Download or read book Southern White Ministers and the Civil Rights Movement written by Elaine Allen Lechtreck and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2018-05-29 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1963, the Sunday after four black girls were killed by a bomb in a Birmingham church, George William Floyd, a Church of Christ minister, preached a sermon based on the Golden Rule. He pronounced that Jesus Christ was asking Christians to view the bombing from the perspective of their black neighbors and asserted, "We don't realize it yet, but because Martin Luther King Jr. is preaching nonviolence, which is Jesus's way, someday Martin Luther King Jr. will be seen as the best friend the white man in the South has ever had." During the sermon, members of the congregation yelled, "You devil, you!" and, immediately, Floyd was dismissed. Although not every anti-segregation white minister was as outspoken as Pastor Floyd, many signed petitions, organized interracial groups, or preached gently from a gospel of love and justice. Those who spoke and acted outright on behalf of the civil rights movement were harassed, beaten, and even jailed. Based on interviews and personal memoirs, Southern White Ministers and the Civil Rights Movement traces the efforts of these clergymen who--deeply moved by the struggle of African Americans--looked for ways to reconcile the history of discrimination and slavery with Christian principles and to help their black neighbors. While many understand the role political leaders on national stages played in challenging the status quo of the South, this book reveals the significant contribution of these ministers in breaking down segregation through preaching a message of love.
Download or read book Southern White Ministers and the Civil Rights Movement written by Elaine Allen Lechtreck and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2018-05-29 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1963, the Sunday after four black girls were killed by a bomb in a Birmingham church, George William Floyd, a Church of Christ minister, preached a sermon based on the Golden Rule. He pronounced that Jesus Christ was asking Christians to view the bombing from the perspective of their black neighbors and asserted, "We don't realize it yet, but because Martin Luther King Jr. is preaching nonviolence, which is Jesus's way, someday Martin Luther King Jr. will be seen as the best friend the white man in the South has ever had." During the sermon, members of the congregation yelled, "You devil, you!" and, immediately, Floyd was dismissed. Although not every anti-segregation white minister was as outspoken as Pastor Floyd, many signed petitions, organized interracial groups, or preached gently from a gospel of love and justice. Those who spoke and acted outright on behalf of the civil rights movement were harassed, beaten, and even jailed. Based on interviews and personal memoirs, Southern White Ministers and the Civil Rights Movement traces the efforts of these clergymen who--deeply moved by the struggle of African Americans--looked for ways to reconcile the history of discrimination and slavery with Christian principles and to help their black neighbors. While many understand the role political leaders on national stages played in challenging the status quo of the South, this book reveals the significant contribution of these ministers in breaking down segregation through preaching a message of love.
Download or read book From Preaching to Meddling written by Francis Walter and published by NewSouth Books. This book was released on 2021-02-02 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For years Southern minister Francis X. Walter was silent about the injustices of Jim Crow, blinded by the status quo, until the violent killing of a fellow priest during the civil rights movement. From Preaching to Meddling is the story of how Walter turned from passive objector to outspoken agitator, marked with Walter's humor and personal recollections of the most formative period of modern American history. In a fascinating, funny, sometimes searing memoir, retired Episcopal priest Francis X. Walter shares his journey from the days of the Great Depression in Mobile, Alabama, across decades of Deep South segregation, and into the interracial struggles for racial justice and freedom in Alabama. The founder of the Selma Inter-religious Project, Walter’s story includes growing up in multi-ethnic, segregated Mobile and learning life lessons at theology schools in Sewanee and New York. Returning to Alabama, Walter spent years as an Episcopal priest navigating how to serve white parishes in Alabama while challenging the racism that most congregants believed was a God-given right. After the tragic murder of seminarian Jonathan Daniels shortly after the Selma to Montgomery March in 1965, Walter moved from pastoring segregationists to agitating against them as he became a committed supporter of the struggles for civil rights and racial justice in George Wallace’s Alabama. From Preaching to Meddling is a personal chronicle of some of the nation’s civil rights struggles in Alabama and of the memoirist’s own struggles with faith and fault. While recounting the people and communities he joined in fighting against the white South’s racial order in rural Alabama, Walter candidly shares questions, dilemmas, and perceptions of his own shortcomings. His is an engaging portrait of momentous times and of himself as both conflicted priest and crusading white Southerner.
Download or read book Letter from Birmingham Jail written by MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. and published by Penguin Classics. This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This landmark missive from one of the greatest activists in history calls for direct, non-violent resistance in the fight against racism, and reflects on the healing power of love.
