Race, Religion, and Black Lives Matter

Essays on a Moment and a Movement

Christopher Cameron,Phillip Luke Sinitiere

• Verlag: Vanderbilt University Press
• Jahr: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780826502094
• Thema: History
• Thema: African American History

Black Lives Matter, like its predecessor movements, embodies flesh and blood through local organizing, national and global protests, hunger strikes, and numerous acts of civil disobedience. Chants like "All night! All day! We're gonna fight for Freddie Gray!" and "No justice, no fear! Sandra Bland is marching here!" give voice simultaneously to the rage, truth, hope, and insurgency that sustainBLM. While BLM has generously welcomed a broad group of individuals whom religious institutions have historically resisted or rejected, contrary to general perceptions, religion neither has been absent nor excluded from the movement's activities. This volume has a simple, but far-reaching argument: religion is an important thread in BLM. To advance this claim, Race, Religion, and Black Lives Matter examines religion's place in the movement through the lenses of history, politics, and culture. While this collection is not exhaustive or comprehensive in its coverage of religion and BLM, it selectively anthologizes unique aspects of Black religious history, thought, and culture in relation to political struggle in the contemporary era. The chapters aim to document historical change in light of current trends and current events. The contributors analyze religion and BLM in a current historical moment fraught with aggressive, fascist, authoritarian tendencies and one shaped by profound ingenuity, creativity, and insightful perspectives on Black history and culture.

PART ONE

Historical Foundations

CHAPTER 1

A Secular Civil Rights Movement?

How Black Power and Black Catholics Help Us Rethink the Religion in Black Lives Matter

Matthew J. Cressler

The Black Lives Matter movement is, without question, the most significant and sustained movement for racial justice since the end of the “long civil rights era” in the 1970s. As such, it has become common to compare the movement to its predecessors. A particular conception of “religion,” and its relationship to the politics of protest, has been key to these comparisons. Scholars and activists alike have debated whether Black Lives Matter is a “secular civil rights movement.”¹ Working from the assumption that it is a secular movement, many have argued that the more apt analogue to Black Lives Matter is not civil rights but Black Power. This argument is an embodiment of what historian Kerry Pimblott calls the “de-Christianization thesis” in Chapter 2 of this book, which contends that as Black Power rose in the late 1960s Black churches moved to the margins of freedom struggles. The activist and public theologian Rahiel Tesfamariam seemed to echo this sentiment when she said of the Black Lives Matter movement that, “If there is a model of revolution that these young people have mirrored most, it’s not [Martin Luther] King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, but rather the radical and countercultural beliefs of the Black Panther Party.” She goes on to compare Black Lives Matter with the Panthers and contrast it with Black Christianity. “Like the Panthers,” she continues, “they have unapologetically celebrated blackness, raising ‘black power’ fists, sporting afros and wearing T-shirts with African imagery. In contrast, the church hasn’t typically been as radical in its rhetoric and tactics. King, for example, opposed the militant arm of the civil rights movement, noting that ‘black power’ carried ‘connotations of violence and separatism.’”² There is certainly truth to Tesfamariam’s comparison. Historian Hasan Kwame Jefferies has similarly argued that Black Power is a more appropriate point of comparison for Black Lives Matter. This is especially the case when one focuses attention on the Movement for Black Lives’ official platform, which channels more Malcolm X than Martin King, more Black Panther Party than Southern Christian Leadership Conference.³ Yet, as a scholar of religion and race, what interests me are the ways that, for Tesfamariam and so many others, “religion” in this formulation has come to be defined as an antonym to “radical.” This essay aims to interrogate the assumptions about “religion” as a concept that operate underneath the surface of the argument that Black Lives Matter is a secular movement. It does so by offering historical perspective on religion in the Black Power movement, another so-called “secular civil rights movement” that preceded Black Lives Matter by almost four decades. First, it examines the contours of what constitutes “the religious” in discussions of civil rights, Black Power, and Black Lives Matter. Building on this theoretical intervention, this essay argues that the history of Black Catholics in the Black Power era can complicate our comfortable narratives of what religion and racial justice are supposed to look like and, consequently, challenge us to rethink what we mean by “religion” in the first place.

