We Can Be and Be Better

WEB DuBois and Living in and with History

A sermon Offered at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Lafayette

Winter 2002

By Rev. Hilary Landau Krivchenia

WEB Du Bois, wrote:

“I have had an early and deep appreciation for the fact that to live is a serious thing.”  Du Bois wrote this on October 3, 1890 as a student in a Harvard English class.  I said last week that humor was one vital way we attain self-understanding – and live more deeply into who we really are.  This humor co-exists – it must – with this core seriousness.  Oh – I love that deep laugh and that strong song – rising above pain, broken winged and a little awkward that lives in the human heart. However, it is this seriousness that allows us to see our humanity -- to live deeply, to take in the richness of yourself – that universe within you – to know the fullness of the world around you, of all who inhabit this world with you.  Maya Angelou, African American poet, wrote:

Too proud to bend,
Too poor to break
When I think about myself
My folks can make me split my side,
I laughed so hard I nearly died,
The tales they tell sound just like lying,
They grow the fruit
But eat the rind,
I laugh until I start to crying,
When I think about my folks.

Thank the poet. 

So I invite us all again back into the race game – and deeper – into the serious business of identity – of knowing ourselves – of understanding our identities and the aspects of which our identities are made – and then – and then – of moving toward that future which is possible among people who know themselves – histories printed into cells and memories, hopes rising on paper and in prayer. This is our time – every moment is our moment of invitation to this awakening.  Our hope and comfort is our awakening together – and awakening one another.

Adrienne Rich, Jewish, lesbian:

But there come times – perhaps this is one of them –

when we have to take ourselves more seriously or die;

when we have to pull back from the incantations,

rhythms we’ve moved to thoughtlessly and disenthrall ourselves, bestow

ourselves to silence, or a severer listening…

Bless poets and songwriters and storytellers for their courage -- they call the soul, onto paper, into the air into awareness.  They open the door – it is our choice to follow their words and move between their words -- deeper -- into that hidden world where we may find ourselves.  It’s black history month – but who cares the month – it is time to know ourselves.  In part, I hope large part, this is why we come here – to this place – to know ourselves.  Sociologists, psychologists, philosophers, administrators, veterinarians, ministers, poets, novelists, insurance brokers, weavers, realtors, biologists, ornithologists, reformers, musicians, mothers and fathers, store clerks all have definitions of what identity is.  I’d be curious to pass around a paper and have you each write a short definition of identity.  Perhaps at another service. Today – I will say from a distant star or close up under a powerful microscope no matter our race we are little different – but at arms length and through the lenses of personal and social history we inherit and create differences -- small and some large.  You are and I am and who we each are arises in relationship and in contrast.  For whatever ultimate oneness we may be part of – imminent, transcendent, interdependent, empty, or woven and glittering – whatever oneness we may be part of  -- we are still these precious individuals – people who learn identity and uniqueness, learn to belong to some groups and not to others, to bear histories, and pass them on.  Where this has been one of our greatest weaknesses it ought to be our power – a great and shared power.  So I invite you to retrace with me and rather condense the pilgrimages of two great men along the paths of identity. One sermon or many could not really do justice to the richness of their lives but these two men’s reflections on identity changed the world.  I invite you as your retrace their steps of consciousness to discover yourself – in your responses: thoughts, feelings, and memories.  We will find ourselves in one another.

            One definition that I have heard of racism is that racism is prejudice plus power.  But the work of racism is more tangled than that.  Oh, there is power – but it slips from hand to hand like a fish.  There is power but it darts out of sight -- changes sides for a moment – takes a disguise.  Racism is a tear in the web of life, a rift in identity, an inability to sense – beauty, music, and love – an inability to have the power of wisdom. 

            I have spoken before of the Rev. Theodore Parker – a Unitarian Minister and abolitionist whose home was on the Underground Railroad – the preacher who often wrote his sermons with a pistol on his desk to protect the fugitives hiding with him.  I hope that we seek, rather than weapons, tools, of the heart and mind to support liberation – tools to transform consciousness.  The abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison attended Parker’s services and it was Garrison who attended one of the early speeches of Frederick Douglass – a slave who had escaped to freedom and whose transformation of consciousness remains as bright a guide as any sign along the underground road to freedom.  Garrison wrote: “I think I never hated slavery so intensely as at that moment; my perception of the enormous outrage which is inflicted by it, on the god-like nature of its victims, was rendered far more clear than ever.”

