Eric Laverentz: A Great Cloud of Witnesses: What the Black Church of the Civil Rights Movement Has to Say to Christians Today
For many people 2020 felt apocalyptic—COVID, a difficult and contested election, a divided nation, economic hardship all were and remain central to our attention. This is still front page news. As 2021 at long last arrives, the shaking of our nation’s conscience around the murder of George Floyd last Spring seems like a long time ago. But what if this terrible event and the fallout still represents the greatest opportunity to bend the world to the shape of the Kingdom of God? Surely the Church has something important to say and do at if we are at such a decisive moment.
I use the word apocalypse quite deliberately. Any good theologian knows of course that apocalypse doesn’t strictly mean the end. It means a revelation, an unveiling of something that was previously unknown. Apocalypse is the end of one thing and the beginning of something else. To that end, our hope, as Christians, is that we are still at an apocalyptic moment in the United States around racism.
However, what is going to be unveiled that was previously unknown? What will that revelation be? If Scripture teaches that racism is sin, surely, the Church has an important role to play in this revealing of a greater alignment with the Kingdom of God. To this end, the Church must sound like Jesus, the Word of God. It is critical that our witness does not resemble the Wall Street Journal editorial page, Black Lives Matter, the ladies on The View, NPR or talk radio.
We must begin with Scripture—using Biblical categories, concepts and language to describe the Divine vision for society and to call out our shortcomings. For much of the American Civil Rights movement, particularly until its latter stages, the Black Church did this very thing. Their language of freedom for their people and accountability for America was deeply steeped in the Word of God. This was a significant contribution that changed our Republic, extended greater freedom to millions and called white Americans to accountability for the system of Jim Crow in the South and prejudiced attitudes and practice in the North.
It is rare to find a Civil Rights leader, particularly pre-1965, who did not draw deeply upon Biblical imagery to convict their listeners and interpret their struggle. Indeed, the pulpit was one of the most powerful tools of the Civil Rights Movement. The theology of the Movement, when it was its most effective in moving the nation, was historically orthodox, at times fundamentalist, and always steeped in the Word of God. Wyatt Tee Walker, one of the chief strategists of the movement and an early member of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference summarized their thinking, “People may laugh at this now, but we read the Bible.”[i] At the conclusion of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, a newspaper reporter noted how a crowd of thousands packed into too small a church sanctuary broke out in applause as a white Lutheran pastor read First Corinthians Chapter 13. The reporter asked pastor Ralph Abernathy, “Isn’t that a little peculiar, applauding at Scripture?” Abernathy replied, “We are a peculiar people.”[ii] The black Church was effective in moving the nation because it followed Scripture.
Historian David Chappell’s 2004 book, Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow explores the question of why post-war liberal activism of the 40’s and 50’s did not move the nation to take steps to dismantle racism while the Black Church proved able. Chappell, an atheist, said:
The black movement’s nonviolent soldiers were not driven by modern liberal faith in human reason, but…were rooted in Christian and Jewish myth. Specifically, they drew from a prophetic tradition that runs from David and Isaiah in the Old Testament through Augustine and Martin Luther, to Reinhold Niebuhr in the 20th Century.[iii]
This is an area of theology and Christian ethics where the evangelical church needs to play catch-up. We need to be held accountable for saying precious little about racism in America before George Floyd’s murder and now we need to be held accountable for saying precious little that is Biblical afterward. Today’s Church can stand on the shoulders of the black Church of the Civil Rights era whose Christ-filled witness in the face of strident opposition transformed the nation.
Those Christian sisters and brothers surround us as a great cloud of witnesses (Hebrews 12:1). Because of their work, we don’t need to hastily and sloppily construct a new theology that addresses ethnicity, humanity, and the legacy of racism in America. Neither do we have to depend upon popular ideology grounded in ideas like innate, determinative privilege and collective racial guilt. We would do well to recognize the Marxism buried in much of the current pop social analysis and understand that Marxism is built on another foundation than the Gospel and ultimately, as history has proven time after time, undermines human rights, liberty and freedom for all. We are nearly 60 years removed from the highwater mark of the Movement. But this does not mean their truths, principles, and practices are irrelevant today. The timeless, Biblical theology of the Black Church of this era, properly understood, is neither salve for the white conscience justifying the status quo or fuel for the unrequited heartache that drives a desire to erase every institution and begin again in a Pelagianist flight of fancy. Leaning on a theology that emerged from a uniquely black perspective and was effective when it was employed provides a third option that yet has something to say to the current crisis.
To illustrate these perspectives that underlay the Civil Rights movement, I will draw heavily upon the words and thoughts of Martin Luther King Jr. Two observations must be made as we begin. First, King was not the only thinker or leader of the movement, but he was the dominant thinker and leader during its most effective period. There were other voices as well: Bob Moses, Fannie Lou Hamer, James Farmer, Jim Lawson, Ella Baker, Diane Nash, John Lewis, Andrew Young, the aforementioned Wyatt Tee Walker and others too numerous to mention. This essay will include their voices. King was an excellent synthesizer of diverse thought and in many ways, his voice represents theirs as well.
Second, since the 1986 publication of David Garrow’s landmark biography, Bearing the Cross, unflattering details of King’s personal life have been widely known. Recently, further troubling details have come to light. Other men have been banished from the public square for far less than what has been credibly alleged against Martin Luther King Jr. There is no defending certain aspects of Dr. King’s private life, but we banish his voice at our own peril. We are all sinners and have fallen short of the glory of God. We should not labor under the illusions that our heroes are perfect or our saints are not also sinners. It is incompatible with the Gospel to cancel Dr. King’s voice because he was a sinner. If so, we would need to cancel every voice—save Jesus’. We also need to desperately rescue his prophetic words of Biblical truth calling America to accountability from the platitudinous bromides that permeate social media every 3rd Monday in January. He had much more to say and still does. Despite his apparent personal moral confusion, we need his clear voice to speak into our need for widespread repentance.
