Religious revivalism in the Civil Rights Movement.

Historians, journalists, sociologists, political scientists, and theologians have been picking over the corpse of the Civil Rights Movement for more than thirty years now. Most scholars have given due credit to the black church for giving birth to the Movement, and in recent years many scholars have delved into the history and theology of the black church to show precedents for the direct action of the 1950s and 1960s, (1) Other scholars, spurred by the controversies the Movement generated but not writing about it directly, have found a long tradition of collective self-respect developing in the black church, which often expressed itself in defiant acts of resistance in the face of overwhelming odds long before the Movement emerged. (2) So the mass direct action of the 1950s and 1960s now appears, to students who read about it for the first time in college courses, as something with a history behind it, a history centered in the black church.

But virtually all scholarship on the Movement's church roots has been devoted to showing that, long before the boycotts and sit-ins made the headlines, the black church acted politically in ways that have been forgotten, or that the black church's message was "political" in ways that are not obvious to outsiders. Scholars have almost never considered the other side of the coin: that the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s--an overtly political movement--had religious dimensions that are not obvious to outsiders, and that these religious dimensions also have an historical tradition behind them. Specifically, hardly any scholars have mentioned even in passing, and none have ever analyzed in detail, the ways in which the Civil Rights Movement fit into a long tradition of religious revivals, going back to the First and Second Great Awakenings, a tradition that incidentally transcends the cultural boundaries of the black church. (3)

In the broader field of religious studies, scholars of revivalism in America and Africa have for many years been showing that religious revivals, which have no explicit political and social messages, often had far-reaching political and social effects--indeed that revivalists unwittingly served to usher in political and social revolutions. (4) But these scholars have not remarked on the other side of their coin either: that explicitly political upheavals, such as the Civil Rights Movement, had far-reaching religious dimensions, dimensions which often link them to events in religious history that are not recognized as precedents for the political upheavals but, in many important respects, are precedents for them.

What is most striking about the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s is that its revivalistic forms and tendencies were often obvious to the participants--ministers and laypersons alike--and remain prominent in their memories. What are these forms and tendencies? Religious revivals are hard to define, but they always include a collective, region-wide enthusiasm for charismatic preachers, belief in miracles, and emotional conversion experiences either described in public "testimony" or enacted directly before an audience. All these are conspicuous in the documentary record of the Movement, yet have not been noticed or acknowledged as such in the literature. The mass religious enthusiasm and ecstasy, the experience of and talk about "miracles," and the conversion experiences are not incidental, but seem to have played vital, functional roles in the political movement. This is not to say they were merely or primarily functional, but their functional role gives the religious experiences in the Movement an historical and sociological significance that deserves attention.

Movement participants often recalled the Movement years as a heady, once-in-a-lifetime moment touched with divine significance. When Johnnie Carr, one of the principal organizers of the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955-1956, was asked why the Movement succeeded, she answered, "Because God sent us that man." She was referring to Martin Luther King. She had been praised by many students of the Movement who emphasize the important role of unsung heroes like her, but she did not think her skills and diligence should take attention from the handiwork of the Lord. "Until He sees fit to send us another," she added, "we won't get any further" (Carr). R. D. Nesbitt, a member of the Montgomery Bus Boycott's finance committee, referred to King as "a modern day 'Moses'" and "truly a God-sent man." Black people in Montgomery were complacent before King came along, Nesbitt said, and fell into disarray after he left in January 1960. "We were united" while King was in Montgomery, and many wanted "to follow him to Atlanta," rat her than carry on without him. "Quite a number of folks left" (22-23). Rufus Lewis, who was chairman of the Boycott's transportation committee, said poor people in Montgomery responded to King "just like he was their savior." Lewis could not "see what's different between him and the Messiah. That's just the truth about it," he said, "and I am not a real religious

As with previous revivals, the religious enthusiasm in Montgomery was not confined to the poor and uneducated. "This was the most stimulating thing in the lives of most of the Negroes in this area," Lewis said. Dr. King "lifted them so high they just can't help but think he is a Messiah. They can't help it, no matter how smart they are" (40-42). Even Stokely Carmichael (now known as Kwame Toure), the so-called "militant" leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), who challenged King's leadership, recognized this. "People loved King," Carmichael said. "I've seen people in the South climb over each other just to say, 'I touched him! I touched him!'... I'm even talking about the young. The old people had more love and respect. They even saw him like a God. These were the people we were working with and I had to follow in his footsteps when I went in there. The people didn't know what was SNCC. They just said, 'You one of Dr. King's men?' 'Yes, Ma'am, I am'" (qtd. in Carson 164). (5)

King was not the only charismatic leader who evoked this response, nor was the sense of an ultimate, divine mission mere after-the-fact hyperbole about a martyred leader. The Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, leader of the Civil Rights forces in Birmingham, apocalyptically told a Civil Rights meeting in 1958, "This is a religious crusade, a fight between light and darkness, right and wrong, good and evil, fair play and tyranny. We are assured of victory because we are using weapons of spiritual warfare" (Shuttlesworth 1958). In a later speech calling upon listeners to defeat Alabama governor George Wallace in 1964, Shuttlesworth drew his own connection to the history of revivals, saying that his and other Civil Rights organizations gave "the Christian Church its greatest opportunity in centuries to make religion real in the lives of men." He thanked God for the new "awakening of the Religious forces" (Shuttlesworth June 1964). Shuttlesworth's fearlessness in nonviolent battle was legendary, and it helped to inspire th e largest and most sustained challenge to segregation in any American city, a city referred to as the Belly of the Beast of Segregation, Bombingham, and the Johannesburg of the U.S.A. Though Shuttlesworth often provoked anger and resentment among rival leaders in Birmingham and elsewhere, even his rivals defended his reputation and spoke of his personal power with a kind of awed respect.

