“EYES ON THE PRIZE”

A Sermon by the Rev. Bruce Clear

Martin Luther King Sunday

January 20, 2008

All Souls Unitarian Church

Indianapolis, Indiana

Nothing inspires me more than the stories of ordinary people who stood up at some cost and with a great deal of courage for a cause that is right. In the history of the United States, there is probably no greater resource for such inspiration as the civil rights movement when it emerged in the 1950s and 60s.

We honor the work and legacy of Martin Luther King, the charismatic leader of the movement who was able to harness the spirit of justice and convince millions of people that we can overcome a seeming mountain of injustice, a legacy of centuries of prejudice and inequality imbedded into the roots of society. It can be done. And it can be done by cumulative efforts of ordinary people of courage and goodwill.

Among the best recounting of that profound period in our history was a series produced around 20 years ago by PBS under the title “Eyes on the Prize.” It was a multimedia history of a struggle that must continue to inspire every generation that follows, giving courage and confidence to all of us that the struggle for justice is worth fighting.

The title, “Eyes on the Prize” comes from an African American spiritual song with a melody both haunting and motivating, encouraging those who are working for just ends to keep up your efforts, and keep your “eyes on the prize.” One refrain says,

“I know one thing we did right

Was the day we started to fight.

Keep your eyes on the prize,

Hold on, hold on.”

I have on my shelf a book with that title that was the companion book to the PBS series. It is a jewel I have turned to often over the years. It retells the story, as the poetic imagery of the song says, of the days when the fight for justice began. As I was thinking of a sermon for today, I re-read some pieces in the book, and found a passage in it that struck something in me I couldn’t let go. In the introduction, Julian Bond, one of the young leaders of that era, said this:

“Most of us are familiar with the heroic leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr. But the passage of time has obscured the lesser-known folk who created the movement that produced King – such people as Charlie Houston, Mose Wright, and Fannie Lou Hamer. This story is really their story, for the movement belonged to them. The civil rights drama involved thousands of acts of individual courage undertaken in the name of freedom.”

The three names he mentioned were unknown to me. Who were they? I consider myself to be perhaps slightly above average in knowledge of the civil rights movement of that era – at least for a white boy of my generation. Why didn’t I know these names? Charlie Houston, Mose Wright, and Fannie Lou Hamer?

I sought the answer to this question and found a sermon. If a sermon is designed to inspire – and I suppose that is often the bottom line – nothing inspires more, I think, than hearing about those who lived with courage and integrity. There may be some of you who know one or two of these names. I expect very few know all three.

These are stories of people who kept their eyes on the prize of human justice and freedom. They are not well known at all, but it is important that their inspiration to us not be lost. Instead of devoting my comments this morning to Dr. King, I wish to honor lesser-known names of equal courage. I’m sure King would approve.

So let me tell you who they are, starting with Charles Hamilton Houston.

CHARLES HAMILTON HOUSTON

Many histories of the civil rights movement of the late twentieth century tend to begin in 1954 with a Supreme Court case of Brown vs. the Board of Education which began the legal dismantling of the practice of segregation. That case, it turns out, is a monument to a man who died in 1950, four years before it came to the court. Charles Hamilton Houston was probably more responsible than any single person for legally challenging the segregation laws which ultimately led to that great decision declaring school segregation to be unconstitutional.

“Charlie” Houston was born in 1895, one year before the court handed down its previous decision in an earlier case, Plessy vs. Ferguson, which in 1896 declared the legality of segregation of the races under the doctrine of “separate but equal.” The court allowed for separate schools for blacks and whites, separate hospitals, separate seating in restaurants or public transportation, even separate drinking fountains, as long as the accommodations and services are equal to both races. This decision would become the inspiration for the astounding career of Charlie Houston.

Houston was born and raised in Washington D.C., where his father, William, was one of few African American lawyers at the time, and graduated from Howard University Law School after years of night classes there. Charles’ mother Mary had been a school teacher, but when it came time to pay for her son’s education, she found she could make more money as a hairdresser for wealthy white women in Washington than as a teacher of black school children.