What does the theology of the Black Church who formed the backbone of the Civil Rights movement have to say to us today?
First, the dominant ethic of the Black Church was agape love.
This comes as no surprise and elements of this theology linger even now in the public consciousness, although somewhat warped and twisted from agape love. The Civil Rights movement was so effective in championing love as motivation that one need only appeal to love to justify nearly any course of action. Agape love, or as King often called it, disinterested love, is often confused with brotherly love (philia) romantic love (eros).
Agape love, which is not dependent upon an objective response, is something different altogether and its practice en masse, in the face of abject hatred, moved the conscience of America. Agape was often expressed through the concern the Black Church had for white America—especially the recalcitrant racists who opposed them. The Black Church absolutely wanted to experience the fullness of American citizenship, the rights due them under the Constitution and by virtue of being made in the image of God. At the same time there was genuine concern for white Americans who had allowed racism to warp their personality and mar the image of God in them. Movement leader Diane Nash described what students who were part of the Nashville campaign witnessed in the hostile White crowds who surrounded them:
Segregation has its destructive effect upon the segregator also. The most of the outstanding of these effects perhaps is fear. I can’t forget how openly this fear was displayed in Nashville on the very first day that students there sat in. Here were Negro students, quiet, in good discipline, who were consciously attempting to show no ill will, even to the point of making sure they had pleasant and calm facial expressions. The demonstrators did nothing more than sit on the stools at the lunch counter. Yet, from the reaction of the white employees of the variety store and the onlookers, some dreadful monster might just as well have been about to devour them all. Waitresses dropped things. Store managers and personnel perspired. Several cashiers were led off in tears.[iv]
The leaders and rank and file participants of the Civil Rights Movement regularly saw the destructive power of racism not only in their lives of course, but also in the lives of white Americans, particularly those who actively opposed their marches, sit-ins and demonstrations. They understood a deep truth attested to by Scripture, that sin destroys. It destroys those who are being sinned against and it particularly destroys the sinner. Being deeply scripted in the Word, they knew that sin, when it is fully grown, brings forth death. (James 1:15) And the sin of segregation and racism is no exception. The Black Church did not only advocate for justice or themselves, but in a very real sense, self-consciously and humbly, they also advocated for their white oppressors.
King, and others in the movement, often quoted Jesus’ Sermon on the Plain and His command: “But I say to you who hear, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. To one who strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also, and from one who takes away your cloak do not withhold your tunic either.” (Luke 6:27-28) This kind of love for their persecutors was actually a key tactic both to change the hearts of the oppressor and to guard the hearts of the oppressed. “Never succumb to the temptation of becoming bitter. As you press on for justice, be sure to move with dignity and discipline, using only the weapon of love. Never let any man pull you so low as to hate him…[v],” King reminded his Montgomery congregation in 1957.
Agape was the driving philosophy of the movement during its most effective phase. On this point there was no compromise for King and the other key leaders. If anyone refused to offer love to their oppressor, they could not be a part of the mainstream of the movement, as long as men like King was at its head. And this uncompromising commitment manifested itself in very particular and peculiar act.
Second, agape works itself out through nonviolent resistance.
The utility of nonviolent resistance lies in its ability to bring to the surface and expose hidden tensions. The black Church who spearheaded the movement lived with the tension of existing as second-class citizens, less than full Americans, and perceived as subhuman. This is the struggle that W.E.B Dubois so profoundly expressed in nearly six decades before the movement when he wrote about the collective experience of being a black American: “One ever feels his twoness,--an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body; whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”[vi]
This universal tension went largely unrecognized by white Americans and so remained unaddressed and unchanged. Non-violent resistance exposed that tension by directly confronting racism wherever it was visibly and usually legally enfranchised. Other than King, perhaps the greatest champion of nonviolent resistance in the Movement was pastor James Lawson. Lawson wrote to King in November of 1958:
I have been convinced for nearly 12 years now that the only hope for the Negro in this country is a genuine movement of non-violence which reflects many of the characteristics of the Montgomery boycott and which strikes not only at the fear of the Negro but also at the power structure of the nation which continue to perpetuate social injustice. If this is to happen it will be because of the ministry uniting as one body and giving initiative leadership to the countless number of Negroes who urgently want such leadership.[vii]
Targets for nonviolent resistance were deliberately chosen in order to create the greatest illustration of this unseen tension. For example, the common narrative around Rosa Parks is that she simply was too tired one day riding home on the bus and spontaneously chose not to give up her seat. That is not the whole story. Rosa Parks was not the first black woman to be arrested for not giving up her bus seat to a white person. For years, black civic leaders in Montgomery debated how to handle segregation on the city buses. They decided upon a boycott of the bus system but waited for the right candidate around which to build the boycott. Only weeks before Ms. Park’s arrest, another woman had also been arrested, jailed and fined $9 but was not deemed a suitable champion as a victim of injustice. Rosa Parks appeared professional, attractive, sympathetic, and was the local secretary of the NAACP. She fit a desirable profile. She had also been trained in non-violent resistance at the Highlander Folk School in East Tennessee. Likewise, the city of Birmingham was chosen for a campaign because of Sheriff Bull Conner’s notoriously vicious tactics. Non-violent campaigns were planned for certain cities and other cities were rejected because of their possibility for excessive violence or, at the other end, an ineffective display. None of this takes away from Ms. Park’s act of courage or the teen marchers who endured fire hoses and police dogs in Kelly Ingram Park. It is important that nonviolent resistance is not something thathappens naturally. It must be a learned discipline, even planned and prepared.
