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By Dr. Bruce T. Marshall
January 16, 2011
Reading:
This morning, I am drawing upon a book by Mark Morrison-Reed called
In Between: Memoir of an Integration Baby. To start, a quotation
from his earlier book, Black Pioneers in a White Denomination,
published in 1980.
“I am a black-born, Unitarian minister of the liberal faith. I am an
anomaly. This uniqueness has placed me in a dilemma. My allegiance
is split. My long and enriching experience with Unitarian
Universalism has led me to a commitment to the liberal ministry. At
the same time I am proud to be an Afro-American, and I realize my
faith is tied to that of the black community. The former presents
itself as a calling, the latter as a fate, and both are experienced
as demands. The quandary I face is twofold. First, given my chosen
vocation as a minister in a white denomination, how can I serve the
black community? And second, how can I inform the Unitarian
Universalist tradition through the black experience? It would be
simpler for me if these communities overlapped or encompassed one
another, but how is one to meet the demands of two apparently
exclusive groups? As I straddle them, I feel the need for a common
ground from which to address both.”
Sermon:
“The Beloved Community” That’s the image Martin Luther King Jr. drew
upon to guide his work. It’s a simple concept, really: the vision of
a society that affirms our shared humanity as what’s most important
about us, a society in which differences of race and class and sex
and age and ethnic heritage and sexual orientation and economic
status are less important than what we hold in common, which is that
we are all human beings making our way through the lives that have
been given to us on this earth. It seems simple, but the Beloved
Community has proven difficult to realize.
This morning I would like to tell the story of Mark Morrison-Reed
and the challenges he faced in trying to live this ideal. It’s a
story featuring both assaults on his sense of worth and dignity—but
also break-throughs and moments of triumph. I’ll say from the start
that I found In Between to be a wonderful book. It’s well written,
clear and direct, emotionally affecting and leaves us with a sense
of hope for the future. (A great book for a discussion group, by the
way.)
Mark Morrison-Reed is now retired from active service to a
congregation. He is married to Donna Morrison-Reed, also a UU
minister. The two of them were co-ministers of the First
Universalist Church of Rochester, New York and then of the First
Unitarian Congregation of Toronto. They have two grown children and
live in Toronto. Mark is a most gracious and open person, qualities
that shine through his writing. I have known him just a little
during my time the ministry. We are about the same age, and he and
Donna followed my uncle who previously was minister at the Rochester
Universalist church.
About a year ago I happened to see Mark walking in my direction on a
street in Washington near All Souls Church. I recognized him—with
the dreadlocks he wears today, he’s hard to miss—but I didn’t expect
him to recognize me. It had been, after all, 15 or 20 years since we
had any contact. But as we approached each other, he looked at me,
said, “Do I know you?” and then he broke into a smile of
recognition. We had a “catching up” kind of conversation, and it
struck me that he seemed at peace—more so than most of us, more than
he had been in earlier years.
● ● ●
When Mark Reed was born in a Chicago hospital in 1949, his father
was barred from the waiting room because of his race. Mark thus
began life in another era, and as he grew up and developed into
maturity, his own story played against a background of larger
societal change.
There was an odd twist at the beginning of Mark’s life. He wrote,
“My arrival (had been) almost normal: anxious parents appearing at
the hospital too early, a long labor, a midnight delivery. The
anomaly went unnoticed until I was 21. I stood, stunned, staring at
my own birth certificate at the counter in the Cook County Bureau of
Vital statistics. Then I laughed....For there it was on the shiny,
officially embossed photostat:
“Mark Douglas Reed—Born: June 16, 1949
Mother: Selina E. Reed—Race: white.
Father: George W. Reed, Jr.—Race: white.”
Mark speculated that his mother with fair complexion and wavy dark
hair—a reflection of her mixed heritage—might have been mistaken for
being Caucasian. But not his father, who he described as teak brown.
And the baby was unmistakably brown-skinned. So how could it have
happened? Well, at the time, the hospital was whites only. Since his
father was banned from the waiting room, nobody saw him. If the baby
was born at this whites-only hospital, then he was, by definition,
white.
This complicated racial heritage is a theme of Mark’s life and it
extends back long before his birth. In the year 1684 at age 14,
Thomas Corker—of English birth—was sent to the coast of Sierra
Leone. There he took an African wife—Senora Doll—who was probably of
mixed blood, since Portuguese traders had begun intermarrying in the
region two centuries earlier. The couple had three children, and
Thomas Corker eventually became governor of one of its territories.
When he and his family returned to England in 1700, he was a wealthy
man.
