The Kindling of the Civil Rights Movement

One stride toward freedom after another had been taken by Blacks since the mysterious cargo arrived on the Dutch man-of-war in 1619. Like thunder follows lightning, each heroic step toward Black uplift was met with a racist backlash intended to keep Blacks in their place. In the mid-1950s, those strides and their reactions reached a fever pitch that sparked a movement unlike any the nation had ever seen. The shock waves that caused the civil rights movement were the aftermath of the Brown v. Board decision, the infamous murder of Emmitt Till, the arrest of Rosa Parks, and the ensuing Montgomery bus boycott. The nation was at a breaking point. These nationally televised events in close succession served as a catalyst for the Black church’s unmistakable surge back into the center of the public drama of race relations.

The most iconic court case the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund won was the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education suit, which deemed racially segregated schools unconstitutional.[1] The aftermath of the Brown decision revealed the true character of race relations in America. The juxtaposition between the legal victories celebrated by the NAACP and the response of average White Americans was glaring. In the South, public-opinion polls demonstrated that eighty percent of White Southerners opposed school desegregation. Consequently, actualizing school desegregation was a long and difficult process that caused grassroots African Americans to grow weary of the NAACP’s method of jurisprudence, especially since the organization became less of a protest agency and focused almost exclusively on litigation and lobbying after World War II.[2]

The ongoing difficulty of implementing the Brown ruling was exacerbated by the heinous murder of Emmett Till (1941–1955), a fourteen-year-old African American boy who lived in Chicago. While visiting relatives in Money, Mississippi, he was murdered for allegedly flirting with a White cashier at a grocery store. Till’s killers beat him in a barn, gouged out his eyes, shot him in the head, and threw him into the Tallahatchie River with a cotton gin fan tied to his neck. Emmett’s mother elected to have an open-casket funeral to show the world what hate looked like. The nation was gripped by this story, and the two men accused were acquitted after being tried before an all-White jury.

With the brokenness of the justice system on full display after the September 23, 1955, verdict of the Till trial, the nation soon witnessed the December 1, 1955, arrest of Rosa Parks (1913–2005). After a long day of work in Montgomery, Alabama, Parks was instructed by a bus driver to give up her seat for a White passenger. She refused and was detained by police.

The news of Parks’s arrest spread around the city with the help of many, but especially JoAnn Robinson (1912–1992). She led the Women’s Political Council and distributed leaflets to Blacks in Montgomery urging them to attend a mass meeting. The meeting’s location was a point of serious deliberation because the host site needed to transcend any factions to encourage broad participation. Against the host minister’s desires, the meeting was held at his church because he had not been in town long enough to make either many friends or many enemies. The church was Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, and the minister was Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., a newly appointed pastor.

Several ministers sought to rally the crowd to no avail, so Reverend King mounted the pulpit and delivered an extemporaneous plea to the people of Montgomery that mobilized the Montgomery Improvement Association on December 5, 1955. Under the leadership of King, Black ministers and community leaders coordinated a bus boycott that challenged segregation laws in the state and brought national attention to racism in the South. The 381-day boycott (December 1, 1955, to December 20, 1956) sidestepped the NAACP’s pattern of using the courtroom alone to dismantle White supremacy. The ideological shift toward nonviolent direct action commanded immediate attention, which directly influenced the Supreme Court’s Browder v. Gayle decision in 1956, the case that successfully ended segregation in Montgomery’s city bus system.

King recognized the need to capitalize on the momentum generated by the success of the boycott in Montgomery, so on January 10‑11, 1957, he gathered sixty Black civil rights–minded clergy from ten states to discuss the coordination of efforts against racism throughout the South.[3] From this meeting the Southern Conference on Transportation and Nonviolent Integration was born. At the first meeting of the conference, in Montgomery in August 1957, the leaders adopted a new name, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.[4]

With activists no longer waiting for the NAACP to plead their case in court, the development of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference ushered in a new chapter in the fight for civil rights that activated grassroots Blacks weary of their daily struggle against racism. Now the Southern Black church once again became the foremost leader in the fight against White oppression—transferring the mantel from Northern Black elites who focused on legal action in courtrooms. In short, the struggle for Black equality was taken from the courthouse to the church house and spilled out into the streets.

