The Historical Society’s 2008 Conference: Migration, Diaspora, Ethnicity, & Nationalism in History

By Randall Stephens

The Historical Society is hosting its sixth biennial conference at Johns Hopkins University on "Migration, Diaspora, Ethnicity, & Nationalism in History," June 5-7, 2008. Blog readers will be interested in a number of the sessions, many of which deal with religious history topics: New Scholarship on the Post-Civil War era; African Americans in the era of the Great War; the State of African-American History and Studies, Parts I & II; What Public Historians Can Teach Academic Historians; Moving Civil Rights History in New Directions; Antislavery Reconsidered: Means, Ends, and Constituents; the Politics of Civil Rights History; 19th Century Religious History.

The relentless thrust of globalization and the unexpected termination of the Cold War have increased rather than reduced global tensions. These developments force us to reconsider some themes once thought to be exhausted. Migrations, the formation of Diaspora communities, and the resurgence of ethnicities, both old and new, have transformed our understanding of nationalism and conventional conceptions of the nation-state. The 2008 conference will consider the above themes.

Franklin W. Knight will chair the 2008 conference program committee.

See more on the conference web site.

Deg's Dispatches, Part VIII

Dispatches from LeConte Hall 323 – Part VIII
by Darren Grem

Things are winding down in our “uncoverage” study of American religious history. Breaking into the late twentieth century this week, we studied the religious underpinnings of political activism, focusing on the civil rights movement and women’s movement. Another selection – Freedom Faith – from the PBS documentary This Far By Faith started us off. I wanted students to consider more than just the notable leaders of the civil rights movement, so they took notes on how this film portrayed the religious activism of African-Americans in the rural and small town South of the 1960s. By giving them some leading questions to guide their note taking, I tried to tie this film back to what we had studied previously about African-American religions and politics, as well as more theoretical concepts like the “religion of the American Way of Life” and “civil religion.” They were more successful at the former analysis than the latter, sometimes skipping completely over questions about how these activists both criticized and utilized notions of “religious freedom,” “religious individualism,” and “civil religion.” Only a few students caught on to these more conceptual connections, and this problem continued as they analyzed documents from the civil rights movement and women’s movement. Utilizing selections from King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” Malcolm X’s “Letters from Abroad,” and Mary F. Daly’s Beyond God the Father, I wanted them to consider the overlap between notions of “religious freedom” and “religious liberation.” How are the two connected? How might the former notion, however defined in various religions, inform similar or different interpretations of the latter notion? Oddly, our discussion of these matters was decidedly unsatisfactory, at least from my seat. Even though I graphed out some of their ideas on the board, this didn’t enliven our discussion much in either the morning or afternoon class. When thinking back, I believe I was asking the wrong questions – or too vaguely put questions – to elicit responses that helped them understand - or debate - the nuances of the material better. But I think their difficulty with this section was also symptomatic of another issue I’ve been having recently with certain aspects of this course’s “uncoverage” design.

Most history classes flow from lectures into discussions. “Uncoverage” works in the reverse, starting with discussions of “raw” history and then following with a concluding lecture. Although I think this reorganization is great for jolting students out of their comfort zone early in the term, I’ve increasingly come to believe that it grants diminishing returns later in the term. Students need scaffolding, and, frankly, nothing like straight-up lecturing grants that. That’s not to say that I’m going to return to a lecture-driven pedagogy for smaller classes like this one; rather, I want to reintroduce lectures at the beginning of specific sections of the class, particularly ones where I think the broad historical context is a necessary foundation for understanding a given set of documents, a film, etc.

There’s a number of other edits that I want to make to the course, but I’ll relate those later, after I get back the end-term course evaluations. We’re moving through our last section of the course – Religion in “Culture War” America – this week, and will finish things off with their writing portfolios and final assignment in the next. Until then…

DuBois Reviewed

PAUL HARVEY

Pastor Robert Cornwall reviews Ed Blum's W. E. B. DuBois: American Prophet, here in Christian Century. He writes:

. . . it's Du Bois's critique of white American religion that makes this an important read for the nonspecialist. What we discover is a deeply spiritual man, influenced by the Social Gospel and religious modernist traditions, who is repelled by the hypocrisy of Christ's white followers. Du Bois's critique of white Christianity is hostile, but he doesn't reject religion or Christianity—only its distortions.

