UUA Conference in New York, New York, Accepts Black Caucus Demands for Black Affairs Council

Two events shook the Unitarian Universalist Association soon after its formation. Both were tied to the struggle for racial justice. One unified the denomination and reinforced its sense of being on the right side of that struggle. The other undermined that assumption and left wounds that, according to the source, have not healed.

On the evening of March 9, 1965, three UU ministers, the Revs. Orloff Miller, Clark Olsen, and James Reeb, were attacked by white racists as they left a restaurant in Selma, Alabama. Reeb was beaten so severely that he died two days later. The UUA board was meeting in Boston the next day and decided to bear witness. It adjourned in Boston and reconvened in Selma, and a second wave of UU ministers and laypeople joined them. The total UU presence reached about 200, along with 350 non-UU white clergy and religious.

Earlier that year, Jimmy Lee Jackson, a young sawmill worker and church deacon, had been murdered during voting rights demonstrations in Selma. After state police violently turned back a march to the state capital in Montgomery, Martin Luther King Jr. sent a telegram to leaders of all US denominations asking for support. More than 20 UU ministers and some laypeople responded. Then-UUA President the Rev. Dana McLean Greeley later recalled in his 1971 memoir that a procession of at least a thousand people marched to a police barricade, where they met state troopers. At Reeb’s memorial service, King delivered the memorial address, and Greeley was assigned to give the main prayer.

The national revulsion over the Selma murders, including that of Viola Gregg Liuzzo, a UU from Detroit who was killed in a separate incident in Selma, helped lead Congress to pass long-delayed civil rights legislation. The Reeb martyrdom became a central part of the denomination’s account of its racial record. The source notes that the story was often set alongside that of the Rev. Theodore Parker, who harbored fugitive slaves, and it adds that many UU ministers and congregations had contributed to racial progress. Yet the source also observes that not all UUs responded to Reeb’s death in the same way. In 1968, Heyward Henry, chair of the newly formed Black Unitarian Universalist Caucus, said that Unitarians had kept asking why black UUs were rejecting them, and he pointed to the difference in response between Jackson’s killing and Reeb’s.

The source says the denomination’s record was less unified than it recalled. Its congregations remained overwhelmingly white, and only a handful of African Americans had ever been ordained as Unitarian, Universalist, or UU ministers. The shift from civil rights to calls for black empowerment came quickly. After the 1967 riots, the Rev. Homer Jack, director of the UUA Department of Social Responsibility, called an Emergency Conference on Unitarian Universalist Response to the Black Rebellion. About 135 people, including 37 African Americans, met at New York’s Biltmore Hotel. The source says that whether the participants fairly represented the denomination was disputed and remains contested.

Soon after the conference began, 30 of the 37 African American delegates withdrew to form the Black Unitarian Universalist Caucus. The caucus’s core demand was that the UUA board establish a Black Affairs Council, appointed by the caucus and funded for four years at $250,000 a year. When the full conference reconvened, it accepted the caucus demands, though some participants left in protest. Not all black delegates agreed with the caucus. Cornelius McDougald, an African American who chaired the UUA Commission on Religion and Race, refused to join it. The source reports that the split among black UUs soon threatened to divide the denomination, and that for about 10 years the acronyms BAC and BAWA marked its deepest division. Accountability and honest dealing were central to the disputes that followed, and the source reports that the division persisted.

After the Biltmore conference, the Department of Social Responsibility received many angry letters and calls. Jack circulated a letter to UU congregations that summarized critics’ claims that the caucus was racist, used totalitarian methods, and spoke for only a fraction of black UUs. He answered that separatism was a tactic rather than a goal, that the denomination had precedent for “cabals, secret caucuses—and worse,” and that 30 of the 37 black UUs at the conference had joined the caucus. He also wrote that “revolutions are never reasonable or rational.” The source says his appeals for forbearance came too late. A 1983 Commission on Appraisal report on these events concluded, “Sides had been chosen and alternatives were not to be explored. Confrontation [was] in the air.”

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