 My name is John Hurley. I serve the Unitarian Universalist Association as Director of Communications. And I'm honored to welcome you to Voices of the Veterans. In his 1966 Ware lecture to our General Assembly, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King exhorted Unitarian Universalists to don't sleep through the revolution. He told the story of Rick Van Winkle, the classic Washington early story about Rip, who slept for 20 years. But Dr. King noted that the most striking aspect of that story was not that Rip slept for 20 years, but that when he went up the mountain, the picture on the sign of the inn was King George III of England. And when he came down 20 years later, it was George Washington. Rip had slept through the revolution. I suggest to you that our seven presenters here this afternoon did not sleep through the revolution. Mark Morrison Reed, in his moving keynote this morning, reminded us that the grounding of our work is in the lived experience of authentic relationships. Our seven presenters today are going to talk to you about their role in the movement and the authentic relationships that motivated them. Our speakers are in order, Susan Butler, the Reverend Clark Olson, the Reverend Jim Hopart, Robert Williams, Patricia Jefferson, Hollis Houston, and the Reverend Liz McMaster. They'll each give a brief presentation, following which, following all seven of them, there will be time for some questions. And I ask that those of you who would like to ask questions come to the microphone. And please make your questions short and a question. Thank you. Our first speaker is Susan Butler. Good afternoon. Everybody here? Yes. First of all, I wanted to thank Paul Murray of the Anna College for loving what we have and the Unitarian Universalists, especially Chinese, for including me in this wonderful conference. I've been so, so impressed by your warmth and your acceptance of everyone. On March 7th of 1965, my sister and I were watching Judgement in Edinburgh. I was glad to hear that referred to this morning. When it was interrupted by a news bulletin depicting the atrocities that were occurring in Selma. In the blink of an eye, we had moved from the terrible situation with the Jews in World War II under the Third Reich, to a very, very frighteningly similar situation in our own self. It was a stunning parallel. During the week that followed, Dr. King made an appeal to the churches and churchmen to come down to Selma. I don't know what to say. During the week, I personally received a call from Al Gordon, who was a fellow New York City public school teacher, and had been a freedom writer. I had worked in Mississippi this summer before during the Freedom Summer. So I was familiar with what was going on in the South. And I called to see if I would go with him to Selma. That was instantly a yes. I remember that Saturday at most of the 13th, we went to a, my sister and I actually, took our parents to one of our data concerts at Terrible in New York City. And it was a very tense situation on the one hand, because I decided not to tell my parents about going to Selma after having seen their reaction to my being in Mississippi. So at the end, everything was fine until the end of the concert when Odetta, as an encore, said, ain't no grave going to hold this body down. And dedicated it to Jimmie Lee Jackson and James Rhee, who had died just the day before the day of trial. Then I got very nervous, not about coming to Selma, but about my parents somehow being intuitive about the whole situation. On March 14th, Alan and I flew to Montgomery and were given housing with an absolutely wonderful woman and her family, Mrs. Howard, on Eugene Street in Selma. Now Mrs. Howard was the soul of endurance. She was a lady who worked very, very hard. She was up at 3.30 or 4 o'clock in the morning. And she worked in a stock factory all day long and never got home until late at night. Yet she was a lady who provided not only for her children, but she provided so beautifully for Alan and I. And as though it was perfectly normal to be functioning fully on a bad four hour sleep at night, it was still amazing. During the week, a lot of different things happened during the week. On Monday, there was an aborted launch. That was a spontaneous launch that James Foreman had called with students from the university there that was blocked in and stopped by the local police. And some of the students were very badly beaten. Two days later, Dr. King called a rally in Montgomery. Alan and I, and here's another connection. We got arrived down to Montgomery with Unitarian ministers. And that was really the first time I had had anything to do with that particular religion. When we got to Montgomery, there was a rally in the Black area with just many people speaking and getting people around. And we marched down to the campus where Dr. King and James Foreman were meeting with Sheriff Butler to try and iron out some new rules regarding assemblage. The heavens opened in the afternoon and it started at 72 degrees and poured and actually hailed. And the temperature dropped about 30 degrees. While this was happening, finally about 5 o'clock, Dr. King and James Foreman came out and they told us that we should go home, but they were still negotiating. And in the midst of all this, Andrew Young came out and he came out to tell them that John Johnson had just ruled that we could have the launch, that it was our constitutional right to have the launch. So in spite of being drenched, we were thrilled. Now I'm getting my one minute sign, so I'm going to close off just by saying one or two words about the children in Selma. And they were everywhere. They were wonderful little girls, skipping around there, a couple little girls coming up to us and asking us for our autographs, which in turn I have sent for theirs, because they were far more important than I am. After that, there was an incident on the street where an older man and an older white man got down on one knee with a three-year-old when now and I were walking back. And he pointed to us and told that little boy that he wanted him to be sure that he would recognize white niggers. Interesting, just