Skit - Picnic in Bon Air Park, 1958
Characters
Narrator: Ann Ulmschneider
Mildred Eldridge: Stephanie Weber
Rev. Ross Weston: Marc DeFrancis
Police officer: Tom O’Reilly
Judge Paul D.Brown: Lance Haworth
White and black picnickers: Lauren Weber, Maura O’Reilly, Wendy Jessup, Desda MossNarrator: It’s time now to travel back 50 years ago to 1958.
The laws in Virginia forbid blacks to sit with whites in public places. At the Glebe movie theatre, blacks have to sit in the balcony. They are not allowed to sit at the lunch counter in the Cherrydale drug store.
The state of Virginia has threatened to close any school system that tries to integrate. The NAACP has sued Arlington County and three other districts for not allowing black children to enroll in white schools.
Many people strongly believe that segregation must end. But others are fighting hard to keep the races separate.
Let’s see what happens on a Sunday afternoon in June when members from our church gather for a picnic in Bon Air Park. The characters in the play include church member Mildred Eldridge and our minister at the time Rev. Ross Weston.
Scene 1: Picnic grounds in park
(People sitting on cloth with picnic baskets
2 people pretending to toss ball
Others are reaching into picnic basket and getting out food and plates.)
Mildred: (Passing a plate to friend) Why don’t you try this chicken—I just made it this morning.
Friend: (Nodding head)—Mmmmm……Good (urges others to try some)
(Police officer approaches Mildred and other black woman)
Officer: Ma’m, we’ve had a complaint about a racially mixed gathering here in the park. I’m going to have to ask you three to leave the premises (points to black women). There is a law in Virginia prohibiting Negroes and white people sitting together in public places.
(Black woman and child stand up and gather their things, preparing to leave.)
Mildred (stands up): I’m sorry, Officer, but I have no intention of leaving. I am here with my friends from church. I have as much right to be here as anyone.
Ross: She’s right, officer. She is with us. Our church is using this public space………………
Officer: I am not here to argue. I am just enforcing the law. (Turns to Mildred): Ma’m, I am going to ask you to leave one more time. If you do not comply, I will have to arrest you.
Mildred: I am not leaving.
Officer: You are under arrest. I’m taking you in to the police station.
Ross: I’ll go with you, Mildred. We’re behind you all the way. The church can post bail so they won’t put you in jail. We’ll provide an attorney to defend you in court.
Narrator:
After Mildred’s arrest, the county attorney decided not to charge her with breaking the interracial seating law. Instead he charged her with disorderly conduct for refusing to leave the park. She appeared in Arlington County Court before Judge Paul Brown.
Scene 2: Court
Judge: Mildred Eldridge, please tell the court what you were doing on the afternoon of June 1.
Mildred: Your honor, I was with a group from my church eating a picnic lunch. I was passing out pieces of chicken when the officer approached me.
Ross Weston: I am the minister of the Unitarian Church of Arlington, and I can back up what Mrs. Eldridge says. We were enjoying one another’s company. No one was being at all disruptive.
Judge: I find you not guilty of the charge of disorderly conduct on June 1st.
There is no evidence of misbehavior or misconduct on your part. You were seated with persons from your own church. None of the persons there objected to your presence.
Case dismissed.
Mildred (surrounded by church friends): I am glad that’s over! I guess we just have to keep on standing up for what is right until the laws are changed.
Narrator: (Addressing congregation)
Raise your hands if you have ever been to Bon Air Park. Are you surprised that black and white people could not sit together in the park?
When I heard the story about Mildred’s arrest, I was amazed that it happened right in the park where I walk every day.
Back in the late 50s and early 60s, our church got in trouble for taking a stand against injustice. Ask yourself this question: Is there an injustice you see in the world now that you would be willing to be arrested for?
In a minute children and teachers can go downstairs for a special activity, hearing from some of the people in this church who have been involved in the struggle for racial justice. Please rise now in body or spirit to sing together Hymn #1040 in the teal-colored hymnal. Children and teachers are invited to leave during the third verse.
Dear Dr. King
By Daniel Edwards
Read by Daniel Edwards and Paul Mungarulire, Teen Counselors at Peace Camp
Dear Dr. King:
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it fly away like a lonely bird?
Dr. King wanted to live his dream.
But it was blurred.We need Peace.
Racism needs to see the last of its days.
No more of these Saddams and KKKs.
It's an ongoing battle throughout the world.
Why can't we all love each other
Our colors swirled?We need Peace.
Why shouldn't we treat others
The way we want to be treated?
Without doing so,
Our life is uncompleted,
Depleted.We need Peace.
