For April 4, 2022
Interlude
August 28, 1955: Emmett Till is murdered in Money, Mississippi. Later that year, December 5, 1955, Rosa Parks initiates the Montgomery bus boycott.
“1955” by Danez Smith. A poem that connects both of these events to the story about the speaker’s grandfather, who lived just a little bit further East, and was sixteen at the time when Till was murdered. He used to sing to court the speaker’s grandmother a couple of years before then, but the grandson has never heard him sing.
February 1, 1960. The sit in at the Woolworth’s cafe in Greensboro, N.C. begins, with four freshmen from the Black state college sitting down to demand desegregation.
“From Behind the Counter,” by Terry McMillan. A short story from the point of view of a Black Woolworth employee behind the café counter (janitorial work), worried about his job and his wife and baby and making ends meet, watching the four students with increasing admiration. At the end of the day, after closing, he pulls down the WHITES ONLY sign, clearly not intending to come back.
Chapter 13: Church, by Anthea Butler
She begins by discussing Obama’s being forced to walk back his support for his own home church, Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, because his pastor Jeremiah Wright’s classical, traditional jeremiads made Wright and Obama himself during his run for President vulnerable to criticism as anti-American (“God Damn America”). Obama eventually responded with his famous “More Perfect Union” campaign speech, basically “explaining” the context to white Americans and criticizing Wright’s “incendiary language.” She highlights this moment because it exposed “a painful truth”–in order for Obama to be elected, “the role the Black church had played in bringing about that possibility had to be disavowed.” The Black liberation theology that Wright had “inherited” from his mentor James H. Cone, influential theologian in the Black church in the 1960s, and the tradition of prophetic antiracist theology that he came from could not be properly acknowledged. The jeremiads that were part and parcel of this tradition, even though rooted in 16th-century Puritan preaching style. They were transformed in the AME church of the early 19th century to excoriate “white Christians for their role in the slave trade,” and continued into the critique of racism that is part of MLK Jr.’s preaching, e.g. Riverside Church 1967.
Besides making room for “righteous anger,” the Black church also served as “a place of protection and practicality” because the typical lack of white control meant that it was where political organizing could take place–but it also put Black churches at risk, and many incidences of burning, bombing, and otherwise destroying churches emerged out of white anger at Black churches (Wilmington in 1898, Tulsa in 1921, the Sixteenth St. Baptist Church bombing in 1963, the burning of the Flood Christian Church in Ferguson in 2014, the shooting of 9 members of the Emanuel AME in Charleston, S.C. in 2015). She points out that alongside that “righteous anger,” the Black church has also always stressed forgiveness (even of those who attacked churches; example response to Dylann Roof, the shooter at Emanuel AME).
Butler addresses the history of Black religion next, starting with the various traditions Africans brought with them on the Middle passage, and the Christian view of slavery as justified if the enslaved were “sons of Ham;” the hairsplitting that came with justifying the idea of enslaving even the converted and baptized (as per 1667 Virginia law, for example). Many Black people, free and enslaved, were converted in the aftermath, e.g. during the First Great Awakening. The “more emotional and ecstatic religious practices” associated with that served to “empower the enslaved” to a certain extent and especially Methodism became a home for Black practitioners of evangelical Christianity. In 1787, the forerunner of the AME church, a group that met at St. George’s Methodist Episcopal Church in Philly, was founded, and eventually, its founders, freedmen Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, not only founded influential Black churches in the 1790s, but also helped the white citizens of Philadelphia out during a Yellow Fever epidemic (a fact that was later “contested, erased, and denied”). In other cities, similar churches were founded, especially after the Second Great Awakening (1790s) and in 1819, Jarena Lee became the first Black woman preacher licensed to preach, and AME congregations in particular proliferated, and took on a leading role in abolitionism and the Colored Conventions of the 19th century.
The spread of Black churches also meant that some of the suppressed rebellions (Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner) were associated with specific churches, which often led to major repression. The first preacher to go into politics to get more political traction was Bishop Henry McNeal Turner, who also founded many AME churches in the South after the Civil War–as well as running for political office and protesting when Southern whites refused to seat elected Black lawmakers–with effective jeremiads, like “I Claim the Rights of Man.” When Reconstruction fell apart and the “Redemption” period began, with white claiming that violent and bloody repression of Blacks would restore and redeem the white supremacist South, churches along with their communities were under threat. Turner actually became a proponent of the Back to Africa movement and founded churches in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and South Africa.
Meanwhile, the US Black churches of the Jim Crow era become important political meeting-grounds–for the NAACP, the National Urban Leage, the Black women’s clubs, etc. People could meet and strategize safely in their congregations, and it is not surprising that church leaders like MLK Jr. emerged as leaders of the Civil Rights Movement. MLK combined the Christian pacifist tradition with Ghandi’s nonviolent resistance, and influenced a number of preacher-politicians (John Lewis and James Lawson among them; I do not know Diane Nash).
But the church and the non-violent protest movement also came under attack by more radical Black activists, e.g. Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam leaders, and in the early 1970s that Black Power movement. The Black church was deeply divided over its stance towards Black Power, but even in 1966, in a full-page NYT ad, signaled that they thought Black Power activists had important contributions to make, and that it was not anti-American. “America is our beloved homeland. But, America is not God”–which is what James Cone, with a new Ph.D. in theology, took up and developed into a powerful massage in the prophetic tradition. Black Theology and Black Power, 1969, became an influential book, adapting liberation theology and teaching at Union Theological Seminary in NYC. Not only Jeremiah Wright but Senator Raphael Warnock was a student of his and is now a “bridge between the Black church, past, present, and future, and political action,” especially because he won against Loeffler, who tried to paint him (again) as anti-American.
While she notes that other current activists “have eschewed the formal Black church tradition” in favor of social-justice movements that are not church-affiliated, she doesn’t really address how they can work together or whether Black church activism is declining / losing power, while secular organizations like BLM, Color of Change, the Equal Justice Initiative etc. are on the rise. Apparently, the numbers of church attendees are declining across the board, and that would affect the number of activists.