Claudia Highbaugh's 'Reflections on the Movement'
Claudia Highbaugh's 'Reflections on the Movement'
In readings, photographs and personal reflections, the Rev. Claudia Highbaugh, dean of religious and spiritual life at Connecticut College, and College Chaplain Stephen Murray led an extraordinary observation of Martin Luther King Day. Below is an abridged adaptation of Highbaugh's remarks.
Reflections on the Movement
By the Rev. Dr. Claudia Highbaugh
This year, 2008, is the 40th year since the death of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King. This is two entire generations of life since Dr. King died and horrible, public, violent death on April 4, 1968. For some of us, that day was not so much a beginning, as an end to a time of confrontation, turmoil, change and hope. So much died that day...words, emotion, relationships, understanding, communication; what did not die changed radically on April 4, 1968 and the radical movement itself had changed, the movement that formed and moved a generation?my generation.
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| Claudia Highbaugh |
It would be great if we could take these few minutes to think of a way of being in the world that makes new personal commitments to communication with people that are different, listening to people that have a different experience of life, culture and ethnic, social or economic background, and finding ways in whatever work or vocation that we choose to always think about what is right and good, what makes for justice.
My work and ministry come as a result of my early commitment to and involvement with a variety of academic communities. I still hope for change and the creation of ways to carefully construct ways to deal justly with one another. I still live in the mind of the movement that demands respect for human rights and the right of all people to participate fully in our economic and political systems, providing access to health and education for all people, and surrounding all of us across ages and generations with a sound, safe and fair legal system. I live with the dream that we will continue to work to create and sustain a better, more positive, value based, instructive, safe and faithful world for our children.
You should know something of the timeline of my life, as I share my reflections for today?I turned 13 in 1963, the year that John F. Kennedy was shot and I turned 20, in 1970, the year that college students were murdered at Kent and Jackson State Universities. I am shaped and formed from the earliest days of my adolescence by a sense of power and violence that binds youthful innocence over to the reality of struggle and oppression in a world of deep injustice and even evil.
The life and work and faith of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. are part and parcel of the text of my life and learning. Part of a foundation that defies innocence and demands confrontation. I am a person living in a world of continued racism and discrimination, who continues to search for and tell the truth. I invite you to this short reflection that asks us to remember the work and words of Dr. King, and his colleagues, naming some of the movement members; women and children, who sacrificed life and limb to bring us this far. In naming those who have been a part of this great pilgrimage, I invite your memory, your participation, and our willing worker spirit as we commit to keep faith, hope and justice as a part of our life and work together.
In the footsteps of one great leader are hundreds of thousands of voices, names, and faces; the martyred and slain, old and young, the faithful and those who struggle with faith. The truth of the movement lies not only in the voice of one great orator, but as well in the lives and faith of those inspired to follow along in the great procession of the Civil Rights Movement.
The pilgrimage, the procession of the movement of generations of black people begins in chains; human bodies bound one to another, tied together, in abhorrent inhuman and vile transport, sheltered from the light of day. The ones that survived the middle passage, crated over in ships bearing them as chattel and cargo somehow confronted with the light of day, passed on this legacy of movement and intimate connection. Somehow, I understand the survival of the African Diaspora in the United States of America and the slave colonies to be a part of a centuries old procession of soul and spirit, flesh and bone; man and woman and child moving with the power of the spirit of life toward survival.
The procession of survival continues into the dark unknown on the underground railroad, where thousands of slaves took to the darkness, empowered by the deep vision and spiritual direction of their forebears tied to one another in the bottom of ships crossing danger waters. Led by the stars and signs and voices of the dead and the call of the living, the slaves moved under the cover of night and wilderness to parts of the civilization of the new world, that were civilized to people of darkness. Beyond chains, and legal submission, beyond humiliation to humanity the people moved, if silently, to unite their spirits beyond survival into freedom.
Movement has always been the paradigm for survival for the people of the African Diaspora. Seen and unseen, known and unnoticed, the movement of a race of tribes never ended, beginning from the day the bodies of the first slaves were chained to the first slave ships.
Over the years and generations, black people have sustained the movement to freedom in sacred and secret places and spaces. The public manifestation of the forward movement to freedom is simply a procession, profession of what always was for the African Diaspora, forward movement.
The steps begin to become public and resounding in the mid-fifties when the procession is staged before the vast audience of the world, in media, on camera live and in black and white. Out loud the forward procession continues, moving with and holding on to hope with the bodies and lives of those who would step in time to history and hope.