The ministerial leadership of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference asserted theologically derived convictions for a just society and catalyzed the masses to nonviolent demonstrations to exact strategic pressure on unjust laws throughout the South. These protests were often organized by conference leadership in conjunction with local clergy. Mass demonstrations were preceded by failed attempts to unravel a particular unjust law (or laws) in private meetings with local government leaders. The goal of protests was to draw attention to unjust legislation through media and to cause lawmakers to pursue a just course of action.[5]

During their many days of protest, demonstrators met in churches, sang hymns (often spirituals), and prayed in preparation to meet the violence of racist mobs with nonviolence. This church-led movement climaxed on August 28, 1963—the eighth anniversary of Emmett Till’s murder—with an estimated 200,000–300,000 people participating in the March on Washington, punctuated by Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech.

The Foot Soldiers

There would have been no civil rights movement without the foot soldiers—the faceless masses who organized rallies, marched, suffered violence, and were arrested. Many of these laypeople were following the lead of their pastors into nonviolent direct action Anchored by the doctrines of historic African American Christianity. Black Christians’ “experience of miracles and dramatic conversions made an essential contribution in transforming” the faith into the “imperative of civil rights reform.” In essence, once these Christians “had been galvanized into social action, they exerted the same force in the public square as they had experienced” in their prayer closets as they dramatized the continuation of Deliverance chronicled in the biblical witness.[6]

The theological formulation of the foot soldiers during the civil rights movement was far less complex than that of their leaders, but it still drove them to engage racial prejudice in society. Fannie Lou Hamer (1917–1977) stated, “If Christ were here today, he would be branded a radical, a militant, and would probably be branded as ‘red.’” Christ, she said, was a “revolutionary person, out there where it was happening. That’s what God is all about, and that’s where I get my strength.”[7] Foot soldiers focused on a God who helped them traverse the chasm from what was to what should be.

Songs were a means of reinforcing the Anchors of the Christian faith in the face of clubs, water hoses, and dog attacks. In the 1950s, grassroots protesters began transforming spirituals and gospels into freedom songs that became the soundtrack for the movement. The renowned Mahalia Jackson (1911–1972) declared, “I sing God’s music because it makes me feel free. It gives me hope.” The communal roots of African ceremonial life were channeled during the civil rights movement as spirituals and gospel music were embedded into the movement’s daily tasks. Music focused the foot soldiers on the mission and allowed them to overcome the fear of beatings and abuse, giving them boldness to respond to their abusers in love, consistent with a nonviolent ethic.[8]

The Student Movement

The Black student movement began quietly in 1942 with the Congress of Racial Equality. This organization was founded as the Committee on Racial Equality by a group of interracial students in Chicago who were committed to nonviolence.[9] Student efforts against racial oppression did not receive national attention until four freshmen from a Black college nonviolently demanded service at a Woolworth lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, in February 1960. In April 1960 approximately two hundred students met at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, to form a new organization called the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Civil rights veteran Ella Baker (1903–1986), having served with both the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the NAACP as a field secretary in the 1940s, organized the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to capture the spirit of the student movement and mold it into a formal body.

Ideologically, students affirmed the nonviolent methods popularized by Martin Luther King Jr. at its founding conference.[10] The first stanza of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s original purpose statement is a faithful summary of their commitments:

We affirm the philosophical or religious ideal of nonviolence as the foundation of our purpose, the presupposition of our faith, and the manner of our action. Nonviolence as it grows from the Judaic-Christian tradition seeks a social order of justice permeated by love. Integration of human endeavor represents the crucial first step towards such a society.[11]

In concert with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which sponsored the event, the motifs of love and nonviolence, as emphasized in the Christian tradition, were central at the establishment of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

Thirty-one-year-old King was the primary attraction for the attendees of the inaugural conference. While in Raleigh, King gave specific recommendations to the budding student movement to express their nonviolent convictions. First, King called the students to develop some type of continuing organization to unify the sit-in movement. Second, he encouraged the assembly to initiate a nationwide selective-buying campaign. Third, the students needed to galvanize an army of volunteers willing to go to jail rather than pay bail or fines. Fourth, the youth had to take the freedom struggle into every community of the South. Last and most vitally, King called the students to delve deeper into the philosophy of nonviolence as the means of pursuing reconciliation and cultivating the beloved community.[12]

The ideological banner over the meeting was nonviolence, but the spirit of the gathering stood in contrast to meetings held by their elders who were also committed to nonviolent direct action. To capture the attention of his young listeners, King concluded his address for the youth assembly with a distinct edge contextualized for his audience. King exclaimed, “The tactics of nonviolence without the spirit of nonviolence may indeed become a new kind of violence.”[13]

Over time, some Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee proponents moved away from nonviolent tactics because they were pragmatic, not convictional on a doctrinal level. The complicated intersection of the Christian faith and the student movements notwithstanding, not all young people jettisoned an explicitly Christian ideology during this period. A significant number of youth and college students, as well as young professionals, were theologically bound to a nonviolent approach to Black uplift. Many of these young people began working directly with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference as Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee became more radical.