            Douglass was born a slave in February of 1818 – though he never really knew his actual birthday or the year for certain.  His identity was defined by those around him and it was a minimal identity of servitude, suffering, and erasure – but, in the course of his life he freed himself by degrees and revealed the great human within – perhaps made greater having had to make conscious so much of that which had been denied and erased.  As most slaves, he was separated early from his family.  He was about the age of my youngest when he was owned by a Colonel Lloyd.  The practice on Lloyd’s farm was to dump boiled coarse corn meal into a wooden trough and then call out to the child slaves to come and get it.  Ysaye Barnwell of Sweet Honey in the Rock wrote this:

¯“For each child that’s born a morning star rises and sings to the universe – hm, we are!”  Barnwell’s is both song and plaint.  Now look back at the farm and the children running to the trough to scrape for food.  With hands or shingles or oyster shells they would race to scoop up the mush.  Douglass was transferred from owner to owner during his childhood and it was during one of these transfers that one of his mistresses began to teach him to read.  She was a kind woman who astonished Douglass with her goodness – at least for a time.  He wrote: “I scarcely knew how to behave towards her.  The crouching servility, usually so acceptable a quality in a slave, seemed to disturb her.  She did not deem it unmannerly for a slave to look her in the face.”  A new sense of himself began to dawn.  When her husband stopped the lessons saying that “Learning would spoil the best nigger in the world.” Douglass recognized, he said, the “white man’s power to enslave the black.  From that moment,” he wrote, “I understood the pathway to freedom.”  A pathway to freedom.  I think of the casual way schooling is offered to children in so many places – with no sense that the soul is getting wings and then I think of twelve year old Frederick who would carry extra bread as he ran his errands to bribe the white children playing in the streets to teach him – a little here -- a little there.  Douglass was in his early twenties when he made his escape.  He fought through the Civil War.  After, he fought for black suffrage.  He became friends and co-workers with the mothers of feminism – with Susan B. Anthony, Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton.  He attended the historic first women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls, in 1848.  Yet, when the 15^th amendment came up he refused to join it with a demand for universal suffrage because the sufferings of women were less visible to him.  He said “When women are hung from lampposts then I will know that the urgency for their vote is as great.”  In 1870, he was instrumental in the passage of the 15^th amendment securing the vote for black men.  We, looking back with our 21^st century eyes, know that no amendment has power if the hearts of those who must enforce it have not been amended as well and real black suffrage was many years in the future. 

            Reconstruction was not only betrayed in the legislation of the nation which promised land, education, rights, and support for freed black persons – it was betrayed by a white population which lived with its own struggles and anxieties – clinging sometimes to power and sometimes – well – I get ahead of myself.  Reconstruction was a process that needed to be internalized among all people.  It was William Edward Burghardt DuBois born also in February – on the 23rd – in 1868 who internalized and expressed reconstruction profoundly and eloquently.  In Great Barrington, Massachusetts, where the custom was to exchange calling cards as a way to introduce oneself – your name and address on a business card.  A teenaged boy received a lesson in identity – a young DuBois recounted years later: “The exchange was merry, till one girl, a tall newcomer, refused my card, -- peremptorily with a glance.  Then it dawned upon me that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil.”  Reconstruction was a social and a spiritual process – it asked for new consciousness as well as new legislation.  A child of the North – Du Bois was one of a handful of black children in a white school and he had faith in the power of words and of ideas – a power he could use.  Still this is a story of identity that arrives as a wounding.  But Dubois was a complex and resilient boy just as he grew to be a complex man – he wrote further,  “I had thereafter, no desire to tear down that veil; I held all beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows.  The sky was bluest when I could beat my mates at examination time – or even at foot race.  with the years, this contempt began to fade; for all the dazzling opportunities were theirs, not mine.”  DuBois was an exceptional person and he did excel and win honors and attentions – he was ravenous for learning – in part because, he said – “education always will have an element of danger of revolution.  Men strive to know.”  He attended Fisk University and there found an affirmation of his race, just as the Fisk Jubilee Singers would bring African-American music into its own and out into the world.  ¯“Michael Row your boat ashore, Hallelujah, Michael Row your boat ashore, Hallelujah – the river Jordan is chilly and wide, Hallelujah, milk and honey on the other side, Hallelujah.”  As a child, I remember singing that song with my activist parents and I remember the notion of the muscle in the work – to get to the other side –, which for me was never heaven – but a world of justice and freedom.  Du Bois opened doors that had been barred to other persons of color.  After Fisk he became the first black man to obtain a Doctoral degree from Harvard University.  Each success drove him -- not for himself but for all the black identity  surging in his heart. He wrote “the knowledge that would teach the white world was Greek to his own flesh and blood.  The love of harmony and beauty that set the souls of my people a-dancing and a-singing, that raised but confusion and doubt in the soul of the black artist, for the beauty revealed to him was the soul-beauty of a race which a larger audience despised.”

