The Role of the Black Church in the Civil Rights Movement

The Role of the Black Church in the Civil Rights Movement Justice, Peace & Reconciliation The Example of Martin Luther King Curtiss Paul DeYoung January 2011 Guadeloupe Martin Luther King would often say, “I am many things to many people. But in the quiet recesses of my heart, I am fundamentally a clergyman, a Baptist preacher. This is my being and my heritage, for I am also the son of a Baptist preacher, the grandson of a Baptist preacher and the great-grandson of a Baptist preacher.” Central to Dr. King’s identity as a leader in the Civil Rights Movement was his religious faith and status as a preacher in the black Baptist church. At the core of King’s perspective on the Civil Rights Movement was that the Movement was most successful when it operated as a church-based effort. I have been asked to speak on the role of the Black church in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s in the United States. In addition to my research on this and related subjects, I also bring an experiential side to my understanding of this topic. I have personally known some of Martin Luther King’s friends and staff members who were black preachers. I did my graduate work in theology at Howard University School of Divinity, which is a school of theology whose primary constituency is the black church. I also served as a pastor in African American congregations in the Harlem community of New York City and in Washington, DC. In order to understand the role of the Black church in the Civil Rights Movement we must first discuss the reason for a separate church for African Americans in the United States. The emergence of a Black church in the United States was the result of racism and oppression. The story begins with slavery. As citizens of the twenty-first century, it is difficult to fully comprehend the horrible human tragedy of slavery in the Americas and the Caribbean. Human beings were kidnapped from their homes in Africa and crammed into ships where they endured appalling conditions as they made their way across the Atlantic Ocean. Many people died during this passage by sea. Others jumped into the ocean determined never to be anyone’s slave. Most endured intense suffering and deprivation with little or no knowledge of what awaited them at the end of the journey. Some of these individuals transported to North America found strength to survive in their faith. Persons who practiced Islam and indigenous African religions were among the millions kidnapped and carried to the shores of what would become the United States of America. Some persons sold into slavery were members of ancient Christian churches in Africa. Many of the slaveholders belonged to Christian churches. Due to language differences it is quite possible that slaveholding Europeans and enslaved Africans stood next to each other unknowingly praying to God. This troubling image of enslaved Africans and slaveholding Europeans standing side-by-side simultaneously calling out to the same God in prayer characterizes the religious relationship between blacks and whites throughout the history of the United States. During the hundred or so years following the arrival of the first Africans on North American soil few embraced the Christianity of their white masters. Then in the 1700s an evangelical movement called “The Great Awakening” attracted enslaved African Americans into the Christian faith in larger numbers. More and more African Americans joined in the services held at white congregations or at open air meetings. For a short time blacks and whites worshiped together as equals before their God. Sadly, after a brief encounter with racial reconciliation, whites returned to their marriage to racism. Congregations soon separated blacks and whites in all aspects of church life. Separate 2 seating was established in most congregations. African Americans were forced to sit in the back of the sanctuary or in separate balconies in what was called the “Negro pew.” They sometimes were required to stand along the rear wall or even listen from outside the building. Some church buildings had separate entrances for whites and blacks. African Americans received Communion separately from whites. As a result of these oppressive acts of segregation, African Americans formed their own religious communities in secret places away from the view of the slaveholder. Here African Americans could keep alive their African culture and experience a freedom of faith expression. These “invisible institutions” as sociologist E. Franklin Frazier called them would later become African American congregations. The Black church in the United States was the result of rejection by white Christians. What these white Christians did not seem to know is that Africans were members of the church from the beginning. Black people did not first discover Christianity through slaveholders or white missionaries. African people and places are mentioned over 850 times in the Bible. Africans played a significant role in the life of Jesus. The beginning and end of Jesus’ life was marked by the involvement of Africans. Shortly after his birth Jesus’ family fled to Africa to escape the murderous threats of King Herod. At his death an African, Simon of Cyrene, carried the cross of Jesus. When the authors of the Bible described the formation of Christian congregations, Africans were there from the beginning as members of churches in the Middle East, Asia, and Europe. Tradition says that the Ethiopian treasury official noted in the Book of Acts in the New Testament who was traveling down the Gaza road back to his home in what today is the Sudan launched the first churches in Africa. 3  Let me say one more thing about this. Like other Jews in Palestine in the first century Jesus had descended from the Hebrew people who were of an African and Asian lineage. So Jesus had a multicultural and multiracial ancestry with African blood running through his veins. Historically in the United States, if you had any discernable trace of African ancestry you were declared black. Given that Jesus had some African ancestors, if he had lived in the United States he could be considered black. I suppose if he had lived here on the isle of Guadeloupe he would be a Creole speaking black person named Jezi. Black people were not an afterthought by God brought into Christianity due to the pity of their white slave masters. People of African descent were founders of Christianity. During slavery the role of Black churches was primarily one of survival and freedom. African American congregations helped blacks survive the horrors of slavery. They also preserved the liberation themes of Christianity. The Black church proclaimed justice, peace, and reconciliation. In order for slavery to be established by white people claiming to be Christians, theologians altered the liberation and social justice message of Jesus. Slaveholders developed a form of Christianity that allowed for slavery and for Christians to be slaves. The so-called Christian religion of the slaveholder was a religion of right belief. You could enslave people as long as you believed the right things about