Freedom's Coming by Paul Harvey

Author:Paul Harvey [Harvey, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, State & Local, South (AL; AR; FL; GA; KY; LA; MS; NC; SC; TN; VA; WV), Religion, Christianity, Social Science, Ethnic Studies, American, African American & Black Studies
ISBN: 9781469606422
Google: MSWbAAAAQBAJ
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Published: 2012-09-01T16:03:29+00:00

Chapter Four

Religion, Race, and Rights

Ours was an evangelical freedom movement that identified salvation with not just one’s personal relationship with God, but a new relationship between people black and white.

—Andrew Young, from An Easy Burden: The Civil Rights

Movement and the Transformation of America.

We stood up. Me and God stood up.—Ethel Gray, Mississippi civil rights activist

Writing to Ralph McGill in 1962, a black Georgian queried the white southern moderate editor of the Atlanta Constitution on the unconscious assumptions that distorted the views of even the best-intentioned white southerners. In a previous editorial, McGill had excoriated religious institutions for doing “nothing at all” to address the region’s social ills. With clergymen delivering sermons that were “routinely irrelevant,” the South’s churches had “placed themselves on the sidelines.” The correspondent quickly pointed out that McGill, of course, referred to white churches. Had so many black ecclesiastical buildings “been burned and bombed because they were on the sidelines?” he inquired. “Have they not provided the meeting-places, theme-song, and leaders for the center of the nonviolent protest?” In McGill’s language, “Christianity” and “the churches” unconsciously signified “white” in both cases. “When one views the churches and Christianity without regard for color,” the letter concluded, “it becomes strikingly clear that Christianity and the churches have never been more relevant (taken as a whole)—or less on the sidelines.”1

This correspondent speaks to the common understanding that black churches and activist ministers sparked a moral crusade to redeem America. Such a view captures part, but only part, of the complicated and ambiguous relationship between religion and the civil rights movement. Leaders of the freedom struggle knew firsthand of the numerous congregations that closed their doors to movement meetings. “The preachers, number one, they didn’t have nothing to do with it,” two local activists recalled of the movement in Mississippi. “Teachers number two, they didn’t have nothing to do with it. Until things got when they could tell they wasn’t gon’ kill ‘em, and then they went to comin’ in.” In Holmes County, a Mississippi civil rights worker reported, “We got turned down a lot of times from the black minister.... He mostly was afraid because they [whites] whooped a few of ‘em and bombed a few churches. The preacher didn’t want his church burned down, and them old members was right along in his corner.” There was good reason, of course, for this fear. In the early summer of 1964, forty-one black churches in Mississippi, of various denominations and geographic locations, went up in flames.2

This contrast between the institutional church and individual church people, previously explored in Chapter 2, emerges strikingly clearly when one looks at the freedom struggle of the 1950s and 1960s. A white student stationed in southwest Georgia in 1965 tellingly concluded that the movement was “saturated with religion,” but for him the “most shocking discovery ... (because it is at such variance with the impression one gets from the national news media) was to find how conservative and separate from the movement are most Negro churches.” He generally found religious leaders “far more conservative than the people in many cases.

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