Sunday, August 28, 1963 was a seminal day in the
history of our country.
It was so important and transformative that even
now, 50 years later, we are still trying to figure it all out.
The march on Washington is remembered for the “I
Have a Dream” speech by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
For those of us who were born after that march,
time has been compressed. We cannot know, and thus cannot remember, the month
and months of tension that preceded and followed that march. Yes, we have seen the film clips and footage,
in classrooms, in television shows, on youtube even. But we can’t really know
the anguish of times.
We know that social anguish of our own times,
though, that are happening now.
This morning’s order of service features two black
leaders who helped to bring the 1963 March on Washington to fruition. Whitney
Young, Jr. and Arnita Young Boswell. Arnita and I went to church together for
years before I knew she was Whitney Young’s sister. Before I knew how deeply
involved she was in the 1960’s.
I had to learn about that part of her life from a
class I took at the University of Illinois in Chicago. I opened a book for a
class I was taking on the 1960’s, and there was a picture of Arnita and her
brother.
Now you have to know that to me Arnita was just
the nice lady at church who felt it has her responsibility to make sure that
all dishes from coffee hour got washed each week. She was a professor at the
University of Chicago, and that was about all I knew.
So I went to her to ask about the photo. And she
admitted to me that yes she had been involved in that work, and yes, Whitney
had been her brother.
My mind was blown.
She told me that the work was not done.
When Arnita died in 2002 it was a big loss for our
church. And I guess, our world.
The work is not done.
This morning, there are 11 Pilgrims walking into
the town of Selma, California, each of them representing 1 million others, each
undocumented, each seeking a pathway to citizenship. By this morning these 11
people will have walked 186 miles down the Central Valley, on their way to
Bakersfield. They have walked day after day.
285 miles in 21 days.
Several of us met the 11 Pilgrims in Merced last
Monday. Kevin, Cass, Janice, Denis and I were met in Merced by Mary Ann and
Rosa. Kevin, Cass, Denis and Mary Ann all walked a mile with the 11. Janice and
I waited for them at the church, with cool water and hugs waiting for them.
Our four arrived at the church sweaty and looking
and solemn in their yellow Standing on the Side of Love colors.
The pictures I’ve seen of the March on Washington
show faces exuberant in the moment. Estimates of the attendees range from
between 200 and 300 thousand people, people who were there estimated that
75-80% of the marchers were African American.
Clancy Sigal wrote this week in The Guardian, that
there had been fears about the march…
But, against the doomsayers, an almost supernatural
peace and good will reigned. Strangers became lifelong friends. A lot of us
were astonished at how beautiful and strong we felt. On that hot, sunny day a
genuine rainbow coalition of Quakers, Catholics, atheists, black and white
church and social justice groups, labor unions, socialists and God-fearers
poured into Washington because we felt that it was terribly important to be
there.[1]
It was terribly important to have been there, to
have participated…to have lent one’s voice and one’s body to a cause.
And this behavior continues.
This morning’s Reading from the Global Scripture
was taken from the Final Instructions[2]
that were sent out to participants before the 1963 March on Washington took
place. There are 11 pages of
instructions, and one form to fill out.
The instructions lay out clearly the level of
behavior expected by the leadership who organized the march. Instructions
ranged from the signs you were allowed to carry, right down to a suggested
lunch that you should pack.
There were clear instructions about what to wear.
“Dress as if you were going to church.”
At first, my inner-Unitarian Universalist bristled
at all of this instruction and seeming commands from on high.
And then I thought about it for a while.
A. Phillip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, the chief organizers
of the March knew that this was a sort of coming out party for a movement. They
knew that after a particularly horrid couple of years in race relations, this
march would be a media frenzy. The media was going to be there to either cover
the biggest race riot in American history, or it was going to be there to show
the biggest single event of racial unity and respectful request for equality.
They knew how they wanted to frame this moment in history,
and so they laid out, in clear detail, what they expected from people.
And the people responded to their requests with compliance,
because they sensed and knew also that this was going to be a moment in
history, and that they were responsible for it.
So they came in their Sunday best. The men in suits and
ties, the women in finery, in the 90 plus degree heat of a Washington DC
August.
They have inspired millions of people to follow in their
footsteps.
There have now been so many peaceful marches on Washington
that it would be difficult to count them all. But the number of the marches
does nothing to minimize the meaning that each march has to those who are
walking there.