Southern CrossRoads

BY ART REMILLARD

The Editors of the Journal of Southern Religion recently added Curtis W. Freeman’s article, “‘Never Had I Been So Blind’: W. A. Criswell’s ‘Change’ on Racial Segregation” to Volume 10. Here’s an excerpt from the conclusion…

W. A. Criswell discerned the political signs of the times more clearly than anyone could have imagined. He was able to envision the passing of the Dixiecrat politics of the Solid South, and the emergence of a new conservatism that would fit like hand-in-glove with the New Religious Right. He later would be hailed as both the godfather of the conservative resurgence of the Southern Baptist Convention and a spiritual advisor in the southern strategy of the Republican revolution. Yet what he wanted more than anything was to be the pastor of the largest Baptist church in the world. His change ensured that would be possible for years to come. Although Criswell has been described as a man of principle and conviction, he more fittingly personified the populist conservatism that was shared by many other white Baptists in the South. They resisted integration in the here and now but were willing to make pragmatic concessions as the social arrangement of Southern culture changed. For the time being the biblical vision of a racially reconciled humanity would have to wait. Nevertheless, as Criswell reminded them, “In heaven we’ll all be together.”

For those unfamiliar with Criswell and his position on segregation, his obituary in the New York Times offers a quick primer.

The Rev. W. A. Criswell, a leader of the conservative movement now in control of the Southern Baptists and former pastor of the First Baptist Church of Dallas, one of the denomination's first megachurches, died on Thursday in Dallas. He was 92. He was the former head of the Southern Baptist Convention and was pastor of First Baptist, the nation's largest Southern Baptist congregation, from 1944 until 1991, becoming pastor emeritus in 1994. The author of Why I Preach That the Bible Is Literally True and 53 other books, Mr. Criswell was a target of both denomination liberals and conservatives during his two terms as convention president in 1968-70. . . . Mr. Criswell once told the South Carolina Legislature that integration was “idiocy,” but he announced after his election to the convention presidency in 1968 that he was renouncing segregation, a practice that was then common in Southern churches and elsewhere.

Also in JSR news, two members of our editorial board Walter Conser and Rodger Payne co-edited, Southern Crossroads: Perspectives on Religion and Culture. Here’s a description from the University Press of Kentucky website (you may notice some familiar names)…

Southern Crossroads: Perspectives on Religion and Culture takes the study of southern religion beyond a narrow focus on Christianity and churches. The interdisciplinary research found in this volume extends to non-Western religions and even to such topics as food, music, art, vernacular folkways, and literature. Contributors include Walter H. Conser Jr., James R. Curtis, Matthew Day, Marcie Cohen Ferris, Paul Harvey, Samuel S. Hill, Barbara Lau, Bill J. Leonard, William Martin, Donald G. Mathews, William D. Moore, Charles E. Orser Jr., Diana Pasulka, Celeste Ray, Randall J. Stephens, and Charles Reagan Wilson.

Post-Katrina, Still Waiting

ART REMILLARD

I recently received word of a PBS documentary, Still Waiting: Life After Katrina. There’s a low resolution version of the film on the website. Here’s a description…

Still Waiting: Life After Katrina documents the remarkable story of resilience, family, and attachment to place. The role of race, women, family, food, and faith are integral to the content and provide powerful teaching opportunities.

Still Waiting takes place in the post-Katrina world of three African American women who grew up in the New Orleans area. The stories of Connie, Katie, and Janie are set against a backdrop of the larger extended family they share. In the film, we see how our primary women who have long held up the center of their respective families react differently to the circumstances that Katrina has thrust upon them.