Everywhere I go,
It's all I hear.
"You're so black!"
"You're so white!"
To me, it's so unclear.
Makes me feel fear,
As if I was tied to train tracks.We need Peace.
"Racism is a waste of possibilities
In human relations," as my mother once said.
She knows.
She was there when the world bled.
We need to release.
To have Peace.Sermon:
Love and Power:
When the Dreams Turn to ActionCentering Words: Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at is best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.
–Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Hymn: Hush, hush, somebody’s calling my name.
Sounds like freedom, somebody’s calling my name.
Sounds like justice, somebody’s calling my name.
Oh my lord, oh my lord, what shall I do?
Last week in a “New UU” class, 15 newcomers to this church were talking about the Seven Principles of our faith. One newcomer was troubled by Number 5: We covenant to affirm and promote the right of conscience and use of the democratic process, within our congregations and in society as a whole.
It was the “society as a whole” part that troubled this newcomer. “I really believe that,” he said, “and it feels like a call to act in the world.” But acting how, and with what words, and doing what, he didn’t know. He was worried about taking a religious principle to the public square. How do you do that, ethically? How do you exercise power responsibly? How do you avoid dominating others with your theology?
Oh my lord, oh my lord. Justice is calling my name. What shall I do?
This morning we heard a story about a call to action that was answered. It may be a bit of a stretch to call Mildred Eldridge our own Rosa Parks, but I do see some similarities to that story, how one woman’s simple action, refusing to stand up, launched the Montgomery bus boycott.
Well, we think of that as a simple action, but it was not. Months of organizing preceded Parks’s decision to stay put when the bus driver told her to move to the back of the bus. Rosa Parks herself was an activist and an organizer with the NAACP in Montgomery. She was not just “a simple department store seamstress,” as the mythology would have it. She was part of a movement that had begun long before she was taken to jail for keeping her seat on the bus. And because she was already part of a movement, when the time came to act, she was ready.
It was not that different for Mildred Eldridge. Around the time of our church picnic, the African American community in Arlington was organized and organizing. How would they overturn Virginia’s law against “mingling” in public places? More importantly, how would they force Arlington, and the state of Virginia, to comply with the school desegregation mandated by the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education, four years prior to the picnic in Bon Air Park?
It was complicated, more than you might imagine. The white community in Arlington seemed to want integration for the most part, but mostly they just didn’t want the state to shut down the good public schools they had struggled to build. And the Commonwealth of Virginia had vowed to shut down any school system that admitted one Black child to any White school. Arlington’s White establishment was therefore saying, “go slow.”
Now this service today was billed as a celebration of the civil rights history of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Arlington, and celebrate we will. But it is impossible to understand the actions taken by this church community outside the context of the careful organizing and preparation done within the African American community, especially the NAACP.
Mildred was part of that organizing. Mildred and Bob Eldridge were ready, when the time was right, to send their son to the front lines. And eventually their son Robert Jr. – you knew him as Bobby if you were around then – became the first Black child to attend a formerly all-White grade school, when he entered Patrick Henry Elementary School.
Mildred and Bob were members of this church.
Our church had been organizing too. When we were just a year old, in 1949, five years before the 1954 court decision, our Day Alliance opened a summer camp for children of both races. The idea was that when desegregation came – and I can’t believe that in 1949, it would have looked like it was coming anytime soon -- some of the Black children and some of the White children would know each other, maybe even already be friends. It was kind of an early version of Peace Camp.
And in 1951, this church was the host and organizer for an integrated group, the Community Council for Social Progress, which joined the NAACP in urging the elimination of Jim Crow practices like separate drinking fountains labeled “white” and “colored.
In 1954, members of this church voted, 228-3, to authorize a delegation to testify for integration at the Gray Commission, which the state formed to try to figure out a way around the Supreme Court decision. We were the only church represented.
So that day in Bon Air Park, Mildred was ready, and the White people in this church, because of all the work they were already doing, were ready too, ready to stand as allies, the way our minister at the time, Ross Weston did, when the police took Mildred to jail. Study and organizing had made us ready for action, and we knew what to do when the time came.
You can see press coverage about this after the service in Fellowship Hall, and also about the bomb threat to our church in 1958. We thank the Journey Toward Wholeness Transformation Team for putting together that display, and also for creating the dramatization we saw this morning. Will the members of the JTW team please stand so we can thank you?
And now it is time to celebrate. Will anyone who was part of the Day Alliance group that created the integrated summer camp in 1949 please stand up, and remain standing, and anyone who was part of the Community Council for Social Progress formed in 1951? You are our elders, and we honor you; you were on the leading edge of social transformation. We thank you for showing us the way.
