A Decisive Decade: An Insider's View of the Chicago Civil Rights Movement during the 1960s

1. The First Unitarian Church of Chicago: My Gateway to the Civil Rights Movement and to Alex Poinsett

7 1. The First Unitarian Church of Chicago: My Gateway to the Civil Rights Movement and to Alex Poinsett There have been many unsung heroes of the civil rights movement who were Unitarian Universalists. —Amanda Smith, High Street Unitarian Universalist Church, Macon, Georgia Ibecame part of the civil rights movement in Chicago as a result of my membership in the First Unitarian Church of Chicago. While an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania, I had been active in the university’s Christian Association and came to know Bob and Wanda VanGoor. Bob and I had served as counselors at University Camp (more about this experience later), and I kept in close touch with the VanGoors while I was in the navy, visiting them several times in New Haven where Bob studied for a bachelor of divinity degree. Upon graduating from Yale, Bob decided that rather than work as a minister he could better serve society by getting involved in the then-nascent concept of health maintenance organizations. He took a position as executive director for the Group Health Foundation in Chicago. While doing fieldwork for my dissertation at Harvard Business School, I visited and sometimes stayed with the VanGoors, who had decided to live in Hyde Park. As a result, I became acquainted with the community. Wanda was active in the Hyde Park–Kenwood Neighborhood Association and several other service organizations, and I came to appreciate the activism of the community’s many residents. The First Unitarian Church of Chicago 8 When we decided to move to Chicago, the opportunity to live in Hyde Park—an interracial community with some of the same characteristics (due to its location near the university) as I had experienced in Cambridge, Massachusetts —was appealing. Soon after moving to Hyde Park in the fall of 1959, Nancy and I decided to check out the Unitarian Church where Bob and Wanda were active members. We joined the church, and our first two children, Bill and Liz, were dedicated there. I welcomed this opportunity to be a part of the community at the Unitarian church. I saw it as a good balance to my work at the university. The latter, with its emphasis on research and rigorous analysis, and to some extent embodying a fairly conservative approach to social problems, often left me with the feeling that my “glass was half empty.” The folks at the Unitarian church, while not rabid and emotional (as subsequent chapters will demonstrate)—indeed, they tended to intellectualize—reasoned from a liberal perspective, one that I found quite congenial and supportive of the emerging civil rights movement. Soon after joining the church, I began attending the Adult Discussion Group, which met an hour before the regular church service, and before long, I agreed to facilitate the weekly meetings. My role in chairing the Adult Discussion Group required gathering background materials, setting the agenda, and keeping a firm hand on discussions that generated wide-ranging opinions and perspectives. When I first joined the group, it numbered about ten or twelve participants. However, as the galvanizing events of the early 1960s unfolded, attendance grew, and fairly soon the group numbered thirty to forty individuals. Two sisters traveled from Evanston each Sunday, and they remarked that the spirited give-andtake of the discussion group “made their week worthwhile.” Two black individuals, Alex Poinsett and Tim Black, were both very active in the group. They became close friends, were instrumental in shaping my thinking and motivating me to get involved in the unfolding civil rights movement in Chicago. Alex spoke eloquently and passionately, capsuling the thinking of the black community. His eloquence was illustrated in a sermon he delivered as part of the service conducted by the Adult Discussion Group on Layman’s Sunday. He stood in the pulpit, his dark skin complemented by the walnut woodwork. After a few quips about being an NAU (Negro American Unitarian), in which he differentiated himself from WASU (White Anglo Saxon Unitarian), he delivered a stunning talk about what Unitarianism meant to him. Alex existed in two worlds. His feet were certainly in the African American community. He grew up with five sisters in Depression-era Chicago. His The First Unitarian Church of Chicago 9 family was so poor, he reflected at one point, that some days they had only sugar sandwiches to eat. In 1944, he was drafted into the U.S. Navy, where he experienced...