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H umanist

H all

 

In the New Millennium

2000 – 2003

 

C hapter 1

 

 

 

The Cleanup Years

 

 


 

BACKGROUND –

 

Our current Fellowship of Humanity, a Humanist Church, has been evolving organically ever since the year 2000 when new leadership was introduced.  The Hall of the Fellowship, Humanist Hall, quickly became very popular and is a model for other halls;  but the Church began a series of experiments in 2000 whose success has yet to be determined.  Humanist Hall spectacularly solved problems of the City of Oakland (such as its lack of user-friendly venues) by becoming a thriving alternative showcase for grassroots ethnic arts  The Humanist Church, however, is still finding its way toward becoming a conscious, progressive, sustainable community that can be a model for future generations.

 

Humanist Hall had been neglected and forgotten and was facing total oblivion for more than a decade before 2000.  Much of the building and its grounds were used to house a huge collection of thrift-store junk:  old sofas, lamps, tattered Queen Anne chairs, televisions, and tons of cheap knick-knacks.  The stage was covered up with junk and boxes of junk, piled seven feet high, so that you could not find a place to stand on it.  The kitchen had been likewise turned into a storeroom.  There were as many as ten toasters stored in it as well as books, more knick-knacks, a bed, excess ornamental tables, and odd things just thoughtlessly tossed about.  There was an actual rat’s nest under the water heater in the kitchen.

 

Before 2000, passers-by on 28th street would dump garbage over the back fence and the Hall’s caretaker dumped garbage under the kitchen porch and into the crawl space and dumped wastepaper and trash into the compost pit.  Old hoses that leaked were simply abandoned on the grounds.  Nobody picked anything up.  The crawlspace was crammed with the remnants of a long gone garage sale:  unsold worthless furniture, stuffed chairs, and house hold belongings were molding there, further degrading the Hall with foul smells.  Both the exterior and interior walls of the building, flaking and pealing, desperately needed paint.  Rotted wood was everywhere:  several staircases, the porches, and the railings were so rotted that they had already collapsed.  Hall windows, both the frames and the glass, had remained broken for years.  Some windows were painted shut.  None of the doors in the building closed properly and no latch on any door worked.  The women’s toilet leaked in three places and caused extensive rot in one corner of the building.  The men’s bathroom had a putrid smell that outlasted all cleansers.  Several dangerous old gas heaters were still being used in the Hall.  The veritable columns holding up the back porch were unsupported and in danger of collapsing.  Exposed wiring was shooting sparks from the main lamps in the Hall.  This list of Hall negligence and abuse could go on for many pages. 


 

WORK –

 

This was the Hall of the year 2000  To save it, the new leadership created a “New Fellowship” out of the old Fellowship that was here.  They cleared away the junk and refuse from both the building and the grounds and started a repair program that never stops.  They recruited activists to work on the building.  These activist-workers replaced the rotted wood everywhere they found it and rewired all the Hall lights.  And they rewired the kitchen lights and the outlets below the stage that serve the sound systems which are set up in the Hall for most of the larger events.  Our activist-workers are mostly free to select the job, select the materials, select the tools, and pick the paint colors in the time frame that suits their needs.  They may decide to paint or to do the preparation work;  surfaces have to be cleaned and scraped.  If they paint, then they decide the kind of paint, the tools they will use, whether brushes or rollers, the colors they want, and the time frame of their work each day they are on the job.  In this way, they patched holes in the floor, replaced practically all of the bathroom and kitchen fixtures, and removed much of the Hall’s gas system for the sake of safety.  This is a list of Hall improvements that could go on for many pages.

 

The activist-workers did their work with a high degree of freedom and flexibility.  They were paid if they needed the money.  Some switched from volunteer work to paid work in order to fill some need and then back again to volunteer work after their need had been met.  Many activists needed a workplace that supported their activism.  One activist-worker stopped work for a few weeks to demonstrate at the Yucca Mountain proposed nuclear waste storage facility.  Our New Fellowship paid for his trip.  There was never any issue about disruption to the workplace.  On return, his activism was applauded and he started work where he left off.  Activists can integrate their work and lives at the Hall;  they do not have to support the military industrial machine during the week and then give a token effort to activist causes on the weekend.  They can throw themselves into their activism and make it a lifestyle.  At the Hall, they can experience “right livelihood.”  If they are arrested, most workplaces would fire them.  But our New Fellowship, instead, raised their bail – as it did for an activist who was jailed for a cop-watch action in Oakland and for another who was arrested by the INS as possible terrorist.

