by Preston Moore, Summer Minister

A sermon given August 7, 2005

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

CALL TO WORSHIP

Once again this Sunday we bring ourselves and our stories to this sacred place—stories that can wound or heal, stories bequeathed to us about who we are, and who other people are, based on the color of our skin.  Come today to consider a recovery of authorship.  Come, let us worship together. 

My stories about race begin fifty years ago in my hometown of Lakeland, Florida.  I was six years old.  Sometimes I went with my mother to a neighborhood everyone called colored town to drop off laundry at Lily Mae’s, a woman who took in washing and ironing.  There were boys running around her place with strange, smooth-sounding names like Sammy Tyrone and George Remondo.  The streets were just dirt roads, and the houses looked like they might fall down.

Martin Luther King was despised in my town.  He was called a “black agitator” and much worse.  The newspapers ran stories about integration happening somewhere else, but people in Lakeland swore it would never happen there. 

My grandmother, Mrs. Robert E. Lee Woodell, ran a boarding house on the main street of downtown Lakeland.  Elderly Yankees came down for the winter and sat on her long front porch in cane-back rockers.  I spent a fair amount of time over there being doted on by my grandmother.  Once in awhile a car full of people from colored town would come down that street.  In my mind’s eye, the car is always old.  The shocks are busted.  The people in the car are laughing and joking.  And then my grandmother says something like, “just look at those niggers, riding down South Florida Avenue just as big as you please.”  She used that word often, scattering it as casually as the flour she used to batter the chicken for frying.

Some of this language started to come home with me.  My mother washed my mouth out with soap.  The rules on race were confusing to a child.  I felt constantly on the verge of violating them without knowing it.  I recall being scolded for taking a drink from the wrong water fountain at the grocery store.  There were separate waiting rooms at the pediatrician’s office.  Lots of opportunities to be in the wrong place, be with the wrong people, say the wrong thing.  But eventually I learned the rules. 

When my family moved away from Lakeland and I went away to college, I unlearned those old rules.  And I assumed that the rest of my family had too.  I invited an African exchange student to come home with me for the Thanksgiving holiday break.  When I told my father, he said that couldn’t happen.  I expressed surprise.  He expressed surprise that I was surprised.

When I sat down with Frank Nelson to start planning this worship service, I didn’t expect this early history to come up.  The discussion progressed nicely enough.  We had a useful exchange of ideas about the worship theme, how a church should engage racial issues, and the background of the Beloved Community group in this church.  But I found myself feeling ill at ease and realized the feeling was connected to these old stories.  They were sitting there between Frank and me.  I couldn’t be myself. 

We all have personal stories about race.  They sit inside the overarching racial stories of community, culture, and country.  These larger stories are powerful.  We live our lives out of them.  Over time, they get so powerful that they seem to be telling and shaping us more than we are telling and shaping them.  Here in the floating island of liberal paradise called Multnomah County, it may look like there are no such overarching racial stories, or only very harmless ones.  But that isn’t true. 

In explaining the large migration to Oregon, the history books—including the ones given to our schoolchildren to read—generally have pointed to the federal government’s offer of free homestead land to “every adult American who moved to Oregon.”  But those statements are just plain wrong.  Under the new land grant law, African-Americans were ineligible for such land—something the textbooks have omitted.  Oregon’s delegate to Congress argued for this exclusion for the express purpose of discouraging African-Americans from migrating to Oregon.  From its very inception, the economic structure of Oregon was one that gave free land to one group and denied it to others.  Land was the foundation for accumulating wealth, and in turn, political power, education, and a broad range of other benefits that white settlers could bequeath to their children, to their children’s children, and even further.

Overt hostility to African-Americans was expressed in laws excluding them from Oregon.  Polite advocates of such laws called them “a troublesome class of people.”  The newspapers printed things about them that I can’t bring myself to say in church.  In a popular referendum in 1857, these laws were included in the state’s first constitution by an 8 to 1 margin.   Oregon is the only free state admitted to the Union with a racial exclusionary clause in its constitution.  Exclusionary laws remained on the books here until 1926.  Even in the popular referendum of that year, over a third of the voters voted against repealing these laws.

