The Religious Roots of the Black Freedom Struggle
Dean J. Johnson
Assistant Professor of Peace, Justice and Conflict Studies
Goshen College
Spring 2007
The black freedom struggle in the United States, which reached its climax between the years 1954 and 1968, is one of the most studied examples of nonviolent social change. This bibliography guides users to a particular feature of the black freedom struggle—the religious roots that ground this nonviolence movement. What follows is a list of books, articles, and videos that help instructors depict the role of the black church and religion as a part of the black freedom movement for social change. The main resources listed in this bibliography are texts and videos that can be used alone as course texts. Supplemental resources are those that can be used with the main titles, but are insufficient as course texts by themselves.
A basic understanding of the black freedom struggle as a grassroots movement shows through in the rich resources of the Eyes on the Prize project (Carson et al.; Hampton), The American Civil Rights Movement (D’Angelo), and My Soul is Rested (Raines); but it is Eyes on the Prize that most clearly demonstrates the important role churches and religious beliefs played in the struggle for black freedom and civil rights, a role that is at the very core of the struggle for social change. Vincent Harding once wrote in a letter addressed to teachers in religious communities, “It may be that I come to you now seeking nothing more or less than affirmation for my own fierce conviction that the Afro-American freedom struggle at its best and deepest levels has always been a splendid struggle of the soul, both personal and collective” (Hope, 202). In his book There is a River, Harding tells how African peoples, from the time of their captivity to the organized meetings among slaves, worked toward freedom and a more just society. The Public Broadcasting System visually documents this history in the series This Far by Faith (Cross). From informal gatherings to formalized church meetings to organized grassroots organizations, communities of faith have been a safe haven for African Americans. Looking toward the just peace of the city, a place of milk and honey, African-American communities of faith have functioned to provide an understanding of social transformation through song, word, and spirit.
Communities of faith helped instill a belief in social transformation in the hearts and minds of the black community. According to Andrew Young, “The slogan of Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was ‘To Redeem the Soul of America.’ That’s what the movement was all about. It was to redeem the soul of America from the triple evils of racism, war and poverty. It was through giving your life and risking your life in service” (Veterans Young).
The church was the place people ran when being chased by the police and the Klan. It was also the place that served as the center of the movement and the community. Bernice Johnson Reagon remembers, “We were also blessed because we were always surrounded with one or two visual organized church organizations who would side with us whether it was a workshop or a mass meeting, there was always a church we could go to” (Veterans, Reagon, 12). Spike Lee also captures the importance of the church in social organizing through his film 4 Little Girls. The film tells the story of the four little girls killed in the bombing of 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, and chronicles the role of the same congregation as a center for organizing. The 16th Street Church was bombed in large part because of its role as the gathering place of the movement in Birmingham.
While communities of faith were places of gathering, organizing and support, the backbone of the movement was the women, young adults, and students. While groups like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference played large roles in policy-making and influencing the powers and principalities and media, it was the women and students who did much of the grassroots organizing. Rosetta Ross offers a solid thesis about the role of women in her book Witnessing and Testifying. Highlighting the life of women like Ella Baker, who was the mother of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and Fannie Lou Hamer, who was a share cropper turned grassroots activist and eventual leader of the Mississippi Democratic Freedom Party, Ross demonstrates how women of faith led the way in social organizing.
With the assistance of local women, the student movement did much of the heavy lifting. The students lived and worked in the most dangerous places, the places that needed the most social transformation. Through a series of interviews, Howard Zinn has captured the stories of some of these student leaders in his book SNCC. Three additional stories then highlight the role of religion among the student activists. They are Anne Moody’s autobiography, Coming of Age in Mississippi, and the Veterans of Hope Project videos of Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons and Ruby Sales. Simmons shares her journey and work with SNCC and how her experience helped shape her understanding of faith. Sales discusses the importance of growing up in a black church and the shooting of Jonathan Daniels.
Understanding the role and development of the student movement also helps to make sense of the rise of the black power movement and its relationship to “religious” or “spiritual” organizations. The black power movement came into being in Greenwood, Mississippi, through conversations among the students of SNCC. Kwame Ture and Charles Hamilton discuss how the movement came into being in their book Black Power. In a seminal article, Vincent Harding weaves together the student movement, the black power movement, and the church, arguing that black power is not merely related to a religious movement; it is, he believes, a form of religious belief (Religion, 8-12).
