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[rivka]

A few weeks back, the Baltimore Sun published a long profile of a member of my church. I missed it when it first came out, but of course it was plastered all over the bulletin board in the Parish Hall, so I got to read it yesterday. It's inspiring.

On his first trip as a civil rights activist, Charles Blackburn already knew the rules: Disconnect the lights in your car so you're not an easy target for snipers. Drive down the center of the road to make it harder to be run off the side. Stick to the black neighborhoods whenever possible.

A white Unitarian minister, he was headed from his home in Huntsville, Ala., to McComb, Miss., where a string of bombings had devastated black homes and churches. It was October 1964. Nine white men arrested in the bombings had just been released.

"I knew what the violence was and that these people were out on the street," Blackburn says. But he made the lonely trip all the same, arriving at a bus station where he was met with a sea of white faces. "I knew what was in my heart, and I knew what I believed. And if they had known this, my life would have been worth very little to them."

He carried another secret in that bus station, and in his years fighting for civil rights in the South: He was gay. It was a secret he would keep for 10 more years, until 1974, when he separated from his wife and moved to Baltimore.

Now, four decades after risking his life in a civil rights struggle for others, Blackburn, 73, says it is time to fight for himself. Along with his partner of 28 years, Glen Dehn, he is a plaintiff in a lawsuit seeking to expand marriage to gay and lesbian couples in Maryland. Blackburn is a bridge between the two movements, a man with a creased face and thinning hair who knows what it means to stand up, and why it is essential.

I knew that Charles had been involved in the Civil Rights movement as a young minister in Huntsville, Alabama, but I didn't know how extensive his involvement was: jailed, threatened, church windows shot out. I know him as an elderly man who sings in the choir, makes stained glass, and keeps up an exquisite showpiece of a Victorian home. And of course, I know him as a genteel, dignified gay marriage activist. Our whole church is behind him.

Read the whole profile. You'll need bugmenot to get past the first page, but it's worth it. Really.

Comments

[wcg.livejournal.com]

Wow, what an admirable man.