“This Ain’t Yo Mama’s Civil Rights Movement”

This provocative phrase was emblazoned on Rahiel Tesfamariam’s black t-shirt as she marched with protestors through the streets of St. Louis, Missouri, in the summer of 2015. Her shirt paraphrased Tef Poe, the local hip hop artist and co-founder of Hands Up United. “This ain’t your daddy’s civil rights movement,” as he put it, represented Tef Poe’s rebuke to the well-established national civil rights organizations that tried to wrest leadership of the protests from the youth in Ferguson in the wake of Michael Brown’s murder. His turn of phrase came to serve as a synecdoche of sorts for the Black Lives Matter moment and movement writ large.⁴ Tef Poe, Tesfamariam, and others have rightly identified the political, tactical, and generational differences that separate Black Lives Matter protests from those that came before.⁵ What Tesfamariam does more explicitly than most is articulate the religious dimensions of these differences. Whereas the civil rights movement tended to be “manned” by “well-dressed, respectable clergymen,” the M4BL is unapologetically feminist and queer. While the civil rights movement relied on the respectability politics that governed Black churches, today’s movement “encourages all to ‘come as you are.’ Natural. Bohemian. Rebellious. Tatted up. Provocative. Ratchet.” “While the civil rights movement of the 1960s was characterized by nonviolent resistance strategies” Tesfamariam argues, “this movement has been much more confrontational.” In other words, present-day activists are unwilling to play by the rules of “the Black Church,” which tends to be more conservative in all senses of the term—in leadership styles, in protest tactics, in gender and sexual politics. This juxtaposition is at the root of Tesfamariam’s identification of Black Lives Matter not with King’s Christian resisters but with the Black Panther Party’s Marxist revolutionaries.⁶

Oddly enough, critics of Black Lives Matter would likely agree with her to some extent. The use of the civil rights movement—or, more precisely, a particular and selective imagining of “the civil rights movement”—as a measuring stick against which to judge Black Lives Matter has been one of the most common ways to criticize contemporary protests. Martin Luther King—or, better yet, a willfully ignorant imagining of “MLK”—has proved a useful meme in this regard. When Ferguson and Baltimore exploded in uprisings, critics retorted, “King would never condone riots.” When protesters block traffic with cries of “No Justice! No Peace!,” critics reply, “King would never disrupt traffic.” When righteous rage over Black death and non-indictments boils over, critics insist “King was never hostile or angry.” Now, it goes without saying that this sanitized MLK is a lie. (This meme is what some writers have referred to as the “Santaclausification” of King and has been thoroughly debunked.⁷) Nevertheless, this particular imagining serves as one of the most effective strategies by which critics can delegitimize Black Lives Matter. It functions as a “myth,” in religious studies scholar Bruce Lincoln’s use of the term. It is “ideology in narrative form.”⁸ The narrative could be summarized as follows: Black and white Christians in the mid-twentieth century joined together in love and, arms linked and singing “We Shall Overcome,” changed the hearts of the nation and peacefully brought an end of racism. MLK figures prominently in this myth, serving as a beloved salvific hero who died to inaugurate a post-racial era. When critics frame “the civil rights movement” in this way and deploy it against Black Lives Matter, a significant element in the critique is that Black Lives Matter lacks the religious-ness of the MLK-led movement. “Religion,” in this view, is thought of as a particular mode of Christianity that is loving, long-suffering, and forgiving. This is why the myth works well when deployed against contemporary, confrontational protestors. The defanged fantasy Martin Luther King can be deployed against anyone upsetting the order of the status quo or calling attention to injustice.