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr

The tragically short life of Martin Luther King has drawn a tsunami of attention from scholars assessing his accomplishments as a political figure, the leader of a social movement, and a figurehead for justice and racial equality. The methods associated with those explorations, however, do not always account for what King identified as the wellspring of his efforts: his Christian heritage. King said, “In the quiet recesses of my heart, I’m 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.”[14] King’s self-consciously Christian engagement with social power structures was theologically Anchored in prophetic evangelical biblicism interfaced with orthodox, neo-orthodox, and liberal scholars during his formal education.[15]

King was the product of a successive line of preachers and was nurtured in the Black Baptist tradition from his infancy. The Christian activism of his father and grandfather’s ministerial leadership made an enduring impact on the young King. Despite his appreciation for the thoughtful engagement of his immediate Black Baptist role models, in his early years King was put off by their emotionalism and what he saw as their overly wooden reading of Scripture.

During King’s academic studies, he read liberal theologians and he was intrigued by their intellectual sophistication. Many of King’s professors were schooled in predominantly White educational institutions where familiarity with liberal theological scholarship was prerequisite for graduation. King’s time at Morehouse College, where he matriculated as a fifteen-year-old freshman, and his time at Crozer Theological Seminary were marked by a broad exploration of the theological universe beyond his Black Baptist upbringing. During these exploratory years is when King penned his theological papers questioning the bodily resurrection of Jesus and the veracity of Scripture.

Rather than pitting his evangelical Baptist heritage against his new liberal explorations, King admitted that he became “a victim of eclecticism” as he sought to “synthesize the best of liberal theology with the best of neo-orthodox theology.”[16] However, further exposure to theological liberalism alerted him to its shortcomings. King insisted, “Liberalism’s superficial optimism concerning human nature caused it to overlook the fact that reason is darkened by sin. . . . Liberalism failed to see that reason by itself is little more than an instrument to justify man’s defensive ways of thinking.”[17]

King’s seminary years reflected a young man whose appreciation for his religious roots was eventually energized by his academic study, though he did not leave the findings of his formal education behind. After becoming skilled at juxtaposing his father’s religious emotionalism and activist orientation with the complexity of White academic theologians, King concluded that orthodox Christianity was not necessarily anti-intellectual, and academic theology did not contain all the answers. As such, King’s theological maturation was marked by a growing capacity to synthesize the best elements of theological alternatives, which has made him a bewildering subject for subsequent theologians and religious scholars.

Among the influences in King’s theological maturation was theologian Walter Rauschenbusch. Regarding his intellectual development, King insisted,

I was immediately influenced by the social gospel. In the early ’50s I read Rauschenbusch’s Christianity and the Social Crisis, a book which left an indelible imprint on my thinking. Of course there are points at which I differed with Rauschenbusch. . . . He came perilously close to identifying the kingdom of God with a particular social and economic system—a temptation which the church should never give in to.[18]

While at Boston University, King encountered the writings of Reinhold Niebuhr and utilized them to critique the extreme optimism found in the social gospel.[19] King reflected, “It seems to me that one of the great services of neo-orthodoxy, notwithstanding its extremes, is its revolt against all forms of humanistic perfectionism. They call us back to a deeper faith in God. Is not this the need of the hour? Has modern man placed too much faith in himself and to little faith in God?”[20] For King, Niebuhr’s Christian realism allowed him to account for the complexity of life, which included acknowledging human evil while still allowing for human morality.[21]

King’s intellectual journey during his studies was marked by his enthusiastic exploration of Protestant liberalism guided by professors who were positively predisposed to the African American Christian tradition. His subsequent years were marked by a demonstrable move away from bona fide theological liberalism and toward his father’s faith. In particular, he rejected the optimism of liberal theology and the pessimism of Niebuhr’s neo-orthodoxy. King’s student papers “demonstrate that he adopted European American theological ideas that ultimately reinforced, rather than undermined, the African American social gospel tradition epitomized by his father and grandfather.”[22] This conclusion directed him toward the personalism of Boston University professor Edgar S. Brightman (1884–1953).