the difference between the two experiences. But later on, we also met a couple of older college students who asked us. They wanted to know why we were here. And I rethought that little boy who I wouldn't have given it prayer for chance to when I talked to these kids because they knew that there was something that they didn't understand. Thank you. I'm Clark Olson, now living in Asheville, North Carolina. You know a little bit of my story anyway from Mark Morrison Greene's talk this morning, wonderful talk. Just, I'll try to say very briefly, that going to sell one was a decision which, as he described, at first I thought I don't have money. And then, well, I did have the money cut off my excuses. And I decided to go. I just decided to go. I had no idea they had done it themselves before. But I assumed it was 1,800 clergy, Sheriff Clark's deputies were not going to, were the state troopers were not going to attack. And that I'd be safe. Those are the assumptions I made. I went to Selma, and you know the story of what happened. Let me say just briefly about that, that it was very, very scary. It was not quite as portrayed in the film. First of all, in the film, Jim Rhee was accompanied by one person. But there were two of us, Orloff Miller, or you're sitting here someplace. The guy saw you, come in over here. Orloff and I were both there at the time. And contrary to the film, Jim Rhee was not hit multiple times by a club. He was hit just one time on the head as he was walking beside us. But that one club fell to him and led him to soon the incoherent babbling. Orloff and I managed to get him around the corner to the Boynton Insurance Agency and from there to an ambulance. The ambulance set a flat tire with a car full of whites pulled up behind us. We didn't know we were on a country road, the radio and telephone, and the ambulance didn't work. And I remember thinking, oh my god, this is all the conspiracy, possibly. And I'm going to be in a ditch tonight along with Shore Merchant and Goodman who have been found in a ditch just three or four months before. I was really afraid. Orloff I think wasn't so afraid because he kept taking notes on the whole thing. We haven't compared degrees inside fairness, but I'm sure that would be Orloff on that. In addition, I had a childhood history of rheumatic fever when I was 12 and 16 years old. So my heart valves didn't work very well. They were a badly scarred. And I now have artificial valves and operated on a battery, which has been the case for the last 20 years or so. But at that time, that heart, I'm like, Mark, he can't talk without crying, either. No, I wish I worked like Mark. Anyway, it was an important part of me growing up. My parents were told by doctors they didn't tell me. But my parents were told by doctors when I was 16 years old that I probably wouldn't live to be 21. I'm now 81. So for the first 20 years, virtually, I don't remember speaking to any groups. I spoke to my congregation when I returned from Selma in Berkeley. But I don't remember speaking to any other groups for at least 20 years. There was when Eyes on the Prize came out, and then Black History Month, and then Martin Luther King's birthday. Then I began to get invitations to speak. And since then, I felt privileged. I felt it a gift. I felt it a gift that I was able to tell the story. I felt it a gift that I was not on that side of the sidewalk. I was on that side. I was a gift that I was alive and I was healthy. And over the years, the meaning grew. As people asked me, what do you think was the meaning of all this? What did it do, et cetera? Well, one of the things that came out of that very strong for me was that it was the death of the white person, the white minister. That was the final tipping point for the passage of the Voting Rights Bill. I think even the movie suggests that. But I believe that's quite true. Today's New York Times has, on the website, has an interview with me. And you may see that the headline is Calls to Selva. At the time, I learned some years ago that research at the Johnson Library showed that President Johnson had made, in reference to Jimmie Lee Jackson's death, Johnson had made not one phone call, zero. But in reference to Jim Reeves' death, there were, I had been told, 57. But the New York Times, in the last two days, fact-checked it and found it was about 50 calls that had been made. The difference between the two is just enormous. And for me to be able to stand up before blacks and whites and tell blacks and have blacks realize, yes, that whites were there, it wasn't that all of that is, all the civil rights stuff is not just Martin Luther King. It was a lot of people who did a lot of things, suffered a great deal, and among them, a white people were there. And by the nature of the racism in our society, it was the death of a white minister that was the tipping point. I say that not out of pride, but out of political reality. I think that's true. I believe that's true. So I'll leave it at that. That's my lesson from it. And I feel very privileged, very privileged. Just a half an hour ago, I had a call from Al Jazeera checking another fact. They're putting up something in two hours on the internet about this whole thing from an interview they had with me. So I've had opportunities galore in the last three months to speak about that. And I love it. It's been a gift to me, and I greatly appreciate it. Relational quality of the involvement and so on. And speaking to the relational quality, I would like to acknowledge that, in addition to these people sitting up here, that as I look out into the audience here, I see five or six or maybe more veterans who are not represented up here. And I think we need to acknowledge all of them. I'm not gonna start to mention the names because I probably didn't have to miss some of them. I'm a Southern Unitarian Universalist. grew up in New Orleans and Charleston, South Carolina and Birmingham, Alabama. There's a special quality about that and especially applied to Birmingham even more than the other places that my father served as a Unitarian Universalist minister when I was growing up. And in Birmingham, simply to