CHAPTER SEVEN
THE AMBIGUOUS POLITICS OF THE BLACK CHURCH
The history of early Christianity offers noteworthy points of similarity with the modern labour movement. Like it, Christianity was in the beginning a movement of the oppressed. It appears first as a religion of slave and freedman, of the poor without rights and of peoples dominated or dispersed by the Romans.
—Friedrich Engels
Long-haired preachers come out every night,
Try to tell you what’s wrong and what’s right;
But when asked how ‘ bout something to eat
They will answer with voices so sweet:
You will eat, bye and bye ,
In that glorious land above the sky;
Work and pray, live on hay,
You’ ll get pie in the sky when you die.
—Joe Hill, “The Preacher and the Slave,” in Tristram Potter Coffin and Hennig Cohen, eds., Folklore: From the Working Folk of America (Garden City, New York: Anchor, 1974), pp. 401-402.
I
The Black Church occupies a unique position in the evolution of Black cultural and political life in capitalist America. From Reconstruction to Black Power, many significant political figures engaged in Black liberation struggles were either ministers or were profoundly influenced by religion: Nat Turner, Henry H. Garnet, David Walker, Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, Andrew Young, Jesse Jackson, John Lewis and hundreds more. The most influential minister in twentieth century American society, Black or white, was Martin Luther King, Jr. The majority of Black theologians and sociologists of religion tend to make a radical separation between Black faith and the specific political praxis of Black clergy. Most political science research on the Civil Rights Movement concentrates on King’s role as a centrist within the broad and often fractious united front that constituted the desegregationist campaign, and ignores the historical relationship between Black politics and faith. Few historians have seriously explored the Movement’s impact on the evolution of the Black Church.
In the decades immediately preceding the Second Reconstruction, Black clergy as a group experienced a decline in political influence and social status relative to other middle-class Blacks. The Civil Rights Movement provided an historic opportunity for activist preachers to direct their working class congregations in the practical struggle to overturn Jim Crow laws, improve housing conditions and to exercise the right to vote. King and other Black ministers succeeded in their efforts to achieve democratic reforms within the capitalist democratic system, but were unable to alleviate the sufferings of the Black masses caused by institutional racism and capitalism. As the Black Power and Vietnam War destroyed the fragile consensus among the petty bourgeois leadership of the Civil Rights Movement, King was pressured to move to the left. With the courage instilled by his nonviolent convictions, he advanced a progressive human rights agenda at home and abroad, and began to make the case for economic democracy. The majority of Black clergy were then, and still are today, unable to follow King’s example established in 1966-1968.
It would be an error to discuss the politics of the Black Church, however, simply by concentrating on the life and death of King. King is important for us only in two specific respects; in his skillful use of Black faith and spirituality as a lever to motivate the consciousness of the Black working-class masses towards decisive action against the interests of racists and the state, and in his development of a certain praxis which was, although idealist in philosophy, clearly anticapitalist by the time of his assassination. In documenting the evolution of the Black Church, King represents the anticapitalist potential that is inherent within the Black clergy. Given the centrality of religion within the life of the Black masses, it is essential to discuss the potential and limitations of this decisive segment of the Black elite.
The foundations of modern Black politics are found within the Black Church. From the beginning periods of Afro-American slavery, the minister assumed a relatively privileged position within Black civil society, playing roles both spiritual and secular. Hundreds of Black Methodist and Baptist ministers were active in electoral politics during Reconstruction. In 1865, for example, the presiding officer of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, the Reverend J.W. Hood, issued a series of radical reforms for Blacks which included the right to vote. There were a large number of Black ministers elected to their respective state constitutional conventions in the late 1860s. Some of the most influential included the Reverends Henry P. Jacobs, Baptist, Mississippi; T.W. Springer, AME, Mississippi; James Walker Hood, AME Zion, North Carolina; Richard Harvey Cain, AME, South Carolina; Francis Louis Cardozo, Presbyterian, South Carolina; and Henry McNeal Turner, AME, Georgia. In the 1880s, Black ministers like attorney T. McCants Stewart, pastor of New York City’s Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, served on that city’s school board and championed the necessity for Black political independence. Many Black religious leaders supported Black nationalist programs, including C.H. Philips, editor of the Colored Methodist Episcopal Christian Index, and Henry M. Turner. Without exaggeration, it can be stated that almost every Black minister was something of a politician, and that every aspiring Black politician had to be something of a minister. With the rise of Jim Crow and the electoral disenfranchisement of most Blacks after 1900, one of the few remaining roles in which articulate and militant young Black men could exercise political influence was as a preacher.1