For that reason, nonviolent resistance is more than a tactic but a lifestyle. Practiced fully and truly, it emerges from the soul. This accounts for the existential crisis the movement faced as factions split off in the latter half of the sixties. James Lawson, King and others became increasingly concerned with newer and younger leaders in the movement who seemed to hold nonviolence as a surface deep tactic” rather than something that “was emotional and spiritual and psychological as well and violence could be done verbally as well as physically.” [viii]
King was forced to respond to the Black Power movement, the Nation of Islam and even rioters who did not embrace nonviolence at a spiritual level or even practice nonviolence at all. Malcolm X famously asserted that he helped King in his nonviolent, love-based approach because his militancy presented a credible alternative to King. Other leaders held out the possibility of violence in response to a failure to meet their demands. King would have none of it. He continued to insist upon the absolute utility of nonviolence. In the summer of 1966, after the success of the march in Selma and other triumphs in the South that resulted in transforming legislation, King oversaw the Chicago campaign. King was shocked and saddened by his experience in that northern city, coming away with the belief that whites in the North were every bit as racist, if not more so, than Southern whites. In a brief 1966 Christmas essay called “A Gift of Love”, King detailed the strong and violent reaction they experienced in Chicago and how nonviolence prevailed. King asserted that nonviolence grew in its effectiveness even as the violence practiced against its purveyors grew.
And in Chicago, the test was sterner. These marchers endured not only the filthiest kind of verbal abuse, but also barrages of rocks and sticks and eggs and cherry bombs. They did not reply in words or violent deeds. Once again, their only weapon was their own bodies. I saw boys like goats leap into the air to catch with their bare hands the bricks and bottles that sailed toward us. It was through the Chicago marches that our promise to them—that nonviolence achieves results was redeemed, and their hopes for a better life was rekindled.[ix]
The practice of nonviolence was a non-negotiable for the mainstream of the movement because they sought to expose latent violence grounded in racial prejudice and hate. For this reason, they were often criticized, particularly by white pastors, for violence following the movement. But for King and others, this was simply exposing the violence latent in the system that black Americans experienced every day. They never allowed themselves to be the purveyors of violence and this included using violent speech. This consensus held for much of the movement and as long as it did, its effectiveness in moving the nation’s conscience held as well.
Third, Jesus’ crucifixion is a representation for the practice of nonviolence and social transformation.
For the black Church the battle against segregation and racism was a cosmic struggle, a clash of the forces of darkness against the forces of light. We should not confuse this with a Manichean cosmology of an eternal struggle between equally matched powers. They absolutely believed in the triumph of good over evil. The movement drew inspiration from Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross. Jesus’ willing sacrifice was a nonviolent act that demonstrated the desperate evil of humanity’s sin but more importantly, the power in meeting that sin with love. King was deeply formed by a fundamentalist upbringing, deeply rooted in the authority of the Bible. He was also impacted by liberal Protestant theology, the kind that came to dominate mainline seminaries in the latter half of the 20th century and his mature theology was a mixture of those two divergent streams. King’s Christology and soteriology would challenge the orthodoxy of most Reformed pastors. Nevertheless, he was not won over to the milquetoast of liberal mainline Protestantism. The Substitutionary Theory, usually understood as Jesus’ death in our place as a sacrifice for our sins, was the dominant atonement theology for the black Church and King and other pastors championed it from their pulpits. King’s sermons absolutely thunder on the power of Jesus to transform lives if we give ourselves over to him. King, quoting an old spiritual, preached in 1967 at Ebenezer Baptist Church: “Thank you Lord, thank you Jesus, you brought me from a mighty, mighty long way….How I got over. And I just want to thank you Lord for bringing me over.”[x]
Because of their reverence for the work of the cross and the glory and praise showered on Jesus Christ, few leaders of the Civil Rights movement had the temerity to compare their nonviolent resistance directly to Jesus. But underlying the practice of non-violent resistance was the bold conviction for the marcher, the protestor, and the resister to take up the cross even to the point of shedding their own blood. King himself said: “To be a Christian, one must take up his cross with all the difficulties and agonizing and tragedy-packed content, and carry it until that very cross leave its marks upon us and redeems us to a more excellent way which comes only through suffering.”[xi]
King often remarked, “We must continue to believe that nonviolent suffering is redemptive.” This theological assertion with sociological and psychological implications is deeply rooted in the cross. This same theme was picked up by other leaders as well who saw the inherent redemptive value in non-violent suffering. Bayard Rustin, whom some considered the architect of the movement, penned an Easter greeting to supporters and followers in 1952. David Chappell summarizes Rustin’s remarks combining Rustin’s words as well as his own:
He saw Jesus as a positive example—"this fanatic whose insistence on love thrust at the very pillars of stable society…” Everyone saw Jesus as a lot of trouble, but even crucifixion could not get rid of Him. “Easter in every age…recalls the imminence of the impossible victory, the power of the impotent weak…Easter is the symbol of hope resurrected out of a tomb of hopelessness.”[xii]
Standing in front of the Lincoln Memorial during the 1963 March on Washington, John Lewis made a direct connection between the cross and social righteousness, “I think that somewhere in the history of the Judeo-Christian tradition is the idea that there can be no salvation without the shedding of blood and there may be some truth in that.”[xiii]
The act of bearing the cross, of mimetically following Jesus is not a tragic act. When the movement leaders talked about the cross, resurrection was always implied. In this way, taking up our cross is a necessary way station on the road to social and moral progress. Fannie Lou Hamer, in a speech where she discussed her sufferings for the movement, including her home being shot with sixteen bullets and being beaten and sexually assaulted in a Mississippi jail, talked about taking up her cross in anticipation of a resurrection.