The oldest son of Thomas Corker and Senora Doll stayed in the region
of Sierra Leone and ruled as king of one of the islands off the
African coast. Their daughter Kate married an English seaman named
William Clevland who had arrived in the region as a mate on a slave
ship. With his new wife, William Clevland set off to make his own
fortune and entered the slave trade. They bore a son, John Clevland,
who was educated in England but returned to Africa when his father
died. In 1764, John Clevland sent his five-year-old daughter,
Catherine to America, traveling on a slave ship with her Aunt. They
landed in Charleston, hub of the North American slave trade.
Eighty years had transpired between Thomas Corker’s arrival in
Africa and Catherine Clevland’s departure to America. During that
time some 70,000 slaves had been transported out of Sierra Leone.
Catherine Clevland stayed in America and inherited a considerable
family fortune including a 750 acre plantation, a variety of farm
animals and 5 slaves. Catherine Clevland was Mark’s mother’s
great-great-great-great-grandmother.
This family became quite successful in America. In Mark’s time, a
family reunion would include a judge, an ambassador, a brokerage
house vice president, and the medical director of an insurance
company. Education, personal responsibility, and family were highly
valued, but the prosperity that enabled these values to develop was
based in part on wealth that had been generated in the slave trade.
Some members of the family had been free blacks in South Carolina
and had themselves owned slaves. As Mark put it, “Slavery served us
well.”
Mark’s father met the woman who was to be his wife and Mark’s mother
at Howard University in 1942. His father earned a graduate degree in
chemistry while his mother received a masters in social work. Mark’s
father became involved in research, moved to Columbia University and
then to Chicago where he participated in development of the atomic
bomb. Later, he earned his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and
entered a life devoted to scientific research, often the only
African American among the people with whom he worked.
So the young Mark Reed inherited a complicated family history. His
ethnic heritage was mixed with some African blood, some English,
some Portuguese and who knows what else flowing through him. The
family’s status and achievement was partially the result of hard
work, also through their ancestors’ participation in the slave
trade. Such a family heritage is more common than we might think.
Mark cites figures that about 20% of white Americans have black
ancestors, as do 20% of white people in England, including the
Queen—while 75% of African-Americans have some white ancestry. The
stark divisions of black and white in this country are not based in
any genetic reality. Diversity lives within each of us.
● ● ●
As a child, Mark wondered about God. Who was this God people were
always talking about, what did He look like, what color was He? He
remembers originally thinking of God as a white man. But he began to
wonder, maybe God was brown, like his family. That didn’t seem right
either. Then he remembered the grace said at dinner.
God is gray,
God is good,
let us thank Him
for our food.
“That’s it!” He concluded. God is gray like the grainy images on the
family’s black and white TV set. We see the beginnings of a
Unitarian in the workings of this child’s mind who envisions a gray
God.
Mark’s family had not participated in any congregation, but after
they moved to Chicago, Mark’s father noticed his children staring
out their apartment’s window on Sunday seeing people all dressed up
for church. He decided it was time to do something. Having been
raised Christian Scientist, he took the family to a Christian
Science service. But when they returned home, Mark’s mother put her
foot down. “No more of that!” she said. One of his father’s
co-workers at the laboratory was a Unitarian who told him what that
meant. The family gave it a try, attending First Unitarian Society
of Chicago. This time Mark’s mother liked it.
So in 1954 the Reed family stood in front of the congregation to
dedicate their three children: Mark, Philip, and Carol. They were
the first African American children to be named and dedicated at
First Unitarian Society since its founding in 1839.
Throughout his young life, Mark found himself negotiating the
sometimes puzzling—often hurtful—field of racial relations in this
country. He was of mixed racial heritage; his father worked in a
profession in which he was often the only African American; the
family attended a predominantly white church. He writes, “Racial
integration meant being one of a few Negroes in a sea of white; it
meant awkward situations and embarrassment lurked near, and so
fostered in me an almost aberrant cautiousness.”
● ● ●
Mark’s story is of struggle in between the worlds of white and black
that occupied only tenuous common ground. His deep belief was that
it didn’t have to be that way—but the real world kept telling him
that it did.
In Chicago, he lived mostly in the white world, yet the family was
restricted to black neighborhoods. Each day as he went to school or
stopped by the church, he made the transition—from one to the other
and then back again. On at least one occasion, he was beaten up by a
gang for not being enough like them; on other occasions he found
himself left out of the white world because he was black. For two of
his high school years, Mark attended a school in Switzerland that
operated communally and gathered people from around the world.
There, he said, he first relaxed. Maybe he would discover who he
was, beyond the racial tensions that characterized life in Chicago.