choose to walk across the door and come into the church as a statement. And you didn't have to say anything. You didn't have to do anything else. That identifies you as a person of a certain type. So that's the kind of Unitarianism that I grew up in and that I carried with me as I went off into college and then to theological school. So it was just crystal clear to me that social justice was an integral part of what the church was about. So I graduated theological school in 1964 and I started my first ministry in a little town up to the Massachusetts and that was the summer of 64. And of course, we began to be aware of things from getting developed in Selma shortly after the first of the year. My first actual direct connection to what was going on in Selma was I got a telephone call on Tuesday evening the 9th from Jack Mendelson. And he said, do you know any doctors in Birmingham we can trust that General Reeve has been injured and he's going up to Birmingham. So I put them in touch with some doctors that I knew in Birmingham. I'm quite confident that he would have been well treated even without that but it was nice to kind of have that reassurance. At that point, my father was the Associate Regional Director for the Southeastern United States. So he was in Atlanta and he had been going back and forth from Atlanta to Selma, often to carry people there. So that happened on Tuesday night and I immediately decided that it was time for me to go but I knew I had some political work to do first because I did not want to go without the support of my congregation, especially the leadership of my congregation. So it took me several days to build that support so that I could go off comfortably and not feel I was going to have a problem when I returned to my church. So I left for Alabama on the 14th, the next Sunday. Got to Atlanta and my father carried me over to Birmingham and I was there over to Selma and I was there in time for Martin Luther King's address for the Memorial Service for James Reed. There's so many stories I could tell but let me mention two things in particular. The two men that I want to identify that were so important to what happened to me when I was in Selma. The names may be familiar to some of them some of you James Orange, have you ever heard of James Orange? Yep. And Albert Turner and I literally went into their hands as they carried me around through Selma and outside of Selma went to marry in Alabama to talk with the white ministers there which was quite an experience. And Albert Turner was my guide on that trip. This, you know, I had been all up to that point about social justice and how it worked but what I discovered in Selma was that how important it was for the people who were suffering the indignities of the injustice to be in charge. And I was able to put my life into their hands for what they wanted me to do not for me to make the decision. So it moved from up here down deep into my guts and it's remained that way for me all the rest of my life as we move in this last 50 years from civil rights to black empowerment and on up to 2015. So that's the basic story that there's so many incidents that I could report but the big message again is Mark's message about a relationship and I've built those relationships and they've carried me forward in my life and in my ministry and in the social justice work I've been involved in. Unitarian Universalist presentation Misunderstanding the journey of Blackville Agnostic. I had some delightful experiences traveling and sharing that story but I just want to key in on the Black Belt part today briefly. It is of course the part of the country that I'm from here in Alabama. The Black Belt hometown is a little place called Union Town, Alabama right on the other side of Selma. I know most of the streets and roads throughout that area personally. Marion, Selma, Hainville down in Lowndes County, Montgomery. I'm very much acquainted with those places and what I saw happening in Selma of course what I preceded at Montgomery and Birmingham caused me to think very differently about the general perception that we Black folk had of white folk. We learned that we definitely could put all white folk in the same belt and this goes back to boyhood, my friend, the experiences that I had growing up as a boy covered the range of experiences when you grew up in an oppressed group. But I hesitated throughout boyhood to share many of those experiences with others because it contradicted the general perception that most of our people had. What I'm saying very directly is that I discovered that there were a lot of people with European ancestry who were hoping, praying, waiting and working along besides to change what was happening in the South. My experience with respect to the Selma in Montgomery March was quite frankly at the end of it. I was in a man found development training program. It was a federal program that started on the MDTA Act and that was one of two African-Americans involved in that. And they wouldn't let us have the integrated program in John Patterson Technical School in Montgomery so they arranged for it to be a building on the western side of Montgomery. Fairview Avenue and those of you who marched in from Selma know that West Fairview was the turning point for you to get off Highway 80 and come up into Montgomery to say to you, clean the avenue which is down roads of parks that have been going on downtown. The particular day the March Act arrived in Montgomery, I had to be in school. There were 25 men in this program. There were two of us African-Americans. The one, the other one didn't come to school that day and he didn't go enjoy the March either. He was, in my opinion, just scared. So for whatever reason, I was there with the other 23 men and they were of various ages from somewhere around age 21 up to about age 75. These were men who basically were involved in many of the electronic training, development and engineering projects from World War II, some of them career war and the younger men like myself. I don't know who it was. That was one of the advanced scouts with the March from Selma, but at that time they had to check out buildings as