Would Philip Hall Like Me?

When I was a little girl, I read all the time. Books were as real to me as my own life. Opening a book, in was inside that world, and connected to the people they were about with an ease and immediacy I rarely had with my schoolmates.

One of my favorite books was a Dell Yearling book called "Philip Hall Likes Me, I Reckon Maybe." I loved it. I reread it a bunch of times. Beth Lambert was the name of the girl it was about. I felt just like her. I really understood how she felt as a person. The things that hurt her were the kind of things that would hurt me too. The things in the book that made her mad made me mad. The things she liked doing I liked doing. As Anne Shirley, of Anne of Green Gables would have put it, she was a kindred spirit. And that Philip Hall...he was pretty cool. I thought she was right, he did seem to like her, lucky. That was what I noticed, and cared about when I was little.

Now I remember back - she was poor, she lived in the South, she had a family that was very involved in a very Christian church, the kind that took trips for church picnics in their own bus. And she was black. Her family was black. Her church was a black, southern Christian church. And Philip Hall was black too.

I knew she was black when I picked up the book; there was a picture of a pretty, black girl in cornrows on the cover. That's about all the impression it made on me at the time. I didn't think that the book was about someone very different from me. All I saw at the time was that it was about a girl around my age, and in reading the book I found I liked this girl and she became one of the friends that populated my imagination. She was there with a pretty mixed bag, Anne of Green Gables and Nancy Drew and Anne Frank and Margaret of Are You There God, It's Me, Margaret, and some others I can't remember the names of.

I remember when I learned that until recently (I was born in the 1960's) black people had to drink from different water fountains, and use different bathrooms. I couldn't believe it. I'd never seen it, and I couldn't believe it had happened at all, let alone not too long before. My parents, civil rights activists and history teachers, showed me pictures of the water fountains and bathrooms with the words 'colored' or 'white only' on them, and I still couldn't believe it. I asked why it had been like that, and learned the story of my country, the country my Jewish and Polish and Italian grandparents had come to as a sanctuary, the country that captured and enslaved people like they were just things, enslaved them and sold them, sold children away from parents, and wives away from husbands and made them do work that no one else wanted to do or could stand to do and beat them and sometimes killed them.

I still remember that feeling of disbelief, of incredulity. I don't remember the day I stopped feeling incredulous, but I do remember the day my friend and neighbor, Deanna was harassed because she was black on the school bus going home. She was the only black student who lived nearby, and I'd never heard anyone use the words the boy used on her since the day my parents told them to me and told me never, never to use them and why they were so bad.

The boy was suspended, and I was one of the students who was asked to tell the story of what he had said. He had scared me and I was glad he was in trouble, and told Mr. Jesdale, the vice principal exactly what had happened. But I never asked Deanna if she was okay or how she felt, and I'll never know what she felt or what has happened to her since we grew up.

Some years passed and I was younger than I am now, but old enough to know about racism and what it means to judge someone by the color of their skin rather than the content of their character. I knew that I was not very concerned about a lot of things I considered superficial in people: what their religion was, what their parents did for a living, where they went on vacation, what race they were. I paid a lot of attention to whether people were funny or mean or smart or strange or intimidating or loyal, and I thought that was enlightened and enough.

One of the UU principles is that revelation is ongoing - what we know or believe may change today or ten years from now, and we have to remain open to the changes in our understandings that come from the growth and experiences we go through in our lives. What I believe now about race and attitudes to race has changed. I used to think that being blind or dismissive of a person's color or heritage was the way to be - part of being a liberal, good person who was not prejudiced.

More living, and working in religion has taught me that being color-blind is not enough for any of us, and perhaps impossible as well. Racism has become sophisticated in the era of political correctness, and it is up to us to become more sophisticated in working against it. Because it is still all around us. Legally black people can vote in Florida, but we learned in the last presidential election how hard the government still makes that with everything from checkpoints to machines which make their ballots to unclear as to invalidate them. Black people driving cars are stopped, ticketed or arrested much more often than whites. Black men are shot or molested by New York City police who are in turn defended by the mayor who built New York into a fabulous city for anyone who can afford it, and a place of diminished services, harassment and abuse for the homeless and poor and non-whites. America's poorest and worst schools are in inner cities and filled with non-white students who have no books, whose school bathrooms are either filled with gang members who torture them or with students whose inadequate schools relegate them to restrooms and closets for classes.

So many of Martin Luther King's words still apply today, almost 40 years, 40 years, since he preached his dream, it is still too much a dream, too little a reality. And he is not even here to help us. Too often that is what happens to people of peace in this world and even in this nation. They die, killed by people of violence and hatred, and we who followed the peacemakers are left to pick up their standard and go forward with it and we do not know how to continue without them.

Our nation's race relations are stuck, have been stuck I think since the OJ Simpson trial and the Million Man March. Whites and blacks who care about continuing King's work have not managed to reconnect in the wake of our divided opinions about Simpson's guilt or innocence, the role of police, the vision of Louis Farrakhan. We learned again in that time about the ways we are different, the ways our life experiences in this country have made us different. We have found no way to reconcile those differences, grab hold of each other again and press forward.

One of Unitarian Universalism's best qualities is our history of activism for social justice. In the 19th century, many of our preachers and congregants were abolitionists, even when it cost them prestige, power, livelihood. Many Universalists, in particular, were leaders in the abolitionist movement. Many Unitarians chose to work for abolitionism within the realm of religion. One of our greatest preachers, William Ellery Channing, whose statue stands in the B oston Public Gardens across the street from his Arlington Street Church, still a UU church, even built a theology of abolitionism. Because of our idea that revelation is ongoing and people must pay attention to what they believe and how they live in accordance with those beliefs, he put forward the idea that slavery was not only socially but also theologically, religiously, untenable because no one who is enslaved is then free to experience revelation and to live in accordance with it.

In the 20th century, Unitarians and Universalists again strove to establish peace and justice, abroad and at home. When Eleanor Roosevelt sought a place in Washington DC for blacks and whites to meet together, she finally found a home, a welcoming home fo those meetings at All Souls' Church, Unitarian. When the civil rights movement began, many Unitarians and Universalists marched, demonstrated, worked and lobbied in that cause, and again from our own neighborhood, the Unitarian minister James Reeb, who served at All Souls' Church, was shot and killed in Selma. There was a board meeting happening in Boston at the time - when they learned of the threats against the march and the murder of James Reeb they tabled the meeting and reconvened in Selma, and marched there with Martin Luther King Jr. In our own Dolan Lounge in our administration building hangs this plaque: (read plaque).

It is good to be reminded of our forebears courage in confronting some of our society's greatest shame and of their steadfastness in working to end that shame and bring instead opportunity and love for all. But they too are not hear to help us - we must help ourselves. We must help our country become the land it has always promised to be. We must help Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream come true.

That part, the big picture part, is easy to say. As ever, the devil will be in the details. There are no governors or public servants anywhere whose lips drip with interposition and nullification, hardly anyone anywhere publicly declares hate in front of a camera or in a statement. But political correctness has become as much a source of oppression as people hoped it would be a source of fresh starts and respect. Nowadays it is a terrible thing to say or do the wrong thing, even if what we intend is right. A college administrator uses the word niggardly in the correct sense, meaning miserly, a sense that has nothing to do with race, and is fired because he should know better than to ever use a word that could be misconstrued. What does that say about us? What hope is there for Martin's dream when now we don't know how to speak to each other, or to forgive each other, and are so afraid of how something might sound that it's actually preferable to say nothing at all. What are we, whites or Euro-Americans or Caucasians or gringos, blacks or Negroes or people of color or African-Americans? And once we figure out how to address each other, really what is there to say next? I am a white, half-Jewish Unitarian Universalist woman from New England. Was I right or wrong when I felt that Beth Lambert was a kindred spirit? I thought Philip Hall was cool. What gives me the right to try to interpret or understand the experience of anyone different that me? What gives me the right to reach out if I might make a mistake? If I made a mistake, would Philip Hall like me?

Maybe. But regardless, what gives me the right, what gives any of us the right, to try, even to make a mistake, is if we care. Caring enough to try is enough, must be enough, to justify our efforts to understand anyone who is different. And if someone disagrees, that doesn't even matter. Nothing can be allowed to deter us. We must succeed. It is the only choice. The dream is the only choice. There is no alternative - isn't it astounding that it is taking so long when there is no other choice. What a testament to the human capacity for pettiness and self-centeredness. Enough. Enough of this nation plagued with fear of mistakes, of offense, of anger and misunderstanding, plagued with mistrust and hatred and violence and pain. No more.

Some Sundays I say that what I am preaching is only my own resolution, that it is not your agreement but your willingness to consider a question, that matters. This morning I have no answer for your consideration, not even the question, because at this point, there is no question, only an imperative. We must move forward. Nothing but the dream is enough. Nothing less than the dream is enough. Decades have passed. Time is passing and we cannot let our nation remain as it is. Young black teens, especially boys, in our cities don't believe they will live adulthood, and far too many of them are right. Whether they are right is not only theirs to choose. Insofar as it is theirs to choose at all, it is also ours. They are our country's children, our children. We all know what is wrong. Racism of many stripes in America means that people, all people, including you and I are wronged and cheated and suffer and even die by the way we live in this country. Nothing about political correctness or the ponderous, even resistant, changes wrought in laws and government programs has made the difference we long for. When will we be free at last? Martin Luther King Jr. is gone. He give us his dream. His dream is our dream now. It belongs to all of us. It will only die if it dies in us. What will we do in this church, in this faith, in this place, in this time to make it live?

Amen.