The twentieth century witnessed a gradual yet unmistakable decline in the political influence and social status of Black ministers. There were at least three basic reasons for this. The first is illustrated in U.S. Census statistics for the period 1890 to 1970. Four important vocations defined as “middle class” within American society were clergy, teachers, physicians and attorneys. In 1890 there were 12,159 Black ministers in the U.S.; that year, there were only 14,100 Black teachers, 909 doctors and 431 lawyers, out of a total Black population of about eight million. Relatively, a very large percentage of the Black intelligentsia and middle class was found within the church. By 1910 the number of Black ministers peaked at 17,495. Thirty years later, in 1940, the total number of Black clergy amounted to 17,102. That year, the U.S. Census counted 63,697 Black school teachers, 3,524 doctors and 1,052 lawyers and judges. The overall percentage of Black ministers within the Black professional stratum was greatly reduced. This decline accelerated after World War II and with the desegregation of white civil society. The U.S. Census of 1970 recorded only 12,850 Black clergy, compared to 235,436 Black school teachers, 3,728 lawyers and judges, and 6,106 physicians. The number of Black elected officials in the U.S. increased dramatically: 103 in 1964; 1,469 in 1970; and 5,003 in 1980. Many of these new and powerful representatives of the Black elite were not ministers, and owed no allegiance to the Black Church. The ministry itself ceased to be the choice vocation of the middle class, or even politically motivated Blacks. Thousands of other professional Blacks exerted, by their sheer numbers, an increasing significance within the Black community’s political, social and economic development.2
Second, throughout the period there was a sharp decline in the per capita rate of Black ministers to the general Black population. In 1890, 14 percent of all U.S. clergy were Afro-Americans. Using Census figures, the number of Black clergy per thousand Blacks in 1890 was a very high 1.62. This figure was relatively constant for several decades. For example, in 1910 the per capita number of Black ministers per thousand Blacks was 1.56; the per capita number of white ministers per thousand whites was 1.42. After World War I and the Great Depression, the per capita rate slipped for both Blacks and whites, but the decline is more pronounced among Blacks. In I940, the figures were .95 for Blacks and 1.11 for whites. In 1970 the per capita number dropped to .53 for Blacks, but increased slightly to 1.18 for whites. In other words, by 1970 there was about one Black minister for every 1,898 Black people—the smallest per capita figure in Black history. Only seven percent of all U.S. clergy were Black in 1960, and this figure dropped to six percent in 1970.3 The Census historically undercounts all Black people, so it is highly probable that the real number of Black clergy during these years was larger than reported. Nevertheless, even given a massive margin for error, there can be little doubt that both in numbers and in per capita percentage Black clergy declined after 1910.
The third and perhaps decisive factor was the escalation of Black political and social criticism levied at the Black clergy. Throughout his career as a political militant and social scientist, W. E. B. Du Bois repeatedly questioned the ambiguous role of the Black preacher as a progressive factor in the liberation of Afro-American people. In “The Religion of the Negro,” written in 1900, DuBois suggested that the basic spirituality of Black folk “swept irresistibly toward the Goal (of) Liberty, Justice and Right.” Black ministers had the obligation to preach a theology rooted in the practical political conditions of Black humanity.4 DuBois praised the Black Church as an expression of the “Negro’s soul” and organizational ability.5 But he criticized the tendency of major Black churches to split and engage in fractious arguments over personalities and matters of doctrine.6 In 1928 DuBois attacked the Black ministers of Washington, D.C. for banning a lecture by Clarence Darrow because of his agnosticism.7 DuBois understood that the shortcomings of the Black Church were small in comparison to the massive hypocrisy and blatant racism evident within white denominations. In 1913, for instance, he used the pages of The Crisis to condemn the segregationist policies of the Episcopal Church, declaring “the church of John Pierpont Morgan” was not “the church of Jesus Christ.”8 He denounced the Catholic Church in 1945 for maintaining “separate white and Negro congregations in the South” and for “(refusing) to receive colored students in a large number of their schools.”9 DuBois believed that all white Christian churches expressed “a double standard of truth” towards the Negro, professing the highest ideals while carrying out “the most selfish and self-seeking” practices of race hatred and oppression.10 For these reasons, DuBois argued, the Black Clergy had no other alternative execpt to become an active agent for social justice and political transformation.
Other critics of the Black clergy were far less generous than DuBois. A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen, editors of the Black socialist journal The Messenger, declared in 1919 that the Black Church was an utter disaster. Black preachers as a group were silent on lynchings, political disenfranchisement in the South, and Black economic exploitation by white capitalists.11 Echoing Karl Marx, V.F. Calverton charged in 1927 that religion was a kind of “other-worldliness” among Blacks. The traditional Judeo-Christian ethic of forgiveness, submissive behavior, prayer for salvation and tolerance toward one’s earthly oppressors simply perpetuated white racism and the brutal extraction of surplus value from the labor power of the Black proletariat.12 Many Northern Black ministers were secretly on the payroll of white industrialists such as Henry Ford, using their influence among working-class Blacks to counsel patience with low wages and to reject unionism. After World War II the level of criticism increased. Writing about that “special gray death that loiters in the streets” of Harlem, LeRoi Jones condemned the Black minister as representing a drug to blind Blacks from the frustrations of urban life. “You can go to church Saturday nights and Sundays and three or four times during the week,” he stated in Home; “or you can stick a needle in your arm four or five times a day.”13 In The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, Harold Cruse suggested that the Black ministers of Harlem “vie with professional social workers and police chiefs over which brand of community uplift is best for soothing the tortured ghetto soul ‘twixt Hell on earth and Heavenly hereafter. Many of them ‘mean well’ toward the ‘masses’ but they are frightened to death of power—others’ and their own.”14 Many, but not all Black ministers, were silent when DuBois, Paul Robeson and other Black socialists and progressives were slandered and arrested during the McCarthy era.15 The growing postwar successes of the NAACP and other more progressive biracial groups further reduced the power and prestige that the Black Church had once claimed.
