I have chosen to believe that the arc bends best through the work of humans on earth. This has always presented a great moral dilemma for me. If I share responsibility, what do I do? This week I chose to join the Concerned Clergy group, and thanked God for being given this opportunity within a Unitarian Universalist congregation.

When I agreed to support a boycott of Taste of Cincinnati I was aware than many members of this congregation, if not the majority of this congregation, would not share my position. I am one of the group's four spokespeople, and in every substantial interview I have had this week, I have been clear that I solely represent myself. Unfortunately, this part is always edited out and is not well understood. Unless the congregation or Board of Trustees votes to endorse a position, my words are just that, my words.

As a Unitarian Universalist clergyperson, I have freedom of the pulpit, the right to say what is in my mind and heart, here and in public. At the same time, each member has freedom of the pew, the right to say what is on your heart and mind, here and in public. In our tradition, the clergyperson's words do not automatically represent a congregational endorsement.

I am grateful to each of you for honoring freedom of the pulpit, particularly those who do not share my opinion, and some of you have been just wonderful about this. I am not upset that some of you disagree with my position. That is your right and I respect your opinions. I am grateful that I minister to a congregation with the maturity to respect differences of opinion. I also want to affirm the struggles some of you may have had with fear, shame, guilt, responsibility, love, and anger. I have shared some of those struggles myself this week. It has been a challenging week for many of us.

As of ten days ago, I did not favor a boycott. So, what changed my mind? I listened to clergy and members of the Black United Front. In the novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus Finch attempts to teach his daughter, Scout, to look beyond her impulsive thoughts and feelings to those of others. He tells her "If you can learn a simple trick, Scout, you'll get along better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view . . . until you climb into his skin and walk around in it."

This past week I left my middle class home, my white skin, my respected clergy position, and stepped into the skin of others. Here is what I saw from that skin. Cincinnati would rather develop a brand new housing development on the riverfront where no one lives, rather than invest 600,000 into Over the Rhine where people already live. Cincinnati would rather spend 36 hours handing out coupons for free pretzels rather than writing the language for a charter amendment to change hiring procedures for police chiefs.

One evening last week I watched a member of the Cincinnati Black United Front challenge Ross Love, a member of CAN and owner of the radio station, "The Buzz", to be the first person to uphold the positive media image proposed by CAN. This challenge received thunderous cheers and jeers from the gathered audience. Those of us at First Church might have discovered the Buzz as a good source of information in the black community, but in my past week, I have learned that the Buzz is considered both biased and controversial in the black community.

Cincinnati would rather replace Midnight Star with the Isley Brothers, then with James Brown, than admit to deeper divisions than a party can heal. I cannot express how poorly this played out within the community invested in the boycott. One of my clergy colleagues said to me "What, wasn't Billy Ray Cyrus available?"

Yesterday Reverend Damon Lynch III said "They think the Negroes will forget everything if they can just dance." The crowd at New Prospect Baptist leapt to its feet and hollered, and cheered, and clapped when they heard this. This is what they were thinking too. The City may have had the best intentions, but for those in favor of the boycott, James Brown played like a slap in the face.

These are just four areas of mistrust, and I barely touched upon the most serious flashpoint, police/com-munity relations. Walking around for a while in the skin of others I found decades of frustration, broken promises, missing funds, and worst of all, broken trust. In all honesty, I did not realize how badly the trust of the black and poor inner city community has been broken. It took decades for the city to earn this mistrust, and the folks who are angry won't be sitting on the back of the bus anytime soon. They are determined to secure justice for the future.

The irony is that currently our mayor has done a good job under very difficult circumstance. Our police chief could be the best we have had in decades. What I learned walking around in someone else's skin is that good and the best in decades are too late, way too late, especially with a list of fifteen black men killed by police in the last six years.

The list of deaths shows some justifiable police work; Harvey Price killed in 1995 after killing a 15 year old girl and lunging at police, Daniel Williams shot and killed in 1998 after shooting and wounding a police officer. Some of the fifteen men killed by police behaved in a violent and dangerous fashion. But not all of them.

