civil rights movement
When MLK responded to an "all lives matter" argument
Fifty-two years ago, eight white clergy penned their version of “all lives matter.” These white men of God questioned the efficacy of the civil rights movement in their hometown of Birmingham, Alabama. They wrote that "honest convictions in racial matters could properly be pursued in the courts.”
Duncan Gray Jr., 53 years after the Ole Miss riot
I recently had the honor of sitting down with a fourth-generation Mississippian who knows a thing or two about racial injustice because he’s spent his life fighting it: Duncan M. Gray Jr., bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Mississippi from 1974 to 1993.
A star-crossed semester
“Tell me what a feminist looks like,” the woman at the microphone chanted. Obediently and enthusiastically, we responded, “This is what a feminist looks like.” It was a beautiful, if chilly, April afternoon, and several hundred students, faculty members, and administrators had gathered in front of the University of Mary Washington’s administration building to mourn the murder of Grace Rebecca Mann and celebrate her life.
Dialogue matters
In 1960, when Vincent Harding moved to Atlanta, he began trying to weld together the ongoing nonviolent activism being lived out by some in the Black Church with the peace witness of the Mennonite Church. This effort became less than a decade long experiment, because Harding would eventually break formal ties with the Mennonite Church. Though his time and effort keeping a foot simultaneously in both the Black community and Mennonite community was fixed should not suggest to us that he no longer had an important role to play in for Mennonite lived faith or that he did not continue to influence the Mennonite Church deeply. In fact, his ongoing legacy for the Mennonite Church lives on today.
Marching with prophets: Selma and the rise of an advocacy style
The third Selma-to-Montgomery march was a civil rights watershed. It also focused the lives of many who gave it its spiritual hue.
by William Bole
Epic march
Seven of this year's eight best picture nominees are stories of lone, white heroes—stories that seem out of touch with the times. The exception is Selma.
Great Society, great awakening
President Barack Obama’s State of the Union proposed to enlarge the American promise of prosperity by introducing a new tax structure for the very wealthy, tax credits for families outside of the wealthy stratum, increased access to retirement plans for more American workers, and a plan to subsidize community college tuition. While there will be resistance to the president’s proposals, the impulse behind them is an appeal to an idealized form of decency that Lyndon B. Johnson believed would make his idea of a Great Society an American reality.
Fifty years ago this month, Johnson introduced his vision to Congress.
A book review of Radical Jesus: A Graphic History of Faith
This is a book for those that are seeking to embody the radical witness of Jesus for their own time, recalibrating their own lives in light of the Sermon on the Mount and Jesus’ example of solidarity with the oppressed. If you, or anyone you know, is looking to be inspired by both the past and present witness of Jesus in the world, and if you would appreciate it communicated through creative and beautiful artwork testifying to God’s Church making visible the Kingdom of God, then Radical Jesus is for you!
American Protestants and the Debate over the Vietnam War, by George Bogaski
Through analysis of denominational statements about what is arguably the most debated military conflict in recent U.S. history, George Bogaski produces an illuminating, if also unvarnished, story.
reviewed by Steven P. Miller
Following Martin
What happened to the civil rights movement? David Chappell offers a carefully wrought study of a nation's fitful waking from a beautiful dream.
Harlem's experiment in interracial, pacifist community
The Harlem Ashram (1940-1948) was a grand experiment that didn't go very far. The interracial Christian commune at Fifth Avenue and 125th Street was modeled after ashrams, or Hindu religious centers, that Gandhi had established in India. Its founders were two white men, Ralph Templin and Jay Holmes Smith, who had been Methodist missionaries in India in the 1930s. There they became interested in Gandhi's synthesis of religion, politics, and nonviolent protest.
Templin and Smith were part of a cohort of American pacifists who saw Gandhi’s work as a potential model for political and religious activism in the United States.
Rest in peace, Vincent Harding
Vincent Harding died yesterday. If all the civil rights leader had done was draft King's "Beyond Vietnam" speech, that would have been quite a contribution. ("I watched this [antipoverty] program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything on a society gone mad on war.") But in the 60s Harding founded Atlanta's Mennonite House (with his wife Rosemarie Freeney Harding), traveled around the South with the movement, and got his doctorate in history (here in Chicago, with Century contributing editor Martin Marty). Since then he led a career of teaching (mostly at Iliff), writing, and activism.
Vincent Harding, a true hero
Vincent Harding combined his sensibilities as a historian and as a pastor. He called us, as individuals and as a nation, to face our weaknesses and learn from them.
The civil rights movement and the global community
When President Obama argued for U.S. strikes on Syria, he used a familiar trope:
When, with modest effort and risk, we can stop children from being gassed to death and thereby make our own children safer over the long run, I believe we should act. That’s what makes America different. That’s what makes us exceptional.
Yet his proposed Syria policy put him in new political territory: against the views of a majority of African Americans.
Converted in 1963
I wanted to join a group of pastors going to the March on Washington. But I had young children—and no money for bus fare and meals—so I didn’t. I've rued it ever since.
Remembering Will Campbell
Campbell got into trouble in lots of different ways. As a seminarian, I was particularly impressed that he dared to drink whiskey with the Klan.
Baptist again: Going back to church
When I left North Carolina at age 22, I never planned to be back in a Baptist church. Years later, here I am.
Remembering the march to Montgomery
In 1965, MLK asked religious leaders to come to Selma and march. Decades later, plans are taking shape in Montgomery to honor those who came.
Generational change
About 15 years
ago I was a guest at the annual meeting of the Association 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.
Sunday, November 14, 2010: Isaiah 65:17-25; Luke 21:5-19
It was the spring of 1963 in Birmingham, and it looked as if the civil rights movement would suffer yet another defeat. The powers that be had more jail space than the civil rights workers had people. But then one Sunday, reports historian Taylor Branch, 2,000 young people came out of worship at the New Pilgrim Baptist Church and prepared to march.