A sermon by Dave Weissbard

delivered at

The Unitarian Universalist Church

Rockford, Illinois

January 19, 2005

My eyes have seen greatness in the flesh. My ears have heard unsurpassed eloquence and prophecy. My body has resonated to the presence of charisma in the highest degree.

In 1966, at the end of my first year in the ministry, I attended the UUA’s General Assembly in Hollywood, Florida where we were privileged to hear Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. deliver a version of his Rip vanWinkle address. Dr. King warned of the danger of the churches sleeping through a revolution, as Rip did, and urged us to become “creatively maladjusted.” It was an experience that I have never forgotten.

In preparation for this sermon I googled Dr, King and I found myself in the martinlutherking.org website. That shows that you never know what you will find on the internet. Martinlutherking.org is a scurrilous, racist compilation of the problematic elements of Dr. King’s life. It stresses Dr. King’s nonlegal name change, his plagiarism, his ties to Communist influences, and his voracious sexual appetite. It must be acknowledged that each of those attacks is, however, based on fact. The conclusions drawn from those facts on that website are, however, very different from the conclusions most, if not all, of us draw from them in context of the whole life of the man.

Martin Luther King, Jr. was not a saint, if by saint we mean a paragon of virtue, one who lived a life of ascetic moral purity. King was larger than life, both in his accomplishments and in his complexity. It is my belief, and I believe it will be the judgement of history, that Dr. King’s accomplishments far outweighed his failings, but we must never confuse him with a deity.

The value of remaining aware of Dr. King’s flaws is that doing so should help us remember that the celebration tomorrow is not a celebration of one man so much as a celebration of a movement. Martin Luther King was not the civil rights movement – he was its symbol, its drum major, as he put it. The movement did not begin with him nor did it end with his tragic assassination 37 years ago. As he was its symbol in life, so is the celebration of his birth a celebration of the movement – of all the people who devoted their lives, and in many cases sacrificed them, in pursuit of what James Weldon Johnson referred to as “the harmonies of liberty” for all people.

There was a revolution in human values during what we refer to as the “civil rights era,” but not only are the challenges it addressed unfinished, but we have indeed lost ground in recent years. “The harmonies of liberty” began fading during the Clinton Administration, and have been even more obscured during the Bush administration. We have as new chair of the US Civil Rights Commission, Gerald A. Reynolds, an African American attorney who brags, “I just assume somewhere in my life some knucklehead has looked at me and my brown self and said that they have given me less or denied me an opportunity, but the bottom line is, and my wife will attest to this, I am so insensitive that I probably didn't notice." He is insistent that racial discrimination is not responsible for disproportionate unemployment, wage discrimination, higher disease rates, lower life expectancy, or poor education of African Americans. As he sees it, there are no systemic problems: it is their own failure to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.

A report issued at this time last year by an organization called United for a Fair Economy, summarizes, using US Census figures, what has happened to the realities of equality during the last three decades:

● Black unemployment is 10.8% -- more than double the white rate. The gap was greater in 2003 than in 1972, and those figures do not include those who have given up and stopped looking for a job.

● In 1968, the typical black family had 60% as much income as a white family, but only 58% as much in 2002.

● Black infants are nearly 2 ½ times as likely as white infants to die before age one - a greater gap than in 1970.

● African Americans had 55 cents for every dollar of white per capita income, in 1968 and it had improved by all of 2 cents in 2001. At that rate of improvement, it would take 581 years to reach equality.

● White home ownership increased by 10% from 1970, from 65% to 75%, but Black home ownership increased only 6% - from 42 to 48%.

● The percentage of black families in poverty decreased from 35% to 24%, but at that rate of improvement, it is estimated that it would take 150 years to achieve parity with whites.

● It is estimated that 1 in 3 black males born in 2001 will spend time in prison - that is 2 ½ times as many as those who were born in 1974, and five times greater than the percentage of white males.

How are we to explain such gaps? Is it, as the racists insist and have insisted right along, that Americans of African descent are indeed intellectually and morally inferior to those who are of European descent? The problem with that assertion is that there are no facts to back it up. Psychologists and anthropologists have found no reliable correlation between skin color and intelligence or morality, only with success in this culture.

It is also true that most of the overt legal discrimination between blacks and whites has been ended without much corresponding progress.

The other explanation, offered by Randall Robinson, author of The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks, and by others, is that there are lingering effects of slavery and segregation which we choose to ignore.

It is, in part due to what Robinson calls “conditioned expectation.” Even though we do not live in the kind of fixed society in which each generation replicated the station of the past, it is amazing how effectively low expectations, hopelessness is communicated, and conversely how expectations of high achievement and privilege are communicated.