The older generation of black preachers had no monopoly on worshipful followers. One of the heroes of the student movement that tried to finish what King, Shuttlesworth, and others had started was Bob Moses. People in rural Mississippi began to refer to him as "Moses in the Bible." In the spirit of the student movement, Moses tried to disavow his own significance (following the example of his namesake when God first called him), and even dropped his last name and tried to become known as "Robert Parris." Mary King also reports that people outside the Movement "invariably called him either a mystic or a saint. Local people in Mississippi used to say that he was 'Moses in the Bible'" (146). (6) John Lewis, one of the most pragmatic of the student leaders, said Moses had a "tremendous impact... [and] not just in Mississippi." According to Lewis, Moses's followers made him "the all-perfect and all-holy and all-wise leader, and I think that's one of the reasons he changed his name" (qtd. in Stoper 128, 140) (7) Bi ll Higgs, a white lawyer from Mississippi, one of the rare "inside agitators" who supported the Movement, said that, when Moses spoke, "It was really like listening to the Lord, I tell you it was!" Moses "could have been Socrates or Aristotle," in the way he tore into Martin Luther King when King suggested compromise on a matter of principle. Kiggs quoted Moses insisting, "We're not here to bring politics into our morality but to bring morality into our politics." When Moses said that, according to Eiggs, "King and everybody knew the jig was up"--that the Mississippi Freedom Delegation would never accept any compromise. James Forman, the black student leader who became one of Moses's rivals and tried to pull the Movement away from both politics and religion, referred to the "almost Jesus-like aura that [Moses] and his name had acquired." (8) Amzie Moore, from an older generation of black Mississippians who attempted to develop an organized, indigenous political movement with few ties to the urban-oriented Sou thern Christian Leadership Conference, made Moses sound like a revivalist preacher, too. Moore said Moses was "like an Apostle who makes his circles, and he goes to this mission and that mission and the other mission, to straighten them out on anything that they might be confused about. And then he makes the circuit" (qtd. in Burner 206n23). (9)

Evangelism, or reaching out to those who do not normally come to church, is crucial to the expansion of all revivals. During times of Civil Rights activity, advertising and excited word of mouth helped expand church attendance in the black South. (10) King's partner, the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, even recalled going out to round up "sinners" in the pool halls, juke joints, and dives of Montgomery, to persuade the sinners by whatever means he could to attend the first meeting of what became the Montgomery Boycott. It was not enough for those who already had the faith to come (Abernathy 140).

In 1962, King, Abernathy, and others made a similar round through the "Harlem" district of Albany, Georgia. This time, they aimed more to persuade the "sinners" not to disrupt Movement discipline (some rock and brick throwing had broken out) than to bring them into the meeting. Still, Abernathy preached to at least one group of Albany's hustlers and sharks, "Close the pool hall and come with us" (qtd. in Watters 213-16).

The promise these religious leaders made of a political deliverance, if people would only unite in the cause, is similar, in form, to the traditional revivalist promise that sinners will attain God's grace if they come to a meeting and repent. The greatest difference is that this time the promise came partially true on earth, in a way that was objectively visible to nonbelievers: in court decisions and Acts of Congress. (When the Supreme Court confirmed that local bus segregation was unconstitutional, King's narrative of the Montgomery Boycott quoted one "joyful bystander" saying, "God Almighty has spoken from Washington, D.C." [King, Stride 160].) But the considerable delay before the promise came true--after a century of setbacks and false hopes--indicates that belief in the promise demanded great faith.

Such credulity-stretching faith was encouraged by talk of miracles. In the first mass meeting of the Montgomery Boycott, Abernathy recalled that two ministers "experienced miraculous cures." They had been too ill to preach, but when the crowd "rocked the rafters," singing songs with "no revolutionary overtones," suddenly "the scales fell from Powell's eyes. ... Huffman's laryngitis had disappeared and he was able to recite a long and remarkably resonant prayer. These were the first of many miracles that would occur over the next fifteen years" (Abernathy 140). In her memoir, Coretta Scott King recalled Martin Luther King's being disturbed that the victory at Montgomery came so fast. "People will expect me to perform miracles for the rest of my life," she quoted him as saying (Coretta Scott King 159). If not any divine spirit, at least good luck and weather kept up with him, however. A witness of King's "mountaintop" speech in Memphis recalled the miraculous special effects: "I'm not a religious fanatic," Jes se Epps said. "But at some points where there should have been applause there was a real severe flash of lightning and a real clap of thunder that sort of hushed the crowd" (qtd. in Beifus 365-66).

