A Darkly Radiant Vision: The Black Social Gospel in the Shadow of MLK 9780300271355

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface
Illustrations
one Shapes of Liberation and Wholeness
two Antiracist Politics in a Neoliberal World
three The Black Social Gospel as Rainbow Politics
four Theologies of Blackness with a Liberationist Bent
five Womanist Interventions and Intersections
six Prophetic Fire and Creative Flourishing
seven Frames of Identity and World House Struggle
Notes
Index

Citation preview

A DARKLY RADIANT VISION

B OOKS BY GA RY DORRIEN

Logic and Consciousness The Democratic Socialist Vision Reconstructing the Common Good The Neoconservative Mind: Politics, Culture, and the War of Ideology Soul in Society: The Making and Renewal of Social Christianity The Word as True Myth: Interpreting Modern Theology The Remaking of Evangelical Theology The Barthian Revolt in Modern Theology The Making of American Liberal Theology: Imagining Progressive Religion The Making of American Liberal Theology: Idealism, Realism, and Modernity Imperial Designs: Neoconservatism and the New Pax Americana The Making of American Liberal Theology: Crisis, Irony, and Postmodernity Social Ethics in the Making: Interpreting an American Tradition Economy, Difference, Empire: Social Ethics for Social Justice Kantian Reason and Hegelian Spirit: The Idealistic Logic of Modern Theology The Obama Question: A Progressive Perspective The New Abolition: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Black Social Gospel Breaking White Supremacy: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Black Social Gospel Social Democracy in the Making: Political and Religious Roots of European Socialism In a Post-Hegelian Spirit: Philosophical Theology as Idealistic Discontent American Democratic Socialism: History, Politics, Religion, and Theory

A DARKLY R ADIANT VISION The Black Social Gospel in the Shadow of MLK

GARY D ORRIE N

New Haven & London

Published with assistance from the Louis Stern Memorial Fund. Copyright © 2023 by Yale University. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail [email protected] (U.S. office) or [email protected] (U.K. office). Set in PostScript Electra type by IDS Infotech, Ltd. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Control Number: 2022937806 ISBN 978-0-300-26452-4 (hardcover : alk. paper) A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Kelly Brown Douglas and Andrea White, cherished friends and theologians

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Contents

Preface ix Illustrations xiii o n e   Shapes of Liberation and Wholeness  1 t w o   Antiracist Politics in a Neoliberal World  34 t h r e e   The Black Social Gospel as Rainbow Politics  104 f o u r   Theologies of Blackness with a Liberationist Bent  188 f i v e   Womanist Interventions and Intersections  261 s i x   Prophetic Fire and Creative Flourishing  334 s e v e n   Frames of Identity and World House Struggle  418 Notes  501 Index  569

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Preface

This book is an interpretation of Black social Christianity since the early 1970s. It stands on its own and concludes a trilogy, completing my argument about the importance of the Black social gospel. For twenty years I implored that someone better than I should write a comprehensive history of this intellectual and activist tradition. Then I faced up to it, writing the first volume in 2015, The New Abolition: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Black Social Gospel, and the second volume in 2018, Breaking White Supremacy: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Black Social Gospel. This third volume begins in the shadow of MLK and moves to our time, interpreting the politics, theology, ethics, social criticism, and activism of an ongoing tradition. I came to this subject by growing up during the King era and relating to the outside world chiefly through King. I was a kid from semirural Bay County, in Michigan’s Lower Peninsula, with nominally Catholic parents from poor families in the Upper Peninsula. My father was slurred throughout his youth as a “halfbreed” for having a Cree mother, and upon moving away, he aimed for all the White privilege he could get. My mother named me after a Native American friend to mark her quiet objection to his strategy of passing. She was proud of marrying a Cree and he was ashamed of being one; my father was in his sixties before he began to feel otherwise. I grew up White working-class and have never claimed any other racial identity, knowing that I internalized whiteness before and after King broke through to me in my adolescence, before I knew much about religion, politics, or the world beyond mid-Michigan. Without his prophetic Christian witness, I would not be anywhere near Christianity or the academy. In my twenties I was a solidarity organizer and a student; in my early thirties I was an Episcopal pastor and an organizer; at thirty-five I became an academic. In the academy my

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work is theological-philosophical on one side and political-ethical on the other, but I have always experienced these fields as integral to each other because I came to write about such things through King’s liberationist Christianity. Whether I am capable of doing justice to this subject can be determined only by the work itself, as I reflected in the prefaces to The New Abolition and Breaking White Supremacy. This book poses an additional challenge because most of the figures discussed in it are my friends, and some have been treasured friends to me for twenty, thirty, or forty years. I have found that when writing about your friends, it helps to remember that we don’t befriend people on the basis of constant agreement. Our friends are people we can wrangle with and still be okay. Here again, I believe my subject deserves all the books it can get, even from me. We especially need work on the Black social gospel that takes a social history approach to it. Mine is an intellectual and political history approach that combines social ethics, politics, theology, philosophy, and social theory, with a social history component. This book capitalizes “Black” and “White” to mark historically created racial identities. “Black” is a social category and collective identity marking a particular history. Capitalizing this term conveys an essential and shared sense of history and identity among people who identify as Black, including those in the African diaspora and within Africa. Capitalizing “White” as an identity group is far more fraught, since the only Whites who welcome doing it are White supremacists. But the risks therein must be accepted because “White” was created to designate a privileged group. Lowercasing “White” and “Black” evades the history that created modern racism. “The Black church,” a complex array of Black Christian groups in the North American context and a central concept in this book, admits of various definitions. At one end of the spectrum, many scholars restrict this category to the seven largest independent Black Methodist, Baptist, and Pentecostal denominations. This approach excludes small Black denominations, Black congregations in predominantly White denominations, and Black Christians in independent nondenominational churches. At the other end, some claim that the Black church is too heterogeneous to justify any definition. On this rendering, the Black church cannot be defined and is not visible; it is an invisible reality recognized by those who are sufficiently familiar with it. My usage is more inclusive than the short-list approach and more definite than the not-definable-invisible approach. I shall define the Black church as including all the Christian bodies just designated and as a group united by one principle—opposition to racism. The core, singular, defining, unifying antiracism of the Black church, however, opens out to a crucial distinction. Some

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Black Christian communities are far more justice-oriented and predisposed to progressive politics than others. This difference distinguishes social gospel and liberationist churches from churches that do not emphasize the struggle for justice. My concept of the Black church includes all Black denominations, Black congregations in predominantly White denominations, and Black Christians in independent churches, but my subject is the Black social gospel tradition that espouses a theology of social justice. Only a minority of Black denominations and congregations have ever belonged to the latter group. Two additional points are noteworthy. The words “America” and “American” naturally recur constantly in this book, reflecting longtime ordinary usage and the fact that only the United States put “America” in its name. I repeatedly sprinkle the term “U.S. American” into the text, however, to register that citizens of the United States do not own the terms “America” and “American.” Finally, some quotations in the book contain italicized emphases, and others employ different style choices from my own. I have a simple rule about quotations: never add or subtract an italicized emphasis, or change a quote in any way. Every quote reproduces what was originally written or said. Many friends helped me think about and write this book. Heading the list are two theological giants whom we lost in 2018, James Cone and Katie Cannon, and the two theologians to whom the book is dedicated, Kelly Brown Douglas and Andrea White. Jim was my closest collaborator and friend for thirteen years. Katie buoyantly accommodated every request I ever made of her except joining the faculty of the “other” Union. Kelly and Andrea are luminaries of the founding and third generations of womanist theology, and, blessedly to me, generous souls with a gift for friendship. I am grateful to Kelly and Andrea, and to Timothy Adkins-Jones, Nia Alvarez-Mapp, Victor Anderson, J. Kameron Carter, Lawrence Edward Carter Sr., Adam Clark, Monica A. Coleman, Juan Floyd-Thomas, Stacey Floyd-Thomas, Stephen Green, Obery Hendricks Jr., Joseph Johnson, James Jones, Serene Jones, Catherine Keller, Jutta Koslowski, Taobohan Lin, Kirsten Lodal, Upayadhi Savanna Jo Luraschi, Tara McManus, Obri Richardson, Eugene Rivers III, Anthony Jermaine Ross-Allam, Larry Rowley, Zachary Royal, Isaac Sharp, Karmen Smith, Aaron Stauffer, S. Aung Lin Than, Arvind Theodore, Emilie Townes, Eboni Marshall Turman, Cornel West, and Zachary White for their reading and sounding-board roles on this book. Isaac Sharp helped me again with the photo gallery, as he did for Breaking White Supremacy, with his customary generosity and care. I am deeply grateful to my friend Jennifer Banks, Senior Executive Editor for Religion and the Humanities at Yale University Press, for taking on our fifth book together, and to her generous, thorough, superb team, assistant Abbie

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Storch and Senior Manuscript Editor Susan Laity, and to copyeditor Ann Twombly. Many thanks go to Burke Library of Columbia University and its entire staff, headed by Matthew C. Baker, for unfailing help in my researching this book. Grateful acknowledgment is made to Alysha Landis at Goshen College in Goshen, Indiana, for the picture of Vincent Harding, with special thanks to Brian Yoder Schlabach. The picture of Andrew Young is in the public domain, photo by Thomas J. O’Halloran. The picture of Jesse Jackson is in the public domain and is reproduced courtesy of the University of Mount Union in Alliance, Ohio. Grateful acknowledgment for the picture of Samuel DeWitt Proctor is made to Marybeth Gasman, Executive Director and Distinguished Professor at the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Institute for Leadership, Equity, and Justice at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Grateful acknowledgment for the picture of James H. Cone is made to the Communications Office of Union Theological Seminary in New York, New York, with special thanks to Ian Rees. Grateful acknowledgment for the picture of J. Deotis Roberts is made to J. Deotis Roberts. Grateful acknowledgment for the picture of Henry Mitchell, Gayraud Wilmore, Robert M. Franklin Jr., and Walter Fluker is made to the Presbyterian Historical Society of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The picture of Cornel West is in the public domain and appears courtesy of photographer Gage Skidmore. The picture of bell hooks is in the public domain. Grateful acknowledgment for the picture of Emilie Townes, Kelly Brown Douglas, and Katie G. Cannon is made to Kelly Brown Douglas. Grateful acknowledgment for the picture of Delores S. Williams is made to the Communications Office of Union Theological Seminary. Grateful acknowledgment for the picture of Stacey M. Floyd-Thomas is made to Stacey M. Floyd-Thomas and the Tennessee Bureau of Ethics and Campaign Finance. Grateful acknowledgment for the picture of Monica A. Coleman is made to Monica A. Coleman. Grateful acknowledgment for the picture of Lawrence Edward Carter Sr. is made to Martin Doblmeier and his team at Journey Films, which featured Carter in Doblmeier’s superb film, Backs Against the Wall: The Howard Thurman Story. The picture of Eugene F. Rivers III is in the public domain and is reproduced courtesy of photographer Ben P L. Grateful acknowledgment for the picture of Traci D. Blackmon, William J. Barber II, and Liz Theoharis, taken by Jack Jenkins, is made to Religion News Service LLC. The picture of Raphael G. Warnock is in the public domain. Grateful acknowledgment for the picture of Eboni Marshall Turman is made to Eboni Marshall Turman. Diana Witt has been my indexer since my trilogy on American theological liberalism; she compiles only superb indexes, and I am grateful to her for another one.

Vincent Harding. Courtesy of Alysha Landis/Goshen College.

Andrew Young. Photo: Thomas J. O’Halloran; Wikimedia Commons.

Jesse Jackson. Photo: University of Mount Union, Alliance, Ohio; Wikimedia Commons.

Samuel DeWitt Proctor. Courtesy of the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Institute for Leadership, Equity, and Justice, Rutgers University.

James H. Cone. Courtesy of Union Theological Seminary.

J. Deotis Roberts. Courtesy of J. Deotis Roberts.

Henry Mitchell, Gayraud Wilmore, Robert M. Franklin Jr., and Walter Fluker. Courtesy of the Presbyterian Historical Society, Philadelphia.

Cornel West speaking with attendees at the Student Pavilion at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona. Photo: Gage Skidmore; Wikimedia Commons.

bell hooks. Wikimedia Commons.

Emilie Townes, Kelly Brown Douglas, and Katie G. Cannon. Courtesy of Kelly Brown Douglas.

Delores S. Williams speaking at James Chapel at Union Theological Seminary. Courtesy of Union Theological Seminary.

Stacey M. Floyd-Thomas. Courtesy of Stacey M. Floyd-Thomas and the Tennessee Bureau of Ethics and Campaign Finance.

Monica A. Coleman. Courtesy of Monica A. Coleman.

Lawrence Edward Carter Sr. Courtesy of Martin Doblmeier, Journey Films.

Eugene F. Rivers III. Photo: Ben P L; Wikimedia Commons.

Traci Blackmon (holding banner, left) and Liz Theoharis, cochair of the Poor People’s Campaign (right), join William Barber during a rally protesting President Donald Trump’s policies outside the White House in Washington, DC, on June 12, 2019. Photo by Jack Jenkins. Copyright 2019 Religion News Service LLC. Republished with permission of Religion News Service LLC, all rights reserved.

Raphael G. Warnock. Photo: warnock.senate.gov/about/.

Eboni Marshall Turman. Courtesy of Eboni Marshall Turman.

A DARKLY RADIANT VISION

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SHAPES OF LIBERATION AND WHOLENESS

W. E. B. Du Bois, reflecting on what Black Americans contributed to U.S. American civilization, sometimes offered a threefold cultural description and sometimes opted for political shorthand. In the cultural mode he said that the gifts of Black folk were story and song, sacrificial work that beat back the wilderness, and the Spirit. In the political mode he said that Black Americans struggled for freedom and justice wherever they found themselves. Martin Luther King Jr., steeped in both sides of the Du Bois tradition through the Black social gospel, said unequivocally that the social gospel struggle for freedom and justice is “the true mark of a Christian life.” Vincent Harding, carrying on the liberationist work of Du Bois and King, said he identified with those who struggled unceasingly against White supremacy, “the most powerful threat to democratic community and biblical faith in the America of their time.”1 This book completes my argument that the Black social gospel is a tradition of unsurpassed importance in U.S. American life and remains ongoing. In The New Abolition: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Black Social Gospel, I argued that four schools of Black social Christianity arose in the late nineteenth century and created the specific social gospel tradition that led to MLK and the civil rights movement. In Breaking White Supremacy: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Black Social Gospel, I argued that the Black social gospel provided the social justice theology and politics espoused by King and his followers in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). The present book is more like the first than the second for being narrow and broad, interpreting the ongoing King tradition within the context of contemporary Black social Christianity. From the beginning, the Black social gospel was a broader phenomenon than the line that led

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to King. This book argues that today the liberationist social gospel of King is the touchstone of a broad Black social Christianity consisting of varieties of liberation and womanist theology, Black religious thought, progressive religion, broad-based interfaith organizing, and global solidarity politics.2 The Black social gospel began in the 1870s as an attempt to imagine what a new abolitionism would be. Some of its founders were abolitionist veterans, and others came of age during Reconstruction. Black abolitionists of the 1830 to 1860 generation such as New York itinerant preacher Sojourner Truth and Boston writer David Walker enlisted the liberating God of the Bible as an enemy of slavery. Their successors confronted new forms of racial terrorism and tyranny that compelled a new abolitionist consciousness, politics, and theology. Reconstruction was abandoned, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments were eviscerated in much of the nation, a mania of lynching and Jim Crow denigration spread across the land, and the founders of the Black social gospel sought to build protest organizations. The old abolitionist convention movement still existed, but it was merely a forum for Frederick Douglass and other notables of the antebellum generation to give speeches. The new abolitionists said that did not cut it; contrary to Douglass, they had to create protest organizations. They combined the abolitionist faith in the God of the oppressed with the language of social justice and social salvation that arose in the progressive and socialist movements. The founders of the Black social gospel espoused four schools of thought. The first group identified with Booker T. Washington and his program of political accommodation and economic uplift. It was mildly reformist politically with an understated cultural nationalism geared to assimilate into White U.S. American society. The second group espoused the nationalist conviction that African Americans needed their own nation, whether or not it took the form of a backto-Africa movement. Here the dominant concept of liberation was separatist, holding little or no hope that politics could ever be liberating in racist White America. The third group waged protest activism for racial justice, strongly opposing Washington. It emphasized the political struggle against White supremacy, treating Black cultural identity as secondary to it. This group had a Socialist flank and a global anti-imperialist bent, following Du Bois into the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The fourth group opposed factional division, calling for a fusion of pro-Washington realism and anti-Washington protest militancy. Du Bois versus Washington dominated the Black social gospel in the early twentieth century, but all four ideological schools existed before Du Bois emerged as the intellectual leader of the protest tradition. The new abolitionists

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founded the Afro-American League, which foundered, the Afro-American Council, which made a strong beginning until Washington took it over, and the Niagara Movement, which Du Bois willed into being but could not sustain. Black social gospel leaders Reverdy Ransom, Alexander Walters, Ida B. WellsBarnett, Nannie Burroughs, Adam Clayton Powell Sr., Richard R. Wright Jr., and Robert Bagnall variously played important roles in these organizations and the multiracial protest organization that did not fail, the NAACP. They paved the way to the generation of Black social gospel leaders who were role models for King: Mordecai Johnson, Benjamin E. Mays, J. Pius Barbour, and Howard Thurman. The full-fledged Black social gospel advocated social justice religion and critical consciousness, combining an emphasis on Black personal dignity with protest activism for racial justice, a comprehensive social justice agenda, an insistence that true Christianity is antiracist, an emphasis on the social ethical teaching of Jesus, and an acceptance of modern science and scholarship. This is my operative definition of the Black social gospel. Black churches were born liberationist, hearing a message of freedom in Christianity that was not what was preached to them. They fled from the racism of White churches and puzzled that White Christians, with the partial exception of full-fledged abolitionists of the Second Great Awakening (1790–1840), did not practice their religion. The Black social gospel had a similarly complex relationship to the famous White social gospel movement that issued social creeds and inspired what should be called the Third Great Awakening. The most important things that defined the Black social gospel were distinctive to it—formative opposition to racism and giving highest priority to racial justice activism. The vaunted democratic progress of the Progressive Era was worthless if it did not break the chains of racial caste. But the Black social gospel also had important affinities with the White social gospel. On both sides of the color line, the social gospel was fundamentally a movement, not a doctrine, featuring a social ethical understanding of the Christian faith. It taught that Christianity has a mission to transform the structures of society in the direction of social justice. This belief was rooted in the commands of the Bible to lift the yoke of oppression and build a just order. The ancient Christian church devised creeds that never mentioned the biblical ethic of justice. The social gospel founders said that was a grievous mistake, which modern social consciousness helped correct. The concepts of “social structure” and “social justice” came into being in the 1880s with the rise of the Socialist, trade union, neo-abolitionist, and Progressive movements. Not coincidentally, so did the social gospel, the fields of sociology and social ethics, and the idea of social salvation. Only with the rise of modern social Christianity did