The influence of religion on the movement for social change becomes clearer in the narratives of the Eyes on the Prize reader and video collection (Carson et al., Hampton), The American Civil Rights Movement (D’Angelo), and My Soul is Rested (Raines). Again according to Harding, “It was in the midst of this great company of witnesses that I grasped again the meaning of Gandhi’s words: ‘My devotion to truth has drawn me into the field of politics.’ For that is precisely what happened to each member of the community of memories—their work for truth, for peace, for justice, for human solidarity had emerged naturally out of their deepest religious convictions. And these convictions, that work, had led them to identify with the expendable people, the exploited ones, the rejected stones. For each of them there came a time of discovery when, as King put it, ‘silence is betrayal,’ when they were faced with the impossibility of neutrality as a religious calling” (Veterans, 76).
Bibliography
Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin. Exec. Prod. Sam Pollard. California Newsreel,
2002.
Brother Outsider documents the life of Bayard Rustin, one of the best strategists and organizers in history and an openly gay man. Rustin worked with the Fellowship of Reconciliation and was one of King’s confidants during the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Rustin, influenced by Quaker A. J. Muste and other spiritual leaders of the FOR, helped King mold his understanding of nonviolence. King, under pressure from those in opposition to Rustin’s sexual identity, dismissed Rustin. But later King needed Rustin to organize the March on Washington and brought him back into the fold despite the strong objections of colleagues. Brother Outsider is a crucial resource for generating conversation about King’s nonviolence and the many people who shaped it, as well as the controversy, which continues today, around heterosexism and homophobia in many churches.
Carson, Clayborne, David J. Garrow, Gerald Gill, Vincent Harding, and Darlene Clark Hine, eds. The Eyes on the Prize Civil Rights Reader: Documents, Speeches, and Firsthand Accounts from the Black Freedom Struggle, 1954-1990. New York: Penguin Books, 1991.
The Eyes on the Prize Civil Rights Reader contains over 700 pages of excerpts and stories from the Civil Rights Struggle. The book is a part of the larger Eyes on the Prize project It is a book that can stand alone or that corresponds with the Eyes on the Prize video series (see below). This anthology of documents and speeches begins with the Emmett Till case and ends in the mid-1980s. The book contains several spiritually motivated speeches and personal narratives about the movement, including sermons. It should be used by those wanting a comprehensive history of the freedom struggle.
D’Angelo, Raymond. The American Civil Rights Movement: Readings & Interpretations. Guilford, Conn.: McGraw-Hill/Dushkin, 2001.
The American Civil Rights Movement: Readings & Interpretations is the best textbook collection of primary and secondary materials available for those teaching about the black freedom struggle. D’Angelo has structured this book for both the novice and the veteran of study about the civil rights movement. In this anthology, D’Angelo has captured many important moments and people. One of the central foci of the book is the significance of social agencies, including the church. The book also contains a helpful glossary and a list of on-line resources. The biggest single drawback of this text is that it has no index, leaving readers searching for specific terms and topics by leafing through the entire book.
Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years 1954-1965 in six parts, and Eyes on the Prize II (1965-1985) in eight parts. Dir., Exec. Prod. Harry Hampton. WGBH Boston, Blackside, Inc., and Corporation for Public Broadcasting, 1987, 1993.
The Eyes on the Prize video collection is the most important resource for anyone wanting to know more about the civil rights movement. The series contains over 14 hours of I interviews and newsreel footage from the mid-1950s through the mid-1980s. The importance of black religious institutions emerges often and clearly in the collected stories and includes highlights of mass meetings, sermons, and speeches as evidence that churches played a central role in the movement. The videos give the audience a glimpse into the culture and times. The video series is a useful tool for teachers and lecturers, providing dozens of short sections to illustrate many points. The internet also contains several useful tools and study guides that draw on the video series. The Eyes on the Prize Reader (Carson et al.) complements the video series.
4 Little Girls. Dir. Spike Lee. Home Box Office Studios, 1998.
Spike Lee documents the story of Addie May Collins, Denise McNair, Cynthia Wesley and Carole Robertson, the four little girls killed in the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. The church had been used as the meeting place for the Freedom Struggle in Birmingham and became a target for white supremacists. 4 Little Girls tells the story of the racially motivated terrorism that rocked the Alabama town, whose nickname became “Bombingham.” Central to the documentary is the role that children played in the Birmingham community when there were very few adults left to do the protesting. 4 Little Girls shows the centrality of the church in the movement. This video can stand alone or be used to illustrate a variety of texts.