One kind of miracle in particular, the conversion experience, plays a crucial role in consummating most religious revivals. In public recitations of conversion narratives, the converted justify their own actions and draw others into the ritual. Typically this involves admitting one's helplessness and surrendering to a higher power. King's own narrative, though couched in understatement, is in this tradition. King tells of his realization that he had put his wife and children in danger by challenging segregation. Death threats came on the phone, and he couldn't sleep:

I got out of bed and began to walk the floor. ... I was ready to give up. With my cup of coffee sitting untouched before me I tried to think of a way to move out of the picture without appearing a coward. In this state of exhaustion, when my courage had all but gone, I decided to take my problem to God. With my head in my hands, I bowed over the kitchen table and prayed aloud. The words I spoke to God that midnight are still in my memory. "I am here taking a stand for what I believe is right. But now I am afraid. The people are looking to me for leadership, and if I stand before them without strength and courage, they too will falter. I am at the end of my powers. I have nothing left. I've come to the point where I can't face it alone."

At that moment I experienced the presence of the Divine as I had never experienced Him before. It seemed as though I could hear the quiet assurance of an inner voice saying: "Stand up for righteousness, stand up for truth; and God will be at your side forever." Almost at once my fears began to go. My uncertainty disappeared. I was ready to face anything. (King, Stride 134)

Many revivalists would have left out King's phrase "it seemed as though" and would not have suggested that God's voice was "quiet" or "inner." But those very mutings make it a revivalist setpiece for an unconverted audience.

Fuller-blown public enthusiasm was common. A participant-observer report on the Albany struggle in the NAACP journal The Crisis, for example, states that, during a public "prayer vigil" in front of city hall, "one of the older sisters 'got happy,' as they say, and responded to the spirit just as if she were praying in the aisle of the Shiloh Baptist Church" (Harding and Lynd 74). John Lewis recalled, "Some of the meetings that we had were like revivals, where people would sing and people would make speeches[;] some of them were fantastic sessions." At one meeting, where Robert Moses announced his name change in Atlanta in 1965. Moses "stood up and took a soft drink bottle with water--he said it was wine but it was not wine--and started singing and marching around the room with a lot of people. It was like being in a revival where the minister saves the souls of the sick" (qtd. in Beardslee 24).

Conversion-like experiences worked across racial lines, as was often the case in earlier revivals; that is one of the features that sometimes distinguished great revivals from established, segregated religion. The Rev. S. S. Seay, former president of the Montgomery Improvement Association (the Boycott organization), told an interviewer in 1972, "I spoke in Charleston, S.C., once and had a white woman come to me and she just wouldn't turn loose. Finally, she said, 'The day of atonement is with us. I don't know if we will ever be able to repent for what we've done to your people.' Then she hauled off and kissed me. I meet person after person like that" (Seay 26).

A black Civil Rights leader in Tallahassee, the Rev. Dan Speed, described King's preaching to an audience that included some "die-hard" racists. Speed saw one of these racists, a news reporter, "get up and whoop and scream. I'm talking about a white ....... A reporter. She forgot her job. I personally had to get her. She said, 'I'm sorry.'" Then another Movement leader, the Rev. C. K. Steele, said to the woman, "'No, don't feel sorry, just let it come'" (qtd. in Morris 98).

Sociologist Aldon Morris, who has done more than anyone to illuminate the role Southern black churches played in Civil Rights activity, explains how the Movement of the 1950s, and particularly King, "refocused" the "cultural content of religion for the black masses" across the South. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, most black churches served as an "opiate," Morris says, preaching "a religion of containment" which held that a good Christian was "concerned with perfecting his or her spiritual life rather than with material well-being." But in the mid-1950s the church revived a militant tradition, the tradition of Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey, Harriet Tubman, and Frederick Douglass. Morris says, tantalizingly, that the new mass meetings "resembled revivals," but he does not elaborate on the parallel. (11)

One movement veteran, Thomas Gilmore, suggested there was as much continuity as there was change in the advent of the Movement. "I consider myself a little mystical," he said. "I think most of us who came through the movement would say, 'I'm going to do what the spirits say do, because I can't really predict what's going to happen tomorrow.' ... To me that is the spirit I'd been introduced to when I was younger. That was the spirit my grandmother talked about, the Holy Spirit that would make her shout." The Movement gave Gilmore "a kind of inner strength" that he had been searching for. He was not sure whether this strength had been "in the process of becoming awake" in his earlier struggles, when he trained for the ministry and then dropped out, "or had been awakened and was frustrated." But he was sure that he found the strength in the Movement: "I got strength from facing the sheriff because he was the biggest man in the county... You really get the feeling that somebody bigger than you is walking beside y ou, and you feel that, well, man, nobody can hurt you if he wanted to. God is real, like Grandma said." After the protests, Gilmore became the first black sheriff of his county in Alabama (qtd. in Beardslee 144).

