Nocturn in Black and White
Martin Luther King Sunday

Liturgical Materials for Sunday the 19^th of January, 2003

Mark Belletini, Minister, Minister
First Unitarian Universalist Church of Columbus, Ohio

Opening words [Next] [back to top]

We are here,
after a week of sun and cold,
to worship, to lift our hearts
on wings of hope and courage,
to celebrate our invitation to love,
and through music, word, silence and story
claim our own part in our living tradition.

And at celebration's end, (together)
may our reason and our passion keep us true to ourselves,
true to each other,
and true to those shared visions of what we can together become…

A Story for All Ages [Next] [back to top]

Kupastu Mandukaha

(The Frog from the Well): an Ancient Sanskrit Story Adapted into English by Ray Nandyal.

In an abandoned well outside a village in India, there lived a frog. He was a good frog, but all he knew was the well and nothing else. Having grown up in the well, he knew the stones it was made of, the plants that grew out of its cracks, and generations of spiders which kept weaving webs like there was nothing else to life except weaving webs. And the frog was happy as can be in his limited knowledge.

One day there was a huge storm. It blew a lot of leaves and even a few branches into the well. It also brought another frog. The frog from the well approached the new frog and said, "Hey, who are you?"

"I'm the frog from the river," said the other frog. "The storm brought me here."

"A river? But there's nothing outside this well."

"Yes, there is. There are a lot of places outside this well like rivers and oceans and mountains."

"Prove it," said the frog from the well.

The frog from the river thought for a while. She couldn't take the other frog out of the well and show him all those places. Eventually she said, "I bet you know this well really well, don't you?"

"Yes, I do," said the frog from the well, proudly. "I know it better than anybody."

"And you don't know me, right?"

"No, I don't."

"If you know your well and you don't know me, then I must be from somewhere else, right? Which means there are places in the world other than this well. I come from one of those places, and it's called a river," said the frog from the river, hoping that this would settle the matter.

"You can quibble all you want," said the frog from the well, "but there's no place other than this well, and that's that."

Then he moved deeper into the well away from the new frog and away from any chance of coming across anything new ever again. Even the spiders thought it was funny how closed-minded the frog from the well was.

Sequence [Next] [back to top]

All the colors make a world, O Truth. You are none of them and yet all of them.

All of them. Hand the color of wheat joined to hand the color of cream tea. All of them. Eyes dark as maple bark and light as glacier ice. All of them. Torsos cinnamon and caramel and cocoa, foreheads reflecting the blue of the noon sky or rust of the sunset. All of them. The chartreuse of leaves drooping off winter rhododendrons in the sun, the restrained gray of stone, and thickets of branches the color of cola. All of them. The white of snowflakes, the pewter clouds, the black wrought iron railings on porches…every shade and tint and hue make a world. Mahogany arms and shoulders the color of rain puddles, indigo evenings and pale saffron dawns, all the hues of rage or despair, all the colors shimmering in musical chords, all the shades of silence…they are you, O Truth, they are you, far more than these flimsy and tissue thin words…..

(silence)

The color of our loved one's eyes, the memory of sun on their shirts or glinting in their hair, the precise hue of their neck, their tears, their shadow… these too are part of you, oh Truth, as is our love, our sorrow and our sighs. We call to mind the colors of all we love, their familiar clothes, their cuffs, the locks of their head…we embrace them by naming who they are, quietly or aloud in the shared sanctuary of this place…

(naming)

Your colors, oh Truth, are in the bread that is broken, the white feathers of the morning dove, the black of a crow's wing, the pearly surface of the waters of the sea, the angry red eyes of escaped slaves, and in the rainbow of the human heart when it comprehends, for but a moment, the spirit behind the spirituals of the ages….

First Reading [Next] [back to top] comes from one of the last sermons which Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered. It was at the National Cathedral in Washington D.C. in 1969

Let me close by saying that we have difficult days ahead in the struggle for justice and peace, but I will not yield to a politic of despair.

I say to you that our goal is freedom, and I believe we are going to get there.