they were coming in to see if there were people who were in hiding with rifles and guns to shoot at the marches. And to this day, I don't know who the brother was. He came in with his overalls on and he looked and he was startled. He drove back and said, what's going on here? And he came directly over to me and I can sense there was a little fear there. He said, brother, is everything all right? I looked around and said, yeah, this is a school and we're studying electronics here. And he said, I feel so much better, all right, carry on. Yeah. What he did though, and this is something that I've shared only once or twice. There was one elderly gentleman that had brought a gun to school with him that day. And I saw him showing it to another elderly white gentleman that was with him on the work bench of where he was. There were two young white men that worked at my work station along with me and they were between the age of 21 and 25, I believe. They knew that, and I won't call this gentleman's name because he didn't shoot anybody that day, but they moved over towards me and said, brother, we're not gonna let anything happen here today. So you just be cool. And they kind of moved in close to me and they looked down at that other hand and there, the look in their eyes for me. Nothing is gonna happen here today. He put his gun away and went into another part of the young classroom. I'll never forget that. The two guys who said, we're not gonna have any problems here today. I discovered that to be a common thing throughout the 60s and the 70s. And this is where I got to meet Dr. John McKee, who was the first humanitarian that I met. He was the director of the prison project. Therefore, my work just be on into the prisons. And that is quite a story to tell. The prison, baby modification unit at Draper Prison became a model for the country in preparations to the next phase of the movement, the criminal justice phase. I'd like to talk about the criminal justice phase perhaps in little private sessions at this workshop if I have time. Thank you for all coming here. Thank you, Unitarians. I became one in 2004, and I am glad I found you. And beyond a measure, let me tell you why. At 10 years old, I grew up in Pensacola, which I grew to call Pensacola, because it was such a confusion with what to be and who to be. You were surrounded by all of these international people coming from all these exotic places in the world and you were this little colored girl with fountains and banners you couldn't stop to. You could go down town, you had to go back home to use the restroom, just all of these things. Having been the youngest of nine children, I was the ninth man out because everybody had a partner. And I was that little one that was born to the bank and everybody thought that they were the baby before I got there three years after. So it was kind of a challenge every day. I walked to this store called Van Meeters down the street from my home and that's where I went and get the notions from my mother and my grandmother. And one of those days, the black Muslim, they had a temple across the street from Van Meeters because we had our own little territory that we lived in and it was safe and it was wonderful and it was prosperous. But I, the little banker, wanted to see beyond that because that was that street where you couldn't go over. Our next-door neighbor built houses over there but you couldn't go see them. At any rate, all of these things were going on in my existence and that black Muslim said to me, hi little black girl, I assume that you're talking about, call it up, an intro, okay? And he commenced to Karenon to help me understand what he meant. And from that day forward, I pledged to know all that I could possibly know about why I was on this earth, why I came to whom I came to. I had lovely, adored, supported families. I had sisters who were going ahead and doing things. And I was just gonna give it all I got and I still have that same enthusiasm at age 66. That's why I'm here. Thank you for having me. I'm gonna add a couple of details about the experience in that quest though and one had to do with deciding to be a part of the integration of Pensacola High School. If you know anything about the sound here, this school was named after the city. It is the place to be. First, we consented to do it. I had information from my parents and they gave us a similar to an SAT test in the school on a Saturday for eight hours to see if we were bright enough. I to the state, I don't know whether I passed or failed because they broke it down demagogically to somebody's mother being a maid, somebody's father being a principal. My father was a union member truck driver. There were only eight of us who supposedly were accepted. So here we go at the age 15 to this old white school. When I say old white, I mean 708 students with 80 blacks and 700 whites. So being who I am, we organized ourselves a little area where we met every morning after the police would leave to do a head count. We did it in the morning, we did it in the afternoon. We transitioned into the white little blouses and plant skirts so we could show our camaraderie because once you got inside the corners of the school, we were like empty trees. Everybody went to the left, everybody went to the right and those people who might sneak a smile and the new people being white people, when they were that violent rank, they couldn't do that if they did that somewhere else. So we championed these mixed messages of what's okay with not okay. Well, I'm told that I left, that's a call to high school with my rebel flag ring, ruby $19 that my daddy raised particularly ill about. Having to pay the board, my mom said, you let it go, we encourage her to stay, she's gonna buy that ring. I later gave it away. I couldn't wait to get to Sean University and all black girls back to college in Raleigh, North Carolina to begin to be me. And the main thing came was the face of integration that only wanted access, it didn't want anything else. Hence the industry. Kenting, my royalty and the blood for my resistance, okay, that's what I'm about. I'm gonna own me what I'm gonna love and I'm gonna