The Black Church continued to serve its traditional function as a “refuge” and forum “to satisfy (the) deepest emotional yearnings” of Black people. However, the relationship between the first and second generation Black urban working class in the North with their Black clergy was becoming at best problematic. In The Negro’s Church, published in 1933, the Reverend Dr. Benjamin E. Mays and Joseph W. Nicholson analyzed one hundred Black sermons at random, discovering that 20 were devoted to theological doctrine, 54 were vaguely “other-worldly” and only 26 centered on contemporary secular affairs. During the depths of the Great Depression, the Black working class had begun to “develop a more secular outlook on life” and increasingly complained “that the church and the ministers are not sufficiently concerned with the problems of the Negro race.” By the dawn of the Civil Rights Movement, noted Black sociologist E. Franklin Frazier would observe that “the Negro church has lost much of its influence as an agency of social control. Its supervision over the marital and family life of Negroes has declined. The church has ceased to be the chief means of economic cooperation.”16 Growing numbers of Black ministers in the North began to be selected by white politicians and business leaders to serve on municipal health and welfare boards. “In this capacity,” wrote sociologist Daniel C. Thompson, these pastors “represent(ed) the Negro community” and served “as advisors to white groups where certain problems directly affecting Negroes are concerned.”17 Nevertheless, the majority of Black clergy seemed ineffective or apathetic in the fight for meaningful economic and political reforms which would touch the daily lives of their congregations.
The Brown decision of the Supreme Court in May, 1954, presented new challenges to Black ministers. To the surprise and chagrin of many Negro clergy, a key element in the forces of “Massive Resistance” to desegregation were white ministers. Many more “liberal Southern Christian clergy cautioned their white congregations to obey the law, “improve communications between races,” and advocated the “full privileges of first class citizenship” for all. But even Atlanta’s white ministers, who were among the most tolerant and “liberal,” warned in a public statement that “we do not believe in the wisdom of massive integration.” Historian Numan V. Bartley has noted that “integrationist activity was not conducive to a smoothly functioning House of God in almost any part of the South.” In Montgomery, Dr. G. Stanley Frazer, leader of Alabama’s white Methodists, and R. Henry L. Lyon, twice president of the Alabama Southern Baptist Convention, “were two of the most prominent ministers in the city and both were outspoken proponents of “segregation.” Dr. John H. Buchanan, Birmingham’s leading white clergyman, declared in 1956 that “the good Lord set up customs and practices of segregation.” Throughout the 1950s and 1960s the American Baptist Association Convention annually condemned desegregation. The American Council of Christian Churches, with a total membership of one million, declared solemnly in 1958 that integration “does violence to the true gospel of Jesus Christ.” Episcopalians in South Carolina proclaimed publicly in 1956 “that there is nothing morally wrong in a voluntary recognition of racial differences and that voluntary alignment can be both natural and Christian.” Mississippi Presbyterians refused to carry out church directives in 1957 to desegregate. The Alabama American Baptist Convention even proclaimed in October, 1959, that integration was a “Communist” plot. White Christian clergy and laymen expressed few reservations to become involved in the fight to preserve white supremacy.18
The Montgomery Bus Boycott, initiated on December 1, 1955 by Rosa Parks, was the beginning of the Second Reconstruction, a massive, ethical movement by Blacks and their white liberal allies to destroy racial segregation. The idea for the nonviolent boycott had been that of E.D. Nixon, an experienced member of the 1941 March on Washington Movement and trade union activist in Randolph’s Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. A chief administrator in the boycott itself was Bayard Rustin, a Black Quaker and social democrat who had participated in the earliest “freedom rides,” or Journey of Reconciliation in the late 1940s. Black ministers were a minority in the major Black political organization of the city, the Montgomery Improvement Association.19 Yet it was the Black clergy which provided the moral, social and political context for the entire struggle: the Reverend L. Roy Bennett, Reverend Ralph David Abernathy, Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and others. King’s address at Montgomery’s Holt Street Church at the outset of the boycott, established the popular framework for Black resistance:
One of the great glories of democracy is the right to protest for right . . . We are protesting for the birth of justice in the community. Our method will be that of persuasion, not coercion. Our actions must be guided by the deepest principles of our Christian faith. Love must be our regulating ideal. Once again we must hear the words of Jesus echoing across the centuries: ‘Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, and pray for them that despitefully use you.’ If we fail to do this our protest will end up as a meaningless drama on the stage of history, and its memory will be shrouded with the ugly garments of shame. In spite of the mistreatment that we have confronted, we must not become bitter and end up hating our white brothers. As Booker T. Washington said, ‘Let no man pull you down so low as to make you hate him.’20
