Message given at Durham Friends Meeting, December 10, 2023
Good morning, Friends,
This is Diana White in the Meeting House. I have not yet met all of you. I am in the process of transferring my membership from Portland Friends Meeting. In my request for transfer, I said that I feel that the semi-programmed worship here speaks to my condition. My sense is that in a silent Meeting there is not the opportunity for sharing, education, and spiritual development in the same way that is possible in this setting. I am excited about becoming a member of this Meeting.
Robert Lawrence Smith, head at Sidwell Friends for many years, said that a Quaker Meeting is “…something akin to a spiritual potluck. Each person [brings] something personal, simple, and sacred to the table in the belief that out of the silence, the voice of truth might be heard.”
Today I will tell you something of what I bring to this spiritual potluck, the Durham Monthly Meeting of Friends.
I first attended Quaker Meeting as a teenager, in Princeton, New Jersey. I was a well-churched child, baptized twice after the Methodists found the Dutch Reformed baptism an insufficient guarantee of my membership in the Kingdom of Heaven. I have many years of Sunday School pins, acquired into my teens. I was also a Pioneer Girl, a sort of fundamentalist Girl Scout. I earned badges for such skills as being able to recite all the books of the Bible.
I was brought up in a union family. My father served in the Pacific theater in World War II. He was a civil rights activist and a champion of democracy. I was raised as an activist and a patriot. Four members of my family, my grandmother, my father, my sister and I, all ran for public office. We are proud losers, zero for seven. My father’s death when I was a teenager left an indelible mark on me about the importance of living one’s life in the moment, because there may not be that many moments. I became a nurse and union activist, then a lobbyist and organizer.
I started attending Quaker Meeting regularly in Farmington in 1990. I spent 25 years active in my monthly meeting, Vassalboro Quarter, and New England Yearly Meeting. I was the first woman to serve as Yearly Meeting Treasurer. I was clerk of Friends Committee on Maine Public Policy after Ed Snyder stepped down. I found Quaker thought and practice consistent with my sense of justice and activism…. “Let your life speak.”
When my son started college, I felt restless. I was teaching at the University of Maine at Fort Kent. I loved my life in northern Maine but felt led to make a contribution to social justice. That sense slowly became a leading to go South, to work for change around issues of racism. I met a professor from Tuskegee University at a conference and then was recruited to teach there.
One of the books that deeply affected me was Booker T. Washington’s autobiography, Up from Slavery, which I first read in elementary school. I have returned to it several times in the last 50 years. Washington was a freed slave who founded Tuskegee Institute to educate other freed slaves. Tuskegee University is a Historically Black University, what is known as an HBCU. It is now one of the Black Ivies. When I first visited there, I felt that I was standing on Holy Ground.
In August 2011, I went to Yearly Meeting in Vermont, and then drove south. I stopped to see my brother in New Jersey. He asked me if I knew the difference between a Yankee and a Damn Yankee. I did not. He explained that a Yankee visits the South, but a Damn Yankee stays. I stopped at my father’s grave to tell him where I was headed. Two days later, I arrived in Montgomery, Alabama, and started at Tuskegee the next day.
I left Maine, with one of the lowest rates of church attendance in the country, to go to
Alabama, which has one of the highest rates of attendance. There is always a whole lot of public praying going on. We always said grace at meals and prayed for success for the football teams. My students prayed before exams… not just prayed… one of the students would spend several minutes in fervent exhortation for their success.
At the end of my first week at Tuskegee, I was asked where I planned to go to church. I said I did not know. I was living and working almost exclusively with African Americans. That Sunday morning, I decided that I needed to find me some white people. So, at the most segregated hour in America, 10 am on Sunday, I attended the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship. A week later one of the regulars called me a Damn Yankee.
I was frequently asked by my co-workers about my religion. I said I was a Quaker and then I was asked what Quakers believe. I used a phrase I learned from Brian Drayton, a New Hampshire Quaker. I said that Quakers believe that the Kingdom is already here and we live in the Kingdom. Anyone who asked found that an acceptable answer although I don’t think that was understood in the way that I meant it.
It was easy to live the testimonies in Alabama. I settled in and learned a great deal. My overall contribution may have been that I demonstrated that there are white people who understand the problems and are supportive of change. More than once I was told, “You understand. You can talk to white people. They don’t listen to us.”
My work in Alabama extended beyond my involvement with Tuskegee University and the Tuskegee community. The US Air Force graduate school is in Montgomery, educating officers advancing to higher ranks. Every year, there are also several hundred foreign officers who are educated with US officers to support collaboration around the world. I started working with the program for foreign officers from Botswana, Tanzania, Rwanda, Kenya, Uganda, Burkina Faso, and Zambia. I did not know how to square that with the peace testimony. As I got more involved, my dilemma worsened. I talked with a Quaker I knew in Montgomery, a war tax resister and activist. We decided that I was speaking truth to power, in the “belly of the beast,” as it were. I was demonstrating that there is a different way to be an American patriot. I did my best work undermining the Air Force doctrine of air power, supplementing for African officers a different approach, an African framework.
One of the Ugandan officers was a helicopter pilot and an attorney. The Ugandans have long fought the Lord’s Resistance Army, a Christian rebel group which sent armed child soldiers into action against Ugandan troops. He asked me to help him with the literature review for a paper he was writing, evaluating the ethical issues when faced with an armed child shooting to kill. I was witness to his distress, and by proxy, to the suffering faced by those who live in very difficult and complex situations around the world.
I sometimes worked with a defense attorney who had a well-honed sense of justice, with righteous indignation about the injustices of the criminal justice system. I was an expert witness in federal court in a high-profile prisoner abuse case. My testimony gave the judge a rationale to reduce the mandatory minimum sentence of 20 years to four years.
I also went to an execution at the lawyer’s request, to evaluate the efficacy of the drug cocktail used to terminate the prisoner’s life. When I arrived at the maximum security prison, I was met in the parking lot by officers who greeted me, “Are you the witness?” I answered, “I am the witness.” I was strip searched and then taken to the viewing room of the execution chamber.
Both the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Equal Justice Initiative are based in Montgomery. The Civil Rights Memorial Center is fronted by a Maya Lin sculpture. The sculpture includes the verse from Amos frequently cited by Martin Luther King, “until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.”
I returned from Alabama in 2019. I was very ill and spent 2020 so sick that my son returned home to take care of me. My daughter was deployed for much of 2020 and 2021, as a nurse supporting COVID care. I have been recovering slowly and learning to walk again. For three years, I have been asking myself, “What am I to do with the time I have been given?” It is still a question that I ask myself every day.
Ten years ago, I met another Damn Yankee, a career Air Force attorney from New Hampshire who was living in Montgomery. He wanted to write a book and needed help. We published Heartlessness of Dixie in 2016, documenting the conditions in Alabama which support racism. Things have not changed much since then.
I was the witness. I was there, in Alabama, to witness. Change occurs in our society when many people work to make that happen. It is important that we witness, name the injustices we see, and stand with those who are burdened by injustice. We witness and we show respect, over and over and over again. Until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.