Now the time may have come that was Christ’s purpose on earth. And we only been getting by, by paving our way to hell. But the time is out. When Simon (of) Cyrene was helping Christ to bear his cross up the hill, he said, “Must Jesus bear this cross alone? And would the world go free?” he said, “No there’s a cross for everyone and there’s a cross for me. This consecrated cross I’ll bear, till death shall set me free. And then go home a crown to wear, for there’s a crown for me.”
And it’s no easy way out. We just got to wake up and face it, folks. And if I can face the music you can too.[xiv]
Hamer, King, Rustin and other leaders could call the black Church to tremendous sacrifice and suffering because they believed that God is just and that His justice will not be denied. This leads us to our next point.
Fourth, the black Church fueled their resistance and protest with Christian hope.
When I was a junior in high school, I received for Christmas the first major collection of Martin Luther King Jr’s speeches and writings. It was called A Testament of Hope. Its title is taken from one of his less well-known essays. I remember being surprised that the title would choose to uplift ‘hope’ as the attribute after which this book of his work was named. It was his last work, written when King was at his most sober, published after his death. In it he makes this claim:
People are often surprised to learn that I am an optimist. They know how often I have been jailed, how frequently the days and nights have been filled with frustration and sorrow, how bitter and dangerous are my adversaries. They expect these experiences to harden me into a grim and desperate man. They fail, however, to perceive the sense of affirmation generated by the challenge of embracing struggle and surmounting obstacles.[xv]
Hope was a consistent theme of the movement, a golden rhetorical thread woven throughout, and was often expressed axiomatically in oft-repeated phrases and mantras like, “My feet are tired but my heart is happy” as well as the song of the movement, “We Shall Overcome.” Those lyrics proclaim a resounding note of hope:
We shall overcome
We shall overcome
We shall overcome someday.
Oh deep in my heart,
I do believe,
We shall overcome, someday.
King (and others) often cribbed the 19th Century Unitarian abolitionist, Theodore Parker, who first said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
Of course, the Black Church’s hope was grounded in something much greater than humanity’s ability to embrace challenges and overcome obstacles or a generally benevolent god. There was a reason they were able to sing as racial epithets were lobbed like grenades and rocks whizzed by their heads and growling police dogs nipped at their legs. They believed in the goodness of Jesus Christ and his determination to make all things new. They believed in a just God and they believed they were on the side of justice. Fannie Lou Hamer, by her own admission, confronted a police officer who beat her in a jail until she “was hard as metal.” She let him know that justice was coming, “It’s going to be miserable for you when you have to face God. Because one day you going to have to pay up for the things you have done.”[xvi]
An important metaphor for King was the Exodus narrative of the crossing of the Red Sea. Historically speaking, the Exodus has deep meaning for the Black church. It was perhaps the dominant Biblical image employed by African American Christians who at first longed to be set free from legal bondage as slaves as the Lord set Israel free. King took the story of Israel’s triumph at the Red Sea as a way to hold in tension the terrible reality of evil alongside God’s determination to overcome it. King claimed a personal, omnipotent God does not allow evil to have the final word but instead comes down inexorably on the side justice. In a 1956 service of prayer and thanksgiving at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, Martin Luther King Jr, whose new celebrity was on the rise, made this stirring comparison:
The Egyptians, in a desperate attempt to prevent the Israelites from escaping, had their armies to go into the Red Sea behind them. But as soon as the Egyptians got into the Red Sea the parted waves swept back upon them, and the rushing waters of the sea soon drowned all of them. As the Israelites looked back all they could was here and there a poor drowned body upon the seashore. For the Israelites, this was a great moment. It was the end of a frightful period in their history. It was a joyous daybreak that had come to end the long night of their captivity…
The death of the Egyptians upon the seashore is a glaring symbol of the ultimate doom of evil in its struggle with good. There is something in the very nature of the universe which on the side of Israel in its struggle with every Egypt. There is something in the very nature of the universe which ultimately comes down the aid of goodness in its perennial struggle with evil.[xvii]
Later in that sermon, King made explicit just Who is the ground of their hope. He said it was not some general cosmic intelligence, but a God who “has a great plan for this world…to achieve a world where all men will live together as brothers…the kingdoms of our Lord and His Christ, and He shall reign forever and ever.”[xviii]
Hope was not a new virtue to the black church. It was perfected and honed for generations as black Christians struggled against slavery, Jim Crow, and racism in America. For the black Church, hope was a necessity for survival. But during the Civil Rights movement, it became a powerful tool of social transformation that allowed them to call America to live out our highest national ideals. As they and their ancestors had hoped, the black church now called America, particularly white Christians, to hope for a better world as well.
Fifth, the Church is a holy instrument of cultural transformation, set aside for the purpose of representing the Kingdom of God to the world.