 

Operations were largely paid for by the new leadership with limited resources.  They wanted to avoid the corruption that creeps into many service organizations which tarnish their public image by developing a highly-paid manager class.  Money coming into the Hall goes where it’s needed:  to pay bills, fix and improve the building, grounds, and gardens, pay activist-workers who need money, buy tools and supplies, and so on.  They trusted that the Hall would become a powerful resource for progressive activists and the progressive community at large.


 

IMPACT –

 

Organizationally, by the year 2000, the Fellowship had degenerated from an activist Mecca in the mid-eighties to a tiny study group of five or six people with no consistent political orientation and no interest in public service as a group.  There was little income in those times and the Fellowship operated by depleting a small savings account.  Turning Humanist Hall into a functional space again – a place the New Fellowship could be proud to show off to potential users of the Hall – took years of constant, strenuous effort.  But the results are magnificent.  Some 20,000 people belonging to progressive or oppressed-minority organizations use Humanist Hall every year.  And membership in the Fellowship has grown to over 40 stable people.  Humanist Hall has a fine reputation as an essential progressive community center and venue all over the Bay Area and the only one that’s solar powered.

 

The impact of Humanist Hall is attested to by its popularity.  It is a well-known progressive community center for the East Bay.  The impact can be detected on its website where its various calendars of events are shown:  there are two separate weekly program series, one a speaker series and one a film series, and two separate weekly event series, one the heavily-booked Hall event series for oppressed minorities and one the activist event series.  Hall events are booked way into the future.  Activists are tremendously encouraged by the support of our New Fellowship.  They pour into Humanist Hall day in and day out:  to work, to cook, to eat, to make music, to find refuge,  and to enjoy a haven from the overbearing, relentless mechanized consumer culture.  By congregating at our Hall, activists can make more connections than they ever realized.  They strengthen their organizations and network with other groups.  They benefit mightily from the Fellowship’s policy not to pit one progressive organization against another.  They spread the word about Humanist Hall being there for them, an infrastructure for the political Left, until it appeared on the map of Oakland as one of the very few progressive establishments that owned property in the East Bay.    

 

The new leadership turned a broken-down building into a platform and refuge for progressive activists and a showcase for Oakland’s cultural diversity.  It was only possible because activists and cultural communities responded to the open-hearted invitation from Humanist Hall to come and make good use of the Hall.  Because the new caretakers of the Hall worked there practically 24/7, the doors were open day and night most of the week.  There was such a need for a Hall like this that people flocked there on the basis of word of mouth.  Humanist Hall receives some 600 calls a month, or 20 calls a day, to use the Hall or find out about it.  Its reputation in Oakland and its usefulness to progressive communities is still expanding. 


 

LEADERSHIP –

 

What makes the New Fellowship an outstanding leader in the progressive community is that it sticks hard and fast to the eight principles laid out for it:  sharing, charity, diversity, simplicity, public service, environmentalism, global citizenship, and progressive activism.  These principles are not uncommon;  but it’s rare to see them lived!  The New Fellowship uses its private rental business (renting Humanist Hall to the diverse communities of Oakland and beyond) to subsidize public service and progressive activism.  Its Humanist Hall provides a refuge and platform for progressive activists and affordable meeting and festivity space for progressive and oppressed-minority groups and persons.  Progressive and suppressed-minority groups that cannot afford any other space come to Humanist Hall to celebrate the big moments of their lives:  baptisms, birthdays, coming of age, weddings, anniversaries, memorials, funerals, rallies, and pivotal meetings.  Humanist Hall is reserved for communities of the Left and the Left Out – and it’s become so appreciated in these communities that it shares a leadership role among them.  The Left are progressive communities of all sorts, from activist organizations to spontaneous righteous rallies to reading groups;  and the Left Out are oppressed-minority communities of all sorts, from ethnic organizations to cultural practice workshops to homeless persons.  In this way, the Hall provides much-needed services on two fronts and fills needs that have long gone unsupported in Oakland.  