Gayraud Wilmore's history of the black church--a history deeply informed by the spirits of the Civil Rights Movement--develops the idea of a return to the old traditions in the Civil Rights era by describing what preceded that era (especially during the 1920s and 1930s) as the "deradicalization" of the black church. The Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s was a return to first principles, an effort to bring the church back to the path of righteousness from which it had strayed. Wilmore's account shows, though Wilmore does not emphasize the point, that after the "revival" of the 1950s and 1960s, the Movement of black radicalism became increasingly secularized, to the detriment of both radicalism and religion. Wilmore holds out a fervent hope for another black theological "renewal," which would incorporate more non-Christian elements than the Movement and thus be palatable to black people who have lost (or never found) faith in Christianity. (12)

Taken out of context, the above examples of conversion and belief in miracles may seem to misrepresent the Movement, whose uniqueness derived from its effective strategy and organization. These examples may have been nothing more than the incidental overflowings of a deeply religious people, whose only way of organizing politics was through the church, and whose only available idiom was one in which God or the devil was the hidden subject of every sentence.

But "miracles" played a direct, Functional role in the political strategy that allowed the Movement to advance. Their magic made excellent public relations, even before the largely secular, Northern liberal audience known variously as "American public opinion" and "the nation's conscience." King described an incident in Birmingham in 1963 in which protesters marched toward the city jail, intending to hold a prayer meeting. Public safety commissioner Eugene "Bull" Connor, flanked by officers with guard dogs and fire hoses, ordered the protesters to turn back. But the leader of the march refused. Connor whirled around to his men, according to King's account, and shouted, "Damnit. Turn on the Hoses."

What happened in the next thirty seconds was one of the most fantastic events of the Birmingham story. Bull Connor's men, their deadly hoses poised for action, stood facing the marchers. The marchers, many of them on their knees, stared back, unafraid and unmoving. Slowly the Negroes stood up and began to advance. Connor's men, as though hypnotized, fell back, their hoses sagging uselessly in their hands while several hundred Negroes marched past them, without further interference, and held their prayer meeting as planned. (King. Why 101)

Septima Clark, a black leader from South Carolina who helped organize the Voter Education Project, reported a similar incident in Greenwood, Mississippi, in 1964. This time, a black protester named Ida Holland and her pastor, the Rev. Donald Tucker, were marching to the courthouse:

The white people of Greenwood decided that they would put the police dogs on the marchers. Rev. Tucker was bitten on the ankle. Ida tried to reach him to bind his wounds and was knocked down by a billy club by one of the police officers. While on the ground she could feel the cold nose of the dog near her eyes. She uttered a silent prayer but knew that the dog would soon bite out her eyes and gnaw her cheek. But for some unknown reason a miracle of not wanting to fight pervaded her troubled spirit and she resigned her body to the fate of the dogs and the officers. The dogs did not bite her and the officer did not hit her again. (King, Why 101)

Her pastor made the experience into a streetside sacrament: "She stood up on her feet and Rev. Tucker pinned a white cross on the left side of her dress over her heart. She had been inducted into the nonviolent army." (13)

To be sure, the use of the term miracle in instances like these is rhetorical inflation. On the other hand, since its use in other instances can never be taken as literally true, it is hard to distinguish reliably between inflated uses and more earnest ones. The important thing is that, even when inflated, the use of the term indicates the extent to which religious language pervaded Movement consciousness. It indicates that the mind of the Civil Rights protesters referred almost reflexively to supernatural forces. The otherworldly idiom of miracles was simply the most appropriate one to explain the otherwise inexplicable surprises that so often resulted from nonviolent action.

Particularly important to mass discipline were times when a miracle kept the nonviolent army from turning violent. One of the leaders of the Tallahassee boycott, the Rev. King Solomon DuPont, said that it was part of God's plan that opponents threatened to bomb his house. He told his son, "Go out and pick me up a box of buckshot shells and bring me a big shotgun." But after DuPont's wife refused to go spend the night at her mother's house with the kids, DuPont said, "The Lord spoke to me almost as plain as you talking." The Lord told him, "'You can't fight those with a shotgun.' "DuPont pumped out the shells, threw the gun aside and said, "Now, Lord, every room in this house is yours. These pieces of furniture are yours. The grounds are yours. I'm yours. And I'm going to bed now." Without his knowing it, other armed black men had taken it upon themselves to guard his house, and a suspicious-looking group of white men who passed his house eleven times never had "the courage to stop... . And it's a good thing they didn't" (DuPont 28-29).

There was more than an abstract parallel between the Civil Rights Movement and revivalism. There was a direct relationship between King and the famous revival leader who was his contemporary, Billy Graham. King and his chief of staff, Wyatt Tee Walker, sought advice from Graham and Graham's staff of tactical experts on how to organize large meetings and build publicity (Branch 594-95), and King appeared on stage in one of Graham's "crusades" in New York City in August 1957. (14) The two men even toured Latin America together. Graham, whose audiences were not segregated, often preached against racism and refused to speak in South Africa (Martin 84).