DuBois saw that we are called to shape and claim our identity.  He wrote: “to attain his place in the world he must be himself and not another.”  Under simpler conditions than DuBois faced, this idea is challenge enough – the claiming of the authentic self.  He further understood that black people searched through a veil -- of history, of oppression, and suffering.  And further that they saw themselves through the lenses of white eyes – of white culture and power.  He wrote: “the Negro is born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American world, which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world.  It is a peculiar sensation, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in contempt and pity.  One ever feels his twoness, an American, a Negro; two souls, two unreconciled strivings; The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,-this longing to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging, he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellow.”

When so recently experienced terrorism as a nation it was as though a new monster had come into our midst and yet terrorism had shadowed the lives of generations of slaves and African-Americans.  It was in1909 in the wake of yet another lynching – this one in Springfield, Illinois, that WEB Du Bois and many others – Jews, liberal Christians, Unitarians, atheist humanists, formed the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People – the NAACP.  This was truly an anti-terrorist group – it used the call of virtue, and the lever of the law to establish and enable justice.  DuBois eventually frustrated with the slow increase of real justice turned increasingly to communism and eventually became a citizen of Ghana, where he died in 1963.  His passing was announced at the historic Freedom March on Washington.

Terrorism isn’t new here – lynching, rape, burning churches, synagogues, crosses, banning marriages between slaves or same sex couples, stalking, hate crimes.  We know it.  It’s the stuff headlines are made of – to make us fearful and ready to cower or to strike.

            Thandeka writes that to become aware of being white is to experience terror – not over the loss of power but at the thought of exile.  White folk carry memories of their own exiles --Nigger-lover – my Dad told me two of his little students calling him that.  There is yet a line we tread and beyond that line we can be outside the circle of family, collegiality, race and yes, even small power.

To live is a serious thing.  Each person here knows that or you would not have bothered to come this morning.  When Thandeka made up the game in which we remember the race of ourselves and every other person we are speaking with consciously for a week we begin to know ourselves.  What is reparation?  Apology?  The world healing Tikkun – how I ache for that! Not in some useless guilt mongering way but more deeply – as severed kin – as brothers and sisters on a stormy sea of waves made by our own troubled histories.  To know ourselves and one another more deeply and truly is to calm that sea.  ¯Nobody knows my trials lord, nobody knows.  Maya Angelou wrote:

Now if you listen closely

I’ll tell you what I know

Storm clouds are gathering

The wind is gonna blow

The race of man is suffering

And I can hear the moan,

‘Cause nobody,

but nobody

Can make it out here alone.

To know ourselves and is to know one another, is to find peace and to make peace and to still the waters.  To take this living seriously is to reclaim long buried joy.  To do this together is the call of our principles.  Unitarian Universalism calls us to establish unity while honoring diversity.  There was the NPR story of the man who tried to contact the descendents of his family’s former slaves.  In acts both small and great – to step across the color line that still exists, stepping across the lunch room to the new person, to produce a 2^nd grade play that sings that we are a rainbow, to spread literacy and health care to every person born, to run for local office and retain your principles – these are acts of more than reparation – they are world building.  Without pistols on our desks we can defend and liberate – those around us who are unfree and that within us which remains in chains and apart.  To know ourselves and one another – is to end terror – to calm the waters and to make the future possible.

            Closing for DuBois

Our senses, restored, never to be the same,

Whisper to us.

They existed. They existed

We can be.  Be and be

better. For they existed.