Charles excelled academically throughout his life. He graduated valedictorian of his all-black high school in Washington, D.C. and then attended Amherst College in Massachusetts, enrolling at age 16, and graduated valedictorian there in 1915, and the only African American in his class.

During the first World War, he served for two years as a lieutenant in France and Germany as an “adjutant general” for the army. The adjutant general would prosecute soldiers accused of a crime, and he was chosen to prosecute black soldiers who faced criminal charges. During this service, he witnessed so many legal injustices against African Americans that he vowed to return after the war and devote himself to confronting discrimination. And he did.

In 1919, he was accepted at Harvard University’s Law School, and would become the first black student elected to Harvard’s Law Review. One of his professors, the later Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, would later describe Charles Houston as one of the most brilliant students he ever had.

After receiving his law degree in 1922, he continued at Harvard to earn his doctoral degree as well. He even spent some time studying civil law in Spain. When his education was complete, he returned to Washington and joined his father’s law firm, though he soon was recruited to teach at the Law School at Howard University there. His most famous student, who would become his closest colleague, was Thurgood Marshall, who decades later would become the first African American Supreme Court Justice.

Eventually, Houston became one of the Deans of the Law School at Howard, and in that role he dramatically re-structured the school. Within two years of his leadership, it became fully accredited for the first time by the American Bar Association.

In 1935, the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) persuaded Houston to take a leave of absence from the law school to lead their legal fight against segregation under Plessy vs. Ferguson. He did. For the next five years, he worked sixteen hours or more a day, seven days a week, putting his whole self into the project.

The strategy he decided on was to focus first on education, and once that succeeds, then move on to other issues, such as public accommodation or housing. He needed to show that the “separate but equal” doctrine wasn’t working, and that state support of education is anything but equal. He’d start with graduate and professional schools, then colleges, then high schools and elementary schools. The strategy turned out to be genius.

The first case was in Maryland, where a black student was denied admission to that state’s Law School because of his race. By then, Thurgood Marshall was practicing law in Baltimore, and he signed up for the case with Houston. Houston argued that in order to be “separate but equal” the state either needs to build an equivalent law school for this and other black students, or grant him admission. He won both in the lower courts and on appeal. Similar cases were brought successfully around the country.

It was time to turn to the lower schools. By then Marshall had joined him at the NAACP as an assistant, and together they traveled throughout the south, taking photographs and gathering other evidence that would show the inequality of education under the “separate but equal” policy.

Here is just one example that eventually was put into a case that was argued much later alongside the famous Brown case. In Clarendon County, South Carolina, the state was spending $179 per year on each white student, and $43 on each black student. The net worth of three black schools serving 808 minority children was one-forth the value of two schools that served less than 300 white students. The teacher-student ratio in white schools was 1 to 28. In black schools 1:47. And so on.

After years of gathering this data, and arguing a number of cases, he eventually left the NAACP to return to his father’s law firm. But he continued focusing on civil rights and racial discrimination. He would take on cases concerning discrimination in the military, among taxicab drivers, and labor unions.

He died unexpectedly of a heart attack in 1950 of a heart attack. By the time of his death, Houston had personally argued eight cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, and won all but one of them. Thurgood Marshall, not yet on that court, was one of his pallbearers. Five Supreme Court justices, a majority, attended.

The avalanche of civil rights laws he started continued. Two months after his death the Supreme Court ruled on cases in Texas and Oklahoma that their law schools and graduate school must admit African Americans. And by then, litigation concerning the segregation of elementary and high schools was moving forward. One case he had worked on personally was included in the bundle of cases that came to be known as “Brown vs. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas.” The decision came in 1954, and it became the final blow in the legal foundation for segregation in the schools. Plessy vs. Fergusson was reversed.

Charles Houston became known as “The man who killed Jim Crow.” Thurgood Marshall ended up arguing the case before the Supreme Court, but gave Houston the credit. Some years later Marshall had this to say:

“A large number of people never heard of Charles Houston. . . (but) when Brown against the Board of Education was being argued before the Supreme Court. . . there were some two dozen lawyers on the side of the Negroes fighting for their schools. . . Of those lawyers, only two hadn’t been touched by Charlie Houston. That man was the engineer of it all.”