Martin Luther King’s life and martyrdom, long etched in Black history, and popularized within Black and U.S. culture, require little rehearsal here. Several important social factors within King’s legacy, and in the history of the Black Freedom Movement, are however grossly ignored. The emergence of King, Ralph Abernathy, and other Black clergy in the forefront of the desegregation struggle was to an extent a progressive response to white clergy who had taken up the cause of white supremacy in Alabama and across the South generally. If Christ could be portrayed by white Baptists as a Ku Klux Klansman, then He could just as easily be enlisted in the ranks of bus boycotters and Freedom Riders by Black Baptists. The Civil Rights Movement occurred at a time when the social and political role of Black preachers was steadily diminishing. By participating in their people’s struggles, the Black ministers could once again set the political and moral climate for millions of Blacks who over previous decades had become alienated or disillusioned with church inactivity in secular issues. As in the years of Reconstruction, from 1865-1877, the Black Church provided the necessary social space for political discussions, strategy sessions and effective protest. With the creation of the Southern Christian Leader ship Conference (SCLC) in 1957, King and other Black ministers forged an appropriate political vehicle for the battle to destroy Jim Crow. Not coincidentally, they created the political terrain essential to reclaim the prestige and class status the Black clergy had lost over the previous half century within the Negro petty bourgeoisie.
King was the most prominent Black minister of the Civil Rights Movement—yet his rise to greatness should not obscure the fact that hundreds of other Black preachers and laymen were responsible for many of the real accomplishments of the Movement. In Lynchburgh, Virginia, the SCLC affiliate led by the Reverend Virgil Wood initiated numerous nonviolent direct action campaigns. The Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth was responsible for many of the successes combating Bull Connor’s racist police force and the white power structure in Birmingham. The Reverend Hosea Williams was an effective SCLC coordinator in the desegregation campaigns in Savannah, Georgia. The Reverend James Lawson assisted King in the founding conference of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) at Shaw University, in Raleigh, North Carolina. The Reverend Matthew McCollum, one of the SCLC’s founders, was a skilled veteran of desegregation struggles in Orangeburg, South Carolina. Other influential Black activist pastors included C.K. Steele of Tallahassee, Florida; C.T. Vivian, the central coordinator of the SCLC; Bernard Lafayette of Selma, Alabama; Walter Fauntroy, director of the SCLC Washington, D.C. Bureau; Wyatt Tee Walker of Petersburg, Virginia; and a host of younger Black divinity students and pastors like Jesse Jackson, Andrew Young and James Bevel. In Northern states, Black ministers who had previously done little in the way of political or economic protest were stirred to act. In May, 1960 in Philadelphia, four hundred Black clergymen decided to pressure white-owned corporations to hire Black employees in “decent positions.” Confronting the racist policies of one company, the ministers initiated a boycott of the firm’s products, an act supported by virtually every Black Masonic lodge, church organization and social club in Pennsylvania.21
Yet it was King alone who captured the imagination of the Black masses, while earning the respect of the media and white establishment. In the early years of the sit-in movement, it was not unusual for teenage protestors to ask each other, “What do you suppose Martin Luther King would do in this situation?” King biographer William Robert Miller writes that by 1960 “King’s symbolic role was supreme, his charismatic stature was universally recognized. In the flux of rapidly proliferating and chaotic events, he towered as a pillar of strength.”22 For whites, confronted with the growing radicalism of SCLC and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), King made the “nonviolent direct action movement respectable.” Historian August Meier recognized in 1965 that “King’s very tendencies toward compromise and caution, his willingness to negotiate and bargain with White House emissaries, his hesitancy to risk the precipitation of mass violence upon demonstrators, further endear him to whites. He appears to them as a ‘respectable’ and ‘moderate’ man.”23 As a minister, King constantly assumed the irreproachable posture of an ethical reformist committed to Gandhian political efforts. When white evangelist Billy Graham urged King “to put the brakes on a little bit” in the desegregation campaign in Birmingham, the SCLC leader relied solely upon Christian doctrines to justify the necessity for continued struggle. King’s famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” published in Christian Century and Liberation in June, 1963, was an eloquent rejection of white Birmingham clergymen’s appeals to halt nonviolent demonstrations.24
III
