The Sound of Light: Bernice Johnson Reagon

 

They are falling all around me
They are falling all around me
They are falling all around me
The strongest leaves of my tree

 

If light could make a sound, I am convinced that one of the sounds it would make would be like the music of Sweet Honey in The Rock, the all Black women a cappella singing group founded by Bernice Johnson Reagon.

That's because while light is an electromagnetic wave, sound is created by vibrations in the air. When there is as strong a force of Spiritual Light as Bernice Johnson Reagon, you know there ain't nothin' going to happen but that Light wave will vibrate. And, make the incredible sounds of harmony and justice and freedom that become Light for all the senses.

Bernice Johnson Reagon was born on October 4, 1942 in Dougherty County, southwest Georgia, the daughter of Beatrice and J.J. Johnson, a Baptist minister. Church and school were an integrated part of her life, with music heavily intertwined in both of those settings.

Dr. Reagon grew up in a church without a piano, so her early music was a cappella, and her first instruments were her hands and feet. When she spoke about her upbringing in this musical culture, she explained that even her early schooling was heavily involved with music, not just the church. She said that her teacher would lead the students outside to play games that entailed singing with their hands and feet, as well as their voices.

She once said, "Singing with my hands and feet and my whole body is the only way I can deal comfortably with creating music." No wonder she causes light waves to vibrate.

A precocious child, she started attending school at age 4 and by the time she was in 4th grade, she started tutoring the children in the 1st grade. At the age of 16, she was accepted at Albany College to study music. While there, she was very active in the NAACP and SNCC. She was expelled from Albany for her involvement in a protest and then briefly attended Spelman College.

Later, she returned to Spelman to complete her undergraduate degree in 1970. She received a Ford Foundation fellowship to do graduate study at Howard University, where she was awarded a PhD in 1975. In in 1989, she won a "genius grant" from the MacArthur Foundation.

Albany, Ga., would become an important center of the civil rights movement when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested there in 1962, causing the media to descend on the town. Dr. Reagon, however, wasn't there to see it. "I was already in jail, so I missed most of that," she recalled, "But what they began to write about ... no matter what the article said, they talked about singing."

The singing that so fascinated the media were freedom songs — often revamped versions of spirituals familiar to anyone who'd grown up in African American churches. Dr. Reagon would later say that, in many cases, she simply replaced the word "Jesus" with "freedom," as in the rousing "Woke Up This Morning."

After Albany State kicked her out due to her arrest, the rising civil rights organizer co-founded The Freedom Singers, an a cappella group that was part of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC. Through music, the Freedom Singers chronicled SNCC's activities, including a movement leader's funeral ("They Laid Medgar Evers In His Grave") and a visit from a Kenyan dignitary brought in by the State Department to demonstrate America's strides toward racial integration ("Oginga Odinga").

When they were being arrested and loaded into the paddy wagons, when they were in jail, when they were having mass meetings in African American churches to organize the next protest, civil rights activists sang all of the songs of their faith in all of those settings.

Dr. Reagon said, "When you're in the civil rights movement, that's the first time you establish yourself in a relationship that's pretty close to the same relationship that used to get the Christians thrown in the lion's den. And so, for the first time, those old songs you understand in a way that nobody could ever teach you."

Gospel music, the music of the Freedom Singers, the music of the Civil Rights Movement, became the sound of The Light of Christ.

Sweet Honey in the Rock

In 1963, Bernice Johnson and Cordell Reagon, a co-founder of The Freedom Singers, married. A year later, Reagon left the Freedom Singers to give birth to their first child, Toshi Reagon. The couple had one more child together in 1965, Kwan Tauna Reagon. Bernice Johnson Reagon and Cordell Reagon then split in 1967. Toshi has continued her mother's legacy. Kwan is a successful chef.

I first heard Sweet Honey in The Rock in the early 80s when they performed at a UCC Church in Portland, ME where we were living at the time. I knew nothing about them but the excitement of some of our friends convinced us that we really needed to cough up the $10 per ticket and go.

That experience changed something in me. Yes, it was the music but it was more how the music changed the feeling in the room. I know it's overused and will sound trite, but it really was electric. I knew that the sound and the harmonies that came from their voices arose from another place - an ancient place - a place which Audre Lorde described as " our deepest and nonrational knowledge."

Lorde named that place "the erotic," which, she said, "is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honour and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves."

Later, after I read Dr. Lorde's work, I came to know that Lord's understanding of the erotic is exactly the place from which the sounds of Sweet Honey in The Rock arose, and transported us all in the time and place to be back with the ancestors as well as in the midst of the chaos of our strongest feelings about gender and race, age and class. 

I was transformed by the Light of their Sound. I don't think I've ever been the same.

In 2003, upon receiving the prestigious Heinz Award, Dr. Reagon spoke in her acceptance speech of the decision she and her long-time partner, Adisa Douglas, made that their "different and related work and struggle would move better were we joined in life partnership--and so it has been--joined and better." The two women remained together as life partners up until Dr. Reagon's death.

Bernice Johnson Reagon died in Washington, D.C. on July 16, 2024, at the age of 81.

In her song, "They Are Falling All Around Me," Dr. Reagon sings

Death it comes and rests so heavy
Death it comes and rests so heavy
Death comes and rests so heavy
Your face I’ll never see no more

But you’re not really going to leave me
You’re not really going to leave me
You’re not really going to leave me

It is your path I walk
It is your song I sing
It is your load I take on
It is your air that I breathe
It’s the record you set
That makes me go on
It’s your strength that helps me stand
You’re not really
You’re not really going to leave me

And I have tried to sing my song right
I have tried to sing my song right
I will try to sing my song right
Be sure to let me hear from you.

I hope something good happens to you today.