It was in Switzerland, reading the news from home in the
International Herald Tribune, that he learned about the civil rights
movement. There were demonstrations, sit-ins, protests against
segregated lunch counters, buses and schools. Then there was the
bombing of a Birmingham church in 1963 that killed four girls. And
the long hot summer of 1964 in which riots erupted in Watts, Harlem,
and Bedford-Stuyvesant.
As a student in this progressive school, Mark longed to be known for
who he was, not classified because of race, but being black was part
of who he was, and it bothered him when no one seemed to notice.
Sometimes he wanted to scream, “Look at me, goddamn it! I am a
Negro.” People claimed to be color-blind, but that ignored a
fundamental part of his identity. As he put it, “How could these
white people act as if race didn’t matter when the Herald Tribune
screamed racial injustice and unrest?”
Upon returning to Chicago, Mark encountered escalating racial
tensions. In his high school, where most of the students were black,
he was regarded with suspicion as “too white.” His refuge became
First Unitarian Church where, he said, “I hung out all the time...I
practically lived there.” Soon he had been hired as assistant
janitor, and then as the Sunday office manager, and the youth group
elected him president.
Ultimately, Mark spent too much time at church, not enough time in
school, and his grades showed it. He enrolled in the only college
that accepted him, Beloit College in Wisconsin, where the incoming
freshman class included 22 African Americans and where the Black
Power movement was gaining influence. At the school’s student union
was a large table where the black students congregated. Mark tried
to be part of both the black and white populations at Beloit,
stopping by the table in the student union to be with the African
Americans but also hanging out with white students.
It was a difficult balancing act—then it became impossible. On April
4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, and the black and
white populations in that school—as well as throughout the
country—split into hostile groups. Martin’s dream of a peaceful
transition to the Beloved Community was destroyed as talk of
revolution hung in the air. Mark again found himself in between,
anguished at Martin’s death, separated from white friends by the
depth of his hurt and anger. But also rejected by the black students
at Beloit because of his resistance to the language of violence they
employed. Mark’s response was to withdraw, stay in his room and away
from people—refusing also attend classes. He felt that
everybody—black and white—hated him.
This was a hard time for many people. Mark quotes his sister Carole
who recalled, “I really struggled during those years because the
world in which I had grown up was a mixed world of diverse cultural
groups...I would sit at the dinner table with Mom and Dad having
long, interesting conversations with all kinds of people—East and
West Indians, Africans, Asians, Europeans, Cubans, Haitians, and
Panamanians. Now my peers were telling me that I had to make a
choice; that it was either all Black Power or nothing; it was either
black or white, but all I had ever known were shades of gray.”
Mark flunked out of college and even though he later returned, he
never graduated. He became a VISTA volunteer, working with black and
Appalachian youth in Columbus, Ohio. And it was there that he began
to find himself. First, he had to abandon his hippie clothes, his
vocal pacifism, his agendas for social change and, instead, listen
to the people he was working with. “(I) learned to listen to the
boys’ desires to make some money and travel, their dreams of manhood
and jobs, and their yearning to outdistance poverty. These young men
came to accept me and so did others.”
The possibility of becoming a minister had occurred to Mark years
before, but his friends either laughed or launched into diatribes
against the church. Now that thought returned. A friend who was a
P.K., that is a preacher’s kid, pointed out how Mark was already
doing ministry—in VISTA as he worked with young men, helping them
experience their own worth. At the Swiss school that operated
communally, and at First Unitarian where his peers trusted and
respected him. His friend spotted a quality of presence in Mark that
is at the heart of ministry. In response, Mark writes, “A sense of
peace settled upon me that was more sober than jubilant. I looked at
(my friend) and he at me, and I offered a half smile and a nod...I
stepped into the street, breathed in, and looked around. To my left,
I caught a glimpse of blue sky.., and a voice from within said,
Remember. Remember this moment. My life had changed.”
● ● ●
The path to ministry did not remove all tensions from Mark’s life,
but it gave a context in which to direct his efforts. Here he was
able to affirm his values of responding to the worth and dignity of
each person. As he put it, “I could not escape racism, but it seemed
that I might make some difference.”
He attended Meadville Theological School in Chicago where he engaged
in research that would become his first book, Black Pioneers in a
White Denomination. At Meadville he arranged to get course credit
for teaching Sunday School and needed a co-teacher. The only catch:
his co-teacher had to be a woman. There was only one woman among his
classmates so he asked her. “Would you like to teach Sunday School
with me?” Friends told him this is the best come-on line they’ve
ever heard, but Mark wasn’t seeking a relationship which is probably
what made it possible for a friendship to develop.