Harding, Vincent. Hope and History: Why We Must Share the Story of the Movement.
Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1990.
Vincent Harding has long been the champion of democratic and religious social change. Hope and History explains the significance of one movement for social change—the black freedom struggle—for the United States and the world. Harding believes that by sharing personal stories, people can learn one another’s history and find common ground across lines of race, class, culture, and religion. The movement contains several life lessons about democratic social change. For Harding, the movement “is a great continuing human classic whose liberating lessons are available to all seekers and discoverers, but especially to those who understand that the battle is still in their own hands and hearts” (10). Hope and History is a book not only for those teaching about the civil rights struggle, it is also a text for those studying to be educators.
_____. “The Religion of Black Power.” The Religious Situation: 1968. Ed. Donald R. Cutler. Boston: Beacon Press, 1968. 3-38.
“The Religion of Black Power” is a classic ground-breaking article in which Vincent Harding explains the black power movement in terms of eschatology, faith and hope. Central to black power was the concept of “self-love” and “healthy self esteem.” According to Harding the leaders of the black power movement placed “love in the context of building a black society” (5). “The Religion of Black Power” should be used as a principle text in conjunction with a text such as Kwame Ture and Charles Hamilton’s Black Power: The Politics of Liberation (see below).
_____. There Is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981.
There Is a River is one of the most comprehensive texts detailing the black struggle for freedom prior to 1900. Harding describes how the struggle, or pilgrimage, for freedom began aboard slave ships leaving Africa and continued through the nineteenth century. Central to Harding’s work is the role religion played in the lives of people seeking a more just society. According to Harding, “The black struggle for freedom is at its heart a profoundly human quest for transformation, a constantly evolving movement toward personal integrity and toward new social structures filled with justice, equity, and compassion. Though it has often seemed to be a restricted political, economic, or racial struggle, it has always tried to help men and women discover their tremendous capacities as individuals and as members of an empowering community” (xxiv). Professors teaching a class about the religious roots of the civil rights movement will want to start with this text.
King, Martin Luther, Jr. Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story. New York: Harper & Row, 1964.
In Stride Toward Freedom, Martin Luther King, Jr., describes the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the use of nonviolence as a form of resistance. He writes about the spiritually motivated journey he and a community of African Americans embarked upon as a leap of faith. According to King, “History is ultimately guided by spirit, not matter” (74). He also details his calling to the Montgomery Movement and his rationale for the use of nonviolence as a religious principle and action (83-88). King wrote the book both as the leader of the Montgomery movement but more importantly as a pastor. Stride Toward Freedom is an essential source for classes in religion and social change.
The Murder of Emmett Till. Dir. Stanley Nelson. DVD. Videocassette. Firelight Media Production, 2003.
Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African American from Chicago, was brutally murdered in Money, Mississippi, on August 28, 1955, for allegedly making a pass at a white woman. The Murder of Emmett Till documents the life and story of the young man affectionately called “BoBo.” Mamie Till-Mobley wanted the world to see what Emmett’s killers did to her son, so she permitted the public to view his body at his wake. People lined the streets of Chicago for hours to see Till’s tortured remains, which could barely be identified. Till’s story sparked national awareness about the problem of lynching in the southern United States. Many believe that Till’s death, more than any other single incident, was the beginning of the movement. The 1963 March on Washington took place on the anniversary of his death in the middle of the week rather than on a weekend. Public Broadcasting provides complementary resources at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/till/sfeatures. In addition, Mamie Till-Mobley and Christopher Benson wrote Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime that Changed America (New York: Random House, 2003).
Raines, Howell. My Soul Is Rested: The Story of the Civil Rights Movement in the Deep South. New York: Putnam, 1977.
In My Soul Is Rested, Raines has captured the personal accounts of several leaders in the civil rights movement. These first hand stories tell of the experiences of grassroots leaders and activists who were on the front lines of the struggle, and their narratives lead readers to feel they are in personal conversation with the figures themselves. The text is divided into parts that follow the timeline of the struggle from 1955 to 1968. Readers will discover little known facts, such as the first sit-ins actually took place in Chicago, not the Deep South, in 1942-1943. As a teaching tool, this text should be used as a principle source accompanied by a more generalized history of the freedom struggle, for example, Raymond D’Angelo’s The American Civil Rights Movement: Readings and Interpretations.
