MAY YOU LIVE IN INTERESTING TIMES
A Meditation on the Life and Legacy of Olympia Brown
James Ishmael Ford
20 March 2016
Pacific Unitarian Church
Rancho Palos Verdes, California
I come to you today with some bad news.
But, not to worry unduly. I also have good news to share.
Let me start with the bad.
Perhaps its not news. These are complex and troubled times. In fact a picture perfect example of that ancient Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times.” Wars and rumors of wars abound across the globe. A very small number of people control more wealth than has been imagined in any empire of the past. A larger number of people are living astonishingly comfortable lives, but precariously, in danger at near any moment of tumbling into the ever-growing mass of people desperately seeking just to survive. While there are great advances in equality in some areas, fierce scapegoating of the powerless, the poor, immigrants, and minorities of various sorts for the ills overtaking us becomes one the most amazing acts of misdirection, largely and sadly willful, as we are every one of us complicit in this bit of kabuki. And our situation is actually even worse than that short litany suggests. The climate of our planet is shifting in ways we can only put educated guesses to, mostly as the result of short-sighted grasping after profit while we seem powerless to address it, addicted to the momentary pleasures of what have to be called ill-gotten gain.
Interesting times, indeed. As we have such an uneven track record as human beings, I’m more than nervous on our behalf. No way this has to turn out well.
And that brings us here, to this place. And to this community. And to that good news.
We proclaim a message of hope, knowing intimately that our hearts without exception are joined, our lives without exception are intertwined, and what happens to one of us, happens to all. Without exception. This is a spiritual vision. We find it by stopping and noticing, against all the blandishments to distract us by opening our hearts and minds. It’s amazing. It is a gate to perspective, and even to something that can be called a peace that passes all understanding. And, also, this vision of our radical interdependence has practical consequences.
Today I want to spend the balance of our time examining what those practical consequences are by telling a story. A real story. A true story. Today I want to share the life of one person who met the possibility of despair, and overcame it in ways that seemed impossible at the time she did it. And in describing her life, I suggest we might be hinting at ours, and because of her, recall what our lives might be.
Today I share here the life of our mother Olympia Brown. If we pay attention, she can show us the way.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century Lephia and Asa Brown were farmers living in Prairie Ronde, Michigan. They were both deeply religious and appeared to value education as dearly as their Universalist faith. Not, I suggest, unlike many of us here today. Olympia was born in 1835, the eldest of their four children. Seeing the need in that frontier town, her parents provided the land for a school, Asa then built the schoolhouse with his own hands, and after that went the rounds of his neighbors to solicit support for a teacher.
Young Olympia often rode with her father as he made these rounds. At home her mother gave the children’s education, for both the boys and girls, her highest priority. As a small aside for those with a genealogical interest, according to Laurie Carter Noble who provided much of the background material I use here, Lephia and Asa would in the fullness of time become Calvin Coolidge’s great great aunt & uncle. We really are all connected. Whether we like it or not.
When it came time to attend college Olympia was refused admission to the University of Michigan because of her gender. So she registered at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in Massachusetts. She was quickly dissatisfied with what proved to be a program more designed to produce a proper young lady than an educated person. After one year at Mount Holyoke Olympia transferred to Antioch College, where the radical Unitarian educator Horace Mann was the school’s president. There were still gender inequities, but she was given access to a real education, at least so long as she was willing to push to the front. She was. And she was so successful her family ended up moving to Yellow Springs to support her siblings who all ended up attending Antioch.
Among young Olympia’s heroes was Antoinette Brown, later Blackwell. She’s so important for Olympia’s story, we need to make a small digression here. Antoinette was not a relative, you may not know this, but Brown is a fairly common name. Antoinette was a Congregationalist, who attended Oberlin and after completing her undergraduate degree continued on with theological studies, completing the coursework but being denied a degree because of her gender and despite her quickly emerging reputation as a theologian.
Leaving school Antoinette went to work for Frederick Douglas, writing for his paper, the North Star. She also was invited to speak at the first National Women’s Rights Convention in 1850. Finally, she was ordained by her congregation, and served a couple of churches, although like with her being denied her theological degree, she was not recognized as a minister by the national denomination. Antoinette was one of the leading intellectual and spiritual figures in the years prior to the Civil War, speaking out on religion, abolition and women’s rights. I want to add with a digression within this digression that in 1878 she crossed over to the Unitarians and her ministry was finally officially acknowledged by a denomination – ours. But, while I find it real real interesting, that’s getting ahead of the story, which is Olympia’s story.
While an undergraduate at Antioch young Olympia managed to arrange for Antoinette to come and speak. As the chief organizer for the event Olympia got to spend some time with the formidable Antoinette. Formidable meeting formidable. They immediately bonded.
And inspired Olympia decided that ministry was also her calling, her destiny. As she came close to graduating from Antioch, Olympia began applying to theological schools. Oberlin offered the same arrangement they gave to Antoinette, she could attend school but would not be given a diploma. Our Unitarian seminary at Meadville responded that, “the trustees thought it would be too great an experiment.” And refused her admission.