King and other Civil Rights leaders attended to Billy Graham's words as well as his techniques with admiration. Fred Shuttlesworth collected Billy Graham columns (which appeared regularly in many Southern newspapers). In one of these, Graham defended his belief in Hell against a reader who had written asking, "How can an intellectual believe in such a medieval concept? I really didn't know that any educated preachers believed in hell any more." In another, Graham answered readers who wanted to know where "the colored people come from," since Adam and Eve were white. Graham replied to these readers, "We are all so race-bound that we think in the color of our own skins. This is natural, but hardly logical. The race problem will never begin to be solved until we see things through the eyes of the other persons, and other races.... The truth of the matter is that people reared in the hot sun of Palestine are of a swarthy color--or light brown--and our Savior must have had a skin color similar to the people of tha t region." (15)

To Graham, the belief in old-time concepts like Hell was just as natural as the disbelief in modem concepts like racism. King was similar to Graham on both counts, and he generated uneasiness among his less pious advisers. Wyatt Tee Walker, perhaps sensitive to the suspicions of charlatanism that attend charismatic ministers of the poor, testified to the sincerity of King's beliefs. The sincerity came through in the retreats the Movement leaders often had, out of the public eye, away from the masses. "People may laugh at this now," Walker said, "but we read the Bible, had prayers, expressions" (78).

Of all the Movement's strategists, the one least inclined to religious enthusiasm was Bayard Rustin. An interviewer asked Rustin whether King "retained that fundamentalist's sense of an active, personal god." Rustin said, "Oh, yes, profoundly, and I was always amazed at how it was possible to combine this intense, analytical philosophical mind with this more or less fundamental--well I don't like to use the word 'fundamentalist'--but this abiding faith" (qtd. in Raines 57). He could have been talking about Jonathan Edwards or Charles Grandison Finney.

What is remarkable about the Civil Rights Movement, and what makes it most like one of the great historic revivals, is that the enthusiasm moved out of the church and into the streets. It also shifted the focus of church doctrine, as revivals usually do, though not always in the same direction as this time: away from eternal salvation and toward attaining justice in this life. In a region where white and black people alike had been reared on otherworldly doctrines, and had seen ample charlatanism, charges of hypocrisy were a frequent reaction to this shift. These charges got considerable play in the press, and it must be said they contained kernels of truth. Local segregationist spokesmen said the black preachers were buying Cadillacs while the poor people were throwing their bus fare into the collection plate and getting blisters on their feet walking to work. (16) In the Northern cities, Malcolm X and later black "militants" made substantially the same charge. The predatory techniques of an Elmer Gantry see m contrary to the spirit of the Civil Rights Movement, yet they are hard to distinguish from the techniques the Movement used. Guilt-mongering for financial contributions was a staple of mass meetings, perhaps had to be, considering how hard-pressed the congregants were. Had the Movement failed, the charges of the segregationists and black militants might not sound so churlish today as they do.

There is some indirect evidence that, if Civil Rights leaders struggled with the worries these charges must have raised, they found a way to live with them. The theologian who most influenced King's public stance, Reinhold Niebuhr, stressed the need for "emotionally potent oversimplifications" in mobilizing any political movement, either for change or for maintenance of the status quo. Niebuhr was not apologetic or optimistic about such simplifications. He warned that any collective action--that is, all politics--was "morally dangerous." But he also said that all political movements always have relied and always will rely on such simplifications--even salutary, morally necessary political movements. It was the part of realism to acknowledge these simplifications, and the part of morality to take responsibility for them and not abuse them (Niebuhr).

The question raised by the charges of charlatanism in the revivalist techniques of the Civil Rights Movement, then, is not, Did the Civil Rights Movement, for all its virtuous achievements, indulge in mass manipulation? Rather it is, Could the Civil Rights Movement break the mold of run-of-the-mill evangelism only by politicizing it? Could it achieve, that is, a true revival that suddenly made religion a greater presence in people's day-to-day lives than ever before, only by turning religion's means to political ends? So the Albany, Georgia, Civil Rights leader Slater King (no relation to Martin Luther King) asked in assessing why the Albany movement had broken down by 1965. Slater King complained of "the lack of relevance of the Negro church," but noted "the symbolism" the church nonetheless held "for the average Negro woman." Black churches cost the black community as much as $150,000 apiece in Albany. A crucial question for Slater King was, "How can we make the church more relevant?" Somehow the Movement d id that. Looking back, he said the most important thing the Movement had done was to give the "blighted lives" of young people "a ray of hope."

I have looked at the black and white workers in SNCC and felt that if there is any such thing as God working through people, I know that he works through them. For I have seen the hope, the faith and belief which they have instilled into other youngsters' lives. I have seen the new vistas of the heart and mind they have opened up to them; and I have seen the conservatives, black and white, almost go into a state of apoplexy whenever a discussion of SNCC comes up. And for the first time, I can imagine what type of persons the pharisees must have been and I can imagine what type of persons the Disciples must have been--intense, devoted, earthy, erring, but still moving forwards. (Slater King) Two years earlier, Andrew Young told a reporter that there was "a resurgence of religious feeling" in the South "because of the civil rights movement." The whole atmosphere had become "more religious, especially when folks start shooting at you--you do a lot more praying." (17) Was a shrewd political strategy the key to a successful effort to "make religion real in the lives of men," as Fred Shuttlesworth put it (Shuttlesworth June 1964)--in other words, the only way to make religion credible in a world plagued by political injustice?