There is a cryptic line in King’s Letter from Birmingham City Jail which if read in isolation seems more in tune with a mystic like Bernard of Clairvaux than a Southern Black preacher, “So we decided to go through a process of self-purification.”[xix] Following that statement King went on to detail the ways in which they spiritually prepared for harassment, persecutions, beatings and jail. In the battle against racism and segregation, this self-purification was a necessary step. They went through this process because they understood, as Biblical people, the pervasive nature of their own sin. They understood that in order to be effective, they needed to discipline their bodies that they might not sin, lest they be disqualified themselves. (1 Corinthians 9:27) The sinful nature had to be tempered. Part of the self-purification process was training in non-violent resistance. Those who were on the front lines of the movement, marching and integrating segregated institutions like lunch counters and schools, spent time being trained how to resist the urge to retaliate in anger. They actually practiced and role-played not responding to racial slurs and even physical assault. An important book for many in the movement was Richard Gregg’s 1935 work, The Power of Nonviolence. King himself wrote the preface for the revised second edition published in 1960. Gregg compared training for non-violence resistance to military training. Both are unnatural acts that require a disciplining of the heart and mind: “If constructive pacifists are to be engaged in action that is a substitute for war, and that must be made just as effective as war, let us try to learn from military men. They know so well how to prepare for vigorous, effective, prolonged action.”[xx]
Another important part of the self-purification process was worship and prayer. The individual events, such as a march or a sit-in, of a nonviolent resistance campaign were bookended with worship. They would worship, sometimes for hours, before they would act. Only after worship, singing hymns and hearing the Word preached from the pulpit, would marchers pour out of the Church toward their intended target—be it a building, a park or a stretch of road. Sometimes, after worshipping for hours, the marches would last only a few minutes before aggressive law enforcement tactics would disperse the crowd. They would also worship following actions amid city-wide campaigns not only to lift their spirits but to communicate information. These were often packed, joy-filled, even raucous events. Historian Taylor Branch described one of these mass meetings during the height of the Birmingham Campaign.
The Monday mass meeting overflowed from St. James Baptist into Thurgood Church, from there to St. Luke’s, and finally to St. Paul’s. Five to ten thousand people packed the four churches simultaneously, buoyed by songs and testimonials from jail. Birmingham preachers circulated among them with impromptu performances, as did soloists and movement treasurer William Shortridge, whose assistants staggered under the weight of a $40,000 offering.[xxi]
The black Church saw herself in American culture much like the pre-Constantinian Church amid pagan culture. The black Church drew upon Scripture to define themselves against the pro-segregation, white-dominant culture. They considered themselves a faithful witness, holding to the true faith, attempting by their active and faithful witness to move the nation, and particularly white Christians away from the apostasy of segregation. The Church existed to change the world. Again, King challenged ‘moderate’ pastors from his jail cell in Birmingham:
There was a time when the Church was very powerful. It was during that period when the early Christians rejoiced when they were deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society. Wherever the early Christians a town the power structure got disturbed…But they went on with the conviction that they were a “colony of heaven,” and had to obey God rather than. They were small in number but big in commitment.[xxii]
The movement intentionally sought to change America by doing the work of the Church. Fannie Lou Hamer often remarked, “The Church has only played at being the Church and has failed to be the Church.” The leaders of the movement were convicted that by living as disciples of Jesus Christ, freed from the apostasy of racism and segregation, that they could transform America, bending the nation to a greater conformity with the Kingdom of God. They saw nothing wrong with imposing their particular religious vision upon the country and in fact saw deep continuity between America’s highest ideals and the Biblical vision of freedom and the Imago Dei. Fred Shuttlesworth put it like this: “We have faith in America and still believe that Birmingham and Alabama will rise to the height of glory in race relations. And we shall be true to our ideals as a Christian nation.”[xxiii] Their strategy was to be true to the very ideals they wished America to practice as a whole. They were bold to believe that their Holy Spirit-infused witness would change America to look more like Jesus. Chief among their goals was one very specific end, something much greater than just ending segregation.
Sixth, the goal of the movement was integration of all people.
King was steeped in a school of thought he learned in his graduate work at Boston University called personalism. Personalism emphasizes the image of God in every human being, uplifting that Divine quality and emphasizing the deep need to treat all human beings with dignity and respect and as an end in themselves rather than a means to an end. King drew upon the thought of the Jewish thinker Martin Buber who emphasized the need for the “I-thou” relationship in human interactions, rather than the “I-it” relationship—the latter of which scars the soul and degrades the personality. In King’s first published book, the story of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, entitled Stride Toward Freedom, he wrote:
…man is an end because he is a child of God. Man is not made for the state;
the state is made for man. To deprive man of freedom is to relegate him to the
status of a thing, rather than elevate him to the status of a person. Man must
never be treated as a means to the end of the state, but always as end within himself.[xxiv][xxv]
Because all of humanity is made in the image of God and is an end in themselves, integration is necessity. To settle for anything less—either in the form of Jim Crow or black separatism was incompatible with the Biblical vision of imago Dei. For the movement, integration meant much more and went much deeper than simply desegregation. Desegregation could be achieved by changing the law, but integration relied upon a change in the human heart. Human beings had to choose to integrate and tear down the invisible walls that separate white from black, rich from poor, educated from non-educated, white collar from blue collar. King had a very specific phrase for this. He called it “The Beloved Community,” building upon language from Isaiah. One of King’s clearest descriptions of the Beloved Community was grounded in his experience sitting in the Montgomery Airport following the 1965 march from Selma to the steps of the Alabama Capital. King looked around the airport and saw a sight that inspired him as a vision of what might someday be but was not yet.
