UUFR thought of itself as an antiracist institution prior to the late 90’s based on doing “good deeds” and supporting African American efforts in the community. The original charter for UUFR stated that “anyone” could join. In the early 60’s the congregation gave money to help bring Martin Luther King, Jr. to Raleigh to speak. There were efforts to help African American children with a summer camp and to host children of the Lumbee Indians who were denied schooling in their own county.
However, in the 1990’s more began to happen. William Edmonston, who had grown up in Raleigh, moved back to care for his mother and joined UUFR. He was an African American doctor with ties to the community. He got us involved with St. Ambrose Episcopal Church. We had potluck dinners back and forth and worked actively with them to clean up the Walnut Creek watershed. We supported their project of creating the Wetlands Center as one of Raleigh’s Parks. That connection ended when the minister’s daughter joined UUFR.
Then around 1998, UUFR had a Jubilee World Workshop and about 40 members attended. This was an antiracism workshop for white people sponsored by the UUA. As a result of this workshop, the antiracism group, Journey Towards Wholeness, was started at UUFR. We also did several projects as a result of the workshop such as creating a list of minority vendors that UUFR should use. The Journey Towards Wholeness group met monthly until about 2012. The group regularly sponsored educational programs after Sunday services which included lunch in an effort to get others in the congregation involved. We generally had the same 30 to 35 participants and never had overt support from the ministers. We read books, saw movies, held discussions, etc. but made little difference in the congregation in general. We had a couple more Jubilee World workshops at UUFR. And the UU district had antiracism workshops and we hosted one of those as well as regularly attending. We actually brought Mark Morrison-Reed, an African American UU minister, to UUFR in an evening program that was well attended to talk about his most recent book (at the time). We also had an actor, Mike Wiley, perform a one-man show “Blood Done Sign My Name” based on the book by Tim Tyson and Tim actually came and talked about it. Many members and others in the community attended. But, the needle in the congregation never moved. This group disbanded because no one would be chair any more. And the UUA was supporting an effort called Mosaic Makers and some members moved to that effort.
In 2016, the UUFR Board of Directors asked that an antiracism ministry team be created to look at UUFR’s policies, procedures and programs to see why no progress was being made in terms of welcoming others of cultural and ethnic backgrounds that were not white. Assistant Minister Sasha Ostrom asked for volunteers, and the Antiracism Ministry Team (ARM) was formed. At first, the group began to review policies and make suggestions for rewriting them. Then Justin Osterman came as the Developmental Minister and actively encouraged the group to find a training program for the congregants. After the two people from Richmond who had written Living the Pledge to End Racism for their congregation came and trained 12 people at UUFR, ARM began to present the workshop to members at UUFR. Justin actively promoted the workshop from the pulpit and more than 200 members were trained. At times programs were developed for children and the workshop also included members from other churches in the area. Efforts to partner with other congregations had started when COVID hit.
Around 2019 the Board of Directors came back to ARM and asked that an evaluation of UUFR’s Policies, Procedures and Programs be conducted as originally requested. A subgroup of ARM began to try to find out how to do this. After contacting the UUA, we found that there was no clear template available. We searched for someone to do a document review and eventually found Dr. Quienton Nichols from Fayetteville State who had some experience in doing such a review. He reviewed our policies and procedures and website. We also hired a consultant, Julica Hermann De La Fuente, recommended by the UUA who suggested that we use the rubric tool that she had developed to evaluate our programs. And Rev. James wanted us to have staff and leaders of the congregation do the Intercultural Developmental Assessment. During this process, the Addressing Institutional Racism Committee of the Board was created. After all of these components were completed, we wrote a report and recommendations. They can be found on UUFR’s website. The report went to the Board of Directors and many of the recommendations were included in the current strategic plan.
One of the recommendations was to contract with Dr. Nichols to created a plan for attracting and retaining BIPOC to UUFR. Rev. James supported creating that contract. The focus groups that led to the BIPOC discussion group were the result of that effort. The discussions led to more involvement and more active recruitment of others by the BIPOC community at UUFR. Rev. James was just as excited about this as many of the members of ARM and AIR. He planned to continue Dr. Nichols’ contract as a pseudo staff member to work directly with the BIPOC community during the current church year. In my time at UUFR, Rev. James was more overtly supportive and positive about the antiracism efforts than any other minister had been.
I think that Rev. James plans to create an antiracism ministry team to work with the minister on programming changes to help UUFR move forward in these efforts. ARM had not done very much in the last two years other than having a couple of Living the Pledge to End Racism workshops. Meetings were irregular. AIR was not sure what to do after completing the report and recommendations. In 2013, members of AIR met with many of the committees and ministry teams at UUFR to talk to them about the rubric assessment tool and get their input about ways their group could help UUFR become more antiracist. The results of these conversations are archived. Creating a new team under the minister seems like a good idea to me.
