A sermon preached at Paint Branch Unitarian Universalist Church
Rev. Diane Teichert
March 13, 2011
READING
From Dr. King’s first public speech, at the mass meeting on the night of the first day of the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955.
And I want to tell you this evening that it is not enough for us to talk about love. Love is one of the pinnacle parts of the Christian faith. [But] there is another side, called justice. And justice is really love in calculation. Justice is love correcting that which would work against love. God is not just the God of love. He’s also the God that standeth before the nations and says, ‘Be still and know that I am God—and if you don’t obey Me I’m gonna break the backbone of your power—and cast you out of the arms of your international and national relationships.’ Standing beside love is always justice.
SERMON
At the time of the March newsletter deadline, when I was finalizing my preaching topics for the month, I was tremendously excited and moved by the relatively peaceful, freedom-seeking revolutionary movements taking place at the time in Tunisia and Egypt. In early February, Al-Jazeera/English, which is available on live TV in this area, ran a story on the leaders of the uprising in Egypt (all 25 minutes of which I will show in my office to anyone interested during Enrichment Hour today). It showed how they sought out training in non-violent tactics from the leader of the student movement in Serbia that is credited with the overthrow of Yugoslavia’s repressive president Slobodan Milošević in 2000. This international cross-fertilization reminded me of the study of Gandhi and his Indian non-violent resistance movement by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other leaders of the freedom-seeking African American civil rights movement of the 1950’s and 60’s.
In the video, the Egyptian leaders (who are always described as “youth” but were actually in their thirties, some of them with doctorates) explain that they learned from the Serbian leader that a successful non-violent campaign requires “Unity, discipline, planning, keeping people engaged, and being clear about our aims.” These are the very elements that King and the other civil rights leaders worked hard to maintain, the very elements that made for their successes.
Knowing that my sermons in February had not featured Black History month, and that by March it would be Women’s History Month, I decided to celebrate the latter with one of my favorite organizing stories from Black History. It’s the story about the crucial role of women in the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955. And not just Rosa Parks.
Since our newsletter deadline, less successful uprisings have begun in many more North
African and Middle East countries, and in Wisconsin as well. And, here in Maryland, our own freedom-seeking movement, for equal marriage, suffered a temporary set-back with the vote on Friday to send the bill back to committee, due to insufficient votes to pass it. As Nancy Boardman, Social Action Co-chair, who is leading our efforts on this issue said to me yesterday, “it’s disappointing, but not discouraging.”
I just what to give a shout-out to all of you who worked the polls last Election Day; showed up for a Lobby Day; came out on a Monday night for the phone bank; attended a Public Hearing; called or emailed your representatives, or got your friends and family to do the same; or spent this past Friday in Annapolis witnessing the proceedings. Paint Branch Unitarian Universalist Church folks were in the trenches. You are great!
We obviously need to garner more support and one of the places we believe we need to start is with other people of faith in Prince George’s County. On recent Sundays since the favorable vote in the Senate, socially conservative clergy enjoined their people to contact their delegates, just like we were contacting ours. The evidence is that they were able to convince more undecided delegates to vote no than we were able to persuade to vote yes. And, some who had announced they’d vote yes, including one sponsor of the bill, decided to vote against it, because that’s what her constituents said they wanted.
So, we have work to do. That’s okay. As Frederick Douglass said, “Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never did and it never will.” I will have to work with other pro-equality clergy to develop relationships with Black clergy and you will have to engage your Black and Roman Catholic co-workers and neighbors in conversation all for the purpose of opening their hearts and minds. Remember, a successful non-violent campaign requires “Unity, discipline, planning, keeping people engaged, and being clear about our aims.” Do we know what we want? Do we still want marriage equality?? Let the people say “YES!”
Back to Women’s History Month and the Montgomery Bus Boycott…
Of all the women involved, the one we know about is Rosa Parks, who was portrayed as a naïve aging seamstress who was simply too tired to stand up that day. First of all, in 1955, Rosa Parks wasn’t elderly. She was only 42. (I used to think that was elderly, but I sure don’t any longer!) She was in fact, though, a seamstress. She worked for a department store and also made extra money doing sewing for white families. She admitted to having been tired that famous day, but it wasn’t the first time she resisted mistreatment. As she said wryly, “I did a lot of walking in Montgomery.” (“Rosa Parks, 92, Intrepid Pioneer of Civil Rights Movement, Is Dead” by E.R. Shipp, NY Times, October 25, 2005; pp. 1, C18).
She wasn’t naïve, or unaware. She and her husband Raymond, a barber, had taken part in the earliest voter registration drives. In fact, she tried to register three times before finally succeeding in 1943. She was a member of the NAACP. Not only was she a member, she was an officer of the Montgomery chapter and had been since at least 1943—so, for twelve years (“Tribute to Rosa Parks” by Pam McMichael in Highlander Reports, October 2005). In fact, it was she who signed Martin Luther King Jr.’s letter of appointment to the chapter’s executive committee, in 1955, the year after he was called to serve the Dexter Street Baptist Church there in Montgomery. (Parting the Waters: American in the King Years 1954-63, Taylor Branch, p. 124).
