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Dear Friends,
Several months ago, my colleague and friend, the Very Rev. Renee McKenzie Hayward, with whom I share leadership of the Antiracism Commission of the Diocese of Pennsylvania, asked me to join her in a presentation about our work to the Episcopal Church Club, a venerable institution that meets monthly here in Philadelphia. We decided that I would try to establish a little historical context for the work we are doing; and then she would talk about that work itself, and our future. What follows are my remarks, delivered today, which uncharacteristically I wrote out and which I thought might interest some of you who have been companions and/or observers of this ministry over the years. This is also being sent out to St. Mary's Constant Contact List by email. If you'd like to be on that list, email Doug Watts at St. Mary's, st.marys@verizon.net.
I'll be happy to read and respond to, if I have time, any comments you may have.
Be well. Blessings in this Holy Week.
Jim Littrell
Remarks to the Episcopal Church Club
The Rev. James H. Littrell
Vice-Chair
The Antiracism Commission of the Diocese of Pennsylvania
April 19, 2011
For the memory of Paul Washington, Margaret Moore and Mamie Wiggins, and in gratitude for the life-giving spirit of the women at the Church of the Holy Apostles and the Mediator in Philadelphia, who at a time when I was wounded and tired invited me in, knew me, loved and cared for me, and finally healed me.
One thing alone I charge you, as you live, believe in Life! Always human beings will live and progress to greater, broader and fuller life. The only possible death is to lose belief in this truth simply because the Great End comes slowly, because time is long.
--The last instruction of W.E.B. Du Bois
Good afternoon, my friends.
Thanks for your hospitality and for your dedication to the important work of educating Episcopalians and our friends about much of the important ministry that goes on under the extraordinarily broad rubric of the Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania. I especially want to thank Penny Cutler for her invitation to my colleague and friend, Dean Renee McKenzie-Hayward, to speak to the Club today about the work of the Anti-Racism Commission of the Diocese and Renee for her invitation to me to share this podium with her.
I have never in my life more enjoyed and learned so much from a collegial partnership than from the one I have shared with Renee in the leadership of the Commission for the last seven years. It’s just as safe to say that Renee’s work in the Diocese has created a new, vigorous, and prophetic path for all of us in relation to that thorniest and most difficult of American issues, race and racism.
Our idea for today is that I, being much Renee’s senior, will give a brief but pithy overview of the development across time of the work of anti-racism in the Diocese. Many of you share that kind of seniority with me, and so will remember, no doubt, our prophetic predecessors in the work, and all of the ups and downs, steps and missteps, rough places and plain, that constitute, I believe, the slow and painful progress we have made as a diocese toward becoming an anti-racist diocese—we say that is our mission as a Commission and an essential part of our mission as a diocese—over the last half century. None of us exists or works in a vacuum—historical or ontological. There is much to remember and learn from our history, and I’m going to aim especially at the last half century, beginning about 1962.
Before that, of course, there were markers of change in our common life. We remember and celebrate the determination toward freedom, equality, and self-determination that led to the establishment of what we now know as the African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas in 1794 and the ordination eight years later of Absalom Jones as the first African American priest in the Episcopal Church. (It’s important to remember, lest we be subject to a mistaken sense of false progressive pride for the prophetic vision of our forbearers, that not until 1864—a full year after the Emancipation Proclamation—were African Americans in general and the St. Thomas delegation specifically given a vote in our Diocesan Convention.) In the Commonwealth, as Lorene Cary reminds us in The Price of a Child and historical markers throughout Philadelphia attest, agents of the underground railroad were powerful, courageous witnesses against the evils of slavery, which persisted all around them. Born in 1868, W.E.B. Du Bois—in my own view the most powerful analyst of and voice against racism ever heard in our nation—became a model and challenge for all of us who would, however haltingly, try to do this work. Though some of his views (particular his early notion of a ‘talented tenth’ in the Black community) changed and evolved over time, the findings and related assertions in his first ground-breaking book, The Philadelphia Negro, researched and written during the two years he lived in our city in the mid-1890’s, are as cogent and challenging today as they were more a century ago. Of the role of the black church in American society, Du Bois said, in a remark that provides important context for the angry conversation that is going on in the Diocese right now—all these years later—that blacks who attended church went for a social gathering first and religion second. Du Bois said that church “introduces the stranger to the community, it serves as a lyceum, library, and lecture bureau—it is, in fine, the central organ of the organized life of the American Negro.” This is exactly the assertion, or at least part of it, that my friend and colleague Jane Cosby and others make in their passionate argument for sustaining the black parishes of our diocese even when they cannot and may never be fully self-sustaining. Paul Washington, about whom more in a moment, used to say the question was not whether the Diocese could afford such parishes but whether the Diocese could afford not to have them.
In Du Bois’s Wikipedia article, his biographer David Levering Lewis is quoted as saying, “In the course of his long, turbulent career, W. E. B. Du Bois attempted virtually every possible solution to the problem of twentieth-century racism—scholarship, propaganda, integration, national self-determination, human rights, cultural and economic separatism, politics, international communism, expatriation, third world solidarity.” We who work toward a diocese that is actively anti-racist continue precisely that enterprise. I remind people over and over that the work of changing the institutions that mark and sustain racism in our diocese will take all of us the rest of our lives, and then some. Ours will not be the quick turn-around or the two- or three-year transformation. And yet…
I arrived in the Diocese, a wayward Quaker-Presbyterian hybrid recently become an Episcopalian, by way of the welcoming and imaginative invitation of a bishop some of you may remember, Robert L. DeWitt. Let’s move quickly, then, to 1962, that year I mentioned earlier. Remember that the ‘Philadelphia Negroes’ of DuBois’s time were now a much larger part of Philadelphia’s population, thanks to the great northern migration of the 30’s and 40’s, during and after which a deep-rooted civil rights movement had birthed and become a powerful voice for racial justice here in the city of brotherly love. All that powerful witness is detailed in a great book I commend to you called Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia by Matthew Countryman.
