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Black Lives of Unitarian Universalism
While this group, which included Leslie Mac and Lena Gardner, both activists in the Movement for Black Lives,3 did not set out for Cleveland to create a new organization or faith community, that is exactly what they accomplished. Drawing from the seven principles of the broader Unitarian Universalist (UU) movement, as well as the ideology of the Black Lives Matter movement, Black Lives UU developed its own seven principles, including “All Black Lives Matter,” “Love and Self-Love Is Practiced in Every Element of All We Do,” and “Spiritual Growth Is Directly Tied to Our Ability to Embrace Our Whole Selves.” The group quickly grew and engaged in effective fundraising that allowed it to bring more than two hundred Black Unitarian Universalists to the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) General Assembly in 2017, a record for Black attendance at that annual meeting. It likewise boasts a vibrant social media presence that has made the organization the go-to space for Black UUs around the country and around the world to share ideas, support one another, and build community.4
While the creation of Black Lives UU might seem to be a novel development in the history of both Black and liberal religion, African Americans have engaged with and been key figures in American religious liberalism since the eighteenth century. Gloster Dalton, a freed slave, was a founding member of the first Universalist church in the United States in 1785. Amy Scott, a free Black woman, was likewise a founding member of the First Universalist Society in Philadelphia in 1790. Egbert Ethelred Brown founded a Unitarian congregation in Jamaica, New York, in 1908 and then moved to Harlem, where he assembled the Harlem Unitarian Church in 1920. In 1947, Lewis A. McGee founded the Free Religious Fellowship in Chicago, a Unitarian church that is still in existence. Along with these pioneers, Black members of the denomination founded the Black Unitarian Universalist Caucus (BUUC) in the late 1960s to make the denomination more responsive to the demands of the Black Power movement. While that organization lasted only six years, it provided a model for the contemporary Black Lives UU organization.
Just as BUUC aimed to wed the political principles of Black Power with the theology of Unitarian Universalism, so too has BLUU endeavored to bring together the politics of the broader Movement for Black Lives with the religious ideals of the denomination. Indeed, for the current leaders of the BLUU Organizing Collective—including Lena Gardner, Takiyah Nur Amin, and Mykal Slack—there is no sharp distinction between their faith and politics. If Unitarian Universalists proclaim the “inherent worth and dignity of every person” as the first of their seven principles, then leaders of BLUU would argue all members of the denomination should be advocates of Black Lives Matter (BLM), both as a movement and as a political ideology. Additionally, BLUU has become a spiritual resource and home for BLM activists who are wary of traditional Black churches. Rather than show up and pass out church flyers at activist gatherings and events, BLUU leaders instead show up, take part in, and help fund these events, activities that provide a powerful example of faith in action for activists suspicious of faith leaders. BLUU has thus built on the powerful historical legacy of its predecessors in the denomination while creating something entirely new—a community of Black religious liberals with the funding to control their own organization and the drive to improve the lives of those on the margins, especially Black women and LGBTQ individuals.