Historical memory is selective. Most Afro-Americans now fail to recall that the support provided for Black activist-oriented clergy by more powerful Black Church leaders was hardly unanimous. The outstanding example of neoaccommodation was the Reverend Joseph H. Jackson, president of the National Baptist Convention. In 1956 Jackson applauded King’s protest activities, and was one of several speakers at a rally marking the first anniversary of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Jackson soon disapproved of King’s growing influence within political circles, and cautioned his ministers not to become actively involved in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference founded in 1957. When the Reverend George Taylor and the Reverend George Lawrence challenged Jackson’s faction for leadership in the National Baptist Convention in 1960-1961, King supported Taylor and Lawrence. In 1961, 800 Black activist-oriented ministers finally broke with Jackson, establishing the Progressive Baptist Convention. Subsequently, Jackson had little to say in support of King, and took any opportunity to condemn nonviolent, direct action activities. At the 1962 National Baptist Convention, Jackson singled out fellow ministers who had assisted the SCLC drive to desegregate Albany, Georgia, criticizing the futility of their efforts. “It is hypocrisy,” he charged, “for a delegation to leave Chicago and go to Albany to fight segregation.” Four years later, when King, Abernathy, Jesse Jackson and other Black ministers followed his advice by staging a massive desegregation campaign in Chicago, Joseph Jackson “issued a public statement dissociating himself from the event and peppering its unnamed instigator with politely worded abuse.”25
The success of Montgomery not only boosted the protest potential of the Black Church, but it affected the political relations of almost every left-of-center group toward the Black clergy. Harold Cruse has argued that Black members of the Communist Party in the 1930s condemned the Black Church as hopelessly reactionary. “Twenty-five years later, with the emergence of Dr. Martin Luther King, the Negro church ceased to be a reactionary, as the Communists jumped on King’s bandwagon.”26 Actually, the leadership of the more conservative NAACP and Urban League, as well as King’s SCLC and CORE eschewed public cooperation and joint work with Marxists and socialists. In 1961, for example, the Louisville branch of the NAACP attacked Louisville’s CORE chapter for working with Carl and Anne Braden, officers in the Southern Conference Educational Fund which was “widely charged” as a Communist organization. James Farmer and CORE’s national leadership “dealt with the Bradens most circumspectly, advising field personnel not to accept food or lodging from them.”27 Two years later, when Black activists were confronted with a desperate shortage of lawyers in Mississippi who would take civil rights cases, the National Lawyers Guild “aggressively volunteered its help to various civil rights groups.” SNCC accepted the Guild’s offer, but CORE’s leaders rejected “cooperation with the Guild, fearing that its identification as a Communist front might damage the movement.”28 The Reverend Adam Clayton Powell, then the most influential Black elected official in the U.S., informed King in 1960 that he was willing to support him—on the condition that he fire Bayard Rustin, a moderate leftist, from his staff. Writing in Harper’s, novelist James Baldwin charged that Martin “lost much moral credit . . . especially in the eyes of the young, when he allowed Powell to force Rustin’s resignation. King was faced with the choice of defending his organizer, who was also his friend, or agreeing with Powell; and he chose the latter course.”29
The explicit anticommunism of many Black ministers, the NAACP and even more liberal civil rights groups existed throughout the postwar period. In 1946, the NAACP rejected cooperation with the leftist Civil Rights Congress’ campaign to oust the notorious racist, Mississippi Senator Theodore Bilbo, from office. Walter White, NAACP leader, argued that “it was imperative that this (campaign) be done under non-Communist auspices.”30 In 1948, CORE’s Executive Committee issued a “Statement on Communism,” ordering chapters not to affiliate with leftist organizations, and “enacted procedures for disaffiliating chapters which had fallen under Communist domination.”31 In a different way, a contempt for a materialist analysis was also expressed by Black, middle class student radicals in the 1960s. Julius Lester wrote in 1968 that “many Blacks view Marxism and Communism as foreign ideologies. Young Black militants do not consider Marxism relevant” since Marx “was a white man.”32 Liberal (and anticommunist) journalist Harry Golden suggested that Communists failed to attract Southern Blacks for two reasons. First, “they do not depend on nor incorporate Jesus and the Gospels.” Second, “the great mass of the American Negroes do not reject the existing social order, they seek only to share fully in its bourgeois blessing.”33 More than other Blacks, the clergy commonly shared an unstated antipathy for atheism in any form, and possessed a class-oriented commitment to the acquisition of private property and Black petty capitalism. “Historically, the Black preacher was the first member of the Black professional class, the Black elite,” writes Robert Allen. “He frequently had some degree of education (and) enjoyed a semi-independent economic status.”34 The unwillingness to unite with Marxists and militant social democrats who expressed a sincere commitment to destroy racial segregation eliminated any possibility that the Civil Rights Movement would transcend its theoretical parochialism and develop a legitimate agenda to reconstruct the political economy of the United States.