As I came into the Diocese, Paul Washington’s prophetic ministry at the Advocate was just three years old. He, David Gracie, Sue Hiatt, Mattie Humphrey, Barbara Harris, John Elliott Churchville, Bishop DeWitt and others became a powerful team; but the captain of the team, at least in our Diocese and in the Episcopal Church, was Paul. His is the voice I first heard and still hear, at any rate. DeWitt provided him, and me, and many others, with his increasingly wise counsel and unwavering support. But it is the face of Paul I see in subsequent years, though often side by side with DeWitt. Paul asked the important questions that moved Bob DeWitt from a pastor to the privileged to a prophet and pastor to the disenfranchised. So it is Paul who is the chief marker for me for the last fifty years, as the Diocese, led by a series of often unwittingly prophetic bishops and laity, engaged and re-engaged with the ugly realities of a racist church and society.
Here are the names of some of the people and chapters that for me mark that long and continuing Diocesan struggle: CORE. SNCC. Chester. Girard College. The Jungle. The1964 Race Riots. ESCRU. The Black People’s Unity Movement. Jesse Anderson. The Union of Black Clergy and Laity. Mohammed Kenyatta at the Church of the Holy Trinity. The Black Economic Development Conference. Freedom Schools. Black Panthers, herded by police, naked against a wall. Frank Rizzo. Reparations. The Restitution Commission. Barbara Harris. Women Ordained at the Advocate. MOVE. Wilson Goode. Lyman Ogilby, Brooke Mosely, Jane Cosby, Allan Bartlett, Frank Turner. Curtis W. Sisco, Margaret Moore, Mamie Wiggins. The Committee to Combat Racism.
The struggle and the work that I’ve witnessed and participated in these last 50 years has been halting and often exhausting. From time to time it has been nearly dormant, mostly I think because of exhaustion. Yet… the work has always continued. Remarkably, too, the work has mostly focused on what I believe to be its most tenacious and deceptive form, the racism that’s embedded—often hidden—deep in the very fabric (and in their underlying assumptions, the threads of that fabric, as it were) of the institutions that shape and define us: our Constitution and Canons, our governance and governing processes, our assumptions about and requirements for ordained ministry, our hiring practices, our parish self-definition and life, an ancient history that constantly reaches into the present moment, determined sometimes it seems to drag us back, the shape of our political life, and even perhaps in our most cherished diocesan programs: DCMM, a coalition almost frozen in time that we use to define and institutionalize aided parishes, for instance, or the rural and romantic ideal of a diocesan camp planted in the southern border country, not long ago a Klan wilderness. But also embedded in our core faith and its documents are other fundamental institutional values—justice, compassion, our mutuality as God’s children. In our baptismal vows, our creed, in the Eucharistic feast we all share, in the scripture which is the living Word of our God—are vital pointers to our future, and to the immense unflagging work we still have to do.
After the 1960’s and 70’s, I recused myself in many ways from antiracist work and turned my attention and then my ministry to the struggle for lesbian and gay civil rights and then to a 14-year ministry in the epidemic world of HIV/AIDS. (Though it’s important to know that all these struggles contained embedded racism and had in common a determination to seek just and love mercy.) I returned to active, organized work against racism in the Diocese at the invitation of Richard Smith, who was in the early years of the last decade chair of what had come to be called the Committee to Combat Racism. We were a small, aging, often disheartened group, but we struggled on as best we could. Then there arrived this remarkable person among us. The Rev. Renee McKenzie Hayward had come to the Diocese to be Rector of Calvary, Northern Liberties, a parish that many of us had pronounced dead, quite prematurely, as it turned out. For most of her life a Baptist, she came to us with a Ph.D. from Temple, from the Diocese of New Jersey, which (in spite of the destructive internal turmoil that then marked that Diocese in some of the same ways our Diocese is marked today) had made huge, concrete progress in its work to create what Renee called “an anti-racist diocese.”
She brought us energy, new focus, and a passion for what we were up to, and suggested an engaging model for doing that work. From her energy and passion, we supped! Soon I was sent with two other Committee members to New Jersey to investigate and experience this model at work. We reported back, renewed and excited, from that transforming experience; and so we embarked. The last six years have moved us into new territory. That is the story Renee will tell you. There could be no better successor than she to the powerful witnesses whose mantle she has taken up, and I will go to my grave a better man and a better priest for her company with me on that way.
A short bibliography for these remarks:
W.E.B. Du Bois The Philadelphia Negro.
Paul Washington with David Gracie. Other Sheep I Have: The Autobiography of Father Paul M Washington.
Randall Kenan. Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century.
Lorene Cary. The Price of a Child.
Matthew Countryman. Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia.
Michelle Alexander. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.
Alice Walker. Her Blue Body Everything We Know: Earthlng Poems, 1965-1990.
June Jordon. Directed by Desire: Collected Poems.
Thomas J. Sugrue. Sweet Land of Liberty: the Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North.
The history page of the website of the African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas, http://www.aecst.org
The website, The Black Past, remembered and Reclaimed, http://www.blackpast.org
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