The unusual size and interconnectedness of the 155-member family portrayed in this film point to a cultural truth that, while unfamiliar in most of the US, resonates strongly in the New Orleans area. The group’s well-knotted bonds of love and reciprocity function like an emotional ecosystem, capable, it seems, of absorbing the profound betrayal of nature and the system. But as the story of their evacuation to Dallas gives way to the story of their return to the bayou and the unexpected difficulties they face, the hopes of reclaiming life as it once existed look increasingly remote.

Still Waiting is a collaborative project of two-time Emmy winning filmmaker Ginny Martin, and Kate Browne, Afro-Creole specialist and professor of anthropology at Colorado State University. The documentary was filmed between October 2005 and March 2007 and was funded by National Science Foundation, Colorado State University, and Women in Film. Still Waiting was broadcast on nearly 300 PBS stations in August, September and October 2007. The film's website includes a low resolution streaming video of the film, a link showing reactions to the documentary, PBS air dates and times, and links for ordering a DVD for personal or institutional use. Please visit www.stillwaiting.colostate.edu

MLK the Preacher

PAUL HARVEY

Jenny McBride reviews the latest volume of the Martin Luther King, Jr., Papers Project here. A brief excerpt:

In addition to such diverse documents as sermon outlines, full drafts, seminary papers, facsimiles, and photographs, Volume 6 also includes transcripts of tape recordings of King's most famous sermons, documents from King's file "Sermons Not Preached," a chronology of sermons preached through 1959, a sermon file inventory listing all the folders discovered in 1997, a list of selected works relevant to King's sermon preparation, letters received after King's 1958 stabbing, and a calendar of documents including materials not printed in this volume. While the scope of the volume may seem daunting, the accessibility of the documents invites scholars and lay readers alike to benefit from this remarkable discovery. As a volume dedicated to King's preaching, Volume 6 arguably best conveys the life and work of the man who said of himself in 1965, "I am many things to many people but in the quiet recesses of my heart, I am fundamentally a clergyman, a Baptist preacher. This is my being and my heritage, for I am also the son of a Baptist preacher, the grandson of a Baptist preacher and the great-grandson of a Baptist preacher."

For more on the denuding of King into a meaningless saint-for all, and an attempt to recapture his prophetic message, also check out Baldblogger on "A King for Our Times," and Christopher Phelps, "The Prophet Reconsidered," which in addition to the Vol VI of the Papers also discusses the following books:

From Civil Rights to Human Rights: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Struggle for Economic Justice, by Thomas F. Jackson (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007)

Going Down Jericho Road: The Memphis Strike, Martin Luther King's Last Campaign, by Michael K. Honey (Norton, 2007)

Vernon Johns Day

PAUL HARVEY

On this MLK day, it's high time to high-five Vernon Johns, courtesy of Civil War Memory and Ralph Luker. From Ralph's introductory essay:

There was a time when John the Baptist was better known than the obscure man of Gallilee who came after him and there was a time when Vernon Johns was better known than Martin Luther King, Jr. When King became the pastor of Montgomery, Alabama’s Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, he identified himself as Vernon Johns’ successor. Subsequent events made it inevitable that Johns would ever thereafter be known as Martin Luther King’s predecessor.

Vernon Johns and Martin Luther King differed in remarkable ways. Johns was born in the rural South and found city life distasteful; King was born in the urban South and won his greatest victories in its cities. Johns was of the generation of King’s father and died in the midst of the civil rights crusade; King’s generation gave the movement its leadership in large numbers and some historians date its end at his death. Johns was an enthusiastic spokesman for black capitalism; King was a critic of capitalism’s economic disparities. Johns advocated armed self-defense of communities of color in the South; King hoped the South could become a peaceable kingdom via aggressive nonviolent protest. Vernon Johns’ congregations sometimes drove him from their pulpit, only subsequently to rehire him; either of Martin Luther King’s congregations would happily have made him their pastor into eternity. . . .

Read the rest here.