 

Mainstream American society has lost its way.  To replace it, people all over, and including the Humanists of the Fellowship, are creating communities that can rely on their own local resources while maintaining global communication, respect, and consciousness.  The leadership of the Fellowship is building a community of a higher consciousness based on simplicity, generosity, sustainability, cooperative economics, and ideals of communitarianism – instead of the deceit, meanness, carelessness, competition, and beliefs in domination occupying mainstream American society.  The leadership is determined to create a community that serves those who are not served by corporate capitalism.  The future belongs to people whose community spirit incorporates both sustainable and exciting ideas and actions.  A community needs to be stable while going through changes and it needs to be exciting so that people are motivated to be in it.  These are the challenges for the leadership. 

 

Because the Fellowship is a Church, the leadership is developing a humanist spirituality in tune with the ecology of the Earth.  And Humanist spirituality requires that the Humanist community hold onto honesty and integrity, consistency, justice and democracy,  intelligence and common sense, tolerance, mindfulness in work, and joy in existence.  Fellowship leaders are on the front lines in getting a grip on these.

 

 

   
 

 

 

 

 

H umanist

H all

 

In the New Millennium

2003 – 2007

 

C hapter 2

 

 

 

The Lawsuit Years

 

 

BACKGROUND –

 

The Fellowship of Humanity is the Humanist Church that owns Humanist Hall outright, ever since the building, called “Humanist Hall,” was given to the Fellowship of Humanity in 1940 by J. George Kullmer.  The building had originally been a Lutheran Church, containing pews which were since removed.  J. George Kullmer, about whom nothing else is known, bought the building from the Lutherans and gave it to the Humanists to use as their church – The Fellowship of Humanity.

 

The religion of The Fellowship of Humanity was said to be “Secular Humanism.”  The only place this is known to be recorded is in a lawsuit filed in the Alameda County Courthouse in the early 1950s.  The Fellowship sued the County of Alameda, in which its Humanist Hall resides, for levying property taxes on it even though it is a church.  The Fellowship won this lawsuit at the level of the California Supreme Court in 1957.  In 2006, the term “secular” to represent the religion of a church seemed inappropriate and the Fellowship is gradually evolving into a church that can call itself a church of “Religious Humanism.”

 

The lawsuit of 1957 was long gone but a new one was forced upon the Fellowship in May of 2005 by nine disgruntled ex-members.  The grievances or legal “complaints” of these plaintiffs in the lawsuit of 2005 were several: 

 

1)   They had been expelled from membership in the Fellowship “for no reason” – allegedly in violation of their (civil?) rights;  the Fellowship bylaws notwithstanding.
 

2)  Being expelled, they were not permitted to enjoy the property
            of the Fellowship, its Humanist Hall and grounds.
 

3)  The Fellowship had allegedly rigged the election of 2004 – in other words, held an election wherein these expelled members were not allowed to participate or vote.
 

4)  The Fellowship’s Board of Directors, allegedly, was entirely illegitimate and its authentic Board was composed of these expelled members.
 

5)  The Fellowship, allegedly, had done no financial accounting of itself.  No financial books were exhibited and few financial reports were made to the membership.
 

6)  Two members of the Board were alleged to be living illegally in the basement of Humanist Hall and deriving too much advantage from their position as residents.
 

7)  The Board allegedly had, in effect, stolen the Fellowship of Humanity from its membership, abolished democracy, allowed no feedback, and ran a dictatorship.
 

8)  The Fellowship allegedly was not entitled to its church status;  it did not honor Sundays, held too many outside events of too much variety, and had no minister.


 

Behind this lawsuit lurked malevolent motivations.  If the plaintiffs could win the lawsuit on all points, the Fellowship would be theirs.  They would be the Board of Directors and ultimately responsible for all Fellowship activities and funds.  But it happens that they were not responsible people.  About half of the plaintiffs were ex-Board members from years gone by when the Fellowship had dwindled down to about six members who came regularly on Sunday mornings.  In those days, the Board only allowed Humanist Hall to be open a few hours a week, the Sunday morning hours.  And over the years they had all let Humanist Hall and its grounds fall into a dilapidated state – an abandoned building on a vacant lot.  If Humanist Hall were a ship, then it was shipwrecked for a decade and resting on the bottom of the sea until the year 2000 when it was dredged to the surface again when a new Board came into being.

