Gospel of Freedom by Jonathan Rieder

Author:Jonathan Rieder
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2013-09-17T16:00:00+00:00

A Child Shall Lead Them

To ignite the Birmingham campaign, King would need more than his passionate preaching. He would also need to draw on the remarkable initiative of some of his colleagues, especially SCLC’s visionary, Rev. James Bevel. Ever since King’s jailing, Bevel had been raring to deploy the students of Birmingham. In the days after King’s April 20 press conference, Bevel had already been working on that task. This wasn’t his first stint at recruiting young warriors. When he and Bernard Lafayette, John Lewis’s roommate and a fellow student at American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville, got out of jail in Jackson, Mississippi, after the Freedom Rides in 1961, they hooked the local black toughs with their own tough talk—“You want to fight? We’re going to fight the white folks downtown”—before reeling them in with their pacifist message.5

Bevel belonged to the revered circle of Nashville nonviolent activism that included not just Lewis and Lafayette but also Diane Nash and the Reverends James Lawson, Kelly Miller Smith, and C. T. Vivian. He had come a long way from his quarrels with Lewis, whom he used to badger: “Why you always preaching the social gospel and not the Gospel gospel?” Once Bevel had seen the political light, he brought his trademark intensity to the task of delivering black people. The civil rights movement was not engaged in “a civil rights struggle,” he came to believe. “It’s a struggle for the Kingdom of God to come.” In 1960, when racists released a cloud of poisonous insecticide into the Nashville White Tower burger joint he and Lewis were trying to integrate, Bevel started chanting the story of the Hebrew boys in the fiery furnace who were miraculously saved after they had refused King Nebuchadnezzar’s command to bow to a false god.6

Bevel returned to that story on Good Friday night—King’s first night in jail—at the Birmingham mass meeting. “You know,” Bevel said, “our [black] preachers can preach the hell out of that [story]. They just don’t believe it … But it happens today just like it did then … One day [in the Old Testament] somebody like [George] Wallace passed a decree, said everybody has to bow to his god … Rich folks, white folks and colored folks, everybody bowed … [except] … three fellows.” Why did Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego not bow? “They had freedom in their bones, I guess.”

The king put the three Hebrew boys in the furnace. Watching from heaven, Jesus asked God, “What you want me to do ’bout it? Should I go down and put the fire out?’” God told him, “Nah, don’t do that, just go down and take the heat out of it.”

Now Bevel began chanting in his high-pitched voice, blurring the line between Birmingham and the Bible, and placing his listeners—and James Meredith, who had recently integrated the University of Mississippi—into the story of the furnace of racism.

Just last fall, bless my soul,

[Governor] Barnett passed a decree,

said, “Every Negro in Mississippi

had to bow to segregation.”

James Meredith looked back at Barnett

and said, “Barnett, I don’t bow to segregation.

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