The Role of Ministers and Churches During the Civil
Rights Movement
The leadership role of black churches in the movement was a natural
extension of their structure and function. They offered members an
opportunity to exercise roles denied them in society. Throughout history, the
black church served not only as a place of worship but also as a community
"bulletin board," a credit union, a "people's court" to solve disputes, a
support group, and a center of political activism. These and other functions
enhanced the importance of the minister. The most prominent clergyman in
the civil rights movement was Martin Luther King, Jr. Timemagazine's 1964
"Man of the Year" was a man of the people. He joined as well as led protest
demonstrations, and as comedian Dick Gregory put it, "he gave as many
fingerprints as autographs." King's powerful oratory and persistent call for
racial justice inspired sharecroppers and intellectuals alike. His tireless
personal commitment to and strong leadership role in the black freedom
struggle won him worldwide acclaim and the Nobel Peace Prize.
Other notable minister-activists included Ralph Abernathy, King's closest
associate; Bernard Lee, veteran demonstrator and frequent travel companion
of King; Fred Shuttlesworth, who defied Bull Connor and who created a safe
path for a colleague through a white mob in Montgomery by commanding
"Out of the way!"; and C.T. Vivian, who debated Sheriff Clark on his conduct
and the Constitution.
Source: http://www.nps.gov/nr/travel/civilrights/players.htm
On the Civil Rights Memorial are inscribed the names of
individuals who lost their lives in the struggle for freedom
during the modern Civil Rights Movement - 1954 to 1968.
The martyrs include activists who were targeted for death
because of their civil rights work; random victims of
vigilantes determined to halt the movement; and
individuals who, in the sacrifice of their own lives,
brought new awareness to the struggle.
May 7, 1955 · Belzoni, Mississippi
Rev. George Lee, one of the first black people registered to vote in
Humphreys County, used his pulpit and his printing press to urge others to
vote. White officials offered Lee protection on the condition he end his voter
registration efforts, but Lee refused and was murdered.
All Souls Unitarian honors former
minister killed in civil rights
movement
By Richard Reeve
March 9, 2014 - 08:02 pm
Local church members are remembering a minister killed in the civil rights movement nearly
half a century ago.
The Rev. Clark Olsen.
Rev. James Reeb died days after he and two other ministers were attacked in Selma, Alabama.
Sunday morning, the Rev. Clark Olsen, one of the survivors, preached at All Souls Unitarian
Church in Northwest Washington where Rev. Reeb once ministered.
Olsen still recalls the terrible events this exact day, 49 years ago, when he, Rev. Reeb, and
another minister, were attacked by four Ku Klux Klansmen, moments after leaving an AfricanAmerican-owned diner.
Reeb's death caused a national outcry. Dr. Martin Luther King called the attack cowardly.
President Lyndon Johnson seized the moment to urge passage of the Voting Rights Act, which
passed in August 1965.
"There is still a struggle," says Rev. Robert Hardies of All Souls."Over 20 states have passed
legislation in recent years, that make it harder mostly for poor folks and people of color to have
access to a ballot."
In the church hallway is a small plaque honoring Reeb. And with one look around the diverse,
inclusive congregation you see a legacy of love.
Source: http://www.wjla.com/articles/2014/03/all-souls-unitarian-honors-former-ministerkilled-in-civil-rights-movement-100955.html
Ralph Abernathy
Freedom RiderMontgomery, AL
Rev. Ralph Abernathy was a key figure in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and beyond. As
the young pastor of First Baptist Church in Montgomery, AL, he and Martin Luther King,
Jr. were among the leaders of the 1955-56 Montgomery Bus Boycott organized in response to the
arrest of Rosa Parks.
In 1961, Abernathy's First Baptist Church was the site of the May 21 "siege" where an angry mob
of white segregationists surrounded 1,500 people inside the sanctuary. At one point, the
situation seemed so dire that Abernathy and King considered giving themselves up to the mob to
save the men, women, and children in the sanctuary.