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Christian thinkers begin to say that salvation must be personal and social to be saving. There is no salvation that does not include justice. I argued in Breaking White Supremacy that King was steeped in the Black social gospel of his role models and was far more radical than the iconic liberal King who had a dream of racial integration. The Black social gospel was the answer to a question too seldom asked: Where did MLK come from? King’s mentors showed him that church leaders could combine academic intellectualism, religious faith, and a passion for social justice. In fact, they said, it was imperative for the church to become known for combining these things. Johnson, Mays, Barbour, and Thurman were democratic Socialists and anticolonial internationalists who took for granted that the best versions of the social gospel were democratic Socialist and anti-imperialist. King assumed the same thing, never believing it made him unusual. After he was gone, he became the global symbol of a dream of equality deferred and denied, defeated by structures of White supremacy that he failed to break, but representing the hope of liberation struggles still unfolding. The Black social gospel is the self-identifying touchstone of many Black churches and a reminder of the United States’ greatest story, the civil rights movement of the King era. In the generation of Ransom and Wells-Barnett it named all Black Americans who espoused a social justice theology on behalf of the new abolition, whether or not they employed the specific jargon of the social gospel. Today it should not be restricted to figures who keep alive the idioms of the early generations or the King era. The past half century of Black social Christianity includes many figures who devoted their careers to “fulfilling Martin’s dream,” as they said, but it does not consist only of those in this line. King’s social gospel was geared to his generation, and some of his faults demand criticism and correction. His sexism was deep-seated and unyielding; he had no inkling of the coming gay rights movement, marriage equality, or queer theory; until 1964 he romanticized the liberal ideal of racial integration; and he stumped for integration for the rest of his life, though the Black Power movement purged him of his romanticizing it. S E VE N FAC ES OF TH E B L A CK SOCIAL GOS P EL AFTER MLK

After King was assassinated, every figure and organization associated with the Black social gospel reeled from his loss and the traumas of the 1960s. It was undeniable that an era had ended and a very troubled future lay ahead. But those who carried on the struggle in King’s name were often lifted by the moral prestige of King and the civil rights movement. The Black social gospel—in the

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specific sense of this category symbolized by King—thrived in seven spheres. First, it undergirded the careers of civil rights leaders who became prominent political figures, especially Andrew Young, Jesse Jackson, Walter Fauntroy, John Lewis, and William Gray III. Second, it played a similar role in the careers of second-tier national civil rights leaders who moved up to become organizational directors, especially Ralph David Abernathy, Benjamin F. Chavis Jr., Marian Wright Edelman, Joseph Lowery, Benjamin Hooks, Vernon Jordan, and C. T. Vivian. Third, it played an important role in party politics in many local areas. By 1984 there were approximately 450 Black mayors spread across the nation, mostly in small to medium-sized southern towns. Upwards of 340 were ministers, nearly all of them Baptists. For most of these preacher-mayors, the civil rights era had not ended; it lived and grew through them. Fourth, in Black pulpits across the nation, the social gospel became a kind of new orthodoxy. Here there were homiletic giants who straddled three generations of the Black freedom movement, pastors who came of age during the King era, and young pastors just starting out. The preaching giants of the 1950s and 1960s began their careers when King was a youth and completed their careers after King was gone. Gardner Taylor held forth at Brooklyn’s mammoth 10,000-member Concord Baptist Church. Samuel DeWitt Proctor restored Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem to its glory days of scintillating preaching and public leadership, while keeping his day job at Rutgers University. Kelly Miller Smith, long revered in Nashville, was lured to a big-steeple church in Cleveland, soon regretted the move, and returned to a distinguished career in Nashville. James Lawson, having invited King to Memphis in 1968, served at Centenary Methodist Church in Memphis until 1974, when he moved to Holman United Methodist Church in Los Angeles. These iconic pastors embodied and registered the movement history they experienced. They were eloquent, grounded, wise, and inspiring. Taylor and King founded the Progressive National Baptist Convention in 1961 after the leaders of the National Baptist Convention USA (NBCUSA) opposed the civil rights movement. Proctor and Smith gently mentored student protesters in the late 1950s and early 1960s, playing parental roles to the students who lit a protest wildfire and sailed past the previous generation. Miller looked out for the students whom Lawson radicalized in Nashville who went on to create SNCC. King recruited Lawson and relied on his expertise in Gandhian resistance. Lawson subsequently exemplified to many what it meant to “be like Martin” and carry forward his vision. Lawson was like Lewis in possessing a record of movement heroism and a rock-of-ages moral integrity that partly inoculated both men from criticism after the tide turned against racial integration.

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Fifth, the women of the Black social gospel were a category unto themselves and involved in all the other groups. In the 1970s they included Operation PUSH cofounder Willie Barrow, SCLC official Dorothy Cotton, former Mennonite peace activist Rosemarie Freeney Harding, Episcopal cleric Barbara Harris, National Council of Churches (NCC) official Anna Arnold Hedgeman, United Methodist official Theressa Hoover, Episcopal cleric Pauli Murray, former SNCC organizers Diane Nash and Prathia Hall Wynn, and educator Jean Young. But women as a whole, and even some of those just named, labored quietly and supportively in churches and the civil rights movement, usually not being candidates for ordination, tenure, or spotlight time. This story began to change only when a handful of Black women graduated from seminaries in the 1970s and founded the womanist movement in the mid-1980s. The sixth group consisted of denominational officials such as AME Bishop John D. Bright Jr., Episcopal Bishop John M. Burgess, United Methodist Bishop Charles F. Golden, NCC official Benjamin F. Payton, AME Zion Bishop Herbert B. Shaw, United Presbyterian official Gayraud S. Wilmore, and Episcopal Diocese of Newark official Nathan Wright. The seventh category counted numerous generational peers of King who carried on his legacy in the academy. The theological wing of the academy counted Vincent Harding, Lawrence N. Jones, Major Jones, Bernard Lafayette, C. Eric Lincoln, Peter Paris, J. Deotis Roberts, Samuel Roberts, James Washington, and Preston Williams. But the coming of Black liberation theology threw into question whether Black social gospel theology should still exist. The challenge to Black social gospel theology did not come only from outsiders such as James H. Cone. It also came from insiders such as Harding, Lincoln, and C. T. Vivian. Harding said in 1967 that a veil had descended between liberals who still wanted to sing “We Shall Overcome” and Black Power radicals who vowed never to be shamed again by a White Christ. Lincoln welcomed Cone to Union Theological Seminary and wrote provocatively that the “Negro Church” was as dead as the God of White theology. Only a militant Black church, rising like a phoenix from the ashes of the Negro church, could support Black theology. Vivian declared in Black Power and the American Myth (1970) that King’s mission ended in failure. Vivian had been a Lawson disciple in Nashville, a cofounder of SNCC, and a King lieutenant in the SCLC, coordinating SCLC branches. In Nashville his fiery temperament contrasted with the geniality of his friend Smith. Vivian shared a close friendship with King based on movement bravery and a shared seminary worldview. He admired MLK immensely, but after King was gone, Vivian said his approach rested on two mistaken beliefs: (1) Integration is the solution to racism; (2) Legislation leads to justice. Vivian

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allowed that King wrung as much as possible out of liberal Christian idealism. At the time, nothing would have worked better. But King wrongly assumed that racial integration was the model of success, that White Americans believed in their democratic ideals, and that White supremacy would break when enough good people recognized the justice of the civil rights cause. By 1970 Vivian struggled to remember that he had ever believed it.3 The only thing Vivian knew for sure was that White liberalism was no longer a basis for making any further progress toward racial justice. White American racism was so toxic and pervasive that it drove Whites into two groups. A small tradition of White radicals shared John Brown’s hatred of racism. The rest were psychologically incapable of acknowledging what Vivian called the “unspeakable and intolerable crime” of American racial tyranny. The only true White allies were the ones who hated racism enough to purge themselves of it. They recognized their complicity in White supremacy and worked to abolish it. Vivian said there were more of them than Black nationalists tended to assume. He had White allies he trusted, and even Brown had sixteen White comrades at Harpers Ferry. But this was a small group, and the genuine White allies did not ask Blacks for validation or a place at the table.4 The “new separatism,” as Vivian called it, was finished with helping White liberals with their problems. What mattered was to build a Black freedom movement that sang its own songs. King and Vivian had pledged allegiance to integration because this concept fit their understanding of how people should relate to each other. A good society has integrationist values. But this idea, Vivian said, does not fit U.S. society. Holding out for integration in the racist United States was demeaning and self-defeating for African Americans. It masked the oppressive relation of Whites to Blacks, making White liberals the brokers of racial integration. Vivian declared that almost everything he had learned in the movement made integration impossible as a goal for the Black community in the post-King era. Integration was dead as a value and goal because most Whites only pretended to believe in it, “and Blacks, in response, have realized that they must develop their own distinctive culture.”5 Vivian made no claim to originality. Cone’s searing first book, Black Theology and Black Power (1969), preceded Black Power and the American Myth by several months. Cone said he wrote to unload the unbearable fury that raged within him. Vivian said he wrote merely to express what many were saying and feeling. His book stood out in a crowded field of separatist and liberationist writing mostly for coming from King’s inner circle. Many reviewers registered the point. If a longtime disciple of King had swung this far against civil rights liberalism, it might be too late to renew the King approach. These were the terms of the debate for as

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long as the liberal-idealist interpretation of MLK held sway. If King was on the wrong side of the argument over Black Power, better leave him behind. Soon there was a Black liberation theology movement led by Cone, Roberts, and Wilmore, who fashioned three different liberation theologies. The one thing they agreed on was that Black theologians needed to theologize out of their own Black experience and tradition, not an inherited Euro-American tradition. This book must wait until chapter 4 to plunge into theological debates that rocked the Black social gospel shortly after King was cut down. Meanwhile the role of the Black social gospel in undergirding racial justice organizing, politics, and church preaching vastly transcended the debates that consumed academic theologians. Andrew Young, the figure standing at the center of chapter 2, was thirty-six years old when King was assassinated. Jesse Jackson, the principal subject of chapter 3, was twenty-six. Young and Jackson went on to highly prominent political careers that symbolize, between them, the march of the civil rights movement into electoral politics. The political struggles that consumed Young, Jackson, and their collaborators drove the Black social gospel in ways that affected millions of people—many more than tracked theological contentions that in 1969 burst aflame for theologians. Young and Jackson stood out among the King disciples who applied King’s vision to political realities of the shadow years. To Young’s surprise, he became the first of King’s lieutenants to run for office, taking the path that won the biggest spotlight, until Jackson surpassed him. Entering the political realm could be construed as winning the right to moral authority, or as squandering it. Young’s successful political career and Jackson’s longtime drive to win insider status in the Democratic Party dramatized this tension. Both combined an antiracist postcolonial approach to world politics with a vigorous Black capitalism, imagining a new world order shaped by Black internationalists and enlightened corporations. Both contended that Black internationalists and Black capitalists held better values than the White versions—or at least they should. Young moved from the U.S. Congress to the United Nations to the mayoralty of Atlanta to the boards of major corporations. He didn’t claim that King would have approved of his political career; all he could say was that conditions changed after Martin was gone, and he liked to think that Martin might have approved of him. Jackson built PUSH (People United to Save Humanity) into a multi-issue organization emphasizing economic activism, converted PUSH into a service organization focused on school evangelism, threw himself into voter registration activism, twice ran for president of the United States, belatedly won a State Department portfolio, and ended his career much like Young, fixing on the corporate pinnacle of economic power. Young was never radical

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and Jackson was radical only in a Black culture sense of the term, outflanking the civil rights establishment to the left in speaking the language of Black Power and cultivating alliances with Black nationalists. Yet Jackson and even Young seemed way out there to most White Americans for criticizing racism and taking seriously the vision of global solidarity they got from King. For many years Young gave quotable interviews to scholars and journalists while expecting someday to write his memoir. Then he wrote a compelling memoir of his life in the civil rights movement, stressing that King assigned him to his main job, corralling SCLC lieutenants. In the shadow years, Young was the only former insider to stay on good terms with the entire group of lieutenants and Coretta King, which didn’t stop him from writing frankly about the volatile egos and fractious behavior of the lieutenants. Gifted with charm and a puckish sense of humor about himself and the human condition, Young specialized during his SCLC days in smoothing things over with southern sheriffs, the media, and critics right and left. Then he discovered to his surprise that working for the SCLC prepared him superbly for a career in politics. Young asked Atlanta to adopt him, and he richly rewarded the city for doing so. He pushed hard in Congress for investments in Atlanta, expounding a vision of Atlanta as a corporate cosmopolitan oasis run by Black officials. He returned to Atlanta after his UN days to run the city for two terms and brought a gusher of corporate investment and business to Atlanta, always touting the upside of corporate capitalism for Black Americans and global people of color.6 Meanwhile Jackson tried and failed on several occasions to write a memoir, even when provided with highly able assistance. Publishers began to plead for a memoir in the early 1970s and are still begging. A succession of editors and ghostwriters worked with Jackson, labored intently, produced a draft, and got a red light from Jackson. It was never a problem of agreeing on a narrative frame or finding an acceptable ghostwriter. Neither was Jackson unwilling to talk about his personal life; he talked about it constantly. The problem was that publishers wanted him to interpret his life. What drove him? What was he thinking? What did it mean? What did he believe about current intellectual trends? Jackson would launch into blustery sermon mode, blowing past the questions. Academic theology had never interested him, nor had intellectual books in general, especially anything theoretical. It was one thing for him to let his many interpreters and biographers write about him, since he could always disown what they said. Putting his own name and word on the line would have pinned him down. Jackson was never for that. Two of his biographers stand out. Black journalist Barbara A. Reynolds, a leftwing activist in Chicago and later a pastor, was close to Jackson for several years,

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but she grew troubled over Jackson’s opportunism, egotism, opaque finances, and harsh treatment of his staff. Then she fell out with him after Jackson blamed his break with the SCLC, in 1971, on Black Chicago Tribune reporter Angela Parker. Jackson attacked Parker as an enemy of great Black men and destroyed her career. Reynolds feared the same thing would happen to her. She named names and talked turkey in a brave, detailed, landmark book, Jesse Jackson: The Man, the Movement, the Myth (1975). Reynolds steeled herself for blowback, which was as bad as she feared, though subtler, because Jackson was far more powerful by 1975. The book got an early splash of attention only to swiftly disappear from bookstore chains. Soon it was as though she had never written it. Jesse Jackson was not a one-sided demolition. Reynolds described a complex, multifaceted, in many ways admirable figure driven by moral passion as well as insecure egotism. She said she could imagine an older Jackson who got control of his ego and became a distinguished leader. Ten years later, introducing a reprint of her book, Reynolds said the Jackson who ran for president in 1984 was far more mature than the one who had cheated the SCLC, broke from it, persecuted Parker, and founded PUSH. Jackson had grown, she wrote, “from an ego-centered missionary forever self-testing his own somebodiness to an inspired visionary offering new hopes and ranges of possibilities for the despised, neglected, abused, and maligned in the United States and abroad.” The tenth anniversary edition fared no better than the original, and Reynolds subsequently returned to emphasizing the negative when interviewers tracked her down. But she put every interpreter of Jackson in her debt, and she recognized that his virtues were at least as great as his foibles.7 Southern White journalist Marshall Frady wrote the other indispensable Jackson book, Jesse: The Life and Pilgrimage of Jesse Jackson (1996). This was Frady’s third book on southern mass communicators. His first book made the biggest splash, a portrait of Alabama’s segregationist leader George Wallace, which both humanized Wallace and allowed him to hang himself through extensive quotation. Frady wrote florid hyper-Faulknerian prose specializing in southern cultural tics. He quoted long riffs of novelesque dialogue, fixing on the ways his three southern subjects used their folk sensibilities to connect with huge audiences. His book on Wallace vividly conveyed Wallace’s glandular, raging, ambitious vitality, too sympathetically at times, though Frady revealed enough that Wallace had to be dissuaded from suing him for libel. His second book was on evangelist Billy Graham. To Frady, Graham was a harder subject, the opposite of the earthy and glowering Wallace. Graham was denatured, sterile, controlled, and willfully nice. He worked too hard at being squeaky clean, covering up the uglies that the Richard Nixon tapes exposed, but it worked for him.8

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Frady rendered Jackson as a cross between Wallace and Graham— voraciously vital like Wallace, compulsively evangelical like Graham, but radically different from both because Jackson was a Black apostle of the social gospel, asking himself constantly how to be like King. Frady liked Jackson immensely and cringed at his mean side. He started following Jackson at the end of the 1988 presidential campaign, tagged along for years on numerous foreign trips, and watched Jackson cope with the aftermath of his career peak, the 1988 campaign. Frady registered that much of the public and media reacted to Jackson with a viral repugnance, describing an ambulance-chasing hustler. Frady pushed back winsomely, noting that Jackson spent much of his life seeking out people in pain, going to far-flung places to meet them, offering friendship and a comforting word, and being adored by thronging crowds who caught that he cared about them with rare moral passion. Jackson wanted to be two things that conflicted, a King-like moral prophet and a leading politician. He oscillated back and forth for many years, never quite willing or able to stop wavering. He shared with King the powerful Black folk spirituality of the NBCUSA, which Jackson inflected, like King, with social gospel theology and politics. Jackson was a lodestar to many Black liberationists and progressives finding their way in the shadow years. He radicalized King’s approach by collaborating with Black nationalists, aligning PUSH with Black Power, developing a Black national agenda, and flirting with third-party politics. He showed there was a third way between civil rights liberalism and the nationalist and left-wing sects that derided Jackson as a dead-end opportunist. This third way, however, was always subject to Jackson’s wavering and whims. PUSH struggled to keep up with his gyrating inspirations. Jackson never acquired King’s intellectualism, never broke from the NBCUSA as King did, and eventually took the political path that King spurned. In his early career, Jackson’s opposition to abortion rights and gay rights were reasons to stay in the NBCUSA. He later changed his positions on these issues while mulling a presidential run, but he stayed in the NBCUSA to contest the political conservatism of Joseph H. Jackson and other denominational leaders. Jackson gyrated until his Rainbow Coalition campaigns of 1984 and 1988 harnessed him to the very concrete, historic, high-profile, and draining demands of running for president. His 1984 campaign dramatically changed what every Democratic Party convention has looked like since, bringing people of color into the leadership structure of the party. It also pulled party debates to the left on single-payer health care, Palestinian rights, and the rights of gays and lesbians—a historic achievement too often overlooked in derisive dismissals of his career. But Jackson was haunted by coming closer than he had expected to his presidential dream. He

