A Sermon by the Reverend Ellen Rowse Spero
First Parish Unitarian Universalist Church,
Chelmsford, Massachusetts
February 19, 2006
Copyright 2006, Ellen Rowse Spero. All rights reserved.
When we left Rev. Egbert Ethelred Brown two weeks ago, he had succeeded and failed. He had succeeded in being the first black man to be ordained as Unitarian minister. He had failed to establish a Unitarian congregation in his native Jamaica. There were several reasons. The first and greatest was the racism of the leadership of the American Unitarian Association. Another was Rev. Brown’s tenacity and refusal to listen to what he did not want to hear. One thing I learned early in ministry is that our greatest strength is also our greatest weakness. In the case of an extraordinary minister like Rev. Brown, his tenacity was the source of his heroism and his tragic flaw.
Having accepted the fact that he would not get the necessary financial and moral support, either from the AUA or from his own Jamaican community, to establish a Unitarian congregation, Rev. Brown did not give up, as so many hoped he would. Instead, he sold everything and moved his family to Harlem, to try to establish a black Unitarian church there.
The year was 1920. It was a remarkable time to come to Harlem. The Harlem Renaissance was just under way bringing Black artists, writers, and musicians into the spotlight. New political ideas of socialism and Black empowerment were developing. Rev. Brown founded the Harlem Community Church, on March 7, 1920 in this context. He developed a close relationship with the Rev. John Haynes Holmes, a prominent Unitarian minister, social activist and pacifist in New York City. Holmes would do much to try to support Brown financially and politically to build and sustain his church.
However, Brown found himself up against even more difficult racial hurdles than in Jamaica. Eliot and Cornish continued to prevent any real support from the AUA. And unlike in Jamaica, where Brown could find viable employment that met his trained skills, racism in America prevented him from attaining any meaningful employment. Although he was an accountant, he could only find work as an elevator operator, which could not provide adequately at all for his family. Throughout the 1920’s and 30’s, Brown constantly requested the AUA for financial support. When the AUA refused, Brown appealed directly to his colleagues and other Unitarian congregations. Eliot and Cornish went through the roof. They could not understand how the racial dynamics prevented Brown from supporting himself in any real way. This resulted in his being removed, without his knowledge, from fellowship as a Unitarian minister. When he did find out, he protested to the Fellowship Committee that he had not been allowed to present his side of the story. Only upon a threat of a lawsuit through the ACLU did the Committee reinstate Brown. It was also during this time that Brown’s dream showed its cost to his family. His wife, Ella, distraught over their constant poverty and disappointments of his career, had a nervous breakdown in 1928. His second son was committed to an asylum because of his alcoholism. And in 1929, his eldest son committed suicide. But even as he was caring for his wife and grieving for his sons, Brown refused to give up his dream and continued to commit the majority of his time and resources, emotional and financial, to his congregation.
Brown’s fortunes took a more positive turn in 1937 when Eliot and Cornish’s leadership came to an end and more thoughtful and supportive leaders, like Frederick May Eliot and Dale DeWitt came into the AUA. Brown began to receive the financial and moral support that he needed with consistency. Finally, he was able to give his whole to his church. The Harlem congregation was showing signs of viability. For several years, Brown ran forums rather than the traditional worship services, bringing in dynamic speakers that attracted as many 300 listeners on a Sunday evening. Rev. Brown recognized that the Black community needed to gain political power if it were to experience any kind of significant advancement in their civil rights. He became very involved in socialism and worked for the Socialist party magazine. He advocated for members of his church to create cooperative business enterprises to develop an economic independence that would benefit all. He offered his pulpit as a place for political and civil rights leaders and thinkers to speak. He began a building fund. And he became a popular speaker in his own right, amongst his black and Unitarian colleagues.
As described in the readings by Brown and Morrison-Reed, Rev. Brown was trying to straddle to worlds with his ministry. Brown wanted to integrate the best of what he saw in his two traditions: the spiritual and emotional depth of the black religious tradition with the intellectualism of Unitarianism. Freedom is a central concept in both black and Unitarian theology. However, because of the very different social, economic, and political experiences of these two groups, freedom had and still has a very different meaning. In Unitariansim, growing out as it did from the social and intellectual circles of Boston, intellectual freedom of the individual was the most important: freedom of belief, freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of conscience. In the black religious tradition, growing out of the experiences of slavery and racial oppression, freedom is both an individual and a communal concept. It is not just the mind, but the body, the soul. It is also freedom of community, for a whole people to be a people, seeking freedom from the laws, institutions, and social mores that classified them as a non-people. Brown was a visionary in that he saw how these two different ways of understanding freedom, the individual and the corporate, could complement one another, empowering both.
