Sermon by Rev. Alan Taylor
Preached at Unity Temple Unitarian Universalist Congregation
January 25, 2004
Reading 1:
From
A Strange Freedom, by Howard Thurman
It was above the timberline.
The steady march of the forest had stopped as if some invisible barrier had been
erected beyond which no trees dared move even in single file. Beyond was
barrenness, sheer rocks, snow patches and strong untrammeled winds. Here and
there were short tufts of evergreen bushes that had somehow managed to survive.
They were not lush, they lacked the kind of grace of the vegetation below the
timberline, but they were alive and hardy. These were not ordinary shrubs… They
were growing as vines along the ground, and what seemed to be patches of stunted
shrubs were rows of branches of growing, developing trees. What must have been
the tortuous frustration and the stubborn battle that had finally resulted in
the strange phenomenon! It is as if the tree had said, “I am destined to reach
for the skies and embrace in my arms the wind, the rain, the snow and the sun,
singing my song of joy to all the heavens. But this I cannot do. I have taken
root beyond the timberline, and yet I do not want to die. I must not die. I
shall make a careful survey of my situation and work out a method, a way of
life, that will yield growth and development for me despite the contradictions
under which I must eke out my days. In the end I may not look like the other
trees, I may not be what all that is within me cries out to be. But I will not
give up. I will use to the full every resource in me and about me to answer life
with life. In so doing, I shall affirm that this is the kind of universe that
sustains, upon demand, the life that is in it.” I wonder if I dare to act even
as the tree acts. I wonder!
Reading 2:
From
"Letter from Birmingham Jail", by Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
I
have just received a letter from a white brother in Texas. He writes: 'All
Christians know that the colored people will receive equal rights eventually,
but it is possible that you are in too great a religious hurry. It has taken
Christianity almost two thousand years to accomplish what it has. The teachings
of Christ take time to come to earth.' Such an attitude stems from a tragic
misconception of time, from the strangely irrational notion that there is
something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually,
time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or
constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time
much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent
in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad
people, but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never
rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of
(people) willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work, time
itself becomes an ally of the forces of stagnation. We must use time creatively,
in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to
make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into
a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy
from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.
Sermon:
Until recently, I hadn’t
realized how much time and energy Martin Luther King Jr. had spent in Chicago.
When I agreed to come to Oak Park, I didn’t know that this village has a unique
and admirable history regarding open housing and encouraging racial integration.
This morning, although for many of you this may not be new information, I want
to briefly recall some of the history of re-segregation in the Chicago area and
how Oak Park with an enlightened plan managed the change so as to integrate with
integrity and survive not only as community intact but today thrives on the
diversity it encourages. And then I want to reflect on the religious imperative
we have today in light of the past and the demands of the present.
Until last summer, I had assumed like many people back in
the ‘60s that the civil rights movement was most necessary in the South where
overt racism taunted African Americans, vociferously resisted integration and at
times erupted in violent rage toward those most vulnerable. It was when I read
American Pharaoh, a book by Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor, about the
history of Chicago under Mayor Daley and its persuasive contention that
Chicago’s greatness as a city has been at the expense of condemning hundreds of
thousands of impoverished people to poor, segregated living conditions,
primarily on account of the color of their skin.
In 1965, Martin Luther King pushed the SCLC, that is the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the civil rights group King helped
found and lead to national prominence in the 1950s and 1960s, to head for
Chicago. Here in this part of the country, it wasn’t the Jim Crow system that
preserved segregation by law but instead through other means: racial steering by
real estate brokers, racially restrictive covenants on house sales, and the
ever-present threat of violence whenever established racial boundaries were
crossed. For King, Chicago was “the Birmingham of the North.”
Already, hundreds of thousands of African American families
were living in poor communities on the South Side, giving this region a
reputation as the worst neighborhood in the nation. And yet, already one hundred
thousand African American people were crowding into the tenement areas being
created on the West Side. To bring attention of the wider world to these awful
conditions, Martin and Coretta King moved their family into an apartment on S.
Hamlin, in a tenement building in the Lawndale community. In a matter of days,
King saw the effects on his own children. He wrote, “Their tempers flared and
they sometimes reverted to almost infantile behavior.” The apartment was “just
too hot, too crowded, [and the environment] too devoid of forms of recreation.”
Life in Lawndale, King said, “was about to produce an emotional explosion in my
own family.”
