Readings:

Songs for the People

Let me make the songs for the people,
Songs for the old and young;
Songs to stir like a battle-cry
Wherever they are sung.

Not for the clashing of sabres,
For carnage nor for strife;
But songs to thrill the hearts of men
With more abundant life.

Let me make the songs for the weary,
Amid life’s fever and fret,
Till hearts shall relax their tension,
And careworn brows forget.

Let me sing for little children,
Before their footsteps stray,
Sweet anthems of love and duty,
To float o’er life’s highway.

I would sing for the poor and aged,
When shadows dim their sight
Of the bright and restful mansions
Where there shall be no night.

Our world, so worn and weary,
Needs music, pure and strong,
To hush the jangle and discords
Of sorrow, pain, and wrong. 

Music to soothe all its sorrow,
Till war and crime shall cease
And the hearts of men grown tender
Girdle the world with peace.

– Frances Ellen Watkins Harper 

 

Bury Me in a Free Land

Make me a grave where’er you will,
In a lowly plain, or a lofty hill;
Make it among earth’s humblest graves,
But not in a land where men are slaves. 

I could not rest if around my grave
I heard the steps of a trembling slave,
His shadow above my silent tomb
Would make it a place of fearful gloom.

I could not rest if I heard the tread
Of a coffle gang to the shambles led,
And the mother’s shriek of wild despair
Rise like a curse on the trembling air.

I could not sleep if I saw the lash
Drinking her blood at each fearful gash,
And I saw her babes torn from her breast,
Like trembling doves from their parent nest. 

I’d shudder and start if I heard the bay
Of bloodhounds seizing their human prey,
And I heard the captive plead in vain
As they bound afresh his galling chain.  

If I saw young girls from their mother’s arms
Bartered and sold for their youthful charms,
My eye would flash with a mournful flame,
My death-paled cheek grow red with shame.

I would sleep, dear friends, where bloated might
Can rob no man of his dearest right;
My rest shall be calm in any grave
Where none can call his brother a slave. 

I ask no monument, proud and high,
To arrest the gaze of the passers-by;
All that my yearning spirit craves,
Is bury me not in a land of slaves. 

– Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

 

Could we trace the record of every human heart, the aspirations of every immortal soul, perhaps we could find no man so imbruted and degraded that we could not trace the word liberty either written in living characters upon that soul or hidden away in some nook or corner of the heart. 

– Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
excerpt from the National Anti-Slavery Standard, May 23, 1857

 

Sermon: A Brighter Coming Day
Rev. Dan Schatz

It happened on a streetcar. A small woman, 33 years old, with a frame her friends called “delicate” sat down. The streetcar rolled on. Happens every day.

But this day, at this woman, people stared. One of them shouted up to the conductor, who came over, looming above the tiny woman.

“You can’t sit there,” he told her, “This section is for White people.” She didn’t budge. The streetcar rolled on.

“You’re going to have to move,” he said, “Go on.” She didn’t budge. The streetcar rolled on.

So he told her, get off the car, now. Leave. People have complained, he said.

She didn’t budge. The streetcar rolled on.

Another passenger, probably feeling like a good ally, suggested, “Maybe she could sit in a corner, out of everybody’s way.”

I imagine she probably just glared at them.

It went on. The conductor kept trying to throw her off the car; she just sat there; the streetcar rolled on, as streetcars must. She tried to pay her fare, but the furious conductor just kept telling her to leave. So, she said, “I threw it down on the car floor, and got out, after I had ridden as far as I wished.” And then she added, “Such impudence.”

The place was Philadelphia, and the year was 1858, which not only was 98 years before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on public transportation, but 55 years before Rosa Parks was even born.

It was neither the first nor the last such incident. Years later, on another Philadelphia streetcar, when another conductor told her to move, she just screamed murder. Now, when I read that in one of her letters, at first I thought she just meant she shouted loudly, but I looked again; no, she put the word in quotes. “MURDER!” The conductor didn’t know what to do. He finally said if she was black she ought to behave herself. She said she knew that “if he was white, he was not behaving himself.”

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper may, indeed, have been “of delicate frame,” but she was fierce. She was also determined, brilliant, unrelentingly ethical, and possibly the most important American author, poet, essayist and social critic that most people have never heard of.

Born to free Black parents in Baltimore, September 24, 1825 – two hundred years ago this Wednesday – her mother died when she was just three years old. She was raised by her aunt, attending a school run by her uncle, a prominent pastor in Baltimore, until she was thirteen years old, and that is all the formal education she got. After that she had to find work as a domestic servant – it was the only job open to a young Black woman – but she managed to land a position with a family who owned a bookstore, so she read voraciously, wrote her first essay when she was just fourteen, and published her first book of poetry when she was twenty-one. She might have stayed there if the Fugitive Slave Act hadn’t made it dangerous for any free Black person in the South. It was so bad that any free Black person entering the state could and would be legally arrested and the penalty was enslavement. Nobody checked too carefully to see if the enslaved person had been born free or not.