Legitimate criticisms of King, coming from Black activists and sympathetic intellectuals, began as early as 1958. In Présence Africaine, Cruse charged that King’s theoretical foundations for social protest exemplified “the confusion of the Negro middle-class mind on (the) question of racial integration.” For Cruse, King’s assertion that the civil rights struggle would allow Negroes to lose their “racial identity” was both tragic and absurd. “It requires neither intellect, education, nor morality these days to howl for civil rights,” Cruse declared, “but it does require some profundity of insight and honesty in racial matters to know what to do with civil rights after they are achieved.”35 By late 1963, Rustin had begun to censure King for relying too heavily upon “the tactics of lying down in the streets to prevent the movement of trucks, and other forms of direct action.” Rustin suggested that “heroism and ability to go to jail should not be substituted for an overall social reform program.”36 In 1963 Black writer LeRoi Jones was perhaps the first critic to draw the historical analogy between King and Booker T. Washington. In Midstream magazine, Jones noted that “Washington solidified the separate but equal lie, when that lie was of value to the majority of intelligent white men. King’s lie is that there is a moral requirement to be met before entrance into the secular kingdom of plenty.” For Jones, King was a model missionary who helped to perpetuate racist hegemony:
In this sense King’s main function (as was Washington’s) is to be an agent of the middle-class power structure, Black and white. He has functioned in Montgomery, Albany, Birmingham, etc. (as has the Negro middle class in general) as a buffer, an informer, a cajoler against action not sanctioned by white Intelligence . . . He is screaming at the blimp with the loudspeaker of recent agonies. He is a hand-picked leader of the oppressed, but only the pickers are convinced.37
In the summer months of 1964 and 1965, the patience fostered by Black ministers within ghetto communities began to wear thin. The absence of any “national organization which could speak to the growing militancy of young Black people in the urban ghettos and the black-belt South,” in SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael’s words, undermined “the struggle against racism.” When innercity Blacks watched the news and “saw Dr. King get slapped they became angry. When they saw little Black girls bombed to death in a church and civil rights workers ambushed and murdered, they were angrier.”38 The number of Black urban uprisings increased from nine in 1965, 38 in 1966, 128 in 1967, and 131 in the first six months of 1968. These urban disorders were not only a rejection of the Johnson Administration’s limited “War on Poverty,” but a break from the quiescence of Black middle class and Black preacher-dominated civil rights organizing efforts. The Black masses were prepared to “take to the streets and thereby declare their hatred for the bondage imposed on them.”39
With the sudden renaissance of Black nationalism in the guise of Black Power, both King and his entire generation of activist-ministers received a profound jolt. SNCC activist Julius Lester’s Look Out, Whitey! Black Power’s Gon’ Get Your Mama! repeated Jones’ denunciation of King as merely the “successor of Booker T. Washington.” King’s message of “love” was hypocritical, Lester declared. “What is love supposed to do? Wrap a bullet in a warm embrace? Caress the cattle prod?” For Black activist veterans of the Albany, Birmingham and Selma campaigns, the spirituality and ethos of nonviolence was dead. “We used to sing ‘I Love Everybody’ as we ducked bricks and bottles,” Lester reflected. “Now we sing: Too much love, Too much love, Nothing kills a nigger like too much love.”40 Robert Allen’s Black Awakening in Capitalist America concluded that even the Black activist minister could not be expected to provide any effective, long-term leadership in the Black Movement. Although “the Black minister remains today an important, if not the most important, social force in most Black communities,” he represents a prime “collaborator” and “force of conservatism.” Allen noted:
While it must be said that the Black church has performed an essential function in maintaining social cohesion in Black communities through decades of travail and suffering, it cannot be denied that the Black preacher is often identified as an ‘Uncle Tom’ . . . He is seen as a traitor to the best interest of his people. .. The minister, in accepting Christianity, also in some degree identified with the major moral values and institutions of white society. Consequently it was relatively easy for him to work with whites, even though this sometimes amounted to a betrayal of Blacks.41
As for Martin himself, the young Black nationalists had little sympathy. “As the crisis of Black America deepened,” Allen wrote, King was converted into “a reluctant accomplice of the white power structure.” The white elites discovered that King was useful “to restrain the threatening rebelliousness of the Black masses and the young militants.” Furthermore, “King could not repudiate this role because he was convinced that the establishment could be pushed and pressured to implement his program.”42 At a speech at the University of California-Berkeley in October, 1966, SNCC chairperson Stokely Carmichael expressed an ambiguous respect yet deep disillusionment toward King and his goals. Carmichael admitted that King was “full of love,” “mercy and compassion,” a man “who’s desperately needed in this country. But every time I see (President) Lyndon (Johnson) on television, I say ‘Martin, baby, you got a long way to go.’”43