When reporters asked Abernathy to respond to Robert Kennedy's complaint that the Freedom
Riders were embarrassing the United States in front of the world, Abernathy responded, "Well,
doesn't the Attorney General know we've been embarrassed all our lives?"
On May 25, Abernathy was arrested on breach of peace charges after escorting William Sloane
Coffin's Connecticut Freedom Ride to the Montgomery Greyhound Bus Terminal, neither the
first nor the last instance of civil disobedience in a lifetime of activism.
After Dr. King's assassination on April 4, 1968, Abernathy took up the leadership of the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) Poor People's Campaign and led the 1968 March on
Washington. Ralph Abernathy died in 1990.
Source: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/freedomriders/people/ralph-abernathy
Fred Shuttlesworth
Movement Leaders
Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth was Birmingham's leading civil rights activist at the time of the
Freedom Rides. A co-founder of the SCLC, he welcomed the Freedom Riders who
showed up on his doorstep on May 14, bleeding and battered after the riot at the
Trailways bus terminal and the Anniston bombing.
He offered the group shelter at the parsonage while seeking medical care for the badly
injured Charles Person and Jim Peck.
That evening, Shuttlesworth spoke at a mass meeting at Bethel Baptist Church. "This is
the greatest thing that has ever happened to Alabama, and it has been good for the
nation," he insisted. "No matter how many times they beat us up, segregation has still
got to go."
Shuttlesworth planned to join the Freedom Riders on their May 20 ride to Montgomery,
but was arrested at the Birmingham Greyhound Bus Terminal on the charge of refusing
to obey a police officer. He later traveled to Montgomery along with other Movement
leaders to support the Riders and was present during the siege and firebombing of First
Baptist Church. Shuttlesworth was arrested while escorting William Sloane Coffin and
other members of the Connecticut Freedom Ride to the Montgomery Greyhound Bus
Terminal.
In 1961, Shuttlesworth moved to Cincinnati to be pastor of Revelation Baptist Church.
However, he remained active in the Deep South Civil Rights struggle, including the
Birmingham desegregation campaign of 1963.
He returned to Birmingham after his retirement in 2007. In 2008, Birmingham's airport
officially changed its name to Birmingham-Shuttlesworth International Airport.
Source: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/freedomriders/people/fred-shuttlesworth
THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT
For more than 100 years, blacks had struggled against racial inequality,
racial violence and social injustice. By the mid-1950s, resistance coalesced
into concrete plans for action, spurred in part by the brutal murder of 14year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi. In September 1955, a photo of Till's
mutilated and battered body lying in an open casket aroused anger and deep
revulsion among blacks and whites, both in the North and South. Three
months after his death, a seamstress named Rosa Parks refused to give up
her seat to a white passenger on a bus in Montgomery, Ala. She was
arrested and fined. Soon after, ministers and lay leaders gathered to decide
on their course of action: a boycott of the Montgomery buses. They also
decided to form an association, the Montgomery Improvement Association,
and chose as their spokesman the newly appointed 26-year-old minister of
the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Martin Luther King Jr. The son and
grandson of ministers, King had grown up in his father's Ebenezer Baptist
Church in Atlanta. In his first speech he clearly defined the religious and
moral dimensions of the movement:
We are not wrong in what we are doing. If we are wrong, then the Supreme
Court of this nation is wrong. If we are wrong, the Constitution of the United
States is wrong. If we are wrong, God Almighty is wrong …
King continued as the principal spokesman for the boycott. Behind the
scenes, Jo Ann Robinson and E.D. Nixon managed the protest and kept it
going. The boycott lasted more than a year. In 1956, a federal ruling struck
down the Montgomery ordinance; the Supreme Court of the United States
later affirmed this decision.