be a human being at any cost, every day, any day, all day. I had the privilege of being at all, being at Shaw, being selected to become a VISTA Shaw volunteer who sent to the nation's capital, and that's when I first felt at home because there were black mannequins in the windows down town. We could go downtown and shop with somebody that looked like me. We were placed in the homes of private citizens who had children or whatever and were there for two weeks and we lived their life and then we were sent out into the community into an agency and assigned. And again, my journey has just been in stages and back to Shaw, I was able to have an audience with Dick Gregory who spoke to our group. I was chosen as the bride for the first African wedding ceremony and I was the mom's bride. Of course, my sister's friend came run across campus to tell her she showed up for my wedding and she wasn't sure whether it was a wedding or whether it was a wedding, you know, a wedding. So there have been a lot of interesting experiences in my life because I just refused to lose who I am and I want to embrace all that I am as much as I can. Probably the revolutionary point for me was that it brought this festival in Los Angeles while visiting my sister one summer and that's when I said it's on, it's on, it's on. But I've since been a federal official, I've since worked with community organizations. I pretty much retired my spirit for a minute after working in HIVAs, casting and testing. I've been a life restoration mode at this point. Thank you for having me, thank you for being a part of that and I've gone home again because when I go back to Gainesville, Florida, I promise you I will be a voice in the Unitarian Universalist Association. Thank you so much. My name is Hollis Houston, I'm a chaplain in New York City. At 6.30 this morning, I woke up and opened the program for this meeting and checked the time and the place and then the title of this panel just went right through me and I said, well my wife says that since then I've looked like a tear in the headlights and I feel like a tear in the headlights because I am not worthy to be called a veteran of the movement, there are people on this table who are right there, right there at a sacred world changing moments and there are people out there hearing us but from the same thing I'm going to be said and I am not one of them. I was asked to be here because I came to the campus a few years after these events that had been in the theater for one hour activism in the movement. I had a certain experience, I'll try to tell you about it briefly. I was certainly raised to the struggle. My father was an extremely learned radical protest and minister whose last seven years of ministry were as an associate pastor in an African Methodist Episcopal Church in the north end of Hartford. I still don't quite know how he did that. So he was very glad that after my MA degree in 1970 I went to Tulum College, north of Jackson, Mississippi to be an instructor of German and speech. Now this was five decades ago, it was the very last stage when anybody could take a degree and go teach to the college. You know what I mean? Well, in any case, the market was such that I was the guy they picked and this was the job I got. I hadn't expected it, but I picked up everything and moved to Mississippi. I did not do well. My first semester was a disaster and in the second semester I picked up the pieces and I was learning some things but not fast enough nor in some respects the right things to see my job. And at the end of that all, I was handling it back to another degree and to graduate school. I was, here's the thing that I think made it important, maybe interesting. My task, which I began, was not to strike in the contract. It was for me to begin to figure out on what terms justice would be articulated in part between me and people who had been for centuries oppressed and denied anything and who would now be looking for it in new terms in a new kind of struggle. I had the privilege and the stressful experience of being taken behind the veil, if you know it was this book. I find that, I didn't know about the veil while I was being taken behind it and I learned later what that was that had happened and I still find that image to be very poignant and descriptive behind the veil to see things that ordinarily people like me don't get to see, didn't particularly then get to see. Things that maybe I wasn't supposed to see. Things I certainly wasn't supposed to take back to my white friends and tell them about. Sometimes it was difficult to articulate it to my black friends. It was a very lonely learning for 40 years by trying to make sense of that time. Here's the thing that, first of all, I'll just say I was of course totally inexperienced as a teacher and I was not well-formed as an adult human being at the time. It was lots of weakness on my part and I wish, sometimes I wish that I couldn't have confronted this challenge at a more mature time in my life and I could have made more of it before I had to leave it. But it has been with me forever and I'm gonna try to explain to you what was really Earth's shape for me and I do not mean necessarily in a pleasant way. The hardest thing for me to come to grips with as I watched performers, as I tried to get performances staged and sometimes succeeded at the beginning did not and I watched audiences of various kinds of presentations is that sometimes I would see black performers say things in a way or behave in a certain way that I hadn't been taught was despicable. No one could ever represent the black person that way and I would say to myself, oh my God, this room is not going to accept this at all and I would wait and I would not only accept it. I'm breaking a chair. It's a very good question. Maybe you should have been a different person who was here but how to understand that and articulate it? I think it has to do with the veil. I think it has to do with the double consciousness that when people have been oppressed for so long they must present what can be called a mask to the powers function. Reserving their presentation, their authentic self for each other