The Black Church by Henry Louis Gates Jr

Author:Henry Louis Gates Jr. [Gates, Henry Louis Jr.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-02-16T00:00:00+00:00

Malcolm X Speaks, rally in New York City, July 27, 1963.

When it came to civil rights legislation, Malcolm X, who left the Nation of Islam in 1964, came to agree with the goals of most southern civil rights activists, even as he agitated for revolution: “We want to make them pass the strongest civil rights bill they’ve ever passed,” he said. “In order to do this, we’re starting a voters’ registration drive. . . . There won’t be a door in Harlem that will not have been knocked on to see that whatever Black face lives behind that door is registered to vote.”

And in the North, these voters could make a difference. “Between 1920 and 1960, African Americans have built real bastions of political power in the urban North so that they can actually demand a much higher level of accountability from the federal government,” says the University of Florida professor of history Paul Ortiz, “so much so that Black voting strength begins to determine U.S. presidential elections. So if you’re a person like John F. Kennedy or Lyndon B. Johnson, and you want to be elected president, suddenly the African American vote is a swing vote.”

The right to vote was still a far-off dream for many African Americans in postwar America, especially in the former Confederate states of the Deep South. Jim Crow laws, poll taxes, literacy tests, and violent terror tactics blocked African Americans’ access to full citizenship, despite the guarantees of the Fifteenth and Nineteenth Amendments, which barred discrimination by race or sex in the right to vote.

“African Americans believed that they had the opportunity to smash white supremacy,” Ortiz says. “It’s one of the most dramatic social movements in American history, and it’s fueled at the base by Black churches, Black fraternal organizations, and Black labor unions.”

Black church leaders, as well as members of their congregations who joined the struggle for civil rights, often suffered a violent and unrepentant backlash. As a result, Pierce explains, “There were plenty of Black churches that did not participate in the civil rights movement. They were afraid to be a part of it. They worried that their churches would be the next to be bombed. And so they refused to allow the leaders of the civil rights movement to even have services there.”

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