So she moved North – first to Ohio, and then to Pennsylvania, ultimately settling in Philadelphia. She continued to write and publish, and did not shy from the realities of Black life.

The sale began – young girls were there,
    Defenceless in their wretchedness,
Whose stifled sobs of deep despair
    Revealed their anguish and distress.

 And mothers stood with streaming eyes,
    And saw their dearest children sold;
Unheeded rose their bitter cries,
    While tyrants bartered them for gold.

By the time she was 30, Francis Ellen Watkins was so much in demand as a public speaker that her name frequently appeared in lists of prominent African Americans. That still didn’t make it easy for her. She was Black and a woman, and faced not only ordinary racism and sexism, but also the disbelief of critics and hecklers who suggested she was actually White, or a man, or a White man in black face and a dress. (To be fair, she thought that was funny.) And she still got hassled on streetcars, which she didn’t find amusing at all, although she reveled in her impudence.

In her long life, she campaigned for abolition, and temperance, and the rights of women, and civil rights for people of every race and gender. She had a rare ability to touch the minds and hearts of Black and White audiences alike, without once sacrificing her integrity or her dignity, or the dignity of anyone else. She minced no words and suffered no fools, but she also spoke with compassion.

During Reconstruction, while lecturing in the South, she wrote of her concern for the poor White people she saw there, who had been slavery’s unwitting cheerleaders, and who once again were getting left behind. “The victims and partisans of slavery, they have stood by and seen their brother outraged and wronged, have consented to the crime, and received the curse into their own souls.” That phrase – “received the curse into their own souls” –is one she came back to again and again. But she also said, “between the white people and the colored there is a community of interest, and the sooner they find it out, the better it will be for both parties; but that community of interests does not consist in increasing the privileges of one class and curtailing the rights of the other.” It’s hard not to notice that 160 years later, our society still has not embraced that community of interest, and those old resentments still curse our nation’s soul.

She saw it happening. And she held on to her compassion, clear-headedness, and dedication to justice, joining the campaign for women’s suffrage, where she offered a powerful counterpoint to leaders like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, who did so much good, but also showed themselves willing to sacrifice the ballot for Black people in order to win their goal of suffrage for White women. And she wasn’t afraid to say it to their faces.

“We are all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity,” she said at the National Woman’s Rights Convention in 1866, with Stanton and Anthony in attendance. “Society cannot trample on the weakest and feeblest of its members without receiving the curse into its own soul…. You tried that in the case of the negro, and in so doing you crippled the moral strength and paralyzed the spiritual energies of the white men of the country…. 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 dewdrops just exhaled from the skies…. You white women speak here of rights. I speak of wrongs….” And she told the story of the streetcar, and of Black veterans denied the right vote, and of Harriet Tubman, hailed as a hero but still disenfranchised. She didn’t pull her punches. Instead she spoke with loving ferocity, reminding her audience always that oppressors were victims, too, by the very act of oppression.

It wasn’t long after that conference that she joined the First Unitarian Church of Philadelphia, where she was a member for over forty years. And over the last few weeks, as I’ve read and researched Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s life and work, I’ve been struck not only with the power and clarity of her words, but also the love she embraced, and embodied, and taught as a spiritual discipline. Her vision was deeply Christian and Unitarian. In one of her later poems, speaking in the voice of religion itself, she wrote,

My name and my nature is love;
‘Twas God only wise formed the plan;
That missioned me down from above,
As the guide and the solace of man.

I read that, and I read her letters and stories, and poetry, and essays, and speeches, and I kept seeing that moral vision of love as humanity’s guide, and the spiritual vision of love as humanity’s solace. She named that love God, but what was most important to her was that we, as human beings, and as a society, live up to love’s demands and promises. Religion, she believed, is what taught humanity “its dignity and worth; its kindred with angels, and alliance to God.” And yes, she said “dignity and worth” well over a hundred years before the phrase ever came into regular use in our religious circles.

This kind of love is not a feeling, but a calling forth to compassion for all of humanity. Over and over in different ways, she taught that our purpose in life is to make this world better for others. In one speech, on the topic of education, she said, “The devising brain and the feeling heart should never be divorced, and the question worth asking is not simply, ‘What will education do for us? but, What will it help us to do for others?’” This was always her compass. What will we do for others? “In fighting truly and nobly for others,” she said, “you win the victory for yourselves.”

Two hundred years after Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was born, we need her voice as much as we ever have. In this time when it is so hard to find the way forward, what would she say? What would she teach us?