Anyone who was part of the Task Force on Racial Diversity, formed in 1993, would you please stand up? Anyone who’s been part of an Anti-Racism Transformation Team or a Journey Toward Wholeness Team? Anyone who has been one of the organizers of Peace Camp, or has sent your child to Peace Camp? Anyone who has worked at Beacon House? Anyone who’s attended a Jubilee Training or a District antiracism meeting? Who has attended ADORE meetings or the quarterly JTW-VaRUUM potlucks? Who has been part of our mission trips to rebuild New Orleans? Anyone working to build relationships with our neighbors in the Buckingham community? Anyone who has done other racial justice work in this congregation? Anyone who works on issues of racial justice not through the church but in other areas of your life? We celebrate you, and we thank you, for your part in a history that calls us not only to pride but to action.
During those years, Vera Tilson was music director, and Vera consciously recruited African American children and adults to perform in racially integrated operas. One was nationally televised. Charles Monroe, the first African American to chair the Arlington County Board, was in one of Vera’s shows, and many years later he would still talk about what a kick he got out of that. Vera, we salute you for that work.
But then, in the 1960s, something changed in the culture. The African American community began to look to itself for power. Especially after Martin Luther King was assassinated in 1968, Blacks rejected a white culture that was seen as paternalistic and not willing to go beyond tokenism. This caused fractures in many Unitarian Universalist congregations, and at the association level, there was a huge schism. Our religious movement, not knowing how to make it right, fell into a deep silence on racial issues, a silence that persisted for 20 years.
Here at UUCA, the shift is captured in Vera’s statement on a video you can watch in the Board Room after the service. Now when she went to the African American community to recruit youth for her operas, Vera says, nobody was interested.
This is a fascinating history, and a painful one, and if we are to understand where we are today and what we are called to do, we must not overlook it. To some degree, this church that I love remains hobbled by that pain. Starting in the 1990s and through today, a small group of leaders in this congregation have attempted to break through the paralysis, offering programs and antiracism seminars and opportunities for service.
But the truth is, we don’t know what to do now to advance the cause of racial justice. The lunch counters are open, the schools are integrated – sort of integrated, at least in Arlington and some other communities. And don’t we celebrate the fact that a Black man for the first time has a real chance to be elected president? But we have not made Dr. King’s dream come to life in this country. You know it’s true; you don’t need me to cite the statistics of economic and social inequality; you need only to remember New Orleans. Our American society is broken, and we don’t know how to fix it.
If there is anything we can understand from our own history in the struggle for racial justice, the inspiring history we have visited today, it is this: however hard it is, we’ve got to stay in the conversation. We’ve got to keep the issues of race on the table. And we’ve got to organize. Why? So that when the time comes to act, we will be ready.
I want to lift up two of the ways this congregation is doing that today. Gary Bogle and Pat Findikoglu, will you come up here? Starting next month, Pat and Gary are facilitating a new covenant-style seminar called “Building the World We Dream About.” They will be leading deep and soulful conversations about our yearning for racial justice. Please see them at coffee hour to find out more and to get yourself into this seminar. Sign up today.
Second, I want to lift up this congregation’s work in VOICE, which stands for Virginians Organized for Interfaith Community Engagement. We are working with 50 other Northern Virginia congregations to build an IAF-affiliated organization that will apply power to turn our love and our dreams into justice. In VOICE, we stand with African-American, White, and ethnically diverse congregations to work together on issues we decide together. See Robert Buckman or Ken Marshall after the service to find out how you can get involved.
Martin Luther King said love without power is sentimental and anemic. Yet like the “New UU” whose comment I quoted at the beginning, we’re not sure how to use our power responsibly. Every generation of new UUs, every new class at UUCA, has to learn how justice is calling in our time, how to make our principles real in the world. We have mucht to learn from Dr. King here. He said that power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. And he also said that we make justice happen – justice at its best – when we use power responsibly, to correct everything that stands against love.
Oh my good friends, let us not falter on this path. Let us study the ways of love and of power. Let us face squarely into the issues of our time. Affordable housing? Just, comprehensive, and compassionate immigration reform? How about our own fears of grappling with problems we don’t know how to fix?
However difficult it may be, let us remain in loving conversation with one another -- about race, about all the hard issues. And when that day comes – the day we hear the call, the day we know that justice is calling our name -- let us act in a way that is worthy of our history.
May it be so.
Benediction
Are you listening?
Will you be ready?
Go forth and study the ways of love, the ways of peace, and the ways of power.
And when justice calls our name, may we answer in such a way that, 60 years from now, WE will be the inspiration to a new generation.
Amen
