An exploration of intersections among labor history, policing in the US, Black Lives Matter, white supremacists, and what happened in Charlottesville.
Massachusetts National Guardsmen with fixed bayonets
surround a parade of peaceful strikers.
Photo Source: http://womhist.binghamton.edu/teacher/DBQlaw2.htm
Photo Source: http://womhist.binghamton.edu/teacher/DBQlaw2.htm
Why do we measure people's capacity
To love by how well they love their progeny?
That kind of love is easy. Encoded.
Any lion can be devoted
To its cubs. Any insect, be it prey
Or predator, worships its own DNA.
Like the wolf, elephant, bear, and bees,
We humans are programmed to love what we conceive.
. . .
It ain't that hard
To love somebody who resembles you.
. . .
But how much do you love the strange and stranger?
. . .
Of course, I'm also fragile and finite and flawed.
I have yet to fully atone for the pain I've caused.
I'm an atheist who believes in grace if not in God.
I'm a humanist who thinks that we’re all not
Humane enough. I think of someone who loves me—
A friend I love back—and how he didn't believe
How much I grieved the death of Prince and his paisley.
My friend doubted that anyone could grieve so deeply
The death of any stranger, especially a star.
"It doesn't feel real," he said.
. . .
And now, in the context of this poem, I can see
That my friend’s love was the kind that only burns
In expectation of a fire in return.
He’s no longer my friend. I mourn that loss.
But, in the Trump aftermath, I've measured the costs
And benefits of loving those who don't love
Strangers. After all, I'm often the odd one—
The strangest stranger—in any field or room.
"He was weird" will be carved into my tomb.
. . .
. . .
This world demands more love than that. More.
So let me ask demanding questions: Will you be
Eyes for the blind? Will you become the feet
For the wounded? Will you protect the poor?
Will you welcome the lost to your shore?
Will you battle the blood-thieves
And rescue the powerless from their teeth?
Who will you be? Who will I become
As we gather in this terrible kingdom?
My friends, I'm not quite sure what I should do.
I'm as angry and afraid and disillusioned as you.
Originally, I had planned a labor service with the title: “Workin’ for the Weekend.” Although I planned to highlight the high cost of each small advance for workers, as well as the abuses by owners who used any means to crush advances, unions, and workers themselves—there was some lightness before I dove into the ways unions and strikes achieved better conditions for workers, including shorter work-weeks that created weekends.
Then Charlottesville filled my Facebook feed.
My heart grew heavier and heavier as I saw image after image and read story after story of the Friday night march and Saturday violence.
Friday—a winding river of torches flows through the darkness on the University of Virginia campus. Closer photos and videos reveal angry, torch-bearing white men shouting Nazi slogans. They surround a few dozen University of Virginia students who chant, “Black Lives Matter.”
Saturday--A horde of heavily-armored white supremacists waves flags, as well as fists and assault weapons. Nazi flags, KKK flags, Confederate flags—symbols of hate and oppression accompanied by anti-Jewish chants. Other photos capture a row of about a dozen clergy people in full regalia, arms linked in a line of resistance, leading maybe 50 religious colleagues. This group, including newly-elected UUA President Rev. Susan Frederick-Gray, faced the white supremacist mob armed only with their faith and their courage.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/look-at-whats-happening-in-america-in-2017_us_598f376ae4b0909642974427
These events called me to take a different approach to the sermon. The focus remains on labor struggles because what happened in Charlottesville grew from the same roots as U.S. labor struggles: Owners versus Workers. One group controls most of the money and property and thereby wields most of the power. For this American holiday, let’s start in the early 1600s when the earliest European immigrants took possession of land in what is now the US. They brought with them enslaved African people. The roots of oppression, exploitation, dehumanization, and violence planted by these immigrants—including my Dutch ancestors—have been growing into a tangled mass for the past 400 years.
To help us untangle these centuries’-old roots, let’s look at some strange fruit they produced when, beginning about 100 years ago, the labor movement and advancing civil rights were met by growing resentments and violence. Several UU principles call me to movements that have worked to promote each person’s inherent worth and dignity and to build community based on justice, equity, and compassion.
Two women who worked to uproot the old oppressions and supplant them with justice and dignity will be our guides this morning. Rose Schneiderman and Heather Heyer exemplify how important each one of us is to the task of creating a better world for everyone.
And the task is both difficult and unending—but you all know that. A large garden requires constant weeding; the larger the plot, the more work there is to do. In my own yard, I pull out unwanted vegetation as I walk to the mailbox or on my way home from the coffee shop. Little by little, plant by plant, I can see more and more of the flowers through the weeds. In May, this work is relatively easy. But at the end of the summer the weeds are thick. And they will return next year.