and for themselves and then a complicated things happen. The mask becomes written on from underneath and the mask becomes double and the mask becomes sometimes a proud achievement, a way of surviving the unsurvivable, a proud thing that people do not. There are aspects of culture that keep coming up and keep being argued over. I think the one I'm going to choose is language. Mark Twain has gotten in trouble when he tried to describe the language of the only human being that Humpfin could trust when he tried to represent that person's language and he didn't try to represent it as a way of person's language, he tried to represent it as something else and he's gotten in trouble for that. Who is he to say that? He's not accurate, it's to be honest. Well, that's an argument that goes on. Scott Jumlin wrote an opera called Tremonisha and in that opera, in that opera, a great black musical artist, some of the characters need what could be called a dialect and sometimes when that opera has been staged as at the Houston Grand Opera in 1975, the language was cleaned up and I say to myself, what authority would a person like me have to clean up the language of a great black artist to make it more like mine and make me so that I will feel better? What is that? And when now, at the opera theater of St. Louis a couple of decades later, they consulted with a black studies professor at Washington University and he said, no, no. First of all, this is Joplin's presentation in his own community and second, it's integral to the plot. Some characters having this language and some do not and so they restored and played it authentically. So, let's speak just about the language and want to conclude a point about language. I've been back to Timberloo twice. The first time was about 40 years after I taught there. I just wandered through and I saw the places I'd worked and I walked outside for a little parking lot outside and when I came out to that parking lot, there was a red convertible and a gentleman came and sat down in that car and he said, hello, sir. And I said, hi. And he said, are you here for the conference? I said, what conference? He said, the Gullah language conference. And we got to talking, he put in my hand a red belt volume of the New Testament in Gullah. I looked at that book and I paged through it and I pulled out the beatitudes and I started to read them. And I know I read them all and I know it's not my language but what I felt I held in my hand was an improved text proofed by scholars but particularly endorsed by that group of my fellow Americans to say this is our language which we are proud of. And I felt that I had been in touch with something authentic and I would have to say that in my still rambling behind the veil, a place where I had, I mean, no one qualified to be but I was pulled in there a long time ago, I have to keep looking for moments like that. I've been watching you, this is wonderful. I also don't feel that I belong here. I thought that, that I probably didn't belong here but I think I do because I know so many women who wanted to go to Selma but I had to stay home with the children. And we are region. My husband and my three children ages six months to seven years moved to Atlanta from New Jersey in 1961. And I saw a world that I'd never seen before. Segregation was still right on. I lived in a neighborhood where segregation was right on high. And I found both Unitarian Universalism and the Civil Rights Movement at the same time and started to find out who I really was. Jeanne Pickett was my minister in the Unitarian Universalist congregation in Atlanta, UCA, grew from 120 members downtown of the Unitarian Liberal Church to a church, to a church that we built out in a not the best place in town but with a red line every place we tried to find a place for home, grew to 1200 members. Jeanne was my mentor and my friend and to him I started in 62 or three or four in 64 with a down time, Rose got through. My four-year-old daughter had to go with me because I didn't have any other place for her. And we took the kids out of the country where they'd never been before. I'm sure there were snakes in the wood pile in Manhattan. They were scared to death of the dark because they had been in the city where it really gets dark. By 1965, I had been volunteering for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the first time I went down to Sweetwater I was scared because it was the name of the wood that I didn't know. But I knew I needed to be with people who thought the same way I would. So then we got the call for Selma and I said to my husband, go on to go home. And he said, well, you're not. You had children to take care of. And although I didn't take it at the time I'm pretty sure that it's because he was scared to death and he didn't know how. So I picked up all the blankets in the house except a few on our beds and took them to Jean to take Selma. I became more involved with equal in the church. I knew some of the best black people and some of the best white people I'll ever know in my life during those times. And but I guess the thing that I remember the most is that the day after Dr. King died I got a call from a good friend of the church to ask if I would go to the airport and pick up Rabbi Heschel and his wife and his child and take them to Dr. King's house. I've done voter registration. I knew where Dr. King and Coretta and the children live. And so I took a good rabbi and his wife and his child and then did what I could. I went out and got cigarettes and camera film for whoever needed it. And about 10.30 before just as people were starting to hit for Ebenezer. Somebody finally decided that somebody needed to stay in the house because you know that's a good time for me and me when everybody's at the funeral. And so I was asked to stay at Dr. King's house to watch his funeral on his television set. That was pretty amazing. And then I went and picked up my family and we walked across town to more house for the rest of the day's program. For about six months after Dr. King died, a bunch of us went down to the King house and sort of mailed, we'd go about two or three times a week and