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wanted desperately to be the vice presidential nominee both times, and he kept hoping for a vice presidential nod after he stopped running for president. He could have won a lower office but aimed too high to run for something lesser; moreover, he never really decided he was a politician. It is not impossible to combine the vocations of moral apostle and politician; John Lewis did it from 1987 to 2020 while representing Georgia’s Fifth Congressional District. But Lewis was an exceptional case who was going to be himself no matter what job he held. Lewis was patient, humble, centered, and fully at home in the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. Jackson was none of these things. He kept alive the protest activism of the civil rights movement, giving newcomers and movement veterans something to join and to do, inspiring activist protégé clerics such as Willie Barrow and Al Sharpton. When this book catches up to its theological side in chapter 4, the theologians it focuses on are Proctor, Cone, Roberts, Wilmore, Jeremiah Wright, Dwight N. Hopkins, the leading second-generation proponent of Black theology, and J. Kameron Carter, for a while the leading third-generation proponent, until he dropped theology. Theology is first-order discourse about matters of religious truth, venturing into the perilous, cognitive, normative, existential work of adjudicating whatever concerns us ultimately. It draws on meta-level fields such as sociology of religion, history of religion, and the like, but theology aims at what is religiously true, making claims about things that individuals and religious communities care about sufficiently to stake their lives on. Theology can be wrong, but it cannot be neutral, being inherently prescriptive. Proctor, the preeminent advocate of renewing Black social gospel liberalism, was a beloved figure whose books beautifully conveyed and reflected on Black faith. Cone began his career as a theological advocate of the Black Power movement, was staggered by the charge that his theology was reactive and dependent, and went on to deepen his roots in Black religion while engaging other liberationist critiques. Roberts began his career as a social gospel liberal and philosophical theologian, embarked on Black theology in 1968, and went on to fuse social gospel liberalism, liberation theology, and Afrocentrism. Wilmore contended that Black theology should be a center of activist contagion within radical Black religious thought, a category reaching beyond Christianity and committed to retrieving African and African American sources. He pulled Cone in his direction, though never nearly as much as he wanted. Wright opted wholly for Afrocentrism, charging that Cone overreacted to White theology. Hopkins inherited Black theology as an ongoing tradition, fusing arguments of Cone, Wilmore, and womanist criticism, reflecting theologically on Black sources. Carter contended that Hopkins and the entire Black theology tradition

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operated too much under the intellectual inheritance of modern White theology. Proctor and King were close friends; for others it took years of struggle to straighten out what they believed about King. The early Cone said harsh things about Black church leaders and halfdismissive things about King, sharply regretting that even the later King called for racial integration. It took many years for the trauma of the 1960s to pass. The entire 1970s and half of the 1980s had to elapse before it was possible for Cone, liberationist philosopher Cornel West, and others who came of age in the 1960s to recover the radical King who sympathized with Black Power criticism, blasted American militarism and imperialism, and recognized the problem with racial assimilation. West took for granted that King was “a grand example of integrity and sacrifice,” and not much more. He later recalled that until the mid-1980s, King was not someone to be claimed for the road ahead: “King was for us the Great Man who died for us—but not yet the voice we had to listen to, question, learn from and build upon.” Then came the recovery of King’s anti-imperialism, antimilitarism, Socialism, and postcolonialism. West rediscovered in King an exemplar of most of the things he cared about, declaring in 1986: “King’s thought remains a challenge to us principally in that he accented the anticolonial, anti-imperialist, and antiracist consequences of taking seriously the American ideals of democracy, freedom, and equality.”9 Cone went through a similar metamorphosis. In the 1970s and early 1980s he rerooted his theology in African American religious history, shedding the reliance on White theologians Karl Barth and Paul Tillich that marked Black Theology and Black Power and Cone’s second book, A Black Theology of Liberation (1970), and he adopted King’s Christian gospel emphasis on redemptive suffering. In the mid-1980s Cone rethought King’s relation to liberation theology, contending that King was the first liberation theologian, whose social gospel was not a species of White liberalism. In Martin & Malcolm & America (1991), Cone argued that Black theology needed to ground itself in a King-andMalcolm dialectic in which each corrected the other. King modeled how to be Christian and Malcolm modeled how to be Black.10 When I wrote The New Abolition and Breaking White Supremacy, Cone was my foremost encourager, critic, friend, and reader. We read each other’s first drafts of articles and books, and for twenty years preceding The New Abolition I had sprinkled my argument that someone should write a comprehensive intellectual and political history of the Black social gospel. Jim prodded me persistently to write it, I would stammer about my limitations, and he would cut me off: “For God’s sake, Gary, it’s your obsession. Just start writing it.” When I finally began he had strong opinions, exhorting me to define the subject as tightly as

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possible—“Don’t let too many people into it! Define it narrowly! Sque-e-e-e-ze it!” I agreed and disagreed. The crucial thing was the protest stream in the orbit of Du Bois that led to King. “Black social gospel” was a catchall if it covered every Black Christian who supported some kind of activism. But the Black social gospel was wider than the school of Du Bois, especially among women. Thus, I defined it narrowly and broadly, tracking the relationships between the Du Bois stream and the three other ideological tendencies. SEV EN A RGU M ENTS

This book makes seven arguments along this line. The first extends my contention in The New Abolition that the founders of Black theology were wrong to claim that Black Americans had never produced an important theologian. Black religious historian Joseph Washington pioneered this claim in 1964, contending that Black Christianity was a sub-Christian folk faith with no theology and no theologians. Washington lamented that Black churches rarely expound the Reformation teaching of Martin Luther and John Calvin that God predestined the elect to salvation and everything that happens in the world. The AME Church listed justification by grace through faith as an article of the church, but did not preach it. Only the evangelical-Awakening doctrine of redemption through repentance made sense to Black preachers. Cone and Roberts took from Washington the threefold verdict that Black Protestantism is wholly different from White Protestantism, lacks any real basis in Reformation theology, and thus lacked theologians. This argument buttressed the assertion of Cone and Roberts that Black theology began with them; they had no theological predecessors. Cone became a towering figure in theology by founding Black liberation theology and brilliantly expressing what it means to take blackness seriously on liberationist terms. His early framing argument, however, wrongly discounted Reverdy Ransom, Henry McNeal Turner, Mordecai Johnson, Benjamin E. Mays, Howard Thurman, and King—creative theological thinkers who thought through their blackness. To be sure, they did not write systematic theology— doctrine-based “real theology,” as Cone and Roberts conceived it. But systematic theology is a Euro-academic enterprise, a point that Wilmore and religious historian Charles H. Long pressed against Cone.11 My second argument builds on the first one, agreeing and disagreeing with Wilmore, who rightly implored Black theologians to stop saying that Black theology was invented in 1969, and who wrongly steered three generations of students away from the Black social gospel tradition. Wilmore was Cone’s closest friend and toughest critic. He argued that Black theology should be a subordi-

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nate discipline within Black religious thought, not a normative Christian enterprise as Cone held, and that Black theology should appropriate the Black radical tradition. Wilmore’s personal importance to me is immense because he was a social justice activist, an ecumenical church leader, and the chief historiographer of Black religious radicalism. He and I shared activist work that Cone declined to join, and Wilmore made an argument about Black theology that resembles my case for the Black social gospel. He spent much of his life trying to revive ecumenical activism and to drag Black academic theologians into political activism. Wilmore wanted Black liberation theology to become the gold standard of progressive religion and politics in the United States. He did not spare anyone’s feelings when he charged and grieved that it did not happen. Wilmore intertwined the struggles for Black cultural liberation and Black political liberation while giving higher priority to the former, since it alone is inherently saving; a mere political victory would be empty. In his landmark book, Black Religion and Black Radicalism (1973), Wilmore said the radical tradition in Black religion seeks to be liberated from White domination, commends respect for Africa, and uses protest and agitation in the struggle for liberation. It is less political and ideological than other forms of radical politics such as Marxian syndicalism, Social Democracy, Communism, or Progressivism because Black radicalism perceives that White supremacy is the fatal sickness of Western civilization, a plague of racist domination. The leaders of the Black social gospel, he judged, were too eager to find a home in racist America, so they flunked the essential test of radical seriousness. Only Ransom, Walters, and Powell Sr. were worth mentioning—with one sentence each. In The New Abolition I argued that Wilmore denied the Black social gospel its due recognition. In this book I argue that Wilmore was a major Black theologian with a complex legacy, and the Black social gospel is still the touchstone of progressive religion and politics in the United States.12 My third argument is that many of the Black social gospel activists who knew King personally did not have to wait until the late 1980s to appreciate the radical King. James Bevel, Harding, Rosemarie Harding, Jackson, Lafayette, Lawson, Lewis, Lowery, Proctor, Vivian, and Young were keenly aware of King’s antiimperialism, antimilitarism, postcolonialism, and democratic Socialism. They were grounded especially in King’s antiracist postcolonialism, expounding it before and after civil rights liberalism became a passé topic. This commitment united these figures as disciples of King even when “radicalism” otherwise did not. Young, Jackson, and Lewis were not radical in any other political sense of the term. Otherwise they would not have achieved immense success in electoral politics. The antiracist postcolonialism that Young, Jackson, and Lewis shared

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with King gave them a different view of the world from the regnant frameworks of Cold War militarism and U.S. exceptionalism. I will argue that it did not fit neoliberalism either—the other regnant worldview framework of the past half century. But Young, Jackson, and Lewis—especially Young—had too much at stake in corporate capitalism to contend against it. My fourth argument is that some of the most creative and vital forms of Black social Christianity synthesize the social gospel and liberationist approaches. Cone, Wilmore, and Hopkins categorically opposed the idea of a liberal-liberationist option. To them, liberalism equated with racial integration, and opposition to it was an either-or acid test of liberation. But no definition or binary passes unchanged from one generation to another, and liberal-liberation is a variable possibility. King was a liberal-liberationist, as were Jackson, Lafayette, Lawson, Lewis, and other King disciples. At the founding of liberation theology, Roberts called for a fusion of social gospel liberal and liberationist approaches. To him this was a self-description. Roberts said Black theology needed to privilege Black consciousness and adhere to science, employ higher critical approaches to the Bible, affirm the social gospel emphasis on social justice, practice the gospel ethic of reconciliation, engage the history of Christian philosophy, and theologize in a global interfaith fashion. Black liberation, to him, did not abrogate the liberal imperative of interrogating modern critical disbelief. His commitment to liberal interfaith theologizing and Black theological consciousness led him to an Afrocentric synthesis. Among figures featured in this book, Victor Anderson, Lawrence Edward Carter Sr., Monica A. Coleman, Walter Fluker, and Robert M. Franklin Jr. similarly fuse liberal-modern, liberation, and postmodern perspectives. My fifth argument is that the Du Boisian idea of double consciousness astutely describes terribly real dilemmas in Black U.S. American life and thus remains in play in every generation. There are compelling reasons to argue that Du Bois’s version of double consciousness was overly geared to the Black leadership problem of his generation, or to the argument between integrationist and Black nationalist camps, or to the anxieties engendered by nineteenth-century evolutionary theory, or to a dismal strategy propping up the Talented Tenth, or that it stigmatized Black embodiment in the service of one or more of these agendas. I incorporate aspects of all these arguments, especially the last two. But Du Bois astutely described a split consciousness within himself that illuminated tensions within his hybrid identity as a Black American. He projected this double consciousness onto all Black Americans, no matter where they came down on the ideological battles of the day, which invited other versions of it. Du Bois was doubly conscious even about the racist veil, both loathing it and priz-

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ing what it afforded him—a superior grasp of the White world. And he internalized some of White America’s ideals and dreams. The doubly conscious focus on dilemmas has been, ever since, an indispensable frame, for good and ill. My sixth argument is that Black social Christianity remains a highly creative tradition of theological, political, activist, and public intellectual discourse despite the fact that its traditional base in the Black church has considerably diminished. The Black churches that emphasize social justice are shrinking. The Black churches that emphasize individual spirituality and getting rich are growing. Most Black churches continue to drive away the cisgender women and gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer seminary graduates who want to be church leaders. Even in the quintessential Black liberationist denomination, the AME Church—where five women serve as bishops and LGBTQ+ individuals are allowed to serve as pastors—two attempts at the General Convention of July 2021 to set aside the church’s decision of 2004 to oppose marriage equality did not make it to the floor for discussion. Most of the womanist founders belonged to predominantly White denominations, and today an increasing number of womanists and Black feminists belong to no denomination. For better and worse, the academy is their vocational homeland. Despite these factors and trends, highly significant forms of church-based Black social gospel activism have arisen in the past generation to make a substantial impact on American politics. Moreover, the growth of the academic sector of Black social Christianity is more for better than for worse. It was radicalizing when Black women became academics, and it still is. My seventh argument is that a capacious Christian metaphysic that mines Black experience and overflows the boundaries of received traditions remains to be developed. It would aspire to the catholic universality of Logos theology, disputing the modern and postmodern prejudice against metaphysical reason. It would refashion the personal idealism that King and Thurman patched together from Augustinian, neo-Kantian, post-Kantian romantic, and neo-Hegelian philosophies, but with a defining focus on Black experience and a recognition that all experience is mediated by language and lifeworld structures. It would not treat cultural analysis, ethical idealism, revelation positivism, aesthetics, or liberation politics as an adequate substitute for metaphysical theologizing. It would ask what kind of Christian philosophy best conceptualizes Black being and experience, building on the critique of colonial racist ordering expounded by King and Thurman. I am generally careful not to impose my post-Hegelian, democratic Socialist, Christian personal idealism on my interpretation of the Black social gospel, but it shows through on occasion, especially in this area. King and Thurman were not wrong in wanting a metaphysical basis and in

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believing they had a good one. They didn’t have to believe unbelievable things about it for it to work for them. The longtime failure to recognize the existence and importance of the Black social gospel exemplifies two endemic faults of White U.S. American culture—its persistent denigration of African American contributions to American life and thought, and its chronic denigration of thought itself.13 I NT E RSECTION S WOM A N IST, S OCIALIS T, LGBTQ+, A N D POSTM ODERN

The New Abolition recounted how Black women played major roles in the early generations of the Black social gospel, both as individuals and as movement leaders. Ida Wells-Barnett bravely founded the antilynching movement virtually by herself and later spoke for the Anti-Lynching Bureau of the Afro-American Council. Molly Church Terrell was the longtime president of the National Association of Colored Women, a national organization that united local club women’s organizations. Nannie Burroughs and Virginia Broughton built the Woman’s Convention of the NBCUSA into a powerhouse of 1.5 million members. Juliette Derricotte and Sue Bailey Thurman were foremost among the many Black women who played leadership roles in the Young Women’s Christian Association and the World Student Christian Federation. These pioneering figures led traditions of Black social gospel witness that were very much ongoing when the King generation came of age and founded the SCLC.14 But the SCLC was emphatically a male outfit built around King, stocked with Baptist ministers for whom women were a servant class. Breaking White Supremacy recounted that the women who carved out leadership roles in it— Ella Baker, Septima Clark, and Dorothy Cotton—had to contend with the assumption that their job was to wait on the ministers. Overcoming that legacy was a herculean generational lift. It began in the 1970s with Black women who coped with loneliness and derision in the seminaries of churches that didn’t want female ministers. Ordination was formally an option for some, but only the Pentecostal and Holiness Churches had substantial traditions of female clerical leadership. Two veterans of the civil rights movement, Pauli Murray and Prathia Hall Wynn, were role models to their younger seminary classmates. Murray was ordained to the Episcopal priesthood in 1977 after relinquishing her faculty chair at Brandeis University and studying at General Theological Seminary. Wynn was raised by her father, Berkeley Hall, to succeed him as pastor of Mount Sharon Baptist Church in Philadelphia. She served as a SNCC field organizer in the 1960s, took over her father’s Mount Sharon pulpit in 1978

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while studying at Princeton Theological Seminary, and went on to a dual career in seminary education and American Baptist Association ministry. Black female seminarians of the 1970s and 1980s had to figure out their relationships to the existing evangelical, social gospel, neo-orthodox, liberation, and feminist theologies. Some found godsend deliverance in the writings of novelist and essayist Alice Walker, who wrote about the distinct folk spirituality of southern Black women. Walker coined the term “womanist” in 1979. Three years later she published her acclaimed novel The Color Purple, and in 1983 she elaborated what “womanism” meant to her.15 The three women usually described as the founders of womanist theology and social ethics were doctoral students at Union when Walker soared to spectacular literary fame: theologian Jacquelyn Grant, an AME minister from Georgetown, South Carolina; social ethicist Katie Geneva Cannon, a Presbyterian minister from Kannapolis, North Carolina; and theologian Delores S. Williams, a lay Presbyterian from Louisville, Kentucky. Theologian Kelly Brown Douglas, an Episcopal priest from Dayton, Ohio, though usually not accorded the status of a founder, also studied at Union in the 1980s and was a founder. In the mid-1980s these four women conferred with each other and supported each other, donning the womanist label that Cannon was the first, in 1985, to embrace. Soon they were joined by numerous others beginning their careers in the theological academy, notably American Baptist social ethicist Emilie M. Townes, Church of God theologian Cheryl Sanders, Roman Catholic theologian Shawn Copeland, AME Zion theologian JoAnne M. Terrell, Christian Methodist Episcopal theologian Cheryl A. Kirk-Duggan, and AME biblical scholar Renita J. Weems. The first generation of womanists created a theological tradition featuring a shared female sensibility, an ethic of communal support and reciprocity, a commitment to the folk wisdom of Black American women, an immanent sense of the divine, and, usually though not always, a rejection of all theologies and moral systems that construe suffering as redemptive. Chapter 5 argues that womanism was, and is, the answer to two questions that haunted progressive seminaries in the 1970s: How would Black women change Black theology when they entered the field? How would they change feminist theology and ethics? Womanist theologians and social ethicists discounted Cone’s heroic male language of revolutionary liberation and his claim that Black people are united by the experience of suffering and humiliation at the hands of White oppressors. These twin features of Cone’s theology were too androcentric and reactive for womanists, who fixed on the moral wisdom that enabled Black women to survive centuries of racist oppression while holding together their families and communities.