Not only was Rosa Parks an NAACP leader, in July 1955, she was among a few who attended an interracial leadership development conference at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee (interracial gatherings were illegal then, remember). The Highlander Center was founded in 1932 to serve as an adult education center for community workers involved in social and economic justice movements. The goal of Highlander was and is to provide education and support to poor and working people fighting economic injustice, poverty, prejudice, and environmental destruction. It helps grassroots leaders create the tools necessary for building broad-based movements for change. The founding principle and guiding philosophy of Highlander is that the answers to the problems facing society lie in the experiences of ordinary people. Those experiences, so often belittled and denigrated in our society, are the keys to grassroots power.
At Highlander, Rosa Parks later said, “I gained strength to persevere in my work for freedom, not just for blacks but for all oppressed people”(Shipp) and “for the first time lived in an atmosphere of equality with members of the other race.” (McMichael). Perhaps her experience at Highlander empowered her, so that five months later, on December 1st, when the bus driver asked her if she was going to stand up, she said, “No, I’m not.” And when he said, “Well, if you don’t stand up, I’m going to have to call the police and have you arrested,” she said, “You may do that.” (Shipp).
Why is it that Americans want to think their heroes and heroines just appear out of nowhere, innocently arising out of mundane daily life to prominence on the national stage? Why do we tend not to see the organizations behind the individual actions, why don’t we want to know that their actions are planned? Why don’t we realize that these people develop into leaders, they don’t just wake up one day a leader? Why do we want to think that change just happens? Why do we sing about freedom coming as if it will come of its own accord?
The story of the Montgomery Bus Boycott is well-told in Taylor Branch’s first volume history of the civil rights movement, Parting the Waters: American in the King Years 1954-63 which is dedicated to the Choir at All Soul’s Unitarian Church in Washington DC. He reveals the combination of individual commitment and organizational preparedness that can bring about social change. (I don’t doubt that a similar combination of individual commitment and organizational preparedness works for any cause, including those of the Religious Right.)
I was fascinated to read (Branch, p. 120-123) that in Montgomery in 1955 alone there actually had been two previous arrests of women who refused to give up their bus seat for white men. In each case, members of the Women’s Political Council, an organization of Negro middle class church women many of whom worked or taught at the all-Negro Alabama State College in Montgomery, conducted interviews of the woman’s family and potential witnesses to weigh carefully whether this was the case on which to base a legal attack on segregation, and decided, ultimately, “no.”
So, on Thursday evening, December 1st, when word came to civil rights leaders that one of their own, Rosa Parks, had been arrested, jailed, and charged with violating the bus segregation laws, but with no charges of resisting arrest or assaulting police officers, I think they must have had a “This might be It!” feeling.
However, her action that day was not planned ahead of time. In fact, Parks said later that it wasn’t really a good day for her to get arrested. She was headed home in a hurry after work that day, in order to send out notices of the NAACP’s upcoming election and prepare for a youth leadership workshop she was to lead that weekend. (Shipp). Instead, she was hauled off to jail. Within a few hours, two fellow civil rights leaders had posted bail and she was released. Later that evening, they put the obvious question to her: “would she be willing to fight the case?” She asked for time to consult her mother and then husband.
Branch writes, “the proposal upset both of them. Raymond Parks came nearly undone. Having just felt primitive, helpless terror when his wife had been snatched into jail, he could not bear the thought that she would reenter that forbidden zone by choice… ‘The white folks will kill you, Rosa,’ he said, pleading with her not to do it.
She decided to go ahead and quickly word was put out that night to key people. First the young Negro lawyer one year out of law school who agreed to represent Parks. He then contacted a friend in the Women’s Political Council.
(This next part of the story, as Taylor Branch tells it, is the part I love the most).
The women met at about midnight that night at their offices at Alabama State, under the pretext of grading exams, to draft a letter of protest of the arrest. The plan for the bus boycott emerged as they kept revising the letter. “Another Negro woman has been arrested and thrown into jail because she refused to get up out of her seat on the bus and give it to a white person. Until we do something to stop these arrests, they will continue. The next time it may be you, or you or you. This woman’s case will come up on Monday. We are, therefore, asking every Negro to stay off the buses on Monday in protest of the arrest and trial.”
But, how to get the word out? “They realized that the best way to notify Montgomery Negroes, given their lack of access to newspapers or radio, was to leaflet the town through the churches and the contacts of the Women’s Political Council. The best place to get copies of such an incendiary letter printed, they realized, was precisely where they were—at Alabama State, on the mimeograph machines in their offices! But this would require stealth and certainly couldn’t be done during office hours. So they stayed, and worked all night printing 35,000 copies.
At 3 a.m., one of them took a break to call the civil rights leader E.D. Nixon to tell him the plan. He instantly approved, saying he’d thought of something similar himself. (!) Nixon was a train porter and leader of the Alabama chapter of the
Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first Black union in the US. He had to leave on a train run through Atlanta to New York and back that day, but told her he would call a planning meeting to take place that afternoon without him. At 5 a.m. he started calling the leading black ministers to ask for their support and explain the boycott. King said he’d think about it. Nixon said, fine, think about it, but told King he wanted to use King’s church basement for the meeting. Nixon went on to make the rest of his calls. The last of which was to a white newspaper reporter, tipping him off about the boycott. Then he boarded his train.
