by Paul Harvey
PAULI MURRAY AND FANNIE LOU HAMER
Much like Thurman, Farmer, and Shuttlesworth, longtime female activists in the mid-twentieth century indelibly shaped the struggle that would transform the country in the 1960s. Grassroots organization depended on black southerners whose deep religious faith emboldened them to action. As one female activist in 1960s Mississippi put it, “I had found it in the Bible that all men were created equal and I didn’t understand that how come that this was my constitutional right and I couldn’t have that. I got mad and I was determined that I wasn’t gonna take no more. I realized that I was angry and that I had really felt this all of my life.” Like so many others, she married the language of evangelicalism (“I had found it in the Bible”) with the tenets of the American civil religion, how “this was my constitutional right and I couldn’t have that.”
They were also inseparable in the mind of Fannie Lou Hamer, who personified the fortitude and vibrant religious imagery of the movement. Daughter of a sharecropper in Ruleville, Mississippi, Hamer rose to prominence in the 1960s as a liaison between “local people” and national civil rights leaders. “Her faith in God is pervasive and in a sense dominates her life,” a northern admirer wrote. “There is a prophetic, messianic sense about her—an awareness, an electricity, a sense of mission which is very rarely absent.” In 1962, at a Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) meeting in a rural church, Hamer and a few others volunteered to register for voting. This serious act of political defiance against the state regime earned them a beating in the county jail. Two years later, Hamer eventually won a seat in the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party’s delegation (sent as a protest against the all-white official state delegation) to the Democratic national convention of 1964. Hamer incited Lyndon Baines Johnson’s special ire as she delivered an impromptu national address explaining why the Freedom Democratic Party would not settle for the compromise of taking two seats on the official (all-white) state delegation. Queried by reporters, Hamer responded with an impromptu narration of black Mississippians who had risked their lives simply for trying to exercise citizenship rights. Hamer felt that “actually working with these kids that they call radical and far left like SNCC I’ve seen more Christianity there than I’ve ever seen in the church.”
Hamer’s magnetic charisma extended to local people and a national audience, including scores of student volunteers in Mississippi. She used her knowledge of the Bible in public rebukes of the timid. As she told one group of black Mississippians, “We are tired of being mistreated. God wants us to take a stand. We can stand by registering to vote—go to the court to register to vote.” Christ would side with the sharecroppers in Mississippi during their struggle. Answering the inevitable charges that civil rights workers were agitators and communists, she retorted, “If Christ were here today, he would be branded a radical, a militant, and would probably be branded as ‘red.’” Christ was a “revolutionary person, out there where it was happening. That’s what God is all about, and that’s where I get my strength.” Summing up her life’s work, she explained, “We can’t separate Christ from freedom, and freedom from Christ.”
Fannie Lou Hamer represented a black folk southern religious tradition activated on behalf of civil rights. Another set of activist women came from those with long experience working in the North at the same time as figures such as James Farmer were creating CORE. One was Pauli Murray (1909–1985), who carried on a remarkable career as a civil rights activist, early feminist, scholar, lawyer, teacher, political candidate, author, professor, and finally in her last ten years Episcopalian minister. From the time she wrote a letter of frustration to President Roosevelt in 1938, she was also a correspondent and friend to Eleanor Roosevelt, who was President Roosevelt’s emissary to the black community. This was not surprising. She had, after all, applied for graduate school training at the University of North Carolina as early as the 1930s, and spent time in jail in 1940 for protesting outrageous treatment given to black defendants in court cases in Virginia. In 1942, she joined James Farmer and others to form CORE and remained active in the movement in the subsequent decades.
In the 1960s, Murray attended law school at Yale. During the civil rights years, she combined her twin interests in advancing the status of African Americans and of women, In the 1970s, she felt called to take ordination orders in the Episcopal Church and entered intensive study in seminary at the age of 63 to pursue this final calling. She and other early female ministerial applicants raised a storm of controversy in the Episcopal Church and other denominations, but Murray was no stranger to controversy, nor to rejected applications and conservative resistance. Murray received her ordination in 1977, becoming the first female Episcopal minister, made the more remarkable given her status as an African American, her age, and her varied career that led her to this point. In her memoir, Murray reflected on the frustrations she experienced as a believer denied full privileges in her communion and at the same time on the solace and strength that her faith afforded.
Pauli Murray in 1946
Source: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Online Catalog, http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/94500294/.
As she later recollected, it was her “growing feminist consciousness” that led to her “battle with the Episcopal Church over the submerged position of women in our denomination.” To challenge inequality in the church took on questions that were insulated from attack because of faith. For example, “an aura of immutability surrounded the exclusion of women from the clergy, reinforced by a theology which held that an exclusively male priesthood was ordained by almighty God.” In March 1966, this became intolerable to her: “I do not know why this familiar spectacle suddenly became intolerable to me one Sunday morning in March 1966. I doubt that Rosa Parks could explain why on December 1, 1955, she rebelled against the segregation she had endured all her life. I remember only that in the middle of the celebration of the Holy Eucharist an uncontrollable anger exploded inside me, filling me with such rage I had to get up and leave. I wandered about the streets full of blasphemous thought, feeling alienated from God. The intensity of this assault at the deepest level of my devotional life produced a crisis in faith.”
