The Third Great Awakening: Religion and the Civil Rights Movement

David Chappell. A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. xiv + 344 pp. Illustrations, appendix, notes, bibliography, and index. $34.95 (cloth); $18.95 (paper).

During a recent research trip to the Mississippi Department of Archives and History in Jackson, Mississippi, I studied photographs documenting the interiors of southern black homes from the early 1900s to the present. I was particularly interested in uses of religious art. Although I found little of what I was looking for, two archivists reminded me about a common feature of the visual culture of southern African-American domestic life popular at mid-century and persisting in some rural areas today. These archivists, both middle-aged black women who had grown up in Mississippi, told me that during the 1950s and 1960s every black home, no matter how rich or poor, displayed two portraits next to one another in the kitchen or living room. One was of Jesus, the other of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Finding images of Jesus and King tacked side-by-side to the walls of southern black homes fifty years ago would come as no surprise to David Chappell in his book about the role of religion in the civil rights movement, Stone of Hope. For this particular visual dimension of modern African-American life symbolizes the key point to his work—that the integration of religion and politics among southern blacks laboring to overthrow the system of Jim Crow was a crucial reason for their many victories. King and his followers found a unifying sense of political purpose and a range of cultural resources in African-American churches that ultimately ensured their triumphs. By contrast, Chappell argues, segregationists failed to garner the popular support necessary to turn back threats to the "southern way of life" because they lacked the enthusiastic backing of most of their spiritual leaders; for them, religion was a source of dissent and fragmentation that undermined their defensive stand. As he puts it, "The civil rights movement succeeded for many reasons. This book isolates and magnifies one reason that has received insufficient attention: black southern activists got strength from old-time religion, and white supremacists failed, at the same moment, to muster the cultural strength that conservatives traditionally get from religion" (p. 8).

Chappell has written an important and entertaining book that deserves a wide audience. Already well known for his 1994 work, Inside Agitators: White Southerners in the Civil Rights Movement, he continues the spirited style of argumentation and bold attack on standard historical explanations that marked his earlier work. Stone of Hope takes it name from the famous "I Have a Dream" speech delivered by Martin Luther King, Jr., on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963. In the speech, King stated that he and his supporters would leave Washington, D.C., and return to the South armed with the faith necessary to carve "a stone of hope" from "a mountain of despair" and win their bloody battle against racial discrimination. Chappell himself hopes to return readers to debates over the importance of religion to the history of the movement and force them to grapple anew with the multiple relationships between faith, race, and politics in modern America.

Chappell begins his investigation of the relationship between "old-time religion" and the civil rights movement by reassessing the intellectual roots of the movement itself. He questions the extent to which liberalism was a powerful font of political ideology for the movement and suggests that, in its mid-twentieth-century formulation, it may have even retarded the movement had black civil rights leaders accepted its premises whole cloth. For liberalism offered no immediate or practical solution to the problem of racial discrimination in the South. As outlined by its most prominent spokesmen, Gunnar Myrdal and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., liberalism preached the power of enlightened human reason...