Civil Rights Movement

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Civil Rights Movement

One of the distinguishing features of the civil rights movement of the mid-twentieth century in America was that it was both a grassroots and a religiously based phenomenon whose aim was to protest against and demand the dismantling of the apartheidlike system of racial segregation, so-called Jim Crow, that defined the politics of white supremacy, especially in the southern states.

From the days of slavery, blacks had suffered the indignity of racial discrimination in which they were thought inferior to whites and denied the most basic of rights. They could not ordinarily vote, attend the same schools and colleges as whites, eat in the same restaurants, share the same seats on buses, or use the same public amenities. In addition, blacks were routinely subject to acts of physical violence, most typical being the practice of lynching prevalent in the South.

It was in this context that the modern civil rights movement arose. To be sure, blacks had always resisted both slavery and Jim Crow legislation. Men and women such as Nat Turner, Sojourner Truth, and Harriet Tubman had built a strong tradition of protest and resistance, much of which had been surreptitious and largely uncoordinated. Indeed, throughout the 1930s and 1940s, churchmen such as A. D. Williams, Martin Luther King, Sr., and others were beginning to tap into that tradition by using it to organize acts of public resistance. But it was not until the mid-1950s that black protest became a mass movement of opposition to white supremacy. Historically, it was the bus boycotts of the 1950s that formally marked the beginnings of the movement. Throughout the South public buses had been segregated into racial sections. Blacks were required by law to sit in the back of the bus, leaving the front seats vacant for whites. The arrest of Rosa Parks in December 1955 for contravening such a law by refusing to yield her seat to a white man catalyzed the movement. This was not the first time blacks had defied bus laws in the South. In June 1953 blacks in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, boycotted segregated buses, as did their counterparts three years later in Tallahassee, Florida. Rosa Parks herself had refused to yield a bus seat to a white man earlier, in the 1940s. The bus boycotts typified a general spirit of civil disobedience that went far beyond concern with bus laws. The boycott itself, together with the sit-ins, the long marches, and, later on, the riots in the ghettos of northern cities, was a popular method of protest that blacks used effectively against white businesses, public institutions, and local governments. But there were also other methods, such as contesting the constitutional legality of racism in southern courts as well as in the Supreme Court of the United States. It was through this approach that one of the most important victories of the movement was achieved, when the Supreme Court ruled in 1955 that public school segregation in the South was illegal.

It was not, however, the use of legal action as a strategy for which the civil rights movement became famous; it was for its use of civil disobedience. Resorting to civil disobedience was not the result of acquiescing in white power but a carefully worked out strategy that was part of the nonviolent philosophy of the whole movement. The aim of this approach was to cause as much social disruption through what was called "nonviolent direct action" as was consistent with dismantling racist structures. Three important points must be made about what made this approach effective. The first is that it was the result of a highly organized effort and was not spontaneous; second, the organizers had at their disposal a significant pool of human and financial resources; and third, the church provided a broad mass of people which the civil rights movement was able to mobilize.

Regarding the first point, the movement consisted of an extensive network of civic and religious organizations such as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Montgomery Improvement Association (MIA), both under the leadership of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.; the Inter Civic Council (ICC) in Tallahassee, under Rev. C. K. Steel; the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR), directed by Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth; the many local chapters of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); and churches and denominational and interdenominational ministerial alliances, to name but a few. What is interesting about these organizations is that almost all of them (the exception being the church and the SCLC) represented other, smaller organizations in their geographical regions. Interestingly, they were either all-Christian or all under the leadership of churchmen. The SCLC became the central organization to which all the others were affiliated.

Although it has become customary to think of the center of this movement as Montgomery, Alabama, and to associate it with the historic figure of Martin Luther King, Jr., it is clear that it was widely dispersed. Of course, the leaders of the movement often met to discuss tactics and strategies, but the implementation of the latter was always constrained by local circumstances, a fact that sometimes led to tensions in the movement. But it was the charismatic figure of King that served as a point of reference for diffusing these tensions. What is important, however, is that together the elements of the movement represented a formidable challenge to the white power structure.

In addition to its strong organizational base, the civil rights movement could count on the financial contributions of its members. Churches and civic organizations as well as individuals gave whatever they could. It has been said that the MIA, for example, had huge bank accounts in nine states in the South. Much of the money came from poor blacks who saw clearly that social and political change was possible only through their active participation in the movement. There were also varied degrees of financial and other support by mostly northern whites sympathetic to the movement. The involvement of ordinary women, youth, and men and the diverse leadership that was represented by the numerous organizations of the movement were themselves other important resources. It was here that the church played a decisive role in giving shape and content to the development of a civil rights culture in the black community.

The black church has always been the only institution truly owned and run by blacks; the only one to serve as a significant gathering point, a structure around which a communal sense of self developed and individual identities took shape. In the southern states there were not many blacks who were not affected by it. Popular participation was indeed one of the hallmarks of the black church, which it bequeathed to the civil rights movement. It was the church's predominance together with the fact that the minister was a highly regarded person in the community that enabled the civil rights movement to be so effective in its mobilization of blacks and in the impact of its resistance on official racism.

But apart from the financial and human resources of the movement, there was also its theology or doctrine, which taught that freedom from slavery and racism was demanded by the gospel of Christ. Thus Christian teaching, especially that prophetic aspect of it concerned with justice, inspired the message and ideology of the modern civil rights movement. Christian prophetic teaching was in fact rooted in a long tradition of religious protest within the black church, a tradition that it had compromised at various times in its history but that it was now recovering with spectacular results. There can be little doubt that one of the contributions of the civil rights movement to modern thought was the development of black theology first formally articulated in the documents of the National Conference of Black Churchmen (NCBC) in the late 1960s and in the writings of James Cone. Black theology sees itself as a people's theology with a long history of religious protest inspired by the experience of the struggles against both slavery and racism.

Bibliography

Hampton, Henry, and Steve Fayer, with Sarah Flynn. Voices of Freedom: An Oral History of the Civil RightsMovement from the 1950s through the 1980s. 1991.

Harding, Vincent, Robin D. G. Kelly, and Earl Lewis. We Changed the World: African Americans, 1945 –1970. 1997.

Morris, Aldon. The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement:Black Communities Organizing for Change. 1984.

Weisbrot, Robert. Freedom Bound: A History of America'sCivil Rights Movement. 1990.

Williams, Juan. Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil RightsYears, 1954 –1965. 1988.

Edward P. Antonio

Contemporary American Religion