"White Lies" Part 2 – Normal People

Emily Wright-Magoonon

This sermon series is inspired by NPR’s serialized podcast White Lies. You can also find an audiovisual narrative and other materials on the special White Lies website.

SERMON

“Harlem” by Langston Hughes

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up

      like a raisin in the sun?

      Or fester like a sore—

      And then run?

      Does it stink like rotten meat?

      Or crust and sugar over—

      like a syrupy sweet?

      Maybe it just sags

      like a heavy load.

      Or does it explode?

The scene on Bloody Sunday before police began attacking the demonstrators.

Last week we dug into the events of 1965 in Selma Alabama – the murder of the young black demonstrator Jimmie Lee Jackson by a state trooper. (He wanted the right to vote.) The beating of hundreds of peaceful protestors by police on the Edmund Pettus Bridge – known as Bloody Sunday. The murder of a white Unitarian minister, James Reeb, who had traveled from Boston to Selma to support the demonstrators. And I didn’t even mention Viola Liuzzo, the white Unitarian from Detroit, who – like James Reeb – went to the South to help with the Civil Rights Movement and was shot and killed while driving a car of other civil rights workers.

Yes, two white Unitarians were killed in the Civil Rights Movement at pivotal junctures.

This plaque hangs at the Unitarian Universalist Association headquarters in Boston. It depicts the three I’ve just spoken of…Jimmie Lee Jackson, Rev. James Reeb, and Viola Liuzzo. Jimmie Lee Jackson was not a Unitarian, but he was included in this plaque because without his death – and the death of many other black people – James Reeb and Viola Liuzzo would not have even gone to Selma.

Last week we talked about how James Reeb’s murder received national attention because he was a white man, whereas Jimmie Lee Jackson’s death did not, and even his gravestone is riddled with bullet holes. Likewise, Viola Liuzzo’s death did not receive national attention – and when it did receive attention, it was to disparage her for being a woman who would leave her children at home to do this work.

The white man, James Reeb, was the only hero in the public eye – the white eye.

But at the risk of continuing this focus on only the white man, we will talk a bit more about James Reeb today.

Because James Reeb is a Unitarian hero.

And the veneration of heroes, especially martyrs, can be a risky business.

The veneration of heroes can create a distance, a safe distance. That person, that martyr, is somehow different from me, somehow special, chosen by Fate for this saintly path.

I am just a normal, humble person. How can I make a difference? I cannot.

But while James Reeb was a man of great integrity, he was also a normal person.

We are all normal people who can strive to live lives of integrity.

Several years before James Reeb was murdered in Selma, Alabama, he was assistant minister at All Souls Unitarian Church in D.C.

Rev. James Reeb

All Souls was one of the most important churches in the denomination, and his job there was a coveted one.

We’re going to listen to a short excerpt from the White Lies podcast we are discussing after service.

This is James Reeb’s final sermon.

(You can find the recording in the first minute of Episode 7 of the White Lies NPR podcast. )

If you came this morning hoping to hear a message of hope, in many ways I will have to discourage you….There were many people who seemed to feel that once we’d had the march on Washington and once we had the civil rights bill, things were just inevitably going to be easier, that somehow we’d done it. And I can say to you only that I think that this is the most dangerous kind of self-delusion, that we have not in any way done it. And that just to the extent that we think we have, we’re going to be dismayed when we find out that we have not. And just to the extent that we permit ourselves to be emotionally dismayed, we ourselves as individuals will in some small way add to this thing that is known as the backlash, which is real and, I feel, in many ways growing, and in many ways possibly stronger than we surmise as yet.

Rev. James Reeb

Rev. Reeb became restless in his position at All Souls. He felt his comfortable position as a parish minister was in conflict with the values he preached.

And so he made a surprising decision.

He left All Souls. He wanted to engage more directly outside of the church walls with the marginalized. He took a job in Boston with the American Friends Service Committee working on low-income housing issues. He worked in a storefront office in the city’s majority-black Roxbury neighborhood, where tenants struggled with unjust landlords. It was important to Jim to live in the same place where he worked, to raise his family there, to send his kids to the local schools.

In the last week of his life, Reeb was chest-deep in a public battle with the Boston fire department. In fact he worried out loud that going to Selma might look to some like he was running from that fight.

A couple months before, a fire had engulfed a 29-unit apartment building in Roxbury. Four people died, including a mother and two young children. She had saved her youngest child by holding him against her as she jumped from the fifth floor. Her body cushioned the fall.

Reeb knew fire codes were a problem in Boston, especially inadequate fire exits in public housing. He met with the resistant fire chief and told him that he was going to form a citizens’ committee to study the fire codes.

The fire chief fought back, saying: “You’re no expert…If you’re wrong, I will murder you.”

Reeb responded, “How do you murder people?”

The story of this exchange was Reeb’s last journal entry before he left for Selma.

24 hours later he was murdered in Selma by white men who saw him as a race traitor.

And yet I still say, while James Reeb was a man of great integrity, he was also a normal person, like us.

After he moved to inner city Boston – Roxbury, he wrote this to one of his friends at the time:

It was difficult to find this house. Almost no one wants to encourage you to move here. …The children are in school and in general happy. John wanted to help to integrate his class. Some gal in Washington wanted to know if I really wanted my children to go to school with negroes and I said yes of course, all children are lucky who integrate schools. Marie is fine, busy getting the house in order. … We are together sharing in what I think will probably be one of the most significant times in our lives. We are all amazingly well, and I am spending more time with the family than ever before. We have finally got our ping pong table. And Marie, John and I play regularly. We are resuming our Friday night birthday festival. We have a cake, candles. Someone tells us about a person we admire, and we sing “Happy Birthday.”….I am faced every day to stretch my mind. There are new problems, new ideas, and new experiences to deal with. I have seized the bull by the horns. I am doing what seems important. And let the damn torpedos come.

