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January 14, 2001

In my last year of theological school, I enrolled in a black theology seminar. Five of us met weekly in Dr. Rook’s living room and wrestled with James Cone’s writings. One moment now stands out in my memory. After reading "God of the Oppressed," one student, a slight, intense, dark-haired man, said, "When I look at my white skin in the mirror in the morning I hate myself." I remember the discussion of theology came to a halt. I felt pity for him. I expressed my concern that nothing good could come of self-hatred. I don’t recall that a resolution was reached, but I had witnessed how hard the burden of guilt is to bear.

When later in 1978 I graduated from Meadville Lombard Theological School, my doctoral thesis was entitled "Black Pioneers in a White Denomination." Writing it has been a survival tactic. If I was going to become a minister in this overwhelmingly Euro-American religious association, I wanted to know why I had so few black colleagues. I set out to interview them or their kin. Ethelred Brown’s daughter. Thom Payne, David Eaton, Lewis McGee, Mwalimu Imara, Ben Richardson and Jeff Campbell. One by one I tracked them down, yet the name of William H.G. Carter was never mentioned.

Carter’s existence was brought to my attention a year later. Felix Lion, one of my senior colleagues in upstate New York, pulled me aside one day to tell me how in 1938 while studying in Cincinnati he’d accidentally come across the Unitarian Brotherhood Church. Besides his surprise, what he remembered most was "the warm, motherly figure, Mrs. Carter."

Four years later, as I was reworking "Black Pioneers" for publication, I tried to find out more about Carter. I wrote Lon Ray Call, who had visited the congregation on behalf of the AUA in 1939. Call replied. Forty years and old age had erased all memory of his visit but he said, "Sorry if I kept a good man from fulfilling his mission." It seems that as he penned his note explaining that Unitarianism was in serious decline, Call experienced feelings of guilt and was moved to apologize.

If we surveyed the situation of black ministers at that moment in 1939, this is what we would have found: Egbert Ethelred Brown, who had transferred his efforts from Jamaica to Harlem in 1920, had his ministerial fellowship reinstated several years earlier after the ACLU threatened to sue the American Unitarian Association. It has been revoked in 1929, which was the same year that Brown’s eldest son had committed suicide and one AUA official had written to another: "No wonder his son committed suicide, he must have been the only wise one in the family."

Lewis McGee was two years away from becoming a member of the Board of the American Humanist Association. A Unitarian minister had counseled him in 1927, "If you want to become a Unitarian minister, you had better bring your own church," and so in ’39 he was still serving African Methodist Episcopal churches in the Chicago region.

Jeff Campbell, a Universalist, who in 1938 also gained fellowship as a Unitarian, told me that Frederick May Eliot "would start making excuses as soon as he saw me at the other end of the corridor." In Unitarian circles it didn’t speak well for him that he’d also run as the gubernatorial candidate in Massachusetts as a Socialist. It would be another 30 years before he would be settled.

Meanwhile there was W.H.G. Carter who, like Brown, was a community activist and, like Campbell and Brown, ran for office, but unlike any of them he was also an entrepreneur. He had been a Unitarian since 1918 and was ministering to a congregation of 50-60 in a Cincinnati storefront at 732 West 5^th St. The local Unitarian ministers knew of his stature and work, but not a word had been passed on to headquarters in Boston until that fateful afternoon that Felix Lion saw the sign that read "The Unitarian Brotherhood Church."

So, in 1938, there were four black Unitarian ministers in the U.S.: men of substance, each struggling on in isolation. There were two black Unitarian churches, one here and the other in Harlem, unknown to one another and receiving minimal or no support from the AUA. It seems Unitarian attitudes had changed little since 1860, when an African-American, the Rev. Mr. Jackson, had presented himself to the autumnal meeting of the Boston Unitarian ministers. He told of his conversion and it is minuted that they took a collection and sent him on his way. "No discussion, no welcome, no expression of praise and satisfaction was uttered, that the Unitarian gospel had reached the ‘colored.’"

Like the Rev. Mr. Jackson, what Carter, Brown, McGee, Campbell and others that followed them experienced instead of an "expression of praise and satisfaction" was, at best, official indifference and often-active discouragement. The experience of the other black Unitarian ministers was so discouraging that I can’t help but wonder if it was not just as well that William H.G. Carter only had the one interaction with Boston.

As Unitarian Universalists we can look back upon these squandered opportunities with regret. Realizing how our forebears abused the black men who came to us in faith, it is easy to feel guilty. No longer shielded by ignorance, shame is what I feel. I know. I’ve felt it, I assume we all have, and know also how it eats away at our self-esteem. What are we to do with the guilt that burdens us?

During a genealogical presentation at a family reunion, when my cousin said Elizabeth Hardcastle had left her niece Catherine Cleveland, my great-great-great-great-grandmother, five slaves, my mind snapped to attention. I had suspected this but never focused my attention upon it because I didn’t want to know. Feelings of confusion and shame gripped me as I sat there. We were African-Americans and slave owners both? I waited. Would my cousin say something more? When I asked, she prevaricated. "These were the oldest slaves," she explained. "They were given to Catherine because she would care for them." The cynic in me snarled. The "Boy Scout" hoped it was true. Torn, I remained silent as the presentation wandered elsewhere. What I wanted was for the lecture to stop. I needed to ponder the moral implications and shift through what it made me feel. I was comfortable identifying myself as a victim of slavery—my father’s maternal grandmother had been freed at age four, and I had known her. What I was unprepared emotionally to incorporate was the fact that I also had ancestors who were slave owners.