This question is not neatly separable from the question of the separation of church and state. The Civil Rights Movement brought religious concerns to bear upon local and national law. In doing this, the Movement may have been no different from any other effort to achieve moral ends by political means. The state frequently responds, that is, to religious pressure, even when that pressure is couched in mild, decidedly unrevivalistic tones. Movement participants were more forthright about the source of their moral sentiments than other reformers, at the time and since. They frequently said things like, "I carry my battle with the Bible in one hand and the United States Constitution in the other." (18) The Civil Rights protesters' patriotism was as sincere as their religious devotion, and they did not see any danger in making the state conform to their religious vision. As Shuttlesworth put it at the end of a public declaration in 1964, "We have faith in America, and still believe that Birmingham and Alabama wil l rise to [the] height of glory in race relations. And we shall be true to our ideals as a Christian Nation" (Shuttlesworth Mar. 1964).

But the tainting of religious bodies with the concerns of Caesar was a more difficult question for Civil Rights leaders. All political movements, even secular ones that shun any explicit establishment of religious ideas, involve the question of reconciling ends and means. King and other leaders often discussed the question, Can a moral end be achieved by political means, which by Niebuhr's definition are always immoral? Even nonviolent means force people to do something against their will; if the nonviolent means are serious, they create real deprivation and loss of life. Niebuhr, perhaps the most important American theorist of nonviolence in the twentieth century, insisted there was no moral superiority in the choice of nonviolent over violent means. King agreed.) Nonviolent action, even to redress existing evils, involves an element of playing God, and is therefore immoral. It is a nettlesome and, Niebuhr suggests, logically insoluble question. Only the discipline of a faith beyond logic could keep successf ul nonviolent action from becoming unchecked evil, and faith was no guarantee. The question, Niebuhr suggested, had to remain alive--could not ever be forgotten or considered answered. Comparison of religious revivals to ostensibly secular political movements may contain the keys to how such questions move through the minds of masses of people and are, to use a Movement word, overcome rather than resolved.

Recollections of extraordinary religious experiences are widespread among Movement veterans and set that period off sharply from their experience in previous and subsequent years. Even for nonparticipants the Movement was extraordinary: Charismatic preachers became inescapably prominent in public life for several years in a row. The huge crowds, spilling out of the churches into the streets, behaving in ways they never had before, often seemed to outsiders to be under a spell. They upset the routine of their communities for months-in some cases, years. They affected political alignments, employment, and trade. The culture and social relations of an entire region were radically transformed. Over the period from roughly 1955 to 1965, the way Americans in the North as well as the South thought and felt about such central notions as race, freedom, and equality changed radically. Perhaps more fundamentally, after a period of widespread apathy in the 1950s, a whole new generation suddenly got the idea into its head that wildly idealistic visions of social justice were realistic and worth the trouble to pursue. Can this be equated with the Second Great Awakening of the mid-nineteenth century, which spurred abolitionism and other radical reform movements? (19)

The eminent historian William McLoughlin, a pioneer in the interdisciplinary study of religious life, writes that great religious "awakenings have been the shaping power of American culture since its inception," and that the difference between the historic "great awakenings" and ordinary revivals is that "awakenings alter the world view of a whole people or culture." (20) If he is right, then perhaps what historians frequently call the Second Reconstruction could just as rightly be called a Third Great Awakening. (21)

The Movement's habit of drawing on revivalist traditions, and its injection of powerful religious emotions into the public discussion that shaped Civil Rights legislation in the mid-1960s, raise the question of whether our peculiar modem habit of separating religion from politics is an entirely realistic habit.

It is now customary for historians and sociologists to point out the great political effects of revivals in the past. So many scholars are driven by a revulsion with oppression that a major trend in contemporary scholarship, perhaps a unifying theme in the otherwise fractious humanities and social sciences, focuses on how oppression succeeds and how resistance to oppression sometimes succeeds against the odds. The political decline of the American Left and the fall of organized socialism in Russia and much of Europe has led to a renewed interest in the role religion might play in defeating what secular movements have failed to defeat. Scholars of religious revivals have made particularly important findings along these lines.

Much of the sociological and historical work on revivals explains how revivals often serve to justify radical social changes to deeply conservative masses of people. Sometimes the changes benefit these masses, sometimes they harm them, but either way the changes require unaccustomed ways of thinking, which revivals provide and reinforce with frequent repetition and memorable imagery. In the revivals that are conventionally recognized as such, the political and social results were generally indirect and unintended. But the Civil Rights preachers' making such results their explicit goal is no more significant than other changes in doctrine from one Awakening to the next. The massive religious upheaval in the 1740s in New England reaffirmed predestination, and the upheaval of the early nineteenth century repudiated it, for example, but that colossal theological difference does not stop most of us from referring to the two upheavals as the First and Second Great Awakenings.

There is evidence, as Paul Johnson argues in his book about the Second Great Awakening in upstate New York, that religious enthusiasms can produce, in effect, a bourgeois revolution, instilling in the artisans a sense of discipline and self-restraint that makes them amenable to new industrial discipline. Allen Tullos makes a similar argument in his book about industrialization in the Carolina Piedmont, which took place during revivals in the twentieth century there. There is evidence, as Rhys Isaac argues in his book about the "Great Revival" in colonial Virginia (confirming in effect what Alan Heimert argued long ago), that revivals can democratize a colony and erase habits of deference to the gentry. There is evidence, as Karen Fields suggests in her brilliant and inspiring book about the Jehovah's Witnesses in what is now Malawi and Zambia, that revivals can come closer than explicitly political revolutionary movements of the time (1910s and 1920s) to effecting--if inadvertently--an anti-colonial war of i ndependence. (22)