In 1996, Darrel Price died after striking his head while being restrained. In 1997 Lorenzo Collins, a mentally ill man, was shot dead after refusing to drop a brick. Michael Carpenter was shot and killed in 1999 after being stopped while driving (every black man's worst fear). Roger Owensby was asphyxiated in police custody in 2000.

In just the past three years, the police have killed 12 black men. Add these deaths to decades of frustration and broken promises, and our city has justice problems. In addition, ten police officers that the city wanted to fire were recently reinstated through arbitration with the powerful police union.

I have great sympathy for our police officers doing an excellent job protecting our community. We need them. Their own union, department, and city are cutting them off at the knees. All officers are endangered because the police cannot police their own, and as citizens, we have not required it of them.

An April New York Times article noted that the Cincinnati riots of 1968 were fueled by the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. and police treatment of blacks. As one resident explained of the 2001 riots "This wouldn't have happened if they had listened to us in those years back then."

As citizens, we have not required much change of anyone or anything, and the business community has not required it either. In the past thirty years there have been six major reports on race relations within the city of Cincinnati. Almost anyone will tell you that six reports later, little has changed. In 1993, a Cincinnati report sent to the U. S. Commission on Civil Rights determined that "racial and cultural isolation is a perennial problem . . . Worst of all misunderstanding among neighborhood groups and residents causes genuine hostility that can have a citywide effect." Nothing changed.

Two years ago, the Sentinel Police Association issued a strong warning that "something must be done to quell the very tense and volatile atmosphere that currently exists between the police and the community." Nothing changed. When our previous Mayor, Mayor Roxanne Qualls, left office, she noted that Cincinnati has "one of the most rigid social hierarchies of any city in the country." Nothing changed.

In a letter to the editor that appeared this week in the Enquirer, one of our members, Glenetta Blair, a teacher at Hughes, wrote "When I talk with my students about peace, we talk about negative peace and positive peace, as Gandhi and King taught it. Negative peace is the absence of violence; positive peace is the presence of justice. I would submit that what we have in Cincinnati is a negative peace—and so it will remain for quite some time."

This week's boycott is a small part of a much larger puzzle. A puzzle filled with decades of neglect. The city lost the trust of its black and poor residents the long hard way. What evidence, what sign of good faith exists to show us that this time it will be different? There has been one sign in the past seven weeks, and that is the racial profiling arbitration agreement worked out with the ACLU, Black United Front, city of Cincinnati, and police department.

The City Council vote to approve this arbitration was 5 to 4. Let’s not fool ourselves that this arrangement was embraced as an opportunity to improve police community relations. Rather, council members were muttering to the very end that it would cost taxpayers money. And the sentiment that ruled the day, that swung the council to accept arbitration with a 5 to 4 vote, is that a lawsuit could have been much more costly.

This decision did not escape the notice of interested Cincinnatians and local clergy. Even after the pain of the 2001 riots, City Council could not easily vote for the arbitration in support of police community relations, as a good will gesture, as a sign of remorse. No, the Council responded to the bottom line, money.

City Council does have financial responsibility for the city, so they need to be concerned about money. That's reasonable, part of their responsibility. But after the most recent riots, in the wake of questionable deaths and questionable police reinstatements, after 6 reports on police community relations, after the warnings of the Sentinels and former Mayor Roxanne Qualls, just once it would have been reassuring, a sign of good faith, to see them embrace arbitration as an opportunity for growth and healing, to demonstrate leadership for positive change.

Just over a week ago, the Concerned Clergy group announced a boycott of the Taste of Cincinnati, Cincinnati's biggest summer fundraiser. The clergy shared concern for vendors who would be adversely affected, and concern for a city already struggling to keep metro area returning to the city center. But let's keep our eyes on the prize. Cincinnati will not go anywhere if it can't bring justice and economic opportunity to all its citizens. We cannot continue to segregate downtown from Over the Rhine. We sink or swim together.

I spoke to a colleague the other day who told me he has extensively studied the civil rights movement. He said the dilemma in civil rights always comes down to this, civility vs. civil rights. When in a forced decision, do we choose just getting along or justice for all? Normally we can have a mix of both, but when forced, like now, by circumstance, which will we choose? Will we get along at the expense of civil rights or will we uphold civil rights while we struggle to get along. History tells us that communities inevitably choose civility over civil rights, just as has happened in Cincinnati.