Bom dia.

An Epiphany Light under a bushel of racism: Ms. Ann Lowe

Anybody who is anybody in America (or, whom others think is somebody wealthy) is listed in a little something called "The Blue Book." Interestingly enough, that is not the color of the book - it is actually black with pumpkin lettering - but the "blue" stands for the elite color of the blood that was understood to belong to those registered therein.

Also known as The Social Register, it is a semi-annual publication (present annual subscription rate: $75) in the United States that indexes the members of American high society, mostly elite New Yorkers but also California Forty-Niners (who became rich in the Gold Rush of 1848/9) and Texas Wildcatters (descendants of the people who settled Texas) as well as a White House crony or two.

If you were in The Blue Book, you probably had your own private list of people who could get you things or make you things that were rare or costly or at least supported the allure of status. Wine stewards and other Alcohol products, Art Dealers, Interior Decorators, Hair Designers, Millners, Chefs, Pastry makers, Seamstresses and Fashion Designers all worked primarily for the then tight circle of the Social elite. 

And because they were privileged and elite, they kept that list to themselves, so if you were good enough to work for the elite, you were perhaps ... maybe... paid well but relative anonymity in your trade was the trade off. Wasn't it enough simply to work for people who lived at this high level of the social stratosphere?

And so it was with the women of the Lowe Family in Clayton, Alabama who were skilled dressmakers who had sewed for wealthy white families in that state for generations.

Ms. Ann Lowe in Manhattan

Ann Lowe was born in Clayton, Alabama, around 1898 and grew up in Montgomery, the youngest daughter of Jane and Jack Lowe. Her older sister was Sallie. She was the great-granddaughter of an enslaved woman and an Alabama plantation owner.

Her mother, Janie Cole Lowe, and her grandmother, Georgia Thompkins, were skilled dressmakers who taught Ms. Ann to sew as early as age five.

By the time Ms. Ann was six, she had developed a fondness for using scraps of fabric to make small decorative flowers patterned after the flowers she saw in the family’s garden. This childhood pastime would later become the signature feature on many of her dresses and gowns. By age 10, she made her own dress patterns. After her mother died, suddenly and unexpectedly when Ms. Ann was 16 or 17, she took over the family business.

That much is known, but the particulars of her life contain conflicting information, including the actual date of her birth, perhaps not unusual for a "Negro" girl born in the Deep South. For example, Ms. Ann indicated that she dropped out of school at 14 to marry; however U. S. Census records indicate that Lowe was “living in Dothan, Alabama, with her first husband, Lee Cone, in 1910.”

Based on the 1898 date of birth, she would have been 12 years old at the time of her marriage. In a 1964 Saturday Evening Post article, the reporter noted that Ms. Ann married a man 10 years her senior shortly after her mother died in 1914, when she would have been 16 or 17 years old. Her son and later business partner, Arthur Lee Cone, was born a year after she married. Unfortunately, he died in a car accident in New York in 1958.

Ann Lowe is probably best known for designing the wedding dress of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy but never given credit for it until years after the wedding. Jackie's mother, Janet Lee Acuhincloss, commissioned Ms. Ann to design the wedding gown as well as all of the gowns of the bridal attendants, having used her to design her daughter's debutante gowns.

Jackie Kennedy's wedding dress

Ms Ann was known as "the best kept secret" in fashion design. That status, perhaps repeated as a compliment, was a thin, gauze applique to distract from the racism that kept her from being at least as as well known as The Houses of Dior or or Chanel admitted that her design and the quality of her workmanship often exceeded their own.

Throughout her career, Lowe was a celebrated designer of one-of-a-kind dresses for her powerful and wealthy clients, although some of them did not pay her for the costs of the labor and materials, or they asked her for prices that they knew were substantially below what they would have paid a white designer. Those circumstances left Lowe with a minimum amount of funds after paying her staff.

Some of her clientele remained loyal to her, helping her through difficult times. For example, in 1962, the U.S. Department of Revenue closed Lowe’s New York shop due to $12,800 owed in back taxes. She also owed $10, 000 to suppliers. The debt was later quietly and generously paid by Jacqueline Kennedy.

After the foreclosure of her salon, Lowe began working for Madeleine Couture. The small, custom salon, located on Madison Ave., belonged to Benjamin and Ione Stoddard. The Stoddards were instrumental in helping Ms. Ann obtain the risky operation to remove cataracts in her left eye, even as she was experiencing glaucoma in her right eye.

In addition, they organized a major fashion show, which included runway models who were former clients wearing the designs Lowe created for them. The Stoddards also arranged two television interviews of Lowe on The Mike Douglas Show in 1964.

Ms. Ann continuously invented and reinvented herself, even though she encountered many devastating obstacles—discrimination, financial challenges, loss of close family members, health problems, and people who took advantage of her kindness and lack of business acumen.

Through it all, she maintained her ambitions to manifest her choices—to work for families on America’s Social Registry and to establish salons that bore her name as the creative director of Ann Lowe fashions.

A collection of five of Ann Lowe's designs are held at the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Three are on display at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC.

A personal note about prestigious Blue Books

General Convention "Blue Books"

At one time, there was an actual book which contained the reports of and the names of all of the deputies to General Convention. It was called "The Green Book". That was until the early 2000 when it became "The Blue Book". It was referred to in the same reverential tones as The Social Register.

One year, when it was announced that the color of the book would change - perhaps (Gasp!) to salmon or crimson - it became front page news on all of The Episcopal Publications at the time. Bloggers (who were all the rage at the time and a real threat to 'legacy media' like ENS) blogged about it and wrung their hands in distress. People were outraged - OUTRAGED, I tell you - as it was seen as a harbinger of the final decline of The Episcopal Church.

