Freedom's Distant Shores: American Protestants and Post-Colonial Alliances with Africa

Chapter 4 A Transatlantic Comparison of a Black Theology of Liberation

83 A Transatlantic Comparison of a Black Theology of Liberation Two of the most egregious social systems in the twentieth century have been racial segregation in the United States and apartheid in South Africa. This essay compares and contrasts the almost simultaneous rise of black theology of liberation on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean in their attempts to combat racism and apartheid. Since both segregation and apartheid were heavily undergirded by white Christian churches in the United States and South Africa, black Christians had to delve into their religious traditions in order to show that the norm of liberation was not alien to religiosity. Indeed, the common denominator for black theologians in the two countries meant that liberation lay at the heart of the message of Jesus Christ and that black power and the Christian religion were coterminous. Black Theology in the U.S. In the United States, the Black Power Movement, which grew out of the 1950s and 1960s Civil Rights Movement, resulted from several strands. First, despite the 1954 Supreme Court decision that separate was not equal and white liberals’ hailing 1955 to 1965 as the decade of Negro progress, the Dwight N. Hopkins Chapter 4 84 A Transatlantic Comparison masses of black people suffered. Between the successful 1955–1956 Montgomery bus boycott and the signing of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, the gap between black and white in every sphere in American society had widened. Despite the passage of the Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1960 and 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the myth of the decade of Negro progress applied only to a minute sector of the black community. In particular, the black middle class reaped whatever meager benefits resulted from the struggle for civil rights. The black poor, the overwhelming majority, languished in poverty and lack of significant societal gains. Second, an increasing number of youth in the Civil Rights Movement voiced a growing disdain toward the hypocrisy of white liberalism. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) mirrored this changing mood. In opposition to the local segregated Democratic Party, SNCC played a leading role in instituting the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) as a representative of the state’s loyal (black) majority for the presidential ticket of Lyndon Johnson. At the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, however, Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale and other white liberals on the convention’s credentials committee, as well as black civil rights establishment leadership, supported the illegal, white, segregationist delegation from Mississippi. The stage was set for Stokely Carmichael, newly elected chairman of SNCC. In June 1966, on the Meredith March Against Fear, Carmichael hurled the thunderbolt of Black Power from the backwoods of Greenwood, Mississippi. Carmichael received one graphic response to his declaration in October 1966. During that month a group of black, urban militants donned black outfits and patrolled the streets of Oakland, California, with carbines, rifles, and shotguns. The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense was born. In December 1966, Ron Karenga created the first Nguza Saba: The Seven Principles of Kwanzaa. Further responses burned like prairie fire. Between 1965 and 1968 nearly three hundred urban rebellions exploded across America and thrust a new term into the national lexicon—the “long hot summer.” The entire political and cultural scenery in black America underwent rapid alteration. The young, black revolutionary generation, whom Julius Lester knighted “the angry children of Malcolm X,” had taken center stage. Theological Themes In the midst of Carmichael’s Black Power cry, urban rebellions, and political, cultural trends in the black liberation movement, black theology burst forth. Black American pastors and laypersons found themselves caught with a theology suitable for the “We Shall Overcome” era of integrationism and liberalism , but apparently insufficient and irrelevant to the needs of the black community in the era of “I’m Black and I’m Proud!” In the hurricane eye of Dwight N. Hopkins 85 a black revolution, the ad hoc National Committee of Negro Churchmen (NCNC) coalesced. In the fall of 1968, Gayraud Wilmore, first chairman of the NCNC theological commission, described “the rising crescendo of voices from both the pulpit and pew demanding that black churchmen reexamine their beliefs; that unless they begin to speak and act relevantly in the present crisis they must prepare to die.” The black revolution presented an ultimatum : unless black pastors “do their thing” in...