She felt raw wounds and refused to attend the Episcopal General Conference in 1973 for fear of an outburst of anger. After being rejected for ordination at one service, she turned around with other female candidates and “walked with bowed heads in solemn procession down the center aisle. No funeral procession could have been more sorrowful.” The incident split the seminary she attended, and some who had supported the women “now railed against using a ‘civil rights demonstration’ tactic which, they felt, had no place in the solemn liturgy of the church. Others contented themselves with hostile stares at those of us who supported the women deacons by our presence at the ordination service. I learned that disputes among the faithful, although usually fought with polite words, can be as acrimonious in their language as a street brawl.” Later, though, she received ordination in a black congregation in Philadelphia: “Symbolically, the rejected opened their arms to the rejected.” She felt vindicated, and that the arc of her life had reached some completion.
THE FREEDOM SONGS AND THE STRUGGLES IN BIRMINGHAM AND MISSISSIPPI
Nowhere is the philosophy of the movement better articulated than in two very different sets of documents: the freedom songs and King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” One represents the energy, creativity, and spiritual sustenance that empowered the rank-and-file of the movement; the latter stands as the single most concise and powerful intellectual manifesto of the philosophy of nonviolent resistance produced by a movement participant.
Religious music centrally shaped racial justice work. From the mid-eighteenth century forward, for example, Christian evangelicals began to write songs that expressed opposition to slavery. The slave spirituals of the nineteenth century formed a fundamental base for American religious music that has sustained social justice struggles. In the twentieth
century, activists and troubadors transformed many of those spirituals into “freedom songs” of the civil rights movement. Twentieth-century gospel music, originating in northern urban black churches in the 1920s and 1930s, also fed into social crusades. The great black gospel singer Mahalia Jackson (1911–1972), for example, sang gospel tunes such as “Precious Lord, Take My Hand,” at numerous mass meetings. Revivalist fervor, and a vision of interracialism encapsulated in the idea of the beloved community, infused the culture of the movement. It arose out of a religious culture steeped in the rituals of mass meetings, revivalistic preaching, and sacred singing. As was true throughout the history of black Christianity, music inspired new visions of freedom. During the civil rights movement, black protestors unified themselves through freedom songs, bringing local people to organizing on behalf of the larger political aims of the struggle (including the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965).
While the freedom songs provided the soundtrack for the movement, “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” was its ninety-five theses nailed to the door of the white southern churches. In his searching letter, written while King sat in jail during the spring 1963 campaign in Birmingham, King severely chastised his white church brethren and other southern “moderates.” They had settled for order rather than fighting for justice. King also employed his theological training in his exposition of just and unjust laws, as explained in Paul’s letter to the Romans. Just as Paul and Silas sat in jail for breaking unjust Roman laws, so King and his cohorts sat in jails for breaking the unjust laws of the Jim Crow South. King’s letter soon achieved the status of a classic of American literature, just as his great speech of that August, “I Have a Dream,” has assumed a canonical place in American oratory. Perhaps most important for King’s own thinking, it represented a significant shift from his views about the role of white moderates. In the 1950s, King frequently expressed hope in the reasonable and moderate class of southern whites to stand up and lead the region into a more just future. He assumed that white southern Christians would pave the way. By 1963, it was all too evident that that was not the case. King’s writings condemned the “moderates,” more so than the Klansmen, as the biggest obstacle to achieving justice, precisely because they would always settle for order over justice.
In the 1950s, the boycott of buses in Montgomery, Alabama provided the impetus for the formation of the SCLC, and propelled Martin Luther King to his fame and leadership. SCLC was an organization of ministers, arising directly from black churches. In 1960, SCLC asked its organizing secretary, Ella Baker, to bring together students to form a youth auxiliary. Meeting at a historically black institution in North Carolina in April, 1960, just as the student sit-in movement was springing up through southern cities, the students instead opted to form their own organization, the SNCC.
SNCC’s language in its early days was deeply theological. Its real impulse involved more than integration, one participant explained, for beyond that lay the “redeemed community and the Kingdom of God.” Racial prejudice, wrote one SNCC idealist, was a “judgment on the lie we have been living. . . . For though the days of lynching may be over, the lynching of personhood continues. It is a spiritual issue.” The nonviolent character of the movement exhibited a “noble, dignified understanding of oneself,” one that could “deal with the rabid segregationist as a person.” The final goal of the student movement, the editor of SNCC’s paper The Student Voice explained, was the “retaining and creating of personhood,” a task made difficult given that mass movements were “necessary to save the South and America.” The radical organization’s “distinctively idealistic belief that fortitude, determined action, and fearlessness would result in momentous social change,” white SNCC worker Mary King later reminisced, “stemmed to a great degree from the Protestant upbringings of most of its workers.” She connected her vision specifically to Wesleyan theology, that “through grace and redemption each person can be saved.” This view reinforced the belief that the “good in every human being could be appealed to, fundamental change could correct the immorality of racial segregation, and new political structures could be created.” Christian SNCC organizers felt a higher power and respected the “spirit” of the deeply evangelical local people with whom they worked. The young students who integrated lunch counters in Greensboro and inspired the original SNCC organizing conference also grew up in black churches.