Doc Watch and Secularism in America

BY RANDALL STEPHENS

I've gotta confess. I'm a documentary junky. Youtube's staple of obscure clips and Netflix's ever-expanding catalog have only fed my habit. (I enjoyed reading about the Jewish Americans doc here on the blog and caught most of one episode last week.)

Two films recently came to my attention. Though, I have seen neither of them. The first was a big hit at the 2007 Sundance Festival. The second should be in theaters this spring.

For the Bible Tells Me So:

Winner of the Audience Award for Best Documentary at the Seattle International Film Festival, Dan Karslake's provocative, entertaining documentary brilliantly reconciles homosexuality and Biblical scripture, and in the process reveals that Church-sanctioned anti-gay bias is based almost solely upon a significant (and often malicious) misinterpretation of the Bible.

Praying With My Legs The Radically Amazing Life and Legacy of Abraham Joshua Heschel:

Filmmaker Steven Brand and Rabbi David Lieber, President Emeritus of the University of Judaism, will view 30 minutes of the proposed 90-minute documentary. “Praying With My legs” is about the life, times, and teachings of Abraham Joshua Heschel, who counted the UJ’s esteemed Dr. Lieber among his students.

(Several weeks ago Paul wrote an entry on Heschel here.)

Another fairly recent item of interest: Wilfred McClay's Pew-sponsored lecture in December 2007 on religion and secularism:

Religion and Secularism: The American Experience:

Some of the nation's leading journalists gathered in Key West, Fla., in December 2007, for the Pew Forum's biannual conference on religion, politics and public life. Given the recent popularity of several high-profile books on atheism, the Pew Forum invited Wilfred McClay, a distinguished professor of intellectual history, to speak on the historical relationship between religion and secularism in America.

Sacred Mission, Worldly Ambition

PAUL HARVEY

Here's a book that should be appearing in about a month or two, keep your eye out for it: Sacred Mission, Worldly Ambition: Black Christian Nationalism in the Age of Jim Crow. I first became interested in this as a Ph.D. dissertation from Columbia some years back. It's now coming out as a book focusing on the world of black Christians in Savannah from the 1890s through the Depression. It's one of the richest local studies of African American religion that I've read, full of fascinating detail but also productive of big (and sometimes controversial) ideas about the role of the church in the community. I'll blog about this more in the future once it's available. Here's some more on it:

Using Savannah, Georgia, as a case study, Sacred Mission, Worldly Ambition tells the story of the rise and decline of Black Christian Nationalism. This nationalism emerged from the experiences of segregation, as an intersection between the sacred (religion and church life) and the secular world of business. The premise of Black Christian Nationalism was a belief in a dual understanding of redemption, at the same time earthly and otherworldly, and the conviction that black Christians, once delivered from psychic, spiritual, and material want, would release all of America from the suffering that prevented it from achieving its noble ideals. The study’s use of local sources in Savannah, especially behind the-scenes church records, provides a rare glimpse into church life and ritual, depicting scenes never before described. Blending history, ethnography, and Geertzian dramaturgy, it traces the
evolution of black southern society from a communitarian, nationalist system of hierarchy, patriarchy, and interclass fellowship to an individualistic one that accompanied the
appearance of a new black civil society.

Although not a study of the civil rights movement, Sacred Mission, Worldly Ambition advances a bold, revisionist interpretation of black religion at the eve of the movement. It
shows the institutional primacy of the churches giving way to a more diversified secular sphere before an overtly politicized struggle for freedom could take place. The unambiguously political movement of the 1950s and 1960s that drew on black Christianity and radiated from many black churches was possible only when the churches came to exert less control
over members’ quotidian lives.

“Oltman’s recovery of a fascinating union of business and religion, in rise and decline, illuminates the history of Savannah and underscores the complexities, opportunities, and tensions that typified early twentieth-century African American communities across the nation. Clearly written and skillfully researched, Sacred Mission, Worldly Ambition leaves indelible impressions of struggles that mattered to communities and individuals alike.”—Jon Butler, author of Awash in a Sea of Faith

Mainstream Versus Mainline; or, Does Class Identification Work Against Racial Integration -- from Guest Poster Carolyn Dupont!