King quickly realized that his fellow African Americans
could have no chance of transcending their poverty if they didn’t have the basic
necessities of life and adequate community resources. On July 10, 1966 King
initiated a campaign to end discrimination in housing, employment, and schools
in Chicago. The issue most volatile was that of housing. During a march he
organized to advocate for open housing, King was hit by a brick from an angry
crowd. I could tell horror story after horror story how African Americans were
treated when seeking to live in a predominantly white neighborhood or moving on
to a primarily white block.
The King family didn’t stay in their S. Hamlin apartment
for long, but many tenement residents never had a choice to leave. I have
difficulty even fathoming the fear and rage of so many people in such a position
both then and now. Despite plenty of political posturing of being hospitable and
welcoming to Dr. King, according to Cohen and Taylor, the power structure
resisted meaningful change.
Chicago never provided the same quality of services to
black neighborhoods as white neighborhoods. Building codes, for example, weren’t
enforced and buildings would deteriorate, contributing to the stereotype that
any neighborhood that had several black people move into it would deteriorate.
Secondly, realtors used scare tactics to get people to sell their houses at low
prices and then turn around and sell them to middle class black families for
much more money. The moving in of a few African American families on a block
triggered white flight. It was called block by block re-segregation. And it
appeared there was nothing that could stop this pattern. This wave of what was
called block-busting swept through Garfield Park all the way to Austin. In 1965,
the sociologist Pierre Divessey predicted that by 1970, Oak Park would be
similarly re-segregated. Other sociologists argued it likely would take longer
but the re-segregation of Oak Park was inevitable.
A group of insightful residents realized it didn’t have to
be that way. I recently had the opportunity to talk with a long time member of
this congregation who has had a unique relationship to this issue: Sandor Loevy,
or as friends call him, Sandy. Sandy was on the Village Board in 1972 when it
was clear a radical approach needed to be taken. He says, “We had to control
change or else Oak Park would have changed on its own.” Although many people
opposed it, the Village Board knew they had to make a commitment to integration.
The first thing they did was develop a policy statement, which reads The people
of Oak Park have chosen this community, not so much as a place to live, but as a
way of life. A key ingredient in the quality of this life is the diversity of
these same people: a broad representation of various occupations, professions,
lifestyles, age and income levels, a stimulating mixture of racial, religious
and ethnic groups. Such diversity is Oak Park's strength.
The Oak Park Housing Center was created for the express
purpose to ensure people of all ethnicities had equal opportunity in housing.
The Oak Park Development Corporation was created that hired Art Replogle who
worked for 23 years at convincing businessmen to come to Oak Park. The Village
Board also hired outside public relations consultants that resulted in positive
articles and advertisements about Oak Park on a regular basis in the local
papers. Sandy says, “We were able to do the things that needed to be done to
break stereotypes.” Sandy tells me, “This had never been done before. Everyone
thought it wasn’t possible. Oak Park became the national model for managed
integration.” He then added, “Many of those who were involved as activists were
members of Unity Temple.”
Oak Park’s commitment to diversity made this community
prime for other kinds of diversity. PlanetOut, a popular gay magazine, ranks Oak
Park among the ten best places to live in the United States for gay couples and
families. A leader of the Oak Park Area Lesbian and Gay Association tells me
that Oak Park was among the very first communities to develop a registry for gay
and lesbian couples. And the high school has an active gay/straight alliance. I
also understand that Oak Park boasts the largest percentage of interracial
marriages. The legacy of a few bold individuals has cultivated a community that
values diversity as a strength. Sandy believes that this would never have
happened if Oak Park didn’t have the form of government it has, that if the
diversity policy had been put to referendum it would have lost. For the
opposition was fierce. A prevalent attitude among many was summed up by a shoe
store owner on Madison who complained to Sandy, “I don’t want to deal with black
feet” and then moved to a distant suburb. Sandy received bomb threats, hate
mail, obscene phone calls, and ugly things in his newspaper and mail. He says he
likely received the brunt of the opposition since he was the only Jewish Board
trustee.
I don’t want to paint a too rosy picture about Oak Park
today. There still is inequity. Percentage-wise there are more black renters
than white renters, and proportionately more white homeowners than black
homeowners. The majority of African Americans live on the east side corridor and
in apartments. There is so much demand to live in Oak Park that housing prices
keep out anyone who isn’t upper middle-class from becoming new homeowners.