The ultimate example of this is Issue 3. The citizens of this city chose civility, or what was deemed civility or morality, over the civil rights of others. Since the passage of Issue 3 Cincinnati has lost over 60 million dollars in business that went elsewhere, and the business community and city government are starting to notice. As a city, we did not choose to take the moral high ground and respect the civil rights of all citizens. Instead, we chose civility, and are only now beginning to question the rightness of our ways, now that we have lost over 60 million dollars. Money. Once again money.

In the past seven weeks, many people have lamented the disappearance of downtown customers. May I respectfully submit that we started losing downtown customers years ago, before the riots, before the boycott, through poor decision making by the citizens of this community. Maybe the arc of the moral universe is long and it bends towards justice, at least inevitably through money. Money is the only reason enough support will collect to get Issue 3 off the books.

One of my Presbyterian colleagues told me that the Presbyterian denomination recently considered relocating its headquarters to Cincinnati. Cincinnati made the list of top three cities and then lost the bid due to poor race relations. We started losing business, millions of dollars in business, years ago. We can't tag that onto inner city blacks and poor whites, or gay and lesbian people. We are reaping what we sowed.

The Concerned Clergy has requested four goals from the city and business communities:

1. 50 million dollars to fund the Mayor's new commission, Cincinnati CAN.
2. Federal decree outlawing racial profiling.
3. Charter amendment that opens the police chief selection process to candidates outside the city and includes a change from Civil Service to Home Rule.
4. Subpoena and investigatory powers for the Citizens Police Review Panel.

You might find the request for money excessive or strange, but commission monies have a habit of being promised but not arriving, or not in the amount promised. Past city commissions have been limited by a lack of funding. Nothing can substantially change without money.

The other three points are all related to police community relations. The last two issues, charter amendments on police chief selection and subpoena and investigatory power for the Citizens Police Review Panel seem easy, but as a wise friend said to me yesterday, if they were easy they would have been done already. If it were easy, if the city, police department, and business community supported it, it would have been done already. If it were easy, it would have passed the last time it was on the ballot. We will need to keep our eyes on the prize to pass any charter amendments.

I struggled, deeply, with the question of boycott. Eventually it was a decision I made with great love and compassion, not anger nor hatred, but love and compassion. There was one man in particular who helped me on my way.

On the Friday the boycott was announced my husband and I went to dinner. We went to a restaurant we regularly attend. As I walked in the door, I thought "I wonder if the owner has a booth at Taste of Cincinnati, and if so, what he thinks?" As it turns out the owner had seen the press conference that day and he recognized me from television. He came over to us and he said "Thank you for what you are doing." I asked him why. He said "I don't have a booth at Taste this year but I have done events in the past. It's a lot of work but you make money. But you know, it's just one day. It's just one day. I will be a black man the rest of my life."

The boycott is just one day, or just three days. Our city will struggle with racism and economic inequality the rest of our lives. There are a growing number of African Americans and poor whites who are not interested in having a party with others, who are not interested in talking about race and keeping everything the same. We have broken their trust, but we have not broken their spirits, their intelligence, or their ability to organize. The boycott is a small piece of a continuing arc that has yet to bend in any conclusive direction. The challenge for each of us is if we will help it, as we are able, bend towards justice. That's the prize. Not one day, not three day, not a negative peace with the absence of violence, but a positive peace with justice, that leads to reconciliation, and ultimately, redemption.

Readings

Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are people who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightening; they want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters.

This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never did and it never will. Find out what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice which will be imposed upon them.

-Frederick Douglas

Another thing we had to get over was the fact that the nonviolent resister does not seek to humiliate or defeat the opponent but to win his friendship and understanding. This was always a cry that we had to set before people that our aim is not to defeat the white community, not to humiliate the white community, but to win the friendship of all of the persons who had perpetrated this system in the past. The end of violence or the aftermath of violence is bitterness. The aftermath of nonviolence is reconciliation and the creation of a beloved community. A boycott is never an end within itself. It is merely a means to awaken a sense of shame within the oppressor but the end is reconciliation, the end is redemption.