Founders or Followers?

Deconstructing Mythologies of Unitarian Anti-Racism: Founders or Followers?

by Rev. Dr. Mark Morrison-Reed

About the event

Join us online or in person for the third lecture in the 2025 Minns Lectures series. Popular Unitarian histories of the late 19th and early 20th centuries tend to focus on our heroic advocates for women’s rights. Without justification, we project backwards a mythology of ongoing Unitarian leadership that carried forward the legacy of Transcendentalist-era abolitionism into a twentieth century white anti-racist identity.  Separating myth from reality and identifying the small number of Unitarian leaders who swam against the currents of Unitarian white supremacy culture from Reconstruction through the Gilded Age are the goals of this lecture series.

Rev. Dr. Morrison-Reed is the foremost historian of the African American experience within Unitarian Universalism through his several books, including Black Pioneers in a White Denomination, Darkening the Doorways,  The Selma Awakening, and Revisiting the Empowerment…