Louis Craig Cornish

From Philosopedia

Cornish, Louis Craig (1870—1950)

Cornish, who had been secretary to an Episcopal bishop, became a Unitarian minister and eventually president of the American Unitarian Association (1937—1937).

During that period, the Depression made it difficult for him to carry out his duties. But he worked for international religious cooperation and led an investigation in the 1920s into the alleged persecution of Unitarians in Transylvania.

A "Louis C. Cornish "Living the Mission" Award has since 1999 been awarded in honor of the

• early twentieth century president of the American Unitarian Association (AUA). Dr. Cornish was a visionary internationalist who devoted much of his life to forging global bonds for liberal religious groups. He headed a task force on human rights for ethnic Hungarians in Romania, and visited the Philippines to initiate connections with Unitarians there. In the spirit of Dr. Cornish, the award recipient should have made significant contributions to international relationships.

Recipients have been as follows:

2006 - Natalie Gulbrandsen

2005 - Rev. Dr. Richard Boeke

2004 - Rev. Peter Raible

2003 - Ms. Patricia Rodgers

2002 - Rev. Richard F. Beal

2001 - Rev. C. Leon Hopper

2000 - Rev. Denes Farkas

1999 - Dr. Judit Gellard

A Dream Deferred

Frederick Emerson Small, in a sermon at the Littleton, Massachusetts, First Church Unitarian, spoke highly of William Ellery Channing, Theodore Park, and Lydia Maria Chapman, Unitarians who vigorously opposed slavery. However, he was quite critical of AUA President Samuel A. Eliot and Secretary Louis Cornish

• who seemed to doubt the capacity of African-Americans to grasp Unitarianism. As a young man, Eliot described black workers as "happy-go-lucky, merry, shiftless rascals . …I’ve seen a good deal of them for they work best with a white man bossing them all the while, and I have had that duty several times." As late as 1933, Eliot was denouncing race prejudice while asserting that the Negro race most needed to develop "thrift, skills, intelligence, and character," implying a deficit in all four. Louis Cornish, who succeeded Eliot as president, considered Ethelred Brown a denominational embarrassment: "Mr. Brown is a negro," he wrote, "and has the facility of speech and lack of foresight which sometimes go with the negro temperament. …I have lived much among negroes …[T]hey are very loveable people and often very child-like. It would be at once unjust and misleading to judge Mr. Brown as you would an Anglo-Saxon.

• I don’t suggest that these Unitarian leaders were any more bigoted than the average white American of their era. But their comments surely dispel any notion that Unitarianism elevated its adherents above the prejudices that ruled the day.

(See entry for Benito Mussolini and Small's view as to why the Black Unitarian Universalist Caucus formed.

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