After the March to Montgomery, there was a delay at the airport and several thousand demonstrators waited more than five hours, crowding together on the seats, the floors and the stairways of the terminal building. As I stood with them and saw white and Negro, nuns and priests, ministers and rabbis, labor organizers, lawyers, doctors, housemaids and shopworkers brimming with vitality and enjoying a rare comradeship, I knew I was seeing a microcosm of the mankind of the future in this moment of luminous and genuine brotherhood.
These were the best of America, not all of America.[xxvi]
Fannie Lou Hamer had a similar vision of America. Speaking in 1971 at the University of Wisconsin in Madison before a predominantly white audience, she claimed that obedience to God would create a movement of young people that would integrate America and that she would not accept a 100 percent black society, even on her native soil.
Before I close, I would just like to say that I believe in God and He said He would raise up a nation that obey Him. So the young people that’s out here today, that’s fighting for justice for all human beings, I believe are the chosen people that’s going to lead this country out if it’s not too late….I figure if the state of Mississippi would become 100 percent black, I would be on my way out. But to make it a state where all human beings will have a chance.[xxvii]
His vision of the Beloved Community brought King into sharp conflict with the Black Power movement. This disagreement pitted King and the other leadership of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference against younger leaders of the movement who came up through the SCLC-inspired Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), like Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown. This was ironic because the statement of purpose for the SNCC opened with these words:
Nonviolence as it grows from Judaic-Christian traditions seeks a social order of justice permeated by love. Integration of human endeavor represents the crucial first step towards such a society.
However as new leaders emerged, ideas like Black Power, Pan-Africanism, black self-sufficiency and skepticism of even white allies gained acceptance and the movement splintered, diminishing its effectiveness.
King understood the frustration among black Americans that led some to embrace separatist ideas, but he rejected the concept outright based not only on spiritual grounds but also simple reality. King believed that separatism was simply impractical, without historical precedent and unable to create economic justice. In his 1964 work Why We Can’t Wait, King severely criticized at length the Black Power movement:
The Black Power movement of today like the Garvey “Back to Africa” movement of the 1920’s, represents a dashing hope, a conviction of the inability of the Negro to win and a belief in the infinitude of the ghetto…Today’s despair is a poor chisel to carve out tomorrow’s justice…Black Power is an implicit and often explicit belief in black separatism…Yet behind Black Power’s legitimate and necessary concern for group unity and black identity lies the belief there can be a separate black road to power and fulfillment. Few ideas are more unrealistic. There is no salvation for the Negro through isolation.[xxviii]
A little further in this brief book, King made the economic argument about the fallacy of black separatism:
However much we pool our resources and “buy black,” this cannot create the multiplicity of new jobs and provide the number of low cost houses that will lift the Negro out of the economic depression caused by centuries of deprivation. Neither can our resources supply quality integrated education. All of this requires billions of dollars which only an alliance of liberal- labor-civil rights forces can stimulate…In a multiracial society no group can make it alone.[xxix]
King and the mainstream leadership of the Movement did not budge from their insistence that integration was both a moral and practical necessity. Still, toward the end of his life, King was famously disappointed with the white Church who had not turned out to support the movement in the numbers King hoped and he still faced muted opposition from white Christian leaders. However, King and others, were not crushed by this heartache. King died, as many will recall, not holed up escaping from a bitter world but advocating for Memphis Sanitation Workers. He also spent the last few years of his life organizing the explicitly multi-racial “Poor People’s Campaign” as well as protesting the Vietnam War on the grounds that it hurt the poor in both the United States and Vietnam. The fact that King refused to become bitter and hopeless is, at least in part, a testimony not only to their hope but their realistic expectations for humanity.
Seventh, transcendent hope is tempered with a critical realism of humanity’s potential due to our sin. King was deeply influenced by Reinhold Niebuhr, whose work he first encountered during his senior year of seminary. For all of King’s ministry and leadership of the Civil Rights Movement, Niebuhr would be a voice in his head, a counterpoint alongside his fundamentalist upbringing, to the liberal theological voices in which he was otherwise immersed. At one point, King wrote that he nearly ‘fell into the trap’ of accepting uncritically nearly everything Niebuhr wrote. To be sure, King never shared a Reformed view of human sinfulness. He called the theology of the Reformation ‘lopsided’ and mistakenly bemoaned that the Calvinist believes ‘that if a baby dies without baptism, it burns forever in hell.’[xxx] King’s theology of human sinfulness walked the line between what he saw as the overly optimistic Protestant Liberal view of human nature and the overly pessimistic view of the Reformation. King believed neither in being so focused on humanity’s goodness as to overlook our capacity for evil or so focused upon our wickedness that we overlook our capacity for good. Niebuhr was a significant voice in this typically “Kingian” theological synthesis.
Reinhold Niebuhr was a Christian realist who claimed that our expectations for humanity should be tempered by original sin causing individuals to be self-centered. This egoism impacts what human beings are able to accomplish collectively and makes humanity a problem to ourselves. Niebuhr believed that liberalism and other philosophies confident about human progress did not adequately account for this reality. They wildly discounted how self-interest taints the ability of human beings to behave rationally and for the good of others and this inability only grew as they obtained greater power and privilege. Niebuhr wrote, “They always remain bound to the forces they intend to discipline. The will-to-power uses reasons as kings use courtiers and chaplains add grace to their enterprise. Even the most rational men are not so rational when their own interests are at stake.”[xxxi]
Niebuhr’s social analysis told King that nonviolent resistance was not merely an idealistic enterprise that would appeal to the better angels of our nature. Instead, nonviolent resistance particularly when paired with economic withdrawal, was a powerful coercive measure that might cause even the most recalcitrant racist to repent in order to preserve their self-interest.