King’s final years provide some parallels with the last months of the major Black nationalist of the 1960s, Malcolm X. Like the former Muslim minister, King had begun to reevaluate the goals of the Black struggle from the simple demand for civil rights to the pursuit of “human rights.” His first public speech on the Vietnam War, given at a Virginia statewide meeting of SCLC affiliates in Petersburg in July, 1965, was a mixture of anticommunism, moral suasion and passivism. “I am certainly as concerned about seeing the defeat of communism as anyone else,” King stated, “but we won’t defeat communism by guns or bombs or gasses. We will do it by making democracy work.” He called for an immediate end to U.S. military involvement in Southeast Asia and a “negotiated settlement even with the VietCong.”44 By 1967 King was actively leading the U.S. peace movement, addressing rallies and proposing concrete details for U.S. disengagement from Vietnam. He became more concerned about the profound similarity between the oppressed material conditions of the unemployed, Blacks and whites, and proposed a “Poor People’s March” on Washington, D.C. in October, 1967. Many of King’s oldest friends rejected him, some visciously attacking his new political concerns in the media. Negro columnist Carl Rowan, who assisted King during the Montgomery Bus Boycott, charged that the leader’s peace activities have “alienated many of the Negro’s friends and armed the Negro’s foes, in both parties, by creating the impression that the Negro is disloyal.” Conservative representatives of the Black middle class, such as Whitney Young of the Urban League, NAACP director Roy Wilkins and former socialist Ralph Bunche bitterly condemned King, as did the only Black in the U.S. Senate, Edward Brooke. Many Black ministers within the SCLC privately criticized King for moving too far left, and publicly separated themselves from any antiwar demonstrations and religious peace services. On April 4, 1968, King was assassinated while assisting 1,375 Black sanitation workers in Local 1733 of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, AFL-CIO in a strike in Memphis, Tennessee. The middle class reformer had become a militant proponent of peace, economic democracy and Black working class interests.45
IV
King’s strengths and weaknesses were not his alone, but those of his social group, the Black clergy. His moral appeals for nonviolence, racial harmony and desegregation were shared by previous generations of Black middle class reformers. His initial reluctance to emphasize economic issues, his implicit anticommunism and desire for compromise rather than confrontation with the white establishment was also the popular ideology of the Negro petty bourgeoisie. Where King departed from his contemporaries was his recognition that Black ministers as a group had to play a decisive role in the reconstruction of U.S. civil and political society. The greatest political contradiction confronting the masses of Blacks, the system of white supremacy, was of course the primary target of King’s efforts. In the process of struggle, however, King concluded finally that the defeat of racial segregation in itself was insufficient for creating Americans. King followed the tradition of earlier Black activist-clergy—Henry Highland Garnet, Henry M. Turner, Nat Turner—by calling for radical and fundamental change. Without hesitation, he broke from many of his own advisors and supporters, and like Malcolm, raised many public policy issues which could not be easily resolved within the existing system. Congressperson Louis Stokes, chairperson of the U.S. House Select Committee on Assassinations, believes that King was murdered because “he had begun to wake up poor people in this country, not only poor Black people but also poor white people. (In) entering this dangerous area,” King had to be killed.46
Many of King’s lieutenants in the Black clergy have failed to pursue King’s vision. Abernathy, Hosea Williams and the brother of the martyred civil rights activist Medgar Evers, Charles Evers, endorsed the presidential candidacy of ultraconservative Ronald Reagan in 1980. Andrew Young, currently mayor of Atlanta, Georgia, served as U.N. ambassador in the Carter Administration.
Several ministers within the SCLC, including Fauntroy, have been elected to high office, and Jesse Jackson’s Operation PUSH captures headlines with political maneuvers which are more style than substance. As a group, however, not a single member of King’s generation has courageously pursued the logic of his final years. Part of their current dilemma is created by their conscious, class-oriented commitment to infuse the Negro middle class into the present economic order and to perpetuate the inert politics of bourgeois reform. They are not prepared to repudiate the system which rewards their own political accommodation at the expense of the continued exploitation of Black working class and poor people.
Even after the most detailed exploration of the politics of the Black Church, a series of contradictions remain. How has the Black Church as an institution failed repeatedly to evolve into a coherent agency promoting the liberation of Afro-American people, and why has it succeeded to reveal itself as an essential factor in Black struggles at certain difficult historical periods? Why is the stereotypical Black preacher the frequent object of embarrassment, ridicule and scorn for the Black petty bourgeoisie and to much of the Black working class, yet simultaneously he continues to be a critically important contributor to the total sum of Black social, cultural, economic and political life? How can such a church create Martin Luther King and Daddy Grace, Ben Chavis and Reverend Ike? Why, in short, does the Black Church continue to perform its fundamentally ambiguous role in the Black experience?