The similarly printed, bound book which contained all the names of The Episcopal Clergy was known as "The Red Book." It was also known as "The Stud Book," even a decade after the ordination of women.

To my knowledge, the color controversy died a quiet, dignified death with the coming of the Age of Technology and is now available online. It was buried alongside the very large three-ring binders which deputies used to lug around from hearing to hearing to legislative session. Deputies of a certain age will remember reams of paper being distributed with the latest updated version of changes to resolutions and the loud "click, click, click" of deputies adding pages to their three-ring binders.

It will also be remembered that Pam Chinnis, the first woman to be President of the House of Deputies and a force with which to be reckoned, would occasionally raise her voice from the podium, rap her gavel, and scold, "Silence. Stop. That. Clicking."

I hope something good happens to you today.

Bom dia.

 

A Eulogy for Perren

A Eulogy for Fr. E. Perren Hayes

Gospel John 14:1-6

The Rev Dr. Elizabeth Kaeton

 

“How can we know the way?” 'Doubting' Thomas asked Jesus.

You know, as I think of it, Perren could have subbed in for Thomas as one of the disciples. That’s not because Thomas is “doubting”. No, Thomas wasn’t doubting. Thomas was curious. And E. Perren Hays was nothing if not curious. Indeed, he was one of the most intellectually curious Episcopal priests I’ve known. And, he would never deny you the opportunity – God forbid it! – to learn all about the things his curiosity had just discovered or uncovered.

Perren was curious about curious things. Things that have captured the curiosity of artists from the time cave-dwellers tried to capture a moment in time and draw that in pictures on the inside of caves or trace them on pieces of stretched, dried animal hide.

He was curious about the light. I remember spending an extra 30 minutes with him one afternoon, because he wanted me to see how the sun shifted on the lawn and the trees from his window in his room at Atlantic Shores.

Now, Perren was also highly skilled at convincing people that they had more time to spend with him than they thought they had – indeed, he could be maddening in that way – but that’s another story for another time. The fact of the matter is that he was right: It was, indeed, fascinating to watch the shadow move slowly across the lawn, and to watch the leaves of the trees take on a variety of the shade of green. And we ought to “make time” to watch it.

Perren was very, very curious about time. He understood that linear time was the invention and preoccupation of the human mind but he often quoted to me the line from the psalmist which has been captured in one of our hymns: "A thousand ages in thy sight are like and evening gone".

Perren’s mind was intensely curious about the mind of God – how God might conceive of time and light and how, in the human mind, at least, one informed the other. There would be no understanding of evening without the absence of light and no morning without its presence.

When speaking of Steven Hawking, Perren once pondered aloud that as the human mind of Hawking was so incredibly brilliant, and if humans are made in the likeness and image of God, how glorious must be the mind of God! “In some ways,” he said, “I can’t wait to find out.”

Hubble Star Nursery

Holocaust survivor and author, Ellie Wiesel, once said, “There are many paths but one way to God.” Being curious, Perrin explored many of those paths. He has now found his way to God, the same way taken by Thomas and James and John, Peter and Andrew and all the other disciples, and the millions and billions and trillions of people over millennia of time who now dwell in Light Eternal.

If we are right when we say, “dust to dust, ashes to ashes,” and the mind of the scientist is one path on the way to God, and if they are right when they tell us that dust and ash from earth rejoin the cosmos and find their way, eventually, to the “Star Nurseries” where we have seen pictures of moments, centuries old, when stars were being formed from dust and ash, then it is true that just as Jesus is “Light from Light,” so, we, too – over the centuries but, to God, an evening gone – become light from that Light.

Perren, rest in peace, my friend. The time for your curiosity has reached its fulfillment. You now stand before The One who is Time itself – who is, all at once and at the same time – The One who is and The One who was and The One who will be.

You stand before The One who is Light from Light, who does not cast a shadow on others but draws everyone into The Light to become light from Light.

Rest well, Perren.  Eternal Light is now yours.

Amen.

The Epiphany of Unwilling Immortality: Henrietta Lacks

 

Good Sunday morning, good pilgrims on the way of the remains of The Epiphany Season. Today is (was) known as Sexagesima, the second Sunday before Lent, which makes it 58 days (not 60) and the 8th Sunday before Easter.

Back in the day, the focus of the meditation for this week was on the story of Noah and how, after the destruction of the flood, God set a rainbow in the sky to remind all of God's creatures (and, I suspect, God's self) of God's promise of a kind of immortality. God promised never again to destroy the earth, its creatures or creation, that we would live on through each other. 

I don't know that God had to make that promise. I suspect we needed to make that promise to God. We seem to be testing God at God's word every single day.

Today is also the 23rd day of Black History Month and I want to lift up, celebrate, and call out the name of the one who shines as an Epiphany, a manifestation of God. It's a tragic story, as many of the stories in this part of American history often are, but it is one that proves that Dr. King was right: The moral arc of history is long, but it always bends toward justice.

Today I want to talk about Henrietta Lacks, the woman whose cells, harvested without her permission, saved countless millions of people with cancer.

Her story begins on August 1, 1920, in Roanoke, Virginia, where she was born to Eliza Pleasant (nee Lacks) and John "Johnny" Randall Pleasant.  Her family is uncertain how her name changed from Loretta to Henrietta, but she was nicknamed Hennie.

Ms. "Hennie"

When Ms. Henrietta was four years old in 1924, her mother died giving birth to her tenth child. Unable to care for the children alone after his wife's death, Ms. Henrietta's father moved the family to Clover, VA, where the children were distributed among relatives.

She ended up with her maternal grandfather, Thomas "Tommy" Henry Lacks, in a two-story log cabin that was once the slave quarters on the plantation that had been owned by Ms. Henrietta's white great-grandfather and great-uncle. She shared a room with her nine-year-old first cousin and future husband, David "Day" Lacks (1915–2002).

