<< 1 >>
Rating: 
Summary: Not-to-be-missed Book on Civil Rights
Review: One of the most important books in recent years on the civil rights movement by an up-and-coming historian who takes no prisoners, pulls no punches. An absolute delight to read and meticulously researched. Demonstrates the crucial influence of religious ideas on the civil rights movement and the end of Jim Crow desegregation. Must reading for students of 20th-century American history and religion.
Rating:
Summary: They Had More Than a Dream
Review: Sin is unfashionable in the U.S. today, at least as dogma. Preachers rarely thunder about human depravity anymore, preferring instead to shower their congregants with good news about human benevolence. David L. Chappell is having none of that. His new interpretation of the civil-rights movement is a first-rate work of history and, not least, a timely meditation on sin."A Stone of Hope" takes its title from the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, in which he spoke of cutting "a stone of hope" from a "mountain of despair." Mr. Chappell seeks to explain just how that stone was hewn: how legally enforced segregation came to an end, and with so little bloodshed. Why did white liberals do so little to overthrow Jim Crow? And why were black activists such as Bayard Rustin, Modjeska Simkins, Fannie Lou Hamer and Dr. King himself so much more effective? The answer, Mr. Chappell argues, is that white liberals lacked the sort of sustaining religious faith that black activists possessed in abundance. He notes that white liberals, seduced by a 1944 report on American racism by the Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal, had come to believe that civil rights would happen gradually, without coercion. They were wildly optimistic about human nature, the power of reason, the efficacy of education and the inevitability of social progress. And because they had no common faith other than "Pollyannaism," they could not instill in their followers either solidarity or discipline. Black activists, by contrast, were realists. Schooled in the jeremiads of the Hebrew prophets and the neo-orthodox theology of Reinhold Niebuhr, they took the venality of individuals and institutions for granted. They knew that power corrupts, that the powerful do not give it up without a fight and that in such fights religious enthusiasm is more potent than rational argument. To be sure, black desegregationists were familiar with liberal political thought. It was their "prophetic Christianity," however, particularly their pessimism about human nature, that set them apart and spurred them to victory. Religion also looms large in Mr. Chappell's analysis of white segregationist thought. While other civil-rights historians have ignored or patronized segregationists, Mr. Chappell takes them seriously. Thus he is able to see how squeamish they were when it came to justifying Jim Crow on theological grounds, how ill-equipped to instill in their troops an ethic of self-sacrifice. A century earlier, pro-slavery thinkers had quoted the Bible earnestly, inspiring hundreds of thousands to die in a lost cause. But there was precious little biblical justification for forced segregation. In their hearts, the segregationists knew that. What is startling about segregationism, Mr. Chappell concludes, is not how sturdy it was but how weak -- how easily it collapsed. "A Stone of Hope" is not without its own flaws. Mr. Chappell gets a few details wrong. For instance, "the most segregated hour in America" (Dr. King's phrase) is 11 a.m. on Sunday, not 10. And his argument that the civil-rights movement was a religious revival -- "the Third Great Awakening" -- falls flat, built more on off-handed quotations from participants than on careful analysis. Still, the book is a major contribution to civil-rights history: clearly written, prodigiously researched and forcefully argued. It is also delightfully opinionated. Mr. Chappell denounces "mushy generalizations" about the black church, noting that many African- American preachers served as opiates rather than agitators, pushing otherworldly salvation rather than this-wordly justice. He sneers at black nationalists who insist that Dr. King learned everything he needed to know in a black church Sunday school, calling this "arrested-development thesis" evidence of "broader anti- intellectualism in studies of civil rights." And he calls civil-rights scholarship that slights religion -- i.e., most of it -- "breathtakingly obtuse." Reinhold Niebuhr is the closest thing to a hero here, serving as both a crucial source for Dr. King's thought and a model for Mr. Chappell's own realistic approach to his subject. Like Mr. Niebuhr, Mr. Chappell is sensitive to the ironies of American history. During the 1950s and 1960s, he notes, "the irrational traditions of prophetic, revivalistic religion served the liberal goals of freedom and equality." He is also acutely aware of human sinfulness. Thus Mr. Chappell refuses either to deify black activists or to demonize segregationists. The former were intellectually inconsistent, he shows, and not without their own ethical failings; the latter were capable of making "constitutionally sound" arguments, however morally unsound those arguments may have been. "A Stone of Hope" respects the public power of religion, but it also brings Dr. King and his co- workers down from the mountaintop, transfiguring them into human beings. Black desegregationists did not conquer Jim Crow because they had a dream but because they had a strategy -- a workable strategy rooted not in pieties about human goodness but in a realistic, even Machiavellian, awareness of the intractability of sin. There is a sermon in that for historians, preachers and activists alike.
Rating:
Summary: No Sones Unturned
Review: The Civil Rights Movement has been well covered by previous writers and I have enjoyed most writings on the subject. In A Stone of Hope I see a fresh perspective, a stone that has not been turned before. The role of religion,especially the "old time religion " of southern Black people has now been elevated to its proper height in the analysis of the success of the movement for equality and freedom. God's voice was echoed by the leaders of the movement and an evil system was dismantled. Faith gave them the fire that moved a race of people to stand up for what was theirs and the world is better for their having believed that God would not allow the Oppressors to continue in their sins. It was truly a prophetic movement. I think that all who are interested in the history of the struggle for justice in America should read this book
<< 1 >>
| 