The insights of Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci, and especially his critique of the role of Catholicism within Italian society and culture, have particular merit for our own situation. Religion for any society constitutes the most important element of the people’s “common sense.” But common sense “is not a single conception, identical in time and space: it is the folklore of philosophy . . . disintegrated, incoherent, inconsecutive.” Organized religions attempt, first, to impose order out of the day-to-day chaos that is experienced in cultural, social and economic relations. Religion endeavors to transform “what the masses think embryonically and chaotically about the world and about life.” Various social strata experience religion in diverse ways. “Every religion (is) a multiplicity of distinct and often contradictory religions: there is the Catholicism of the peasants, the Catholicism of the petty bourgeoisie and the town workers, the Catholicism of the women and the Catholicism of the intellectuals.” The same could be claimed for Black America. The rural sharecroppers and urban poor are attracted to evangelical or fundamentalist denominations, with their physical and passionate expressions of faith and conversion. The Black working class for a century and more has consistently been Baptist and Methodist. The Black petty bourgeoisie are generally attracted to “high church” Anglicanism, Catholicism, Presbyterianism and Congregationalism. Substantial elements of the Black intelligentsia have been either Quakers, deists, agnostics or atheists. Nationalists have often been attracted to alternatives to Christianity, particularly Islam. Extreme integrationists have sometimes claimed Judaism. What unifies believers here is faith itself, “the most important element of a non-rational character” in all religious creeds.47
“But (faith) in whom and for what?” Gramsci asks. “The power of religion has consisted and does consist in the fact that they feel strongly the need for the doctrinal unity of the whole ‘religious’ mass, and struggle to prevent the superior intellectual elements detaching themselves from the inferior ones. The struggle has not always been fought without serious inconvenience for the church itself, but this inconvenience is connected with the historical process which transforms the whole of civil society and which en bloc contains a criticism destructive of religion.”48 Any and every religious organization is confronted with the problem of uneven ideological development and irregular commitments that the masses express toward the church and its dogma, an unevenness which is itself a direct product of class distinctions. Moreover, for historically oppressed groups, religion becomes a primary forum for the divisions that exploiters have pressed upon that people’s socioeconomic reality. The church strives for unity in a material environment that cannot congeal itself.
The practical tasks of the Black Church have been (1) to provide an idealist, non-rational popular worldview to the Black masses, Christianity, which is achieved by the ritualistic acts of individuals who acknowledge Christ and the particular elements present within the theology of a denomination; (2) to preserve and to defend the actual material interests of one’s congregation, and by extension, all Black people, by confronting the state apparatus, by taking calculated political risks, and by articulating the real grievances of Blacks from pulpits to public policy meetings; (3) to develop fraternal relations with white congregations and denominations, yet maintaining the unique character and independent spirit of the Black Church; and (4) to build cultural and social unity and a critical respect for Black history among Afro-Americans, while opposing the imposition of racial segregation, vigilante violence and racial hatred upon Blacks by whites. The Black Church is divided, because its raison d’être is divided. Confronting this nearly impossible challenge, Black churchmen have almost always set a series of priorities, either consciously or unconsciously. Those ministers who have emphasized material, day-to-day challenges of being Black in a racist/capitalist state, and those who have not hesitated to leave the cloistered halls of God to enter the turbulent and gritty realities of the streets are part of what I have called the tradition of Blackwater. Those ministers who emphasize prayer over politics, salvation over suffrage, the study of Ecclesiastes over the construction of economic cooperatives, represent the Other-Worldly position of Black faith. Both are legitimate and historically grounded within the Black Church, and are often expressed in contradictory ways by single individuals. The most conservative and accommodating Black itinerant preacher always has within him the capacity to become a Nat Turner.49
Both traditional perspectives within the Black Church are flawed, however. The basic contradiction evident within the most elementary kernel of Christian theology is that “despite everything,” the evil of the world is rooted within man himself, “that is, (Christianity) conceives of man as a clearly defined and limited individual. Man is conceived of as limited by his individuality and his spirit as well.” We are all our “brother’s keepers;” neither “good works” nor our “faith” can erase the primal sin of another man/woman. Each individual who wishes to be “saved” must, through his /her own accord, confront Christ as his/her personal savior, or acknowledge that “there is but one God and that is Allah,” etc. Gramsci argues, “it is precisely on this point that a change in the conception of man is required. It is essential to conceive of man as a series of active relationships (a process) in which individuality, while of the greatest importance, is not the sole element to be considered. . . . man changes himself, modifies himself, to the same extent that he is a nexus.”50
The contemporary race/class crises within American society require that Black ministers confront the basic question that delienates humanity from all other forms of animal life—what is a human being, and what can hunanity become?51 Man/woman is the product of many ideological, political and economic forces. But in the end, collectively, humanity creates itself, its institutions and its common sense. The internalized patterns of a people’s history becomes the basis of their class consciousness. By transforming ourselves, and our consciousness, we begin to make history. The next great challenge, the battle for socialism, will force the Black Church to place the collective needs of Black humanity ahead of the narrow individual needs of any single person. Whether the Black Church, and those courageous ministers who embody the militant tradition of Blackwater, can face this test remains to be seen.
Black ministers all too often have been content to interpret the scriptures in various ways and to preach salvation to the masses. The real point of Black faith, and the fundamental meaning of King’s evolution toward more militant politics, is to change the conditions of the oppressed Black majority for the better. If Black ministers fail to learn from their own mistakes, they may as a social group decline still further in the esteem of their own people. If they succeed, they have the potential to spark anew the moral and ethical commitment that remains essential within the struggle against racism and capitalist exploitation. It is entirely possible that the most decisive ally of the Black working class in its struggle for democratic socialism, at least among the Black elite, will be the Black Church.