Black History Month Marked At Church

Using African drums to drive home their point along with a gallery of newspaper clippings tracing the path of the civil rights movement in this country, members of the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Huntington celebrated black history month Sunday.

Civil rights attorney Frederick Brewington of Freeport, guest speaker, urged congregation members to remember, even when things are going wrong, that “the arc of the universe tends to bend toward justice.”

It was a defining moment in America when Barack Obama was elected president, Brewington said, yet despite the bright future it was a moment that led many to cry as they remembered the history of blacks in America. That history “is the prism through which we examine our heritage and look to the future based on hope,” he said. Quoting Ephesians, he urged listeners to put on the whole armor of God and to struggle against evil.

Instances of standing tall help spread the ideas of hope and justice. A prisoner in Africa reported taking inspiration from seeing Nelson Mandela walk unbowed across the prison yard day after day. “If you stand upright, then when they go to climb on your back you’ve got plenty of opportunity to throw them off,” Brewington said. “Nelson Mandela is still not bending.”

Early black leaders in this country also chose not to bend, using the drums and other ways to help set an example “so the arc of the universe could continue toward justice for those yet to come,” he said. The fight continues today. “Egyptians want justice and freedom just like blacks and slaves did in America. “This prism of history is not just ours but is worldwide, a universal sense.”

He urged listeners to “refuse to be silent, refuse to be lied to, refuse to be misled, refuse to suffer, refuse to be cheated, refuse to be abused, refuse to be imprisoned. Celebrate the victories that the arc of the universe brings us.”

One of those victories, Brewington said, is that John White’s prison sentence was commuted in December by former Gov. David Paterson. White was sentenced in the 2006 slaying of Daniel Cicciaro Jr., 17, during a confrontation in White’s Miller Place driveway. Brewington, one of White’s lawyers, relayed how White’s reaction to that night’s events was informed by his memories of how his family was burned out by the Ku Klux Klan when he was a child. “We don’t rejoice in the loss of a life but in the fact that justice has a way to weed out things because Paterson commuted White’s sentence,” Brewington said.

Reactions to the talk varied. Fellowship member Pat Testa said she liked the message and the way Brewington pulled different elements together. “It’s a very meaningful message,” she said.

“I was hoping he would address more of ‘where do we go from here’ rather than where we have been. We already know that,” said Anne Rattinger, also a fellowship member.

Black history month started out as black history week, chosen initially by Carter Godwin Woodson to recognize two men intimately linked with black history – abolitionist Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, according to Paul Glatzer, a former Whitman teacher and fellowship member. Woodson was founder of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History in 1915, and began Black History Week in 1926.

The service opened with a reading by Helen Boxwill of the story “To Be A Drum,” by Evelyn Coleman, and a session of drumming of a traditional Haitian song by fellowship members Harriet McKenna, Helen Boxwill, Lauren Singer, Elizabeth Fernandez and Richard Fernandez.

In the lobby, fellowship member Joyce Williams had on display clippings from the ’60s civil rights movement, which she became active in and followed when she was a student at the University of Alabama when a black student attempted to enroll. Her displays chronicled the 1963 March on Washington, the Selma to Montgomery marches and the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign in Washington, D.C., as well as information on the beating death of Unitarian Universalist minister James Reeb of Boston, who went to Selma to participate in one of the three marches and who died from injuries he received when he was beaten March 9, 1965.