Sample Sermon - UUCJ's Involvement in the Civilt Right's Movement

Contemporary Text: The Words of Martin Luther King, Jr., by Coretta Scott King.

Every man [and woman] must decide whether [they] will walk in the light of creative altruism or the darkness of destructive selfishness. This is true judgment. Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, “What are you doing for others?”

It is pretty difficult to like some people. Like is sentimental and it is pretty difficult to like someone bombing your home; it is pretty difficult to like someone threatening your children; it is difficult to like congressmen who spend all of their time trying to defeat civil rights. But Jesus says love them, and love is greater than like.

When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door that leads to ultimate reality.

Something should remind us once that the great things in life are things we never see. You walk out at night and look up at the beautiful stars as they bedeck the heavens like the swinging lanterns of eternity, and think you can see it all. Oh, no. You cannot see the law of gravitation that holds them there.

Civil rights leaders and Mississippians across the nation Friday hailed the arrest of Edgar Ray Killen in the slayings of three civil rights workers in Philadelphia , Miss. , 40 years ago. So wrote Ana Radalat of the Clarion Ledger Washington Bureau, this January eighth, and news we’ve been hearing through various venues. And, Monday is Martin Luther King Day; I think its time to look at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Jackson and its role in the civil rights movement.

In writing this sermon, I am compiling information I have received from Gordon Gibson, former minister of UUCJ, [1] from reprints of articles from the Clarion Ledger and information Dary Shenfelt and Margaret Drake have located for me.

I’ll begin at the beginning: It was during the Korean War, in1951 several Unitarians were contacted by or contacted the American Unitarian Association’s national office and told they were interested in a Unitarian fellowship being established in Jackson, and would help support it. They agreed that was a good idea, and on September 7, 1951 , twelve people met to form the Unitarian Fellowship of Jackson. Florence and Harry Newman were two of them (for whom the religious education is building is named), and Bill Lynch, Bob Branson, and our own George Vockroth, they were in the petroleum industry, and apparently one was from Millsaps College . There were twelve at the charter meeting at the Edwards Hotel , and they signed a Bond of Union: In the freedom of truth we unite for the worship of God and the service of man.

In 1954 the Supreme Court ruled in Brown versus the Board of Education of Topeka, KS that schools had to desegregate overthrowing the concept of “equal, but separate schools,” which had been accepted until then. Emmett Till was murdered in 1955 in Money, MS. The Till murder is another of several civil rights cases that have been reopened long after most people thought they had been consigned to the history books. It was opened, as you know in 2004.

Little Rock ’s Central High was integrated by nine black students protected by Federal troops two years after Emmett Till’s death in 1957. During this very volatile time in the south this Unitarian Fellowship was growing, and they had begun to set aside money for a building fund. (It’s a good idea for a church to have a building fund!) The congregation purchased land on Lynch and Ellis Avenue and in November 1958, they moved into the building changing their name to the First Unitarian Church of Jackson.

The Freedom Rides were in 1961, James Meredith entered Ole Miss in Oxford , MS , in 1962 with much distress, two guards were killed and many injured. A year later NAACP field secretary in Mississippi , Medger Evers was murdered in Jackson as he was going into his house. A jury in Jackson of eight blacks and four whites took six hours to convict Byron De La Beckwith of the murder in 1994. Beckwith was then 73. He had been tried twice in 1964-- both times the all-white juries had deadlocked.

In 1961, the Unitarian and the Universalist churches voted to merge into what was to be the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations, the UUA. Like other Unitarian churches after the merger The First Unitarian Church of Jackson changed its name to The Unitarian Universalist Church of Jackson about 1973.[2]

The UUA sent the Reverend Don Thompson to MS to help its small churches. Thompson was installed, in 1963 as minister at the then First Unitarian Church of Jackson, and also served the Universalist churches in Louisville , Ellisville and Laurel …. I can’t imagine how he did that![3]

The Reverend Don Thompson had a lifetime of social action experience in Chicago before he came to Jackson , but he had decided to “soften” that in Jackson and volunteer to do chaplaincy work at the state mental hospital according to the Reverend Gibson. He was seeking non-violent and fairly unobtrusive ways of promoting civil rights, when he was asked to fill a vacancy on the Board of Trustees of The Mississippi Council on Human Relations. He became the secretary and found that the job entailed storing all the files in his office, and the church was the mailing address for the Council. As this was the only biracial organization in the state it was far from benign and Thompson became “a lightening rod”[4] to those critical.

William (Bill) Higgs, who joined UUCJ in 1961, was labeled a “southern maverick” because he was the only white lawyer in MS to take on civil rights cases at that time.[5] Mr. Higgs filed against the White Citizen’s Council. I found references to him in the American Civil Liberties Union Archives, Series 3, Subject Files, Princeton library online:

Los Angeles Civil Liberties Foundation Proposed Fund to Help William Higgs... for the Advancement of Colored People: Official at Jackson , MS .[6].