Like many people in her family and town, Ms. Henrietta began working as a child on the tobacco farm where she fed the animals, tended the garden and worked the tobacco fields. Due to family necessity, she dropped out of school when she was in the sixth grade. When she was 14 years old, she had her first child, a boy, followed by a daughter who was born seriously disabled.

Ms. Henrietta married David Lacks in 1941. Later that same year, they moved with a cousin to Turner Station, MD, so her husband could get a job at Bethlehem Steel at Sparrow's Point, outside of Baltimore. Eventually, they were able to purchase a house in that same town which became the oldest and largest African American community in Baltimore County at that time.

Ms. Henrietta and David had three more children together. In 1951, at the age of 31 and less than 6 months after having given birth to her 5th and last child, Ms. Henrietta visited The Johns Hopkins Hospital complaining of vaginal bleeding. Upon examination, renowned gynecologist Dr. Howard Jones discovered a large, malignant tumor on her cervix.

Not long before her death, doctors removed some of the cells from the tumor. They later discovered that the cells could thrive in the lab, something no human cells had every before achieved. Indeed, it was discovered that Henrietta's cells were unlike any of the others he had ever seen: where other cells would die, her cells doubled every 20 to 24 hours.

Soon the cells, called HeLa cells, were being shipped from Baltimore around the world. For 62 years — twice as long as Ms. Henrietta's own life — her cells have been the subject of more than 74,000 studies, many of which have yielded profound insights into cell biology, vaccines, in vitro fertilization and cancer.

 

Lacks Family - Congressional Medal of Honor

Perhaps it was because Hopkins Hospital was only one of a few hospitals to treat poor Black people that they felt a sense of "ownership". But Henrietta Lacks, who was poor, Black and uneducated, never consented to her cells being studied. For 62 years, her family had been left out of the decision-making about that research.

Hopkins Hospital also stated that, after reflection on their 50 year relationship with the Lacks family, "we found that Johns Hopkins could have – and should have – done more to inform and work with members of Henrietta Lacks’ family out of respect for them, their privacy and their personal interests."

Finally, in 2013, the National Institutes of Health came to an agreement with the Lacks family to grant them some control over how Henrietta Lacks’s genome is used. In the history of the NIH, that had never before happened .

In fairness, it should be noted that, Johns Hopkins has never sold or profited from the discovery or distribution of HeLa cells and does not own the rights to the HeLa cell line. Rather, as Johns Hopkins itself reports, they "offered HeLa cells (named for the first two letters of her first and last name) freely and widely for scientific research."

Officials at the National Institutes of Health ultimately acknowledge that they should have contacted the Lacks family when researchers first applied for a grant to sequence the HeLa genome. They belatedly addressed the problem after the family raised its objections.

The Lacks family and the N.I.H. settled on an agreement: the data from both studies should be stored in the institutes’ database of genotypes and phenotypes. Researchers who want to use the data can apply for access and will have to submit annual reports about their research. A so-called HeLa Genome Data Access working group at the N.I.H. will review the applications. Two members of the Lacks family will be members.

The agreement does not provide the Lacks family with proceeds from any commercial products that may be developed from research on the HeLa genome.

The Lack Grand & Great Grand Daughters

As one who has benefited from cancer research, I feel a special debt of gratitude to Ms. Henrietta Lacks, unwitting and unwilling as she might have been to be a recipient of my deep thanks.

I am especially grateful that the research on her cells has made it possible to test my DNA as well as the unique DNA of my particular cancer tumor which provides information for me to pass on to my children and grandchildren.

They now know that the DNA that was passed down to them from me does not contain the DNA of either breast nor bowel cancer.

Ms. Henrietta is remembered as having hazel eyes, a small waist, size 6 shoes, and always wearing red nail polish and a neatly pleated skirt. She will also be remembered with her name on a building at Johns Hopkins, a Congressional Medal of Honor, and in various other ways.

Ms. Henrietta Lacks will live on in immortality - without her understanding or permission - with deep gratitude that, despite her tragedy and poverty and oppression, and through the persistent efforts of her children and grandchildren, something good has come.

There are many ways God's promise to Noah is lived out. A rainbow in the sky is but one.

I hope something good happens to you today.

Bom dia.

We Who Believe in Freedom: Ella Baker

 

We who believe in freedom cannot rest

We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes.

 

Until the killing of Black men, 

Black mother's sons

Is as important as the killing of White men 

White mother's sons.

We who believe in freedom cannot rest

We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes. 

Those of you who know the music of Sweet Honey in the Rock may know the words to this anthem. You may have sung them as you listened along to a recording of it. If you were lucky enough, you may have been inspired as you heard them sing this song in concert. And, if you ever were lucky enough to have heard Sweet Honey in the Rock in concert, you are lucky enough.

This is Ella's Song, named for the brilliant Civil Rights community, grass-roots organizer and strategist, Ms. Ella Josephine ("Ella Jo") Baker. 

 

Ms. Ella Jo Baker was born on December 13, 1903, in Norfolk, Virginia, to Georgiana (called Anna) and Blake Baker. In 1910, Norfolk had a race riot in which whites attacked black workers from the shipyard where her father worked. Her mother decided to take the family back to North Carolina while their father continued to work for the steamship company. Ella was seven years old when they returned to her mother's rural hometown near Littleton, North Carolina.

She grew up there, in North Carolina, the middle of three surviving siblings, listening to her grandmother, Josephine Elizabeth "Bet" Ross, and her stories about life under slavery. It was from her grandmother that she learned the full meaning - and the dangers - of resistance and resilience.