Yes, James Reeb was a man of exceptional integrity: He relocated his family to Roxbury and helped integrate schools with his own children. Yes, James Reeb sacrificed a prestigious position to do organizing work. Yes, James Reeb bought a ticket to Selma when Rev. Dr. King asked folks to come demonstrate. Yes, he was murdered by white supremacists, and his death helped pass the Voting Rights Act.

But he also was excited about playing ping pong with his family. And their Friday night birthday festival.

We are all normal people who can strive to live lives of integrity.

When the black public intellectual Cornel West gave his Ware Lecture to Unitarian Universalists at our General Assembly, he riffed on WEB DuBois’ question: “How shall integrity face oppression?”

Here are some of West’s remarks:

“Now by integrity, I don’t mean purity. Each and every one of us, not free of spot or wrinkle. …

“But at the same time, integrity has to do with what is the quality of your courage and your willingness to bear witness radically against the grain even if you have to sacrifice something precious, including your popularity in the name of integrity…

“And let us be very clear, that to be fundamentally committed to integrity makes you counter-cultural in an age of mendacity. You have to cut so radically against the grain. Intellectual integrity, the quest for unarmed truth, and we know the condition of truth is always to allow suffering to speak. And if you don’t allow those who are suffering to raise their voices and play a role in the shaping of all of our destinies, you can rest assured that mendacity is operating in a powerful manner.”

Now, I went to Harvard, but I had to look up a word he uses twice: mendacity. …Mendacity means untruthfulness.

White Lies.

One of the White Lies of our country is the lie of white supremacy. And as we talked about last week, white supremacy doesn’t just live in white supremacists…

It is the water we swim in.

Last week I quoted Cornel West saying that even as a black man… “when I look in the depths of my soul I see white supremacy because I grew up in America. And if there’s white supremacy in me, my hunch is you’ve got some work to do too.”

This part I didn’t quote last week:

Oh, yes, we’re not talking about purity. … What is the quality of your struggle? Now push it back to learn how to die, in order to learn how to live, to murder what’s inside of us. Too much male supremacy inside of me. I grew up in America. Too much anti-Jewish sensibility…Anti-Muslim, anti-Arab—hatred shot through. And then this notion—oh, this notion I abhor—that somehow an American life has more value than a life in other parts of the world.Let’s have integrity. Let’s tell the true across the board.

Cornel West

So in this search for integrity, let’s hear again what Cornel West said:

If you don’t allow those who are suffering to raise their voices and play a role in the shaping of all of our destinies, you can rest assured that mendacity is operating in a powerful manner.

Cornel West

So one of the most important things we can do as people striving for integrity is to privilege the voices of those who are suffering – those who are suffering under the weight of entrenched systems humans have created.

Bryan Stevenson, who wrote the book Just Mercy that has now been made into a movie and is in theaters…talks about the need to get proximate…get close. James Reeb did that by living in the community he worked in, by making their struggles his own. By developing relationships. And by showing up when Dr. King made the call.

We are all normal people who can strive to live lives of integrity.

Dr. King’s call is coming to us from all around…it doesn’t have to mean going to Selma.

Answering the call can mean listening deeply to someone who, by the color of their skin, or the sexual orientation, or their gender identity…has something to speak about the suffering our systems inflict.

This includes getting real about the suffering in our history. It is not over and gone.

By returning to violent history and allowing those who suffered to tell us the truth, we are exercising what is called, “liberatory memory” …to liberate our history from a lie and possibly be saved by the truth. 

The concept of Sankofa comes to us from Ghana, from the Twi language. It translates as “go back and get it.” 

As my colleague Rev. Karen Johnston says: “[Sankofa] calls us to acts of “liberatory memory”: to look back to the past in order to learn for the future; to do so that we might liberate ourselves and others from some of the shackles of history – harm done, harm experienced, lies told, truths buried.  The Sankofa symbol is a bird.  Its body faces forward.  Its head turns back.  In its beak is an egg – fragile, precious, full of potential: the seed of knowledge from facing our past that we plant for a resilient future. A future with integrity.”

So, what a gift that we can keep each other company in this endeavor…

For we are all normal people who can strive to live lives of integrity.

I’ll close with the end of Rev. Dr. King’s eulogy for Rev. James Reeb. He entitled it “A Witness to the Truth”

…Here and there an individual or group dares to love and rises to the majestic heights of moral maturity. Therefore I am not yet discouraged about the future. Granted, the easygoing optimism of yesteryear is impossible. Granted, that those who pioneered in the struggle for peace and freedom will still face uncomfortable jail terms and painful threats of death; they will still be battered by the storms of persecution, leading them to the nagging feeling that they can no longer bear such a heavy burden; the temptation of wanting to retreat to a more quiet and serene life. Granted, that we face a world crisis, which leaves us standing so often amid the surging murmur of life’s restless seas. But every crisis has both its dangers and its opportunities, its valleys of salvation or doom in a dark, confused world. The kingdom of God may yet reign in the hearts of men.

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

May it be so.

– Rev. Emily Wright-Magoon

For further reading/listening: