by Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell

Words shared at a special Music and Worship Service,

Sunday, Feb. 13, 2000

First Unitarian Church, Portland, Oregon

Oh, there was a time! There was a time when we thought we could change the world! The 60’s.

Where were you way back when? Were you a parent, aghast that your daughter started wearing a mini-skirt? Were you a young man who was facing the draft? Were you only a child, who heard about the 60’s much later from the music, from book and film? If you wish you had been in the thick of it, well, you’re right—it was a time to remember. A time of ideals and a time of excesses. It was a time that invited us to rethink the institutions of our country—the government, the university, the army, the capitalist machine. And it was a time for us to rethink our personal lives. It was a moment in history that provided a wedge into our experience and made us question the fundamentals: Is this the way I want to live? What is moral, what is just? What’s worth giving my life for?

It was a time, surely, for the young. A youthful professor at Harvard, Timothy Leary, in the Psychedelic Review, a journal that he founded, exhorted his readers "to remember that God (however you define that higher power) produced that wonderful molecule, that extraordinarily powerful organic substance we call LSD, just as surely as ‘He’ created the rose, or the sun . . . ." Leary was soon asked to leave Harvard. Not to be dissuaded from his mission, he gave his followers what might be considered the mantra of the movement: "turn on, tune in, drop out."

The women’s movement, which flowered so fully in the 70’s, had its roots in the ‘60’s. Inspired by such writers as Simone de Beauvoir in her classic work The Second Sex, published way back in the ‘40’s, and by Betty Freiden’s The Feminine Mystique, women began to question their appointed role. They wanted equal pay for equal work, job opportunities, access to contraceptives, and safe abortion. They wanted, in other words, control over their lives and control over their bodies. They wanted nothing less than equality.

The popular musical Hair said it all. Its central metaphor was the mark of youth, the hair left uncut, flowing down over the shoulders, free, sensual, uncontrolled. It was about sex without all the rules. It was about the belief that pleasure was, after all, good for us. It was a slap in the face of the Protestant ethic, authority in general, and American imperialism in Vietnam, in particular.

Who was fighting this war in Vietnam? Disproportionately, it was poor boys and minorities. Another manifestation of the racism that was everywhere in the country, as we discovered, not just in the South. A young preacher named Martin Luther King, Jr., emerged as a leader who would give a new vision about racial justice and would take the issues out of black churches into the streets and at the lunch counters and voter registration offices. Later more militant blacks such as Malcolm X and H. Rap Brown would call for black pride and black power. Yes, we are beautiful and good, blacks said. See us as we are. Call us by our true names.

These protesters, both the anti-war protesters and those in the Civil Rights movement--mostly young, blessed with energy and unhampered by complexities--faced danger, sometimes sustained injury, and some even died. Social change does not often come cheaply—it comes with sacrifice. But when you believe that the values you see all around you are wrong, and you can’t live with them anymore, you try to make a difference, or you begin to die inside. No guarantees, but you have to try. So you imagine a new way, and you begin to serve the truth, as you see it. And you know what? Sometimes you win. Sometimes the world will never again be the same because you dared to dream.

THE WOMEN’S MOVEMENT

Women of the 50’s and women of the 60’s were two different creatures. I should know—I had a foot in both camps. In the 50’s during the post-war boom, women were told to stay at home and polish their skills as homemakers. Not that that is a bad choice—but then it was the only choice. Women lived through their men, which left the men carrying the burden of their own lives and the lives of their wives, as well.

I met my husband-to-be at a book discussion group. The book being discussed that evening? The Feminine Mystique. I took his silence for concurrence, which was a tactical error. He wasn’t interested in the book—he was there looking for a woman, and he found me. I was looking for a good provider, and so I put the book aside.

A 1960 article in the New York Times described the life of an educated woman like this: "Like a two-headed schizophrenic . . . once she wrote a paper on the Graveyard poets; now she writes notes to the milkman. Once she determined the boiling point of sulphuric acid; now she determines her boiling point with the overdue repairman . . . ."

I remember being glad that I had birthed sons instead of daughters, because I knew my boys would have an easier way than girls. And yet I raised them as much as I could to be egalitarian. I bought them the Marlo Thomas record "Free to Be You and Me," and we played it a lot, and we danced in the living room to the music, and often I was moved to tears. Imagine that! Men and women free to be what they want to be!

Many women failed to flourish with these limitations, and we began seeing therapists and taking psychotropic drugs for depression. Once we began to talk to one another and to understand that we were not alone and that perhaps the social and political forces of the day were making us crazy, we began to get better. The National Organization for Women (NOW) was established in 1966 by 300 women and men in Washington, and as part of their charter, they wrote: "the time has come for a new movement toward free equality for all women in America, and towards a truly equal partnership of the sexes as part of the world-wide revolution of human rights. . . ."

Ironically, the women participating in the great causes of the time became conscious of their subordinate position and the rights withheld from them in the very organizations working for justice. Virtually all the leadership in the student movement was male. The women made the coffee and did the typing. (Remember when we actually typed?) Yes, they had a new sexual freedom, but the granting of sexual favors came to be part of the expectation during the marches and sit-ins. Who was it who said, "The only position for women is on their backs"? All power relationships began to be questioned.

Same sex relationships were mentioned outloud for the first time. Helen Gurley Brown of Cosmopolitan fame, wrote Sex and the Single Girl, in which she mocked orthodox moral views. The book mainly concentrated on tips for attracting a man, but it did boldly offer this bit of wisdom: "Suppose you like girls. It’s your business and I think it’s a shame you have to be so surreptitious about your choice of a way of life." Then there were the Stonewall Riots in 1969, a truly watershed event. There was a gay bar in Greenwich Village that was constantly harassed by the police, who would come in and do a sweep from time to time. But this time instead of running away, the drag queens stood together. Others joined them, and the American Gay Liberation Front was founded that day.

Personally, I never imagined in those days that I might become a minister, much less a minister of a large church. And I know that a big part of what I do is just to be willing to stand in this pulpit, just to be here for little girls to see. Sometimes they come through the line after church and take my hand and touch the velvet on my robe. I smile, and I think, "You can be anything that you want to be."

CIVIL RIGHTS

Certainly one phenomenon of the ‘60’s was facing facts—accepting that some of our cherished illusions about constitutional freedoms, about the great melting pot, were simply not true. World War II changed the expectations of minorities about how they should be treated, for the service was more egalitarian than the towns and cities these men had come from. It was time for a change.

In 1954, the Supreme Court declared that separate education was unequal education. In 1957 nine students tried to enroll in all-white Central High in Little Rock, Arkansas, and they had to be escorted in by Federal troops.

Martin Luther King, Jr., began his protest movement with a bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama. There were sit-in’s and voter registration drives. Demonstrators were attacked with fire hoses and police dogs. King was jailed many times. In his notable "Letter from Birmingham Jail," he wrote in part: ". . . when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television . . . –then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait."

In 1963, 200,000 blacks and whites marched on Washington, where King declared to the group, "I have a dream." The first of the infamous Selma marches took place on March 7, 1965. This peaceful and dignified march was first halted by state troopers and then viciously assaulted from the rear by local police. Two days later King started another march, but was stopped by an injunction. That night a white Unitarian minister named James Reeb was badly beaten with iron bars, and he died two days later. It was this incident which led President Johnson on March 15 to address a joint session of Congress and make a powerful commitment to civil rights.

But the pace of change was slow, and blacks understandably become impatient. There were riots in Watts in the summer of 1965, riots that went on for 6 days. Thirty-five people were killed, and property damage was estimated at $200,000,000.

Toward the end of his short life, King himself was becoming cynical about changing hardened hearts with his peaceful demonstrations. He began putting energy into issues of economic inequity, and in fact was assassinated while supporting a sanitation workers’ strike in Memphis.

Before his assassination in 1965, Malcolm X had already begun calling for black separation, black pride—and he even advocated violence, in the case of self-protection. Violence? How could they advocate violence? Up until now, you see, all the violence had been directed at blacks. The Black Panthers came on the scene. I remember when H. Rap Brown came into the Presbyterian church in New Orleans where I was worshipping, unrolled his scroll of offenses and asked for reparation. It was a more confrontational time.

Yes, things are different now. Nobody gets turned away from lunch counters. But minorities get turned down for bank loans. We have a thriving black middle class now. But we have more black men in jail than in college. When will we stop seeing color as a judgment on character? When will these trials be over?

WAR

Vietnam became the great universal issue binding together protests over race, poverty, consumerism, and repression of freedom. A new kind of activism among American students started in 1964 in Berkeley, with the Free Speech Movement. Copying student movements in Italy and in France, students in Berkeley and then at many other universities began rebelling, mainly against university authorities. But then in 1965 with the expansion of the war in Vietnam and the conscription of many young men, the war became the focal point.

Vietnam drew these youthful protesters together and broadened their base to include many pacifists, students, clergy, and ordinary Americans who were sickened at the loss of life and the injustice of it all. Students flashed the peace sign. "Make love, not war," they said. The biggest show of unity of the many different anti-war organizations occurred in October of 1967. More than 100,000 protesters came together in a carefully planned march on the Pentagon. Also present were 1,500 Washington police, 2,500 national guardsmen, 200 U.S. marshalls, and 6,000 soldiers. Dr. Spock was there, and Noam Chomsky, poet Robert Lowell, and of course Norman Mailer, who later penned Armies of the Night. The young soldiers faced what was, in effect, a mixture of demonstration, teach-in, and hippie love-in. Some female hippies bared their breasts; some placed flowers in the barrels of soldiers’ guns; some invited soldiers into the bushes to make love not war. All in all, it was a powerful affirmation of opposition to the war. At midnight, after most of the demonstrators had gone, the soldiers and police came in with their gun butts and billy-clubs and brutally removed those who remained.

Young men began burning their draft cards. Buddhist monks in Vietnam burned themselves alive. In our country so did a Quaker, Norman Morrison, and a Catholic, Roger LaPorte. Eisenhower spoke of the "moral deterioration" of America’s youth. Kingman Brewster, President of Yale, referred to the "tragedy of college rebels who hurt their own cause."

During the Chicago Democratic Convention in August of 1968, the students and radicals ostensibly were there to support Eugene McCarthy, but they actually wanted to reveal to the world the total system of violence they believed lay under the government establishment and our support for the war. Mayor Daly was ready: 12,000 police were on hand, supported by 6,000 national guardsmen. The convention center was wrapped in barbed wire. About 5,000 protesters showed up and attempted to march toward the Amphitheatre, setting off what could only be described as a police riot. There were many open wounds and literally clouds of tear gas. The demonstrators hurled stones, up-ended dustbins, and hammered on cars. Not wanting this debacle to be reported, the police "took out" cameramen and reporters, and some suffered quite severe injuries. The marchers got to the Hilton and got themselves on evening TV, but in doing so, set themselves up as sacrificial lambs. Busloads of helmeted officers lined up and charged the demonstrators, chanting, "Kill, kill, kill." Heads were smashed, limbs torn from their sockets, people trampled. It seemed that peaceful protest was becoming impossible in this country.

That feeling was confirmed in a terrible way on May 4, 1970 when, absolutely without justification, members of the Ohio national guard opened fire on student demonstrators at Kent State, killing four and wounding nine. On the 15^th of May police shot and killed two students and wounded nine others at Jackson State, a black college. These killings were the most horrific events in all the turmoil of the 60’s. Our children felt they must bear testimony against the evil they saw, and for this they were killed. Our children. We killed our children.

PRAYER

Spirit of Life, we are thankful for those who sacrificed life and limb that we might have a more just society. May we never forget what they gave. It is a new day, and for all the change, much is left to be redeemed. Help us not to become too comfortable in face of evil and injustice. Give us hope that we can make a difference. Help us dream great dreams, and give us the courage to follow the truth that we know.

BENEDICTION

Go now, and live your life as if it mattered. Go in love and go in peace.

PRAYER

God of love and mercy, hear our prayers. We are thankful for the blessings of life itself, blessings of health, blessings of friendship. And yet, O God, there are those times when we feel frightened, beaten down by life. So today we pray especially for those whose losses seem so great, so overwhelming. May they be comforted by the love in this community and by the larger love that it represents. We put all our needs, spoken and unspoken, before you this day. (PAUSE) Amen.

Copyright 2000, by Rev. Dr. Marilyn Sewell.  All rights reserved.