Two years later, King and other black ministers formed the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), with the goal of organizing antisegregation efforts in other communities in the South. Its members included
Montgomery minister Ralph Abernathy; Andrew Young, a Congregationalist
minister from New Orleans; James Lawson from the United Methodist
Church; and Wyatt T. Walker, a Baptist. Civil rights activist Ella Baker served
as the group's executive secretary; King was elected president and declared
that the goal of the movement was "to save the soul of the nation." As
historian Albert Robateau has observed, "The civil rights movement became
a religious crusade."
As with emancipation, the civil rights crusade was sustained by the Exodus
story. As congressman and civil rights activist John Lewis observes: "Slavery
was our Egypt, segregation was our Egypt, discrimination was our Egypt, and
so during the height of the civil rights movement it was not unusual for
people to be singing, 'Go down Moses way on down in Egypt land and tell
Pharaoh to let my people go.'"
Churches played a pivotal role in protests. In crowded basements and
cramped offices, plans were made, strategies formulated, people assembled.
Decades of providing social services now paid off in organized political
protest. Marches took on the characteristics of religious services, with
prayers, short sermons and songs. But not all churches joined the civil rights
movement. As historian Barbara Savage has shown, most pastors and
congregations were reluctant to defy the status quo. J.H. Jackson, the
conservative leader of the venerable National Baptist Convention and pastor
of Chicago's Olivet Baptist Church, was staunchly opposed to King's tactics
as he affirmed the rule of law. Like Thurgood Marshall and the leadership of
the NAACP, he believed that civil disobedience, mass protests and any other
efforts that put African Americans in conflict with the powers that be would
compromise their efforts toward equality via the courts. Like Booker T.
Washington, he was convinced that it was the responsibility of black people
to prove their economic value and social worth to the dominant society by
modeling morality, entrepreneurialism and citizenship. Tensions finally split
the National Baptist Convention, U.S.A., the largest historic black
denomination, when King and others broke off to form the Progressive
Baptist Convention.
But not all those prepared to fight for civil rights subscribed to King's
strategy of nonviolence. King himself seemed reluctant to risk arrest. But
under pressure, he participated in a march in Birmingham that he knew
would land him in jail. A group of white ministers sent a letter criticizing his
actions. King replied with "Letter From Birmingham Jail," a profound
reflection upon Christianity and the imperative for social justice and social
change. King's letter was smuggled out of jail and widely published.
The White House advised King not to proceed with plans for a March on
Washington, but on Aug. 28, 1963 -- eight years to the day after the death
of Emmett Till -- 200,000 civil rights activists, including preachers, rabbis,
nuns, farmers, lawyers, store clerks and students, descended on the
Washington Mall to hear King deliver the most famous speech of the 20th
century, "I Have a Dream." Drawing upon the language and cadence of
Scripture, King linked biblical precepts to the Constitution and the
Declaration of Independence, and called upon the nation to honor the
commitment of the Founding Fathers to social justice and liberty for all.
The afterglow that enveloped the march was quickly shattered when four
little girls attending Sunday school were killed by a bomb that exploded in
the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham on Sept. 15, 1963. The
following year President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But
King himself faced growing criticism. Malcolm X, fiery spokesman for the
Nation of Islam, mocked his nonviolent approach. Stokely Carmichael and
others issued calls for "Black Power." King denounced the Vietnam War and
began to organize the Poor People's Campaign. His assassination on April 4,
1968, signaled the end of the apex of the civil rights movement.
Source: http://www.pbs.org/godinamerica/black-church/
Source: http://www.equalvoiceforfamilies.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/50_year_march_infographic.png
Source: http://sojo.net/sites/default/files/mainimages/blog/Screen%20Shot%202013-08-29%20at%2012.28.51%20PM.png
How did white religious leaders respond to Martin Luther
King, Jr.? Click this link to see a short video link:
http://www.cleanvideosearch.com/media/action/yt/watch
?videoId=cxQomiMHyJ0