I could not access the files. Sadly, he was entrapped by the Jackson Police Vice Squad in the bus terminal rest room, and according to church’s membership book in February 1963; Higgs was “barred from the state.”

Another Church of Jackson congregant, Buford Posey had to leave the state after signing the membership book. He joined this congregation in 1961. Posey was from Philadelphia , MS , and “had been called eccentric” practically all of his adult life, since at least 1946 when as a young man of twenty-one, he became the first white person to join the Mississippi NAACP. He later explained that he did so because he believed that black veterans of World War II deserved the right to vote in the country they had risked their lives to defend.”[7] Buford Posey told NBC News that the Klan had murdered the civil rights workers in Philadelphia . He left the state in ’64.

These were dreadful times made even more so by the 1963 murder of the President of our nation, John F. Kennedy in Dallas . The nation was horrified; we grieved deeply, though some of us remember the callow cheering of others. It didn’t seem the times could get any worse!

Mississippi Freedom Summer was the following summer (1964) and James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwermer were murdered in Philadelphia , MS . According to a UUA report in January 1-9, there were 5 UU ministers along with 28 UU students who had responded to the general calls for citizen involvement. Other ministers were reported in Mississippi later by the UUA. This congregation hosted a number of them in their church services on Ellis and Lynch.[8]

In 1965, an experimental Head Start Program was begun in the Church on Ellis and Lynch Streets by Florence Newman, one of the original members of the church, and the Reverend Thompson. It was the first and only integrated pre-school in MS, and it was in the Unitarian Church in Jackson ! Gordon Gibson told me some Millsaps College students working at the school misled some white families into thinking they would loose their welfare checks if their children didn’t attend the school, which naturally caused resentment and more Ku Klux Klan attention.[9]

The head teacher of the Project was not a member of the church, but she agreed to the challenge. After signing the contract to teach at the Head Start Project, she was told her regular teaching contract was canceled with Jackson School Board. Gordon Gibson told me she fought the suspension and won.

It was so dangerous then that the teacher went to great lengths to not leave the building in a predictable fashion as she was silhouetted as she passed through the door in the evenings. Her husband took her out in the country and had her practice driving the car with her eyes barely peering over the dash as Viola Liuzzo, a UU from Detroit and civil rights worker had been shot and killed as she drove her car outside Selma , March 25 the same year, (1965) by three Klansmen. Viola’s story is featured in a documentary, Home of the Brave, premiered in 2004.

Though not directly associated with this church in Jackson let me try to put 1965 in a sequence for you:

Jimmie Lee Jackson was the first fatality in the Selma campaign In response to that February 26 shooting of Jimmie Jackson in Marion , Alabama the first attempted march from Selma to Montgomery was planned. March 7, 1965 became known as Bloody Sunday after the violent treatment of those marchers as they tried to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge .

After Bloody Sunday, Dr. King called clergy and laity to come to Selma for a second march. The Unitarian Universalist minister, the Reverend James Reeb went to Selma , as did other UU ministers. Reeb and two other UU ministers were beaten March 9 by white men with clubs after they left a Selma café. The Reverend Reeb died March 11, 1965 .

The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. preached Reeb’s eulogy in Birmingham , March 15, 1965 , which you can read online. That very evening President Lyndon Johnson presented his Voting Rights Bill to Congress![10]

The next day, March 16, Viola Liuzzo decided to go to Selma to help with the proposed second march. The second march from Selma to Montgomery began March 21. She was shot after the march on March 25 outside Selma . She was headed to Montgomery to pick up another carload of tired marchers. In May three men were acquitted of her murder even though one of those arrested was an FBI informer who testified against the others.

That same May 1965, a former Klan member (or FBI informer) called Rev. Thompson and told him the Mississippi Ku Klux Klan had marked him for death.

An African American, John Frazier had joined the church[11]. He was a student at Tougaloo College , and later entered the ministry. It was this Johnny Frazier that Thompson dropped off after a UU Church of Jackson Board meeting on his way home that evening in 1965 when the Klan carried out their threat against Thompson. He was shot with buckshot behind the Magnolia Towers Apartments on North State Street where he lived. His wife was upstairs. The first blast from a light green sedan driven by a white man with two white passengers went into the building wall, but the second caught Thompson in the back and shoulder. He survived, but suffered a punctured lung with shot lodged in his body so near his heart it couldn’t be removed. George Vockroth who was the church President at the time told me Thompson’s shoulder remained injured. The Reverend Thompson later joked that what saved his life was his weight…the good pastor weighed about three hundred pounds…he had proved his doctor wrong, his weight didn’t kill him; it had saved him!

Gordon tells me he believes the bi-racial school at the church was the cause of the attack by the Klan on Thompson in August 1965, an article in The Terre Haute Star I found at the Harvard library online says the attack followed threats stemming from his efforts to integrate this congregation, either or both could be true since the school was in the church and both were integrated.