Download or read book Project Demonstrating Excellence written by Elaine Allen Lechtreck and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 562 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Mississippi Praying written by Carolyn Renée Dupont and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2013-08-23 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mississippi Praying examines the faith communities at ground-zero of the racial revolution that rocked America. This religious history of white Mississippians in the civil rights era shows how Mississippians’ intense religious commitments played critical, rather than incidental, roles in their response to the movement for black equality. During the civil rights movement and since, it has perplexed many Americans that unabashedly Christian Mississippi could also unapologetically oppress its black population. Yet, as Carolyn Renée Dupont richly details, white southerners’ evangelical religion gave them no conceptual tools for understanding segregation as a moral evil, and many believed that God had ordained the racial hierarchy. Challenging previous scholarship that depicts southern religious support for segregation as weak, Dupont shows how people of faith in Mississippi rejected the religious argument for black equality and actively supported the effort to thwart the civil rights movement. At the same time, faith motivated a small number of white Mississippians to challenge the methods and tactics of do-or-die segregationists. Racial turmoil profoundly destabilized Mississippi’s religious communities and turned them into battlegrounds over the issue of black equality. Though Mississippi’s evangelicals lost the battle to preserve segregation, they won important struggles to preserve the theology that had sustained the racial hierarchy. Ultimately, this history sheds light on the eventual rise of the religious right by elaborating the connections between the pre- and post-civil rights South. Carolyn Renée Dupont is Assistant Professor of History at Eastern Kentucky University in Richmond, KY.
Download or read book Sanctuaries of Segregation written by Carter Dalton Lyon and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2017-03-20 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2017 Eudora Welty Prize Sanctuaries of Segregation provides the first comprehensive analysis of the Jackson, Mississippi, church visit campaign of 1963-1964 and the efforts by segregationists to protect one of their last refuges. For ten months, integrated groups of ministers and laypeople attempted to attend Sunday worship services at all-white Protestant and Catholic churches in the state's capital city. While the church visit was a common tactic of activists in the early 1960s, Jackson remained the only city where groups mounted a sustained campaign targeting a wide variety of white churches. Carter Dalton Lyon situates the visits within the context of the Jackson Movement, compares the actions to church visits and kneel-ins in other cities, and places these encounters within controversies already underway over race inside churches and denominations. He then traces the campaign from its inception in early June 1963 through Easter Sunday 1964. He highlights the motivations of the various people and organizations, the interracial dialogue that took place on the church steps, the divisions and turmoil the campaign generated within churches and denominations, the decisions by individual congregations to exclude black visitors, and the efforts by the state and the Citizens' Council to thwart the integration attempts. Sanctuaries of Segregation offers a unique perspective on those tumultuous years. Though most churches blocked African American visitors and police stepped in to make forty arrests during the course of the campaign, Lyon reveals many examples of white ministers and laypeople stepping forward to oppose segregation. Their leadership and the constant pressure from activists seeking entrance into worship services made the churches of Jackson one of the front lines in the national struggle over civil rights.
Download or read book Mississippi Praying written by Carolyn Renée Dupont and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2015-09 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2013 Frank S. and Elizabeth D. Brewer Prize presented by the American Society of Church History Mississippi Praying examines the faith communities at ground-zero of the racial revolution that rocked America. This religious history of white Mississippians in the civil rights era shows how Mississippians’ intense religious commitments played critical, rather than incidental, roles in their response to the movement for black equality. During the civil rights movement and since, it has perplexed many Americans that unabashedly Christian Mississippi could also unapologetically oppress its black population. Yet, as Carolyn Renée Dupont richly details, white southerners’ evangelical religion gave them no conceptual tools for understanding segregation as a moral evil, and many believed that God had ordained the racial hierarchy. Challenging previous scholarship that depicts southern religious support for segregation as weak, Dupont shows how people of faith in Mississippi rejected the religious argument for black equality and actively supported the effort to thwart the civil rights movement. At the same time, faith motivated a small number of white Mississippians to challenge the methods and tactics of do-or-die segregationists. Racial turmoil profoundly destabilized Mississippi’s religious communities and turned them into battlegrounds over the issue of black equality. Though Mississippi’s evangelicals lost the battle to preserve segregation, they won important struggles to preserve the theology that had sustained the racial hierarchy. Ultimately, this history sheds light on the eventual rise of the religious right by elaborating the connections between the pre- and post-civil rights South.
Download or read book Born of Conviction written by Joseph T. Reiff and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2016 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In early 1963, twenty-eight white Methodist ministers caused a firestorm of controversy by publishing a statement of support for race relations change. Born of Conviction explores the statement's resulting influences on their lives, their reasons for signing the statement, and the various interpretations and legacies of the document.