Due in no small part to Niebuhr’s interest, King did not place his hope in human goodness and progress alone. He rejected that liberal narrative, choosing instead to wrestle with humanity’s brokenness.
The contribution of liberalism to the philological-historical criticism of biblical literature has been immeasurable value and should be defended with religious and scientific passion.
But I began to question the liberal doctrine of man. The more I observed the tragedies of history and man’s shameful inclination to choose the low road, the more I came to see the depths and strength of my sin. My reading of the works of Reinhold Niebuhr made we aware of the complexity of human motives and the reality of sin on every level of man’s existence. Moreover, I came to realize the complexity of man’s social involvement and the glaring reality of collective evil. I realized that liberalism has been all too sentimental concerning human nature and that it leaned toward a false idealism.[xxxii]
For this reason, the dichotomy of humanity, the black Church and the leadership of the Civil Rights Movement did not shy from using a variety of tactics in their quest to bend America to the shape of the Kingdom of God. Nonviolent resistance, at its heart, is not only a moral tactic but a coercive one as well. This often drew them into tough decisions born both of necessity and the possibility of dramatizing the injustice of segregation, like the choice to allow schoolchildren to march in Birmingham knowing they would be arrested and likely set upon by police dogs and fire hoses. They combined intentional discipleship, passionate worship and prayer with intense negotiation with local governments and passionate appeals, often face to face, with Federal officials—including the Attorney General and even the President. They didn’t reject the founding documents of the nation, but instead appealed to them. They asked America to simply “live up to what it had put on paper” seeing within those soaring statements the promise of freedom for all. Despite allegations that they were communist, they remained devoted to freedom and liberty for every woman, man and child. Although King was no free-market, supply-side capitalist, and he championed such tactics as a guaranteed living wage, he was deeply suspicious of communism and Marxism.
The communist may object, saying that in a Marxian theory the state is an “interim reality” that will “wither away” when the classless society emerges. True—in theory; but it is also true that, while the state lasts, it is an end in itself. Man is a means to that end. He has no inalienable rights. His only rights are derived from and conferred by, the state. Under such a system the fountain of freedom runs dry. Restricted are man’s liberties of press and assembly, his freedom to vote and his freedom to listen and to read.[xxxiii]
It is worth pointing out that the black Church, particularly in the South, who had languished under the thumb of legally mandated government oppression, was at first reticent to embrace a solution by that same government as the solution to their dilemma. They demanded that the government set them free from these binding structures but their appeal for equity (as opposed to equality) was not primarily an appeal to government. They made their greatest early appeal to the American people, particularly the Church, to live differently not by force of law but by their freedom to choose to love their neighbor as themselves. As most of the white Church proved at best indifferent to their struggle, the appeals to Caesar grew. And Caesar, sensing an advantage to being seen as a champion to a newly enfranchised people, positioned himself to take advantage. President Lyndon Johnson delivering the 1965 commencement address at historically black Howard University sounded very much like the Movement as he championed the 1965 Voting Rights Bill and alluded to much, much more.
The voting rights bill will be the latest, and among the most important, in a long series of victories. But this victory–as Winston Churchill said of another triumph for freedom–“is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning. That beginning is freedom; and the barriers to that freedom are tumbling down. Freedom is the right to share, share fully and equally, in American society–to vote, to hold a job, to enter a public place, to go to school. It is the right to be treated in every part of our national life as a person equal in dignity and promise to all others. But freedom is not enough. You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: Now you are free to go where you want, and do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please. You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, “you are free to compete with all the others,” and still justly believe that you have been completely fair. Thus it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates. This is the next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but opportunity. We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result. (emphasis mine)
Johnson’s sweeping call for change came less than two months after the march from Selma to Montgomery, generally seen by historians as the last major, successful campaign of the movement. As Congress debated the bill, the images of Selma and the bloodshed at her Edmund Pettis Bridge were still fresh on the minds of Congress. If the 1963 March on Washington represented the highwater mark of the Movement, Selma marked the ebbing of the tide. After Selma, as the fight largely passed from the sanctuaries and pulpits of black Churches to the halls of government, the Movement’s unity fractured, its effectiveness waned and a decade or more of dizzying progress stalled to a point of inertia. More than fifty years later, with a few notable exceptions, the Church remains largely segregated and we are roiled, once again, as a nation by racism as we confront our willingness to live up to our creed that “All men are created equal.”
Conclusions for the Church Today
In Bearing the Cross, historian David Garrow in his epilogue confronts the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement and Martin Luther King Jr.
As Diane Nash says, “If people think that it was Martin Luther King Jr.’s movement, then today they—the young people—are more likely to say, gosh, I wish we had a Martin Luther King here today to lead us.’ …If people knew how that movement started, then the question they would ask themselves is, ‘What can I do?’[xxxiv]
David Chappell in Stone of Hope sounds a similar note argues that we must see the participants in the movement as unique rather than ordinary people not so we can be intimidated by their greatness but to see them how they were and hope to build on their successes.[xxxv]
How do we do that? My observation as someone born after the 60’s is that there is a hole in the heart of those who seek change for that decade. They either hearken back to the days of “takin’ to the streets,” long for a national social consciousness roused from a long slumber or desperately try to re-create the energy of the decade through surface-deep imitation of marching, speech-making and sloganeering. What if what moved the nation toward racial healing and integration was simply the Holy Spirit working through the lives of people sold out to Jesus? This movement of the Holy Spirit cannot be the work of anyone else but the Church of Jesus Christ. Extrapolating exact steps the Evangelical Church should live out today to follow their example deserves an essay of its own. However, a greater awareness of how the black Church changed the hearts of hundreds of millions provides us with some terra firma on which to stand amid the wind and waves of competing ideas and philosophies.