For me the Civil Rights Movement, born of the procession of faithful, became public on December 1, 1955, when going home one day, Mrs. Rosa Parks simply refused to move from her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama city bus. Dozens of black people had done the same action in the months previous, wishing and planning to continue a procession to freedom, by non-movement. But this time, the community rallied around this quiet and reserved and hard workingwoman as a symbol of its courage. And thus began the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the beginning of the public trial for the movement of people enslaved to a government of injustice.
Called out from his pulpit and the protection of the church; the young preacher, Martin Luther King, Jr. became the spokesperson for the continuation of the procession to freedom, now embodied in a public movement of the people of the Diaspora.
I remember sitting with my mother on the first day of the Little Rock debacle, and for the first time in my young life, watching her cry. When I asked my mommy why she was crying, she simply said the she wished for a better, safer and happier world for her baby. It was the first time that I understood that the world did not think that all little children were not good people.
Some of the characters in the movement sat and did not move. Rosa Parks and these children were committed to sitting down to move ahead. The voice of the articulate preacher was shaping a procession of faithful, committed people; women and children who would take great risks and employ great courage to shape a new world, to move the procession forward, in hope of creating freedom.
Dr. King's movement had an army of people who worked in communities across the nation for the guarantee of civil rights for all people. Young people and church people ministers and politicians marched and rallied, but there were also many who gave their lives and commitment simply for the right to vote, to speak, to engage the system of rights for all people. These were not only the marchers, but also workers, placing life and limb in jeopardy everyday, so the marchers could march, the children could read and write and the southern poor black folk could register to vote.
Many of those called to live into the procession of black Americans moving towards freedom and rights, did so at great sacrifice?some of them were wounded and some of them died.
The entire movement is laid upon the steps and journeys of people who, though trained and informed and warned of the dangers and difficulties of their actions, still maintain a commitment to a movement that would survive, even though many, whose names we do not know, were martyred, their names forgotten.
In the continuing procession of workers and marchers, people in the movement and the community of the faithful called to the procession of generations moving toward freedom, we cannot forget that the flesh and blood of the great leader Martin Luther King was preceded by the deaths of even small children who did not understand their part in the long procession of the faithful.
Can you recall any of the faces of the Civil Rights Movement?the march across the William Pettis Bridge, and the fearful violent confrontation of the police with the peaceful procession? Have you been taught about the images of the children's crusade in the streets of Birmingham, hundreds of children crammed into makeshift jails and cells, turned back with fire hoses?
Did you see the images of the burning buses from the Freedom Rides, and busted jaws of black folks and whites, beaten senseless for wanting a seat on a bus? Do you remember anything about the March on Washington, and the gathered crowd on the mall waiting and listening and anticipating the now-famous ?I have a Dream? speech?
Even when you reckon with the unwritten names and the unknown martyred, even when you struggle with bleeding marchers and the children in jails and in coffins, I cannot imagine that your attention to the movement of the past allows you to believe that all of our work is done.
The movement may well be done. But I am here today as an eyewitness to the powerful sacrifices of the un-named and little known participants in a procession to freedom that is not done. I invite you to march and join those who will speak for justice, live for justice and work against the odds and with the hope of justice.
Today, right now, make a plan for you life work that that will make a difference. Today, I am inviting you out of memory and into the procession.
I grew up in the Civil Rights era as a grade school student in an Episcopal Parochial School. In my school for eight years, there was a weekly mass and worship for the children. In the captive memory of my childhood, like a dream, is the movement of the weekly procession of our church school mass. At the head of the procession the altar boy carried a large cross, and then came two more children carrying two tall candles, followed by the children's choir and the startling voices of Father Martin and Father Mack. In the early years of grade school, before I was in the choir, each week I was comforted and touched because of the passing by blessing of the people in my everyday life, moving steadily, surely to the place of renewal?walking with a steady pace. They carried the symbols of the Holy, proceeding to enter the time of prayer and closure of a hard week spent in the tasks of learning and growing. In the later years of my life in the mysterious and sacred place of the children's mass, I participated in the procession singing and living the words of faith:
God of our weary years, God of our silent tears
Thou who hast brought us thus far on the way,
Thou who hast by thy might led us into the light,
Keep us forever in the path we pray.
Lest our feet stray from the places our God,
where we met Thee,
Lest our hearts drunk with the wine of the world
we forget Thee;
Shadowed beneath Thy hand,
May we forever stand,
True to our God,
True to our native land.
So come with me now, the invitation is yours. Fall in line. Step foot forward in light of new possibilities, new relationships, the power of your education; across time and circumstance, past injustice and violence and oppression. Stay on the road, hang in with the procession, follow behind the children's choir. And keep in your line of vision, the path that leads to justice and equality?a world made new.