But there is something more to which Robinson points. Part of our sense of ourselves comes from our rootedness in a family that spans the generations, or at least a culture, for those who don’t have access to family history. Imagine what it would be like if the stories about alien capture of humans were true, and we could be scooped up and taken against our will to another planet, and were forced into slavery, doing the work that was deemed beneath our captors. What if we were bred like cattle and the women among us were used freely for the sexual pleasure of the captors and our families were broken up at the whim of our captors? And what if this went on for centuries? And what if we were declared free, but were denied real opportunities to become a part of the dominant culture and its economy? What if we were promised “40 acres and a mule” and saw neither?

It is not impossible for African Americans to break through the heritage of slavery and segregation – look at Oprah and Bill Cosby and Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice and Clarence Thomas and Michael Jordan – no one can deny that some can break through, but that does not eliminate the reality of the invisible chains that so many wear.

Solving these problems, the first thing is to see them I mean to really see them. That is the hard part. Mustering the will to solve them is difficult, but less so. Least difficult is the business of designing the mechanics of solutions. All of us look. Few of us see. Or want to see, trained lovingly as we are in the more genteel, commonplace, everyday bigotries. So pain-free is our indulgence of the customary blindness, not knowing that the real problem is not unlike that of the habitual smoker who felt no pain, saw no problem, and of course, had not the least intention of killing himself. And dead he got to be, though it hadn’t seemed to deter his sightless fellow smokers. Oh, they looked at him dying but they couldn’t see the smoke killing him or them.

It’s like the clearly established pattern of racial discrimination in the Rockford schools that so many good people could not see for such a long time – but we’ll get back to that.

It is Robinson’s belief that reparations are in order. Much of the wealth of this society was built on the backs of unpaid slaves and on resources stolen from Native Americans. The Germans have paid reparations to Israel and to Jews for what was done to them during World War II. The US government has paid reparations to Japanese Americans for what we did to them in World War II. The continuing impact of slavery on African Americans is no less deserving of some compensation.

Robinson is not just talking about money – although that is a part of it. He stresses the process that would lead to reparations – the acknowledgment, the validation. Part of his point is that it is important for Black Americans to fight for them because they are due them. That struggle itself would be liberating. He says:

We would show ourselves to be responding as any normal people would to victimization were we to assert collectively in our demands for restitution that, for 246 years and with the complicity of the United States government, hundreds of millions of black people endured unimaginable cruelties . . . Left behind to gasp for self-regard in the vicious psychological wake of slavery are history’s orphans played by the brave black shells of their ancient forebears, people so badly damaged that they cannot see the damage, or how their government may have been partly, if not largely, responsible for the disabling injury that by now has come to seem normal and unattributable.

Until America’s white ruling class accepts the fact that the book never closes on massive unredressed social wrongs, America can have no future as one people.

Robinson envisions reparations that might be in the form of educational services that would provide a boost. Rather than ghetto schools being the least equipped and staffed as they so often are, they could through a reparation fund be the best! Every African American who qualified would be entitled to a free college education. The ultimate beneficiary of such a program, would, of course, be our society because people who have hope, people whose potential is affirmed, people who are equipped to succeed, are far more likely to succeed.

There is, of course, a certain idealistic dimension to all this. It is a reality that the present disparity would not have been allowed to continue as it has if it did not serve some purpose. As many social critics have pointed out, the existence of a lower class of which the middle class is afraid, serves to help protect the upper class from challenges to their privilege.

But there is a trap there. To acknowledge that powerful forces want to maintain the status quo and to accept that they have the power to do so would mean that we might as well stop trying to bring about change. Where would we be today if Martin Luther King had accepted the inevitability of change? While the Civil Rights revolution did not bring about the “harmonies of liberty” to which we aspire, things are not as they were. In the words of an anonymous black preacher:

John Philpot Curran warned us that “eternal vigilance” is the condition upon which we have liberty, and if we stop being vigilant “servitude is at once the consequence of [our] crime and the punishment of [our] guilt.”

In both of the last two presidential elections, state officials have not been held responsible for blatantly racial discrimination in access to voting. If this trend continues, we will have observers from outside countries coming to monitor our polls – as if we would permit that.

The “harmonies of liberty” are not just something that Martin Luther King achieved for us and gave us the right to bask in. As a drum major, he showed us the way, but we have become lost in the decades since his murder. The celebration of his birth provides an opportunity for us to rededicate ourselves to lifting our voices to sing out the harmonies of liberty.

Each year, I find that I am recharged by attending the community celebration of Dr. King’s birthday sponsored by the black Ministers’ Fellowship which were held at Pilgrim Baptist Church. This year I am going to be switching to the alternative daytime observance which is being held at Midway theatre, beginning at 1:00. The featured speaker is going to be Senator Barack Obama. Many of you have attended these services in the past, and I hope that more will do so tomorrow. These events are an opportunity for us to be clear that justice is not just a concern for those who have the least, but that we recognize and affirm our oneness in the struggle for liberty: their oppression oppresses us; the injustices they experience, affect us; our liberty requires their liberty.

