Bounds of Their Habitation Read online

  CONCLUSION: OF ONE BLOOD

  The 1924 immigration law had tried to resituate Protestantism more securely at the center of America, but Protestant organizations themselves took the lead in advocating a more plural America. Racism and nativism remained powerful forces and significantly affected social life and legislation. The Native Origins Act of 1924 represented the culmination of efforts by a generation of nativists to right the ship (as they saw it) of American immigration toward its historic roots in northern and Western Europe. They sought a renewal of white, Protestant America. The Klan did the same, and the latter-day Klan of the twentieth century focused its animus on Catholics and Jews in northern cities more so than their historic enemies of southern blacks.

  The immovable object of racist nativism, however, met the irresistible force of a diversifying America. Immigrants radically transformed demographics, especially of urban America, and even in the heartland of white Protestant America people responded to the reformist sentiments of the social gospel and looked to alternative spiritual expressions. The organizers of the World’s Parliament of Religions had sought to contain the riot of religious diversity under the big tent of liberal Protestantism, but the complicated currents of religion and race in American history can never be so easily corralled. And, in the civil rights years, they were about to explode the historical foundations of America’s deep-rooted patterns of religious racism.

  6

  Religion and Civil Rights

  The Color of Power

  “THEY SAY THAT FREEDOM IS A CONSTANT STRUGGLE,” civil rights activists sang during some of the most soul-wrenching movement days in Mississippi. They might well have been describing the long and tortuous journey toward civil and religious freedoms for ethnoracial communities in American history. The African American civil rights movement arose from a long history of struggle and turmoil. The major national figures are well known, if not particularly well understood (especially Martin Luther King, now tamed into a fairly harmless national saint rather than seen as the economic and social radical that he was). Even less known are the heroic efforts of those who fought Jim Crow in the courts and in their own neighborhoods and locales for decades leading up to the critical movement times of the 1950s and 1960s. In doing so, they fought against a long history of religious racism, as narrated in this book.

  A long civil rights movement stretched from the black social gospel, discussed in chapter 5, to the late twentieth century. Yet the movement as a self-conscious political force—a movement—can still be analyzed in the post–World War II era as a distinct historical phenomenon. The struggle for human and civil rights took a central place in the American consciousness in these years—the King years, as historian Taylor Branch calls them. Not surprisingly, for African Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans, religion assumed a central place in quests for freedom.

  This chapter narrates a few of those struggles and also covers the growing numbers of whites (many from religious communities) who identified themselves as coworkers in the fight. They understood that when some were not free, all remained in chains. It focuses particularly on the African American civil rights movement as a dramatic challenge to one long narrative about religion, race, and rights in American history. The chapter also examines Cesar Chavez and the Latino farm workers movement as well, tracing the parallels as well as the divergences of religion, race, and rights among Mexican American Catholics. Biographically, the lens will zoom in here on the theologian and humanist Howard Thurman, his protégé and Congress of Racial Equality founder James Farmer, the longtime feminist activist Pauli Murray, the Mississippi freedom struggle icon Fannie Lou Hamer, the civil rights leaders Martin Luther King and Fred Shuttlesworth, and the Mexican American activist Cesar Chavez. Deploying elements of their religious traditions in distinct ways, all of them transgressed the boundaries of American racial habitations. And all of them staged a constant struggle for freedom.

  THE CHURCH AND THE MOVEMENT

  Since the early twentieth century, black churches had come under severe fire for being “otherworldly,” too concerned with preaching the joys and terrors of the other life to address the pressing concerns of black Americans in this one. Black churches certainly served important functions of sustaining communities in difficult times. They provided necessary social, recreational, and political outlets for a people denied access to public facilities and political power. Yet, in constructing internal defenses against the external ravages of Jim Crow, black churches often became depoliticized, especially compared to the central political role they had played during the heady days of Reconstruction after the Civil War (1865–1877).

  And yet it is not so remarkable that the civil rights crusade drew so much of its strength from churches. Or, more accurately, from church people and select ministers. For it took deep religious faith to sustain the thousands of black southerners who stood up in the face of white southern power. It took spiritual sustenance to endure the petty daily harassment as well as more explosive acts of terrorism (beatings, bombings, kidnappings, and lynchings) that stalked activists who sought to “redeem the soul of America,” as the manifesto of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) proclaimed as its mission. While many churches, through indifference or fear, closed their doors to the civil rights crusade, church men and women made up the majority of the rank-and-file of the movement. They filled jail cells and engaged in acts of nonviolent civil disobedience. Religious imagery undergirded the movement. Ministers and church activists provided much of its leadership, moral passion, and steely commitment. They empowered a crusade to undermine the historic Christian mythic grounding for destructively hierarchical ideas of whiteness and blackness. For them, black lives mattered spiritually. The historically racist grounding of whiteness as dominant, blackness as inferior was radically overturned in part through a reimagination of the same Christian thought that was part of creating it in the first place. As one female sharecropper and civil rights activist in Mississippi explained in regard to her conversion to the struggle, “Something hit me like a new religion.”

