Tuesday, March 18, 2014

My Bondage and My Freedom

On Sunday, March 16th I preached the following sermon at the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church - Unitarian Universalist.  In my mind it is part of what I call our Jefferson's Legacies Initiative, programs and efforts recognizing that our name gives us much to champion, but also an imperative to work for the eradication of the racism and oppression that can be directly linked to the system of enslavement in which he participated. 
 If you want to hear this sermon, it will be podcast on our website.

“Sincerely and earnestly hoping that this little book may do something toward throwing light on the American slave system, and hastening the glad day of deliverance to the millions of my brethren in bonds—faithfully relying upon the power of truth, love, and justice, for success in my humble efforts—and solemnly pledging myself anew to the sacred cause,—I subscribe myself, Frederick Douglass. Lynn, Mass., April 28, 1845”
Seven years before the 1852 publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s influential anti-slavery novelUncle Tom’s Cabin, and the publication the next year of Twelve Years a Slave by Solomon Northup, Frederick Douglass published his first autobiography, Narrative Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave.  Ten years later, in 1855, he published his second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom, which gives this sermon its title.
I don’t generally give what in some circles are appropriately called “book report sermons.”  I don’t subscribe to the “lecture and concert” theory of Unitarian Universalist worship.  But I’ve got to tell you – while I knew Douglass’ name, of course, what I’ve learned about his story while preparing for this morning has astounded me.  I’m hoping it will astound you, too.
The man who came to be known as Frederick Douglass was born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, sometime during 1818, most likely in February.  At the beginning of his Narrative Life he said, "I have no accurate knowledge of my age, never having seen any authentic record containing it."  He had no clear memory of his mother, either, because it was the custom in the part of Maryland he was from to separate a mother and her children as soon as possible.  He said he never even saw her “by the light of day” because while she would lay down with him to help him to sleep she would be long gone by the time he woke up.
He was moved from one “owner” to the next – and I put “owner” in quotes because, of course, no human can actually own another, no matter what some have thought.  When he was twelve he had been given to a man named Hugh Auld and his wife Sophia.  An appropriate name, actually, because Sophia taught Douglass the alphabet, even though it was illegal to teach enslaved people to read or write.  When her husband discovered what she’d been doing he strongly disapproved, and offered what Douglass later referred to as the "first decidedly antislavery lecture" he’d ever heard – he said that if a slave were to learn to read he would become discontented with his situation in life and begin to long for freedom.  Truer words were never spoken, and it was in this encounter, perhaps, that set in place Douglass’ life-long belief that, as he put it, “knowledge is the pathway from slavery to freedom.”  It is known that on his own Douglass learned to read and to write from watching white children and the men with whom he worked.
When he was hired out to a man named William Freeland – a rather ironic name this time – he began to teach the other enslaved people on the plantation to read and write.  The enslaved on other plantations heard of these lessons and would come to the Sunday School Douglass had begun, as many as 40 at a time.  While his own so-called owner didn’t seem to mind what was happening in the Sunday School, other plantation owners did, and one day they burst in on the assembly with clubs and stones.  Shortly thereafter, he was moved to the farm of a man named Edward Covey, whom Douglass described as, “first rate hand at breaking young negroes."
Now bear in mind – all this happened before Douglass was sixteen years old!  And it was this young man’s youthful and rebellious spirit that Covey tried to break.  Douglass endured countless beatings and whippings at Covey’s hand, but eventually he fought back.  He literally fought back, fighting both Covey and his cousin for over two hours before finally emerging victorious.  Covey never beat him again after that.
Douglass had tried to escape when he was with William Freeland, and he tried again when he was with Edward Covey, but he was never successful.  In 1836 – when he was eighteen years old – Douglass met a free Black woman named Anna Murray.  She had seven older brothers and sisters who’d been born into slavery, but her mother had been manumitted just before Anna’s birth, so she and her four younger siblings were born free.  She and Douglass fell in love, and she helped him, finally, to escape the enslavement.  (Their daughter Rosetta would later remind people who idolized her father that his was a story, “made possible by the unswerving loyalty of Anna Murray.”)
Of his newfound freedom, Douglass would write, 'I felt as one might feel upon escape from a den of hungry lions.  Anguish and grief, like darkness and rain, may be depicted; but gladness and joy, like the rainbow, defy the skill of pen or pencil.”  He sent for Anna, and the two were married just eleven days after he’d arrived in New York – it was September 15, 1838. 
September 15th – that’s the day my son Theo was born, 163 years later.  A lot has changed in that time, yet not as much as we – and especially we white folk – would like to believe.  As recently as this past week a man named Jim Brown, who was running for Congress in Arizona’s 2nd District, wrote on his FaceBook page,
“Back in the day of slavery, slaves were kept in slavery by denying them education and opportunity while providing them with their basic needs … Not by beating them and starving them.  (Although there were isolated cases of course.)  Basically slave owners took pretty good care of their slaves and livestock and this kept business rolling along.”
I don’t know what infuriates me more, his assertion that “slave owners took pretty good care of their slaves,” or his casual equivalence of “slaves” and “livestock,” or that he’s still out there on the campaign trail and might still have the opportunity of serving this country in Congress.  How much has changed, really?
