gentlemen of them, but put them in a freezing climate, to labor for their own living, good and bad together.
13. In 1866, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, African American writer, lecturer, and activist, wrote in "We Are All Bound Up Together:"
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 the curse in its own soul. You tried that in the case of the negro. You pressed him down for two centuries; and in so doing you crippled the moral strength and paralyzed the spiritual energies of the white men of the country... This grand and glorious revolution which has commenced will fail to reach its climax of success until throughout the length and breadth of the American Republic the nation shall be so color-blind as to know no man by the color of his skin or the curl of his hair. It will then have no privileged class, trampling upon and outraging the unprivileged classes, but will be then one great privileged nation, whose privilege will be to produce the loftiest manhood and womanhood that humanity can attain.
14. In May, 2007, in "Claiming Our History, Warts and All" David Pettee, a Unitarian Universalist minister, wrote:
I have wrestled long and hard to understand if I am now responsible for the actions and deeds of those who lived before me. If I allow myself to be disconnected from history, then I am off the hook. But when I acknowledge my true relationship to our community of memory, I can no longer make sense of the privileges I have inherited. I know that these comforts I enjoy are a direct product of the labors of others who were denied the opportunity to pursue their own dreams... We must be willing to claim all of our history, warts and all.
15. In 2007, UUA President and Unitarian Universalist minister William Sinkford wrote:
There's a kind of liberation that comes with being able to actually know our past and talk about it freely. If we're not able to talk about it freely, the past gets built into the walls in ways that we have a hard time seeing.
FAITH LIKE A RIVER: WORKSHOP 12:
LEADER RESOURCE 3: MARY LIVERMORE, PORTRAIT
From the Unitarian Universalist Association archives.
FAITH LIKE A RIVER: WORKSHOP 12:
LEADER RESOURCE 4: OLYMPIA BROWN, PORTRAIT
From the Unitarian Universalist Association archives.
FIND OUT MORE
Unitarians and the Fugitive Slave Law
Strange, Douglas. "From Treason to Antislavery Patriotism: Unitarian Conservatives and the Fugitive Slave Law," (at pds.lib.harvard.edu/pds/view/2573358?n=12332&s=4) Harvard Library Bulletin, Vol. XXV, No. 4 and "Abolitionism as Maleficence: Southern Unitarians Versus 'Puritan Fanaticism' — 1831 — 1860," (at pds.lib.harvard.edu/pds/view/2573358?n=12550&s=4) Harvard Library Bulletin, Vol XXVI, No. 2
Martha and Waitstill Sharp and the History of the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee
Celebrating the Work of Martha and Waitstill Sharp (at www.uusc.org/files/TheSharps.pdf) (Cambridge, MA: Unitarian Universalist Service Committee)
Diversity and Welcoming Congregations
James, Jacqui and Judith A. Frediani, Weaving the Fabric of Diversity (Boston, MA: Unitarian Universalist Association, 1996)
Unitarian Universalist Association Office of Muliticultural Growth and Witness (at www.uua.org/aboutus/professionalstaff/identity-basedministries/index.php)
Unitarian Universalism and the Quest for Racial Justice (Boston: Unitarian Universalist Association, 1993)
The Welcoming Congregation Handbook: Resources for Affirming Bisexual, Gay, Lesbian, and/or Transgender People (Boston: Unitarian Universalist Association, 1999)