Continuing In The Call: Clara Esther’s Commitment To The Civil Rights Movement of Today
Clara Esther
United Methodist Deaconess
Civil Rights Activist
While serving as a delegate from the Alabama-West Florida Annual Conference to the 2024 Southeastern Jurisdictional Conference, Clara Ester selected three UMC agencies for which, if elected, she would be happy to work. (GCORR was one of the three.) However, Ester didn’t think she would be selected.
“After arriving at the Jurisdictional Conference, and looking around the room … seeing all the young people, I thought, ‘I’m 76-years-old … it won’t happen; I won’t get elected,’” she said.
National leadership certainly isn’t new to Ester. She’s a UMC deaconess; was vice president of United Women in Faith (UWF); served as president of the National Association of Deaconesses, Home Missioners and Home Missionaries; and represented the Southeast Jurisdictional Conference on the National Charter Support Team for UWF. Being elected as a member of the GCORR board for this quadrennium is the latest addition to her already lengthy resume of service.
Ester’s commitment to advancing human and civil rights and nonviolent resistance in the pursuit of racial reconciliation started in her teenage years. She attended Rev. James Lawson’s Memphis, Tenn., church; she also babysat his children. One-on-one conversations with Rev. Lawson, during the times he picked her up or drove her home from babysitting, helped Ester more fully understand the “why” behind the Civil Rights Movement—probably even more so than his Sunday sermons, she shared.
Her call to service, the “flip of her life,” came one evening while sitting at the back of the church and hearing striking city sanitation workers sharing stories of their mistreatment.
“They couldn’t wash their hands at a gas station … had to take their gloves off right after handling garbage cans to eat their lunches,” she explained. “That night, I heard God’s call and answered it. Whatever service I could do … even if I had to sacrifice … I’d do that to help someone else.”
Because Ester is “such a humble individual,” people aren’t immediately aware of her historic contributions to the Civil Rights Movement, explained Zan Jones, UWF national director.
Jones first met Ester in 1994, when she and her husband moved to Mobile, Ala., and started attending Ester’s church, Toulminville Warren Street UMC.
“When she shared her personal story with me (of being with Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. when he was assassinated), I said, ‘Clara, I’m truly honored to be in your presence.’”
Jones wondered how Ester harbored no anger from the trauma she witnessed first-hand during the Civil Rights Movement.
“I said, ‘I’m mad, and I didn’t even go through it.’”
Ester’s simple, but powerful response, “how will we move forward if we continue to hold onto the past?” helped Jones shift her perspectives on the work of racial reconciliation. She also credits Ester’s mentoring for her rising to the position of UWF national director.
“I blossomed under her direction,” Jones said. Back when Jones joined Ester’s church, she accepted Ester’s invitation to attend the local meeting of United Methodist Women. Impressed with all that the group was doing, Jones said that she wanted to jump right in and do what she could to address community needs. Soon after, she started attending more district and conference church meetings, at Ester’s urging, and made connections with more women across the Annual Conference. She even ran for the Office of Social Action.
“She told me, ‘you can do this,’” Jones said. “She kept me on a path, made sure that I knew what I needed to be involved with, what we were fighting for.”
“She’s given me so much, over the years … she’s inspired me … put a fire in me. I probably never would have been at this level (as a national director) without her encouragement.”
Honesty is one of Ester’s qualities that Jones admires most.
“She may be the only person of color in a room, but she doesn’t hold back in sharing her position. She does not allow her audience to dictate her response. I really respect that.”
Ester’s pastor agrees that one of Ester’s most worthwhile qualities is her “brutal honesty.”
“Whatever it is that she knows, she will share it,” said Antonie Walker, pastor of Toulminville-Warren Street UMC.
Pastor Walker, who calls Ester a “change agent,” explained that “Clara’s passion, perspective, and personality makes her who she is.”
“Clara is a diehard, a stalwart, in the social justice movement,” he said. “We’ve come a long way, but we have a long way to go. She’s in the fight right now; she won’t let go of this Gospel plow.”
“It’s very much the Gospel which is at the center of all she does,” Pastor Walker added. “Clara understands that the Gospel is transformational--and that Jesus was a change agent. She knows that this work of sanctification, of transformation: It’s a daily thing, the picking up our cross. She gets that because she lives it out daily; that’s what we know about her.”
“Instead of turning her into a monument, we need to join her in the movement,” he urged.
The work of agencies such as GCORR is as needed and as relevant today was it was back in 1968 when the denomination was being formed, Ester said. During her first onboarding GCORR meeting last fall, she told her fellow board members that “much unfinished business remains.”
GCORR “has an obligation to try and educate … through Scripture, but also through the lives of great people who have walked this earth,” Ester said.
The spread of misinformation as well as the “the lack of true, honest history being taught to all of us has been a damaging factor (in America),” she added. “When the truth starts revealing itself … we realize that this is not the way the world has been shared with us in history books.”
Jones credits GCORR for continuing to raise awareness of the inequities that still exist.
“I know that GCORR is a vital part of us continuing to move forward in the years to come,” Jones said. “If we don’t continue to work to change the narrative, we’ll just be stagnated, carrying the same issues forward.”
Regarding the choice of many local churches to disaffiliate rather than become more inclusive (of people who identify as LGBTQ+), Jones expressed sadness that she’ll no longer be able to work with some United Methodist women across the denomination. Those women will follow the guidelines of their local church, in choosing to leave rather than become a more equitable, diverse, and inclusive church, she explained.
Certain organizations within the Church can be viewed as a nuisance--like GCORR and BMCR (Black Methodists for Christian Renewal), “any time there is a commission that comes together to examine fairness and equity,” Pastor Walker added.
“Things like that are only nuisance to those who do not understand what privilege really is,” he said.
Despite so many attempts inside the UMC as well as out in society to “separate us from one another,” Ester hopes that people will choose to be “hurricane victim helpers.”
“When a storm or disaster comes through, people put their politics and religion aside and simply try and help,” she explained. “That’s what we are called to do. If we all could live out that ‘hurricane victim helper’ call, that’s how you start working toward that Beloved Community.”
“We outta care because it’s the right thing to do.”
Asked why she continues to answer the call to serve on boards such as GCORR, Ester responded, “So often we choose not to get engaged because of the time commitment to organizations. We must be at the table for our voices to be heard.”
Ester’s present wish is that the UMC “becomes who we claim that we are in our Social Principles: peacemakers, loving, kind--and that we will live out who we say we are.”
“I see hope in our denomination … see GCORR as a critical part of feeding information around issues of disability and racism and hatred to our conferences and local churches.”
The church still has a long way to go toward health and wholeness … toward becoming the Beloved Community, Pastor Walker acknowledged.
“Clara knows that (the Civil Rights Movement) isn’t just history; it’s present reality … still requires not just prayer, but legislation … for us as citizens to live out (social justice) in our everyday existence,” he said.
“If we really want to honor to Clara … the best way to do that is to be busy about our Father’s business: social justice. Building the Beloved Community is the business that Clara is about. She is a daughter with whom God is pleased.”