As a slave, her grandmother had been whipped for refusing to marry a man chosen for her by the slave owner. She was punished for her insubordination with hard labor plowing fallow fields. Despite the work, she nevertheless attended every celebration on the plantation, dancing until the early hours of the morning to show that her spirit remained unbowed.

Her grandmother’s pride and resilience in the face of racism and injustice continued to inspire Ms. Ella throughout her life. Her particular talent was assisting people to empower themselves, giving them a context for understanding the injustices Black people continue to face, as her grandmother had provided for her. People in her town knew Ms. Ella Jo as "the whirlwind". Seems she inherited her grandmother's energy level, as well.

Ella's Song contains the words: "That which touches me most is that I had a chance to work with people, passing on to others that which was passed on to me."

Sweet Honey in the Rock

Ms. Ella attended Shaw University in Raleigh, NC. As a student she challenged school policies that she thought were unfair. After graduating in 1927 as class valedictorian, she moved to New York City and began joining social activist organizations.

During this time, Baker lived with and married her college sweetheart, T. J. (Bob) Roberts. They divorced in 1958. Baker rarely discussed her private life or marital status. According to fellow activist Bernice Johnson Reagon, founder of Sweet Honey in the Rock, many women in the Civil Rights Movement followed Baker's example, adopting a practice of dissemblance  about their private lives that allowed them to be accepted as individuals in the movement.

It occurs to me that many of the Black women I've known who are leaders in The Episcopal Church, have also adopted this practice of dissemblance, which often raises questions about their sexual orientation. I'm thinking here, especially, of Bishop Barbara Clementine Harris.

Just a few weeks ago, a woman who had graduated from CDSP (Church Divinity School of the Pacific) remarked, as if it were true, that the resistance to Bishop Barbara's election was that not only was she a woman and an African-American, but that she was a lesbian.

I laughed right out loud. There is, of course, nothing in the world wrong with being a lesbian. That said, Barbara Clementine Harris was not a lesbian. Strong? Feisty? Opinionated? Black Feminist/Womanist Liberation Theologian? Check. Check. Check. And, check. Lesbian? Well, we want the best for our leaders, of course, but that was not true of Bishop Barbara. She made up for it by being one of the strongest advocates for LGBTQ+ people in the House of Bishops.

Ella's Song was written as a tribute to Ms. Ella by her friend Bernice Reagon. It contains the words
"I'm a woman who speaks in a voice and I must be heard.
At times I can be quite difficult, I'll bow to no man's word."

Baker befriended John Henrik Clarke, a future scholar and activist; Pauli Murray, a future writer and civil rights lawyer; and others who became lifelong friends. The Harlem Renaissance influenced her thoughts and teachings. She advocated widespread, local action as a means of social change. Her emphasis on a grassroots approach to the struggle for equal rights influenced the growth and success of the civil rights movement of the mid-20th century.

From Ella's Song: "Struggling myself don’t mean a whole lot, I’ve come to realize,
that teaching others to stand up and fight is the only way my struggle survives."

Historical highway marker in NC

In 1930, she joined the Young Negroes Cooperative League, whose purpose was to develop black economic power through collective planning. She also involved herself with several women’s organizations. She was committed to economic justice for all people and once said, “People cannot be free until there is enough work in this land to give everybody a job.”

Ms. Ella began her involvement with the NAACP in 1940. She worked as a field secretary and then served as director of branches from 1943 until 1946. Inspired by the historic bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955, Ms. Ella co-founded the organization In Friendship to raise money to fight against Jim Crow Laws in the deep South.

While serving as Executive Secretary for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC)  she organized the founding conference of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) held at her alma mater, Shaw University, during the Easter weekend of 1960.

She had immediately recognized the potential of the students involved in the Sit-in Movement and wanted to bring leaders of the Movement together to meet one another and to consider future work. Miss Baker, as the students usually called her, persuaded Dr. Martin Luther King to put up the $800 needed to hold the conference. Rev. King hoped they would become an SCLC student wing. Ms Baker, however, encouraged the students to think about forming their own organization.

Addressing the conference, Rev. King asked the students to commit to nonviolence as a way of life, but for most in attendance, nonviolence was simply an effective tactic. Speaking to the conference Ms. Baker told the students that their struggle was “much bigger than a hamburger or even a giant-sized coke.”

In presenting this bigger picture and encouraging them to form their own organization, Ms. Baker displayed the talents she learned from her grandmother: resistance, resilience and assisting people to empower themselves.  The students decided to form their own organization: SNCC. And with the formation of SNCC, she encouraged the new organization to organize from the bottom up.

From Ella's Song: To me young people come first, they have the courage where we fail.
And if I can but shed some light as they carry us through the gale.

The older I get the better I know that the secret of my going on
Is when the reins are in the hands of the young, who dare to run against the storm

Committed to achieving racial equality

I think, of all the things I've learned about Ms. Ella Jo Baker, this one fact is the most impressive. I mean, imagine standing up to a giant like MLK, Jr. Imagine being so committed to the principles of resistance, resilience and empowerment, that you stand up for them, even in the face of the sexism known to exist in the Movement, and to the very face of the Leadership of the Civil Rights Movement.

Adopting the Gandhian theory of nonviolent direct action, SNCC members joined with activists from the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) to organize the 1961 Freedom Rides.  In 1964 SNCC helped create Freedom Summer, an effort to focus national attention on Mississippi’s racism and to register black voters.

She became president of the NAACP in 1952. In this role, she supervised the field secretaries and coordinated the national office's work with local groups. Baker's top priority was to lessen the organization's bureaucracy and give women more power in the organization; this included reducing Walther Francis White's dominating role as executive secretary.