  Early scholarly studies followed in the wake of media attention given to King, Malcolm X, and movement leaders and celebrities. But scholars soon uncovered the “local people” who did much of the actual work of the struggle. This most especially included women, who made up the bulk of church membership. It also included the long history of civil rights thought that emerged and developed through the twentieth century through figures such as Howard Thurman, James Farmer, and Pauli Murray.

  THURMAN, FARMER, AND THE LONG HISTORY OF CIVIL RIGHTS IDEAS

  Howard Thurman and James Farmer were in the generation between “the nadir” of African American life from the 1880s to the 1910s, and the civil rights movement itself. Together with figures such as Benjamin Mays, Richard R. Wright, and John Hope, they educated figures who reshaped the bounds of habitations of race and religion in American history.

  Born in 1899 in Daytona, Florida, Thurman’s first influence was the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA). The YMCA functioned as one of the primary vehicles for carrying on the social gospel movement in the early twentieth century. It was a waystation for numerous southern liberals and radicals seeking to apply their Christian training into real-world social problems. The YMCA and YWCA also sponsored numerous speaking tours, international visits, and brought together people from widely varying backgrounds and gave them the opportunity to forge youthful crossracial alliances. Thurman later rejected some of the strictures imposed upon him by the Victorian ethics and conduct required by the YMCA, but it was an important training ground for his growing immersion in social gospel ideas.

  Howard Thurman (1899–1981)

  Source: Freebase Public Domain.

  Thurman later attended Morehouse College in Atlanta, a city he returned to frequently over the next decades. His bitter experiences with the overt racism of the southern city, which was never “too busy to hate,” stayed with him. They soured him
even as his training at the historically black Baptist Morehouse College with the likes of Benjamin Mays (who became a lifelong friend) nurtured decades of cooperation and friendship. After receiving theological training in Rochester, New York, he served as a nationally prominent minister and educator at Howard University in the 1930s and 1940s. From his post there, he crisscrossed the country on speaking engagements, began some of his first significant writing, and struggled to balance his thoughts on both the potentialities as well as the limitations of Christianity. In addition, he investigated the dilemmas of the universal message of Christianity and the particular expressions of it within the American racial hierarchy.

  One turning point in Thurman’s life came in 1935. He traveled with his wife Sue Bailey Thurman as part of the “Negro delegation” of the American Christian Student Movement. At first, he was reluctant. He did not want to be put in the position of defending indefensible practices in American Christianity. Once persuaded, he sought out audiences with prominent Indian thinkers and writers, including Rabindranath Tagore and Mohandas Gandhi. Traveling originally in India, he gave talks in Ceylon. A lawyer there peppered him with questions concerning the racial hypocrisies of American Christianity, and whether other religions might better express the aspirations of black Americans. In February, the Thurmans and a few others conversed with Gandhi for three hours. Arguably, the conversation changed the course of American race relations from that time forward.

  Much of the conversation hinged on the meaning of the word nonviolence, originally Ahimsa in the Sanskrit. Gandhi explained how the word did not come across fully in English, with the negative non- at the beginning. In reality, nonviolence was a metaphysical force, a truth that underlay the seemingly endless violence of human life. Always given to a love for the mystical, Thurman was fascinated. Sue Thurman, however, pushed Gandhi on how to apply these ideas in a context where black Americans faced lynching. Much as he replied later when challenged on whether nonviolence had any relevance for Jews facing Nazi exterminationist policies, Gandhi reached for the concept of self-immolation, meaning a complete removal of one’s self from contact with the source of the evil. By some accounts, at the end of the talk, Gandhi mused that “if it comes true it may be through the Negroes that the unadulterated message of non-violence will be delivered to the world.” By Thurman’s own account, Gandhi ended the meeting by pointing out that the greatest enemy of Jesus in the United States was Christianity itself. Either version plausibly expresses Gandhian sentiment, but the former became the tagline that was published in an account of the meeting published the following year. Leaders at the founding meeting of the SCLC two decades later remembered it; they understood themselves to be carrying out Gandhian principles of social struggle.

  Coming home from his visit to India, Thurman had new visions for what would be required for racial transformation in American life. After his epic encounter with Gandhi, Thurman kept a heavy teaching and lecturing schedule through the country. At the North Carolina College for Negroes in 1942, he told an audience of the gulf between democracy and the American way of life. Blacks, he believed, would be “largely responsible for the soul of America. We are called at this moment of crisis in our nation’s history.”

  He planned what later became the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples, founded in 1944 in San Francisco. It was one of the first self-consciously multiracial congregations in American history. Meanwhile, he spread the Gandhian gospel and planted the seeds of what would become the ethic of nonviolent resistance to white supremacy in America. He worked out his ideas, expressed later in Jesus and the Disinherited, that Jesus represented the oppressed in American society. Thurman had come to see, during the war, that segregation was in effect a will to dominate, and that it could only be defeated through powerful forces of resistance. His goal, as historians Peter Eistenstadt and Quinton Dixie explain, was to “rip people from their complicity and complacency with evil. Only in this way would people in power relinquish ‘their hold on their place. It is not until something becomes movable in the situation that men are spiritually prepared to apply Christian idealism to un-ideal and unchristian situations.’” Full preparation to do nonviolent battle with Jim Crow, Thurman said, would require “great discipline of mind, emotions, and body to the end that forces may not be released that will do complete violence both to one’s ideals and to one’s purpose.”