Ross, Rosetta E. Witnessing and Testifying: Black Women, Religion, and Civil Rights.
Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003.
“From the period of slavery through the modern times, many Black religious women in the United States practiced racial uplift and social responsibility as a means of fulfilling what they understood as their duty to God” (5). Rosetta Ross highlights the lives of several important women in the modern civil rights movement: Septima Clark, Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Diane Nash, to name a few. These women took control of their lives and led the fight for human dignity. Women were the heart of movement organizing and did all the heavy lifting. This text should be used in conjunction with those like D’Angelo and Raines.
This Far by Faith: African-American Spiritual Journeys. Prod. June Cross and Dante J. James. PBS Video. The Faith Project, Inc. and Blackside, Inc., 2003.
Conceived by Henry Hampton, This Far by Faith follows the spiritual lives of African slaves and later African Americans. The roots of the freedom struggle are in the acts of resistance undertaken by the first Africans who were captured and forced into slavery, and from there the struggle never ceased. In many cases, the struggle was nurtured by the church. For many, church was the only occasion slaves were allowed to gather without their masters. The black religious journey is central to the resistance movement that peaked in the mid-20th century. With regard to the development of the civil rights movement, instructors will want to place a particular focus on episodes 1-5. In addition, Juan Williams and Quinton Dixie have written a companion to This Far by Faith with the same name (New York: Blackside, Inc., 2003).
Ture, Kwame and Charles V. Hamilton. Black Power: the Politics of Liberation. New York: Vintage Books, 1967.
Black Power outlines the ideological underpinnings of the black power movement. Influenced by authors like Frantz Fanon, the revolutionary black power movement thought of itself as a partner in the larger fight against colonialism instituted by whites. Ture and Hamilton outline a specific set of principles and plans that would allow the black community to not only become equal to but surpass the white community. The authors help learners understand the black power movement in order to have a full grasp of the long term struggle for black freedom. This text should be accompanied by Vincent Harding’s article “The Religion of Black Power.”
The Veterans of Hope Project: Educational Video Archive and Pamphlet Series. Denver, Colorado: The Veterans of Hope Project, 2000/2004.
Created by Rosemarie Freeney Harding and Vincent Harding, the Veterans of Hope series represents the collected stories of active members of the struggle for freedom and justice. The focus of the project is on “religion, culture and participatory democracy” and their part in the quest for freedom. The Hardings asked civil rights activists to reflect particularly on the role religion played in their lives. Video and pamphlet interview titles include:
Andrew Young: Former Executive Director, Southern Christian Leadership Conference and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations (2000)
Anne Braden: Racial Justice Organizer (2004)
Bernice Johnson Reagon: SNCC Freedom Singer and Founder of Sweet Honey in the Rock (2004)
Charles H. Long: Historian of Religion (2004)
Dolores Huerta: Labor Organizer and Co-founder, United Farmworkers Union (2004)
Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons: Islamic Scholar and SNCC Organizer (2000)
James Lawson: Teacher and Practitioner of Nonviolence, former pastor, Holman United Methodist Church (2000)
Ruby Sales: Episcopalian Seminarian and SNCC Organizer (2000)
Professors can use these videos to introduce students to key players in the struggle and as tools for understanding the role of biography in larger social contexts. Professors should also reference the Veterans of Hope Project website www.veteransofhope.org where they can find video clips and course materials that have not been distributed in video/pamphlet format.
Zinn, Howard. SNCC: The New Abolitionists. Cambridge: South End Press, 1964.
In 1964 Howard Zinn compiled interviews with the young leaders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. In 2002 Southend Press re-released this classic text. These personal stories reveal the deep convictions, importantly religious convictions, that led students to take on the system. Many of the students credit church leaders and church families for much of their support and nurture. SNCC is an essential text because the fullness of the civil rights movements can only be understood through the testimonies of student organizers. Although Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference is credited with motivating the movement, the students were the heart and soul of it, working with the women to organize the mass gatherings and protests.
Supplemental Resources
Clark, Septima Poinsette, and Cynthia Stokes Brown, ed. Ready from Within: Septima Clark and the Civil Rights Movement. Trenton, New Jersey: Africa World Press, 1990.