 

The other half of the plaintiffs were members of an organization called East Bay Food Not Bombs, in addition to being Fellowship ex-members.  They wanted to use Humanist Hall as the East Bay chapter headquarters for Food Not Bombs.  If they could take over the Fellowship, they could use Humanist Hall as their main cook house and headquarters for Berkeley/Oakland.  In fact, the chief organizer of the plaintiffs long ago had tried to take down the banner on top of the stage in Humanist Hall that reads:  “The world is my country, to do good is my religion” (quoted from Thomas Paine) and replace it with a banner that would read:  “Food Not Bombs Central.”  They wanted Humanist Hall because they thought it would be easy for them to get it by way of a lawsuit and because they had been unable to retain any of their other quarters.  In the course of their lawsuit against the Fellowship, they had been banished from five other cookhouses in the East Bay that they were using.

 

These two groups of ex-members, the one with a sour grapes complex and the other with a coup d’etat in mind, ganged up together to become plaintiffs who sued the Fellowship for all it was worth.  And while the lawsuit was in process, they met in another church not two blocks away once a month on Sundays, calling themselves “The Humanist Fellowship” and pretending to be the Fellowship of Humanity.  They used the address of the Fellowship of Humanity as their own address and the membership list of the Fellowship of Humanity as their own membership list, adding friends of their own to the list.  They elected their own Board and their Secretary took notes at their meetings.  The minutes of their meetings show in no uncertain terms that their “Humanist Fellowship” was no more than a hate group focused on exploring how to take down the Fellowship of Humanity, deplete it of resources and revenue, and ruin the careers, the reputations, and the lives of its Board members.  In short, they became a formidable enemy for the Board of the Fellowship of Humanity to contend with even while the Board had all the work and responsibility of keeping the Fellowship afloat.


 

WORK –

 

The Fellowship of Humanity used its last financial reserves to hire a highly qualified lawyer to defend it against this vicious lawsuit.  He was first Recording Secretary and then President of the Bay Area Chapter of the National Lawyers Guild at the time.  Just about all the documents that the Fellowship ever produced were required for this lawsuit, and many more were written especially for it, in defense of the Fellowship.  Documents of key importance in the lawsuit were the Fellowship’s bylaws, its membership lists, minutes of its annual meetings, its treasury reports, transcripts of the depositions, and chronologies of events that took place in Humanist Hall in the lawsuit years from 2003-2007.  These documents and many more were poured over in minute detail by the Fellowship’s lawyer and possibly the plaintiff’s lawyer and the judges involved.

 

It was determined that the Fellowship’s bylaws were faulty and that the expulsion of the plaintiffs had been on faulty grounds and too hurried, since several of them had been expelled almost at the same time.  The Fellowship had indeed purged itself of unwanted members within a year or two of 2003, using its new bylaws.  These unwanted members had shown themselves to be bold liars, slanderers, and demagogues, back stabbers, and betrayers of trust, disrespectful of everything and everyone connected with the New Fellowship.  And they had run a smear campaign far and wide to destroy the reputations of Board members. 

 

A determination had to be made regarding each grievance in the lawsuit.  By 2006, the lawsuit had devolved into a settlement process and each side was compromised.  On the plaintiff side:  plaintiffs were granted the right to apply to the Fellowship for re-admission as members in 2006;  they were granted the right to enjoy the property of the Fellowship on certain stipulated Sunday afternoons approximately twice a month until 2007;  they were granted the right to have one Board member;  they were allowed to put their old bylaws on the ballot at the annual meeting of 2006.    

 

On the Fellowship side:  the Fellowship was allowed to bar all friends of the plaintiffs from membership;  it was allowed to bar all friends of the plaintiffs from enjoying its property;  all of its candidates were allowed to run for Board seats at the annual meeting of 2006;  its financial records were not judged to be improper, illegal, or even relevant;  the two Board members living in the basement of Humanist Hall were not required to be ejected, evicted, or otherwise removed or demoted;  and the elections of 2006 were conducted by the two opposing lawyers so that democracy at the elections was not in question.  The crucial issue, whether the Fellowship could decide its own membership, was decided in its favor.  The church status of the Fellowship of Humanity was held to be inviolable and irreproachable.  The Fellowship of Humanity triumphed against the vicious lawsuit of 2005.           


 

IMPACT –

 

The lawsuit had a devastating impact on the Fellowship, its Board members, and its regular members.  Although the same Board members continued to win Board seats in election after election at the Fellowship’s Annual Meetings, they were nevertheless surrounded by controversy.  The smear campaigns against the Board members by the plaintiffs spread by conversation, phone, and email to almost every regular member and to countless strangers in the Berkeley/Oakland vicinity as well.  They created confusion about the nature of the Fellowship, whether it was a good place or a bad place.  It seemed to be doing well and contributing to the progressive movement at large but the plaintiffs insisted to everyone they contacted that it contained a dark secret – that the Fellowship was run as a dictatorship, oligarchy, serfdom, or fiefdom and that people were kicked out willy-nilly.