But, the Universalist seminary at St Lawrence University accepted her, if reluctantly. Dr Ebenezer Fisher, the president wrote her saying “It is perhaps proper that I should say, you may have some prejudices to encounter in the institution from students and also in the community here… (However, t)he faculty will receive and treat you precisely as they would any other student.” In this rather long letter he admitted he personally “did not think women were called to the ministry.” But then concluded, “…I leave that between you and (God).” Olympia thought that was where the decision should be made, ignored the warnings, and in 1861, as the American Civil War was beginning, she entered divinity school. Three years later she graduated, awarded her degree, and, most importantly, was ordained to the Universalist ministry, becoming the first woman regularly ordained in a national denomination.
In 1864, as the Civil War was winding down, Olympia was called to her first parish in Weymouth Landing, Massachusetts. While serving there and once abolition had been won, she threw herself fully into the struggle for women’s suffrage, working closely with Susan B. Anthony, Lucy Stone and others. She also began to speak around the country. In 1870 she accepted a call to the pulpit of the Universalist Church in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Three years later she married John Henry Willis, shocking the sensibilities of the day by retaining her family name. This appears to have been a perfect love match. John actively supported her dual callings as a parish minister and increasingly as a social justice activist. They had two children, Henry & Gwendolyn.
During her first pregnancy a faction in the Bridgeport church found the pregnancy unseemly and moved to have a vote of dismissal. While it failed, Olympia felt her ministry compromised and resigned after her son’s birth. From there she entered into a conversation with the leadership of the Unitarian church in Racine, Wisconsin, where she was warned “a series of pastors easy-going, unpractical and some even spiritually unworthy… had left the church adrift, in debt, hopeless and doubtful whether any pastor could again rouse them.”
Olympia would later write, “Those who may read this will think it strange that I could only find a field in run-down or comatose churches, but they must remember that the pulpits of all the prosperous churches were already occupied by men, and were looked forward to as the goal of all the young men coming into the ministry with whom I, at first the only woman preacher in the denomination, had to compete. All I could do was to take some place that had been abandoned by others and make something of it, and this I was only too glad to do.”
With her call, John closed his business, and traveled ahead to Racine, where he purchased a part ownership of the Racine Times Call. Olympia settled into her new ministry, bringing healing and competence to the work. She also began to make the Racine church a center for progressive social thought, bringing in as speakers her old friends and colleagues Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Julia Ward Howe. The church flourished.
After nine years serving the congregation, and not long after her father’s death, Olympia decided to leave the parish and full time ministry in order to devote all her energies to the suffrage movement. She was fifty-three. Olympia became the leader of the Wisconsin Suffrage Association and served as vice-president of the National Woman Suffrage Association.
John died, unexpectedly, in 1893. Olympia wrote of this, how “Endless sorrow has fallen upon my heart. He was one of the truest and best men that ever lived, firm in his religious convictions, loyal to every right principle, strictly honest and upright in his life… with an absolute sincerity of character such as I have never seen in any other person.” Often, I’ve found, those who succeed greatly, succeed in significant part because there is someone with them, giving them fierce support. For much of her life thanks to John, Olympia had that support.
She burned for the right to vote, and gradually moved toward more confrontational engagements. As such in 1913 she became a central leader of the Woman’s Party. When President Wilson failed in his promises to support suffrage, Olympia led a protest where she burned his speeches in front of the White House. I tried to find an archive photograph from that event. I couldn’t, but I can imagine it. The time was right. The smell of justice was in the air, and it smelled much better than the damp ashes Olympia left in front of the White House.
Indeed, finally, finally the tide had turned. Women won the right to vote nationally in 1919. Olympia and her old mentor Antoinette were among the few original leaders of the movement who had lived long enough to cast their own votes. In 1920 at the age of 85, Olympia cast her first presidential vote. To my mind somewhat surprising, for Warren Harding. In 1924, her second and last vote for president she supported the radical Robert La Follette, who somehow seemed more appropriate for winning her vote to me, than Mr Harding. But, that’s how it works with self-determination. We make our choices, and we live with the consequences.
In those years following winning universal suffrage at least on paper, people of color were still waiting for their full access to the ballot, and Olympia returned to that battle as she had when advocating abolition. Finally, as age overtook her, she retired, spending her summers in Racine and wintering with her daughter who taught Latin and Greek at Bryn Mawr Prep School in Baltimore. She died in Baltimore in 1926, at the age of ninety-one. According to the obituary in the Baltimore Sun, “Perhaps no phase of her life better exemplified her vitality and intellectual independence than the mental discomfort she succeeded in arousing, between her eightieth and ninetieth birthdays, among… conservatively minded Baltimorans.”
She was buried in Racine next to her husband, John.
So, briefly, what’s the take away? For us, here, today? Remembering the dangers we face. All of them. Well, it’s not that hard. We can following Olympia’s example. At the front, as a Universalist, she saw the connections, she knew the mysteries of universal love, of love beyond belief. Good news indeed. And then she did the next thing. She acted upon those principles with dignity and tenacity. Fierce tenacity.
That’s what Olympia did. Our mother has shown us the way.
And, that’s what we are called to do. Today. See the connections. And act, as best we can.
Nothing more. And, nothing, nothing less.
So be it. Blessed be. And, amen.
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