African-Americans came to Portland by the tens of thousands to work in the shipyards during World War II.  A housing development sprang up in Vanport to handle the influx of shipyard workers.  40,000 people were housed on 648 acres.  648 acres—almost exactly the size of those parcels of land given away to white settlers arriving here from Missouri.

When World War II ended, the newly arrived African-Americans had no work.  The business community in Portland was alarmed at the prospect of a large and restive population of unemployed African-Americans.  They called the Urban League in New York and asked for help.  The organization responded by sending Bill Berry, an African-American social worker, to Portland.  When he got here, the local leadership asked him what he thought it would cost to send the city’s thousands of unemployed African-Americans back where they came from.  The “troublesome class of people” who had become temporarily desirable as a solution to Portland’s wartime labor shortage had gone back to being “troublesome” again. 

Berry was stunned.  Stunned by the reverberating echo of that pre-statehood story, which taught this lesson:  the way to deal with race is to exclude, deport, make invisible.  Erase.  He refused to participate in such a plan, but offered to stay and work with them to develop ways to create jobs and integrate the laid-off workers into the local community.  After much hand-wringing, the local leaders agreed, and a Portland chapter of the Urban League was opened.

Race relations did improve, sometimes through dramatic accidents.  When the Columbia River overflowed its banks at Vanport on Memorial Day in 1948, thousands of African-Americans were left homeless.  Many Portlanders ignored their plight.  There were others, though, who were moved to great compassion and reached out to many families.  Progress was made, but the effects of the old toxic story of African-American inferiority are still felt in Oregon today.  Portland has the lowest percentage of African-Americans of any large American city except Phoenix, Arizona and San Jose, California.

Historically, the experience of the handful of African-Americans living in Oregon has been one of invisibility.  Forgotten in this invisibility are inspirational stories of individual heroism.  Like the story of Beatrice Morrow Cannady, who became the first African-American woman admitted to the Oregon State Bar Association in 1922.  She performed as a solo vocalist at her law school graduation.  But when the formalities ended and preparations were made for celebration, socializing, and dancing, she and her family were asked to leave in order to “avoid any embarrassment.”  What was it like to be a black woman and embark on a career of civil rights advocacy in 1922—the year when 12 of Multnomah County’s thirteen seats in the state legislature were won by candidates supported by the Ku Klux Klan? 

And what was it like to be a black settler who came here from Missouri to escape racial prejudice, spending the winter of 1844 near The Dalles tending livestock?  Learning of the exclusionary law passed that year in Oregon, this black settler moved north of the Columbia River to what is now Tumwater, Washington, where such laws had no force.  He gained a reputation for great kindness and generosity.  He managed his crops well and found himself with a large store of grain during a particularly bad wheat shortage.  When offered an unheard of price for his entire crop, he refused, saying he would donate it to white neighbors whose crops failed.  History does have a sense of humor.  The black settler’s name was Bush.  George Bush.  Actually, George W. Bush.

The old racial myths do dwell in us still; but is that a sufficient reason for us to dwell on them in church today?  What spiritual purpose does that serve?  Racism is spiritually wounding to both the perpetrator and the victim.  Stories have the power to wound and to heal, because lies always wound and truth always heals.  The racist stories out of which we have lived for generations are false and wounding to all of us.  Telling the truth about ourselves, even painful truth, is a healing form of self-love. 

The new chapters we need to write in our individual and collective stories about race can’t start on a blank page.  They have to be connected to the old chapters.  Otherwise, the story doesn’t hang together, and we can’t live out of it.  At the same time, our story has to be told in the voice of who we are now.  For everyone here this morning, it won’t do for the new chapters we write about race to be mere secular tales of laws and rights.  Instead they must be a religious story of wounds and healing, love and truth-telling, of moving toward wholeness.  And because we are Unitarian Universalists, our religious stories cannot villainize.  There can be no devil characters to whom convenient assignments of blame are made.

Our religious values also tell us that these stories cannot have a theme of guilt.  Guilt is self-indulgent, rather than self-loving.  It substitutes punishment for taking responsibility.  We can feel punished for a while and then move on.  Guilt is a cheap substitute for responsibility in one sense, because actually taking responsibility for the truth can be very difficult.  In the long run, though, it’s not cheap at all, but rather is horribly costly.  Guilt does not heal, and the pattern of wounding continues. 