We're going to win our freedom because both the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of the almighty God are embodied in our echoing demands. And so, however deep the angry feelings are, I can still sing "We Shall Overcome." We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. We shall overcome because Carlyle is right: "No lie can live forever." We shall overcome because William Cullen Bryant is right: "Truth, crushed to earth, will rise again." With this faith, we will be able to hew, out of the mountain of despair, the stone of hope.

Second Reading [Next] [back to top] comes from Mary Stanton's most excellent and critical biography of Viola Liuzzo From Selma to Sorrow published by the University of Georgia Press in 1998

White segregationists passionately hated "mixers" - white people who were willing to mix with blacks. (It was assumed all blacks wanted to mix with whites.) Mixers were believed to advocate a kind of social sharing comparable to the communist theory of economic sharing, and so were considered communists. Since communists were atheists and mixers were communists, it was only logical to assume that mixers were atheists too.

Writing in 1965, Calvin Hernton observed that "Sexual paranoia is an inextricable ingredient in that psychiatric terror known as racism… Like any paranoiac, the racist experiences himself as an authentic individual only when he projects his or her fears onto others and imagines they are attacking … A liaison between a white woman and a black man was considered an affront to white male authority. Equality would break down the white social order.

Vi Liuzzo, with her Michigan plates and a black man in the front seat of her car, symbolized everything the segregationists most feared and despised. Here was a white woman who had clearly stepped across the line. Her behavior removed her from the category of sacred white womanhood and motherhood (which in the chivalric code of the South… required male protection) and into the despised category of race traitor.

Vi's outwardly conventional blue-collar lifestyle rendered her uninteresting even to the feminists, who never acknowledged her. Yet Vi was murdered precisely because she afforded such a clear symbol to the segregationists: the image of a white female driving after dark with a local black activist resonated for them. Viola Liuzzo fell through nearly every conceivable crack in our image-conscious culture, and, within a year of her brutal murder, she dropped out of memory.

Sermon (in four voices): Nocturn in Black and White [Next][back to top]

1.Wendy Fish

I'd never been to Selma, Alabama until about a year ago. Back in the 60's, I didn't answer the call to help with voter registration in the South. I wasn't among the people of goodwill and courage and conviction who went South and demonstrated about the overwhelming injustice that African-Americans suffered. I wasn't there during the civil rights movement's most dramatic and decisive moments.

I wasn't there, but I wanted to know first-hand about that time. I eagerly signed up for a chance to be a part of a group of Unitarian Universalist clergy to hear stories of those pivotal days in the struggle for justice and voting rights from colleagues who were on the march from Selma to Montgomery. A hundred and thirty-one Unitarian Universalist colleagues heeded The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s call for clergy to come immediately to Selma following Bloody Sunday. Some of their remembrances are captured in books, and a powerful CNN Documentary was done by Unitarian Universalist Clark Olson who was there. I was privileged to hear first person stories from four of these justice seekers, to walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in a silent processional, to hear about James Reeb, Jimmy Lee Jackson and Viola Liuzzo from the pulpit of Brown's Chapel where so many key moments in history took place.

James Reeb was a Unitarian minister from Boston who responded to the call to Selma and was hit in the head with a club wielded by white segregationists. He died of his injuries.

Never was his name mentioned without also talking about Jimmy Lee Jackson, who, in his last days, defended his mother against a state trooper's verbal abuse. No white policeman thought a Black woman's dignity should be defended. Jimmy Lee Jackson was shot, February 18, 1965; demonstrators protested his brutal death as part of the demonstrations which took them on their march to Montgomery to demand the right to vote. We know this march as Bloody Sunday.

And we heard stories of Viola Gregg Liuzzo, a white 38-year-old mother of five, who shuttled marchers to Selma with the help of Leroy Moton, a young African American man from Dallas County. After transporting one group to Selma, Moton and Liuzzo began the return trip to Montgomery to pick up another. At some point in Lowdnes County, a car filled with four armed Ku Klux Klan members from Birmingham began to chase Liuzzo's car at speeds of up to 80 miles per hour. They fired two shots. Liuzzo died instantly. Moton was able to stop the car and flag down help from a passing car.