Mrs. King, Coretta would come down and speak to us and thank us for what we were doing. We handled over a million pieces of mail from all over the world that they would bring in from the post office and it was really big postal bags. Just sorting them as to country, state, city, whatever. It was one of the highest privileges of my life. And I owe it to just pure luck that brought me to Atlanta when I did, when we moved there, to Gene Kickett and the rest of the UUCAA friends that I've kept all this time. I'm grateful to all of you who came here and I'm grateful to those of you on the planning committee who worked so hard and so long to put this together. Thank you. Something I wanted to reflect that I'm not so sure I covered in my message is I think that this room and this table represents what's good in the world, that we, the differences are sitting together and we're communicating and we're learning and we're open and we're kind and I just feel like this is human royalty and maybe contagious. Woo! Are there questions for any of our panelists? Would you go to the microphone, please? Thank you. Hi, I guess I just would like to direct this to you, Rev. Olson, given what you witnessed and what you experienced there and maybe the rest of you too, I'm wondering with your thoughts and feelings on what the Supreme Court did to the Civil Rights Act a few years ago. Well, I'm appalled by it. I guess I don't need to bring the alone details, but I'm reasonably comfortable, comfortable in that there are rising in the country voices and gatherings that are going to do something about that. The most exciting experience I had in that regard is being among the 80,000 people who was in Raleigh some months ago when Regent Barber, the Reverend Barber's folk, he speaks to our warning and saying, all right, with us, I should say, he is a very dynamic person and if there's anything that could change Alabama, sorry, North Carolina, that's where I'm from, if there's anything that could change it, he's among them and he's got a lot of followers so I'm pleased that he's got a lot of followers and fellow workers, I won't say followers, fellow workers. That's happening and I'm confident that there's enough beginning to happen at least around the country as a reaction to all that. It may take a while, it took a long time to 100 years to get the Blacks registered to vote in the South and hopefully it will not take 100 years. It may, more than anything else, simply take the demographic shifts which are already underway in our culture. Thank you. Conch area, we're voting in turn versus the first amendment. I've already started to address it, I've been concerned about the late and racism that's really risen up with the election of Barack Obama, how do you see that we can move into the future and do something to address that overcoming? Would you like to address that to a specific panelist? No, I think all of them have, I see it as a problem. Does someone like you yield that? I'm sorry, please. I am a take action person, I think that we thought we had is the beginning of something that can make a difference. I started a group on Facebook and I'm determined that that social media vehicle, it has so much power that we've just not tapped and we've not really maximized the impact it can have on our society. But the page that I started is called For the Children. And I'm back to the whole village concept from the motherland to neighborhoods that when something happens, when you learn something, you share it and teach the children. So I have to stop myself from just constantly trying to re-educate and have us rethink who we are as human beings regardless of color and that we all believe and that we all blend. And I'm trying to approach that over two different angles. One is over here we have the group that needs to understand that they are kings and queens, that their stage is in their struggle and that they've come beyond some stages of this time to embrace their worthiness and their wealth. Over here I'm saying to this other that's involved with the participants, we're all one, we think, we can speak, we can agree to disagree, let's forgive, let's love more consciously. Thank you, Jim. Yeah, I think in America the history of racism has been when it's been dealt with in one way, like the end of slavery, it morphs into something else. So it's a continuing issue and a problem in this society. I think that blatant racism has to be met with breaking justice, unapologetically, blatant justice. And that requires immunity and it requires institutionalization. And that's the answer that I would have to expressions of blatant racism. Thank you, Jim. I have a brief comment, that's a very good question. And it's one that's been discussed quite a bit since Barack Obama's been president. One thing that I've had some difficulty with my grandfather's office, they are now 21 twins. We raised them from three months old so we've gotten to know each other very intimate. And we've had some difficult discussions about race prior to because they occurred when you're not ready to talk about stuff like that. And it generally comes up like a Barack Obama's first black president, et cetera, again, for some reason, I have to all the way start an argument by saying, listen son, Barack Obama had a black father and a white mother. How come you always want to ignore the fact that his mother is black to you? He is not a black or a white man, like Barack Obama's president of the United States of America. Black and white. That's the case, and he doesn't think of himself as just a black man. Said, look at the pictures of his mom and his grandparents, et cetera, and the one you see as his father. Barack Obama is us. And in order to punctuate that, set my DNA sample off so that I could find some of my father's relatives, my dad, who I don't know. And this is what I'm gonna conclude with. I have something like 975 relatives in 23andme, Ancestry.com, have them put that picture there. And I want you to know something. Three fourths of those relatives in 23andme DNA database, Robin Williams or Europeans, they are white. And we know how that happened. So I have no problem with discussing