It is particularly hard to try to take responsibility for the parts of the truth that appear to be not of our own making.  Listening to the community history of racism in Oregon, our minds want to say, “but I did not banish black people, I did not demonize, I did not discriminate.”  We reach for consoling aphorisms, like “the sins of the fathers should not be visited on the sons.”  But in fact the sins and the wounds of the fathers and mothers are always visited on their sons and daughters.  Mirror-image legacies of privilege and oppression have been bequeathed to the current generations of whites and blacks.  Whites are both privileged and wounded by the old story.  We cannot pick and choose.  We must accept all of it as fully ours.

We need some shining examples to meet this challenge.  We have one in the person of Martin Luther King.  Forty years ago yesterday, President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965.  Forty years ago next Thursday, the neighborhood in Los Angeles called Watts exploded in riots.  Thirty-four people were killed, mostly African-Americans.  Martin Luther King went there to help restore peace. When he spoke in Los Angeles, he was laughed at by the people of Watts.  He was told to get out.  He was told that the Voting Rights Act meant nothing to these despairing people, trapped in an urban ghetto.

Dr. King was transformed by his trip to Watts.  He saw how he had unconsciously projected the story of his own comfortable middle class upbringing in Atlanta onto African-Americans in the Northern urban ghettos.  Imagine how these realizations must have felt to him.  A few months later he moved his work to Chicago and rented a slum apartment there to live in.  For the remaining two years of his life, his whole orientation shifted toward the deadly combination of racism, militarism, and economic oppression in our society.  He told the truth about the old stories out of which he had lived and took responsibility for that truth.

If we take on the challenge of writing new chapters in the story of race in our lives, what might they look like?  I hope the first ones will be as simple as truth-telling and friendship on a one-to-one basis—with each other here and with African-Americans  in the larger community we already share.  We are each others’ co-authors.  There will be no recovery of authorship until we recognize that we are all living out of one overarching story, however different our individual parts of it may be.

For me, my conversations with Frank to prepare for worship this morning represent a beginning of this kind of truth-telling and friendship.  After that first meeting, I went back to Frank and started to open up about my discomfort, my fear of saying the wrong thing, my bad feelings about my own personal history.  Some of the heaviness of that feeling of unease started to dissipate.

Darrell Millner, a professor of Black Studies at PSU, singles out as most important those events in our community life that provide whites with opportunities for self-examination on matters of race.  These opportunities almost always take the form of actually getting to know people who have been an abstraction in our lives.  When people get to know each other, amazing things can happen.  As in the story of that black settler with the famous name.  When Washington was organized into a separate territory in 1853, George W. Bush’s white neighbors didn’t forget his generosity with his wheat crop.  He was legally excluded from owning the land he had farmed since 1845, but they successfully petitioned the U.S. Congress for an exception.

I don’t know whether or when our new chapters will make our church more multicultural.  I think if we want to diversify our church, we first have to diversify our lives, which will require painfully honest communication about race and some basic changes in our patterns of daily living.  When these things happen, some of the people we know well and count as friends, and who happen to be African-Americans, may come here.  If they do, we can be welcoming without unease or pretense, expressing our enthusiasm for having them here in the same way we do with anyone else—not because they represent a solution to what we perceive as our diversity problem, but because we are passionate about the saving message of our religion, because we are on an exciting spiritual journey and want to share it.  And because we are eager for what they can contribute.

In the back of our church history book, I found a short statement used to welcome new members from 1963 to 1966.  It reads:  “You have, by inscribing your names in the book of members of the church, joined an increased company of men and women who have looked upon this church as their spiritual home.  They have sought, as you should seek, . . . to make of the church a Beloved Community.”  The words “beloved community” in that statement are capitalized.  I like to think that someone got the idea to include those words from Martin Luther King.  I like to think about the possibility of bringing those words back.  It is our story to write.  It is within our power to repeal or leave intact the invisible love laws that say who shall love whom and how much.  It is for us to say who we mean when we say “we.”  AMEN.

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Copyright 2005, Preston Moore.  All rights reserved.