Although decades after the battles, my trip to Selma was poignant, sobering, deliberate, an experience indelibly etched in my memory.

The day ended with a bus ride through the Alabama countryside to a memorial for Viola Liuzzo, the civil rights volunteer from Detroit, who was shot in the face as she sang, "And Before I'll Be a Slave, I'll be Buried in My Grave."

It had been a cloudy, gray day, and when our bus pulled off the road into the unpaved parking lot designed for visitors to this memorial, there was a mere hint of daylight left and it was starting to drizzle. Our group of fifty tumbled out to pay tribute to this courageous, self-determined woman and to see her monument before dark.

We walked up a narrow paved path to a simple five foot marble stone encircled by a dignified metal fence. There was a large fresh arrangement of pink flowers. The inscription read, "In Memory of our sister Viola Liuzzo who gave her life in the struggle for the right to vote, March 25, 1965." No one spoke. We stood in solidarity with a woman who envisioned a better way, a woman who may have been afraid, but she followed the call, a woman who had courage even if she didn't have all the answers, a woman who put her faith into works and who should be remembered. After a significant time of shared silence, one voice began to sing, and soon our group was united in a quiet and respectful chorus, "If you can Die for freedom, I can too."

2. Mark Belletini:

Wendy was clearly deeply moved by the monument to Viola Liuzzo. I have never been to Alabama, but I too was deeply moved, and disturbed, by reading her biography this week.

She was indeed pretty much forgotten, as her biographer says. But why?

Because certain departments in our own government, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation under the thumb of that devious man, J. Edgar Hoover, did all they could to discredit her. There is clear evidence that they themselves were involved with the situation around her death. The man charged with her killing, who, by the way, still speaks of it as a fact, got off twice, once by a so-called "hung jury," and once, voted "not guilty." Both juries were white. The lawyers on both sides of the case self-declared as segregationists at the trials. As I read page after page of language to curdle the blood, I suddenly had a clear understanding of why, when the O.J. Simpson trial verdict was announced, everyone yelped for joy in the neighborhood in Oakland where I used to live. I'm talking wild joy, with prayers of thanksgiving and dancing in the streets. I was one of only three white folks in ten square blocks. My neighbors saw what happened as a mirror of what had been happening to them…and their white friends…a thousand, no a thousand, thousand times in this country.

The trials of the killer of Viola Liuzzo was one of those trials…a sham from beginning to end, a travesty of justice, an insult to almost everyone except the KKK, who got what they wanted.

Why was Viola Liuzzo murdered? That one is easy…she was murdered because she was a white woman in a car at night with a black man. And, in Alabama in the sixties, that was just not allowed. Not by law, but by two hundred years of social mores.

Who was Viola Liuzzo? A mother of five, a working class woman who was born in Queens, lived in Chattanooga for a while, then moved to Detroit where she used to sling hash at a diner.

She went to Wayne State University for while, learned to love the thinking of Thoreau and Emerson, and left her religion, Catholicism, when a baby died. She had a hard time understanding a God who permitted such loss. So she started attending the Universalist Unitarian Church down on Cass Ave near Wayne State. There she heard Emerson and Thoreau from the pulpit. She also befriended the Rev. Malcolm Boyd, the radical Episcopal chaplain at the school.

Vi, as she was called, became interested in the civil rights movement. Little by little, as she heard radio broadcasts by King and others, she was convinced that she had to do something. She didn't feel like a prophet or organizer, but she knew she could be a good support staff to anyone…she was one to roll up her sleeves.

So she drove down to Selma and offered to be a driver. She found a young 19 year old young man to be her navigator, as she helped to drive folks from Brown's Chapel to Selma and back to Montgomery.

The local KKK, hating this invasion from the north, simply could not deal with a white woman being friends with a black man. So they murdered her, unashamed, thinking they were protecting themselves.