King said that philosophical personalism provided him the “metaphysical and philosophical grounding for the idea of a personal God, and it gave me a metaphysical basis for the dignity and worth of all human personality,” a longstanding feature of a Big God in African American Christianity.[23] Personalism helped King synthesize intellectual reflection and religious belief. In particular, it helped him solve the quandary of how an omnipotent God could oversee a world full of evil. “God’s power is finite, but his goodness is infinite,” that is, there could be no real goodness if God simply compelled morally good behavior. This “is the only adequate explanation for the existence of evil. . . . It establishes the Christian idea of sacrificial love on metaphysical grounds. . . . Theistic absolutism fails.”[24]

As King’s theological commitments crystallized, he sought methods of social action that were consistent with his Christian commitments. True to his propensity for synthesizing various thought forms, King borrowed concepts of grassroots mobilization from secular socialist A. Philip Randolph. In addition, King found an example of nonviolence that sparked social change embodied by Indian lawyer Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948). King insisted that “Christ furnished the spirit and motivation while Gandhi furnished the method.”[25] The centrality of Christian nonviolence embodied by Gandhi peppered King’s speeches and publications. The conviction that the unearned suffering of Blacks was redemptive appeared early in his theology and remained dominant throughout his life. When his home was bombed and Blacks were prompted to respond violently, King took an opportunity to send a clear message about nonviolence: “We must not return violence under any condition. I know this is difficult advice to follow, especially since we have been the victims of no less than ten bombings. But this is the way of Christ; it is the way of the cross. We must somehow believe that unearned suffering is redemptive.”[26] By the time King graduated from Boston University with his Doctor of Philosophy, he was decidedly a preacher, not a scholar. Forging an often-unwieldy synthesis from diverse (and at times divergent) theological streams, King “affirmed his abiding faith in a God who was both a comforting personal presence and a powerful spiritual force acting in history for righteousness.”[27]

As a pastor thrust onto the international scene, his faith in a personal God who called people to action was undeniable, even in his theological basis for diagnosing and mending social problems. King referred to segregation as immoral. The modernists of his day relegated this evil to the realm of unjust social policy (labeling it a sociological disorder), but King insisted that segregation was a sin and an evil that was contrary to God’s perfect plan for humankind. Racist systems treated people in ways not intended by the Creator.

“The problem of race and color prejudice,” King declared, “remains America’s greatest moral dilemma.” He added, “There must be a recognition of the sacredness of human personality.” He noted that “segregation stands diametrically opposed to (this) principle.” Instead, “the tragedy of segregation is that it treats men as means rather than ends, and thereby reduces them to things rather than persons.”[28]

As King was the preeminent leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, continued references to Christianity marked the methods that many relied on during the tumultuous days of the civil rights movement. For King, nonviolence was not a methodology that he pragmatically adopted; it was demanded by the Christian faith he embraced. Framing his fight for racial justice as a battle between light and darkness (Acts 26:18), not Black and White, King situated biblical agapē love as the cornerstone of his logic.[29] Concerning the love that motivates nonviolence, King said in an address to the Young Men’s (and Women’s) Christian Association at the University of California at Berkeley,

Agape is understanding, creative, redemptive good will for all men. Biblical theologians would say it is the love of God working in the minds of men. It is an overflowing love which seeks nothing in return. And when you come to love on this level you begin to love men not because they are likable, not because they do things that attract us, but because God loves them and here we love the person who does the evil deed while hating the deed that the person does.[30]

In the same address, King countered his critics by affirming, “Nonviolent resistance is not a method of cowardice. . . . The nonviolent resister is just as opposed to the evil that he is standing against as the violent register but he resists without violence. This method is nonaggressive physically but strongly aggressive spiritually.”[31]

While not all Black Christians followed King’s methods, numerous Blacks and their allies followed King in a self-consciously Christian approach to dismantling racism in society. King’s complex theological formulation was translated to audiences filled with foot soldiers by his charismatic and sermonic communication style, which drew heavily on the biblical imagery that marked the Black preaching tradition. The stories and images of Scripture were vivid illustrations of good overcoming evil and endless examples of God’s love for all people to leverage in the race toward justice.

EDITORIAL NOTE: This article is excerpted from Swing Low: A History of Black Christianity in the United States, vol. 1. Copyright (c) 2021 by The Marion E. Wade Center. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press. www.ivpress.com, All Rights Reserved.