God. As long as you believed in the Virgin Birth, The Divinity of Jesus, and the Resurrection, your behavior did not matter. Once you had the right belief you did not have to worry—you were free to be as brutal to the people you enslaved as you felt necessary and still call yourself a Christian. One former enslaved African recounts the actions of the minister at her church: “Why the man that baptized me had a colored woman tied up in his yard to 4 whip when he got home, that very Sunday and her mother belonged to that same church. We had to sit and hear him preach .... And he had her tied up and whipped. That was our preacher.” In order to allow for slavery and justify the slave master’s desire for domination, white Christianity was stripped of its liberating power. The Jesus who preached freedom and liberation was replaced with a white Christ who served as a symbol of right belief, which included the white person’s divine right to own African people. Furthermore, slaveholders forced enslaved Africans to worship a white Jesus who looked like the slave master. Two forms of Christianity developed side by side: a slave master Christianity based on believing the right things and a Black church that emphasized the message of liberation in the Bible. Black churches were one of the first and often only institutions in society where African Americans had relative freedom from the control of whites. African American congregations were places where political and social leadership developed and the interests of the black community were furthered. African American congregations started many of the vital institutions within the black community such as schools, banks, insurance companies, and low-income housing. The fact that the Black church was an institution owned and controlled by African Americans shaped its role in the Civil Rights Movement. A tradition of social and political activism within the African American church fueled the activism of the Civil Rights Movement. Since black pastors received their salaries from the church and not from white led institutions, they were free to not only be clergy but also community leaders, social justice activists, and leaders of civil rights organizations. They could speak out against white racism without the fear 5 of losing their jobs. A majority of the people who volunteered to participate in protest marches were from churches. Church people were beat by policemen, arrested, and put into jail for demanding that they be treated fairly. Nearly all of the names we associate as heroic leaders in the Civil Rights Movement were members of black churches: Rosa Parks, Andrew Young, Fannie Lou Hamer, John Lewis, Septima Clark, Jessie Jackson, and so many more. The Black church also infused the Civil Rights Movement with some characteristics that were intangible. The biblical message that we are all created in the image of God, that we are children of God, has been at the heart of the Black church’s healing message of identity to congregants who have internalized racism. Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement understood that oppression was internal as well as external. No one described the effects of internalized racism better than Frantz Fanon: “I begin to suffer from not being a white man to the degree that the white man imposes discrimination on me, makes me a colonized native, robs me of all worth, all individuality, tells me I am a parasite on the world, that I must bring myself as quickly as possible into step with the white world.” In response to this psychological reality that Fanon described, King told African Americans, “Somebody told a lie one day. They couched it in language. They made everything black ugly and evil. Look in your dictionary and the synonyms of the word black. It is always something degrading, low, and sinister. Look at the word white. It is always something pure and high. But I want to get the language right tonight. I want to get the language so right that everybody will cry out, ‘Yes I am black and proud of it. I am black and beautiful.’” This was an important theme in the Civil Rights Movement. If you believed you were a child of God then you knew that as a human being you deserved your civil rights and you were willing to struggle to claim them. You hear it when Martin Luther King declared, “We are not 6 engaged in any negative protest … We are determined to be people. We are saying that we are God’s children. And that we don’t have to live like we are forced to live.” The Black church also provided the Civil Rights Movement with a hopeful resolve. Hope gave the protesters a spirit of perseverance. They believed that God would help them. The spirituals from the days of slavery and sung in the churches through the era of segregation offered messages like: “The Lord will make a way somehow!” “God can make a way out of no way!” Martin Luther King echoed this sentiment on the very first night of the Montgomery Bus Boycott when he preached, “We are guiding and channeling our emotions to the extent that we feel that God shall give us the victory.” Finally the Black church helped shape the vision for the anticipated outcome of the Civil Rights Movement. Dr. King said, “It is true that as we struggle for freedom in America we will have to boycott at times. But we must remember that as we boycott that the boycott is not an end within itself … The end is reconciliation; the end is redemption; the end is the creation of the beloved community.” King hoped that by participating in protests for human rights the church could transform society into a beloved community. The mission of his Black church-based organization the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was “to redeem the soul of America.” For King and the Civil Rights Movement the outcome desired was justice, peace, and reconciliation. Justice, peace, and reconciliation remain central to the Black church today in the United States and to a growing multicultural church movement. Certainly the election of Barack Obama as the president of the United States was partially a result of the Civil Rights Movement and its protests for voting rights for African Americans. Also, President Obama’s own commitment to 7 justice, peace, and reconciliation were nurtured through his years in a Black church in Chicago. I know his former pastor and I know that Mr. Obama was shaped by social justice preaching. So the question I end with is this: What is the role of the church in Guadeloupe? What should churches do about injustice in Guadeloupe and France? If Martin Luther King and the African American church are examples to be followed then the church in Guadeloupe and anywhere else where injustice prevails must inspire people to organize movements for social change. The church has leaders and an organizational structure that can sustain a movement. But even more so the church has a message that empowers a “child of God” identity, produces a persevering hope, and ignites people’s imagination to envision a reconciled society. There is poverty and injustice in Guadeloupe and France. What is the church’s role to address these realities in the second decade of the 21st century? 8