If a lot of African-Americans back in the '60s had guns and the legal right to use them for self-defense, you think they would have needed Selma? . . . If John Lewis had had a gun, would he have been beat upside the head on the bridge?
Quinton Dixie and Peter Eisenstadt focus on the first half of Thurman’s life, finding there not only the deep and complex roots of his mature works, but also a far-reaching influence on historical events and actors.
About 15 years
ago I was a guest at the annual meeting of theAssociation of Christians Teaching Sociology. In one session a professor reported on a
student's project. Taking the Century as a barometer of mainline Protestantism and Christianity Today as a barometer of evangelicalism, his student
compared the respective responses to the civil rights movement. The student
found that the Century was very hospitable toward the movement and that CT was critical of
it. (Full disclosure: At the time of this ACTS meeting, I was working for
CT.)
Since ACTS is comprised
largely of evangelical scholars, there was some hanging of heads in the room.
Evangelicals, they agreed, had been on the wrong side of history, not to speak
of the wrong side of justice.
William Barber has a way of getting people arrested. Since he took
charge of the NAACP in North Carolina, he's been inspiring
followers—black and white—to engage in acts of civil disobedience.
Years before Brown v. Board, the North Carolina Council
of Churches fought for integrated schools. Almost 75 years later, the council mobilized again for the same cause.
In The Help, set during the civil rights era, an aspiring
journalist decides to write a book about the African-American domestics
in the small Mississippi town where she grew up. The movie, adapted by
Tate Taylor from Kathryn Stockett's best seller, is a glossy Hollywood
potboiler that uses a serious theme and historical context as cover.
During the early 1950s, the Century’s editors could hardly be classified as strategists in the war for civil rights, but they tried their hand at analysis and expressed sympathetic support for both the commanders and the ground troops.
It was the winter of 1967, and Jesse Jackson was completing his master’s degree at Chicago Theological Seminary. The young Baptist minister had left his native North Carolina to attend a northern United Church of Christ school, in part, he recalls, so that he could concentrate on his studies away from his civil rights activities.
