James Reeb.When Uus and Justice Meet

1 Part I. Introduction: When UUs and History Meet In the summer of 2006, while I was a seminarian at Meadville Lombard Theological School in Chicago, I had the opportunity to join the recently retired Reverend Gordon Gibson, his wife Judy, and thirty fellow UU ministers and ministers-in-training, for a tour of the deep south. Gordon named it a Southern Civil Rights Tour. In the mid-1960s, Reverend Gibson’s first ministerial call was to the UU church in Jackson Mississippi. During the years he and Judy lived and worked in Mississippi, they had the opportunity to meet and work with many of the leaders of and participants in the Civil Rights Movement who had been every degree of activists, some since the 1950s. Many of these men and women had grandparents who were slaves, and parents who grew up in the post-Civil War South and the reality of Jim Crow. Every black person we met, including our bus driver Joseph, were ‘foot soldiers’ during those turbulent times. All generations of local residents marched, were arrested, were chased by the KKK, were beaten and even killed, but they never gave up trying to register at their local courthouse so they could vote. Our 8-day itinerary would take us to Nashville; then to Birmingham and the 16th Avenue Baptist Church where we attended the Sunday service with folks who were there on April 29, 1963, when the four elementary school girls were putting on their choir robes for church and were suddenly blown apart by a KKK bomb; to Marion Mississippi (the childhood home of Coretta Scott King); to Selma and the Edmund Pettis Bridge; to Montgomery (the place where Rosa Parks started a year-long bus boycott) and a tour of Martin Luther King’s Dexter Avenue Church; to Money Mississippi and the site of 12 year old Emmet Till’s brutal and hideous murder in 1955; to the Neshoba County Fairgrounds -- the heart of the KKK white supremist community where the murder of three civil rights workers inspired the movie, Mississippi Burning; to Jackson where I stood in Medgar Evers’ kitchen where, after passing through Evers’ body then the living room window, the assassin’s high-powered bullets pierced through the wall into the kitchen bouncing off the refrigerator and one finally exploding the watermelon that was setting on the kitchen counter; and then a visit to beautiful Tougaloo College founded in 1869 for 2 freed black slaves. And if all that wasn’t enough, we ended the tour in Memphis Tennessee where, as I gazed out the window of the warehouse across the street from the Lorraine Hotel, I knew I was in the exact spot Dr. King’s assassin sat waiting for him to walk out onto the hotel room balcony on the morning of April 4, 1968. Needless to say, the tour was life-changing for me because until then, I had only experienced the American Civil Rights Movement through a child’s eyes watching and listening to Walter Cronkite on the evening news. The scrapbook I put together after the tour not only has pictures, journal entries, and souvenirs, it has transcripts of the conversations we had in the churches with the foot soldiers, the youngest of whom we met were in their sixties. The packet I put together for you to take home, if you’d like, is transcripts of conversations, we had with some of the folks we met in Marion. While they were deeply involved for years in trying to get their county clerk to let them register and vote, many of them had been traveling the thirty miles or so to Selma to be part of the march to Montgomery after the killing of Jimmie Lee Jackson. Where the Civil Rights Movement and Unitarian Universalism intersect in real life, is the story of James Reeb. All my adult life, I have been an activist and if I’ve learned one thing about the struggle for justice is that you can’t give up. So every time an opportunity arises to share my story and the stories that were given to me, I take it because, from the very beginning of time, stories are how humans learn the difference between wrong and right. There are so many different ways to be an activist in the struggle for justice, that anyone who chooses to serve this greater good must start by learning the stories and then passing them on. For some, being a story-teller is being a dedicated activist. I often wonder which one of my grandchildren will want my scrapbook and who will be the story keeper and story teller after I am gone. No matter which grandchild it is, I am confident these stories, and all the ones which have not been gifted to me, will continue to inspire action in the service of all that causes life to flourish. 3 My grandchildren are already learning from me about the American Civil Rights Movement, and how all the layers of connected issues still have a vital role in the epic struggle for true justice --- and don’t let anyone tell us otherwise. Part II. Homily: When UUs and Justice Meet Excerpt (adapted) from “Uplifting the Vision: James Reeb and the Struggle for Civil Rights” by Beth Lefever James Reeb, A Unitarian Universalist minister was about as devout a Christian Presbyterian as one could ever expect to find. A biblical literalist who, while in college, would rise at 3 a.m. on a Monday morning to study rather than break the biblical injunction to rest on the sabbath. Reeb was uncompromising in his ideals, values, and beliefs until, after diligent and exhaustive thought, study and discussion with those he respected and trusted, he came to the conclusion his childhood beliefs were significantly lacking. James Reeb was a man of utmost integrity who found living outside his belief system intolerable. When that insight occurred, he realigned his values-structure and committed fully and deeply to change. This is how he became a Unitarian. What guided his intense passion to remain true to his ideals? As he explained it, he was guided by an inner light that would not let him go, and which informed all of the important decisions he made in his life. This light apparently began to shine early in Reeb, for he trod the moral high ground from boyhood, working hard to live out those values, honed and hewn through careful thought, study, discourse and debate. Perhaps it was a light reflected off his parents, both of whom also strove to live morally righteous lives. James’ father was a caring, attentive man, who worked hard to provide for his small family. James’ mother, whose first child was stillborn, was in labor when she dedicated the life of her 4 second baby to God. A devout woman, she held firmly to that ideal and was supported by Jim’s equally devout father. Mrs. Reeb devoted herself to the care and nurturing of her son who, though born healthy, fought several serious illnesses throughout his childhood. The most debilitating of these diseases was rheumatic fever, which kept young James confined to total bed rest for a very long period of time during which his mother nursed and tutored him and was his closest companion. James was doted on, in the best sense of the word, by his highly principled parents. As his biographer, Duncan Howlett, suggests, as a child who was often the center of attention, James, “… learned early both to demand it and respond successfully to it.” But this love of attention was just one among any number of characteristics and occurrences which guided and informed his life’s journey. Another was a physical anomaly which profoundly affected who he was to become. Though attractive in both appearance and temperament, he was cross-eyed as a child, and he learned early what it was like to be set apart because of physical characteristics over which one had no control. As a teenager, James underwent an operation which corrected the problem and he was grateful to feel less visually distinctive and more able to fit in. But his sensitivity and capacity for empathy were strongly shaped out of this experience. Another formative influence was the home atmosphere in which he was raised. James’ parents were thoughtful, intelligent people who highly valued both education and religion. From an early age, James embraced those values also, particularly in matters of faith. He was a very serious student. As he studied and matured, James became more staunchly literal in his interpretation of the Bible and he struggled to live according to his understanding of Biblical mandates. For example, while studying the Sermon on the Mount in college, he became quite distraught that he could not bring himself to give away the second of his two suits, believing that was what Jesus would have him do. He really needed two suits, however, because he was very involved in church, often providing pulpit supply during the time when those in the pulpit were expected to be dressed up. 5 Another of his ideals was serving the poor. Reeb fervently believed he was called by the life and message of Jesus to put his efforts into serving the disadvantaged. He began doing so in earnest after he became ordained a Presbyterian minister and then serving as a hospital chaplain in Philadelphia. There he came face to face with the meaning of poverty, and the cultural deprivation and restrictions resulting from it. There too, he first came to know African Americans.

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