The roots that both Rose Schneiderman and Heather Heyer worked to dig out go back 400 years. Europeans that came to North America depended on the unpaid labor of enslaved African people. As settlements grew, so did business and manufacturing. Owners required inexpensive labor—the cheaper the labor, the greater the profit—so even paid employees worked 6-7 days a week, 60 or more hours, in unsafe and unhealthy conditions.
The first American worker strikes began as early as the 1600s. And enslaved people always worked to escape.
Owners hired security forces to keep workers in line and to hunt down escaped slaves. Security forces routinely fired indiscriminately into crowds of strikers and their families. Hired patrols were authorized to use any force necessary to re-capture escaped slaves and often kidnapped free people whom they forced into slavery. These twisted roots grew into organized, state-sponsored law enforcement, including the two officers who died in Charlottesville after filming evidence that led to the arrest of Heather Heyer’s killer. They also grew into the officers who, early last century, donned KKK robes and led lynch mobs that murdered black people—and officers who have killed so many black men, boys, and women in recent years.
Pre-1920 poster featuring American social activist Rose Schneidermann.
Rose Schneiderman spent her life in pursuit of fair pay, reasonable work hours, and humane working conditions, especially for women garment workers. She was a Jewish woman, Russian Polish immigrant, union leader, and suffragist—almost everything the white supremacists who marched in Charlottesville despise.
A speech she delivered to labor supporters in the early 20th Century planted a phrase that grew to become a motto of the labor movement:
“What the woman who labors wants is the right to live, not simply exist — the right to life as the rich woman has the right to life, and the sun and music and art. You have nothing that the humblest worker has not a right to have also. The worker must have bread, but she must have roses, too. Help, you women of privilege, give her the ballot to fight with."— Rose Schneiderman, 1912
“Her phrase "Bread and Roses", became associated with a 1912 textile strike of [mostly] immigrant[,] . . . women workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts.” It remains an expression of the human need for both physical and spiritual sustenance; for justice and equity, yes, but also for compassion and dignity and beauty.
Photo Source: http://womhist.binghamton.edu/teacher/DBQlaw2.htm
Massachusetts National Guardsmen with fixed bayonets
surround a parade of peaceful strikers.
Rose Schneiderman’s family immigrated to New York when she was 8. She began work at age 13—just after 6th grade—and by age 16, she was working in a NYC garment factory. That means she was a worker who rose to leadership in the labor movement.
She was also a founding member of the ACLU and a suffragist who was politically active.
“In 1920, Schneiderman ran for the United States Senate as the candidate of the New York State Labor Party. . . . Her platform had called for the construction of nonprofit housing for workers, improved neighborhood schools, publicly owned power utilities and staple food markets, and state-funded health and unemployment insurance for all Americans.” [Wikipedia]
Later, she became NY State Secretary of Labor, where she “campaigned for the extension of social security to domestic workers and for equal pay for female workers.”
Early in her union work, she responded to “the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911, in which 146 garment workers were burned alive or died jumping from the ninth floor of a factory building.” The Women’s Trade Union League "had documented similar unsafe conditions — factories without fire escapes or that had locked the exit doors to keep workers from stealing materials — at dozens of sweatshops in New York City and surrounding communities; twenty-five workers had died in a similar sweatshop fire in Newark, New Jersey shortly before the Triangle disaster.” In response, Schneiderman gave a fiery speech that included these words:
“This is not the first time girls have been burned alive in the city. Every week I must learn of the untimely death of one of my sister workers. Every year thousands of us are maimed. The life of men and women is so cheap and property is so sacred. There are so many of us for one job it matters little if 146 of us are burned to death.
". . . [E]very time the workers come out in the only way they know to protest against conditions which are unbearable the strong hand of the law is allowed to press down heavily upon us.
Public officials have only words of warning to us – warning that we must be intensely peaceable, and they have the workhouse just back of all their warnings. The strong hand of the law beats us back, when we rise, into the conditions that make life unbearable.
"Too much blood has been spilled. I know from my experience it is up to the working people to save themselves. The only way they can save themselves is by a strong working-class movement."— Rose Schneiderman [Wikipedia]
She lived to be 90 years old—she had spent the better part of a century working for justice and for human dignity.
Heather Heyer died in Charlottesville at age 32.
