A Lost Moment in Congregational History
Today I mistakenly typed the phrase Unitarian Society of Cleveland into google instead of Unitarian Universalist Society of Cleveland. I got a strange result. Via googlebooks I found a sentence reference to the congregation in The COINTELPRO Papers By Ward Churchill, Jim Vander Wall. It reads "Thus, the FBI targeted the entire Unitarian Society of Cleveland in 1964 because the minister and some members circulated a petition calling for the abolition of HUAC and because the church gave office space to a group the FBI did not like."
HUAC stands for the House on UnAmerican Activities Committee. The committee was fond of calling supposed supporters of the Communist Party in front of it and accusing them of being un-American. Wikipedia has an article on HUAC if you’d like to learn more.
I have never heard of this piece of congregational history and I know nothing about it other than the one sentence in Churchill’s book. Hard to know what, if anything, Churchill’s sentence actually refers to without doing a lot more research.
And then there’s the story at First Unitarian Society of Chicago, that a government agent infiltrated the congregation to spy on similar “unamerican” activities, and liked the church so much that he joined.
Comment by Chip Roush — February 26, 2009 @ 11:43 am
I wonder to what extent your story is apocryphal. I have heard a similar one about the First Unitarian Universalist Society of San Francisco.
Comment by Administrator — February 27, 2009 @ 5:55 pm