I recently read, too, about a teacher in Ohio – who was, thankfully, suspended after this incident – who allegedly responded to one of his African American students who had expressed the desire to one day be President, “We do not need another black President.”  The teacher denies the allegations, of course, but can we deny that such things are being said, are being thought, around the country.  When President Obama recently sat down for a mock, comedy interview on the internet showBetween Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis as a way of promoting the Affordable Care Act to a demographic unreached by the usual media, one the host’s classically inappropriate and uncomfortable questions was, “So … what’s it like being the last Black President?”  (To which Mr. Obama replied, “What’s it like for this to be the last time you talk with a President?”)  But you know people are thinking it.  You know people are wishing it.  You know that people are actively organizing and working to ensure that there never will be another person of color in the White House.  You know it.  How far have we come, really?
Back to Douglass – he became fervent speaker on the Abolitionist circuit.  William Lloyd Garrison became both an inspiration and an ardent supporter. Yet when his first autobiography, Narrative Life was published people were skeptical that a black man could write such an eloquent book.  (It reminds me of all the commentators who fell over themselves in 2008 to say how eloquent then candidate Obama was.  Remember that?)
As his reputation grew there were those who feared that Douglass’ so-called “owner” would try to get his “property” back, and so he was encouraged to go abroad and speak in Ireland and England as other free African Americans had so successfully done.  Of this experience, Douglass wrote:
"Eleven days and a half gone and I have crossed three thousand miles of the perilous deep. Instead of a democratic government, I am under a monarchical government. Instead of the bright, blue sky of America, I am covered with the soft, grey fog of the Emerald Isle [Ireland]. I breathe, and lo! the chattel [slave] becomes a man. I gaze around in vain for one who will question my equal humanity, claim me as his slave, or offer me an insult. I employ a cab—I am seated beside white people—I reach the hotel—I enter the same door—I am shown into the same parlour—I dine at the same table—and no one is offended... I find myself regarded and treated at every turn with the kindness and deference paid to white people. When I go to church, I am met by no upturned nose and scornful lip to tell me, 'We don't allow niggers in here!'" 
I want to be clear that I’ve intentionally chosen to retain Douglass’ own language there not only for historical accuracy but because I want this to be uncomfortable.  I want it to be painful.  It can be so easy to hear all of this history in an abstract way, in a distant way, in a disconnected way.  And that, perhaps, is often the lecturer’s way.  But I’m a preacher, and this is a sanctuary, and we’re here for a sermon.  So all of this background, all of this history, is to bring us to this point – whether it’s the story of Frederick Douglass, or Solomon Northup, or Harriet Tubman, or Sojourner Truth, or (closer to home) Isaac Jefferson, or Sally Hemings (of whom there is no known image, although this may be one of her daughters), these are stories that need to be told, and retold, and engraved in our memories and on our hearts because unless we do we are really all still enslaved to them, whether we know it or not.
Michelle Alexander’s powerful book The New Jim Crow makes an extremely strong case that there is a clear progression from the oppressions and dehumanization of slavery, to the Jim Crow laws that followed on the heels of slavery’s nominal end, to the current system of mass incarceration which overwhelmingly and, she argues, quite intentionally targets people of color.  Slavery kept Black Americans out of public life, as did Jim Crow, and today an African American woman or man who has served time as a result of “America’s War on Drugs” can find themselves legally stripped of the right to vote, can be denied housing and public assistance, and can find it nearly impossible to get a foot in the door in the job market because of that one question on most application forms – have you ever been convicted of a felony?
We need to hear these stories, and tell these stories because it is so important that we remember – when we are in our own private despair or lose strength for the struggles that still need to be waged – we need to remember that despite the most oppressive of beginnings a person likeFrederick Douglass, or Malcolm X, can rise to accomplish astonishing things. 
I thought of Malcolm X while I was reading about Douglass and tried to imagine the conversations they might have.  I was struck by their mutual insistence that education was the key to freedom, and then about how much history, and truth, has been lost and denied as a result of oppression and suppression.  And it’s not as if racism stands alone.  Racism, Classism, Ableism, Sexism, Heterosexism, and so many other “isms” beside, are all ways that some of us keep others of us in perpetual second class status, keep others of us as always being “other.”
Douglas knew this.   Back in the 1800s he was saying things like, “I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong.”  He fought for the rights, for the equality of African Americans, women, Native Americans, and recent immigrants.  He was even nominated, without his approval apparently, to be the first African American to run for Vice President as the running mate of Victoria Woodhull on Equal Rights Party ticket of 1872.  (And Woodhull’s an amazing story in her own right, but that’ll have to wait for another day.)
Here’s a cool fact – in 1848, at the Seneca Falls Convention at which Elizabeth Cady Stanton asked the delegates to pass a resolution asking for women’s suffrage, the convention was far from unified.  And then a 30-year old Frederick Douglass, the only African American in attendance, rose and spoke.  He said that he could not accept the right to vote as a Black man if women were denied that same right.  He said, “In this denial of the right to participate in government, not merely the degradation of woman and the perpetuation of a great injustice happens, but the maiming and repudiation of one-half of the moral and intellectual power of the government of the world.”  The resolution passed.
These are stories that need to be told, and retold, and engraved in our memories and on our hearts because unless we do we are really all still enslaved to them, whether we know it or not.  In the words of Emma Lazarus, who also composed the poem that stands at the base of the Statue of Liberty, “Until we are all free, we are none of us free.” She said this a few years after the time we’ve been talking about, and it’s a refrain lifted up again by President John F. Kennedy and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. fifty years ago, and they are still true today. We must always remember.  We must never forget.  And we must ever keep moving.

Pax tecum,

RevWik
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