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Religion, Race, and Justice in a Changing America

Author: Gary Orfield

Publisher:

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13:

In many respects, religion was a bedrock of the civil rights movement during the 1950s and 1960s. Theology infused the spirit and rhetoric of the movement, churches served as the gathering place for its followers, and men of the cloth--foremost among them the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.--led the perilous journey that changed the nation.Today, the quest for improving the lives of racial minorities and pursuing justice is less a "movement" and more a collection of diffuse efforts to fend off a retrenchment from affirmative action and nondiscrimination laws, improve economic prospects for residents of low-income urban neighborhoods, and organize grass-roots political activities. In that context, the relationships between religion and civil rights have become less obvious and more complex.This volume of essays takes stock of the ways in which different religions, their leaders, and their followers now see their role in promoting civil rights. Developed in conjunction with the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, this book is the first in a series edited by Gary Orfield and Holly J. Lebowitz. Authors include Robert Franklin, president of the Interdenominational Theological Center; Robin Lovin, dean of the Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University; David Chappell, a Buddhist scholar at the University of Hawaii; Amina Waddud, an Islam expert at Virginia Commonwealth University; Reuven Kimmelman at Brandeis University; and Allan Figueroa Deck, professor at the Loyola Institute for Spirituality.

Episcopalians & Race

Author: Gardiner H. Shattuck

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Published: 2021-03-17

Total Pages: 469

ISBN-13: 0813160227

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“Superb. . . . The first comprehensive history of modern race relations within the Episcopal Church and, as such, a model of its kind.” —Journal of American History Meeting at an African American college in North Carolina in 1959, a group of black and white Episcopalians organized the Episcopal Society for Cultural and Racial Unity and pledged to oppose all distinctions based on race, ethnicity, and social class. They adopted a motto derived from Psalm 133: “Behold, how good and joyful a thing it is, for brethren to dwell together in unity!” Though the spiritual intentions of these individuals were positive, the reality of the association between blacks and whites in the church was much more complicated. Episcopalians and Race examines the often ambivalent relationship between black communities and the predominantly white leadership of the Episcopal Church since the Civil War. Paying special attention to the 1950s and 60s, Gardiner Shattuck analyzes the impact of the civil rights movement on church life, especially in southern states, offering an insider’s history of Episcopalians’ efforts, both successful and unsuccessful, to come to terms with race and racism since the Civil War. “A model of how good this kind of history can be when it is well researched and centers on the difficult choices faced and made by people who share institutional and faith commitments in settings that call those commitments into question.” —American Historical Review “Will be of considerable benefit to scholars, students, church members of all denominations, and anyone concerned with issues of racial justice in the American context.” —Choice “An essential addition to the history of race and the modern South.” —Journal of Southern History

Freedom's Coming

Author: Paul Harvey

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2012-09-01

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13: 1469606429

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In a sweeping analysis of religion in the post-Civil War and twentieth-century South, Freedom's Coming puts race and culture at the center, describing southern Protestant cultures as both priestly and prophetic: as southern formal theology sanctified dominant political and social hierarchies, evangelical belief and practice subtly undermined them. The seeds of subversion, Paul Harvey argues, were embedded in the passionate individualism, exuberant expressive forms, and profound faith of believers in the region. Harvey explains how black and white religious folk within and outside of mainstream religious groups formed a southern "evangelical counterculture" of Christian interracialism that challenged the theologically grounded racism pervasive among white southerners and ultimately helped to end Jim Crow in the South. Moving from the folk theology of segregation to the women who organized the Montgomery bus boycott, from the hymn-inspired freedom songs of the 1960s to the influence of black Pentecostal preachers on Elvis Presley, Harvey deploys cultural history in fresh and innovative ways and fills a decades-old need for a comprehensive history of Protestant religion and its relationship to the central question of race in the South for the postbellum and twentieth-century period.

Race, Religion, and Politics

Author: Stephanie Y. Mitchem

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2018-09-06

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 1538107961

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This book examines race, religion, and politics in the United States, illuminating their intersections and what they reveal about power and privilege. Drawing on both historic and recent examples, Stephanie Mitchem introduces readers to the ways race has been constructed in the United States, discusses how race and religion influence each other, and assesses how they shape political influence. Mitchem concludes with a chapter looking toward possibilities for increased rights and justice for all.

Rhetoric, Religion and the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1965

Author: Davis W. Houck

Publisher: Baylor University Press

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 1013

ISBN-13: 1932792546

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V.2: Building upon their critically acclaimed first volume, Davis W. Houck and David E. Dixon's new Rhetoric, Religion, and the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1965 is a recovery project of enormous proportions. Houck and Dixon have again combed church archives, government documents, university libraries, and private collections in pursuit of the civil rights movement's long-buried eloquence. Their new work presents fifty new speeches and sermons delivered by both famed leaders and little-known civil rights activists on national stages and in quiet shacks. The speeches carry novel insights into the ways in which individuals and communities utilized religious rhetoric to upset the racial status quo in divided America during the civil rights era. Houck and Dixon's work illustrates again how a movement so prominent in historical scholarship still has much to teach us. (Publisher).