I'm pleased to guest post this dispatch from the recent meeting of the American Society of Church History, which meets together with the AHA. Our guest poster today is Carolyn Dupont, author herself of an outstanding study ("Mississippi Praying: White Religion and Black Equality, 1954-1966) on race and religion during the civil rights era. Dupont reports on an engaging panel she attended at the ASCH meeting.

BY CAROLYN DUPONT

If, as Kathryn Lofton suggests, our primary task as religious historians is one of comparison and classification, then a set of papers at the recent meeting of the American Society of Church History suggests that religious historians are profitably engaged in that task. A panel of four very strong papers demonstrated a great deal of creativity and underscored the need for historians to produce "tough categorical anatomies" (also Lofton's phrase; see this blog, "Spirituality, Smirituality," August 26, 2007).

Julie Byrne, Brendan Pietsch, Elesha Coffman and Catherine Bowler, all graduates of or current Ph.D. students at Duke, presented papers that were highlights of my experience at the annual AHA (of which the ASCH is an affiliate) meeting in Washington, D.C. last weekend. Two of the papers had special interest for me.

In "Mainline versus Mainstream," Coffman demonstrates the pitfalls that result from sloppy and undifferentiated descriptors in her examination of two words frequently interchanged in scholarly dialogue about American Protestantism—mainline and mainstream. Not only is there a sort of division (between moderates and liberals and between core and periphery groups) within the mainline, membership in the club has evolved a bit since the early twentieth century. Most importantly for Coffman, however, mainline has a strong class connotation that ties it to upper-class, old Protestant northeasterners, whom she argues "can never be mainstream." Scholars ought to have caught the inherent contradiction, as since about 1970 mainline is nearly always associated with decline, yet mainstream is " wherever the majority of Americans want to go—which for the past several decades has been into conservative and, increasingly, Pentecostal churches. The mainline, by contrast, is tethered to a past and a social location . . . Conflating mainline and mainstream simultaneously transforms Riverside Drive bureaucrats into just plain folks and pushes anyone who would dissent from the mainline to the “extremist” fringe."

Bowler's paper, "Thriving on Azusa Street: Word of Faith within and without Pentecostalism," offers an analysis of a sector of that mainstream—the "Word of Faith" movement in neo-Pentecostal churches. Typified by names familiar to any channel-surfer with curiosity about contemporary Christianity—T.D. Jakes, Creflo Dollar, and Kenneth and Gloria Copeland—this movement often appears so this-worldly oriented as to render false its claim to the mantle of the 1906 Azusa Street revival. But Bowler asks us to take this genealogy seriously, seeing the Word of Faith message as an expansion and redefinition of the four major traditions that have shaped Pentecostalism. Power for service becomes understood as faith—a power that enables the believer to "get results from God;" the tradition of entire sanctification that once meant freedom from sin is now demonstrated by prosperity and health ("a perfecting process that unfolds from the use of Faith"); and divine healing has assumed an increased importance as an expression of the believer's faith. Finally, the premillenialism that traditionally looked for God to rescue believers out of their problems by taking them to heaven has become "victorious living." "God takes the problems from the believers, bringing a bit of heaven to them."

Bowler's explanation of this branch of neo-Pentecostalism helps with the project of defining a group that resists easy classification because of its organizational fragmentation and its theological pluralism. Primarily, understanding the Word of Faith movement as an expression of traditional Pentecostalism "anchors Pentecostalism in the language of experience," the only agreed upon way of defining this group, and one consistent with their own self-definitions. While the historic experiential marker of Pentecostalism used to be tongues (an experience), "prosperity is a new ability to demonstrate a spiritual membership" in the Pentecostal community. Additionally, such an understanding helps us to anchor Pentecostalism in the "new realities" of world Pentecostalism. Since the vast majority of Pentecostals live in developing countries, "poverty has becomes an increasingly Christian problem," says Bowler, and "the Faith Movement allows scholars to examine how people are searching for a Christian solution for it."