The meeting did take place at King’s church on Friday. He and fifty Negro leaders came. They endorsed the bus boycott plan. They drafted a short leaflet that announced the one-day boycott on Monday as well as a mass meeting on Monday night for further information. They called the city’s 18 Negro taxi companies to ask them to transport Negroes to work on Monday for the cost of a bus ride, ten cents, instead of their normal fares. And dealt with myriad details.
By Sunday, thousands of Montgomery’s Negroes had either seen the leaflets or heard the news word of mouth. But, there was one minister of a black church who couldn’t seem to confirm the rumors he’d heard about it. Though his church was black, it was a Lutheran “mission church” and the denomination had sent an eager young white man right out of seminary. Being a white man, his parishioners weren’t sure they could trust him with the news of the boycott, so no one answered his questions.
So, he decided to phone the person he knew best outside his own congregation (having been shunned by most of the whites in town), the Negro woman who used his church building for her NAACP Youth Council. “Mrs. Parks,” he said, “I keep hearing that somebody was arrested on the bus and there’s going to be a boycott. Is that true? Who was it?” There was a long pause. “It’s true,” Parks said, almost sheepishly. “It was me, Pastor Graetz. I was the one arrested.”
“You?” he exclaimed. He rushed over to the Parks home to get the details. And the next morning, from his pulpit he announced that he and his family would observe the boycott, and he urged his members to do likewise. A murmur of approval went through the congregation. King, Abernathy and all the rest of the Negro clergy made similar announcements that Sunday.
On Monday morning, as Branch tells it, the Kings were up before dawn keeping watch at the front window for the first morning bus. “When Coretta saw the headlights cutting through the darkness, she called out to her husband and they watched it roll by together. The bus was empty! The early morning special on the South Jackson line, which was normally full of Negro maids on their way to work…was empty. So was the next bus, and the next. In spite of the bitter morning cold, their fear of white people and their desperate need for wages, Montgomery Negroes were turning the City Bus Lines into a ghost fleet. King, astonished and overjoyed, jumped into his car to see whether the response was the same elsewhere in the city. It was. He drove around for several hours, watching buses pass by carrying handfuls of white passengers.”
I’d love to tell you the rest of the story in this much detail, but unfortunately time won’t allow. As you know, the boycott that Monday was wildly successful. “Some blacks rode in carpools. Others rode in black-owned taxis…But most black commuters—40,000 people—walked, some more than 20 miles.” (Shipp). At a planning meeting that afternoon, the Negro leaders met, decided on the negotiating demands for the bus boycott, formed a bus boycott organization, elected the newest minister (King) in town as its President, and planned the mass meeting to be held that night. To everyone’s complete astonishment, 5000 people by police reports and 2-3 times that by Negroes’ reports, showed up for the mass meeting, so many they filled the streets outside around the church. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., in his first public speech as a civil rights leader, perfectly tapped and even increased the energy and commitment of the people who had walked everywhere that day.
The non-violent, freedom-seeking Montgomery Bus Boycott went on for 381 days–more than a year of organizing, car pooling, planning meetings and mass meetings- more than a year of withstanding arrests, imprisonments, and all manners of violence against them–and not responding in kind, for more than a year.
On December 20, 1956 U.S. Supreme Court notifications arrived at the federal courthouse in Montgomery and deputy U.S. marshals served notices on city officials. The buses were to be integrated. That night, King told a mass meeting that the walking was over.
The next morning, before dawn, he boarded a city bus with a couple other Negro ministers and a white activist, with whom King sat near the front of the bus for a photo op. “We are glad to have you,” the driver politely said as he pulled from the curb. He even went so far as to make an unscheduled stop to pick up Pastor Graetz, the white Lutheran minister who had supported the boycott from day one.
It’s a tremendous story of faith, courage and organization, isn’t it? As we all know, it was just one step in a tremendous struggle that would include boycotts and sitins, voter registration drives, marches and rallies, Supreme Court decisions and landmark legislation. “Unity, discipline, planning, keeping people engaged, and being clear about our aims.”
None of it “just happened.” None of its leaders “just emerged.” They found their leadership voices and learned their leadership skills in organizations. E.D. Nixon in his union. Rosa Parks and others in the NAACP and at Highlander Center. The Women’s Political Council members, Rev. King and the other clergy, in the Black Church.
So many of them got their start, and their inspiration to keep up the long hard work of organizing for change, in their church. Just like the equal marriage issue, on both sides, some of the best organizers come from the churches.
How great that it always has and still is happening among us, too, on the freedom issues of our day, right here at Paint Branch Unitarian Universalist Church! May it ever be so.
Our last hymn, in honor of International Women’s Day this past Tuesday, was inspired by a banner in the huge 1912 walkout of textile workers, many of them immigrants, women and children, in Lawrence Massachusetts. Please rise in body or in spirit to sing #109, As We Come Marching, Marching also known as Bread and Roses.