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Grant made the first womanist intervention before it was named, protesting that Black women were exploited in Black churches, invisible in Black liberation theology, and misrepresented in White feminist theology. Cannon named and championed womanist social ethics, describing distinct moral virtues that Black women instilled in Black churches and brought to Black theology. Williams made a landmark critique of liberation theology and an equally landmark case that sacrificial theologies of the cross are harmful to Black women. Douglas wrote a theology of the Black Christ before taking on the controversial topic of antigay prejudice in the Black church. Townes wrote influential works of social ethical criticism and became a prominent leader in theological education. Sanders criticized theologically liberal and humanist tendencies in the womanist tradition from a conservative Pentecostal perspective. Copeland established that womanism is not monolithic on the subject of redemptive suffering. Terrell mediated a defining womanist debate over how far womanists should go in repudiating the idea of redemptive suffering. Kirk-Duggan mined the spirituals to illuminate the ripped-away wholeness of African life. Weems, the first African American woman to earn a Ph.D. in Hebrew Bible, taught in her early career at Vanderbilt Divinity School and Spelman College before taking an administrative path at American Baptist College in Nashville. The womanist founders worked together and supported each other, defying the competitive ethos of the academy. They wrote about seeking wholeness in one’s life, being attuned to the God within, working for justice, and building peaceable communities that enable all people to flourish. They did their own thing, carrying on the work their souls required, as Cannon put it, and refusing to live in the folds of old wounds, as Townes put it. They created a womanist community in the American Academy of Religion, networking in assiduously nurturing fashion—except Williams, who mostly kept to herself. Yet Williams is the most influential womanist thinker, partly because she accentuated her negations. Cannon, Townes, and, especially, Williams identified womanism with the view that theologies of redemptive suffering are pernicious. Only the ministry and resurrection of Jesus are saving, not his suffering and death. If this position put Cannon, Townes, Williams, and most of the womanist tradition against King, Cone, and most of the Black church tradition, they were willing to say so. But womanism was not one-view-only on any subject, and it was usually committed to the Black church, at least in its first and second generations. Grant, Terrell, and Copeland embraced the womanist critique of atonement theology but not the repudiation of cross theology. Redemptive suffering, they argued, is central to the Christian gospel and Black Christianity, even if no abstract atonement theory adequately expounds it.

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Chapter 6 tracks how an ongoing tradition of Black social Christianity refashioned and renewed its thinking about democratic Socialism, cultural criticism, Black feminism, gay and queer sexuality, modern theology, the womanist tradition, and national politics. It features Cornel West, Michael Eric Dyson, Obery Hendricks Jr., bell hooks, Traci West, Victor Anderson, Stacey Floyd-Thomas, and Monica A. Coleman, and also discusses Karen Baker-Fletcher and Diana L. Hayes. It builds toward a discussion of the Obama era and its legacy. Cornel West sailed through Harvard College as a teenager and was already a legend in theological education when he began his teaching career at Union Theological Seminary at the age of twenty-three. As a doctoral student at Princeton, he absorbed a postmodern version of American pragmatism and wrote a dissertation on Marxian ethics. In his early career he combined Marxian syndicalism, pragmatism, critical race theory, neo-Gramscian cultural analysis, and liberation theology. Later he became best known for reaching a broad global public as a scintillating cultural critic, speaker, and activist. Dyson came up from the streets of Detroit and an early career as a Baptist minister. He emphasized cultural criticism from the beginning of his academic career, ranging over trends in hip-hop, jazz, politics, postmodernism, the Black church, and social theory, reaching large audiences of readers and viewers. West is exceedingly gifted, brilliantly exuding blues-inflected religion and espousing an intersectional vision of democratic Socialism through Gramscian cultural struggle. For many years, Dyson’s career and intellectual legacy had strong affinities to West’s until the Obama presidency occasioned a rift between them that highlighted their significant differences, both Obama-related and not. West was a role model to Dyson and Hendricks during their doctoral student days at Princeton, when West dubbed Hendricks “the knife,” a higher calling than the pursuit of the critical edge. Hendricks went on to develop a scholarly argument about the politics of Jesus that Jackson recognized as the theological undergirding of his social justice ministry. The contestation with capitalist culture and postmodern criticism inflected new iterations of Black feminist and womanist thought. hooks, the leading exponent of Black religious feminism, did not join the womanist celebration of grandmothers and folk wisdom, having come to her convictions by an individuated feminist path. She wrote a stream of vivid, readable, luminous, searing, sometimes unforgettable books that reached large audiences. One of them was a dialogue with West, with whom she sustained a like-minded career-long conversation. Traci West, a United Methodist social ethicist, judged, like hooks, that “Black feminist” suits her better than “womanist,” a concept smacking of cultural conformism. Anderson pressed a similar concern about insularity more broadly, making a landmark argument against the reactive blackness of Black theology. As a gay

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man from a harsh family background who was both saved and afflicted by the church, Anderson is allergic to dogmas, confining identity claims, and heroic liberationist narratives, both heteronormative and not. He espouses a religious aesthetic of the grotesque that complements the critique of insularity mounted by the second and third waves of womanist thought. Stacey Floyd-Thomas defined and exemplifies the second wave, reasoning that womanism needs a method. The first wave relied on telling one’s story and building a self-naming womanist community. She developed a method based on a reformulation of Walker’s four tenets, establishing an interdisciplinary, interfaith, “deeper shaded” womanism, a generational project differently formulated by Baker-Fletcher, a United Methodist theologian who stresses ecological consciousness, and Hayes, a Catholic theologian who severs the womanist connection to White feminism. Floyd-Thomas astutely charted the womanist tradition and made a historic contribution to it. She emphasizes the openness of womanist thought to nonChristian religious traditions and to Black humanism, exemplifying outwardreaching, interfaith inclusivity. Yet Floyd-Thomas had barely begun to make her case for a second wave, in the early twenty-first century, when Monica A. Coleman argued that a third wave had already begun. Coleman judged that her commitments to postmodern hybridity, individualism, and anti-essentialism made her a different kind of womanist, operating with a broader range of topics than the first two waves. She also protested that most of the womanist community is not very political, unlike adherents to the Black feminist tradition. If Floyd-Thomas represented the concerns of wave two with deepening the disciplinary standing of womanism and renewing its commitment to Black churches, Coleman represented the inclination of wave three to pull back from disciplinary concerns and the churches. These differences were not generational when they were first marked, since Floyd-Thomas is only five years older than Coleman. Since then the generational frame has become more relevant, as noted by social ethicist Eboni Marshall Turman, who stresses that the trends heralded by Coleman are accelerating. The coming of Obama changed the social and political landscape in which all Black intellectuals, activists, and church leaders operated. It fueled a narrative about America reaching or approaching the postracial cosmopolitanism that he symbolized. It triggered a torrential right-wing backlash that refuted the happy cosmopolitan story. Obama said as little as possible about race until seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin was gunned down in February 2012 and his murderer was acquitted the following year. Meanwhile, police officers cut down many others as though their lives did not matter. Obama, in the White House, heightened the danger to Black Americans in the street. Black Lives

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Matter, a movement hard to see coming when Obama was elected in November 2008, symbolized what came of the Obama era. Obama proclaimed in his first inaugural address that the old arguments about antiracist politics were stale and no longer applied. The ground had shifted with his ascension; those who still talked about congenital anti-blackness needed to climb into the new century. The ground shifted again when Trayvon’s murderer went free and Black queer organizer Alicia Garza said it surprised her how little Black lives matter. These three words radiated brilliantly as a judgment on America’s entire history of anti-Black racism, including the so-called Obama era. The half-truth in Obama’s inaugural address was powerful enough to carry him to the White House, but it did not rectify centuries of racist oppression and exclusion, ongoing legacies of police violence, catastrophic Black unemployment rates, and incarceration policies that created a New Jim Crow. Black Lives Matter (BLM), as the name of a platform and then a global movement, focused especially on ending police violence against queer persons of color. Much of its early rhetoric put Black church leaders on the defensive, charging that they were part of the problem. It felt as though BLM didn’t want the support of Black church leaders, which wasn’t true. But if church leaders were going to play a role in BLM, even a back-row supportive role, they had to respect lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer leaders and pro-LGBTQ cultural politics, disavowing the politics of respectability. For many that was a nonstarter. Where is this story heading? In 2010, Princeton religion scholar Eddie Glaude Jr. offered a strategically hyperbolic answer: “The Black Church Is Dead.” He didn’t mean that Black religiosity is dead; Glaude cited a Pew Research Forum study reporting that 87 percent of African Americans identified with a religious group and 79 percent described religion as being very important in their lives. But the idea, he said, of the Black church as a repository of the nation’s moral and social conscience “has all but disappeared.” Glaude acknowledged that the church that rallied for the civil rights movement was always a minority phenomenon within Black Christianity. King’s denomination vehemently opposed him; conservative forms of Christianity have long abounded in the Black church; and the prosperity gospel isn’t new either: remember Reverend Ike? Superstar Black prosperity preachers Creflo Dollar and Bishop Eddie Long have enormous followings; meanwhile, Glaude noted that many Black Americans also throng to White prosperity preachers such as Joel Osteen, Rick Warren, and Jentezen Franklin. Even more deadly, Glaude observed, is the routinizing of the Black prophetic witness. Prophecy is not inherent to the Black church, and pointing to past deeds does not sustain it. No backward glance defines what the church is

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today, but routinized backward glances are the norm. Whenever someone begins a sentence by saying, “The black church has always stood for” or “The black church was our rock,” deadly routinizing recurs, turning memory into currency. Glaude said it was not too late to change this picture. The Black church could become prophetic again, something he wanted very much to see. But it was getting awfully late to change the picture.16 Chapter 7 is a concluding reflection on moral leadership in the prophetic Black church. Historically, all Black churches shared a simple creed of nonracism, and Black leaders in the social gospel stream called on Black churches to live up to the liberationist aspects of Black faith. This twofold frame, which operates in all three of my volumes on Black social Christianity, still describes the broad reality. Pastors such as Timothy Adkins-Jones at Bethany Baptist Church in Newark, New Jersey; Danielle L. Brown at Shiloh Baptist Church in Plainfield, New Jersey; Calvin O. Butts III at Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, New York City; Willie Dwayne Francois III at Mount Zion Baptist Church in Pleasantville, New Jersey; Otha Gilyard at Shiloh Baptist Church in Columbus, Ohio; Cynthia L. Hale at Ray of Hope Christian Church in Decatur, Georgia; Frederick D. Haynes III at Friendship-West Baptist Church in Dallas; William H. Lamar IV at Metropolitan AME Church in Washington, DC; Jacqui Lewis at Middle Collegiate Church in New York City; Otis Moss III at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago; Reginald W. Sharpe Jr. at Fellowship Missionary Baptist Church in Chicago; Gina M. Stewart at Christ Missionary Baptist Church in Memphis, Tennessee; Dennis W. Wiley and Christine Y. Wiley at Covenant Baptist United Church of Christ in Washington, DC; and Andrew Wilkes at Double Love Experience United Church of Christ in Brooklyn, New York, carry on liberationist social gospel ministries in congregations. But today the mainline Black churches that support the social gospel are declining. Only the Pentecostal and neo-Pentecostal churches are growing, where the surging growth is almost entirely among churches that preach about getting rich and being healthy. The droll saying in theological education is that liberation theology opted for the poor, but the poor opted for Pentecostalism, especially in prosperity versions.17 Three trajectories are in play for proponents of Black social justice theologies. The first is to settle for a home in the academy. The second is to renew the social gospel and liberationist churches that combine personal evangelical piety and social justice politics. The third is to make serious headway in the Pentecostal and neo-Pentecostal churches of the Sanctified tradition. Number three has long loomed as the one with the biggest upside. If only the Pentecostal and neo-Pentecostal churches caught fire for social justice! Eugene Rivers III,

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featured in chapter 7, has championed this possibility for decades, as has Cheryl Sanders. Walter Fluker, also featured, makes a leap-into-fire case that the Black church future must be Pentecostal. Six other figures in chapter 7—Lawrence Edward Carter Sr., Robert Franklin, Traci Blackmon, Raphael Warnock, William J. Barber II, and Eboni Marshall Turman—are advocates of revitalizing the mainline Black churches, in some cases with mixed resort to option one. None of them contends that Black theologians and activists should write off the church and settle for the academy. But Carter, Franklin, and Turman are academics, as are three others discussed in chapter 7 and earlier chapters— J. Carter, Willie James Jennings, and Anthony Pinn. Fluker came up from the “Bucket of Blood” district in Southside Chicago and storefront Black Baptist evangelicalism. He passed through the U.S. Army and White conservative evangelicalism before finding his way to social gospel seminaries that launched his eminent career in teaching and scholarship at Vanderbilt Divinity School, Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School, Morehouse College, Boston University School of Theology, and Candler School of Theology at Emory University. Fluker became a pillar of the Black social gospel establishment through his work at these institutions, always emphasizing the role of Black churches in nurturing public moral leaders. Throughout his career he made an argument about the moral leadership of King and Thurman. In his later career he made an argument about where Black Christianity is heading. Black Christians, Fluker contends, should not fear postracialism, even as they grapple with the ghosts of racism. Blackness, if not completely fluid, is very close to it. Instead of clinging to essentialized blackness and the dilemma consciousness of the Du Bois and King generations, Black Americans should embrace their shape-shifting diasporic reality. Fluker argues that Black Americans have never had a home in America, a verdict rightly drawn, in different ways, by the Black nationalist and Black Pentecostal traditions. If mainline Black American Christians accept their wilderness reality, it might be possible to drop the America focus of the dilemma traditions. The Black church appropriated too readily the biblical story of deliverance from slavery in Egypt, overlooking its harm to women, Canaanites, and others banished to the wilderness. Fluker calls Black churches to relinquish dilemma consciousness and the Exodus hermeneutic. To wake the dead, church leaders must embrace the diasporic consciousness of their exiled life in the wilderness, thrown into the fire of what King termed the “world house.” King called in 1967 for an interreligious ethic of nonviolence that embraces the “world house” of peoples, exuding the “Hindu-Moslem-Christian-JewishBuddhist belief” that love is divine and God is love. Lawrence Carter, since 1979,

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has dedicated the Martin Luther King Jr. International Chapel at Morehouse to this vision. Carter gives central place to the global spiritual ethic of King and Gandhi, for whom divine nonviolence was not one belief among others; it was the key to everything else. Carter welcomes speakers from various religious traditions to the chapel’s pulpit, educates students in the tradition of King and Gandhi, and dispenses Morehouse lore. Modeling his ministry on King and Gandhi left him feeling constantly inadequate, until Carter found a third spiritual model, Daisaku Ikeda, the leader of a lay Nichiren Buddhist organization, Soka Gakkai International. It counts more than twelve million members in nearly two hundred nations. Ikeda enabled Carter to let go of his achievement anxiety. Being a disciple of King and Gandhi created a doubly impossible standard of accomplishment. Adding Ikeda yielded a peaceable sense of place in a world-scale interfaith community that Carter didn’t have to create.18 Carter has spent his entire career at Morehouse, unlike Robert Franklin, another pillar of the Black social gospel establishment, who taught at Candler, Colgate Rochester, Harvard Divinity School, and the University of Chicago Divinity School before serving presidencies at Interdenominational Theological Center (ITC) and Morehouse for five years each, among other stops leading back to Candler. Fluker, Carter, and Franklin exemplify the commitment of the Black social gospel establishment to train moral leaders. They consider this work their central vocation. Atlanta, the epicenter of the Black social gospel, continues to cultivate and attract new leaders. Meanwhile, outside Atlanta, Eugene Rivers III, Traci Blackmon, and William J. Barber II exemplify the ongoing activist vitality of Black social Christianity. Eugene Rivers, born in Boston, growing up in Chicago and Philadelphia, and making his career in Boston, barely survived his teenage years as a gangbanger in a tough north Philadelphia neighborhood. A Black Pentecostal pastor rescued him, fighting off the gangs, which in Philly included the Nation of Islam. Black Panthers were gunned down and Rivers asked God to spare him, but he was racked with survivor guilt for outliving the Panthers. He fled to Yale, where he sampled courses surreptitiously, and was admitted to Harvard, where his conformist-achiever classmates repulsed him. So Rivers never graduated, though he married a classmate, Jacqueline Olga Cooke. Rivers founded a Pentecostal congregation in the Dorchester section of Boston, Azusa Christian Community, and a refuge center called the Ella J. Baker House. There he competed with the gangs for the souls and bodies of vulnerable kids. He knew what it took to rescue them from the drug and gang cultures—a substitute family undergirded by strong moral values. A big personality, controversial from the beginning, Rivers blistered churches and academics that fell short of being

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helpful. The mainline churches, he said, are hopelessly middle class. Political conservatives have the right moral values but terrible politics. Political liberals have better politics but nothing else, spurning moral values and the Holy Spirit. Rivers loved Black nationalists but grieved that most are antireligious and nearly all are insular, settling for a small world. He preached a church-based ethic of self-help, self-reliance, mutual aid, and moral leadership. Rivers forged a coalition that pulled kids out of gangs, worked with the Boston police, and significantly reduced gang crime, which brought him national renown. The media treated him as the Republican answer to Jesse Jackson—a story line that rewrote itself repeatedly for twenty years. Rivers played along and denied it simultaneously. He was not really a Republican, being a leftist on global politics and fiercely antiracist. In 2000 he voted for Al Gore instead of George W. Bush. But his renown peaked in the Bush years as the face of Bush’s emphasis on faith-based community programs. Rivers charges that Jackson and other Black social Christian leaders are essentially secular in their political lives. They dropped their Christian positions on sexual ethics to be good Democrats, and their social gospel theologies are too liberal and relativistic to fight White supremacy on a spiritual level. White supremacy, Rivers contends, is a demonic evil, not just a structure and legacy of social power. At least Republicans believe in the Holy Spirit and the demonic, whereas the Democratic Party barely tolerates religious people, policing what they say about moral issues. Rivers guards his status as a political independent, working with Democrats when they win office, but he earned his media image as the Republican Jesse Jackson. Blackmon and Barber conduct a similar dance concerning partisanship, protecting their nonpartisan independence while clearly working on the Democratic side of the field. Both eschew ideological labels and frames, contending that the Christian gospel is enough to define them and is the only thing that does. Blackmon grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, worked for twenty-five years as a registered nurse in cardiac care and mobile health care, and entered the AME Church ministry as a second vocation. She switched to the United Church of Christ in 2009 to enable Christ the King UCC congregation in Florissant, Missouri, to call her to its pastorate. Five years later an unarmed eighteen-year-old Black man, Michael Brown, was gunned down three miles away in Ferguson. His body lay uncovered on the street for four hours. His blood poured onto the pavement. Blackmon plunged into the explosion of grief, rage, trauma, and violence that erupted in Ferguson. She rose to the moment, gathering clergy-led protests. She spoke to the moment, decrying the eagerness of White Americans to react hysterically to the presence of a teenaged Black man. She said his blood saturating the pavement called out for a response.