Baker believed the program should be primarily channeled not through White and the national office, but through the people in the field. She lobbied to reduce the rigid hierarchy, place more power in the hands of capable local leaders, and give local branches greater responsibility and autonomy.

From Ella's Song: Not needing to clutch for power, not needing the light just to shine on me. I need to be one in the number as we stand against tyranny. 

She is often referred to as "the unsung hero of the Civil Right's Movement." Ms. Ella's influence was reflected in the nickname she acquired: “Fundi,” a Swahili word meaning a person who teaches a craft to the next generation. Baker continued to be a respected and influential leader in the fight for human and civil rights until her death on December 13, 1986, her 83rd birthday.

The very first verse of Ella's Song "Until the killing of Black men, Black mother's sons, is as important as the killing of white men, white mother's sons," calls us to remember the systemic nature of racism. Racism not only hurts the people it oppresses, but it causes serious damage to the souls of the oppressor.

Which is why it is so important to remember that Black History is American History. It is critically important that we take at least these 28 days every year to remember and recall and celebrate the contributions of Black people to our history and heritage and culture.

Every year. Every single year.

We who believe in freedom cannot rest

We who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes. 

I hope something good happens to you today.

Bom dia.

A Bright Epiphany Light Phillis Wheatley

Statue of Phillis Wheatley on the Boston Women's Heritage Trail

 

"On being brought from Africa to America":

Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,
Taught my benighted soul to understand
That there's a God, that there's a Saviour too:
Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.
Some view our sable race with scornful eye,
"Their colour is a diabolic dye."
Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain,
May be refin'd, and join th' angelic train.

That was one of the first poems written by Phillis Wheatley, the first published African American poet. 

The internalized oppression makes me weep every time I read it.

Born in West Africa - either in present day Gambia or Senegal - in 1753, Ms. Phillis was was sold by a local chief to a visiting trader, who took her to Boston in the then British Colony of Massachusetts on July 11, 1761,^[on a slave ship called The Phillis. She was seven or eight years old.

After she arrived in Boston, Ms. Phillis was bought by the wealthy Boston merchant and tailor, John Wheatley, as a slave for his wife Susanna. She was named after the slave ship that took her from her homeland, and was given their surname. Her birth name is not recorded in history.

It was common in those days for people to know the birth date, place and pedigree of their cattle and horses and even their house pets, but not of the humans they held in bondage. 

The Wheatleys' 18-year-old daughter, Mary, was Ms. Phillis's first tutor in reading and writing. Their son, Nathaniel, also tutored her. John Wheatley was known as a progressive throughout New England; his family afforded Ms. Phillis an unprecedented education for an enslaved person, and one unusual for a woman of any race at the time.

When she was 11, she began corresponding with preachers and friends. By the age of 12, Ms. Phillis was reading Greek and Latin classics in their original languages, as well as difficult passages from the Bible. At the age of 14, she wrote her first poem, "To the University of Cambridge [Harvard], in New England," complete with classical Greek references.

In that poem, she encourages Harvard students to be grateful for their privileges and to live virtuously. The poem wasn't published until 1773. Ms. Phillis would encounter great difficulty in getting her work published, even though the Wheatleys promoted her enthusiastically.

At first, publishers in Boston had declined to publish her poetry, doubting that an African slave was capable of writing such excellent poetry.

Ms. Phillis was forced to defend herself and her integrity in court in 1772. Indeed, she was defended in court by several prominent people, including John Hancock, as well as the Mayor of Boston and the Lt. Governor and Governor of Massachusetts, who all had read her work, examined Ms. Phillis, and verified its authenticity.

They even signed a statement which exonerated her.

In 1773, Susannah Wheatley sent Ms. Phillis to England. Even though Phillis’s fame was growing, Susannah felt she would have a better chance of publishing her poems in England. 

 She sent Ms. Phillis, escorted by Susannah’s son, Nathaniel, to London where she met many important figures of the day.

Influential people in London were very interested in her poetry and many became her patrons. Her collected works, ‘Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral' was published in London in 1773. This publication brought Ms. Phillis fame in both England and in the American colonies. She included the signed statement from her case in court in the preface of that book.

Unfortunately, shortly after her arrival in London Ms. Phillis learned that Susanna Wheatley had become gravely ill. Phillis returned immediately to Boston and in 1774 Susanna died.

Ms. Phillis was freed but stayed on with John Wheatley until he died in 1778. Her freedom meant she had lost her patrons and even though she had written a second volume of poems in 1779, she could not get them published. Fortunately, some of her poems from the second volume were later published in pamphlets and newspapers.

While none other than George Washington praised her work, Thomas Jefferson, in his book Notes on the State of Virginia, was unwilling to acknowledge the value of her work or the work of any black poet. He wrote:

Misery is often the parent of the most affecting touches in poetry. Among the blacks is misery enough, God knows, but no poetry. Love is the peculiar oestrum of the poet. Their love is ardent, but it kindles the senses only, not the imagination. Religion indeed has produced a Phyllis Whately but it could not produce a poet. The compositions published under her name are below the dignity of criticism.

Jefferson was not the only noted, Enlightenment figure who held racist views. Such luminaries as David Hume and Emmanuel Kant likewise believed Africans were not fully human.

Unfortunately, her poetry has earned her controversy and criticism from Black scholars as well, seeing her work as a prime example of "Uncle Tom Syndrome," and believing that this furthers this syndrome among descendants of Africans in the Americas.

Others have argued on her behalf, citing that her work was used successfully by abolitionists as evidence of the intellectual and creative capacities of African descendants. Henry Louis Gates asked "What would happen if we ceased to stereotype Wheatley but, instead, read her, read her with all the resourcefulness that she herself brought to her craft?"