In other words, ostensibly religious movements have political dimensions, which deserve the attention they have gotten in recent years. But the converse is also true. Ostensibly political movements have religious dimensions, which deserve equal attention. The most successful struggle against oppression in modem America, the Civil Rights Movement, in particular, defies sustained comparison with any nonreligious movement. As a deductive, theoretical proposition, it is hard to imagine masses of people lining up for years of excruciating risk against Southern sheriffs, fire hoses, and attack dogs without some transcendent or millennial faith to sustain them. It is hard to imagine such faith being sustained without emotional, mass rituals--without something extreme and extraordinary to link the masses' spirits together. (23) As an inductive, historical proposition, it is impossible to ignore how often the participants carried their movement out in prophetic, ecstatic Biblical tones. In this age of declining faith in revolution, the tradition of revivalist religion--commonly understood to be the opposite of revolution, indeed the most potent form of the opiate of the masses--might supply the raw materials of successful social change in the future. (24)

Notes

(1.) See Sitkoff; Carson; McAdam; Garrow; Fairclough, To Redeem; Branch. The wave of local "grassroots" studies that has dominated scholarly research for many years now also throws the role of the church into high relief, though some see the church as reacting to a movement that began outside of it (see Chafe; Norrell; Fairclough, Race; Dittmer; Payne). Sociologist Aldon Morris has devoted more attention than others to the form and function of black religion in the Movement in his influential work.

(2.) This is especially evident in Gayraud Wilmore, and in Lincoln and Mamiya's The Black Church in the African American Experience. More specialized works on the largest denomination of the modern black church in its formative years also seek to establish the church's importance in building collective, ultimately politicizable strength and "resistance": See Higginbotham and to a lesser extent James Melvin Washington. (Washington also emphasizes conflict within the church and its sometimes destructive effects on the community.) Cheryl Townsend Gilkes's work on the cultural resistance growing out of black Pentecostalism around the turn of the century has been extremely influential. Broader studies of African American culture, such as the Lawrence Levine's influential work and Vincent Harding's There Is a River, focus on the strength the churches gave black communities to resist and fight oppression even while the churches seemed to accommodate to the status quo or to withdraw from controversy.

All of this is a reaction, perhaps a partial overreaction, to older works, especially those of Benjamin Mays and Joseph Nicholson, and E. Franklin Frazier, which (though they did discuss certain strengths) lamented the backwardness and conservatism of the church. The important works of Ruby Johnston and Joseph Washington, Jr., rarely mentioned by recent scholars, reflect the transition between the Mays-Nicholson-Frazier interpretation and the current emphasis on religion as cryptopolitical resistance. See also Hunt and Hunt.

(3.) The works cited in n1 above give credit to the black church as an institution and black religion as a tradition, but do not consider the revivalistic pattern of collective enthusiasm, or the historical precedents for such waves of enthusiasm in white as well as black churches. Though Aldon Morris delves more deeply into religious life than the others, he only mentions revivalism once in passing. Of the works on the black church in n2, Lincoln and Mamiya use the phrase revival meetings to describe the preparation for the Rev. Jesse Jackson's 1984 presidential campaign, but they do not compare the Civil Rights Movement to revivals in any way. As will be noted below, Wilmore refers to the Movement as a "revival," but only once in passing.

(4.) On this literature, and the crucial question of the relationship revivals have to the wide-ranging political and social changes that they tend to accompany, see n22 below.

(5.) The once-in-a-lifetime feeling is also expressed in a recollection by a Mississippi Movement veteran quoted in John Dittmer (271, and cf. 409).

(6.) Carson notes that Moses changed his name to just Parris in 1965 (156). See also Burner (54n59). I am indebted to Burner's fine biography for most of what I know about this enigmatic leader, who refused to reveal much about himself either to interviewers or in the records of his organization, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

(7.) Jack Newfield (Village Voice 3 Dec. 1964: 3,21) also compared Moses to the original. See Burner 204, 277n15.

(8.) See Romaine 289-90; Burner 186-87, 187n76, 200; Forman 420n1.

(9.) Sally Bellfrage describes Fannie Lou Hamer altering a verse of "Go Tell it on the Mountain" to make it, "Who' that yonder dressed in red? / Let my people go. / Look like the children Bob Moses led... (14). Bellfrage stayed in the house of an "intensely religious" black family in Mississippi: "In a corner near a picture of Christ hung one of Bob Moses." The woman of the house "had cut it out of the Saturday Evening Post, put it in a frame, and often gazed at it with love. 'When he first come here I'd cry for him. I thought sure they'd kill him.... I never thought they'd let him leave alive'" (81).

(10.) Black ministers reported a new high in Sunday church attendance, and local police reported a marked decrease in "Negro crime and drunkenness," according to a local white moderate group (Alabama Council on Human Relations, Newsletter 2 [Feb.-Apr. 1956]: 2).

(11.) Morris 96-99. In the Mississippi Movement, there was also widespread dissatisfaction with the conservatism of the black clergy on the eve of the Civil Rights Movement (see Dittmer 65-67, 150-52, 265, 268-69).