Despite the success here in Oak Park, the need for King’s
vision seems as necessary today as then. Re-segregation continues to be a
problem in the Chicagoland area. It has extended into areas of Bellwood and
Broadview and Maywood. Poverty, crime, drugs and gangs continue to be horrific
realities, not only to the east of Oak Park but also to the west. Just this past
week, a thoughtful man came to talk with me. Not long ago his Bellwood home had
windows shot out during a drive-by shooting. This man has two teenage boys. He
told me that he’s too scared to allow his wife and sons to live at home. A month
ago he was pushed over the edge. The brother of his boy’s best friend was shot
in the back as he got into his car right in front of his house. Dwight Earl
Clark was 24 years old. I saw the broad, lovely smile of this young man on the
cover of the order of service for his funeral.
I wish this was an isolated incident. It’s not. The living
conditions for many of our neighbors are not unlike a tree fighting for life
above the timberline. Life is harsh, dangerous, and yet so many people continue
to live with dignity and compassion. But others resort to drugs and crime to
escape their painful existence.
It is overwhelming to acknowledge, I mean to really
acknowledge the plight of so many of our brothers and sisters so close to home.
Adrienne Rich names the religious imperative in the face of such suffering and
injustice:
My heart is moved by all I
cannot save:
So much has been destroyed
I have to cast my lot with those who, age after age,
perversely, with no extraordinary power,
reconstitute the world.
As we remember the vision and legacy of Martin Luther King
Jr., may we know that he was a man like us. He had his own fears and demons. He
had many obstacles to overcome. In many ways, he lived as a tree above the
timberline, refusing to bow down to the overwhelming pressure of tradition and
prejudice. Instead he hewed close to truth, that truth that is at the source of
life, calling others to moral clarity and conviction. He declared:
[Humanity] must evolve for
all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation.
The foundation of such a method is love. I refuse to accept the idea that the 'isness'
of man's present nature makes him morally incapable of reaching up for the 'oughtness'
that forever confronts him.
He knew what James Baldwin put so succinctly, “My life, my
real life, was in danger, and not from anything other people might do but from
the hatred I carried in my own heart.”
Carter Heyward, a theologian who came of age during the
civil rights movement, writes:
Three decades later some folks, including lots of “60s
people,” deride that moment in our recent past as a poignant one of dreams
that either could never have been realized ("the Age of Aquarius") or already
have (as if racism were a thing of the past). This repudiation is either a
dismissal of the power of a dream or the failure to make connections between
what was achieved during that turbulent decade and what was not. For people
who lived during this period or who have met it mainly through media and oral
tradition to disavow the 60s as hopelessly idealistic and culturally chaotic
or as a long ago time which is no longer ours is to turn away from a
wellspring of our most sacred power to participate in shaping our own
historical moment.
Rather than finding a place to stand in history that
is somehow "ours," a moment in which we are comfortable and from which we draw
our spiritual strength through memory, or nostalgia, or repudiation, we need
to help one another find ways to move and bend and change together. This is
the church's spiritual work, our ethical foundation. We need to be learning,
theologically, to experience time itself as movement in the life of all that
is human, creaturely, and divine, forever changing and always in relation to
whatever has been already and whatever will be.
…[T]he 60s are not over and done, and they never will
be. We who are here now, in this moment, are creating the pastoral and
prophetic significance of that decade by how we are living our lives right
now. We today are responsible for whether the 60s will be remembered largely
as a decade of cynicism, violence, and pipedreams or as the sacred moment of a
dream of justice that was and still is possible.
It is tempting to live in the United States, even here in
Oak Park and River Forest, and keep one’s gaze inward, thus casting a blind eye
to the struggles of communities that lie beyond the boundaries of our own. It is
tempting for our congregation to keep its gaze inward and fail to look outward
beyond these walls. Such postures lead to spiritual malaise. King’s remarks from
a Birmingham jail seem as pertinent today as they did four decades ago:
More and more I feel that the people of ill
will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will.
We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and
actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people.
Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the
tireless efforts of (people) willing to be co-workers with God, and without
this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of stagnation. We
must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do
right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform
our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood.
Casting one’s lot with those who reconstitute the world
brings no immediate gratification nor financial rewards but instead heartbreak
and often despair. But more than that, when living out of empathy and
compassion, when living in accordance with truth, truth as understand most
deeply, we human beings achieve liberation. Martin Luther King Jr. knew that. He
lived it as best as humanly could. May we follow his example.
Blessed be.
Amen.
© Copyright 2004 Alan C.
Taylor, All Rights Reserved.
