Advertisement
At the top of a bright flight of stairs, just outside of the chapel of the Unitarian Universalist Association’s headquarters in Boston, I am greeted by bas relief plaques of three faces: Jimmie Lee Jackson, Rev. James Reeb, and Viola Liuzzo, martyrs of the 1965 Selma, Alabama, voting rights campaign. Seeing that memorial in our headquarters, I am reminded of the UUA Board’s accountability to larger work, partnership, and liberation.
You know the story: Peaceful protestor Jackson’s beating and killing by state troopers inspired the Selma march; white supremacists killed UU minister Reeb during the historic demonstration; and the Klu Klux Klan murdered UU Liuzzo while she helped shuttle marchers when it was over.
Like many of you, I have long heard stories about our board, both good and bad, but perhaps the most dramatic involves that March on Selma, Alabama, in 1965 and our UU presence there. The board was scheduled to meet that week, the story goes, but when the call went out from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the board decided to suspend the meeting so that any who was able could answer that call to join the historic march. All told, about 500 UUs went to Selma and Montgomery to participate in the civil rights campaign.
I am one of the newest members of the UUA Board of Trustees. I have such love for our Unitarian Universalist faith and congregations and our work in the world that it is a huge honor to be able to serve in this way.
So, when the present-day Board of Trustees met in Boston in October for our only in-person meeting this year, and the No Kings marches were subsequently scheduled for the Saturday we were together, it was a given that we would join the march.
Wrapping our meetings up early and checking out of our hotels, a group of UUA leaders, including board members and our Executive Leadership Team—Rev. Dr. Sofía Betancourt, Carey McDonald, and Rev. Ashley Horan—went together to meet up with other Unitarian Universalists near the Boston Common and march together. Yellow Side With Love T-shirts made a splash in the crowd.
At the same time, I was rushing to Providence, Rhode Island, about an hour to the south, to join First Unitarian Church of Providence at that city’s march. Rev. Liz Lerner Maclay, senior minister, has been a friend since seminary and is the godmother to my daughter. She and her congregation were in the middle of a weekend working with David Smith, gifted musician and executive director of Worship at All Souls Church in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
I had already planned to join them in Providence for the workshop that day, but with what else had come up, and armed with the last Side With Love stole the UUA bookstore had for sale, I met Maclay at the doors of her church to march with her congregation. They, too, had changed their plans to include showing up at the No Kings event.
We met the crowd who’d gathered in Providence—some estimates had that crowd at above 30,000—as they were rounding their march along Station Park and back towards the steps of the Rhode Island State House. Greeting the crowd dressed in our clerical gear, Rev. Maclay and I had full exposure to all the signs and costumes of regents, and dancing inflatable frog outfits (a nod to our Portland, Oregon, comrades), and a chance to cheer everyone who passed us.
As clergy, I hope that our presence said to those who saw us that our Unitarian Universalist faith sees what is happening in our nation as a moral issue. Because we do. We see it as we did sixty years ago when our Board of Trustees halted what they were doing to join the march from Montgomery to Selma. The way we have, again and again as a religious tradition, seen morality needing to play out in the streets and spill onto the steps of the capitol buildings of our cities and the capital city of our nation. The photos of Unitarian Universalists across the country, including my parents in their 80s in New York City, dancing, singing, marching, chanting, many with their UU shirts and hats and posters, is heartening.
We tell stories, but we also live into them in each era. The stories that say that wherever we are, whatever else we had planned, when there is work to be done to shape the institutions that shape lives, and when the narrative of who we are together, collectively, as a nation is at stake, we join the march.
Because sometimes this is the work. And everything else can wait.