As I said a moment ago, when I was reading the
rules that were laid out for the March, I bristled a little at the idea of the
authority being expressed in them. I thought “who are these guys to tell me how to dress and what to bring?”
Me, as if I had even been alive to be there. But
you get my meaning.
One of the dangers and benefits of loving another
minister is that often work follows you home. And when you talk about things,
not just related directly to this congregation, but to our greater faith of the
global Unitarian Universalism, sometimes the other guy says something that you
just can’t help quoting.
Wednesday, when the choir hosted a pot-luck, get
together, invite new people to sing with us, we were talking about the
Sanctuary, and the Rev. Denis Paul started talking about the sacred.
He said that when something is sacred, you treat
it differently, with a reverence. And then he grabbed a hymnal that had been
water-damaged and mold had set in. A hymnal that he found on his chair the
Sunday before.
What we do here, week after week, when we gather
is not of the same level of import on the national stage as the 1963 March on
Washington for Freedom and Jobs, or the 1993 March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay, and Bi Equal Rights and
Liberation, or what the 11 very vulnerable human beings are doing today walking
from Sacramento to Bakersfield, in homage to Cesar Chavez’s march to
Sacramento.
What we do here though is important.
When I think about the differences between the
1963 March and the 1993 March on Washington, some glaring differences strike
me.
For one, in 1993 there was no dress code, implied
or otherwise, and the photos show it. The 1993 March lacks the dignity of the
1963 march.
The 1963 March had a solemnity to it that made the
world pay attention.
In part, I can’t help but think, because people
put aside their side issues, and their side concerns and all focused on one
goal: raising awareness of the plight of people of color in our nation. The
organizers and the marchers recognized that in order to be successful they had
to be able to engage those who would be seeing this march, that they the
participants would have to be able to use an event in which the collective
dignity was unquestionable.
In presenting unquestionable dignity to the nation,
the nation, the white majority, would have to re-examine they way their fellow
Americans had been mistreated for centuries.
It was a sacred duty they were carrying out, and
they all knew it.
In order to affect a change, a change that has
still not come to fruition, 300 thousand individuals had to agree to come
together and focus on one task.
And when they did that, change came.
As in all things, our Unitarian Universalism has
blessings and challenges.
We are a church of the free mind. We have no creedal
test. We have no dress code, few expectations and we like it that way.
But my question about that is this, “Are we losing
something in the exchange?”
Are we by our very casualness diminishing the very
important work of caring for our spirits? Is our lack of taking ourselves too
seriously costing us the gravitas that our spiritual and religious work
deserves?
Is this why so many people refer to our churches as country clubs of like-minded people?
Maybe what they don’t see in our churches
nation-wide is a sense that we are engaged in anything important, because we
don’t act as if we are doing anything important together.
The people who took busses and trains to
Washington DC in August of 1963 knew they were doing something important. So
important that I worry the word important doesn’t do it justice.
They knew on some level that they were fighting
either for their lives, if they were African American, or if they were a white
ally, they knew they were struggling for a world made more fair for all.
Isn’t that also our goal? A world made more fair
for all?
Why do we walk? Why do we march on Washington?
We do so to demonstrate to the world what matters
to us deeply.
I do hope you’ll consider travelling to
Bakersfield on September 2nd for the culminating event for the
Pathways to Citizen effort. This is the event that the UU Legislative
Ministries, and PICO have asked as many Californians to attend as possible. I
know there will be busses from Modesto to Bakersfield, but I don’t have all the
details yet. If you can come along, please contact the church office, so that
when I get information I can pass it along.
What lessons can we take from the 1963 March on
Washington for Jobs and Freedom?
One of those lessons I think we can learn is that
there is a time for play and a time for work. Work time doesn’t need to be
without joy and laughter, but it does need it’s own honored time. I’m sure that
more than one marcher in 1963 had spent the Friday night before the march at a
jazz club.
But when it came time to do the sacred work of
societal change, that reveler put on their Sunday best and focused on the task
at hand.
Our important work, our sacred work, of attending
to our spiritual lives, deserves a time of it’s own, set apart from the rest of
the week. Our work deserves to be elevated to a place wherein something special
happens.
As we enter into our 60th year of
Fellowship, let us celebrate the work that has already taken place. Our
forebears and we ourselves have offered up the sacrifices of time, talent and
treasure.
Let us honor those sacrifices by treating what we
have here in this Sanctuary, the people, our covenant, with deep respect and
caring for one another.
Amen.
