Rev. Clyde Grubbs… is a Minister at All Souls Braintree, Massachusetts. He is a member of the Unitarian Universalist Association Board of Trustees.
Grubbs is also a Cherokee and serves as co-president of Diverse and Revolutionary UU Multicultural Ministries, a Unitarian Universalist Association organization for people of color.
He has ministered to congregations in Indiana, Texas, Florida, California and in Quebec, Canada.
Until he was 10, Grubbs grew up in a Cherokee community in Texas. After a short stint at the Crane Theological School at Tufts University in the 1960s, Grubbs went to work in the antiwar movement, organizing campus protests against the Vietnam War.
After the war, Grubbs continued his organizing work, in anti-racism, the labor movement, Chilean solidarity and with the Boston Indian movement. He also became a college history teacher and he joined the Arlington Street Church in Boston, where a series of conversations with the then-new minister, the Rev. Kim Crawford Harvie, put him back on a path to theological school.
Previously, Clyde Grubbs joined the Communist Party USA and led a 1984 party delegation to Soviet Azerbaijan. In Baku, the delegation attended the 50th Anniversary of the Azerbaijan Komsomol (Communist Youth).
Clyde Grubbs left the Communist Party in 1991 when the party split and became associated with the breakaway Committees of Correspondence faction.
Grubbs enrolled in Andover Newton Theological School and graduated in 1994. He began his parish ministry work and he married the Rev. Marjorie Bowens-Wheatley. Bowens-Wheatley worked for both the UUA and the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee and she and Grubbs were co-ministers at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of Austin.
Clyde Grubbs has been involved in “anti-racism” work for many years[1]:
- The first anti oppressive collective, I belonged to was a group of men working to overcome patriarchal ways of being. We didn’t have a trainer, but there was plenty of literature on patriarchy available, and yes, lots of women had published their observations of ways in which men’s behavior was oppressive. We could be open and honest about our lives, and share with each other why we wanted to change.
- Later I was part of a group of men who identified as Native Americans. We were from different traditions and none of us shared a common “tribe.” We lived in Boston, and we knew that we could not be Indians alone. We also knew that we had work to do as men in relationship to being true to our heritage. Every man in that weekly conversation (that went on for over a year) agreed that male supremacy was not compatible with the way of our ancestors, and that patriarchy had been learned from our conquerors.
In 2017, Clyde Grubbs was a member of Boston Democratic Socialists of America‘s public Facebook group and of Democratic Socialists of America, Green Socialist Caucus closed Facebook group.
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