A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow.

A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow. By David L. Chappell. (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, c. 2004. Pp. [xiv], 344. Paper, $18.95, ISBN 0-8078-5660-6; cloth, $34.95, ISBN 0-8078-2819-X.)

This is an important book that offers something of a revisionist approach to various aspects of religion and the civil rights movement in the American South. David L. Chappell, a professor at the University of Arkansas, seeks to explore "the cultural changes behind the civil rights movement" with attention to four specific questions. These include: Why did American liberals fail to secure significant changes in civil rights during the 1930s? Given that failure, how did blacks secure the spiritual courage to take new action? Third, how did blacks sustain courage and action amid innumerable difficulties and "drudgery"? Fourth, "why were the enemies of the civil rights movement, for one fleeting but decisive moment, so weak?" (p. 2).

Chappell's work offers insight into many elements of American politics and culture as they relate to civil rights. His section on liberalism is particularly fascinating as he explores various liberal spokespersons such as Lionel Trilling and John Dewey and the abiding, but not especially helpful, belief that reason would defeat racial prejudice. He concludes that while liberals were sincerely concerned for black rights, they chose not to "do anything drastic to promote them" (p. 3). Blacks viewed the world as essentially corrupt and thought it necessary to take steps to defeat the evil of segregation and racism. Chappell examines the work of the all-too-human leaders and their brave foot soldiers. He finds it amazing that they believed themselves to be both morally correct and capable of defeating cultural practices so strongly set against them. In what may be the most intriguing (and perhaps controversial) sections of the book, Chappell maintains that--unlike so-called social conservatives before and alter the 1950s and 1960s--segregationists tended to view both the blacks' and their own denominations as "enemy" since many of those denominations, including the infamous Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), had officially supported desegregation from the early days of the civil rights movement. Thus, even if they did not support the civil rights cause publicly, white denominations and ministers tended to distance themselves from the actions of radical segregationists. Chappell makes his case giving particular attention to the SBC and the various so-called mainline denominations. He argues that "[t]he segregationists' tone was often defeatist: segregationism had the wry honor of sounding like a lost cause before the battle even began. Segregationist violence in this light appears to have been more an expression of desperation than determination" (p. 7). In presenting this thesis Chappell concludes that most historians of the civil rights movement have failed to look at both camps in the struggle, especially at the way demonstrators understood segregationists and the way segregationists understood themselves. He admits, however, that, as his research deepened, he discovered that there were more than simply two sides. There were many subgroups among the civil rights promoters, with multiple agendas for the movement and its larger impact on blacks and American society. The segregationists often divided against themselves and were obsessed with those divisions--a fact that "had been all but invisible in the existing literature" (p. 187).

This is a very important book that allows students of the period and of the movement to reexamine in some depth the relationship between ideology, personality, institutions, and southernness. It deserves to be read (and reread) by scholars of the civil rights movement in order to discern the author's intent more clearly. His arguments are a bit dense in places, partly due to the complexity of the thesis and material, I think. I am personally intrigued by the thesis since Chappell takes me to task for suggesting in an earlier article that fundamentalists used biblical inerrancy as a prop for supporting their racist views ("A Theology for Racism: Southern Fundamentalists and the Civil Rights Movement," in Tony Badger et al., eds. Southern Landscapes [Tubingen, 1996], pp. 165-81). Chappell insists that southern white ministers showed little interest in supporting racism publicly and that segregationists themselves often condemned southern churches for not speaking out in racist ways. This may be the case, but Chappell and I do not survey the same southern denominations. He tends to focus on mainline Presbyterians and Southern Baptists, whereas my article gives greater attention to the Independent Baptists, a group he seldom even mentions. Independent Baptists, obsessed with biblical inerrancy, were the last gasp of the old southern defense of slavery, insisting that segregation (if not slavery) was permitted in an inerrant Bible. Any compromise on such literalism was a slippery slope that would lead to liberalism and the loss of orthodox Christianity. They continued that insistence well into the 1970s, and it is implicit in some of their churches even today. Indeed, Martin Luther King Jr.'s classic liberalism was the primary reason to disregard his moral and spiritual credentials and imperatives. Chappell does not examine those issues. Nonetheless, this is an intriguing work that should not be overlooked.

BILL J. LEONARD

Wake Forest University