Harvard University would eventually establish a chair called the Charles Hamilton Houston Professorship of Law. In 2005, the Law School there created the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice.

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They say that some people are born great, some people achieve greatness, and some people have greatness thrust upon them. Charlie Houston achieved greatness through innate talent, high values, and dedicated hard work. The next two people I present had greatness thrust upon them. They were ordinary people who through extraordinary and unwelcome circumstances found greatness when challenges were thrust upon them.

MOSE WRIGHT

The next person I want to talk about was a poor black preacher, all of sixty-four years old in 1955, when the story I am about to tell took place. In that year, Mose Wright lived in an old cabin in the rural lands outside the tiny town of Money, Mississippi. Mose Wright. Who was he? To understand the role Mose Wright played I first need to talk about the heartbreaking case of Emmett Till, a name I suspect many of you may recall.

Emmett Till was the fourteen year old African American boy from Chicago who spent the summer in Mississippi in 1955 with his cousin Curtis Jones at their relatives’ home. His mother, Mamie Bradley, was a teacher in Chicago, and Emmett was her only son. Emmett was city smart, and quite popular in school in Chicago, but unlearned about the racial expectations of the deep South. His mother, who grew up in Mississippi and knew the culture, warned Emmett before boarding the train, saying, “If you have to get on your knees and bow when a white person goes past, do it willingly.” It turns out he didn’t really have much of a chance to learn much about the culture down there.

One day, he and a group of friends were, as they say today, “hanging out” around town. They were outside the grocery store when Till showed them a picture of his wallet from friends from Chicago, and claimed that one picture of a white girl was his girlfriend. They didn’t believe him and one boy pointed to a white woman in the store, and dared him to say something to her. Emmett went in the store and bought some candy. One version of the story says that he whistled at her as he left the store. Another version says he said to her, as he was leaving, “Bye, bye, Baby!” In any case, Carolyn Bryant was highly offended and stormed out of the store and got in her car. An old black man who had been playing checkers on the porch outside the store told the boys she was going to get a gun and kill them.

So they ran away home scared. A few days later, in the early hours after midnight, Roy Bryant, the woman’s husband, and his brother-in-law, J.W. Milam, came to the house where Emmett was staying. They kidnapped him, drove him to a secluded spot, beat him, tortured him, and shot him, throwing his body in the Tallahatchie River, tied down with weights. When his body was later found, everyone knew who did it. Bryant and Milam were arrested.

Emmett’s mutilated face and body were sent in a casket to his mother in Chicago. When she opened the casket, she was sick and appalled, and she was determined to show the world what those men did to her son. A picture was taken that circulated in newspapers around the country. The terrorists of Mississippi were exposed across America, and the press flocked to the trial in Sumner, Mississippi.

The trial was held, and after an hour of deliberation, the jury made up entirely of white men returned a verdict of “not guilty.” They claimed that since the body was so mutilated, it could not definitely be identified as Emmett’s. A year later, the two now free defendants received $4,000 for a interview with Look Magazine. Protected against another trial by double jeopardy, they confessed in detail to killing Emmett Till.

So who was Mose Wright? Mose Wright was Emmett Till’s great-uncle, and the grandfather of Emmett’s cousin Curtis Jones, who joined Emmett that summer in Mississippi. Mose Wright was the owner of the country cabin where the boys stayed that summer, and the home from which Emmett Till was kidnapped. Mose Wright was the only witness to his kidnapping. When he confronted the kidnappers, Mose Wright was threatened by the kidnappers that if he identified them, they would kill him.

In Mississippi in the 1950s, it was unheard of for a black to testify against a white in a criminal trial. It would mean his own death warrant. Emmett’s cousin Curtis returned to Chicago, where his mother kept him from testifying to save his life. After inevitable death threats, Mose sent his wife Elizabeth into a hiding in Chicago until the trial was over, and Mose himself never spent another night at his home.

Who was Mose Wright? He was a poor old black man with enough courage to stand up in court in Mississippi in 1955 and accuse two white men of killing his 14-year old nephew.

