For the younger American generations, the figures of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s often fit into one of two categories. Either they are so mythical as to be unreal (Martin Luther King, Jr., is a beatific saint, and George Wallace is a villain from a Saturday morning cartoon) or they are seen simply as the equivalent of today’s often clownish race activists (Al Sharpton on one side, David Duke on the other).
Rhetoric, Religion, and the Civil Rights Movement 1954-1965 (Baylor University Press, 2006) is a collection of primary sources from the civil rights movement, including sermons, speeches, and essays. The volume demonstrates the ways in which religion fueled and inspired the civil rights movement by inspiring real men and women, with human flaws and human heroism, to change the way things are.
Davis Houck, a communications professor at Florida State University, and David E. Dixon, a political scientist at St. Joseph’s College, assemble speeches from such famous figures as King, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Aaron Henry, along with others (black and white) whose pleas for racial impartiality might otherwise be lost to history.
Perhaps my favorite is a sermon by white Congregationalist minister, Robbins Ralph, who points out to a Florida church the hypocrisy of white supremacy held by those who claim to follow Christ. He concludes: “I beg your pardon if I have spoken in such a way as to disturb your thinking. I beg God’s pardon if I have not.” I don’t know anything about Pastor Ralph but after a statement such as that, given such a context, I want to say: “Now that’s a shepherd.”
This volume is worth reading and owning because it reminds us how Christian theology from the apostolic era to the present day has always meant to be communicated through the spoken word, in an appeal to the conscience. This book would make a good parallel read alongside a good history of the role of religion in the civil rights movement, such as David Chappell’s remarkable A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow.