Septima Clark was an inspirational teacher who lost her job for belonging to the NAACP and later worked on behalf of the Highlander Folk School where civil rights leaders were getting a movement education. There Clark invented many techniques for popular education that have since been adopted by contemporary education in the United States. Ready from Within tells the story of Clark’s work and her decision to quit her job as a school teacher and take up the leadership of “Citizenship Schools.” She prepared many blacks Americans to take voting registration tests, a centerpiece in the struggle for freedom and rights. She taught her students to be “ready from within” to resist the evils and terror of the Jim Crow South. Clark and Brown’s text supports the broader study of the important role women played in the movement.
Collier-Thomas, Bettye and V. P. Franklin, eds. Sisters in the Struggle: African American
Women in the Civil Rights-Black Power Movement. New York: University Press, 2001.
Collier-Thomas and Franklin have collected a series of papers detailing the lives and ideas of the most significant women in the freedom struggle. “In many ways this volume demonstrates the coming of age of African-American women’s history and presents new information and theoretical approaches, and suggests future areas of research” (6). The text includes chapters about Ella Baker, Septima Clark, and Rosa Parks. Unlike other texts of its type, Sisters in the Struggle also includes a section on the women of the black power movement. Sisters in the Struggle is an excellent companion to the primary sources by the women discussed in the book.
Crawford, Vicki L., ed. Women in the Civil Rights Movement: Trailblazers and Torchbearers, 1941-1965. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1993.
Women in the Civil Rights Movement is a book derived from a conference on the contributions of black women to progressive social change in the United States in the period 1941-1965. According to the editors, “The papers that were selected for this volume make clear that women had a multiplicity of roles in the civil rights movement and that not all experienced it in the same way” (xvii). Women were clearly the organizers and encouragers of the movement. A special highlight of this text is the repeated references to the central role of the Highlander Folk School. It is a well documented text that complements primary documents by the women of the freedom struggle.
Harding, Vincent. Martin Luther King: The Inconvenient Hero. Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1996.
Harding writes about King as no other author and this text is like no other. Many people leave King conveniently at the “I Have a Dream” speech. Harding, however, focuses on the later part of King’s life and argues that the great leader moved beyond the feel-good images of little black and white girls and boys holding hands, to an unpopular opposition to the War in Vietnam and the belief that the problems of society were directly connected to the way in which the United States treated its poor. For those who delve more deeply into King’s role as the leader of the civil rights movement, this text shows his true radicalism.
Lincoln, C. Eric, and Lawrence H. Mamiya. The Black Church in the African-American
Experience. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1990.
The church has long been the center of the African-American community. Lincoln and Mamiya undertake a sociological analysis of the influence of religion on the history of black Americans. Using six dialectical models, the authors render “black religious phenomena” in both historic terms and statistical data. Scholars interested in the civil rights movement will want to focus on Chapter 7 (“The New Black Revolution: the Black Consciousness Movement and the Black Church”) and chapter 8, (“‘Now is the Time!’ The Black Church, Politics, and Civil Rights Militancy”). These chapters focus on the role religion, and especially the church and its charismatic leaders, played in creating black consciousness, black power, and the movement toward social change.
Moody, Anne. Coming of Age in Mississippi. New York: Dial Press, 1968.
Anne Moody was a young student involved in the Mississippi struggle. Coming of Age in Mississippi is Moody’s autobiography, covering the span from an early age through her student days and involvement in Jackson, Mississippi, 1963-64. She believed in the fight for human rights and like many young adults became disillusioned with King and his counterparts. Moody bares her soul in this text leaving the reader wanting more when it ends. The book portrays an excellent example of women’s leadership in the student movement.
The Rosa Parks Story. Dir. Julie Dash. Xenon Pictures, 2002.
Rosa Parks was a woman of conviction who was trained in nonviolent direct action long before staging her sit-in protest on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Park’s life is recreated in this Xenon Pictures film story. From a young age she raised questions about the treatment of African Americans. After marrying, she took a position as a secretary for E. D. Nixon at the local NAACP. With training from Highlander Folk School, she decided to take a stand against the systems of injustice in Montgomery. There are very few films about Rosa Parks. This motion picture should be shown with primary texts depicting Park’s life. It is not a stand-alone source.
Last Updated: October 2007
