This has all happened before and it will all
happen again. --Battlestar Galactica
[I delivered this sermon on September 4, 2016, at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of New Orleans.]
Reading:
In May 1866 Frances Ellen Watkins Harper addressed
the Eleventh National Women's Rights Convention in New York City, where she sat
on the platform with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Today’s reading is some excerpts from that speech.
I FEEL I AM SOMETHING of a novice upon this
platform. Born of a race whose inheritance has been outrage and wrong, most of
my life had been spent in battling against those wrongs. But I did not feel as
keenly as others, that I had these rights, in common with other women, which
are now demanded. About two years ago, I stood within the shadows of my home. A
great sorrow had fallen upon my life. My husband had died suddenly, leaving me
a widow, with four children, one my own, and the others stepchildren. I tried
to keep my children together. But my husband died in debt; and before he had
been in his grave three months, the administrator had swept the very
milk-crocks and wash tubs from my hands. I was a farmer's wife and made butter
for the Columbus market; but what could I do, when they had swept all away?
They left me one thing--and that was a looking glass! Had I died instead of my
husband, how different would have been the result! By this time he would have
had another wife, it is likely; and no administrator would have gone into his
house, broken up his home, and sold his bed, and taken away his means of
support. . . . I say, then, that justice is not fulfilled so long as woman is
unequal before the law.
We are all bound up together in one great bundle of
humanity, and society cannot trample on the weakest and feeblest of its members
without receiving the curse in its own soul. You tried that in the case of the
Negro. You pressed him down for two centuries; and in so doing you crippled the
moral strength and paralyzed the spiritual energies of the white men of the country.
When the hands of the black were fettered, white men were deprived of the
liberty of speech and the freedom of the press. Society cannot afford to
neglect the enlightenment of any class of its members. . . .
This grand and glorious revolution which has
commenced, will fail to reach its climax of success, until throughout the
length and breadth of the American Republic, the nation shall be so
color-blind, as to know no man by the color of his skin or the curl of his
hair. It will then have no privileged class, trampling upon and outraging the
unprivileged classes, but will be then one great privileged nation, whose
privilege will be to produce the loftiest manhood and womanhood that humanity
can attain.
I do not believe that giving the woman the ballot is
immediately going to cure all the ills of life. I do not believe that white
women are dew-drops just exhaled from the skies. I think that like men they may
be divided into three classes, the good, the bad, and the indifferent. The good
would vote according to their convictions and principles; the bad, as dictated
by prejudice or malice; and the indifferent will vote on the strongest side of
the question, with the winning party.
You white women speak
here of rights. I speak of wrongs. I, as a colored woman, have had in this
country an education which has made me feel as if I were in the situation of
Ishmael, my hand against every man, and every man's hand against me. Let me go
to-morrow morning and take my seat in one of your street cars--I do not know
that they will do it in New York, but they will in Philadelphia--and the
conductor will put up his hand and stop the car rather than let me ride. . . . Today
I am puzzled where to make my home. I would like to make it in Philadelphia,
near my own friends and relations. But if I want to ride [a streetcar] in the
streets of Philadelphia, they send me to ride on the platform with the driver. Have
women nothing to do with this?
Here
ends the reading.
The story goes, “In the city of Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania, in the year 1858, a young black woman entered a streetcar and sat
down. The conductor came to her and insisted she leave, but she stayed quietly
in her seat. A passenger intervened, asking if the woman in question might be
permitted to sit in a corner. She did not move. When she reached her
destination, the woman got up and tried to pay the fare, but the conductor
refused to take her money. She threw it down on the floor and left.”
At that time her name was Frances Ellen Watkins. Two
years later she married a man named Fenton Harper. Six years after that,
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper gave that speech at the Eleventh National Women's
Rights Convention from which you have just heard some excerpts.
In fact, she goes on at length – longer than what I
quoted – about her experience of not being allowed to ride the streetcar and
being segregated in the train. She also says that Harriet Tubman, who was still
alive in 1866, was not allowed to ride the streetcars in the city where she
lived. Harriet Tubman.
In 1858 black people were not allowed to use public
transportation. In 1958, they had to sit in the back of the bus. Rosa Parks
famously refused to do that, 100 years after Frances Watkins insisted on her
right to ride the streetcar.
And here we are, not even one hundred years later.
To us it seems perfectly obvious that black people should be able to pay their
fare, and ride the streetcar, and sit next to white people. What’s the problem
with that? How could that be a big deal?
I’m bringing this up because when we look back at
history, we tend to assume that things were always simple. But when you’re
right in the middle of it, it’s not simple at all, and change seems scary and
impossible.