The police state tactics of the Mississippi establishment intimidated many civil rights organizations. It would be more productive to focus on locales where some victories could be secured, they reasoned. The students in SNCC would not be intimidated, however. Early in the 1960s, SNCC sent organizers to Mississippi, the heart of southern segregationism. In 1964, SNCC and other groups organized Freedom Summer, which brought over eight hundred volunteers from around the country to Mississippi. Freedom Summer arose from SNCC’s efforts to publicize the difficulties of voter registration for tens of thousands of black Mississippians. The white Mississippi establishment lived up to its reputation, forming its own Sovereignty Commission as a state-sanctioned way to harass the “outside agitators.” The fact that many churches and ministers shrank from the conflict did not spare them from being targeted. In mid-summer 1964, three black churches burned in Pike and Amite counties, despite the fact that the parishioners in these congregations had not been politically active.
Violence targeting civil rights centers continued well beyond Freedom Summer and the congressional civil rights acts of the mid-1960s. McComb, Mississippi gained a reputation as the “bombing capital of the world,” with numerous violent attacks during and after Freedom Summer. Attempting to separate COFO from its local support base, segregationists employed indiscriminate violence against African Americans in McComb. A SNCC worker surveyed the damage to both buildings and spirit:
Who now? My mother, father, sister, brother. God damn, how much blood do they want. They got the church—Society Hill—the movement church. Its doors were closed this summer, but it has always been the center of the movement in South McComb. . . . The NAACP holds its meetings there. I spoke there this summer. SNCC workers were there the past Sunday and the Sunday before. . . . The church is demolished. It was a terrible blast. The police are here, certain again to see that all clues are removed and destroyed.
In 1964, over 1000 movement activists were arrested; dozens suffered beatings. COFO and SNCC members pondered painful questions. Could the sacrifice be justified? “We had told a lot of people to put down their guns and not be violent in Mississippi,” SNCC organizer Dave Dennis later recalled, “and I wasn’t so sure that the nonviolent approach was the right approach anymore. And I had to do a lot of soul searching about that.” For many in the movement, the beatings administered the next year to John Lewis and scores of others attempting to march across the Edmund Pettis bridge in Selma, Alabama, marked the nadir for the philosophy of nonviolence and soul force. One SNCC worker reported of talking with a civil rights leader in Lee County and trying to determine “how to convince him (or to decide whether we should convince him) to leave his pistol home when he comes to mass meetings. After an intensive discussion of non-violence at one of our meetings, [he] told me, ‘I believe in the Bible, the Lord, and my 30–30.’”
This man spoke for the fact that, for many, nonviolence could serve its purpose as a useful tool, but violence in the name of self-defense had to be in the arsenal of options as well. The rise to fame in the 1960s of Malcolm X (largely through his searing autobiography, as told to Alex Haley) came in part through his capturing of the rhetoric of self-defense that already long had been part of black communities. Born Malcolm Little in Omaha, Nebraska, this orator of black power and pride grew up the hard way in Boston. After a career in petty crime, he was finally caught and sentenced for his criminal activity. While in prison in the early 1950s, Malcolm engaged in an intense period of self-study that resulted in his conversion to black Islam. He became a follower of Elijah Muhammad, a
black man from Detroit who was the prophet of the movement and a protégé of the movement’s founder, Wallace Fard. As was the custom among many converts, Malcolm rejected his given “white” name of Little and took the name “Malcolm X,” signifying the lost names of his black ancestors brought during slavery.
Through the 1950s and early 1960s, Malcolm emerged as the Nation of Islam’s foremost spokesman, attracting thousands to his passionate speeches. Malcolm rejected integration as a solution. In its place, he argued for black power, self-defense, and economic autonomy, and supplied his followers with the Nation of Islam’s own “history” of the evil doings of the white devil in history. Critics labeled the Nation of Islam a “cult” and criticized Malcolm’s ideas as “black supremacy” akin to the white supremacy he fought against. CBS News produced a famous documentary, The Hate that Hate Produced, that purported to expose the workings of the cult.
Malcolm’s real following, however, came not so much for his offering of orthodox Nation of Islam doctrines as for his insistence that oppressed African Americans had to defend their rights “by any means necessary.” He attracted admirers throughout black America for his eloquence in defending his positions and insisting on racial pride. In the early 1960s, Malcolm was disillusioned by corruption and thievery within the Nation of Islam organization; he broke with the formal organization and, late in his life, began the Organization of Afro-American Unity. This corresponded also with a broadening of Malcolm’s vision, from one of strict black separatism to one that embraced a more universalist notion of Islam. Malcolm was assassinated in 1965, but not before he had captured the imagination of a younger generation and provided an alternative answer to the nexus of race and religion in America, and black Americans’ response to that.