Video Preview of "The Empowerment Controversy"
Clips from the 2006 Young Adult Prophets Seminar

These video clips are excerpted from the first day of our 2006 seminar, "Love Does Not Punish." The topic on this first day was the Empowerment Controversy which split the Unitarian Universalist Association in 1969, 1970, and perhaps ever since.

Our theology reached a climax in Selma, Alabama in 1965. when over a hundred UU ministers supported Martin Luther King Jr. in demanding the right to vote for Blacks. The goal of integration and the religious values of equality and democarcy were joined on a crucible heated by white supremacy. Within a few years our theologically supported goal of integration was broken. African American community leaders had joined in great numbers and, as a caucus, won one million dollors from the General Assembly to fund black directed empowerment projects in many US cities, especially those cities which had experienced riots and uprisings.

For two years beginning in 1969 the Association was embrolled in the potential and the conflicts it raised. Nearly half the delegates walked out of the General Assembly in 1970 in protest over a vote that rescinded the money. Many African Americans left our societies and nothing like that level of interracial dialog has occurred since. Our religous humanist theology has never recovered. Part of the story was told by Jack Mendelsohn, Victor Carpenter, Tracy Robinson Harris, Judith Friedianni, Dorothy Emerson and the posse of Young Adults at our seminar.

We hope to finish editing the video soon but meanwhile check the video preview here.