Historian Nikhil Pal Singh identified and interrogated this “ideology in narrative form” almost a decade before the rise of Black Lives Matter. In Black Is a Country (2004), Singh coined the phrase “civic myth of civil rights” to identify the ways selective readings of the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King were used to buttress the aims of the US racial state and subvert ongoing struggles for Black liberation and democracy.⁹ This civic myth of civil rights is the story rehearsed every year in celebration of America’s progress toward Martin Luther King’s dream of the day when children “will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” Thankfully, Singh is just one of a number of scholars who have challenged this mythic rendering that centers almost exclusively on the male-minister-led movement that fought segregation in the Jim Crow South through respectable nonviolent Christian protest between 1955 and 1965. We now know that Black activists fought for fair housing and equal employment in the urban North ten years before Rosa Parks sat down in that Montgomery bus; that nonviolence always coexisted, albeit in tension, with long-standing Black traditions of armed self-defense; and that Black women were instrumental organizers without whom there would have been no movement at all.¹⁰

The civic myth of civil rights operates as a declension narrative, which tells the cautionary tale of how the impatience and anger of Black Power activists undid civil rights successes. The Black Panthers, in this telling, serve as the pantomime villains that wasted the good will of well-meaning white people and inaugurated decades of repressive backlash. In this way, the civic myth of civil rights was weaponized to delegitimize Black Power protest decades before it would be deployed to delegitimize Black Lives Matter. Scholars such as Singh disabuse us of the misconception of this declension narrative. And yet, one myth has survived this demythologization. The civil rights movement still tends to be imagined as the religious antecedent to a secular Black Power movement. As Kerry Pimblott unpacks in her book and discusses in Chapter 2, both “popular and scholarly accounts of black power depict a movement marked by a profound de-Christianization.” She further notes that this juxtaposition of religious (read: Christian) civil rights with secular (read: radical) Black Power contributed to arguments about the movement’s declension, pinning the blame on “black power’s abandonment of its spiritual moorings.”¹¹ This is certainly the case in religious historian Charles Marsh’s classic book God’s Long Summer (1997), wherein he positions Cleveland Sellers and Black Power as the tragic conclusion in a cautionary tale about what happens when you put “the Gospel on the backburner.”¹² While Singh is generally unconcerned with religion as such, he does inadvertently reinforce this same distinction when he contrasts the ways the civic myth of civil rights buttresses the US nation-state’s “dominant and defining systems of belief: Christianity, liberal-individualism, and democratic-capitalism” with the actual anti-imperialist King defined by “more complex, worldly, and radical politics.”¹³

Thus, an array of different people have bought into the idea that Black Lives Matter, and Black Power before it, differ sharply from a prior generation’s civil rights struggles due to an absence of religion. They are, of course, making this case for different reasons. Tesfamariam is not only defending Black Lives Matter against its (Black) Christian critics, she is also forwarding a critique of the conservativism of Black-church politics in the hopes of remaking Black religion and radicalism for the twenty-first century. Critics wielding the meme-ified MLK are attempting to either dismiss or destroy efforts to upend the white supremacist status quo. Historians like Singh are hoping to recover the more radical legacies of Black freedom struggles that have been obscured by memory and subverted by the state. Nevertheless, despite their differences, all operate under the assumption that “radicalism” serves as code for “not religious.” Scholars and popular audiences alike share the presumption that, for better or for worse, Black freedom struggles radicalized once they were freed from the restraints of religion.

Black Catholic history, to which we will now turn, seriously challenges this reading. Activists and scholars are right to criticize the Black Christian exceptionalism of civil rights scholarship that polices the parameters of “proper” protest by comparing all activism to King’s Christian nonviolence. Yet we should not overstate the case in our attempt to reinstate Black Power in Black freedom struggle historiography. It is true that Black Power represented a significant critique of racial liberalism as an ideology and Christian nonviolence as a tactic. But it is also true that some Black religious communities, especially those in urban settings outside the US South, embraced this critique. By the end of the 1960s a small but growing number of Black Catholics did too. Black Power transformed Black Catholics, and Black Catholics, in turn, engaged the political and cultural nationalisms that defined the Black Power era.

Black Catholics and Black Power

The presumption that “religion” is synonymous with a particular mode of Christianity and that “radicalism” is, by its nature, secular pervades US Catholic histori...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction by Christopher Cameron & Phillip Luke Sinitiere
• Part One: Historical Foundations
• Part Two: Contemporary Connections
• Contributors
• Index