This is very important because any white Christian faces a double-bind when it comes to racism that can compromise our ability to play a role. Racism exists and throughout our nation’s history, black Americans (and others) have labored under the burden of an uneven playing field. We need to acknowledge this and confess that we have not yet rid ourselves of significant vestiges of that sinful condition. We also need to repent of our complacency with an arrangement that has served our interests. However, to acknowledge that reality often results in white people being morally compromised as participants in the discussion about racism let alone efforts to address it—even if it is only our own realization of our racial brokenness that compromises us. White Christians of goodwill, who want to do something, may find themselves frustrated at the extreme either/or of spouting slogans and principles they do not believe or choosing to sit passively in silence. This dramatic choice will result in ends that are out of alignment with the Kingdom of God. We must remember Jesus’ promise that the poor in spirit as well as those who mourn will be blessed and those who thirst for righteousness will be satisfied.
Our black brothers and sisters in Christ from this era have shown us a third way—a way that is at once Scriptural, effective and radical. There are no shortcuts to following in their footsteps. Generations of discipleship, prayer and fidelity to Scripture went into the work that gushed out of them like living water. The nation changed, in no small part, because one part of the Church of Jesus Christ stood up for justice and righteousness, at great personal cost. They have left us a blueprint of principles upon which to build and a roadmap of tactics to employ. Most importantly, they have left behind a legacy of faith in Jesus Christ, a great cloud of witnesses, and hope for a society and a culture not yet seen in either America or her church. Our nation and the Church will be decisively changed by how we handle this apocalyptic moment. The Church must play an important role or we will all choke on what King called “the stale bread of hate and the spoiled meat of racism” fed to us by the powerful.[xxxvi] This is true in either maintaining the unsatisfactory status quo or succumbing to a government-imposed uber-solution in the name of elusive categories like fairness and equality.
The world desperately needs, as Fanie Lou Hamer suggested, “the Church to be the Church.” As Christian people in 2021, we may be more than a half-century late, but the timelessness of God’s Word assures that we will not be ineffective in realizing His revelation of what is to be.
Rev. Dr. Eric Laverentz
January 1, 2021
[i] Quotation found in David Chappell, Stone of Hope (University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, NC, 2004) p.97.
[ii] Richard Lischer, The Preacher King (Oxford University Press, New York, NY, 1995) p. 218.
[iii] Chappell, Stone of Hope, p.3.
[iv] The New Negro, Matthew H. Ahmann, ed. (Fides Publishers, Notre Dame, 1961) p.49.
[v] Martin Luther King Jr, “The Most Durable Power,” in A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. ed. James Washington (Harper San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, 1986) p. 10.
[vi] W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk, (Penguin, New York, NY, 1989) p.5.
[vii] James Lawson, “Letter from James M. Lawson,” November 3, 1958, found in The Letters and Papers of Martin Luther King, Volume IV Symbol of the Movement, 1957-58 (University of California Press, Berkeley, CA,
[viii] David Halberstam, The Children (Fawcett Books, New York, NY, 1998) p. 525.
[ix] “A Gift of Love,” King, Martin Luther Jr., found in A Testament of Hope, p.63.
[x] Found in The Preacher King, p.226.
[xi] Martin Luther King Jr. found in L. Harold DeWolf, “Martin Luther King Jr. as Theologian.” Journal of the Interdenominational Theological Center Volume 4 (Spring 1977)
[xii] Chappell, Stone of Hope, p.56.
[xiii] Ibid. p. 76.
[xiv] The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer, ed. Maegan Parker Brooks and Davis W. Houck (University Press of Mississippi, Jackson, MI, 2011) p.4
[xv] Martin Luther King Jr., “A Testament of Hope,” found in A Testament of Hope, p. 314.
[xvi] The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer, p.5.
[xvii] Martin Luther King Jr., “The Death of Evil Upon the Seashore,” found in The Papers of Martin Luther King Jr. Volume III, The Birth of a New Age (University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 1997) p.259-260.
[xviii] Ibid, p.261-262.
[xix] Martin Luther King Jr. “Letter from Birmingham City Jail,” found in A Testament of Hope p. 302.
[xx] Richard B. Gregg, The Power of Nonviolence (Greenleaf Books, Canton, ME, 1960) p. 149.
[xxi] Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63 (Simon & Schuster, New York, NY, 1998) p.772
[xxii] Ibid., p. 300.
[xxiii] Found in David Chappell, Stone of Hope, p. 100.
[xxiv] Martin Luther King Jr., Stride Toward Freedom (Ballantine Books, New York, NY, 1958) p.74.
[xxvi] Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community (Beacon Press, Boston, MA, 1967) p.9
[xxvii] The Speeches of Fanie Lou Hamer, p.130.
[xxviii] Martin Luther King Jr. Why We Can’t Wait found in A Testament of Hope, p. 584-585.
[xxix] Ibid, p.586.
[xxx] Martin Luther King Jr. Strength to Love (Fortress Press, Philadelphia, PA, 1981) p.130-131.
[xxxi] Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society (Westminster John Knox Press, Louisville, KY, 2001) p.44
[xxxii] Strength to Love, p.146-147.
[xxxiii] Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community, p.186-187.
[xxxiv] Garrow, p. 625.
[xxxv] Chappell, p. 190.
[xxxvi] Martin Luther King Jr. “Eulogy for the Martyred Children,” found in A Testament of Hope p. 221.