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Ferguson changed Blackmon’s life. She spoke widely about the meaning of Ferguson, was appointed to a state commission and a White House council, and became a national leader of the UCC denomination, heading its Justice and Local Ministries division. She became the public face of the mainline Protestant opposition to racism and a flood of voter suppression. On the road she urged members of her mostly White denomination to interrogate their White privilege and their complicity in the worse-than-ever turn in recent American politics. Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, and Blackmon addressed church audiences that just wanted to talk about Trump, Trump, Trump. Some things must be said about Trump, she offered. But the most important thing is that his presidency did not come from nowhere. Trump is a product of four hundred years of racism and a half century of cunningly racist politics geared to destroy the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. William Barber epitomizes the ongoing existence of the prophetic Black church. He grew up with two models of pure-hearted discipleship in Roper, North Carolina. Barber’s paternal grandmother had Mother status at her Disciples of Christ congregation in Roper, and his father was a schoolteacher, supply preacher, and community organizer, choosing a life of humble service to others. Barber didn’t realize until his college years that he had the spirit of his grandmother and father. In his early career as a Disciples of Christ pastor, he acquired moral leadership skills he could only learn firsthand, not by watching his father. Just after he accepted his second pastoral call, in Goldsboro, North Carolina, Barber confronted the great crisis of his life, awaking to find that he was paralyzed, attacked by an extreme form of arthritis that locked his neck, hips, and the base of his spine. For months the pain was excruciating. His family and congregation rallied around him, Barber learned to walk with a walker, and for twelve years he devoted his immense pastoral energy to serving his congregation and community. Then in 2005 he started walking again without a walker. Barber scaled up to the state level, leading the North Carolina NAACP. One form of coalitional activism led to another. The NAACP presidency gave him access to other social justice groups in North Carolina. Barber fused fourteen of them to form the Historic Thousands on Jones Street. It had quiet years of building power followed by noisy years of being attacked for registering voters and helping to elect Obama. The anti-Obama backlash was ferocious in North Carolina. Barber girded his coalition against it and founded a second group called Forward Together Moral Movement in North Carolina. Forward Together was interreligious and geared to civil disobedience. In the spring and summer of 2013, it staged a weekly protest at the state capitol on Jones Street called Moral Mondays. The format was revival evangelicalism, but the preach-

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ers came from many faith traditions. Moral Mondays was a spectacular success. It caught national attention for railing with religious revulsion against the White backlash in North Carolina and the nation. It inveighed against a flood of voter suppression, and it made Barber famous. In 2017 he scaled up to a national moral awakening movement, launching a new version of the Poor People’s Campaign. Barber gives quintessential social gospel sermons pairing Psalm 118 and Luke 4—the rejected stone has become the cornerstone, and Jesus came to preach good news to the poor. The gospel, he contends tirelessly, is about lifting up the poor. The soul of America cannot be saved without remembering what the gospel is really about. The elections of 2018 approached and the Atlanta epicenter reasserted itself, lifting Stacey Abrams and Raphael Warnock onto the national stage. She is the daughter of two Methodist ministers, and a leader in the Georgia Democratic Party. In 2018 she lost a spectacular campaign for governor, almost overcoming an onslaught of Republican voter repression. Abrams prevailed on her friend and ally Warnock to run for the U.S. Senate in 2020, relying on the same clergyeducator-business-activist orbit in Atlanta that put Young and Lewis in the U.S. Congress. Running statewide had always been a bridge too far for this group; even Young was humiliated when he tried. Warnock won a historic victory that changed what was possible, delivering the U.S. Senate to the Democrats. The narrative of chapter 7 builds toward Warnock, and it would have done so even had he lost his Senate race on January 5, 2021, for Warnock distinctly represents the hopes, dreams, breadth, depth, and range of debates within the Black social gospel and liberationist traditions. He was groomed to succeed Cone at Union, and he wrote a doctoral dissertation surveying the situation in the Black church. But the dissertation spelled out why Warnock cast his lot with the church instead of the academy. By the time there was a book version, The Divided Mind of the Black Church (2014), he was eight years into his pastorate at Ebenezer Baptist Church. There Warnock preached what he said in the book: The Black church is the product of four liberation movements and an evangelical hermeneutic. But the Black church has never integrated its liberationist motifs because a White individualistic version of its evangelical heritage has distorted Black faith. Liberation theology lacks the requisite concern with personal spirituality to achieve this integration, partly because it lives primarily in the academy. The integration that is needed cannot be carried out in the academy. Only the Black church cares enough about its saving work to save itself and become what it should be.19 The closing chapter integrates arguments by J. Carter, Jennings, Pinn, and Turman into its framing discussion of the future of Black social Christianity.

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Carter contends that the anti-Jewish prejudices of ancient Christian Gnosticism played the founding role in creating racist discourse. Jennings traces the racist warping of the Christian imagination during the modern imperial era, focusing on the writings of important but little-remembered theologians during the Atlantic slave trade. Pinn espouses a Black religious humanism that dispenses with God, theodicy, and providence, as well as the piety acquired from two Awakening movements. Turman argues that the problems of rank sexism and heteronormativity catalogued in womanist literature of the 1980s and 1990s have not been rectified in much of the Black church. Churches are still so male-dominated and patriarchal that many cisgender women and LGBTQ+ persons have to flee them for their own well-being.20 The main thrust of chapter 7, however, is to highlight the ongoing vitality of Black social Christianity in moral leadership education, public intellectualism, academic theology, and movements of social justice activism and electoral politics. A tradition that boasts the intellectuals and public moral leaders discussed in chapters 5, 6, and 7 cannot be written off as the afterglow of a heyday. Black faith is profuse and soulful, steeped in suffering, whether theologized or not, and bent on freedom, whether politicized or not. Its acquaintance with sorrow gathers religious communities at the cross, sometimes with a blues inflection, and at the Easter tomb, in the hope of resurrection. Black social Christianity, a product of Black Christian communities with an incomparable legacy, is struggling but far from dead. VI NC E NT H A RDIN G A N D TH E DA R KLY RADIANT VIS ION

In 1985 a band of sociologists headed by Robert Bellah made a splash with a dismal diagnosis of the moral and social health of the United States. Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life, coauthored by Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton, sought to explain how it is that the United States, ostensibly a democracy, tolerates extreme inequality and denigrates the poor and vulnerable. The authors answered that the crisis in U.S. American democracy was both long-standing and novel. Social Darwinism runs deep in U.S. American culture, but so does the impulse to reform society in the direction of equality and the common good. Throughout the nation’s history, they argued, four moral languages have competed for influence. The capitalist ethic prizes economic competition and success. The ethic of expressive individualism prizes personal liberty and feeling. Biblical religion calls for faithfulness to a transcendent moral order. Civic republicanism teaches an ethic of community stewardship and cooperation.21

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Habits of the Heart stressed that the biblical and republican traditions hold the same litmus test for assessing a society’s moral health, asking how it deals with the cluster of problems pertaining to wealth and poverty. The Bible condemns inequality and oppression, taking the side of the poor against the powers that exploit them. Republican theory from Aristotle on assumes that a free society can survive only if there is an approximate equality of opportunity among citizens. The Bellah team lamented that America’s individualistic traditions were routing its biblical and civic republican traditions, creating a society of selfish consumers. Ronald Reagan, recently reelected to the presidency in landslide fashion, symbolized what the nation had become, very sadly, to the authors. Habits struck a cultural nerve. The book’s portrait of a narcissistic commercial society was heralded as a telling critique of the loss of community in U.S. American life. Countless church study groups pored over it for clues to what went wrong and how churches might speak to the moment. In the academy the book was rocket fuel for the upsurge of communitarian theory that political philosopher Michael Sandel had set off in his book Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (1982). Sandel contended that American liberals and conservatives wrongly fix on individual rights and success, abetting the egocentrism of American culture. Both of America’s dominant political traditions erode the ties of families, communities, and nation. Communitarians resurrected John Dewey’s concept of democracy as a creative community of shared values and his concept of politics as the project of continually re-creating the public. They retrieved Aristotle’s idea of justice as a community bound by a shared understanding of the good, commending character-shaping institutions. There was a conservative wing of communitarian theory led by political philosophers Alasdair MacIntyre and Christina Hoff Sommers, a liberal mainstream espoused by Sandel and sociologist Amitai Etzioni, and a Social Democratic wing championed by Bellah and political philosopher Michael Walzer.22 The Bellah book called for a renewal of morally generative communities of memory that care about social justice. In the dominant American vision of a good society, it said, one attains enough success to stand apart from others, not have to worry about them, and perhaps look down on them. In the biblical and republican visions, the good society subordinates private interest to the common good, resisting the relentless capitalist drive to turn labor and nature into commodities. Habits of the Heart appealed eloquently for economic democracy, a new American politics of the common good, and a new social ecology that strengthens the social ties that bind human beings to each other. Yet the book was assiduously White and middle-class. The topics, history, idioms, and purview were White and middle-class without exception, and the cast of

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figures was entirely White except for the token exception of King. Habits lauded King as an exemplar of America’s best moral traditions without accounting for the African American communities and traditions that produced him. It made vaguely disapproving allusions to racism without making race a category of analysis or distinguishing anti-Black racism from other forms. It generalized about U.S. society while ignoring Black Americans, Latinx Americans, Native Americans, and Asian Americans, both middle-class and not. Somehow the Bellah book conceived its White middle-class sample as a sufficient basis for assessing the moral trajectory of U.S. society. Vincent Harding thus gave it one cheer. Born in Harlem in 1931, Harding graduated from City College of New York in 1952, served in the U.S. Army from 1953 to 1955, and in 1958 befriended King, who urged him to join the civil rights movement in Atlanta. From 1961 to 1964, Harding and his spouse, Rosemarie Freeney Harding, worked for the Mennonite Service Committee in Atlanta, where they founded a peace center and served in the SCLC and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). In 1965 he completed a doctorate in history at the University of Chicago and won a teaching position at Spelman College in Atlanta, which spurred him to clarify what he believed about the Vietnam War. Harding unveiled his answer on August 8, 1965, two days after Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act. In an open letter to the SCLC Convention in Birmingham, Alabama, Harding said the United States was wrong in 1945 not to recognize the newly independent Republic of Vietnam, wrong to support French colonialism in Vietnam, wrong to sabotage the Geneva Accords of 1954, wrong to support the Diem dictatorship in South Vietnam, wrong to send troops in 1963, and wrong to massively escalate in 1965. The SCLC needed to take a stand against America’s massive imperial violence in Vietnam. This plea burned in King’s head and heart for two years. He made stray remarks against the war but held off from a burgeoning antiwar movement, fearing the political fallout. When King finally joined the antiwar movement in April 1967 by giving the Riverside Address, he enlisted Harding to write it because King’s speechwriters were appalled by his decision to defy Johnson, the civil rights establishment, the prestige media, the Black press, the AFL-CIO, the Ford Foundation, and the Democratic Party.23 After King was assassinated in 1968, Harding carried forward his legacy with deep-souled brilliance. Nonviolence was a spiritual life and path to Harding that connected him to all persons and faith traditions, throwing him into struggles for social justice. He prized the spirituality that welled up wherever Black communities existed, writing luminously about it. He revered Du Bois, but wished that Du Bois had trusted more fully the spirituality of his Black soul, taking less from Hegel, James, and Marx. He admired Cone, but not Cone’s commitment

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to systematic theology, a doctrine-based species of rationalism alien to Harding’s experience of Black spirituality. He also held powerfully conflicted feelings about Habits of the Heart. Harding told me its argument about four moral languages and economic democracy was one of the most illuminating he ever read. He would have gladly cited it in his lectures and writings, except the book cut him painfully, a memory that stuck with him for many years. Somehow the esteemed White sociological coauthors of Habits believed they could grasp the common good by writing only about people like themselves.24 Habits extolled a roster of six exemplary Americans. All six were male, five were White, and King was turned into an exemplar of White liberal idealism. Harding told the authors their parade of White males and King-tokenism wounded him deeply as he turned the pages: “Do you understand the pain?” No Black abolitionist apparently ranked with the slave-owning Thomas Jefferson as an exemplary American. Harding countered that Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman struck him as far better exemplars of biblical and republican morality than Jefferson. To put it bluntly, any discussion of the U.S. American common good that focused only on White middle-class Americans was offensive and ridiculous.25 A truthful account of America, Harding contended, would cast aside the White American conceit that the United States belongs to White Americans, or to them above all others. He loved Du Bois on this theme, holding fast to Black story and song, sacrificial work, the Spirit, and the struggle for freedom and justice. The White superiority version of America’s truth, Harding said, is a selfserving lie. What America needs is a “darkly radiant vision of America’s truth.”26 Harding taught religion and social transformation at Iliff School of Theology in Denver from 1981 to 2004, graced the lecture circuit for another decade, and died in 2014. He was a font of lore about the movement and generous with those, like me, who plied him for remembrances of it. He cherished King, once telling me that his later life as a revered seer and professor was unthinkable to him as a young man, “before Martin stirred up the churches.” But Harding was always quick to add that the movement made King, not the other way around, and that fixing on King is mistaken. Fixing on King is the last thing that Martin wanted. His focus was entirely on the solidarity struggle for liberation and the beloved community.

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ANTIRACIST POLITICS IN A NEOLIBERAL WORLD

The SCLC lieutenants who carried on after King was cut down coped with the mediocrity and vengeance of a miserable political period. The political and cultural backlash that elected Richard Nixon twice was briefly derailed by the Jimmy Carter presidency, only to resurge triumphantly in the coming of Ronald Reagan. Yet this was the period when many African Americans won political office and entered employment fields newly open to them. The civil rights movement made new kinds of Black leaders possible. Some supervised White employees in corporate business enterprises. Others took managerial positions in federal and state governments, higher education, and civil society. Many ran for offices in local, state, and federal politics, paving the way to a formal voting bloc in the U.S. Congress, the Congressional Black Caucus. The rise of Black politicians changed the structure of civic and political leadership in Black American communities. The politicians presumed their right to arbitrate the political interests of Black Americans, contending that they earned their authority and accountability democratically. Leaders of the civil rights organizations were inclined to resist the authority of politicians, contending that politicians are compromisers by definition. The protest leaders had a stronger claim to the spirit of Martin Luther King Jr., but he lived before the civil rights movement changed the conditions under which everyone after him operated. Now it was very much in question what counted as protest politics, what Black leadership looked like, and whether Black Americans needed or wanted leaders at all. Andrew Young pioneered the march of SCLC veterans into electoral politics, expounding King’s Christian postcolonial vision in Congress and the United Nations. Ralph Abernathy kept the SCLC going, more or less, until the board 34

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replaced him with Joseph Lowery and Abernathy turned to the political right. All were symbols that the civil rights movement still existed and still represented the conscience of the nation. In Atlanta the civil rights movement attained establishment status. The long climb to this status began with the founding of Black colleges during Reconstruction that were vehicles and symbols of Black achievement. It ratcheted upward with the Atlanta ministers who inspired King—Martin Luther King Sr., William H. Borders Sr., Benjamin E. Mays, and George Kelsey—and a legendary political organizer, John Wesley Dobbs. It made steep gains through King’s incomparable significance, the presence of SCLC headquarters, and a renowned business leader, Jesse Hill. It culminated with the generation that belatedly validated Atlanta’s longtime boast that it was too busy being economically productive to waste time on self-defeating racial hostility. There was already a Black establishment in Atlanta before the King era ran out. The next generation turned it into the political establishment of Atlanta. Young, Abernathy, Hill, Lowery, Jean Young, John Lewis, Julian Bond, and Maynard Jackson Jr. played important roles in this achievement. All were champions of racial justice and equality, while dividing over the politics of economic justice. From its beginning the Black social gospel had a strongly procapitalist flank, a Socialist flank, and a mixed-progressive mainstream, all with histories of supporting Black enterprises. Young was always in the liberal wing of the first group, but his enthusiasm for corporate capitalism heightened with each career stop, topping out at a celebrant level of boosterism and enrichment. He rose to the top of the SCLC by making himself indispensable to King. King hired confrontational types who raised hell in hostile cities, so every SCLC meeting was a clash of egos. Young’s job was to corral King’s band of firebrands. Wyatt Walker preceded Young as executive director, but Walker mixed volatility with an authoritarian style, making the SCLC too hot at the top to be sustainable. Young had the diplomatic temperament that the SCLC needed—not that he enjoyed the job. He grew up in New Orleans as the son of two graduates of Straight College, a Congregational school in New Orleans founded in 1868 by the American Missionary Association. Young’s father, Andrew Young Sr., went on to Howard University Dental School after college, graduated in 1921, returned to New Orleans to establish a dental practice, and surveyed the Straight campus in search of a wife. He found one in Daisy Fuller, a light-colored schoolteacher whose grandfather had migrated from Poland and ran a shipping line; Fuller was studying for her teaching certificate. Both of Young’s parents were steeped in Afro-Saxon Congregationalism, believing deeply in its Puritan ethic of hard work and education. Daisy Young was superintendent of the Sunday school and

