I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle by Charles M. Payne

Author:Charles M. Payne
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2007-03-16T07:00:00+00:00

MASS MEETINGS: LEANING ON THE EVERLASTING ARMS

“It is said that these people accumulate into crowds and then by their speeches are exhorted into frenzy and then seek to march in a body to register.”

GREENWOOD COMMONWEALTH

April 1, 1963

I once heard a journalist who had covered the movement remark that two decades after its height the civil rights movement had inspired no great works of art—no great novels or films, no great plays. He rather missed the point. The movement was its own work of art, and mass meetings were among the places where that might most easily be seen. Mass meetings, which had the overall tone and structure of a church service, were grounded in the religious traditions and the esthetic sensibilities of the Black South. If the drudgery of canvassing accounted for much of an organizer’s time on a day-to-day basis, mass meetings, when they were good, were a part of the pay-off, emotionally and politically.

The Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott of 1955 is one of the turning points of the modern movement. According to Ralph Abernathy, the first song at the first mass meeting there was “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms”: What a fellowship, what a joy divine, leaning, leaning on the everlasting arms. What have I to fear, what have I to dread, leaning on the everlasting arms? It was an appropriate choice. Emile Durkheim wrote:

The believer who has communicated with his god is not merely a man who sees new truths of which the unbeliever is ignorant; he is a man who is stronger. He feels within him more force, either to endure the trials of existence or to conquer them.31

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