October 19, 2025: History as a Source of Resistance

Rev. Susan Frederick-Gray

The teaching of history is under attack because it is a source of power and resistance to authoritarianism. What is our role in protecting history and continuing to share it to inspire our own courage and action?

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Sermon Text

History as a Source of Resistance

Rev. Susan Frederick-Gray

UU Church of Bloomington

October 19, 2025

READING

Our reading this morning is from the great American historian, Howard Zinn, from his collection of essays titled A Power Governments Cannot Suppress.

“To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents [present moments], and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”

SERMON History as a Source of Resistance

When I was a kid, there was a ritual in my house for the beginning of each new school year. On the day when I came home lugging my backpack full of the new year’s textbooks, my mom would have me take out all of my history books. She would quickly peruse the indexes for the names Susan B. Anthony, Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells, Lucy Stone - women who had made history - and shaped our present. While memories are never exact - she might have looked for other names - I generally remember, year after year, she would be disappointed - not finding any or very few of these women’s names.

I am grateful to my mom for the lesson that was embedded in this ritual. Even though, I admit, I sometimes rolled my eyes. It not only helped me learn these women’s names - and with her help and my own study, learn more about them - it also helped me understand that there is a lot of history that gets left out of our textbooks.

On the one hand, of course this is the case - there is a lot of history. But, after a lot of powerful and intentional efforts to expand the history we tell - and to expand the voices who are writing and publishing about history - we are experiencing a well-organized reactionary backlash intent on controlling access to information and re-writing and erasing history.

This is taking the form of book bans, attacks on libraries, restrictions on how and what teachers can teach - and this is happening from grade schools to here at I.U. And it is taking place through concerted efforts to distort or erase history that might make us uncomfortable - history that might undermine the mythology of American exceptionalism.

And we should be ringing alarm bells at this misinformation and censorship. Whether it is what is happening to the Indiana Daily Student and National Public Radio (after all news is the first draft of history), or to the attempts in Texas and Florida to white-wash slavery - proclaiming as positive what was objectively a shameful and immoral part of American history. This should not be up for debate.

So, why is the Republican Party and the MAGA movement attacking, censoring and seeking to re-write history?

First, it is because erasing and distorting history makes it harder to understand the present - and makes people more easily susceptible to accepting false narratives and propaganda.

And second, and even more important, censoring history can undermine people’s sense of their own power, their own agency. And this is why history is such an important part of resisting tyranny, defending human rights and helping to shape a better future.

My mother wanted to make sure that my understanding of history included learning about powerful women who shaped and changed history for the better. And, it isn’t a perfect history. Susan B. Anthony’s racism, I would later learn, kept Black women out of the suffrage movement undermining the power of that movement to create deeper change for equality for all women. Still, giving me these names, teaching me what she knew of the history and giving me books to learn more - she gave me models and helped me understand that it took struggle and organizing and sacrifice to create more equity for women - and she wanted me to know that I too had power.

When our history books - and particularly our children’s history books do not contain stories about women, Black Americans, Indigenous People, Asians, Latinos, queer people, disabled people, poor and working class people, oppressed people who acted courageously, powerfully to make peoples lives and our future better - then how do we, holding these identities today, see ourselves as agents with power in our world and our lives?

We need to share with each other and with our children the stories of the people who were - who are - magnificent in their work for justice, for human rights, for climate justice. Sojourner Truth agitating and working to change the racism at the heart of the women’s suffrage movement, Ida B. Wells fighting for anti-lynching legislation, Lucy Stone an abolitionist and women’s suffragist who helped inspire Susan Anthony, Bayard Rustin, the black, gay, civil rights leader who was one of the key architects of the movement, Fannie Lou Hamer and Coretta Scott King and Bernice Johnson Reagan, Black women leaders of the civil rights movement, Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man to be elected to office in California, and Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera prominent women of color in the gay and trans liberation movement of the 60s and 70s, and LaDonna Brave Bull Allard the Native Dakota and Lakota historian who was one of the founders of the Water Protectors movement in Standing Rock, Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta who founded the Farm Workers Movement, Judith Heumann one of the most effective organizers in getting the Americans with Disabilities Act Passed. I could just keep going. And there is still so much history I don’t yet know.