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treasurer at Central Congregational Church in New Orleans, and Andrew Young Sr. was a deacon who sang in the church choir. The sermons were discursive and formal, from a manuscript. The spirituals were not sung, emotional displays were eschewed, and earnest service to the community was stressed. Much of Daisy Young’s Creole family passed for White, which Young learned not to judge while growing up in a mostly White neighborhood.1 Andrew Young Sr. tutored his two sons, Andrew and Walter, in the dismal aspects of Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois, teaching them to accommodate White society like Washington and to prize the Talented Tenth like Du Bois. He said White racists should be approached with condescending moral concern as people afflicted with a terrible illness—something like polio. Meanwhile, his dental patients were to be treated with friendly courtesy. Earnestly raised for Talented Tenth success, specifically as a dentist, Young rushed to Dillard University at age fifteen, transferred to Howard University as a sophomore, and never caught up to his classmates. It galled him that his parents expected him to be exactly like them: successful, churchgoing, respectable, and confined to segregated middle-class marginality. Howard was more of the same, except worse. Young had never met Black people who were too haughty and class-conscious to speak to each other. At Howard he met many of them. Men wore suits and ties to class and some of the women wore fur coats and heels, “as if they were only in college to snag a future doctor or lawyer.” Howard felt very northern, bourgeois, arrogant, and cold to Young. He befriended a few unpretentious army veterans who were there because of the GI Bill. They helped him hang on at Howard. Young was a senior on the brink of flunking out before he felt he belonged. One more D would have expelled him. Shortly before he graduated, Young acknowledged that he was as thoroughly middle-class as his Howard classmates and professors. At least many of them joined the NAACP and signed petitions; Young had feared that joining the NAACP might damage his career options. He came to terms with being middle-class just in time for his storied career to be possible.2 But Young broke the hearts of his parents by opting for a ministerial career. A Church of the Brethren youth conference at Camp Alexander Mack in Milford, Indiana, exposed him to Gandhi and social gospel progressivism for the first time. At Howard, Young had been too alienated and checked-out to be influenced by its Black social gospel tradition of Gandhian internationalism, liberal theology, and democratic Socialism, never mind that Mordecai Johnson epitomized it as the Howard president. At Camp Mack, Young got a second chance to experience the social gospel and converted to it. He left the camp knowing that he wanted to be like Johnson, perhaps as a minister. Young got a

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job as a youth organizer in Connecticut and took classes at Hartford Theological Seminary in Hartford. It was a bastion of liberal theology and the social gospel, with a historic emphasis on missions, which had begun to evolve into a pioneering emphasis on cultural internationalism. He soaked up all of it. Young’s grades at Howard would have disqualified him for admission to Hartford Seminary, but enrolling as an unofficial student gave him a second chance. Hartford awarded him a scholarship, and Young trained for the ministry. His father grieved and raged at this turn of events. Anyone could be a minister; why waste the expensive education he had financed? Young Senior eventually softened a bit, but he never forgave his son for entering the ministry when he could have been a dentist. In 1954 Young served a summer internship at a Congregational church in Marion, Alabama, where he met and married Jean Childs, a former childhood schoolmate of Coretta Scott. Childs was much like Young’s mother: shy, light-colored, very southern, middle-class, and very Congregationalist. Young graduated in 1955 and the newlyweds moved to Thomasville, Georgia, where Young served two congregations and Jean Young taught elementary school. John Wesley Dobbs, director of the Negro Voters League, enlisted Young to head a local voter registration drive. The Thomasville KKK threatened to shut it down, and Young told his wife that if the Klansmen showed up at their house, he would shoo them away from the porch and she was to stand in the picture window pointing her rifle. Jean Young replied that she would do no such thing. Every person under a sheet was a child of God, she said. If Young made an exception for members of the Klan, he had no business being a minister. Subsequently the Black business leaders of Thomasville threatened to organize a boycott of White businesses, the Klan backed down, the voter registration drive was completed, and Young learned a bedrock lesson about the power of the business community.3 In 1957 he met King at Talladega College. Young tried to engage King in theology shoptalk about Paul Tillich, but King waved him off, explaining that the movement had taken over his life. Later that year the National Council of Churches (NCC) asked Young to join its work for racial justice. Young joined the Youth Division of the NCC, serving from 1957 to 1961 as its assistant director. He spoke across North America, telling youth conferences that Christian ministry had to change if the churches wanted to play a role in changing America. He made friends across the spectrum of institutions that the missionary societies had founded—schools, hospitals, churches, publishing houses, and farm projects. On occasion he met with U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, who came from the ecumenical movement and was devoted to the NCC. Young also spoke across Europe, linking the NCC to the World Council

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of Churches and its Programme to Combat Racism, through which he met religious leaders from Latin America and future Zimbabwean revolutionary leaders Joshua Nkomo, Robert Mugabe, and N’dabinge Sithole. Shortly before James Lawson’s disciples struck in January 1960 in Nashville, Young befriended Lawson. A television report on the Nashville Movement enthralled Andrew and Jean Young. They vowed to join the struggle in the Deep South, moving to Atlanta with their three daughters. Young ran a voter education program sponsored by the United Church Board of the Congregational Church, now called the United Church of Christ, while Jean Young taught second grade in the public school system and Sunday school at a historic social gospel congregation, First Congregational Church. The voter program was housed at SCLC headquarters, to the shock and anguish of Young’s parents. Young Senior was a down-the-line NAACP race man who joined his wife in the Urban League. Nothing, they said, could possibly justify King’s radical, incendiary, disruptive activism. King caused mayhem and harm wherever he went. Young reminded his parents that he worked with King through their denomination. How far-out could that be? The movement, he believed, had to win over people like his parents, as well as the White liberals and moderates and, especially, the children of the 1960s. Young was highly effective with all three groups. He mediated with the local police chief, Laurie Pritchett, when King was jailed in the Albany, Georgia, campaign. He negotiated with the White business community when the SCLC struck in Birmingham, Alabama. He quietly led the SCLC into the brutal campaign in St. Augustine, Florida, succeeding Walker as executive director. King teased that Young was good at running the ship but too rational and temperate to disrupt anything. The SCLC wasn’t going to abolish racism with polite rationality. King loved to tell his lieutenants how he would preach their funerals—always a humorously scalding roast of Hosea Williams (volatility), James Bevel (extremism), and Young (Uncle Tom). Were Young to be killed on a march, King planned to tell White Americans they made a terrible mistake: nobody ever loved White people more than Andy Young.4 But Young took two vicious beatings in St. Augustine, pummeled with fists and head-smashed with a blackjack both times. He stood up to Williams and Bevel when they tried to hijack the meetings, and he chastised Black males who refused to demonstrate. Many Black men said they were too proud and masculine to march with King and a bunch of churchwomen and teenagers; nonviolence was beneath them. Young called them out in King’s fashion, charging that they reserved their violence for Black people. White people they assiduously avoided, a cowardly form of nonviolence. Andrew and Jean Young marched

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in separate demonstrations in St. Augustine. The SCLC had a rule about romantic partners demonstrating together; it was forbidden because marching through hate-filled mobs in the company of one’s spouse or children was too much. Holding fast to nonviolence and being willing to suffer for it had to be done on an individual basis. Young fixed on the contorted faces and hateful venom of the White crowds. Jean Young stressed how sad and pathetic they seemed to her. Young and King formed a close bond; the only other SCLC insider whom Young trusted was Fred Bennett, a childhood friend of King’s and a Baptist minister. Young explained that with the other lieutenants, “you had to pretend to be something, to act important.” Bennett was the opposite of pretentious. He never spoke at meetings, projecting a humble simplicity. After the meetings, King and Young relied on Bennett to analyze what had just transpired. Young wrote speeches for King, worked the media, carried out arduous tasks that King gave only to him, held the organization together, and relied on Bennett to guide him. After King was murdered, Young felt that confusion and despair completely took over: “All of my good friends seemed incapable of adjusting to the new realities.” Abernathy complained that Young’s speeches for him didn’t sing or soar; why did Young hold back? Young set Abernathy straight about his speechwriting. He hadn’t written any of King’s literary allusions or rhetorical runs; he wrote only issue points for King, who improvised the poetry, theology, and Shakespeare allusions. Young believed that Abernathy would have done better just being himself. As it was, “he kept trying to imitate Martin.”5 That was never going to work. Young had a lightbulb moment just after the SCLC was forced to make a painful decision about Bevel. King’s death seared Bevel, a loner who needed King. Bevel did whatever he wanted, ignoring pleas from Young and Abernathy to work with them. In 1970 Bevel held forth at Spelman College to starstruck coeds, wrote on the walls with a Magic Marker, effused expansively about free love, peed into a cup, and told the students to drink it; otherwise they were not really his followers. James Orange, a Bevel protégé, sadly told Young that Bevel had truly flipped out this time. Young and the SCLC board committed Bevel to a hospital psychiatric ward for two days, which enraged Bevel. The SCLC convened an emergency meeting at which Young made the case for not expelling Bevel: Martin had prized Bevel precisely for his eccentricity, and they were all in Bevel’s debt for his brilliant contributions to the movement. Young and Lewis voted for therapy, not expulsion, and everyone else voted for expulsion. They were done with Bevel. After the vote, Young and Lewis convened to debrief. At the time, Lewis was chair of the Southwide Voter Education Project. He had recently written to

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Julian Bond, a member of the Georgia state legislature and former press secretary of SNCC, urging Bond to run for Georgia’s Fifth Congressional District seat in the U.S. Congress. Lewis said they had to run someone who would bring out the movement veterans and not be afraid to campaign for White votes. Bond declined to run and Lewis turned to Young: What about you? Young had never thought of himself as a potential political candidate. He still hadn’t decided to run, or asked Jean Young for permission, when Lewis and singer Harry Belafonte settled on him. Belafonte reworked his schedule, reached out to his celebrity friends Sidney Poitier and Lena Horne, and told Young to gear up. To Young, entering electoral politics was another marker that the King era was over.6 FRO M P ROTEST POL ITICS TO ELECTORAL P OLITICS : ANDREW YOUN G A N D ATL ANTA P OLITICS

Young reasoned that the SCLC’s best work had been its voter registration drives. Then the direct-action phase of the movement passed and the civil rights organizations splintered. It seemed to Young that running for office was a logical culmination of his years of struggle alongside King, no matter what King might have said otherwise. Atlanta was the best place in the South to try it because civic Atlanta boasted constantly of being different from other southern cities. Atlanta had a Black bourgeoisie and it hosted the SCLC. The swing of American politics to the right under Nixon was undeniable. Maybe a flock of Black elected officials could be a brake on the rightward tide. Maybe they could pull the nation back to dealing with American racism, poverty, and militarism. Young took a plunge into politics on this basis, later explaining to Ebony magazine, “There just comes a time when any social movement has to come in off the street and enter politics.” He was grateful to have a few forerunners: Bond winning a Georgia state house seat in 1965, Carl Stokes winning the Cleveland mayoralty in 1967, Maynard Jackson Jr. challenging the incumbent U.S. senator Herman Talmadge in Georgia in 1968, and Jackson winning the vice mayoralty of Atlanta in 1969. Young counted on his social skills; people liked his friendly informality and reasonableness, and many prized his connection to King. His SCLC colleagues were lukewarm at best toward his decision. Young could empathize, because they were right—he had, in fact, judged that there were better options than sticking with the SCLC.7 Atlanta had bragged since the 1880s that it was too busy becoming prosperous to be hateful, never mind that most of White Atlanta was routinely, constantly, vengefully hateful to its Black population. Unlike Savannah and Charleston, Atlanta was not an elegant city dating from the colonial era or

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located on a waterway. Atlanta sprouted in the 1840s from a tiny rail junction in the red clay interior of Georgia. It had no mineral wealth, unlike Birmingham, and nothing grew in its red clay except the bustling spirit of enterprise. Atlanta was distinctly and determinately open for business. Henry Grady, managing editor of the Atlanta Constitution, mythologized this identity in 1886, claiming that Blacks in Atlanta were better protected by the rule of law and more prosperous than anywhere else in the South. Grady took White supremacy for granted while exhorting his White readers that Black Americans had a role to play in helping Atlanta build up its industrial wealth. It was backward and self-defeating to confine African Americans to menial jobs and picking cotton. If Atlanta allowed Blacks to work in its factories, investment capital from the North would pour into Atlanta, the industrial sector would thrive, and a New South would arise. Booker T. Washington, delivering the Atlanta Compromise Speech of 1895 to the Atlanta Exposition, proposed exactly this deal with the elite business class of the South. If the White business owners stopped barring Blacks from good-paying jobs, Washington said, Black Americans would stop complaining about losing their rights, at least for a season of peace. That didn’t happen, and in 1896 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Plessy v. Ferguson that racial segregation is fully justified in law and custom.8 But Atlanta never lacked a trickle of White industrialists, Black entrepreneurs, and White and Black journalists who believed that Atlanta could still be different, or already was. The Coca-Cola Company, founded in Atlanta in 1886 and soaring in the 1920s under new ownership, was generally paternalistic toward its African American employees. Ralph McGill, a prominent columnist for the Atlanta Constitution in the 1930s and 1940s, persistently called the White South to a higher standard of social decency. William B. Hartsfield, Atlanta’s mayor from 1942 to 1961, hired Black police officers and successfully recruited Black civic leaders to his governing coalition. Jesse Hill, president of the Atlanta Life Insurance Company, was the dean of Atlanta’s Black bourgeoisie, working with Hartsfield to expand the Black middle class. It featured a strong contingent of ministers headed by William H. Borders at Wheat Street Baptist Church, Martin Luther King Sr. at Ebenezer Baptist Church, and Benjamin Mays at Morehouse College. All were supporters of the SCLC and mostly successful in preventing it from demonstrating in the city of its headquarters.9 The Black ministers were allies and admirers of John Wesley Dobbs, the “mayor of Auburn Avenue,” who battled to restore the voting rights of Blacks in Georgia and prevailed in his long struggle against the White primary system. Dobbs was Atlanta’s foremost proponent of Black uplift. He founded the Georgia Negro Voters League, won a campaign to hire Black police officers, and got

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streetlights installed on Atlanta’s center of Black commerce and culture, Auburn Avenue. Black uplift, in his storied telling, had five foundations: religion, education, money, political security, and culture. The condensed version of his stock speech rested on three B’s: the book (an education at one of Atlanta’s Black colleges); the ballot (voter registration and voting); and the buck (economic development). The colleges were Atlanta University, Clark College, Morris Brown College, Spelman College, and Morehouse College. Dobbs sent his six daughters to Spelman, the eldest of whom, Irene Wesley Dobbs Jackson, mothered the next generation’s symbol of Black Atlanta uplift, Maynard Jackson Jr.10 Irene Dobbs, a gifted pianist and linguist, was the valedictorian of Spelman’s class of 1929 and studied successively at the University of Chicago, Middlebury College, the University of Grenoble, and the University of Toulouse before her marriage to Maynard Holbrook Jackson, a Baptist minister from New Orleans. The couple settled in Dallas, where she gave birth in 1938 to the third of her six children, Maynard Jackson Jr. Seven years later the family moved to Atlanta, where Jackson Senior served as pastor of Friendship Baptist Church and Jackson Junior grew closer to his renowned grandfather. Jackson aspired to be a pastor like his father, but his father died in 1953 and the bond deepened between Jackson and Dobbs. Irene Dobbs Jackson packed up her children in 1956 and returned to Toulouse to complete her doctorate in French literature. She wrote to King the following year that it thrilled her to see him on the cover of Time magazine—“a hometown boy who had ‘made good.’ ” Graduating in 1958, she joined the Spelman faculty and applied in 1959 for a membership card at the Atlanta Public Library, explaining that in France she joined any library she wanted. In Atlanta, African Americans were permitted to read library books, but only in the basement, and could not check them out. Dobbs Jackson got her membership card and thereby integrated the Atlanta Public Library. Meanwhile, her third child sailed through Morehouse, graduating in 1956 at the age of eighteen.11 Jackson was already fully himself at Morehouse—gifted, precocious, ambitious, and brash, with a big personality. He tried law school at Boston University, but he was too young and rushed to study case law. For a while he drifted through various jobs, selling encyclopedias and working for the Ohio State Bureau of Unemployment Compensation. In 1961 he returned to law school, enrolling at North Carolina Central University, and graduated in 1964. Jackson worked as a lawyer for the National Labor Relations Board and managed a public interest legal service. He may have contemplated a political run, but he did not prepare for one, lacking money, backers, patience, and a strategy. That did not stop him in 1968 from impulsively challenging Talmadge. Jackson was thirty years old and undaunted by his lack of political experience.

