Black Radicalism ReconceptualizedStruggle and Resistance in the Ohio Valley

The conception of black radicalism as deeply masculine, secular, and urban is common among scholars of the civil rights and black power movements. While this understanding of black radicalism helps make sense of the differences in ideologies and approaches of various activist groups, it has often led to the erasure of the varied forms of radical thought and activism throughout the nation, particularly outside America’s largest cities. Two excellent historical works from the University Press of Kentucky, Kerry Pimblott’s Faith in Black Power: Religion, Race, and Resistance in Cairo, Illinois and Keona K. Ervin’s Gateway to Equality: Black Women and the Struggle for Economic Justice in St. Louis, seek to complicate our understanding of black radicalism and resistance by shifting focus to those often overlooked as radical activists—Christians and women. In doing so, they also reveal the many ways the understudied Ohio Valley has helped develop unique forms of radical activism. Indeed, these two monographs not only show that radicals were active in both St. Louis and Cairo, Illinois, but reveal the ways the unique position of border cities helped black radical activism flourish.

In Faith in Black Power: Religion, Race, and Resistance in Cairo, Illinois, Pimblott challenges the standard narrative of black power’s “de-Christianization” (6). Traditionally, historians have characterized the black power movement as either divorced from religion or actively hostile to Christianity. Malcolm X’s critique of Christianity as a religion designed to keep African Americans passive and nonviolent held a great deal of weight within the larger movement. However, as Pimblott recognizes, most histories of the civil rights movement emphasize the role of faith and religious institutions in movement mobilization, particularly in their analyses of the southern phase of the movement. Few question the centrality of churches in developing grassroots resistance, providing both institutional support and a liberation theology critical to the successes of the southern movement. How, then, do we understand this perceived shift from a movement with deep Christian roots to one that rejected Christianity as unsuitably radical?

According to Pimblott, most analyses of black power have neglected the dynamic relationship between black power activists and black churches. The simple story often told of a rejection of Christianity ignores that the movement was not anti-Christian, particularly if ones shifts the focus away from the West Coast or the Northeast. Instead of accepting a rather reductive view of the role of black churches as largely conservative institutions uninterested in the shifting discourse on rights and radicalism, Pimblott challenges us to view it as a “complex and heterogeneous institution capable of sustaining multiple and divergent ideological traditions simultaneously” (9). Pimblott convincingly argues that the black church was attentive to the needs of local activists who required the institutional and organizational resources of these community centers but also a church willing “to help rework the movement’s dominant ideology and strategies as well as attendant religious discourses” (8). And, in turn, black churches needed the support of local activists who supported church leaders and showed that black churches could support more radical politics.

In exploring this relationship between faith and black power, Pimblott hones in on the Cairo United Front, a nationally renowned black power organization headed by Reverend Charles Koen. Over three chapters, she traces the founding of the organization as well as the rise of a more conservative nation, which, in part, led to the organization’s (and Cairo’s) decline. In the most riveting chapter—“From the Seminary to the Streets: Grassroots Black Theology and the Forging of a United Front”—Pimblott explores the founding of the United Front, an organization that took seriously the black power conception of coalition building. Under Koen, the United Front sought...