This woman was Donna Morrison, a white Canadian, also raised a
Unitarian. From friendship developed a relationship and then a
commitment to marriage. Both families—black and white—nurtured in
the open-hearted values of Unitarianism, nevertheless opposed the
marriage. And so it was over the objections of their families that
Donna Morrison and Mark Reed became Mark and Donna Morrison-Reed.
When Mark was ordained in 1979, Unitarian Universalism was 97.5%
white. He was only the 18th black minister since 1888 and only the
second reared within the faith. Settled as co-minister with his wife
in his first church, Mark said, “I would scan those pews every
Sunday, search for black faces and count them—I couldn’t help it....
Spy even one person of color, and I relaxed a little, although I
couldn’t have told you why.”
“Sometimes my race means everything,” he wrote, “and sometimes it
means nothing. And sometimes I delude myself.
“I believe that when one soul encounters another, race is a tissue,
a thin rather than substantive barrier. The dying don’t care about
the color of my skin when I hold their hand. The suicidal don’t
reject my counsel because I am black. My bleary-eyed jogging
partners couldn’t care less as we groan about our aches and pains,
our children and spouses. Days go by when the thought I am a black
man never crosses my mind. Sometimes I am allowed to be simply
me....Still, serving in the ministry, I never knew when one of my
white parishioners, someone I had known for years, would surprise
me. Suddenly something hidden would grab me by the collar yet again.
“One evening, having skipped dinner, I was lying in bed with a fever
when a call came from a church member. ‘Mark? Please come. There’s
been a fight. Peter’s in his room and won’t come out. Hurry,
please!’
“Five minute later I was in my car, ten minutes after that at their
front door. I knocked. It opened. There was a fist-sized hole in the
stairwell wall. I talked to the parents. I talked to Peter. I
comforted his sobbing sister. I coaxed him downstairs. We all
talked. I got them to listen to one another. We worked out a plan of
action. I forgot I was burning up.
“When it was time to go I hugged the wife, and she confessed, ‘I
could never have imagined being held by a black man before.’
“Suddenly I was not there; I had shifted out of my body. I was
looking down on this white woman and black man standing in the
living room. What the hell is going on? I had not thought of my skin
color or theirs for one instant. What does my being black have to do
with anything?...
“I said an awkward farewell, and stepped out of the door. Settling
into my car, I shook my head more at the absurdity of it all than in
bitterness. As I backed down the driveway, I glanced at the clock.
It was nearly midnight. Abruptly aware that I was in a white suburb,
I kept an eye out for the police as I drove home.”
● ● ●
In the preface to this book, Mark offers its conclusion—an
affirmation that runs through it all, despite the ups and downs of
his life. It’s a very simple affirmation, which I quote,
“Integration is inevitable. There is no other way. Never was and
never will be.”
But the integration of which Mark speaks is different from earlier
times in which it meant that everybody would learn to fit in to the
dominant culture—that we would be of different colors but otherwise
just the same. Or at least strive to be. What he’s talking about
here is a society in which we are valued not because we’re the same
but because each deserves that valuing as a human being.
He offers a suggestion I find intriguing. This is for a black
Haggadah, that is, the format of the Jewish Seder adapted to the
African American experience.
Mark writes, “The slave narrative is missing from the American
story. We need a black Haggadah that begins: ‘We were stolen from
Africa and enslaved in America, the land of liberty...’ And we need
a time set aside when families gather for a meal and retell the
tale, using a newer, truer narrative. Black history is America’s
history. Being a slave is as American as George Washington and apple
pie. The Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation, the Great
Migration, and the civil rights movement are more central to the
American story than the embellished tale of the Pilgrims elevated to
an all-American feast day.
“The Afro-American journey from slavery to freedom is the saga of
the unfinished revolution, the unfolding story of America’s
evolution. This experience is a defining characteristic of American
culture, and neither exists apart from the other. They are
interdependent, and this is what integration means: to bring
together the parts to form an authentic whole. If every family in
America gathered yearly to celebrate the black struggle, which is
the quintessential American struggle to be free, black self-esteem
might well flower, and the American psyche might be transformed.”
I began with a reading from Mark’s earlier book in which he notes
his struggle to find common ground from which to address both the
black and white experience in America. In this book, I think he
finds that common ground, expressed in this affirmation.
“My most fundamental belief (is) that each individual is due
respect—indeed, reverence—as a unique manifestation of God’s
creation; and that, beneath everyone’s skin color and cultural
fascia, we are first and foremost human, sisters and brothers
belonging to one human family.”
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