Shortly after the death of John Wheatley and her emancipation, Ms. Phillis met and married John Peters, an impoverished free black grocer. They lived in poor conditions and two of their babies died.

John was imprisoned for debt in 1784. With a sickly infant son to provide for, Ms. Phillis became a a scullery maid at a boarding house, doing work she had never done before. She developed pneumonia and died on December 5, 1784, at the age of 31, after giving birth to a daughter, who died the same day as her.

It is never easy to be "the first" in any category but it certainly helps when one is to the position born. That would seem to be so for Ms. Phillis Wheatley. In her very short life with its tragic ending - too soon! - she was able to open minds and hearts to her full humanity and so, the possibility of the full humanity of others - including that of her oppressors.

Her life and her work demonstrated that art in all of its forms - poetry, literature, music, sculpture, pottery, fabric - is able to cross boundaries and cultures and languages and weaken the stronghold of prejudice and bigotry, even while bearing its unbearable burdens. 

I hope something good happens to you today.

Bom dia. 

Three Black Women of Literacy: Harriet Jacobs, Susie King & Septima Clark

The other night, I stumbled on a staggering statistic for Americans. According to the National Literacy Institute, 21% of Americas are illiterate.

Let that sink in. Twenty-one percent - a figure approaching one quarter of Americans - can not read. 

Oh, but it gets worse.

* 54% of adults read below a 6th grade level. 

* 20% of adults read below a 5th grade level  

* 34% of adults who lack literacy proficiency were born outside the US

Let me put that into perspective for you.

According to most readability assessments, The New York Times is considered to be at a roughly college level reading level, often estimated around a 12th-grade reading level. The reading level The Washington Post can vary, but it is estimated to be around a 10-12th grade reading level. The Los Angeles Times generally falls around a 10th grade reading level. The Boston Globe is generally considered to be written at a college reading level.

According to readability analysis, Fox News generally falls around a 7th-8th grade reading level. The National Enquirer is generally considered to be around 6th grade. Most "local newspapers," depending on their location, aim for a reading level around an 8th to 11th grade level with many considering the average to be around an 8th grade level.

Let the reader understand.

There's good news and bad news: The good news is that The NY Times has a much higher circulation rate than The National Enquirer. The bad news is that The Fox News Channel is the most-watched television news station for the past 23 consecutive years.

Here are some other concerning statistics from the Barbara Bush Foundation:

20% of high school seniors can be classified as functionally illiterate at graduation

70% of prisoners in state and federal systems are illiterate
85% of all juvenile offenders rate as functionally or marginally illiterate
43% of those with the lowest literacy skill live in poverty.

Let me also add this: According to recent data compiled by Pew Research, approximately 56% of people incarcerated in the US are people of color, with Black Americans being disproportionately represented in the prison population, making up around 32% of the incarcerated population despite representing a smaller percentage of the overall US population.

If you hear alarm bells going off as you consider of present administrations' fervent, passionate goal to dismantle the US Department of Education, you may, in fact, be "woke".

Harriet A. Jacobs

You may also understand why literacy has been a passionate goal of the Black Community. I want to lift up and celebrate and call the names of three women who have been heroes of this movement. These women fought against incredible odds to teach themselves how to read and write and then, became fiercely committed to making sure others were literate. They understood that literacy was one of the keys to liberation. Their clue was that their slave owners were fiercely committed to keeping them illiterate.

This is taken from the Barbara Bush Literacy Foundation:

In 2020, three Black women of literacy

Harriet A. Jacobs (1813-1897)
Susie King Taylor (1848-1912)
Septima Poinsette Clark (1898-1987)

were inducted posthumously into the Reading Hall of Fame. All three contributed to the quest of literacy for African Americans, specifically in the area of adult literacy.

‣ Harriet Jacobs was born a slave in North Carolina in 1813. In her autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, she details life in slavery and her daring escape. Having been taught to read by her owner’s daughter, one story she shares is of helping another older slave learn to read. Once she obtained her freedom, she taught former slaves to read and write at Freedmen’s Schools. Her work also involved family literacy—in many cases, children and their parents would learn together.

Susie King Taylor

‣ Susie King Taylor was born a slave in Georgia in 1848. She was taught to read and write by a freed woman, going to school each day “with our books wrapped in paper to prevent the police or white persons from seeing them.” (King, 1902, p.5). She was the first African American teacher in Georgia and taught children and adults at a Freedmen’s school. A published author, she related her stories of the Civil War and teaching adults in her book, Reminiscences of My Life in Camp with the 33d United States Colored Troops Late 1st S.C. Volunteers: “I had about forty children to teach, beside a number of adults who came to me nights, all of them so eager to learn to read, to read above anything else.” (King,1902, p.11).

‣ Lastly, born in 1898 in South Carolina, Septima Poinsette Clark was a teacher and Civil Rights activist. Known as an innovative teacher, she used “real world” materials in her
teaching and tied her teaching to voting rights. She helped start Citizenship Schools for Black adults and led the Voter Registration Project from 1962-1966. She retired in 1970, after having an enormous impact on voter registration in the south—over a million African Americans had registered to vote. In 1979, she received the Living Legacy Awardfrom President Jimmy Carter. Her published works include Echo in My Soul and Ready From Within: Septima Clark and the Civil Rights Movement.

 

Septima Poinsette Clark

Years ago, at a General Convention in some city, a long, long ago, it was my privilege to serve on the Urban and Social Justice Committee (I think it was, then, Committee 25). One of the hearings of that committee was on the Industrial Prison Complex.

I remember with a kind of intense clarity the testimony of a woman, an Episcopal Priest, who had served as a Prison Chaplain, on Death Row as part of the Texas Prison System, which has the dubious distinction of having the highest number of executions in America. (Note: Alabama has a high death sentencing rate due to judges overriding jury verdicts of life to impose capital punishment. Since 1976, Alabama judges have overridden jury verdicts 112 times.)

