In March 1961, Rev. David Cole, lead minister at UUCUC and Executive Director of the Channing-Murray Foundation, invited Dr. Willard Uphaus to speak to the University community. 

Dr. Willard Uphaus was a pacifist preacher and Christian Socialist who was jailed for refusing to disclose names in a McCarthy-era investigation of Communists in 1956. A graduate and instructor at the Yale Divinity School, Dr. Uphaus spent much of his life supporting what at the time were called “extremely liberal and radical views” on labor rights, civil liberties, and criticism of American capitalism. He was the executive director of the National Religion and Labor Foundation, co-director of the American Peace Crusade, and with his wife, Ola, the director of the World Fellowship Center.

Dr. Uphaus received the Gandhi Peace Award for Promoting Enduring Peace and the Sacco-Vanzetti Memorial Award for Social Justice. In his 1963 autobiography, “Commitment,” he wrote, “We all suffer from an over-all kind of callousness, a callousness that can tolerate poverty and unemployment beside special privilege, a callousness that permits the hurting of human beings because of their color or social status, that allows more emphasis to be put on popularity than on truth, more on bigness than on quality, and that is content with petty moralizing while gross evils are built into the very system under which we live.”

 

Rev. Cole requested a grant of $130.00 from the Billings Lectureship Fund of the American Unitarian Association for Dr. Uphaus’s honorarium ($100.00) and expenses ($30.00). The fund denied the request but the church and the Foundation found the funds and Dr. Uphaus did come speak at Channing-Murray. 

Rev. Cole reported to the Association in Boston that, “Naturally, I was very much disappointed that Billings Fund could not underwrite the Uphaus visit. However, we presented him on campus to a capacity audience, and managed to collect some ninety dollars in a collection, and so the whole affair came off fairly successfully.” 

Research into the Billings Fund does not make clear why Channing-Murray was denied $100 but does show that in 1967 the fund made a total 0f $7,500 available for grants for lectures to UUA Adult [Education] Programs. By 2008, grants of up to $2,000 each were possible for guest speakers through the UUA Office of Young Adult and Campus Ministry grant program. 

Robert Charles Billings (1819-1899) was a successful Boston merchant. At his death, he bequeathed a fortune worth in today’s dollars over $55,500,000 to Harvard, MIT, Wellesley, Boston Medical Library, various schools and facilities for the blind, aged, and infirm, and the Unitarian Church in Roxbury, MA.