Unfortunately, he did not know how to make this happen. Even when he had overcome many of the racial and economic hurdles of the AUA and was finally able to give his all to his congregation, he kept tinkering with the worship service and the structure of the life of the congregation. One year, he would go the political-intellectual route, sacrificing the music, prayer, and other emotive practices of his tradition. The next year, he would return to the more traditional services, forsaking the intellectual discourse and debate. He also had a conflict of communities within his church. Brown attracted blacks from both the African American community and from the immigrant Jamaican community. These two groups had different cultures and histories, and sometimes saw things very differently. So while he could get excellent attendance on Sunday evenings and hold rousing talks or sermons, the core group of members, willing to support the church financially and with their time and talent, never numbered more than forty. Rev. Brown was indeed a pioneer, trying to stake out new territory and a new way of doing things. But like many pioneers, he could not always get the land to produce what he wanted or needed. Furthermore, he was a pioneer with a tragic flaw. It would be his tenacity, with which he had kept his dream alive for so long, that would kill it in the end, at least for the Harlem Community Church. It had to be his vision and he could not hear the voices and visions of others.
By 1940, Rev. Brown had become a respected minister and his congregation seemed on the road to viability. The AUA saw the potential of this congregation but they also realized it needed new and younger leadership if it was going to survive. Now that Rev. Brown had reached the age of retirement, the AUA agreed to pay him a pension if he promised to step down and allow a younger minister to lead the congregation to the next level. Brown could not let go and refused to step away, even after he retired. He held on until his death in 1956. Soon after his congregation, which never got a building of its own, closed down. Morrison-Reed writes: "Ethelred Brown is a very human hero. A man torn between diverging duties and drive by self-interest, too. Within the man, beside his laudable hopes there lurked a selfish zeal, a ministerial hubris that put his family’s needs second. It was this hubris that kept him from giving the church over to younger hands that might have been able to sustain it after his death. This is the tragedy. Neither the church nor his family were foremost in Brown’s mind; foremost was his need to fill the ministerial role and to forward his cause. In a way the extent of his suffering, to which the American Unitarian Association contributed, chained him to ministry. He could not discount his entire life’s work by forsaking the cause for which he had suffered. He was trapped both by his old pain and his ever-blossoming hope." (pp. 109-110).
There is so much in Brown’s story from which to learn, not just about race and racism but also about vision, about ministry, about human endurance and frailty, about striving to embody a community of faith that truly reflects and lives its beliefs and values about our human diversity and our unity. As Unitarian Universalists, we have not historically done as well with the issues of race and racism as we have with those concerning sexuality or gender. Some of the reasons why are apparent in the story of Rev. Brown, and some have as much to do with social class as race. Are we doing better than in Brown’s time? Absolutely. We are more diverse than in Brown’s time, in our ministry and our congregations. And we elected the first black president of a majority white denomination, the Rev. Bill Sinkford. But we remain a predominantly white, middle-class religion. In a nation, where this is a shrinking population, we need to think about why.
More and more, people coming to Unitarian Universalism say that they are here for the community. If this is so, then expanding the concept of freedom beyond the individual and the intellectual to one also grounded in community and in justice is something we can learn and embrace from the black religious tradition and from the story of Rev. Brown. As both Brown and Morrison-Reed point out in the readings, religion is at its most ineffectual and its most dangerous when it is one dimensional: individualistic or denying of the individual, only for the head or only for the spirit. The more inclusive we are of the full range of human religious and spiritual experience, the more powerful and truer our faith, the more whole we become, as individuals and as a community, a people.
In the first part of this sermon, I spoke of the call of convictional community: to live as if our convictions, our hopes, our vision of a just, healed and whole world are already true, and not mere ideals waiting for us in some future time or place. Henry Hampton, another black Unitarian Universalist observes: "I am given to talking about dreams because dreaming separates us from other animals, other life forms. I have a favorite line from a play I read years ago, a Chaucerian drama. The line goes, "In dreams begins responsibility." And indeed it’s true. When you dream of something, you can begin to take it upon yourself, to make it yours, change it. But you have to dream first…You have to think of the world as you would really have it. I don’t mean wish it. I mean dream it. And sometimes I think Unitarian Universalists wish more than they dream." (Henry Hampton)
We see from the story of Rev. Brown how the convictions need to be embraced by the whole community, or the dream will be shattered. If diversity is truly a conviction, a dream of Unitarian Universalism, the story of Rev. Brown is a humbling lesson. It teaches us that diversity is not simply about including people of a different race or ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation, class or education in how we already do things. Rather it is in being willing to walk thoroughly in one another’s stories and experiences and to learn to expand our understanding and experiences because of them. True diversity is more than embracing the breadth of humanity. It is also embracing the depth, as scary as that may be. But it is by going into the depths, into "…our deepest experiences of joy and sorrow…" , to quote Rev. Brown, that we experience true healing and transformation. To paraphrase an old Unitarian hymn, may what he dreamed be ours to do.
Resources:
Mark D. Morrison-Reed. Black Pioneers in a White Denomination. Boston, MA: Skinner House Books, 1994.
Mark D. Morrison-Reed and Jacqui James. Been in the Storm So Long. Boston, MA: Skinner House Books, 1991.