She said that, as she heard the confessions of the inmates before their executions, they expressed three consistent "wishes":

"I wish I had been able to read."
"I wish I had never started drugs."
"I wish I had a family."

She added, solemnly, clearly, and passionately, "I don't think I've ever heard a clearer vocational call to the churches. We can start literacy programs. We can start drug addiction prevention programs. We can be a safe haven, a sanctuary, a family, for God's children."

I felt convicted by her testimony. Still do. In two congregations I've been privileged to serve, I have made sure we had Literacy Programs. In several churches, I gave my full support to the ESL Programs already in existence. No, it wasn't enough, but it was something.

Wherever you are, please do whatever you can to further the cause of literacy. Education - even in its most basic elements of Reading, Writing and Arithmetic -  is the key to liberation. The relationships formed between teachers and students are transformative.

Please follow the path illuminated by the three bright lights of these Stars of the Epiphany: Harriet Jacobs, Susie King and Septima Clark.

Don't know what to do about the oppression of the current, cruel fascist regime? Pleading for mercy was a good, indeed noble, start. Unfortunately, it fell on intentionally deaf ears.

I've got three suggestions as the next steps in the Christian Pilgrimage to act justly, love mercy and walk humbly: Literacy Programs, Addiction Prevention Programs and Supporting At-Risk Families.

I hope something good happens to you today.

Bom dia.

The Women of Black History Month: Paging Dr. Rebecca Lee Crumpler

Good Wednesday morning, good pilgrims on the path of The Remains of The Epiphany Season. There's so much in the news that is deeply disturbing but none more than the fact that there's a serious outbreak of measles (MEASLES, for God's sake), in Texas, there are children who are seriously ill and in hospital, and the Head of Health and Human Services is a committed immunization conspiracy theorist with a dead worm in his head.

Somewhere in my growing up in Massachusetts, I remembered learning that the first Black woman to be a doctor lived and worked in my home state. I remembered her name was Rebecca but that's all I could remember. I finally found her, last night, and I thought today would be a perfect day to introduce her to you, if you've not already met.

Please meet Dr. Rebecca Lee Crumpler, born in 1831 in Delaware, to Absolum Davis and Matilda Webber. Very little is known about her life. Indeed, I did not know of her Delaware roots.

An aunt in Pennsylvania, who spent much of her time caring for sick neighbors and may have influenced her career choice, raised her. Why? It could be any number of reasons but there were lots of lynchings in those days in Delaware. So were untreated diseases among people of poverty, especially poor Black farmers and sharecroppers.

In any event, life expectancy was not long if you were poor and Black.

By 1852 she had moved to Charlestown, Massachusetts.After attending the prestigious Massachusetts private school, West-Newton English and Classical School, she worked as a nurse for eight years (because the first formal school for nursing only opened in 1873, she was able to perform such work without any formal training).

In 1860, she was admitted to the New England Female Medical College. When she graduated in 1864, Crumpler was the first African American woman in the United States to earn an M.D. degree, and the only African American woman to graduate from the New England Female Medical College, which merged with Boston University School of Medicine in 1873.

In her Book of Medical Discourses in Two Parts, published in 1883 and one of the very first medical publications by an African American, she gives a brief summary of her career path:

"It may be well to state here that, having been reared by a kind aunt in Pennsylvania, whose usefulness with the sick was continually sought, I early conceived a liking for, and sought every opportunity to relieve the sufferings of others. Later in life I devoted my time, when best I could, to nursing as a business, serving under different doctors for a period of eight years (from 1852 to 1860); most of the time at my adopted home in Charlestown, Middlesex County, Massachusetts. From these doctors I received letters commending me to the faculty of the New England Female Medical College, whence, four years afterward, I received the degree of doctress of medicine."

Dr. Crumpler practiced in Boston for a short while before moving to Richmond, Virginia, after the Civil War ended in 1865. Richmond, she felt, would be

"a proper field for real missionary work, and one that would present ample opportunities to become acquainted with the diseases of women and children. During my stay there nearly every hour was improved in that sphere of labor. The last quarter of the year 1866, I was enabled . . . to have access each day to a very large number of the indigent, and others of different classes, in a population of over 30,000 colored."

She joined other black physicians caring for freed slaves who would otherwise have had no access to medical care, working with the Freedmen's Bureau, and missionary and community groups, even though black physicians experienced intense racism working in the postwar South.

"At the close of my services in that city," she explained, "I returned to my former home, Boston, where I entered into the work with renewed vigor, practicing outside, and receiving children in the house for treatment; regardless, in a measure, of remuneration."

She lived on Joy Street on Beacon Hill, then a mostly black neighborhood. By 1880 she had moved to Hyde Park, Massachusetts, and was no longer in active practice. Her 1883 book is based on journal notes she kept during her years of medical practice.

I am delighted to learn even this little bit about Dr. Crumpler and feel pleased to know of her Delaware and Massachusetts connections. I can't tell you how often I walked on Joy Street in Boston, having been the former home of the Diocesan Offices, which moved in 1988 after 100 years to Tremont Street, adjacent to the Cathedral. 

It feels a privilege to have walked the same neighborhood where Dr. Crumpler lived and tended to those who were sick and had no other means of care. Next time I'm in Boston, I plan to visit her former residence and say a prayer of thanksgiving for her life.

I pray today that her spirit hovers over and informs the other former resident of Massachusetts, that the decisions he makes for the millions of people in his care will be wise, founded on good science and ethics, and devoid of political influence.

Not a dream. It's actually what all of his predecessors have done.

I hope something good happens to you today.

Bom dia.