  One of Thurman’s most prominent intellectual mentees was Martin Luther King, who frequently quoted Thurman in his sermons. King frequently turned back to Thurman’s classic Jesus and the Disinherited. In December 1955, at the beginning of the Montgomery bus boycott, King urged the crowed that the protests should be shaped by “the teachings of Jesus,” that they must love their enemies, and concluded: “We, the disinherited of this land, we who have been oppressed so long, are tired of going through the long night of captivity. And now we are reaching out for the daybreak of freedom and justice and equality.”

  Sitting in his class at Howard in the late 1930s, where he was a Divinity school student under Thurman’s tutelage, James Farmer, soon to become one of the founding members of the Committee (later Congress) of Racial Equality (CORE), remembered penetrating philosophical questions, the point of which was to challenge students to think beyond becoming complicit in the American racial system of oppression. Born to a family a Texas Methodists, Farmer grew up witnessing the scars of segregation all around him, and determined to do something when he could. With his training from Howard Thurman and others, Farmer became one of the founding members of CORE in Chicago in 1942. From its beginnings, Farmer later remembered, CORE determined that people, not experts or professionals, should lead the struggle for racial justice based on the principles of nonviolent direct action. CORE members helped to spread the practices of sit-ins in the 1940s. They initially focused their efforts on segregated institutions in Chicago. Later, Farmer and a group of others from CORE organized the Freedom Rides of 1961, when groups of integrated passengers boarded buses traveling through the Deep South, intending to test Supreme Court cases mandating segregation in interstate travel. The violence and bombings that met some of the travelers gripped the nation and dramatized the realities of segregation in the region. Two years later, Farmer involved himself in organizing the March for Jobs, Freedom, and Justice in Washington—now known as the March on Washington, when a quarter of a million people heard Martin Luther King deliver his most famous address.

  The radical legacy of Thurman, Farmer, and CORE eventually found its way to the ministers and church communities in southern cities who began organizing boycotts and crusades early in the 1950s, leading up to Rosa Parks and the 381-day Montgomery bus boycott from 1955 to 1957. Meanwhile, in some of the toughest, meanest places in the South, individuals such as Fred Shuttlesworth braved years of violent attacks in carrying on the struggle of nonviolent resistance.

  Electrified by the Brown decision and his sense of God’s hand moving in history, Shuttlesworth’s civil rights career blossomed in the 1950s. He felt divinely inspired to defy a response to the banning of the NAACP in Alabama imposed by the state authorities. Resisting more senior ministers who urged moderation, Shuttlesworth and his followers organized the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR). He saw the new group as part of a “worldwide revolution which is a divine struggle for the exaltation of the human race.” Repeated attempts on his life only enhanced his personal authority and charisma.

  In the early 1960s, as movement leaders struggled to find a way to capitalize on their earlier successes, Shuttlesworth led an interracial conference in Birmingham on “Ways and Means to Integrate the South.” The success of the gathering convinced Shuttlesworth to pressure King and the SCLC leadership to choose Birmingham for their next crusade. “There are certain places that have symbolic meanings,” as one participant put it, including the town infamously known as “Bombingham.” After the meeting, true to form, bombers struck Bethel Baptist Church (where Shuttlesworth had preached)
for the third time since 1956. Shuttlesworth told black Birminghamians that he possessed no “magic wand to wave nor any quick solution by which the God of segregation can be made to disappear,” but had only “myself—my life—to lead as God directs.” After suffering a severe beating while trying to enroll his daughter in a school, he lay near death on the ground but heard the voice of God telling him, “You can’t die here. Get up. I got a job for you to do.” Of his courageous actions, he later reflected, “I really tried to get killed in Birmingham. I exposed myself deliberately, and I felt [that] if I did give my life that the country would have to do something about it.” Shuttlesworth placed himself squarely in the “contest for justice and righteousness” from the Old Testament to the present. He saw the biblical parable of good and evil being waged in places like Birmingham. When James Farmer of CORE came to Montgomery during the Freedom Rides, Shuttlesworth escorted him through a mob surrounding a church. Miraculously, the crowd of hostile whites opened up and allowed them to pass. Farmer attributed this to Shuttlesworth’s well-deserved reputation for near insanity in pursuit of justice. For Shuttlesworth, it was more akin to God opening up the Red Sea. Reflecting on the years of violence he had experienced, Shuttlesworth predicted the logical conclusion of the white South’s course: “whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad. The tragedy of our city and state today is that madness has been substituted for sanity.” Yet the movement would not “curse and abuse those who curse and abuse us,” for love would prove the superior force. “Water hoses tried in vain to drench a fire that wouldn’t go out,” Shuttlesworth said of the movement in Birmingham.