Charles and Jean McGehee in Jacksonville

1. Charles and Jean McGehee in Jacksonville Presented by Jerome Fosaaen 1/8/2017

2. In an novel experiment, today I will read my remarks, so that open captions may be displayed and remain in sync with my words.

3. Perhaps in the future we will use Text to Speech technology, which will allow simultaneous transcriptions of talks , but that may take a bit more effort.

4. I will preface my historical remembrance of Charles White McGehee and his wife Jean

5. with a few remarks to provide you with some idea of why I feel it important

6. to celebrate these two individuals.

7. They arrived in Jacksonville at a turbulent time, both for Jacksonville and the nation.

8. Their tenure coincided with, and Charles preached upon, great issues:

9. the civil rights movement, political assassinations, the escalation of the Viet Nam War and then widespread protests against the war,

10. the Cuban Missile Crisis and the nuclear arms race

11. and a policy of deterrence called MAD, or, Mutual Assured Destruction.

12. Later, Charles was to focus upon the Watergate scandal as a prism through which to view democracy and ethics.

13. I was introduced to the UUCJ through high school friends who were not members of the church,

14. but who belonged to a youth group associated with the church known as LRY, or Liberal Religious Youth.

15. To understand just how liberal Liberal Religious Youth were, you should know that we had weekend sleepovers at the church

16. which we called Organized Religious Gatherings of Youth, or, ORGY for short.

17. It was all in the spirit of the times, and we did have adult supervision.

18. On ORGY weekends we met and prepared dinner on Friday night, had workshops on Saturday,

19. and usually on Sunday we presented some small part of the Sunday service, often a song or a skit we had developed.

20. Charles McGehee already had white hair, and because his spine had been fused,

21. he could only stand using crutches, he could not bend at the waist.

22. So he stood tall and severe, leaning on his crutches, during the entire service.

23. Frankly, his appearance was a little intimidating to me, although he was always kind and encouraging in his remarks.

24. Later, when I had graduated from high school, I no longer attended LRY functions,

25. but I gradually gravitated back to the church to attend Sunday services, during which time I was undecided about joining.

26. You see, I was not a “joiner”.

27. However, I can tell you the very day that I did decide to join the Unitarian Universalist Church, and why.

28. October 21st, 1973 I had ridden my bicycle from across town, a distance of at least 10 miles.

29. When it was time for his sermon, Charles made his way to the lectern on his crutches,

30. and as he stood there, he waved a sheaf of papers above his head and said he had a sermon planned

31. but it would have to wait, something had come up that must be addressed.

32. What he said that day convinced me without a doubt that I was a Unitarian Universalist.

33. I will come back to that sermon a little later.

34. The Reverend Charles White McGehee was selected to be the first settled minister to the Unitarian Fellowship of Jacksonville in 1960.

35. You see, the Unitarians and Universalists merged only in 1961. At the time, the fellowship owned and was meeting in

36. a single family home in the Riverside neighborhood, having been kicked out of various temporary venues.

37. After meeting at the YWCA for a while, they had been asked to leave after a University of Florida professor

38. had spoken about the “Kinsey Report” - research into human sexuality.

39. Two other meeting locations had to be abandoned when the fellowship had been asked to segregate or leave.

40. So Charles fit right in when he became active with the NAACP.

41. Rodney L Hurst, Sr, then a teenaged member of the NAACP Youth Council,

42. would later write a book about the efforts to integrate the lunch counters in Jacksonville.

43. The book was titled It was never about a hotdog and a Coke, and in it he devotes a chapter to Charles,

44. writing “Few white ministers in Jacksonville Florida supported the Youth Council NAACP and the sit-in movement in 1960.

45. Reverend Charles White McGehee did as the pastor of the Unitarian Universalist Church in Jacksonville.”

46. And: “When his wife Jeanne, (sic) drove him to various functions and meetings,

47. the back of their van was situated in a way so he could lie at an angle.

48. After he was assisted out of the van and onto his crutches,

49. he would make his way to the function, where he would stand. At NAACP Mass meetings,

50. you could always find Rev. McGehee somewhere near the front of the church standing on his crutches.