(12.) See Wilmore 177. King's mentor from undergraduate days, Benjamin Mays, complained about the otherworldly emphasis of Southern black churches in The Negro's God. In a report on motivating black people to vote, the Citizen Education Project noted its leaders were planning a series of conferences for ministers on "The Bible and the Ballot," which would "help to overcome some of the ill effects of a pious, personalistic religion which has no pro[p]hetic concern for the community. Our experience has been that this gives ministers some theological basis for participating in voter registration" (Semi-Annual Report to the Field Foundation, 1 July 1962-31 Jan. 1963, Southern Christian Leadership Conference Papers 136:29, King Library and Archives, Martin Luther King Center, Atlanta).

(13.) Septima Clark interview transcript 78-80, King Library and Archives, Martin Luther King Center, Atlanta. Charles Payne does not use the Clark testimony, but his thorough and provocative new analysis of the Movement in Mississippi was helpful in tracking down the full names of Tucker and Holland. His book, incidentally, finds the Movement in Mississippi to be much more secular than most scholars have agreed the Movement was in the South in general. His discussion of the religion of poor black women as a kind of functional equivalent of property ownership, in the sense that it gave propertyless people a sense of efficacy in public life, is intricate and fascinating. Payne does not consider that, if he is correct in finding the Movement in Mississippi much less religious than the Movement appears to be elsewhere (and I think he is), that may help explain why the Movement there was so much less unified and successful in Mississippi than it was, for example, in Alabama.

(14.) Garrow 97. And see Moore.

(15.) Birmingham News clippings, 1961-1965, Shuttlesworth Papers 4:15, King Library and Archives, Martin Luther King Center, Atlanta.

(16.) See, for example, Montgomery County (Alabama) Citizens' Council, States' Rights Advocate 1 (28 June 1956): 3.

(17.) Young, qtd. in New York Times 22 July 1963.

(18.) Interview transcript of a Mr. Johnson, Morehouse College classmate of Martin Luther King, Jr., in Montgomery Boycott Papers, Folder 64, King Library and Archives, Martin Luther King Center, Atlanta.

(19.) It is commonplace to see the Second Great Awakening in the Protestant churches in the North leading to the great wave of reform movements, especially abolitionism. (The only movements that really took off in the South were prison reform and temperance.) See, for example, Tyler's classic as well as Cross; Davis; and, most recently, Robert Abzug's ambitious attempt to capture the religious essence that held the Awakening and the various reform movements together.

(20.) See William McLoughlin, Revivals xiii, 1. This is an important work that brings social theory and social science research to bear on the history of religion. See also McLoughlin's standard work, Modern Revivalism.

(21.) McLoughlin saw a third "Great Awakening" between 1890 and 1920 and, more tentatively, a fourth (underway as he wrote) from roughly 1960 to 1990 or so, but his notion and periodization have not caught on among historians. It remains the convention to refer only to the First (roughly 1730 to 1760) and Second (roughly 1800 to 1840) Great Awakenings; few historians ever think of there having been a third or a fourth. Tom Wolfe, in his famous essay on the "Me Decade," suggested tongue-in-cheekily that the various drug-related or drug-like cults of the 1960s and 1970s constituted a "Third Great Awakening," roughly equivalent in years (though not in depth or breadth of experience) to what McLoughlin thought might be a Fourth (111-47). Wolfe sees the first two Great Awakenings as nothing but destructive of tradition.

(22.) See Johnson; Tullos; Isaac; Fields.

(23.) Cf. Wilmore: "No brainwashing appropriation of Marxist dogma or of some other purely materialistic philosophy of social change could have awakened the awe-inspiring sense of mission and prophetic gifts that were released in Malcolm X by his conversion to Islam." Wilmore quotes Malcolm X as saying, "The only true world solution today ... is governments guided by true religion--of the spirit" (186). Robert Moses said that the mass meetings, with their "testifying" and other expressions of enthusiasm, were the "energy machine" of the Movement in Mississippi. See Dittmer 131.

(24.) The role of religion in public life today has been provocatively raised by several authors. Among them, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, in "Why Are Liberals Afraid of God?" Washington Post, 16 Mar. 1982, takes her readers to task for leaving religion to right-wingers, adding the interesting point that "liberals who mock the idea of sin and punishment and find evangelists particularly odious are often able to tolerate and even applaud this type of religiosity among blacks." Michael Ferber, in "A Religious Revival on the Left" (Nation 6-13 July 1985), provides examples of religious movements for social change and a compelling argument for converting other movements for social change into religious ones. He does not, however, propose dropping the "left" label, which has long-since lost its ability to inspire (or even to describe accurately) commitment to social change. Robert Bellah, et al., in Habits of the Heart, accord religion an important role in what still holds some movements for renewal together, though they obscure the point somewhat by jumping on the classical republicanism bandwagon. Glenn Tinder, in "Can We Be Good Without God?" (Atlantic Dec. 1989: 69-85) and in The Political Meaning of Christianity, and Stephen Carter, in The Culture of Disbelief, plumb the consequences of ignoring and suppressing religion in efforts to remake the world.

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David L. Chappell is Associate Professor of History at the University of Arkansas. His book Inside Agitators: White Southemers in the Civil Rights Movement won the 1995 Gustavus Myers Award.