Who did I miss? Shout out other names of people who have behaved courageously, magnificently for justice, for peace. Keep sharing these names - teach them to your children, the young people in your life, to each other. Remind them that learning about these leaders will lead them to other names of incredible, inspiring, powerful people who brought courage, compassion, love and commitment to our world. And read banned books. And help your kids and others find great banned books to read. And if they are curious, show them how to find out more. And correct the misinformation - or too little information — they may get at school.

History is a powerful thing. It helps us understand why things are the way they are, it also helps us understand more fully who we are and who we can be and how others have created change before us.

The Czech dissident who had to flee Czechoslovakia during communist repression, Milan Kundera, writes in his 1980 book, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, “The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory, destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long that nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was… The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”

What history gets told, what gets left out, what spin gets put on the history…all of this matters. If history wasn’t powerful, the powers that be would not be trying to suppress it.

History is powerful - it is also complex and fundamentally human. It matters that we are honest about our history as a nation, as a people, as a religious community too, particularly the places where injustice, violence, corruption and exploitation have dominated, but also - as Zinn reminds us, our histories of “compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.”

History reflects humanity - our capacity for cruelty and our capacity for magnificence. And we have to tell all of this history. Because incomplete histories give us incomplete understanding and incomplete tools. How can we grow - how can we dream and create more justice, more equity, more love, more peace if our tools and understanding are incomplete?

In the opening essay in Zinn’s book, A Power Government Cannot Suppress he writes, “To think that history-writing must aim simply to recapitulate the failures that dominate the past," writes Zinn, "is to make historians collaborators in an endless cycle of defeat…If history is to be creative, to anticipate a possible future without denying the past, it should, I believe, emphasize new possibilities by disclosing those hidden episodes of the past when, even if in brief flashes, people showed their ability to resist, to join together, and occasionally win. I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future may be found in the past’s fugitive moments of compassion rather than in its solid centuries of warfare.”

It is these fugitive moments of compassion, of solidarity, of power that so often get suppressed. One of the histories of this country most suppressed is the history of the labor movement. Who knows where the term “red-neck” comes from? I learned this term as a derogatory slur - for someone who perhaps wasn’t very smart, or racist, from a rural community. But it actually comes from the Mine Wars in West Virginia - an essential part of the broader labor movement - a movement that took 100 years of struggle to earn things like the eight-hour work day.

The mine workers worked in company towns - where the mining companies own everything. They were their landlords, bosses, store owners. And the companies would pay workers in company scrip instead of US dollars, so the only place they could spend that money was giving it back to the mining companies.

Miners worked for poverty wages, many lost their lives and sacrificed their health to pull coal out of the earth to power the country. They still do it.

The mine workers were white and black, immigrants, many didn’t speak the same language, and they wore red bandanas around their necks as a symbol of solidarity in the Mine Wars and in the March on Blair Mountain.

And when the mine workers won better wages - they also won equal pay for black and white workers. This is the history that is especially - and intentionally suppressed - the times when people organized across race and nationality - because that level of solidarity - and refusing to be divided brings real power - and that is a threat to those who seek to keep us divided and fighting amongst ourselves, while they take all the fruits, all the wealth, all the resources for themselves.

Yes, history is full of stories of injustice, of times of defeat for human rights and justice - but it is also full of stories of people and communities that refused to be silent, that held up a better way, that created care and help in times of need and that ultimately changed what is possible for so many today.

And even as we live in these dangerous times, and the struggle for freedom, for justice, for a future for everyone’s children on this planet can seem overwhelming - we can still create love and kindness, care for each other, resistance and joy - and amplify a vision of a world where all belong - and all are needed - and all are valued.

History can be inspiring, particularly if we remember Zinn’s words, “If we remember those times and places - and there are many - where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.”

For let us remember that yesterday, the “No Kings” rallies across the country - that too is who we are. That too is our world, our country.

May we continue - even through suppression and erasure - to pass on the “past’s fugitive moments of compassion” as a way to inspire us all to act. For if we do act, as Zinn writes, “in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents [present moments], and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”

In the words of Rev. Bruce Beisner, “May we not give up. May we not give in. May we not pretend this doesn’t hurt. And may we continue to live our values.”