In Between: Memoir of an Integration Baby - Softcover

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Rev. Dr. Mark D. Morrison Reed is the author and editor of several books, including Black Pioneers in a White Denomination, Darkening the Doorways: Black Trailblazers and Missed Opportunities in Unitarian Universalism, The Selma Awakening: How the Civil Rights Movement Tested and Changed Unitarian Universalism, and Revisiting the Empowerment Controversy: Black Power and Unitarian Universalism, all from Skinner House Books. He has served as co-minister of Unitarian Universalist congregations in Toronto and Rochester, New York, and as an affiliated faculty member at Meadville Lombard Theological School and the coordinator of the Sankofa Archive there. In 2019, Rev. Morrison-Reed received the Award for Distinguished Service to the Cause of Unitarian Universalism.

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In Between: Memoir of an Integration Baby gives voice to the unspoken story of those Afro-Americans who were among the first to bring racial diversity to their neighborhood, school, church or workplace, to the increasing number of partners in interracial relationships and those blessed with and yet struggling to raise multiracial children in a polarized world.

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Growing up in the fifties, integration was all I knew—kids, white and black and the odd Asian, playing together in nursery school, church, kindergarten, and children’s choir. It would continue in Switzerland, where my family spent a sabbatical year and I stayed for two more. From a rustic international boarding school located in a remote mountainside village, I watched the civil rights movement, the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Malcolm X’s assassination, and James Reeb’s murder in Selma.

As the cultural storm mounted, I reluctantly returned home and tried and failed to straddle the divide between black and white. Battered, I set out upon a tortuous search for redemption that eventually led back to the Alps, but did not end there. The urge to stay was strong but the call to the Unitarian Universalist ministry was stronger. Returning to America, I entered seminary. There I married another student, an Anglo-Canadian, and with her raised two multiracial children of dual nationality. For twenty-six years, we served as co-ministers in a religious movement that was, and remains, overwhelmingly Anglo-American. In all this, without realizing it, I was being true to my lineage—four hundred years of interracial relations and miscegenation.

Caught in a twilight zone between the races, my family was part of the interracial drama of which James Baldwin wrote. As slaves and slaveholders; as Union and Confederate soldiers; as a scientist facing government-sanctioned discrimination while working on the atom bomb; as GIs serving in a segregated U.S. Army, defending freedom from Nazi tyranny; as lawyers and laborers; as lovers and rapists, my ancestors played their bit parts. I, like them, was just another extra. But the realities of our lives have led me to this truth: Integration is inevitable. There is no other way. Never was and never will be.

This story, however, is not just about how America’s emerging multiracial identity played out in my life and those of my ancestors; it is also about self-integration and as such subsumes and transcends what we call race. By self-integration I mean the embracing of one’s heritage and ancestors, accepting their struggles as one’s own without romanticizing them or claiming the good parts while sloughing off the embarrassments. All their stories are mine and mine theirs—a seamless continuation. And because that is so, my choices were never mine alone. They were framed by my ancestors’ lives—an extension of their passions, values, and failings. I am their manifestation in the present and trajectory into the future.

Self-integration and self-acceptance asks still more; ultimately I also have to come to terms with myself. A bundle of human needs, contradictions, and potential, I was born into an upwardly mobile, middle-class Afro-American family, raised in an interracial milieu, and fated to come of age during the either-or era of Black Power. But driven toward wholeness—for I don’t know how else to describe surviving bouts of depression, conquering a victim mentality that seems endemic among Afro-Americans, and owning the depth of my smothered rage—I came to celebrate and be empowered by my heritage, to give thanks for my upbringing, to accept my tempestuous feelings, and to acknowledge rather than hide the warring elements of my personality. This spiritual quest for integration, this process of incorporation, is me taking responsibility for my own life. This is the story of my wayward journey toward wholeness.