Download or read book Freedom s Coming written by Paul Harvey and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2012-09-01 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a sweeping analysis of religion in the post-Civil War and twentieth-century South, Freedom's Coming puts race and culture at the center, describing southern Protestant cultures as both priestly and prophetic: as southern formal theology sanctified dominant political and social hierarchies, evangelical belief and practice subtly undermined them. The seeds of subversion, Paul Harvey argues, were embedded in the passionate individualism, exuberant expressive forms, and profound faith of believers in the region. Harvey explains how black and white religious folk within and outside of mainstream religious groups formed a southern "evangelical counterculture" of Christian interracialism that challenged the theologically grounded racism pervasive among white southerners and ultimately helped to end Jim Crow in the South. Moving from the folk theology of segregation to the women who organized the Montgomery bus boycott, from the hymn-inspired freedom songs of the 1960s to the influence of black Pentecostal preachers on Elvis Presley, Harvey deploys cultural history in fresh and innovative ways and fills a decades-old need for a comprehensive history of Protestant religion and its relationship to the central question of race in the South for the postbellum and twentieth-century period.
Download or read book Politics and Religion in the White South written by Glenn Feldman and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2005-09-30 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Politics, while always an integral part of the daily life in the South, took on a new level of importance after the Civil War. Today, political strategists view the South as an essential region to cultivate if political hopefuls are to have a chance of winning elections at the national level. Although operating within the context of a secular government, American politics is decidedly marked by a Christian influence. In the mostly Protestant South, religion and politics have long been nearly inextricable. Politics and Religion in the White South skillfully examines the powerful role that religious considerations and influence have played in American political discourse. This collection of thirteen essays from prominent historians and political scientists explores the intersection in the South of religion, politics, race relations, and southern culture from post–Civil War America to the present, when the Religious Right has exercised a profound impact on the course of politics in the region as well as the nation. The authors examine issues such as religious attitudes about race on the Jim Crow South; Billy Graham’s influence on the civil rights movement; political activism and the Southern Baptist Convention; and Dorothy Tilly, a white Methodist woman, and her contributions as a civil rights reformer during the 1940s and 1950s. The volume also considers the issue of whether southerners felt it was their sacred duty to prevent American society from moving away from its Christian origins toward a new, secular identity and how this perceived God-given responsibility was reflected in the work of southern political and church leaders. By analyzing the vital relationship between religion and politics in the region where their connection is strongest and most evident, Politics and Religion in the White South offers insight into the conservatism of the South and the role that religion has played in maintaining its social and cultural traditionalism.
Download or read book Whitewashing the South written by Kristen M. Lavelle and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2014-10-23 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whitewashing the South is a powerful exploration of how ordinary white southerners recall living through extraordinary racial times—the Jim Crow era, civil rights movement, and the post-civil rights era—highlighting tensions between memory and reality. Author Kristen Lavelle draws on interviews with the oldest living generation of white southerners to uncover uncomfortable memories of our racial past. The vivid interview excerpts show how these lifelong southerners reflect on race in the segregated South, the civil rights era, and more recent decades. The book illustrates a number of complexities—how these white southerners both acknowledged and downplayed Jim Crow racial oppression, how they both appreciated desegregation and criticized the civil rights movement, and how they both favorably assessed racial progress while resenting reminders of its unflattering past. Chapters take readers on a real-world look inside The Help and an exploration of the way the Greensboro sit-ins and school desegregation have been remembered, and forgotten. Digging into difficult memories and emotions, Whitewashing the South challenges our understandings of the realities of racial inequality.
Download or read book The Gospel of the Working Class written by Erik S. Gellman and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2011-07-15 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this exceptional dual biography and cultural history, Erik S. Gellman and Jarod Roll trace the influence of two southern activist preachers, one black and one white, who used their ministry to organize the working class in the 1930s and 1940s across lines of gender, race, and geography. Owen Whitfield and Claude Williams, along with their wives Zella Whitfield and Joyce Williams, drew on their bedrock religious beliefs to stir ordinary men and women to demand social and economic justice in the eras of the Great Depression, New Deal, and Second World War. Williams and Whitfield preached a working-class gospel rooted in the American creed that hard, productive work entitled people to a decent standard of living. Gellman and Roll detail how the two preachers galvanized thousands of farm and industrial workers for the Southern Tenant Farmers Union and the Congress of Industrial Organizations. They also link the activism of the 1930s and 1940s to that of the 1960s and emphasize the central role of the ministers' wives, with whom they established the People's Institute for Applied Religion. This detailed narrative illuminates a cast of characters who became the two couples' closest allies in coordinating a complex network of activists that transcended Jim Crow racial divisions, blurring conventional categories and boundaries to help black and white workers make better lives. In chronicling the shifting contexts of the actions of Whitfield and Williams, The Gospel of the Working Class situates Christian theology within the struggles of some of America's most downtrodden workers, transforming the dominant narratives of the era and offering a fresh view of the promise and instability of religion and civil rights unionism.
