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Rev. Mark Morrison-Reed;
Celebrant: Petra Lange.
In March 1965, when the call came to join the African-American citizens of Selma, UUs responded. Why, despite the risk, did they go? And how did the experience change them, even as it changed the world? Imbedded in the answers to these questions are lessons that will serve us well today as we take up the mantel in striving to make justice a reality.
Mark Morrison-Reed served for 26 years as co-minister with his wife, Donna, in Rochester, New York, and Toronto. During this time he also served as vice-chair of the UUA Commission on Appraisal and the Ministerial Fellowship Committee. As a historian of the African-American presence in UUism, he is author of Black Pioneers in a White Denomination, Darkening the Doorways: Black Trailblazers and Missed Opportunities in Unitarian Universalism and The Selma Awakening: How the Civil Rights Movement Tested and Changed Unitarian Universalism. He also wrote the curriculum How Open the Door? The African-American Experience in Unitarian Universalism and the book In Between: Memoir of an Integration Baby. He is co-editor of a meditation manuals Been in the Storm So Long and Voices from the Margin. A former president of the Canadian Unitarian Council, he is currently an affiliated faculty member at Meadville Lombard Theological School in Chicago, coordinator of its Sankofa Archive – a collection of materials about the people of color who were Unitarian Universalist, and UUA Ambassador to fellowships in Europe.