I could say a great deal more about these two fine papers, but in the interests of provoking discussion, I'd like to join my own research interests in religion and race to this summation and offer a few observations. I can't help but be struck by the irony that, though mainline churches in the 1950s and 60s ardently championed the civil rights cause, most contemporary mainline congregations have very few black members. Coffman's reminder that these churches are strongly anchored to a class identity suggests why this may be the case—their class identification has worked against racial integration.

On the other hand, the white Pentecostal denominations were largely uninterested in advocating black equality during the civil rights years, yet Word of Faith and other Pentecostal-type churches are currently some of the most racially diverse sites in America. I also wonder whether it's important, in linking Word of Faith churches to the Pentecostal tradition, to identify where these neo-Pentecostals are coming from. They don't seem to come from the ranks of historic Pentecostalism, but rather from other churches or from no religious background at all—does this make any difference in their "categorical anatomy?" They seem to be true "upstart sects"—just the kind of places that have historically been the greatest sites of religious innovation and creativity.

A Rabbinic Christmas Eve

PAUL HARVEY

Here's a little Abraham Joshua Heschel for you, in time for your holiday season: Edward Rothstein, "A Rabbi of His Time, with a Charisma that Transcends It," in today's New York Times. The article references the second volume of Edward Kaplan, Spiritual Radical: Abraham Joshua Heschel in America, 1940-1972 (Yale).

Here's a story, from the life of Heschel, retold in the piece and in the biography:

In 1965, after walking in the Selma-to-Montgomery civil-rights march with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel was at the Montgomery, Ala., airport, trying to find something to eat. A surly woman behind the snack-bar counter glared at Heschel — his yarmulke and white beard making him look like an ancient Hebrew prophet — and mockingly proclaimed: “Well, I’ll be damned. My mother always told me there was a Santa Claus, and I didn’t believe her, until now.” She told Heschel that there was no food to be had.

In response, according to a new biography, . . . Heschel simply smiled. He gently asked, “Is it possible that in the kitchen there might be some water?” Yes, she acknowledged. “Is it possible that in the refrigerator you might find a couple of eggs?” Perhaps, she admitted. Well, then, Heschel said, if you boiled the eggs in the water, “that would be just fine.”

She shot back, “And why should I?” “Why should you?” Heschel said. “Well, after all, I did you a favor.” “What favor did you ever do me?”

“I proved,” he said, “there was a Santa Claus.”

And after the woman’s burst of laughter, food was quickly served.

From Civil Rights to Human Rights

BY PAUL HARVEY

Following on yesterday's post on George Houser and the Journey of Reconciliation:
In Today's Legal History Blog, Mary Dudziak notes the following review:

Thomas F. Jackson, From Civil Rights to Human Rights: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Struggle for Economic Justice (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007) is reviewed for H-1960s by Norman Markowitz, Department of History, Rutgers University, New Brunswick.

A key passage, not least for its use of basketball as a metaphor for understanding everything:

In effect, King became for the mass movement something like a great "center" in basketball (to use a sports metaphor), through which both offensive and defensive action flowed.Others were the practical organizers, the playmakers or point guards.But, without the center, without his ability to absorb punishment and keep the action around him moving, particularly the players without the ball (the masses of African American people and their civil rights movement allies), and the team would fail. Although some historians have stressed the limitations of the Southern based civil rights movement,especially its lack of any program beyond the elimination of de jure segregation and the establishment of elemental citizenship rights that northern blacks already enjoyed, Jackson shows clearly that King always viewed economic and social rights as essential components of civil rights.

For King, the defeat and destruction of segregation in the South was a necessary condition to the establishment of broad economic and social rights for Northern blacks, other minorities, and the white poor. King's larger socialist orientation, Jackson shows, led him to understand that racism directed against African Americans both obscured and intensified class oppression.