She worked for an attorney who hired her because she was good with people. She was a member of the Industrial Workers of the World, also known as Wobblies or the IWW. Their mission is to unite all workers under one general union, as an umbrella organization whose members could also belong to the more specialized unions such as those Rose Schneiderman belonged to and worked for.
The first IWW charter in Canada,
Vancouver Industrial Mixed Union no.322, May 5, 1906.
The IWW motto is: An injury to one is an injury to all. They also advocate worker ownership. When Heyer heard that white supremacists would be marching through her town, she knew she had to show up and speak up for justice and compassion.
She was killed as the mass of neo-Nazis and counter-protesters made their way across town from the original venue to a larger park. One of the people injured by the driver who killed Heyer had pushed his fiancée out of the way, then was himself hit. The driver reversed to run over him again, this time fracturing his leg.
At Heyer’s funeral, her mother said that they had tried to silence her and ended up magnifying her voice instead. She urged people to show up and speak up for love and justice in honor of her daughter.
Sherman Alexie wrote his poem “Hymn” expressly in response to what happened in Charlottesville. The excerpt that appears at the beginning of this sermon ponders what it means to love the stranger. The poem ends with the difficulty of knowing how to respond to calls for inequality, to those who deny the worth and dignity of some people, to those who would kill people who promote justice and compassion. He writes:
Who will you be? Who will I become
As we gather in this terrible kingdom?
My friends, I'm not quite sure what I should do.
I'm as angry and afraid and disillusioned as you.
But I do know this: I will resist hate. I will resist.
I will stand and sing my love. I will use my fist
To drum and drum my love. I will write and read poems
That offer the warmth and shelter of any good home.
I will sing for people who might not sing for me.
I will sing for people who are not my family.
I will sing honor songs for the unfamiliar and new.
I will visit a different church and pray in a different pew.
I will silently sit and carefully listen to new stories
About other people’s tragedies and glories.
I will not assume my pain and joy are better.
I will not claim my people invented gravity or weather.
And, oh, I know I will still feel my rage and rage and rage
But I won’t act like I’m the only person onstage.
I am one more citizen marching against hatred.
Alone, we are defenseless. Collected, we are sacred.
We will march by the millions. We will tremble and grieve.
We will praise and weep and laugh. We will believe.
We will be courageous with our love. We will risk danger
As we sing and sing and sing to welcome strangers.
To worship is to shape what is of worth—you come here to be reminded of your values and of what those values urge you to do. We come here together to nurture each other into our best selves. We worship together to support and encourage each other to act on our values.
I was called to explore this difficult topic and leave the light-heartedness behind. What do the UU Principles call you to do? How can we acknowledge the inherent worth and dignity of every person, including the people shouting hatred? What work does your conscience or your spirit or your god call you to do?
Heather Heyer died in Charlottesville at age 32.
Heather D. Heyer was killed on Saturday. August 12, 2017, in Charlottesville, Va., after a car crashed into demonstrators protesting a white supremacy rally. Credit Facebook, via Reuters
She worked for an attorney who hired her because she was good with people. She was a member of the Industrial Workers of the World, also known as Wobblies or the IWW. Their mission is to unite all workers under one general union, as an umbrella organization whose members could also belong to the more specialized unions such as those Rose Schneiderman belonged to and worked for.
The first IWW charter in Canada,
Vancouver Industrial Mixed Union no.322, May 5, 1906.
The IWW motto is: An injury to one is an injury to all. They also advocate worker ownership. When Heyer heard that white supremacists would be marching through her town, she knew she had to show up and speak up for justice and compassion.
She was killed as the mass of neo-Nazis and counter-protesters made their way across town from the original venue to a larger park. One of the people injured by the driver who killed Heyer had pushed his fiancée out of the way, then was himself hit. The driver reversed to run over him again, this time fracturing his leg.
At Heyer’s funeral, her mother said that they had tried to silence her and ended up magnifying her voice instead. She urged people to show up and speak up for love and justice in honor of her daughter.
Sherman Alexie wrote his poem “Hymn” expressly in response to what happened in Charlottesville. The excerpt that appears at the beginning of this sermon ponders what it means to love the stranger. The poem ends with the difficulty of knowing how to respond to calls for inequality, to those who deny the worth and dignity of some people, to those who would kill people who promote justice and compassion. He writes:
Who will you be? Who will I become
As we gather in this terrible kingdom?
My friends, I'm not quite sure what I should do.
I'm as angry and afraid and disillusioned as you.
But I do know this: I will resist hate. I will resist.
I will stand and sing my love. I will use my fist
To drum and drum my love. I will write and read poems
That offer the warmth and shelter of any good home.