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He was long on self-confidence and knew he could make a splash, being a child of Atlanta’s Black aristocracy. Talmadge crushed him statewide but Jackson won in Atlanta, which launched him as a political up-and-comer. The following year he ran for vice mayor against a longtime member of the Board of Aldermen, Milton Farris. Jesse Hill and Martin Luther King Sr. believed that Jackson was too young, pushy, and unprepared to be running, so they concentrated on adding African Americans to the board. Jackson brushed off the elders and won the election with 58 percent of the vote, just when the vice mayoral position acquired new importance in running the city council. In 1970 moderate Democrat Sam Massell became Atlanta’s first Jewish mayor, winning strong Black leadership support, but the coming of Jackson raised the specter of a young Black mayor in the next electoral cycle.12 Belafonte raised money for Young fresh from Jackson’s election as vice mayor. Black politicos schooled by Dobbs and Hill felt the electoral tide turning in their favor. Ivanhoe Donaldson, a former SNCC organizer, managed Young’s campaign, recruiting idealistic students who barely missed the King era. Young discovered that his shy, country, Alabama church-girl spouse had bloomed into a public speaker. Jean Young, during the years that her husband traveled with the SCLC, focused her activism on child welfare, developing an ample network. Young enjoyed working with her on the campaign, grateful that her Atlanta contacts exceeded his own. He schmoozed with conservative wealthy White Democrats whom he had no chance of winning over, just to tamp down their fears. He met Jimmy Carter, who was running for governor, and won over two of Carter’s financial backers, Atlanta architect Paul Muldawer and his wife, Carol Muldawer. Young won the Democratic nomination in 1970, competing in the fall election on a Democratic ticket featuring Carter for governor and arch-segregationist Lester Maddox for lieutenant governor. Young aimed at the touted “New South” coalition of Black, White liberal, and White labor voters that elected Bond and Jackson. He said the tricky part was to enlist White support “without stirring up the dyed-in-the-wool white racists in the process.” Bennett advised Young to ask Hill to convene a meeting of Black ministers. Young was puzzled; why should he ask the insurance guy to gather the ministers? Bennett said all those preachers got their churches by borrowing money through Atlanta Life. When the person who holds your mortgage summons you to a meeting, you show up. Hill and the Muldawers made Young financially viable, helping him run a strong campaign. He was good at personable banter and appealing to goodwill. He met White Georgians who said they liked Maddox and him equally, which confirmed to Young that political campaigning is not only about ideas, causes, and interests. Voters take emotional

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snapshots of candidates, sometimes supporting candidates with contrasting views. Young relied on television ads resembling the charismatic-candidate approach of Robert Kennedy’s campaign. The Fifth District, represented by right-wing Republican two-term incumbent Fletcher Thompson, was 30 percent African American. Thompson portrayed Young as a flaming radical militant who hated America. Young believed that White moderates would not reward such ludicrous fear-mongering. On election night he was rudely refuted. Black voters didn’t turn out and Thompson crushed him, winning 57 percent of the vote. A plausible winning coalition existed for Young, but not with a weak Black turnout.13 Young and Jean Young fled to Jamaica for a few days, contemplated their failure, and vowed to run again in 1972. Clarence Bacote called on Young to explain what he had done wrong. It was pointless to aim generally at everyone. Bacote had a Ph.D. in history from the University of Chicago and had taught at Atlanta University since 1930, specializing in the Reconstruction Era. More pertinent for Young, Bacote had directed the Atlanta NAACP’s citizenship schools for many years and consolidated Atlanta’s numerous Black voter registration groups. In 1962 Bacote and Mays worked tirelessly to put Leroy Johnson in the Georgia General Assembly, the first Black Georgia legislator since Reconstruction. With Young he went straight to the map, going precinct by precinct, telling Young he needed to learn which precincts he could win, focus on them, ignore the others, and turn out the vote.14 Massell appointed Young to chair Atlanta’s Community Relations Commission, a godsend appointment that expanded his local network. But Young was excluded from the new Fifth District when the Georgia legislature redrew its boundaries and gerrymandered him out of it. The American Civil Liberties Union fought back, contending that the new boundaries violated the Voting Rights Act strictures against blatant gerrymandering. The legislature was compelled to redraw the boundaries again, and the African American percentage of the district rose to 38 percent. The new-new boundaries put Emory University in the Fifth District, placed several conservative White precincts in the Sixth District, and re-included Young. This time he enlisted former SCLC lieutenant Stoney Cooks to run his campaign and relied on grassroots organizing and radio stations, not television buys. Hill worked hard for Young, and Bennett enlisted community leaders and organizers. Every day, Young’s first and last call came from Hill, and there were several Hill calls in between. Jean Young formed a kitchen cabinet of female organizers and a group called Women for Young that mobilized female voters. One of Young’s major donors was a conservative White Republican chair of

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Aaron Rents, Charlie Loudermilk, a measure of Young’s amiability. Young got a New York advertising executive to compose a campaign jingle for him. There was a soul version, a pop version, and a country version. Belafonte sang a benefit concert and former mayor Ivan Allen Jr. fund-raised for him. Young’s few television ads were pitched to White liberals, crafted by two brainy White strategists on their way up, Stuart Eizenstat and Jack Watson. This time his Republican opponent was a moderate, Rodney Cook, as Thompson retired from Congress. Cook defended Georgia’s dependence on military bases and defense spending, whereas Young said the United States spent too much on the military and too little on neighborhoods. He thought this position might hurt him, but by 1972 many Georgia Democrats were sick of the Vietnam War. The militarism issue turned out to be a wash; meanwhile, the campaign focused on issues that favored Young. He called for higher federal and state spending on public education, moving away from Atlanta’s reliance on property tax funding for education. He called for racial integration at all levels of American society and opposed highway building and commercial development along the Chattahoochee River. Young argued that America could do much better at sharing its immense wealth across racial and class lines. The polling data projected a four-point loss, but Cook turned out the vote in the seventy precincts he targeted, getting 74 percent of the Black community to the polls. Young won 95 percent of the Black vote and 23 percent of the White vote to become Georgia’s first Black congressional representative since Reconstruction.15 The following morning he toured the bus stops to thank the custodians, janitors, hotel workers, and hospital workers who had voted him into the U.S. Congress. These were people who left home at 6 a.m. every day to change buses downtown to get to the White districts where they worked. On election night they braved pouring rain after work to vote, many for the first time. Young surprised them by showing up to thank them. They were jubilant, startled, and teary. They greeted him so emotionally that Young allowed himself to ponder— perhaps this was more than an electoral victory? Certainly, it was much more. Young was the first Black representative from Georgia since Jefferson Long in 1872 and the first Black representative, along with Barbara Jordan of Texas, from the Deep South since Reconstruction. This milestone did not occur to him until he was mobbed with joy at the bus stops. Young claimed that this first never mattered to him. Why make a fuss about something so “right and natural”? But the jubilation at the bus stops taught him that such firsts were terribly important to others. Lewis later recalled, “I was ecstatic.” It was nice that Jordan won that year, Lewis said, but Texas was not a true Deep South state, certainly

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not like Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia. Young was the first in a century in the true Deep South.16 In Congress he was a liberal in domestic politics and a postcolonial liberal in foreign policy, combining Du Bois with Wilsonian internationalism. Young called himself a pragmatic idealist and a realistic liberal, two names meaning the same thing. He criticized Nixon for cutting rural antipoverty spending, opposing school busing, exploiting racial fears about urban crime, and prolonging the war in Vietnam, but he also befriended Republicans one by one. Appointed to the House Banking and Currency Committee, Young joined its subcommittee on international trade, eager to expand Atlanta’s global trade. He took a similar approach to the Congressional Black Caucus, which had a frosty relationship with Nixon. Michigan Representative Charles Diggs founded the informal Democratic Select Committee in 1969, enlisting the nine Black representatives in Congress to work together. Three newly elected House members—William Clay Sr. of Missouri, Louis Stokes of Ohio, and Shirley Chisholm of New York—joined Diggs in providing energetic leadership for the new group. By 1971 the number of Black representatives had risen to thirteen, and Charles Rangel of New York proposed a new name for the group that was adopted—the Congressional Black Caucus. Diggs was its first elected leader, Delegate Walter Fauntroy (District of Columbia) was an outspoken member of it, and Clay declared that Black Americans had no permanent friends or permanent enemies; it had only permanent interests. Nixon refused to meet with the Black Caucus in 1971, and the group responded by boycotting his State of the Union Address. Two years later, Spiro Agnew was forced to resign the vice presidency after an investigation revealed that he accepted bribes as governor of Maryland. Nixon nominated Republican Minority Leader Gerald Ford to replace Agnew, and almost the entire Black Caucus opposed him. The exception was Young. Ford and Young had forged a friendship at the Congressional Health Clinic while Ford recovered from a knee injury and Young recovered from a pinched nerve in his neck. Young said Ford’s decency made him better than the alternatives; moreover, nothing passed without Republican votes. Young became Ford’s favorite liberal Democrat. Chisholm described Young as a quintessential diplomat: “In the Black Caucus, Andy will sit and listen, and then in a very cool way will kind of get us all together.” Young played an inside game instead of using his King-connected celebrity to be a media star.17 But he keenly realized what worked for him—the moral authority he carried through King and the SCLC: “That was what made people stop and listen when it was my turn to speak.” Young made a top priority of passing federal legislation to increase funding for mass transit systems. The Urban Mass Transportation Act

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of 1964 created the Urban Mass Transit Administration, which provided federal subsidies for the first time for urban and rural mass transit projects. In 1969 Atlanta’s outgoing mayor, Ivan Allen Jr., pushed a referendum to approve the sale of bonds and a local sales tax to create a mass transit system, the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA). The referendum failed and Allen’s successor, Massell, enlisted Hill to develop a strategy for attracting Black voter support. They focused on MARTA contracts for Black companies and management positions for Blacks. Since the city needed federal assistance to construct the rail line, Young worked through the banking committee to obtain highdensity residential and commercial development near the MARTA stations, proposing the federal legislation that started Atlanta’s boom in mass transit. Young stressed that an advanced public transportation system in Atlanta would help all Atlanta businesses and benefit the entire city, especially poor Blacks who could not afford a car. Mass transit, he said, should not be a Democratic issue. It was about entire cities and the communities they served.18 Atlanta replaced its weak mayor and Board of Aldermen system with a strong mayor and City Council system. The new mayor, whoever it turned out to be in 1973, would appoint heads of administrative departments and make a larger mark on the community. Massell figured that Jackson would run against him. Massell tried to retain his base of support in the Black community, but Whites fled to the suburbs in the early 1970s and Jackson employed the Bacote datadriven approach that worked for Young, urging Black voters to support one of their own. Hill switched to Jackson, reasoning that Atlanta was overdue for a Black mayor who would push harder for minority contracts. He proved to be right on both counts. When Jackson took office, less than 1 percent of the city’s contracts went to minority firms. Jackson pledged to raise this figure to 25 percent through a combination of minority hiring and joint-venture contracts, and to appoint a Black police chief. Both plans riled the White business leaders who were accustomed to getting their way in City Hall. Jackson was both defiant and accommodating, beloved in the Black community for his swashbuckling style and getting things done, and constantly challenged to do more for it. He had a fighting spirit and a willingness to deal with the White business class, telling audiences frankly, “Atlanta can’t prosper without city hall and business in bed together.”19 Atlanta business boomed under Jackson, but so did White complaints about Jackson and the loss of Atlanta’s supposedly idyllic past. Nostalgia for the reign of the White paternalists grew obnoxious. Hartsfield, the story went, showed how to run Atlanta without wielding a big stick. Then came the Camelot years, 1962 to 1970, when Allen ran the city. Allen had real achievements to be nostalgic about.

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He was an enlightened businessman who removed the “White” and “Colored” signs in City Hall on his first day in office, hired the city’s first Black firefighters, and authorized Black police officers to arrest Whites. In July 1963 he courageously testified to Congress that he supported the public accommodations section of the proposed civil rights bill. Allen was the only elected southern official to do so, earning a torrent of outrage for it. He befriended King Senior and King Junior, prizing his bonds with civil rights leaders, which minimized protest demonstrations in Atlanta. Allen presided over a downtown construction boom that transformed Atlanta. He deserved to be lauded, but idealizing Allen’s tenure had an upshot that engulfed Jackson in controversy and demeaned his achievements. Alarmism about street crime soared in Atlanta, as did White flight, never mind that street crime did not increase. Every time the Atlanta Constitution pined for the Camelot days of Allen, which was often, Jackson paid a price for being brash, the first Black mayor, and the first mayor with strongmayor authority.20 Meanwhile, reporters puzzled over Young’s keen interest in foreign policy. What did that have to do with civil rights? Young explained that he was like King, Mays, and Du Bois in viewing the struggle for justice in global terms. In 1965 White nationalist Rhodesian leader Ian Smith unilaterally declared that Southern Rhodesia was independent of Britain. The UN imposed sanctions on Smith’s regime, President Johnson supported the sanctions, and the United States stopped importing chrome from Southern Rhodesia. In 1971 U.S. Senator Harry Byrd (I-Virginia) seized on Nixon’s indifference to reverse America’s policy toward Southern Rhodesia. The Byrd Amendment to the Strategic and Critical Materials Stock Piling Act prohibited the U.S. government from banning the importation of any strategic material from a non-Communist nation. The United States went back to importing chrome from Southern Rhodesia, joining Portugal and South Africa as the only nations to defy the UN boycott. Young protested that the Byrd Amendment propped up an odious regime. At the same time, he proposed an amendment to a military aid bill that prohibited Portugal from using its U.S. military aid against its colonies in southern Africa. Portuguese forces had battled rebels in Angola and Mozambique since the early 1960s, trying to retain Portugal’s colonial empire. They copied the U.S. tactics in Vietnam, clearing trails with bulldozers, herding peasants into strategic hamlets, and obliterating the food supply with chemical bombs. Young warned that U.S. aid to Portugal put the United States on the wrong side of another anticolonial war that threatened to pull Americans into another Vietnam. The United States needed to act on its best values, telling the Portuguese government “that this is the year 1973 and the days of violent colonialist rule are over.”21

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The protest against the Byrd Amendment made little impact in 1973, but it planted a flag on an issue that roiled Congress through the mid-1970s. Young’s amendment on Portuguese military aid passed 69–57, a victory he achieved by reaching across the aisle to southern Republicans. Young had already judged that some Republicans were more approachable than many Democrats, especially southern Democrats. After his amendment passed, he explained that he looked for opportunities to work with Republicans on issues that did not hurt them.22 In 1974 a new government in Portugal terminated its colonial wars in Angola and Mozambique, and Young turned back to Southern Rhodesia and South Africa. He pointed to the anti-apartheid economic sanctions instituted by U.S. and British churches. If churches could swing their members against South African apartheid, Nixon had no excuse for propping it up with favorable treatment. Young supported Diggs in persisting against the Byrd Amendment. A House poll in July 1974 indicated that 104 members were definitely opposed to appeal and 30 were definitely in favor. Americans knew little about Ian Smith’s regime, and most politicians were happy to keep it that way. Young protested that Smith’s regime was beyond-the-pale reprehensible. Nixon resigned in August and the Black Caucus appeared to win a major victory when President Ford announced that he supported the repeal of the Byrd Amendment. Four times the repeal forces scheduled a vote; every time they averted a defeat at the last minute by backing down. The Byrd Amendment survived amid the furor over Ford’s controversial pardon of Nixon. Once again, every member of the Black Caucus inveighed against Ford except Young. Much as he disliked Nixon, Young said, he was against being vengeful. He viewed Ford’s pardon as an act of Christian forgiveness: “It’s the preacher in me coming out.” Ford confirmed Young’s judgment about him by issuing pardons to approximately 6,000 military draft evaders; this time, only liberals cheered Ford for being charitable. To Young, the subsequent pardons provided some political cover for the first.23 He cruised in November 1974 to reelection with 72 percent of the vote. In December the Commission on Racial Justice of the United Church of Christ sent Young and tennis star Arthur Ashe to South Africa. African National Congress (ANC) leader Nelson Mandela was enduring his twelfth year in prison; Young visited ANC leader Robert Sobukwe, who had spent the entire 1960s in prison and was now banished to confinement and public silence in a mining town, Kimberley. Young asked what he could do for the anti-apartheid struggle. Sobukwe said there was nothing; Black South Africans had to fight their own battles. Young persisted and Sobukwe came up with something—could Young arrange an American college education for his teenaged daughter Miliswa and son Dinilesizwe? Young

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took them into his home in Atlanta, sending them first to Atlanta Junior College, where Jean Young taught. Subsequently Miliswa studied biology at Spelman and Dinilesizwe studied engineering at Morehouse. Historian Andrew DeRoche, describing Young’s personal style as a civil rights ambassador, tried to imagine a White official taking in the Sobukwe teenagers and could not do it.24 In his second term Young became the first Black representative ever appointed to the House Rules Committee, rose to the executive committee of the Black Caucus, and stoutly defended the food stamp program as a bulwark against rural and urban poverty. Ford named Foreign Service diplomat Nathaniel Davis assistant secretary of state for African Affairs, brushing aside Davis’s controversial role as ambassador to Chile in 1973, when the CIA backed a coup against Chilean president Salvador Allende. Young cried foul, protesting that Davis would be toxic to African diplomats and that Ford should care how they felt. In February 1975 the House debated whether to establish a national holiday honoring King. Young inserted into the Congressional Record King’s Riverside Speech of 1967, stressing that King had tried to teach the United States how to view itself and the world from an anticolonial perspective.25 Meanwhile he was a zealous steward of Atlanta business interests, especially concerning MARTA and the expansion of Hartsfield Airport. In March 1975 Young sought federal funding for low-income housing at the Edgewood Redevelopment Project but failed. The same month he and Jackson pitched an expansion of the airport to Congress. Young and Jackson had a vision of new jobs, vastly expanded minority contracting, and airport-related development fusing together to enlarge Atlanta’s Black middle class and make Atlanta a global power. New tourism and global trade would come to Atlanta if they built a big enough airport. Young and Jackson built their political careers on the strength of this vision and their popularity. With Jackson there was always controversy because he scared White people and he tended to swagger. The way was smoother for Young, who later built on Jackson’s achievements. In July 1975 the Voting Rights Act came up for extension. Young gave a heartfelt speech on the House floor touting the law’s success, observing that it made it possible for Black people like him to be elected in the South. Before the Voting Rights Act, he recalled, “in order to be elected from our part of the country, you had to present yourself at your worst.” Otherwise decent Whites ran as segregationists to fend off hateful types to their right. Young urged the House not to regress to that; the House agreed, 341–70.26 In September 1975 another House vote against the Byrd Amendment fell short. Minnesota Democrat Donald Fraser led the fight, which lost, 209–187, and Young was crestfallen. He asked if Congress was truly willing “to write off

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all black Africa” just to get some Rhodesian chrome. America didn’t need it; there was enough chrome in American junkyards to last a dozen years. Meanwhile Young opposed the deep involvement of the CIA in Angola’s civil war. Until September 1974, when a military coup overthrew Portugal’s corporatist Estado Novo regime, three rival nationalist groups in Angola fought for independence from Portugal. Subsequently the three groups vied with each other for sole control of Angola: Agostinho Neto led the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), a leftist organization centered in the capital, Luanda; Holden Roberto led the northern-based National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA), boasting strong support in the U.S. government; and Jonas Savimbi led the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), an offshoot of the FNLA and supported by the nation’s largest ethnic group, the Ovimbundu. Ford, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and the CIA backed FNLA and UNITA against MPLA. In October 1975 South African forces invaded Angola, and Cuba responded with an invasion force that crushed the FNLA and the South Africans. Kissinger told the CIA to ring the alarm in Congress for more secret funding, which broke the story. Young was appalled—did the CIA learn nothing from its catastrophes in Iran, Guatemala, and Chile? The standard slew of soft-on-Communism accusations did not faze him. Young said the Soviets would never prevail in Angola because they had no idea how to treat people of color. Turning Angola into a proxy fight of the Cold War was the worst thing to do in Angola. Iowa’s Democratic senator Dick Clark led a successful fight to block all covert aid to Angola, and Kissinger was thwarted; the Cuban-backed MPLA took control in Angola.27 Kissinger, however, was wily and complex. He could be hard to pin down because he was a cunning realpolitiker skilled at divide-and-conquer. Kissinger negotiated the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty of 1972 (SALT I) with the Soviet Union and the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Vietnam in 1973. He and Vietnamese negotiator Le Duc Tho won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973, and Kissinger was eager to add to his legacy. Smith declared on British television that Rhodesia would prevent majority rule for at least a thousand years, which spurred British Prime Minister James Callaghan to resolve the Southern Rhodesia crisis. Callaghan laid down four preconditions for Rhodesian independence: majority rule, Black suffrage within two years, no independence before majority rule, and timely negotiations. Smith rejected these terms outright, but Kissinger— surprisingly—embraced Callaghan’s solution. Kissinger called for peace, economic development, and racial justice in Africa, coming out against the Byrd Amendment. His last months in power were tortuously ambiguous. Kissinger got South African Prime Minister John Vorster to withdraw his support of Smith,