I'm reminded of this every year when our local paper, the Colorado Springs Gazette, prints its annual absurdly ahistorical and ritualistic editorial on King day -- never mind that this Goldwater-Libertarian paper opposed every single piece of civil rights legislation in the 1960s (all that government intrusion on the private sector, you know), reprinted approvingly Reagan's slurs and innuendos about King, has opposed all extensions of the Voting Rights Act, and opposes all forms of affirmative action whatsoever, claiming (falsely) that King would have opposed them also. King's economic critique arose from his prophetic religious stance, as this review reminds us.

Rev. Houser's Ongoing Journey

BY PAUL HARVEY

Methodist minister George M. Houser was there in 1947, on the Journey of Reconciliation (also discussed here and in Ray Arsenault's recent Freedom Rides: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice), the prelude to the Freedom Rides of 1961. In my experience, few know of this event now, in spite of its coverage in civil rights scholarship. He's still here, nicely profiled in today's New York Times, one of two survivors of the 1947 ride. An excerpt:

The Supreme Court ruled in 1946 that segregation in interstate commerce — as distinguished from local transit — was unconstitutional, a ruling largely ignored in Southern states.

To test it, Mr. Houser and the pioneering civil rights leader Bayard Rustin organized the first freedom ride into the South, dubbed the Journey of Reconciliation. In April 1947, 16 blacks and whites exchanged proscribed seats on interstate buses over two weeks, blacks in front, whites in back, from Washington through the Upper South.

Sometimes they were ignored or even supported. Sometimes they were arrested and even attacked. Mr. Rustin and two other protesters served 22 days on a chain gang in North Carolina after being arrested for violating Jim Crow laws.

The pillars of Jim Crow did not immediately tumble and fall. But Mr. Houser figures they didn’t have to.
Instead, he said, the experience taught him first that a small group of people with an idea can have a huge impact over the long stretch of history.

Second, he said, it taught him that you have to take the first steps even if you don’t know where they will lead.

“I have kind of a theme, which comes from an old hymn,” he said. “‘Lead, kindly light, amidst the encircling gloom/Lead thou me on/The night is dark and I am far from home/Lead thou me on.’ And then it goes: ‘I do not ask to see the distant scene/One step enough for me.’

“And I believe that,” Mr. Houser said. “I believe one step is enough and you take it, as long as you have faith you’re doing the right thing to begin with.”

Blood Done Signed this Blog

John Turner, More on Religion and the Civil Rights Movement

Paul's recent post on religion in the 1960s (and particularly about David Chappell's Stone of Hope) prompted me to think about another recent book on religion and the civil rights movement: Timothy Tyson's Blood Done Sign My Name. Tyson's book has gained numerous plaudits and won the 2007 Louisville Grawemeyer Award in Religion (which comes with a $200,000 prize).

The honors are richly deserved. Blood Done Sign My Name is one of the very best books I have read in recent years. Part autobiography but much more, Tyson's narrative hinges on an unpunished murder of a young black man in Oxford, North Carolina in 1970.

There are some similarities to Stone of Hope. Religion takes center stage in the civil rights movement. Tyson's father, who pastors a white Methodist church in Oxford, takes courageous stands for racial progress over the stiff resistance of many of his parishioners. In both books, religion also infuses early black struggles for civil rights.

Chappell observes that the civil rights movement succeeded "with remarkably few casualties … astonishingly nonviolent." Here Tyson's narrative offers a very different (though not entirely contradictory) conclusion. Violence -- or at least the threat of violence -- was at the heart of racial progress in Oxford. As Tyson argues, "The struggle was far more violent, perilous, and critical than America is willing to remember … It had taken the physical threat of 'Black Power' to make the moral argument of civil rights mean anything on a local level." Change only took place when southern blacks threatened the white establishment with violence and chaos.