 

Board members were put on the defensive all the time trying to explain to people who wondered what was going on that they were being persecuted by plaintiffs who had nothing to lose and everything to gain by suing the Fellowship.  Board members were much demoralized during the whole course of the lawsuit.  They were hard pressed to do all the extra work involved in the lawsuit, prepare all the documents, go to all the meetings, and continually explain to people everywhere that the lawsuit was unwarranted and actually a scam to grab the property of the Fellowship.  The Board labored under heavy controversy and prejudice through the lawsuit years and many members and outsiders had questions and doubts that were hard to satisfy.  Some Board members dropped off the Board and some regular members dropped out of the Fellowship on account of pressures caused by the lawsuit, in particular, the pressure to be for or against the way the Board was handling the Fellowship and the lawsuit.

 

The lawsuit made it clear who the friends of the Fellowship and its Board were, who approved the direction that the Fellowship was headed and who did not.  Those who did not joined the plaintiffs’ campaign to smear the Board and tear down the Fellowship, attacking every institutional structure that the Fellowship had:  from the right of the Caretaker to act as security guard to the right of the Fellowship to claim its church entitlements. 

 

The reputation of Humanist Hall suffered too.  Many people who had heard that the Hall was under siege by a lawsuit stayed away.  Many outsiders had doubts and tentatively asked questions.  The rental business that supports Fellowship activities and the maintenance, repair, and improvement of Humanist Hall also fell off to some extent.  The lawsuit was a disaster for Humanist Hall and its financial resources, and for Board members and their morale.  Nevertheless, the Fellowship pulled together, pulled through, and prevailed.                   


 

LEADERSHIP –

 

While the lawsuit spread misery on everyone it touched, it was also the source of vast learning for Board members.  At the outset of the lawsuit, Board members started on a learning curve in legal matters and lawsuits that is still with them.  Today, Board members have lost their naïveté and are much more knowledgeable about the legal affairs of the Fellowship and much stronger as human beings under siege.  Board members took the opportunity of the lawsuit to strengthen their defense of the Fellowship against those who would jeopardize it.  Board members today have so much more confidence in their own leadership of the Fellowship as a viable church with a future to look out for.

 

It has been of the utmost importance to Board members to secure the Fellowship as a Humanist Church, taken care of and run by Humanists, for generations into the future.  They want to hand the Fellowship down the generations of Humanists as a Humanist Church and community center for progressive organizations.  The lawsuit threatened to destabilize this vision since, had the lawsuit been won by the plaintiffs, Humanist Hall could have easily been sold to developers who are gentrifying the neighborhood of the Fellowship.  However onerous the lawsuit process, Board members and their lawyer defeated the plaintiffs at every turn which strengthened Board members’ resolve to take the greatest care in positioning the Fellowship for its future role.  Today the Fellowship has leaders who are absolutely determined to propel it into the future it was meant for:  a Humanist Church and flagship progressive community of its own, striving to live the humanitarian ideals it set up for itself, as well as a progressive community center for Oakland and the East Bay.

 

The Fellowship’s very survival as a Humanist Church, and its place in the City of Oakland as a well-known progressive community center, is a testament to its leadership among progressive institutions.  It has remained a church, and remained left and progressive, when its resources were considerably diminished, when its officers where heavily attacked, when its integrity was threatened on all fronts by slanders.  Stronger within itself, the Fellowship is prepared to become stronger within the City of Oakland and stronger within the greater progressive movement.  It has taught itself much wisdom in how to handle internal political affairs.  Its leadership is preparing to teach itself how to handle external political affairs – the relationship of the Fellowship to the City of Oakland – to ensure the long-term survival, the sustainability, of the Fellowship as a Humanist Church.  What the leaders teach themselves they can teach others as well.  The Fellowship today shines as a beacon of integrity in progressive values to all who come within its range.  By virtue of its leadership, it was saved from the greed, contempt, arrogance, incompetency, thoughtlessness, carelessness, slanders, and lies of its opponents and lived to see a new day dawn.

 

 

  

 

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