Two weeks ago the US Supreme Court gave the government tacit permission to target people based on nothing more than the color of their skin, their workplace, or the language they happened to be speaking. And they’re doing it. ICE has rounded up firefighters, literally while they were fighting fires, veterans, and police officers, and teachers. And I remember Frances Ellen Watkins Harper arguing before that sea of White women for the rights of Black people. She said, “I have sometimes said that I thought the nation had touched bottom, but let me tell you, there is a depth of infamy lower than that. It is when the nation, standing upon the threshold of a great peril, reached out its hands to a feebler race, and asked that race to help it, and when the peril was over, said ‘You are good enough for soldiers, but not good enough for citizens.’”

Today, when I read her poetry depicting the anguish of mothers torn from their children, I think of the inhumanity of a government which does the same thing, persecuting and separating immigrant families. And I remember how important her work became in reminding a nation of the dignity and humanity of those mothers. We cannot afford to turn our eyes the other way.

When I feel helpless at how quickly things have become so bad, I remember her insistence that as small and young and vulnerable as she was, there was work for her on the underground railroad. “I have a right to do my share of the work,” she said, “though I may be deficient in many of the conventionalisms of city life, and be considered as a person of good impulses, but unfinished, yet if there is common rough work to be done, call on me.” All of us have a role, whether or not there is any recognition or glory, whether it feels important or not. “The humblest and feeblest of us can do something,” she said.

She was not afraid to do that work, and she was never afraid to speak truth to power. This was a woman who often went to places where people had been killed for speaking freely, and there were times she was warned not to go to a particular place because of the danger of speaking there. She spoke in places where children had been killed for “indiscreet speech,” and in such places, she gave her lectures for free.

Today our government has launched the most vicious attack on the freedom of speech in most of our lifetimes. They have acted to silence university students and faculty, scientists and activists. And this week, when they acted again to silence a prominent critic, the corporate media capitulated entirely.

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper understood not only the importance of free speech, but also the power of the people who are willing to take direct action for the cause of freedom. She believed in boycotts, and speaking out, and she never acquiesced to the pressure to dial it back, no matter how many feathers she ruffled.

How will we use our voices and our power for freedom? How will we fight well and nobly for others? How will we use our power and our voices to lift all people – especially those who are vulnerable and marginalized and subjected to hatred? Remember what she said, so many times, about the curse of trampling on the vulnerable, the spiritual damage racism and sexism do not only to individual racists and sexists but to those who stand by and allow it happen, and to society itself. Remember that she taught us to embrace a community of interests. That community still exists, if we are willing to do the work.

It is, above all, a community of inclusion. There’s no record of anything Frances Ellen Watkins Harper said or thought about gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender people, at least as far as I know. But I think she left us some clues. She wrote constantly about morality, which she defined not as who you are or how you live, but how you treat other people. Everything she said and did in her 85 years tells me that if she were alive today, she would be out in front, speaking and writing for everybody’s rights, for everybody’s freedom, for everybody’s “dignity and worth.”

There’s hope in that kind of work, a hope that she and others created through perseverance, even in the most painful of times in our history. So I believe she would guide us to find and create hope, for every race and gender, and class, and orientation, and for our country.

At the end of her most famous novel, Iola Leroy, she tacked on a poem: 

There is light beyond the darkness,
Joy beyond the present pain;
There is hope in God’s great justice
And the negro’s rising brain.
Though the morning seems to linger
O’er the hill-tops far away,
Yet the shadows bear the promise
Of a brighter coming day.

This was a woman born in a time of slavery, who literally had to flee the city of her birth as a homeless refugee. This was a woman who witnessed first hand the difficulties of reconstruction, and the advent of Jim Crow and segregation in the North as well as the South. This was a woman who campaigned her entire life for the right of women to vote, and never lived to see it happen.

But she lived with the conviction of a brighter coming day, and the moral imperative of bringing that day about. That vision and that conviction gave her the courage to stand face to face with streetcar conductors, and racists and sexists and Governors and luminaries, and the poorest among us, of every race, and see there – humanity, a community of interest.

The shadows bear the promise of a brighter coming day.

That doesn’t mean it comes automatically, or that some things won’t be worse before they get better. She knew that as much as anyone; she’d witnessed it firsthand. It means that in hidden places, millions of people just like us are answering the call to justice, and together, we can bring justice. How will we live that conviction? How will we answer her moral call to live in service to others, to embrace our common humanity, to meet these times with courage, diligence, and love?

This day is ours. These shadows are all around us; there is no doubt. Yet because of all of our efforts, the shadows bear a promise, and there is work for every one of us. It began before we were born and will continue for as long as humanity exists. Remembering our forbears and reaching toward the future, together, all of us will bring the brighter coming day.

 

 

Higher and better than hate for hate,
Like the scorpion fangs that desolate,
Is the hope of a brighter, fairer morn
And a peace and love that shall yet be born.

– Frances Ellen Watkins Harper:
excerpt from “A Fairer Hope, a Brighter Morn”