I will sing for people who might not sing for me.
I will sing for people who are not my family.
I will sing honor songs for the unfamiliar and new.
I will visit a different church and pray in a different pew.
I will silently sit and carefully listen to new stories
About other people’s tragedies and glories.
I will not assume my pain and joy are better.
I will not claim my people invented gravity or weather.
And, oh, I know I will still feel my rage and rage and rage
But I won’t act like I’m the only person onstage.
I am one more citizen marching against hatred.
Alone, we are defenseless. Collected, we are sacred.
We will march by the millions. We will tremble and grieve.
We will praise and weep and laugh. We will believe.
We will be courageous with our love. We will risk danger
As we sing and sing and sing to welcome strangers.
©2017, Sherman Alexie
To worship is to shape what is of worth—you come here to be reminded of your values and of what those values urge you to do. We come here together to nurture each other into our best selves. We worship together to support and encourage each other to act on our values.
I was called to explore this difficult topic and leave the light-heartedness behind. What do the UU Principles call you to do? How can we acknowledge the inherent worth and dignity of every person, including the people shouting hatred? What work does your conscience or your spirit or your god call you to do?
No one of us has to do everything, but if each one of us does something, we can dig out more of those nasty weeds. You can learn as much as possible about our nation’s tangled roots of injustice, about the early imbalance of power that sowed the seeds of today’s inequities and hatreds. If you want to find out more about Black Lives Matter or SURJ (Showing up for Racial Justice), they are both active in Milwaukee. You can help register voters and offer rides to the polls. Write your elected representatives.
When we join together, our work to create beloved community becomes greater than the sum of its parts.
One image on my Facebook feed after Charlottesville featured a young white man holding a hand-lettered cardboard sign. It read: Free Listening.
When we join together, our work to create beloved community becomes greater than the sum of its parts.
One image on my Facebook feed after Charlottesville featured a young white man holding a hand-lettered cardboard sign. It read: Free Listening.
Follow your strengths and your calling to do what you can.
________________________________________________________________
Sources
https://thinkprogress.org/clergy-in-charlottesville-e95752415c3e/ Think Progress Meet the clergy who stared down white supremacists in Charlottesville JACK JENKINS AUG 16, 2017, 8:00 AM
http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/20430/heather_heyer_picked_her_sideand_joined_a_long_history_of_white_anticapital In These Times TUESDAY, AUG 15, 2017, 7:16 PM Heather Heyer Picked Her Side BY RUSSELL RICKFORD
http://plsonline.eku.edu/insidelook/brief-history-slavery-and-origins-american-policing Eastern Kentucky University, Police Studies Online, A Brief History of Slavery and the Origins of American Policing by Victor E. Kappeler, Ph.D.
http://plsonline.eku.edu/insidelook/history-policing-united-states-part-1 Eastern KY U The History of Policing in the United States, Part 1 (of 6) by Dr. Gary Potter
http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Protected+speech
https://www.dol.gov/general/laborday/history-elevator DOL's Historian on the History of Labor Day Linda Stinson, a former U.S. Department of Labor’s historian, provided us with some answers about the history of Labor Day in 2011.
Wikipedia
________________________________________________________________
Sources
https://thinkprogress.org/clergy-in-charlottesville-e95752415c3e/ Think Progress Meet the clergy who stared down white supremacists in Charlottesville JACK JENKINS AUG 16, 2017, 8:00 AM
http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/20430/heather_heyer_picked_her_sideand_joined_a_long_history_of_white_anticapital In These Times TUESDAY, AUG 15, 2017, 7:16 PM Heather Heyer Picked Her Side BY RUSSELL RICKFORD
http://plsonline.eku.edu/insidelook/brief-history-slavery-and-origins-american-policing Eastern Kentucky University, Police Studies Online, A Brief History of Slavery and the Origins of American Policing by Victor E. Kappeler, Ph.D.
http://plsonline.eku.edu/insidelook/history-policing-united-states-part-1 Eastern KY U The History of Policing in the United States, Part 1 (of 6) by Dr. Gary Potter
http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Protected+speech
https://www.dol.gov/general/laborday/history-elevator DOL's Historian on the History of Labor Day Linda Stinson, a former U.S. Department of Labor’s historian, provided us with some answers about the history of Labor Day in 2011.
Wikipedia
- 1912 Lawrence Textile Strike
- Bread and Roses
- Industrial Workers of the World
- Ku Klux Klan
- Labor Day
- Rose Schneiderman
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