The Role of Ideas in the Civil Rights South.

Edited by Ted Ownby. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, c. 2002. Pp. xiv, 219. $48.00, ISBN 1-57806-467-8.)

The premise of this anthology is that ideas count and have important consequences. We generally think of the civil rights movement as a case of people reacting to events. The purpose of these nine essays, however, is to examine the ideas behind the actions and to show bow they manifested themselves in activism for and against civil rights.

In the lead essay, David L. Chappell argues persuasively that liberalism and the civil rights movement differed significantly because of the ideas that guided and inspired them. Secular, white-oriented liberalism took its cues from Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma (1944), an unabashedly optimistic tome that predicted the democratic American Creed would soon triumph over racism, without great sacrifice or bloodshed. Emerging from the southern black church, the black-oriented civil rights movement, as exemplified by Martin Luther King Jr., learned its lessons about sinful humankind from the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah, as updated by the neo-orthodox theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. The prophetic tradition that drove King and other black leaders such as John Lewis and James Lawson, Chappell contends, provided the inspirational spark that liberalism lacked, and it propelled courageous activists filled with the spirit of sacrifice into the racist streets.

In the next two articles, Charles Marsh and Ralph E. Luker probe deeper into King's theology to show bow he gravitated between optimism and pessimism. Like Chappell, Marsh stresses the influence of Niebuhr in causing King to abandon the optimistic idea of the "beloved community," with its roots in G. W. F. Hegel and Josiah Royce (p. 25), and to move toward the more sobering theology of Karl Barth, an even more severe critic of Christian liberalism than Niebuhr. On the eve of his death, sensing a Barthian theological crisis, King judged: "The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land. Confusion all around" (p. 37). In a similar vein, Luker illustrates how the iconic preacher ever struggled to maintain a balance between what he called "superficial optimism" and "crippling pessimism" (quoted on p. 49)--that is, between the influence of Walter Rauschenbusch and Niebuhr. In the final article on King, Keith D. Miller shows how King used language from the Bible, sermons, and hymns to create the political eloquence of his famous "I Have a Dream" speech.

Changing the focus to secular thought, Tony Badger argues that white southern liberals from J. William Fulbright to Terry Sanford were too cautious and too racist to offer a program that African Americans could embrace, thus driving blacks to direct action and to the federal government for relief. Richard H. King dissects the thinking of conservative white intellectuals such as Wilmoore Kendall, Richard Weaver, and M. E. Bradford--antimodernists all, and fairly obscure even to historians of black-white relations. Opposed to mass democracy and the modern welfare state, these conservative intellectuals considered the civil rights movement an offshoot of malignant liberalism. Unlike southern politicians, they seldom played the biological race card, justifying the separation of the races on the alleged inferiority of black culture; Weaver, for example, once wrote that jazz was "the clearest of all signs of our age's deep-seated predilection for barbarism" (p. 133).

While the essays penned by Linda Reed and Elizabeth Jacoway on Fannie Lou Hamer and Jim Johnson, respectively, prove engaging, they focus less on ideas than the other works. Jacoway brings Johnson to life as an extreme Arkansas racist who drove the moderate Orval Faubus to the right during the 1957 Little Rock crisis. In the final article Lauren F. Winner surveys the ideas of southern blacks opposed to desegregation. This surprisingly large group consisted of members of the middle class whose livelihood depended on segregation, older blacks paralyzed by habit and fear, and a number of incipient black nationalists.

These essays, though of uneven quality, effectively demonstrate how ideas shaped the language and actions of those who fought for and against the historic civil rights movement. They highlight an important aspect of the movement that is too often ignored. This collection is particularly good at explaining why King, Lewis, Fred Shuttlesworth, and countless others braved beatings and bombings in their crusade for dignity and justice.

DAVID W. SOUTHERN

Westminster College