race ever again. It does not matter to me again. Dick Gilbert, Rochester, New York. I had one problem with Mark's work, the Selma Awakening. I discussed it with him. I think he agrees with me on it. And that is, why do we have to wait for a dramatic and horrific event like Selma to be awakened? What do we do for the long hard slog of justice-making when there aren't Selmas to motivate us to stir us up? And I worry about that in our own movement that we seem only to react to the dramatic, we don't have to persist to discipline to carry on that kind of struggle without the Selmas happening. For anybody who'd like to tackle. I'd like to go back to a point that Mark made reference to as a matter of fact. That is, it has, one of the things that's come to me in the last years. What I've done about speaking about Selma and so on, and I know so many of the, as a result of my situation, I've come to know many of the civil rights people. But one thing I know that I have not done, and I realize this in the last, let's say, 10 to 15 years, is that I haven't reached out into the community and simply gotten to know more people on a one-to-one basis. And I changed that four or five years ago when my wife and I ceased to belong to the YMCA in town, and are now members and have been for four or five years with the YWCA, which is mostly women, but it's also black, mostly blacks. And I have among many individual friendships that reaching out on a social basis, on a daily basis, on a friendly basis, on a person-to-person basis. I've really enjoyed that, and I've never had that experience in my life before of reaching out in that way. And I think that's one piece of the solution. All of us, taking every inspiring opportunity we have to meet people and become friends with people and to know a person as a person rather than a race. By the way, I also mentioned Lewis Gates' program, the tracing of DNAs. And I love the idea that there's no such thing as race. There's no such thing as race. My name is Lillian New York, this is for you, Jim. What was it like to talk to these white clergy in Marion, Alabama? The white clergy in Birmingham? Oh, the white clergy in Marion, you know, okay. This was a group of, the group that went over there was a group of northern white clergy to go meet with their southern clergy colleagues in the city. I got assigned to the Methodist Church. And so Albert Turner that I mentioned earlier saw that I got there, and we went in and sat down with this minister. Now, this was a minister who had been educated, I forget whether it was in Vanderbilt or whether it was in Atlanta, in Canberra. But, you know, so this man was not some sort of uneducated southern racist. He was in a terrible, terrible situation. There had been a rumor started in town that one of the local restaurant owners had served black people in the white board of the restaurant, which had not happened, but the rumor got started. And so white started boycotting his restaurant. And so this minister took his wife and his children and went to the restaurant to support this man. And just for that simple act, you know, he was suddenly marked as a troublemaker. It was really hard for those white clergy in a small town like that to take very much of a progressive position, even though their education and ministry had prepared them for that. It was an awful place to have to be. And I don't know what transpired with the others because that was who I wanted to see. Thanks, Jim. Bruce Pollock Johnson from Philadelphia. I wanted to follow up on Dick Gilbert's question and comments. I don't know the details. I'm sure there are people in the room here who do better, but Selma didn't just happen. The idea is you look for the places in the system where there are injustices. You look to see where you can find a place that will expose the brutality that has to come out of a different force, whatever that structure is. And that's when something happens. You know, just wait until it happens. You need to orchestrate carefully, strategically, how do you find those most critical structures and expose them. And I think that's, we've got minds here that are tuned into that. And that's what we should be spending some of our time doing is thinking about what are the structures now that are causing Ferguson and other things? Where can we have the leverage? It's harder to see. It was a lot more visible when you had a segregated cell. That's our challenge. And I hope we can all brainstorm together to think about what those strategies and what those points are. Thank you. John, can I say something? I think Bruce makes me think too that there are an awful lot of issues out today. Maybe they're always had been. It just seems that we hear about them because of electronics. And I know I was in one of our churches talking about legislative action some time ago. And as I led to go to coffee hour, one of the women said, oh, so many issues. And I said, then just pick one. And work like your life dependable. Thank you, Liz. I think this needs to be our last question. Hi, I'm Mark Ross, Director of Economy and Development at the UA. And I've noticed that there's a lot of collective justice for making life experience right up here on the stage. And back in the 60s, most of y'all were the age that our millennials or post millennials are today who are currently engaged in activism. And this is a question for each one of you. In one sentence, what wisdom would you share with our youth today? One sentence. No, don't pile up the dependent clause, see that? Susan. That's really very hard. That's it. I think that I would say hold on and keep your eyes open and your time will come. Do something. Step up. You never know what may happen. Look what happened to me. Do something. That's it. Connect to institutions that are working for justice. Get ready to work with people you've never worked with before because this plan is changing. What do you believe? To quote my friend Gordon Gibson, show up, shut up, listen, make yourself useful and let go of the results so that your life, the arc of history, is longer than yours. Be present. Susan. Clark. Jim. Robert. Patricia. Hollis. Liz. Thank you.