Download or read book When the Church Bell Rang Racist written by Donald Edward Collins and published by . This book was released on 1998 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For centuries ringing bells have signaled the welcome of the Christian church to all who would hear its gospel. At certain times and in certain places, however, prejudice has led the church to limit its welcome to its own kind. The Southern white church during the civil rights movement fell victim to racial prejudice and its bells rang a welcome only for those who supported the segregated status quo. Donald E. Collins tells the story of the Alabama-West Florida Methodist Conference and its reactions to the civil rights movement.Part memoir and part historical analysis, Collins reflects on white Methodists' struggle to come to terms with their consciences in the face of racial change and the standards of Christianity's universal gospel. With events in Alabama during the civil rights movement as backdrop, Collins tells the story of the challenge that confronted the Methodist church during those stormy years. From the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955-1956 to the Selma march in 1965 and beyond, this narrative describes those struggles for change against the forces of resistance. Based on Collins's own experiences and those of the more than 55 Methodist ministers that he interviewed, this moving story is told with pride, pain, sorrow, and hope.
Download or read book Beyond the Burning Bus written by J. Phillips Noble and published by NewSouth Books. This book was released on 2013-06-01 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anniston, Alabama, is a small industrial city between Birmingham and Atlanta. In 1961, the city’s potential for race-related violence was graphically revealed when the Ku Klux Klan firebombed a Freedom Riders bus. In response to that incident, a few black and white leaders in Anniston took a progressive view that desegregation was inevitable and that it was better to unite the community than to divide it. To that end, the city created a biracial Human Relations Council which set about to quietly dismantle Jim Crow segregation laws and customs. This was such a novel notion in George Wallace’s Alabama that President Kennedy phoned with congratulations. The Council did not prevent all disorder in Anniston—there was one death and the usual threats, crossburnings, and a widely publicized beating of two black ministers—yet Anniston was spared much of the civil rights bitterness that raged in other places in the turbulent mid-sixties. Author Phil Noble’s account is carefully researched but told from a personal viewpoint. It shows once again that the civil rights movement was not monolithic either for those who were in it or those who were opposed to it.
Download or read book Lift Up Your Voice Like a Trumpet written by Michael B. Friedland and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2000-11-09 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the Supreme Court declared in 1954 that segregated public schools were unconstitutional, the highest echelons of Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish religious organizations enthusiastically supported the ruling, and black civil rights workers expected and actively sought the cooperation of their white religious cohorts. Many white southern clergy, however, were outspoken in their defense of segregation, and even those who supported integration were wary of risking their positions by urging parishioners to act on their avowed religious beliefs in a common humanity. Those who did so found themselves abandoned by friends, attacked by white supremacists, and often driven from their communities. Michael Friedland here offers a collective biography of several southern and nationally known white religious leaders who did step forward to join the major social protest movements of the mid-twentieth century, lending their support first to the civil rights movement and later to protests over American involvement in Vietnam. Profiling such activists as William Sloane Coffin Jr., Daniel and Philip Berrigan, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Eugene Carson Blake, Robert McAfee Brown, and Will D. Campbell, he reveals the passions and commitment behind their involvement in these protests and places their actions in the context of a burgeoning ecumenical movement.
Download or read book Seventh day Adventists and the Civil Rights Movement written by Samuel G. London, Jr. and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2010-02-17 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seventh-day Adventists and the Civil Rights Movement is the first in-depth study of the denomination's participation in civil rights politics. It considers the extent to which the denomination's theology influenced how its members responded. This book explores why a brave few Adventists became social and political activists, and why a majority of the faithful eschewed the movement. Samuel G. London, Jr., provides a clear, yet critical understanding of the history and theology of the Seventh-day Adventist Church while highlighting the contributions of its members to political reform. Community awareness, the example of early Adventist pioneers, liberationist interpretations of the Bible, as well as various intellectual and theological justifications motivated the civil rights activities of some Adventists. For those who participated in the civil rights movement, these factors superseded the conservative ideology and theology that came to dominate the church after the passing of its founders. Covering the end of the 1800s through the 1970s, the book discusses how Christian fundamentalism, the curse of Ham, the philosophy of Booker T. Washington, pragmatism, the aversion to ecumenism and the Social Gospel, belief in the separation of church and state, and American individualism converged to impact Adventist sociopolitical thought.