A few weeks after the attempted murder, the settlement director of the UUA Department of Ministry wrote Thompson inquiring whether I quote; You think the time is now for you to move to a more comfortable situation in a different climate? The Minister replied from his hospital room:

Thanks for the offer of assistance in placement. If any of the Mississippi congregations feel that my presence is a danger to them, I’ll take advantage of your offer. Otherwise, I feel that I ought to try to stay here for the next seven or eight years. (“I should live so long.”) I realize that the same nightriders may be out to finish the job, but why have a successor who would also be a target.

The Klan probably is quite upset because, for once, their execution didn’t take. Maybe they will do something about it. One cannot live on the basis of fear.

…It takes courage in Jackson to join a liberal church. Yet, I believe that my continuing after the shooting incident might attract some worthwhile members. [12]

While Reverend Thompson was healing the UUA had asked for volunteer ministers to go to Jackson until he could return to the pulpit. However, a couple of months later Thompson accepted the advise of local friends, corroborated by the FBI, and left the state on a few hours notice before the Klan was planning another attempt to kill him. His wife, Leila, who was a librarian at Millsaps, followed him a few days later.

There was the time Gordon referred to as the unfortunate “use” of the church, during the “Meredith march” in 1966, when the UUA did call for UU’s to join the end of the march and, [as Gordon Gibson recalls] announced they would meet at the church without checking with the church officers. By then, of course, the congregation was operating without Don Thompson and really didn’t need to be tied to a hastily organized and oddly focused march. (It was during the course of this march that Stokely Carmicheal and others began to popularize the term “Black Power.”)[13] Apparently it caused the church members much stress and fear for their families; fear there would be reprisals not just by the Klan, but also in their places of work and for their children in the schools. Some families quit coming, and others moved away from Mississippi .

The Reverend Gordon Gibson first came to Jackson , Mississippi for a couple of weeks when Thompson was healing, and later succeeded Don Thompson in 1969 as minister of this congregation and Our Home congregation in Ellisville. Gordon told me at one point in that ministry he was serving each church quarter time and had a “day job” to support his family! He and Judy were in Jackson for fifteen and a half years. He served full-time from 1969 to 1972, then he was an “active member” of this church, and again served as minister part time from 1978-1984.

Malcolm X was murdered in that same 1965, and President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act soon after his murder. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis in 1968, and Robert Kennedy killed in Los Angeles .

This congregation sold its’ Lynch Street property and bought on North State Street At first they met in the original house on the property, but then razed it, and in 1972 built this for all purposes windowless building that seems more a hiding place, a place to come together and heal. It was a very traumatic time to be alive and to be a member of a liberal church in the south…I can only imagine!

In closing, Clarisse Campbell, a friend of Margaret Drake’s wrote in her book, Civil Rights Chronicle (176) of those in Jackson :

The Unitarians were very hospitable to us though one young man suggested we not talk in Jackson about being there [at the Unitarian Church ] as the police were always watching them since Unitarianism is not a popularly accepted religion in this region.

Not a popularly accepted religion, I could sermonize about the cost of progressive religion to the faithful and on the work that faith asks of the faithful drawing us all, including this minister, up short, but I won’t.

No, I choose to close with words of Paul Hendrickson in an article he wrote for the Houston Chronicle, “Cause for singing about a little light in Mississippi,” printed January 10th (2005). He mentions in the article that This Little Light of Mine was a popular song among the civil rights workers, and so he wrote his closing words, which I will use also: Let it shine, let it shine, this little light of THEIRS, those who have kept witness. Let it shine. Let it shine. Let it shine!

[1] G. Gibson emailed JL in 2006: Judy and I were in Jackson 15.5 years. I served as full-time minister of UUCJ 1969-72, and part-time 1978-84. The six intervening years I was an [ordained]“active lay-person.”

[2] Gordon Gibson says the congregation used the First Unitarian Church of Jackson name until about 1971 and for about a year or two before it became legally recognized around 1973 as the Unitarian Universalist Church of Jackson (check for official date).

[3] Gibson believes he also served the Gulf Coast and Meridian fellowships.

[4] Gordon Gibson’s phrase to J Luck.

[5] Rev. Gordon Gibson

[6] libweb.princeton.edu/libraries

[7] Quote Per Gordon Gibson, email Dec. 14, 2006 . The information on Buford in Seth Cagin and Phillip Dray’s We Are Not Afraid (about the Neshoba murders) says [the above] on page 346)

[8] Gordon Gibson: The black community did a fantastic job of housing and feeding volunteers.

[9] Rev. Gordon Gibson

[10] For more information see: No Greater Love: The James Reeb Story, by Duncan Howlett (Harper and Row, 1966)

[11] Gibson replied with this info after the sermon: Shortly after the Reverend Thompson had arrived at the Jackson Unitarian church an African American woman was accepted as a member of the Jackson church. An African American teacher at the Headstart school, Josephine McKinney was a member of the Unitarian church in Jackson

This was in 1964, the same time the Freedom Riders met at the church, a time when about thirty percent of the congregation left as Gordon told me out of “justifiable fear.”

[12] Gordon Gibson provided me these words from a copy of the letter in his possession.

[13] Quoted from Gordon Gibson’s email to J. Luck previously cited