The FBI tried to suggest she deserved it. They implied there was a sexual relationship between the two, which was not true. They said she was manic-depressive for which there is no evidence. They said she was a communist…but she was a working class housewife and mother and hash slinger from Detroit with energy and principles that moved her. She was naïve about some things, that's for sure. The desperate segregationist culture of Alabama was not something she really understood instinctually.

It was her impulsiveness and naivete that made her more vulnerable than most.

Viola Liuzzo was an ordinary person, a white woman, who was trying to hew the mountain of despair called racism in this nation down to a small hard rock of hope. And she was murdered for it.

When Martin Luther King Jr. preached about hope and freedom, he was not just talking about equal opportunity and equal rights and fiscal parity. He was also talking about the freedom to learn deeply from other cultures and traditions and ways of being in the world, to love whomsoever you will love, and the humility and character it takes to do both of those things. He was talking about the freedom to really mean it when we say we are free human beings.

We have to be free to be human beings in the fullness of what that means, not the least of what that means.

3. Lea Pearson - My Life with a Black Man

Being married to a Black man for 22 years has had a profound effect on my artistic, social and political life.

Growing up in rural New England I knew few Black people. The one I knew best, Frances, was a lady who cleaned our house, a patient of my father. I was very fond of her but thought she smelled funny.

I was accustomed to living with folks from other countries (we had foreign students from Laos, France, Iraq and Japan), but I never got close enough to the few people of color I knew in high school and college to ask any of the many questions I had about how we were different, yet alike.

As a UU, I knew there were issues and I was brought up to seek equity and reach out to those in need. Isolated in a world of white privilege, I didn't hear much about the civil rights movement, though I knew it was going on.

Meeting Tony coincided with growing to be a musician and becoming a fully independent adult, 3000 miles from my family and the sometimes suffocating intimacy of New England. His comforting closeness gave me a safe place to ask my questions. How does Black hair feel? Do you blush?

Silly questions, but the personal is political, and in order to feel intimate with another you need to understand. You need to feel as if that person is familiar to you.

There was so much that was unfamiliar. While I was listening to the Boston Symphony on Saturday nights with my parents, Tony was trying to cruise the streets of LA with his friends. I knew nothing about the world of Black composers, first-hand racism, children who cannot sleep at night because of hunger, slang and colorful southern metaphors such as "she sticks to him like white on rice" and "the joint was tight as Dick's hat band."

It has been a wonderful and difficult adventure, challenging me to question all my assumptions. (And, like a good UU, I have tried.) This has inspired me to seek out the music of Black women composers, making me want to bring music to those who have no access to it, helping me to understand the artists of color with whom I work, considering the impact of so many social and political issues on my children, becoming comfortable with being the only white person in a room, learning the intricate vocabulary of color shades, wrestling with the loud male mock-insults that are so much a part of my men folk, sleepily participating in breakfast table discussions about race relations, ferreting out my unknown prejudices and inquiring, always inquiring, into my assimilation of our society's dominant white culture.

Yet I know that my relationship is offensive to some. Being a person who has always tried not to offend (I hate being loud in restaurants), it is curious to me that I have never, not once, questioned our being together because of our racial differences. I may hate to raise my voice in public, but I never feel apologetic about my choice of mate.

Most interesting to me now, is that I am no longer comfortable being in white-only environments. As classical musicians, Tony and I are always painfully aware of the absence of people of color among our chosen culture. At concerts and other events I frequently wonder, "where is everybody?"

This past weekend I went to New Hampshire to see my mother, age 87, get married. As lovely as the occasion was, it felt extremely weird to be back in a place where there were literally NO people of color.

I still have many questions; I still struggle with all the ramifications of connecting with a culture that feels at once so familiar and so strange. But the privilege I feel now is that, on a daily basis, I am one of the lucky ones that get to know the internal reality of a person of a different race.

4. Tony McDonald

A. It is not as dangerous now as it was in the 60's and before for a black man to be with a white woman.

1. It is no longer life threatening.
2. Even in the south, I believe.
3. I, personally, have never been threatened, or even confronted, because of associating with Lea.

