Race, Rights, and Revivals

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Scholarship over the past 30 years has produced countless political analyses of the Civil Rights Movement. But in a new article in the African American Review, a University of Arkansas researcher examines the movement's religious side - declaring it part of a revivalist tradition that spans centuries back to the First and Second Great Awakenings.

"Reading the testimony that Civil Rights activists left behind, the parallels of their experience to the classic revivals of Africa, the Americas and Europe leapt out at me. Yet there's no more than a fleeting mention of that parallel in any of the literature on the movement," said David Chappell, associate professor of history.

Chappell corrected that oversight in the winter issue of the African American Review. In an article titled "Religious Revivalism in the Civil Rights Movement," Chappell classifies the movement as a distinctly religious - as well as political - crusade. In doing so, he sheds light on the organizational and motivational strategies of Civil Rights leaders and goes far to explain the accounts of rapture, the ecstatic experiences, common among activists' recollections of the movement. He also raises timely questions about the realism of separating politics from religion.

In researching revivalism through history, Chappell has come to believe that the idea of separating politics and religion is a "peculiar superstition of the modern era." He suggests that the Civil Rights activists of the 1950s-60s - and other Christian activists - have a more realistic perspective, one that ignores the distinction between politics and religion. While the institutions of church and state should be kept legally separate, he says, the revivalist tradition shows that religion and politics readily infiltrate and influence each other.

According to Chappell, the Civil Rights Movement demonstrated to the modern world the motivational power of religious sentiment - a lesson that has not gone unnoticed in politics. In fact, he believes the success of the Civil Rights Movement contributed to the rise of the religious right in the 1970s-80s. This strongly conservative faction noted how much could be accomplished when religious convictions were brought to bear on social problems, he said, when dissatisfied people were motivated and mobilized by charismatic leaders.

It's a historical perspective that ought to be considered at a time when the nation's most powerful politician - the president - has been criticized for his religious emphasis and his faith-based initiatives. Chappell finds Bush's perspective "hypocritical and scary, on the whole."

On the other hand, he adds: "It's naive to think that religion can be kept out of politics. From that observation, you might draw the conclusion that we need to fight with renewed vigilance for separation of church and state - to keep the blending to a minimum. Unfortunately, in pursuing that line of reasoning, you run the risk of suppressing another civil rights movement, of quashing the next really progressive social revolution."

Chappell, a noted scholar of the Civil Rights Movement and author of two books - "Inside Agitators: White Southerners in the Civil Rights Movement" and "A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion, Liberals, and the Death of Jim Crow" (forthcoming) - has long been interested in the movement's religious undertones.

In his latest article, he sets the movement in a new context - viewing it from the tradition of religious revivalism. The article demonstrates how an ostensibly political conflict adopted the form and rhetoric of religious evangelism. It begins by defining revivals as mass movements that involve widespread enthusiasm for charismatic preachers, belief in miracles, and displays of conversion through word or act.

Likewise, the Civil Rights Movement exalted its leaders. Activists referred to figures such as Martin Luther King and Bob Moses of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee with terms of reverence usually reserved for Biblical prophets. Many went so far as to call them outright saviors. In speech and action, these leaders emphasized the importance of faith - faith in God's active support for the cause at hand.

Belief in miracles was also evident in the Civil Rights Movement. Chappell cites testimony that shows many activists perceived divine intervention in the most remarkable or fearful moments of their involvement. Occasions when fire hoses failed to fill or when attack dogs refused to bite were recounted by witnesses as miraculous events and passed along as evidence of the righteousness of their fight.

Finally, Chappell describes how the atmosphere at civil rights meetings often resembled a tent revival more than a political rally - people swooning and screaming in the audience, opponents experiencing changes of heart. Recruitment of new activists and supporters was integral to maintaining the momentum of the movement, he said.

But the Civil Rights Movement did more than just appropriate the form and rhetoric of revivals, according to Chappell. In his article, he quotes activist Bob Moses insisting to King: "We're not here to bring politics into our morality but to bring morality into our politics." The typically religious concerns of morality, faith and righteousness did not simply exist alongside the movement's political concerns of freedom and equality. Leaders and activists considered the two inextricable.

Such a mixture of social and spiritual motives is characteristic of the revival tradition, Chappell said.

"A revival can result not just in religious change but in widespread social change. The Second Great Awakening of the 19th century, for example, gave rise to abolitionism and to more humane treatment of the mentally ill," he said. "Many participants in the Civil Rights Movement saw the fight for equality as a moral imperative, part of the social gospel, which says we have a mission to alter the social system to alleviate suffering and to dismantle organized sin. They saw segregation as just such an organized sin."

Chappell believes this religious conviction set the Civil Rights Movement apart from other political uprisings. He credits it for motivating and strengthening a disadvantaged and disenfranchised group and for holding that group together in the face of violent opposition.

"It's what gave them hope, determination, solidarity and most important, a spirit of self-sacrifice. When you add it all up, those things, especially the last, explain why a relatively poor minority - powerless, excluded, miseducated - could win even though they were outnumbered, outvoted and outgunned," he said.