A Stone of Hope

Author: David L. Chappell

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2009-12-07

Total Pages: 359

ISBN-13: 0807895571

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The civil rights movement was arguably the most successful social movement in American history. In a provocative new assessment of its success, David Chappell argues that the story of civil rights is not a story of the ultimate triumph of liberal ideas after decades of gradual progress. Rather, it is a story of the power of religious tradition. Chappell reconsiders the intellectual roots of civil rights reform, showing how northern liberals' faith in the power of human reason to overcome prejudice was at odds with the movement's goal of immediate change. Even when liberals sincerely wanted change, they recognized that they could not necessarily inspire others to unite and fight for it. But the prophetic tradition of the Old Testament--sometimes translated into secular language--drove African American activists to unprecedented solidarity and self-sacrifice. Martin Luther King Jr., Fannie Lou Hamer, James Lawson, Modjeska Simkins, and other black leaders believed, as the Hebrew prophets believed, that they had to stand apart from society and instigate dramatic changes to force an unwilling world to abandon its sinful ways. Their impassioned campaign to stamp out "the sin of segregation" brought the vitality of a religious revival to their cause. Meanwhile, segregationists found little support within their white southern religious denominations. Although segregationists outvoted and outgunned black integrationists, the segregationists lost, Chappell concludes, largely because they did not have a religious commitment to their cause.

Saints in the Struggle

Author: Jonathan Chism

Publisher: Religion and Race

Published: 2019-01-14

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 9781498553087

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This book uncovers and examines the contributions made by black Pentecostals in the Church of God in Christ (COGIC) to civil rights struggles in Memphis during the 1950s and 1960s. This book provides detailed description of prominent Memphis COGIC activists' engagements with local civil rights organizations.

Mississippi Praying

Author: Carolyn Renée Dupont

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2013-08-23

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 0814708412

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Mississippi Praying examines the faith communities at ground-zero of the racial revolution that rocked America. This religious history of white Mississippians in the civil rights era shows how Mississippians’ intense religious commitments played critical, rather than incidental, roles in their response to the movement for black equality. During the civil rights movement and since, it has perplexed many Americans that unabashedly Christian Mississippi could also unapologetically oppress its black population. Yet, as Carolyn Renée Dupont richly details, white southerners’ evangelical religion gave them no conceptual tools for understanding segregation as a moral evil, and many believed that God had ordained the racial hierarchy. Challenging previous scholarship that depicts southern religious support for segregation as weak, Dupont shows how people of faith in Mississippi rejected the religious argument for black equality and actively supported the effort to thwart the civil rights movement. At the same time, faith motivated a small number of white Mississippians to challenge the methods and tactics of do-or-die segregationists. Racial turmoil profoundly destabilized Mississippi’s religious communities and turned them into battlegrounds over the issue of black equality. Though Mississippi’s evangelicals lost the battle to preserve segregation, they won important struggles to preserve the theology that had sustained the racial hierarchy. Ultimately, this history sheds light on the eventual rise of the religious right by elaborating the connections between the pre- and post-civil rights South. Carolyn Renée Dupont is Assistant Professor of History at Eastern Kentucky University in Richmond, KY.

Race and Restoration

Author: Barclay Key

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2020-05-06

Total Pages: 263

ISBN-13: 0807173088

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From the late nineteenth century to the dawn of the civil rights era, the Churches of Christ operated outside of conventional racial customs. Many of their congregations, even deep in the South, counted whites and blacks among their numbers. As the civil rights movement began to challenge pervasive social views about race, Church of Christ leaders and congregants found themselves in the midst of turmoil. In Race and Restoration: Churches of Christ and the Black Freedom Struggle, Barclay Key focuses on how these churches managed race relations during the Jim Crow era and how they adapted to the dramatic changes of the 1960s. Although most religious organizations grappled with changing attitudes toward race, the Churches of Christ had singular struggles. Fundamentally “restorationist,” these exclusionary churches perceived themselves as the only authentic expression of Christianity, compelling them to embrace peoples of different races, even as they succumbed to prevailing racial attitudes. The Churches of Christ thus offer a unique perspective for observing how Christian fellowship and human equality intersected during the civil rights era. Key reveals how racial attitudes and practices within individual congregations elude the simple categorizations often employed by historians. Public forums, designed by churches to bridge racial divides, offered insight into the minds of members while revealing the limited progress made by individual churches. Although the Churches of Christ did have a more racially diverse composition than many other denominations in the Jim Crow era, Key shows that their members were subject to many of the same aversions, prejudices, and fears of other churches of the time. Ironically, the tentative biracial relationships that had formed within and between congregations prior to World War II began to dissolve as leading voices of the civil rights movement prioritized desegregation.