There is a lot more interracial mixing in general, nationwide. We even see it on TV, in commercials, etc. (where it is not the main story).

B. Nevertheless, I know that some people still have trouble with it.

1. These suspicions and prejudices are frequently old patterns, carried on by people of my generation and before.
2. They may recall when it was dangerous, or they may think it is still a case of whites plundering black people - "white women taking our men." Maybe it's even a holdover from slave mentality when the ideal, the unattainable for a black man, was to have a white women.
3. Spike Lee tells you all about it in the film Jungle Fever. (Note: A most excellent film about Italian family culture as well. MLB)
4. I remember hearing all about this "problem" when I was younger. It was a frequent topic of conversation between my sister and her friends.

C. I know this thinking still exists.

1. In a small volume called "How to Find and Keep a BMW (black man working)," published in 1995, Dr. Julia Hare discusses black men with white women in vitriolic tones.
2. We know people of the older generations still carry those prejudices from their youth. Case in point, Trent Lott.
3. Did you know that Denzel Washington (who can do no wrong) has said that he will not kiss a white woman on the screen? I don't think it is because Denzel has a problem with white women. It is because he does not want to alienate a major portion of his fan base, which is black women, and he knows that that will.

D. I, myself, am not immune.

1. As I mentioned, I had the ideas (about not crossing the line and taking up with a white girl) beat into me from an early age.
2. Even though I live in a glass house, I still find myself occasionally questioning an interracial couple that I see: i.e. "Do they know what they are doing? Do they know they have crossed a line?" "Are they aware of the kind of resentment it can stir up?" I ask myself these questions, not them, of course, but I ask them.
3. I married Lea simply because she was the only one for me, but I know that our association offends some people. I only feel it, though, when around other black people, because I know where that sentiment is coming from. I don't care in a white situation. I say "shame on them for being prejudiced anyhow."

E. Hope for the future.

1. This seems to be one area where young people really have the advantage.
2. There are so many more racially mixed kids and kids from racially mixed families today that the old prejudices have to be falling away.
3. You see more young mixed couples too, of all races, in the newspaper, in the mall, on the street, everywhere.
4. I think, and hope, that they do not carry on the stigma from the old days. Once it was a safety device to tell us not to date white women. Black men had to know that associating with white women could get you killed. Remember Emmet Till? He was a young black boy of 14 who merely spoke to a white women in 1950's Mississippi and was brutally murdered because of it. (There is a "made for television" movie about it on this week).
5. But, as I said at the beginning of these comments, those days are over, even in Mississippi, so we don't need that segregation anymore.
6. Here, I think young people are leading the way. To them I say - carry on.

Coda: Mark

And to all of us on this celebration of a great dream, I say, "Carry on." We can indeed hew a stone of hope from a mountain of despair. We can indeed overcome. We are not fooling ourselves, like that foolish frog in this morning's story who really thought that the narrow well in which he lived was the whole world.

Freedom is not a pipe dream…and King's life is the call to do it together."

Prayer [back to top]

A stone of hope, he said. A stone of hope.
Doesn't sound terribly showy.
Doesn't seem very exciting.
No great granite columns in a temple to
human greatness.
No new Stonehenge of moral rectitude.
No impressive sculpture of the newest divinity.
But a stone, a small rock,
something homely enough to bob in the hand,
something I may not throw,
since I live in a glass house.
Something I can only cradle in my palm,
something small but durable.
Maybe that's all I need…
maybe something so small really is the philosopher's stone, the rock of ages,
the stone that gathers no moss,
the stone that rolled off the cave of death.
Maybe that's all I need inside me,
something small but durable,
something I cannot throw since violence
is worthless and more than worthless.
Maybe all I need is this stone of hope.
No complete answers or finished social plans,
no final, self-assured, "I have arrived,
too bad about everyone else" attitude.
Just this…a small light stone hewn from the
mountain of my despair.
May I never drop it, oh Love,
may I never drop it.

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