Sermon

INTRODUCTION: “Where are you going?” his mother asked. “I'm running away,” said the little eight-year-old boy. “Where are you running to?" she said.

The boy was silent. His suitcase was half full. He had put in some clothes. Now he was putting in the important stuff: his favorite books and a toy or two. He was leaving a lot behind. But where he was going he didn’t think he would need much, because he was going to some yet undetermined place where everything was fair and equal.
"Where will you go?" asked his mother again. "Some place where the color of my skin won't matter,” replied the boy with a quiver in his voice. The mother waited a moment and then said, "What happened?"
Little Whitney Young said, "I was walking down the street and two White boys called me a 'nigger.' Then they made me get off the sidewalk so they could pass by. I hate them." By now he was crying. "I wish I had never been born and I wish I had never been born black."

His mother put her arm around him and said, "Whitney, your color is beautiful. It's just that some people don't see it that way. Do you know that when I was your age I wanted to run away from home, too, thinking I could find a place where the color of my skin wouldn't matter?"

Whitney looked at his mother with fresh approval and asked, "You did! What happened?"

"Well, my momma saw me packing my bag and said she knew what I was doing. She told me that she had tried to run away too and her momma had caught her and her momma had remembered the time she'd packed her suitcase, too.”

She took young Whitney’s hands and looked in his eyes and said to him, “All of us Black people have had decisions to make about how to deal with the unfairness of the world simply because we’re people of color."
          Whitney Young asked, "Why did you and your momma and your momma's momma decide not to go – not to run away?"
          His mother answered, "Well, my momma's momma told her and momma told me and now I'm telling you: We Youngs don't run from bad things. We face them and we change them."
          "How do you change them?"
          His mother then told him this: "Well, your momma's momma, my momma, and I all understood that if you believe what some Whites want you to believe – that our color is the problem – then hate grows. It festers inside you and you grow up bitter. Your momma's momma, my momma, and I all gave you something different: a heritage of pride. We’re proud to be Black.”

She said, “Those boys on the street feel small inside. That's why they picked on you, so they will feel bigger. But if you know that they are that way because of their own ignorance and smallness, then nothing they say can hurt you.

          “And let me tell you something else. For three generations, our family has been watching the world change and we've been helping it along. It's your turn now to join us and to work to change bad things rather than run from them."
          "But what do I do?"
          "You'll know when the time comes."

Whitney Young went on to graduate from Kentucky State University, where he was a member of Alpha Phi Alpha, the first fraternity established by African Americans for African Americans. He earned a master’s degree in Social Work from the University of Minnesota, and received a Rockefeller Grant to study for one year at Harvard. He became Dean of the School of Social Work at Clark University in Atlanta. He then became President of the National Association of Social Workers, a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Honor, and at age 40 became president of the National Urban League. At the time he began his service to the League, they had 38 employees and a $325,000 budget. Ten years later upon his death, they had 1,600 employees and a budget of $6,100,000. In the process, he had become an advisor to presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon, initiated programs like the “Street Academy” to reach drop outs and prepare them for college, and was in the forefront of the Civil Rights Movement

Of all the Civil Rights leaders, Whitney Young had a unique perspective from which to speak. He was a power broker and used that post most effectively.

When the Black Power movement became a threat to the status quo, Whitney Young helped America to understand it by saying:

"Black Power simply means: ‘Look at me. I'm here. I have dignity. I have pride. I have roots. I insist, I demand, that I participate in those decisions that affect my life and the lives of my children. It means that I am somebody.’"

He believed that access to economic opportunity for Black people was a right historically denied. But it was the same goal that Dr. King had when he marched with the garbage workers in Memphis for better wages, which led to his assassination.

Whitney Young was also a part of the 1963 March on Washington, and was very affirming of Dr. King. But in contrast to Dr. King, Whitney Young said,

"You can protest, march, picket and demonstrate, but somebody must be able to sit in on the strategy conferences and plot a course. There must be tacticians, the researchers, the professionals to carry out the program. That's our role."

He too was targeted for assassination. The FBI arrested and prosecuted two would be assassins. In 1968, they were convicted in the New York Supreme Court of conspiring to murder Whitney Young.

Now as a change of pace, I want to say that we’re especially honored to have within our midst, a man who knew Whitney Young and worked with him on affordable housing in New Jersey.

Because of time constraints, I’ve asked Mr. Roy Kennix to limit his remarks to five minutes, which will only give us a hint of the man, but it’s one from which I’m sure we will benefit.

As most of you know, Roy Kennix is a member of our congregation and was the director of LEEDCO for many years, working primarily within the minority community to empower small businesses and new and would be entrepreneurs. He and his wife Frankie Jennings, now direct the largest after school tutoring program in Lee County Schools. I’ve always been proud to be associated with everything he does. Thanks Roy for agreeing to give us a personal up close insight to the man Whitney Young:

These are especially difficult times economically for many. There’s a very real sense in which our economic system has failed. The giant bailouts of Wall Street, and the subsequent advantage of the system taken by firms like Goldman Sachs, are telling indictments against unregulation or self-regulation (which have been proven to be almost the same thing). You would think that any self-respecting American would have agreed that in these times having a good job is reward enough, but not for the greed filled creators of the present recessionary crisis. They have had the temerity to take huge bonuses not for hard work or strategic insight, but for being in the right place at the right time.

However, there is one unexpected benefit of the recession. It is that Americans are outraged at greed gone to seed. The outcry has even caused the robber barons at Goldman Sacs to hire a public relations firm to mitigate the fallout.

Further, conspicuous consumption is no longer the in thing, in America. In fact, McMansions are recognized as hugely destructive ecological footprints. Former Vice-President Gore learned that when he built his mega-mansion, as well as former presidential candidate John Edwards.

The point is that when people are going without food to eat, the rest of us need not only to help out, but to be voices against the excesses of the wealthy and rich. As Whitney Young put it best, “Every woman and man are our sister and brother, and every person’s burden is our own. Where poverty exists, all are poorer. Where hate flourishes, all are corrupted. Where injustice reins, all are unequal."

On March 11, 1971, Whitney Young drowned in the prime of his life at age 50, while swimming with friends in Nigeria, where he was attending a conference sponsored by the African-American Institute. As a sign of his prominence and importance, then President Nixon sent a plane to Nigeria to pick up Young's body and then he traveled to Kentucky to personally deliver the eulogy at Young's funeral.

I close with one last Whitney Young quote – an epitaph, of sorts. He said, "I am not anxious to be the loudest voice or the most popular. But I would like to think that at a crucial moment, I was an effective voice of the voiceless, an effective hope of the hopeless."

[1] The fourth in a series of sermons entitled: “Unitarians who made a difference,” presented Nov. 22, 2009 at All Faiths Unitarian Congregation of Ft. Myers, FL, meeting at the Crestwell School, 1901 Park Meadows, Ft. Myers, FL by the Rev. Dr. Wayne Robinson, Minister.