Obviously Catherine Cleveland had prospered in South Carolina. Slavery had served us well. I blush as I say this but one look around the hotel banquet hall was all that was required to remind me how much we had profited: a judge, an ambassador, a brokerage house vice-president, a bank manager, the medical director of an insurance company, mingling with physicians and lawyers, teachers, dentists and social workers. How was I to respond to this reality that some of the advantages that have been mine are the fruit of an institution I had always considered an abomination? How was I to respond to the fact that my family and I were indebted to such a past? Since then I have come to see that my situation parallels that of white Americans and UUs. They—you—we haven’t known how to deal with the inequities of the past any more than I did. Who can tolerate knowing that one of the pillars of one’s prosperity is a great evil? The burden of guilt is not easily borne, but what to do about it?

Tell the truth. America was no empty frontier waiting to be settled by Europeans. That fabrication helps us evade a painful reality. The "American Wilderness" was a moral one: the genocide of Native Americans, compounded by the enslavement of kidnapped Africans. Slavery was written into a "Constitution" which we deem a sacred document designed to defend freedom. This was not incongruent, for that freedom ironically was never meant for any besides white, land-owning males. The ideal, however, was greater than the white men who articulated it. Once the notion of freedom was in the air it could not be contained. The "Emancipation Proclamation" set the slaves free. The economic bondage and attenuation of political rights imposed by America’s caste system only delayed freedom. Even "Jim Crow" could not stop it—the unfinished revolution continued, and continues still although many no longer notice.

This places us in a conundrum. White people, in general, are blind to the subtle forms of discrimination that black Americans bitterly consider ordinary. It’s hard to notice the cumulative advantage that goes with one’s place in society, and it is more likely that Euro-Americans experience themselves as the victims of today’s society. In this context, to ask white people—no matter how good their intentions—to take responsibility for their ancestors’ misdeeds and injustice is to create expectations that will never be met. To ask them to change is to place the onus upon those who have little understanding and less motivation. To hold out hope that they will change can only create more bitterness, since whites, regardless of what efforts are made, will fall short of what we who are black hope for, once again leaving us disappointed and angry.

So what are we to do? William F. Schulz, former president of the UUA, wrote in the preface to Black Pioneers in a White Denomination, "It calls upon us to transcend both apathy and guilt because both deal cruelly with vision." Vision is the key.

Which is to say the past was what it was, but we can transcend it. To transcend it we must transform it, and transforming it requires a process of healing. People begin to heal when they give voice to their stories and have their pain acknowledged. In the realization of how ugly, uncomfortable and messy our past is, denial is a compelling choice. But denial of past wrongs only perpetuates them for it says, "We do not see you, recognize the injustice nor understand your pain." This is also what happens when people say, "Let’s forget the past and look toward the future." As Leslie Edwards observed, "You can say, ‘The right thing wasn’t done back then and I wasn’t (there) back then, so I’m going to go ahead and forget about it. The past is the past.’ Or you can say, ‘If there is anything I can do to recognize (that) what was done in the past was wrong, I want to acknowledge it and step forward and do what I can.’" Ultimately, we can’t move toward reconciliation until the pain has been spoken of and listened to.

Healing begins by accepting the truth about what happened back then. Recognize it, regret it, grieve it, accept it and move on. Our regrets about the past are, in part, what bring us here today. Shed tears for how we treated William H.G. Carter. Grieve the lost opportunity. Grieve that we did not live up to our principles which affirm the inherent worth and dignity of every person, and were not true to our Judeo-Christian heritage which calls on us to "love thy neighbor as thyself." Reconciliation, as they have discovered in South Africa, requires truth. That is what this weekend is in part about—reconciliation. It asks that we pause to remember the history we would rather forget.

Remembering the past with regret can strengthen the resolve to do the only thing we can do—together to shape a more just tomorrow. For in that moment when the one person feels hurt and the other feels sympathy, a bond is established. That connection can be built upon. And as the relationship grows, we can move beyond avoidance, guilt and self-hatred, and let go of the anger and recrimination to embrace the only things that can sustain us over the long haul – the love of God, which we find in one another, and our shared vision of tomorrow. For alone, our vision is too narrow to see all that must be seen, and our strength too limited to do all that must be done, but together our vision widens and our strength is renewed, and that is cause, as it is today, to celebrate and recommit with our souls.

Let us pray:

Dear God dwelling within, among and beyond us all we come to you with furrowed brow and shoulders bent to share news of our frustration and failures and our hope, for we are still searching – searching our hearts for that place that knows we are one human family, searching the world for companions with whom to share in our work, searching for a way that will lead us forward into a tomorrow blessed by words of reconciliation spoken today.

Amen.

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