Tyson's book is eminently readable -- it is narrative history at its best (and would be very accessible to undergraduates). It is also challenging, because it overturns some now cherished beliefs about the civil rights movement. The book is also sobering, as violence succeeds where religion fails. The civil rights movement is not a redemptive chapter in American History, or at least it wasn't at the time. See Tyson's discussion of Blood Done Sign My Name in the Christian Century.

Tyson also intelligently and effortlessly integrates religion into his narrative. The reader meets a wide variety of southern religious movements (even the Free Will Baptists get an introduction), and even when the narrative moves out of Oxford's churches, religion haunts the story. Blood Done Sign My Name may or may not alter the place of religion in the historiography of the 1960s, but it provides a model example of how to put religion at the heart of one of the central struggles of that long decade.

Getting Religion in the 1960s

John Wilson of Books and Culture and I have been carrying on a dialogue about scholarship on religion and the 1960s. My last post on this is here, which has the links to follow the discussion so far. We've disagreed on some points, but agree on the goal of a richer and more capacious scholarship. I see that scholarship emerging all around me; Wilson sees the "canonical" and textbook accounts as straitened by views of religion which remain unsatisfactory or condescending (or both). Wilson sees evidence of "entrenched orthodoxies" still holding back scholarship, with authors of non-canonical books apparently having to write from the margins of high academe (this was in reference to Doug Rossinow's Politics of Authenticity); I still find this to be a fairly unproductive form of academe-bashing. George Marsden, Mark Noll et al changed the dominant historiography on evangelicalism as a force in American history; I'm sure good books on religion in the 1960s will do the same. "Entrenched orthodoxies" may or may not exist now (we disagree on that point), but in any event they will crumble when faced with superior scholarship.

It's going to take a number of shorter posts to respond to the issues involved here, so let me start here and continue on with this intermittently over the next couple of weeks when I can steal a few moments to think it over further.

Today in my class on Southern History from Civil War through Civil Rights, I had one of those golden moments that we long for in the classroom, but which come too infrequently -- and it was a moment that speaks to our discussion here. I queried the class about a piece about race, religion, and civil rights which they had read. In discussing the piece, a smart political science major in the class volunteered to speak and noted that, for some political science class, she had read David Chappell's Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow (the link takes you to my review of the book for the journal North Star). She then explained the basic points she got from the book, which fit directly into our ongoing class discussion. David's book is quite sophisticated, not normal undergraduate fare, but this student "got" it and contributed richly to the class dialogue.

As it happens, I have a very particular disagreement with Chappell on his interpretation of the role of religion in segregationism; beyond that, however, his broader points remain an example of the richer and more capacious scholarship that Wilson and I both desire. He writes, "The civil rights movement succeeded for many reasons. This book isolates and magnifies one reason that has received insufficient attention: black southern activists got strength from old-time religion, and white supremacists failed, at the same moment, to muster the cultural strength that conservatives traditionally get from religion."

In going over the student's points, the students in this class at least seemed to understand that any rich history of the 1960s must go way beyond the usual oversimplified views, and should feature religious belief as a central actor. And they didn't get this from me -- this is not a class about "religion" per se. They brought it from elsewhere -- other understandings, other classes. The students in this course will be getting more along these lines when they get to our next text, the oral history compilation My Soul is Rested, and they'll get a view from the other side in the final book of the semester, Kevin Kruse's White Flight.

Without my consciously intending to provide them with such, the students are getting a rich dialogue on religion and the central event (for my money) of the 1960s, the civil rights movement. I might add that a pretty rich and capacious view of religion as religion (not just as a commentary on something else) is, I believe, "canonical" within civil rights scholarship -- to the degree that Charles Payne's I've Got the Light of Freedom was mildly revisionist for pointing out how little connection to religious belief a number of male (in distinct contrast to female) civil rights activists in Mississippi claimed.

In his post, John Wilson quoted from and then offered a trenchant critique of a passage in Lisa McGirr's Suburban Warriors. I hope to respond to that next (have to track down my copy of the book first!). Stay tuned, and let the dialogue continue.