The national shame of racism and its aftermath is serious and it needs our attention, but I want to bring this down also to a very practical level in terms of what it is possible for us to accomplish. We are all aware that the Rockford Schools were convicted in court of a sophisticated pattern of racial discrimination. As a result, our schools underwent a period of administrative chaos which made nothing better for anyone, and increased our debt. There are problems in public schools across America, and some of our problems are related to wider cultural issues, but we know for sure that it was impossible for our schools to operate under the supervision of a court appointed master and that master’s staff while also under the supervision of our own administrators. The education of all our children suffered. There were some good ideas that emerged during that period, but few of them worked as they had been expected to. One of them was the concept of magnet schools that would attract voluntary mixing of white and black kids. Some decrepit schools were closed and for the first time in a long time, new schools were built on the west side.

The Montessori Magnet was the most successful, and it is fully integrated, has a long waiting list, and is producing educational excellence. A number of our children have attended or are attending there.

One of the marked failures is one about which I know more than I wish I did. A new building was built and talented teachers were recruited for the Ellis Arts Academy, a kindergarten through eighth grade school at the corner of West State and Central Avenue. It never really became an arts academy, in spite of its name. It is, in truth, a neighborhood school in Rockford’s ghetto with more than 70% minority students. Most of the families that were attracted by the facilities and the vision gave up before long. Ellis has not, since it opened, had an effective administration. As a result, discipline has been almost non-existent. In spite of a committed teaching staff, test scores have been abysmal because an excessive amount of teacher time and energy has gone into just trying to maintain order when there was no authority that would support them.

Joann Shaheen, whom many of you know is a gifted educator, devoted considerable effort to Ellis as a volunteer, but found she could make no difference in the midst of the chaos and withdrew.

And then my wife, Karen, was offered a position as one of the theatre teachers at Ellis. Joanne tried to warn us, but Karen needed the job and we never imagined that the situation could be as dire as it has been. There are those who blame the situation on the kids and on their families, but the fact is that the Lewis Lemon Global Studies Academy has largely the same population and is one of the most successful schools in the community with twice the average test scores as Ellis. You cannot blame the victims.

The point of this is that there is actually some good news and a challenge. Dr. Thompson, the new superintendent, recognized the necessity of a drastic change at Ellis and just before Christmas he appointed a new principal, Dr. Patrick Hardy. In days, there was a dramatic improvement in teacher morale and in the implementation of the district’s discipline policy. A principal makes a tremendous difference! The teachers almost get into wrestling matches to prove who is most thrilled with the changes at the school. An atmosphere of failure has been replaced with the beginning of a “can do” confidence.

This is background to my emerging point. A principal and a talented staff can do only so much to turn a school around. Kids whom we have failed for several years cannot simply bounce back as quickly as teacher morale has. They have learning deficits to overcome before they can succeed.

Many years ago, at Evelyn Palm’s urging, this church adopted Lathrop School. That school had excellent principals and many talented teachers, but they needed help. We sent a number of volunteers to work with teachers to give individual attention to students. After a couple of years, and a change in principals with a corresponding change in atmosphere, that relationship fizzled out in spite of many successes.

I want to suggest to you that it is time for us to try again. We have an enormous amount of talent in this congregation, and we have people who have some time they could devote to making the world a better place by attacking the roots of racism.

Dr. Hardy is determined to turn Ellis around, and that is more of a challenge than he could even imagine at first, but he still believes it is doable, given the talented staff he has to work with. But more is needed. And that’s where we come in.

I am appalled by the fraud that has been perpetrated in the name of the citizens of Rockford. We have pretended at Ellis to be educating kids to whom we have been presenting a grossly inferior product. I want to try to undo some of the harm that has been done, and so I am going to volunteer some of my time to do what I can. The particular need, according to Dr. Hardy, is for help in the after school tutoring program, although there may be some during-school help used also. Dr. Hardy assures me that there will be strong staff support for any volunteers. I am asking if some of you will join me at Ellis to support its rebirth. I can make no promises about how successful we will be, but I can tell you how we will fail if we do not try. If it were not to work out, at least we would have tried. But I believe the odds are good. Will you join me in trying?

I have not despaired of the future. I believe firmly that we can [emerge from the bleak and desolate midnight of man’s inhumanity to man, into the bright and glittering daybreak of freedom and justice.] I know that there are still difficult days ahead. And they are days of glorious opportunity. Our goal for America is freedom. Abused and scorned though we may be, our destiny is still tied up with America’s . . . We can sing “We Shall Overcome” because somehow we know the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. . . . With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. We will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood and speed up the day when all God’s children all over our nation and the world will be able to walk on the earth as brothers and sisters, and that we can sing the words of the old Negro spiritual – “Free at last, free at last, Thank God Almighty we are free at last.”