"He's Got the Whole World in His Hands" 

Comments on Campus Disturbances and Black Power

by Rev. Max D. Gaebler 

Rare 1969  Printed Sermon by Rev. Max D. Gaebler, Madison, Wisconsin, on Black Student Strike at UW-Madison, their Demands, and White Guilt. 

Delivered at First Unitarian Society, Madison, Wisconsin, Feb 16, 1969 and All Souls Unitarian Church, Tulsa, Oklahoma Nov 16, 1969. 

Seven unbound leaves, 8.5 X 11 inches, folded in half, one of which serves as a cover to the others. Good with moderate wear to the cover, previous owner name, and a hint of edge toning to the interior leaves. 

The Rev. Max David Gaebler (1921-2018) was a minister at First Unitarian Society in Madison, Wisconsin from 1952 until his retirement in 1987, a civic leader in Madison, and a Unitarian leader on the national stage as well as being active in the Unitarians-Universalists merger. He often sided with students at the nearby University of Wisconsin campus during their protests for social reform and against the Vietnam War. He even inserted himself in the campus demonstrations between police and anti-war demonstrators, urging peaceful protests. 

Amidst the Black Power Movement of the 1960s, unrest among African American students over slow progress toward race-related goals on campus led to the Black Student Strike in February 1969. A list of 13 demands were presented on February 7 to the Chancellor under the threat of class boycotts and other disruptions. When students actually hijacked lecture halls and blocked building entrances, the governor activated the Wisconsin National Guard. In the immediate wake of these demands and boycotts, Gaebler wrote and delivered this sermon to the First Unitarian Society in Madison on February 16. Its focus was on the strike, race relations and his observations and analysis of guilt among the middle-class white population as well as thoughts on how the University community should respond. 

“White middle-class students and some faculty members, too, have felt so guilty in the face of these demands that they have in effect been immobilized by them…  all powers of rational judgment are silenced and total acquiescence takes their place. That such acquiescence is itself an insidiously patronizing response does not ordinarily occur to them.” 

“Justice is not only a matter of our individual relationships; it is an aspect of the institutional structures of social life as well. While you and I may not be to blame for the existence of ethnic ghettos in our urban centers, for example, we nevertheless must share responsibility for dealing with the injustices and deprivations they represent and foster. Not to recognize that responsibility or to fail to act on it is indeed a source of guilt.” 

Gaebler delivered this sermon again on November 16, 1969  in Tulsa, Oklahoma at the All Souls Unitarian Church (home of the Rev. John B. Wolf—this sermon was acquired with a small collection of  Rev. Wolf sermons during the same era). An interesting and very scarce sermon from a white, liberal religious leader on the demands of African American college students in 1969 as their protest was unfolding, and perhaps an early writing on the subject of white guilt, for which we find none earlier. OCLC locates only two other written items by Rev. Gaebler, both from 1988 (a radio script and a study of Unitarians in other regions of the world). We find no sermons or writing by Rev. Gaebler from this time period for sale online.