Who was Mose Wright? Listen to these words of journalist Murray Kempton, a reporter who attended the trial. He wrote his eyewitness account and said this:

“Mose Wright, making a formation no white man in his country really believed he would dare to make, stood on his tiptoes to the full limit of his sixty-four years and his five feet three inches, and pointed his black workworn finger straight at the huge and stormy head of J.W. Milam and swore this was the man who dragged fourteen-year-old Emmett Louis Till out of his cottonfield cabin the night the boy was murdered.

“’There he is,’ said Mose Wright. He was a black pigmy standing up to a white ox. J.W. Milam leaned forward, crooking a cigarette in a hand that seemed as large as Mose Wright’s whole chest, and his eyes were coals of hatred.

“Mose Wright took all their blast straight in his face, and then, for good measure, turned and pointed that still unshaking finger at Roy Bryant, the man he says joined Milam on that night-ride to seize young Till for the crime of whistling suggestively at Bryant’s wife in a store three miles away and three nights before.

“’And there’s Mr. Bryant,” said Mose Wright and sat down hard against the chair-back with a lurch which told better than anything else the cost in strength to him of the thing he had done. He was a field Negro who had dared try to send two white men to the gas chamber for murdering a Negro.”

That’s who Mose Wright was.

FANNIE LOU HAMEL

Courage was also found in the core character of another person I wish to honor this morning: Fannie Lou Hamel. She was born in 1917, the youngest daughter among 20 children, and the granddaughter of slaves. Her family was sharecroppers, and she started working the fields at age six. (When the service is over, I’m going to ask Ed Harris to define “sharecropper.” It’s one of those words I think I know until someone asks me, then I realize I haven’t the slightest idea.).

Fannie Lou and her husband worked on a plantation, where he drove a tractor and Fannie worked in the field until the owner found out she could read. So he made her a time-keeper. She and her husband adopted two children, and some years later, without her consent, she was sterilized by a white doctor as part of Mississippi’s plan to reduce the number of poor blacks in the state.

During the 1950s, Fannie became involved with a civil rights group called the Regional Council of Negro Leadership, which made voting rights for African Americans a high priority.

Black citizens who registered to vote in Mississippi risked losing their jobs, being beaten up, or lynched. When the civil rights group called for people to register to vote, Fannie was the first to volunteer. Later she reflected on that saying,

“When they asked for those to raise their hands who’d go down to the courthouse the next day, I raised mine. Had it high up as I could get it. I guess if I’d had any sense, I’d have been scared – but what was the point of being scared? The only thing they could do was kill me, and it seemed they’d been trying to do that a little at a time since I could remember.”

When a busload from that meeting went to town together to register, Fannie led them all in singing gospel songs – something that became her trademark in the struggles ahead. She registered, and the next day she lost her job, as did her husband, her dog was missing, and she received death threats.

Impressed by Fannie’s spirit, movement leaders recruited Fannie, and she traveled the state organizing and doing activist work. On June 9, 1963, her group of organizers was arrested in Winona, Mississippi for disobeying a “whites only” policy in a restaurant, and in jail they were savagely beaten by the police, some of them almost killed. Hamer’s wounds made her permanently disabled. “Every day of my life,” she later said, “I pay with the misery of that beating.”

The experience made her even more dedicated, and Fannie Lou Hamer continued organizing, and was especially known to volunteers who came to Mississippi in 1964 which was to be known as “Freedom Summer.” Nearly a thousand students flooded the state to organize voter registration in black communities.

1964 was a presidential election year, and the Democratic Party of Mississippi participated in the racism of the culture. Blacks were excluded as party delegates. Hamer and others organized a political group within the party called the “Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party,” or the “Freedom Democrats.” Fannie was elected vice-chair of the party.

When the Freedom Democrats came to the party’s national convention with a plea to be seated as delegates, Fannie Hamer was the spokesperson before the Credentials Committee, and her plea was televised nationally. President Johnson sent a group to negotiate a compromise with her, including Hubert Humphrey and Walter Mondale. She stood her ground and refused to compromise.

Though they didn’t get seated, the party convention adopted a resolution demanding equality of representation at the next convention in four years. The next year, after being re-elected, President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, and at the next Democratic convention in 1968, Fannie Lou Hamer would be seated as an official delegate from Mississippi. In 1972, the Mississippi legislature passed a resolution honoring her national and state activism. The vote was 116 to 0.

Her activism continued until her death in 1977: establishing a Freedom Farm Cooperative, the Head Start children’s education program, and working with Dr. King’s “Poor Peoples’ Campaign.” Her tombstone epitaph carries her most famous quote about her struggle to achieve equality:

“I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired!”

So there you are. Charles Hamilton Houston. Mose Wright. Fannie Lou Hamer. Three out of thousands of stories during that era of people who succeeded in keeping their eyes on the prize – the prize of human justice. Each story quite different from the other, but each full of courage and resolve.

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Before I close I want to mention very briefly the names of two others who during this period kept their eyes on the prize. I mention them because they both have ties, directly or indirectly, to us in this room.

The first name is that of James Reeb, a minister at All Souls Unitarian Church in Washington, D.C., who in 1965 answered the call of Dr. King for clergy from around to country to come to Selma, Alabama and join with him on the march from Selma to Montgomery. James Reeb came, and on the night before the march he and two other Unitarian ministers joined together for dinner at a small restaurant in the black part of town. When they left and began walking into the night, they were attacked by racist thugs – terrorists, we call them today. Reeb took the most injury, and died. Later, Dr. King spoke at his funeral service.

I’ve told the story of James Reeb here before, and I promise you I’ll tell it in full again some time. It is a story that needs to be repeated in our congregations – the story of a true martyr for the cause of justice.

The second name is more familiar to many of you. W. Edward Harris. It was Ed Harris who grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, and spent the first half of his life, through the fifties and sixties, working for racial justice. It was Ed Harris who made a conscious decision to devote himself full time over a number of years for that cause. Over those years he suffered beatings and other violence for his principles. He was ostracized in much of the community. He and his family received death threats. And through it, he kept his eye on the prize. For those who don’t know, Ed Harris is the Minister Emeritus of this church. In retirement, he now sings in our choir. I hope he is up there in the choir loft today, and I guarantee he came to church today not knowing I would be saying this.

For those of you who don’t know, his story was told in his memoir, Miracle in Birmingham, which is for sale in the bookstore. I recommend you read it.

All Americans, of every race, owe a debt of gratitude to those who kept their eyes on the prize so that our country could at last begin to live up to its ideals – ideals that were completely empty for so many for so long. I wish we could thank Charles Houston for what he did for our country. I wish we could thank Mose Wright or Fannie Lou Hamer. They are gone.

I am grateful, at least, that we can thank Ed Harris.

READING from Julian Bond, Founder of SNCC; head of NAACP

From the Introduction to the book “Eyes on the Prize” by Juan Williams

For most Americans, the civil rights movement began on May 17, 1954, when the Supreme Court handed down the Brown v. Board of Education decision outlawing segregation in public schools. The court unlocked the door, but the pressure applied by thousands of men and women in the movement pushed that door wide enough to allow blacks to walk through it toward thid country’s essential prize: freedom.

(There were) unheralded people, black and white, who were the soul of the movement. . . . This story is really their story, for the movement belonged to them. The civil rights drama involved thousands of acts of individual courage undertaken in the name of freedom.

I lived through these times. I was fourteen years old when the Supreme Court handed down the Brown decision. Like most young black people of the day, I didn’t realize the far-reaching significance of the court’s pronouncement. The highest court in the land had said that racially segregated schools were unconstitutional.

In 1955, I was 15 years old, one year older than Emmett Till when he was killed visiting relatives in Mississippi. When he supposedly flirted with a white woman, be broke a taboo that was as real in rural Pennsylvania, where I grew up, as it was in the Deep South. What happened to Emmett Till could have happened to me.

The movement changed my life. As a boy, I thought the most I could ever achieve was a teaching or administrative position in a black school. By the mid-eighties, I had venture beyond the limited horizons glimpsed from the segregated fifties. I had served as a Georgia state representative for more than twenty years, and in 1986 I ran for congress of the United States. As A boy I never dreamed of running for public office, let alone achieving it.

My life was just one of the millions of black and white lives that were profoundly affected by the great movement that spanned the years 1954 to 1965. (Ever since), black Americans have shown great tenacity and courage in continuing to strive for their rights as Americans.