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which forced Smith to publicly swallow the principle of eventual majority rule. But Vorster stepped up his brutal repression in South Africa, slaughtering nearly six hundred young demonstrators on a single day. Kissinger dissembled and postured to the end, brushing off African and American officials and alienating his own staffers, hoping he still had time to polish his legacy, which was not to be. Six years of Nixon, eight years of Kissinger, and the Senate hearings of 1975 on CIA abuses paved the way to a president who promised Americans never to lie to them, cheat them, dishonor them, or mistreat them. Carter and Young were deeply serious about rectifying the moral reputation of the United States. Each appreciated the other’s informal, friendly, Christian sincerity, and each had a big stake in the claim that a New South was emerging, propelled by Atlanta. Carter put out feelers for a presidential run in 1974, when he was still governor of Georgia. Young was skeptical, doubting that a little-known southern Democrat could be elected. Carter nurtured their friendship, asking Young for updates about South Africa and Southern Rhodesia. A friendship grew gradually, slowed by Young’s caution. In 1975 Carter announced his candidacy for the presidency at the Hyatt Regency in downtown Atlanta. Young had a speaking engagement nearby at the Lovett School. Just as Young seated himself, Carter’s aide Jody Powell approached him with a question: Would he introduce Carter at the announcement? Right now? Young improvised a friendly warm-up for Carter, but he did not climb aboard until the Black Caucus met with all the Democratic contenders. Twenty Black members of Congress grilled the candidates on their positions. They liked the liberal candidates on affirmative action, school busing, and full employment spending, and they spurned the moderates. At first they were hostile to Carter, who confirmed their suspicions. Carter was against busing, racial quotas, and the Humphrey-Hawkins bill for full employment, and he evinced real enthusiasm for balanced budgets. The last question for every candidate turned the tide for Young: How many Blacks are on your staff? Nearly every candidate had one or two. One prominent liberal didn’t have any; he said he was still looking for one. Carter said he didn’t know how many he employed. Harlem’s Charlie Rangel erupted—Why were they bothering with Carter? He was wrong about everything and didn’t even know how many Blacks he employed. Georgia state senator Ben Brown, a Carter staffer, was summoned to answer the staff question: Carter had twenty-seven Black staffers in community organizing, fund-raising, media relations, and other key positions.28 Carter could not have been nominated in the old boss-dominated Democratic Party, and he had opposed George McGovern in the 1972 primaries. But he benefited from the reforms that McGovern enacted in the party; the only way to

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get nominated in 1976 was to rack up primary victories. There was a large field of twelve viable candidates headed by California’s Governor Jerry Brown, a newgeneration neoliberal; former governor George Wallace of Alabama, the tribune of White supremacists; Arizona representative Mo Udall, a liberal favorite; Washington senator Henry M. Jackson, a Cold Warrior supported by neoconservatives; former Peace Corps director Sargent Shriver, a liberal from the Kennedy clan; and Idaho senator Frank Church, a liberal fresh from the dramatic Church Commission hearings on the CIA. Carter was the least ideologically defined of this group and the least known. Both factors turned out to be advantages. Young worked hard for Carter, speaking for him across the country. He enlisted his Philadelphia congressional colleague William Gray III and his network of Black church pastors to support Carter. Carter finished second in Iowa and first in New Hampshire on his way to winning thirty contests and the nomination. At the Democratic convention in New York City, Young gave a seconding speech for Carter. He told reporters he would not seek a position in the Carter administration, since he was not the type who needed to ride in a limousine or wear a cabinet title. Young played an important role in helping Carter squeak out a victory over Ford in November. Carter won 94 percent of Black voters, who turned the outcome in Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina. Winning in Pennsylvania was especially sweet to Young, and decisive. Winning in Mississippi was incomparably thrilling: “When I heard that Mississippi had gone our way, I knew that the hands that picked cotton finally picked the president.”29 P OSTC OL ON IA L A N TIRA CIS M AND A M ERICA N F OREIGN P OLICY

Carter knew very few foreign policy experts and very little about foreign policy. He couldn’t stand pompous personalities, so that ruled out a lot of entitled types from the Ivy League and the Beltway think tanks. His membership in the Trilateral Commission was his only credential in this area. It was a New York– based group of corporate executives, foreign policy academics, foreign-service professionals, and politicians dedicated to building a United States–Western Europe–Japan alliance of economic and political interests. Carter won admission to it in 1974 as the governor of a southern state seeking trade relations with the European Common Market and Japan. His lack of foreign policy experience compelled him to select old hands for secretary of state and national security advisor: Cyrus Vance for State and Zbigniew Brzezinski for national security.

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Both were Trilateral bigwigs, and Brzezinski was chiefly responsible for Carter’s membership in the commission. Vance was a liberal, patrician, Yale-educated New York City lawyer and World War II veteran who had served as assistant secretary of state under Johnson and supported Shriver in the Democratic nomination race. He was committed to coexistence with the Soviet Union and a second SALT agreement that would establish numerical equality between the two superpowers in terms of nuclear weapons delivery systems. Brzezinski was an immigrant from Poland, Harvard-educated, a Columbia University political scientist, fiercely antiSoviet, and a self-styled hawkish realist. Vance versus Brzezinski was built into the Carter administration before it took office, which the Beltway media gleefully flacked. Vance tried to diminish the roles of the national security advisor and the specialized policy committees that had built up during the Kissinger years, and Brzezinski fought him. Vance was born to privilege, comfortable in the liberal establishment, and a consummate diplomat. Brzezinski clawed his way up as the Democratic version of Kissinger—brainy, aggressive, and an outsider. Brzezinski believed the entire Vance wing of the party was too eager to coexist with Russia, refusing to risk anything that might jeopardize SALT II. He shared the neocon view that Henry Jackson would have been the best president. The neocons went all-in for Jackson, believing that only he could be trusted to fight Communism. But Brzezinski was pragmatic, judging that Jackson’s stodgy personality would never make it to the White House. Carter was a fresh face, educable, and had supported Jackson in 1972. So Brzezinski worked on him, joining Carter’s campaign team in August 1975. Carter prized Brzezinski’s support and his professorial tutorials; by the end of 1975, Brzezinski was Carter’s chief advisor on foreign policy.30 Choosing Vance and Brzezinski was a balancing maneuver for a presidentelect short on advisors. Carter developed a close friendship with Vance, a cooler relationship with Brzezinski, a strong friendship with Young, and brought only three of his personal friends into the government—Press Secretary Powell, Management and Budget Director Bert Lance, and Chief of Staff Hamilton Jordan. After the November election, Young went to a conference in Lesotho, a small independent nation within South Africa, accompanied by Diggs and Randall Robinson, the founder of a fledgling Black lobbying organization. He had just returned from Lesotho when a reporter asked about a rumor that Carter planned to appoint him as ambassador to the UN. Young said he knew of no such offer and was still planning to serve his third term in Congress. Shortly afterward Carter asked Young to take the position, explaining that he intended to emphasize human rights in his foreign policy. Carter allowed that Barbara

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Jordan was probably better qualified for the position, but she had no connection to King. He wanted to connect civil rights to human rights, and Young was the perfect person to do it. Young wanted to say yes but worried that Jean Young would have to give up her teaching position in Atlanta. Carter offered sympathetically to speak to her, making the same pitch—her husband was uniquely qualified to advance the cause of human rights. The Youngs moved to New York believing they had discerned God’s will for them.31 Brzezinski worried from the beginning that Vance hired too many liberals eager to end the Cold War. Soon this worry evolved into a chief story line of the Carter White House. Vance tried to prevent Brzezinski from meeting with foreign ambassadors, while many of Vance’s staffers regarded Brzezinski as an adversary. Brzezinski gave it right back, insisting that he couldn’t do his job without meeting ambassadors and that State was woefully short on toughminded realists. Vance was unfailingly gentlemanly; Brzezinski played hardball with zeal; and the two staffs stirred a constant State versus NSC battle in the media. Vance had the public role while shunning publicity. Brzezinski had a mostly private role, but he stoked publicity. He played up to Carter their shared outsider status, noting that Poles and American southerners had much in common—poverty, feudalism, humiliation, wounded pride, alcoholism, a passion for military titles, a tendency to dominate women, a tradition of storytelling, and a pronounced resentment at being the butt of demeaning jokes. If he and Carter were in the White House, he said, it meant the Yankee elitists no longer ruled. Brzezinski took advantage of being Carter’s age. Almost everyone on Carter’s senior staff was a generation younger than he, and many were products of the civil rights generation who enjoyed, unlike Vance and Brzezinski, Young’s irreverent approach to his job.32 Young was diplomatic, and not, in his new job. He took the minimum necessary interest in team play and no interest in the twin trademarks of diplomacy— anonymity and innocuous speech. If Carter had wanted that, he would have picked someone else. Yet Young’s greatest accomplishments as UN ambassador rested on diplomatic maneuvering that no one else could have pulled off. He was immediately Carter’s most visible, outspoken, and news-making official. During his confirmation hearings, Young was asked if he would support a policy with which he disagreed; he said if the policy violated one of his principles, absolutely not. CBS reporter Dan Rather asked him if Cuba’s troops in Angola guaranteed that the guerrilla war would go on indefinitely. Young replied that the Cubans brought a “certain stability and order” to Angola, not an assurance of protracted war, though the only thing that justified their presence was to counter the South African troops. The issue in Angola, Young contended, was not that Cuba

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exported Communism to it. It was that Cuba took a stand against racism. Racism was a far worse threat than Communism to the well-being of Angolans.33 No American ambassador had ever said publicly that fighting racism is more important than fighting Communism. Young took in stride the early shrieks of incredulity and accusation the Rather interview provoked. Harry Byrd and Senator Jesse Helms (R-North Carolina) were Young’s foremost antagonists, nursing years of grudges over the Byrd Amendment and the civil rights movement. But mostly there was a shower of praise for Young. It drowned out the attention paid to the rest of Carter’s cabinet, while Young was confirmed in the Senate by a vote of 89–3. Carter had run for the presidency brandishing a question: “Why not the best?” During the campaign it evoked a contrast between Carter and the twisted cynicism of Nixon and Kissinger. At the swearing-in ceremony for Young, Carter applied it to Young: “Of all the people I’ve known in public service, Andy Young is the best. He exemplifies a rare combination of inner strength, quiet self-assurance, deep religious faith, superb personal courage, and sensitivity to other people’s needs who are not so influential, wellknown, and powerful.” Young heard a lot of that in the early going. He was the favorite of the new president without having to grovel for Carter’s favor; appointing Young confirmed Carter’s self-image as the righteous peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia, who came to redeem America.34 Carter dispatched Young to Africa to capitalize on Young’s popularity with African leaders and to learn what they expected from the new administration. Young visited fifteen African nations and met with seventeen African heads of state. There were snipes from conservatives that Young was obsessed with his African roots instead of defending America’s interests—before he had done anything besides travel to Africa. African leaders told Young they wanted Carter to abolish the Byrd Amendment and pressure Smith to deliver on majority rule. Young declared upon returning to the United States that repealing the Byrd Amendment was a “kind of referendum on American racism.” In mid-March, Congress voted in favor of repeal and Carter exulted that the country had finally gotten “on the side of what is right and proper.” Meanwhile, Young hosted a stream of friends and developing nations diplomats at his apartment in the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, socializing into the wee hours several nights per week. Stoney Cooks ran Young’s team, and Young’s deputy ambassador, Donald McHenry—his secretary at the State Department—ran the policy apparatus, both in buttoned-down fashion compared to Young, who favored hallway gettogethers punctuated with high-fives.35 Young and Vance were allies on the major issues, espousing liberal internationalism, antiracism, human rights, and pulling back from the Cold War. They

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hired like-minded aides, notably Richard Moose as assistant secretary of state for Africa and Bill Maynes as assistant secretary of state for international organizations. Young’s penchant for zingers, however, irritated Vance, a paragon of Ivy League gentility and reticence. In style, Young was more like Brzezinski, an opinionated intellectual with a penchant for sharp remarks. Young and Vance organized a working group called the Gang of Five, consisting of Britain, Canada, France, West Germany, and the United States, that pressed South Africa to allow free elections in Namibia. They worked closely with British Foreign Secretary David Owen on Namibia and Rhodesia, supporting Callaghan’s Labour-coalition government. Always there were tensions between State Department staffers who distrusted Brzezinski and NSC staffers who distrusted State. Brzezinski argued that Vance and Young clung too closely to Britain on the Rhodesian problem and were too accepting of Cuba’s military presence in Africa. Instead of being led by the nose by the British, the United States should adopt an independent policy of benevolent neutrality in Rhodesia. That would allow Smith to yield to the only viable alternative—the moderate Black Africans led by Methodist bishop Abel Muzorewa, perhaps leading to a broader settlement down the road. To Brzezinski, the crucial objectives were to sustain positive relationships with the frontline African states and smooth the way for a gradual transfer of power in Rhodesia. He told friends that Vance was good at negotiating with reasonable people and bad at standing up to thugs. If a policy contained a risk of requiring force, Vance was sure to oppose it. Brzezinski, Carter’s defense secretary Harold Brown, and their staffers fed this complaint to reporters on background.36 Young exulted that it took only two months for Carter to abolish the Byrd Amendment and that Carter designated him to represent the administration at the World Conference on Action Against Apartheid in Lagos, Nigeria. If such things were possible in only a few months, Young could handle the flak he took from leftists for representing the U.S. government. Some protested that he became a stooge for the American empire who wrongly thought his SCLC record exempted him from criticism. South African Black liberationist Steve Biko said it sharply, refusing Young’s entreaties to meet with him. Young, Biko observed, had “no program except the furtherance of the American system.” Biko resented the fact that Young did not support divestment by U.S. companies in South Africa or comprehensive U.S. governmental economic sanctions. Young warned Carter to play a careful hand in South Africa. The mission was to help Black and White South Africans work together to abolish apartheid, not to drive Pretoria into a reactive corner. He allowed that undoubtedly there were important differences between the civil rights movement and the Black South

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African struggle, but the other hand prevailed whenever Young said it. If the United States could overturn decades of law and custom, surely South Africa was capable of adopting multiracial democratic rule that protected individual rights.37 At the lectern, Young was circumspect. To reporters, he tended to tease and provoke, committing ostensible “gaffes” when he inadvertently blurted out the truth. The first big one occurred on April 5, 1977. A British television interviewer asserted to Young that Britain was free of the racism that plagued the United States. Young struggled not to gag, managed a jovial smile, and replied that, actually, Britain was “a little chicken” concerning its racism in Britain, Rhodesia, and South Africa. The howls of protest within and outside Britain immediately proved his point. What was Young talking about? How did any American official have the effrontery to accuse Britons of racism? Britain’s UN representative Ivor Richard admonished Young that he was supposed to be a diplomat. His job was not to give seminars, sermons, or even political speeches on racial justice. Young cowered at the reprimand, apologizing to Richard. He meant to be somewhat playful, he explained, but his “American chauvinism” triggered an annoyed reaction when the interviewer suggested that racism was a uniquely American problem: “It was the worst day in my life.”38 The following month another clueless interviewer set off another Young reaction that set off another round of incredulity and outrage. Young said he and Carter understood the racial challenges confronting southern Africa far better than Russian officials did because he and Carter had spent many years dealing with civil rights, whereas the Russians were “the worst racists in the world.” To Young, Russian prejudice against Jews and various ethnicities of the Caucasus, Central Asia, East Asia, and Africa made Russia number one on a bad list. He qualified this judgment by noting that Russians were not more bigoted than other racist Whites. The Swedes, he said, were “terrible racists” who treated Black people as badly as Blacks were treated in Queens, New York. Moreover, England’s old colonial racism was still “very strong throughout the island.”39 This time Young did not apologize for contending that racism reached far beyond the KKK and the leftover segregationists. He told a protesting Swedish envoy that Americans who took exile in Sweden during the Vietnam War saw plenty of Swedish racism. They recognized what it was even if Swedes did not. He doubled down in interviews with Playboy and U.S. News & World Report, observing that Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson were racists who took for granted the superiority of White American civilization. What mattered was to perceive that racism is often subtle and unconscious, not

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consciously hateful. Young believed that Kissinger, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, overreacted against the racism he experienced as a youth by denying its importance in foreign affairs. Nixon and Ford, Young said, were racists in the sense that needed to be named and uprooted. They were not hatefully bigoted; they were racist because they lacked any understanding of the ways that people of color across the world are harmed by racial prejudice.40 Young was trying to raise the bar on what could be said about racism. Maybe White cluelessness could be remedied by introducing White audiences to the everyday perception of Black Americans. The New York Times proved to be both helpful and not, publishing letters that took Young seriously and op-eds that derided him. James Reston, the paper’s leading columnist, wrote a classic of skewering put-down, “The Case of Andy Young.” Every paragraph from Reston’s high perch dripped with condescension. He said Young couldn’t make it through a week without criticizing some nation for “being beastly to his fellow blacks.” Lately Young had taken to “wandering around Africa” lecturing Smith and Vorster about the sins of apartheid, somehow believing he was doing his job: “The truth is that Andy Young is doing what he damn well pleases. He is going beyond, even defying, Carter’s spirit of compromise. He is irritating the allies while Carter is trying to win their cooperation.” Young picked a fight “with the Swedes, of all people”—how ludicrous! He was very talkative about his job, yet took no interest in Canada, Latin America, Europe, the Soviet Union, China, Japan, or other Asian nations. Reston explained the puzzle of Young, who cared only about Africa, racism outside the United States, and racism inside the United States. When Young was a politician, Reston recalled, he complained that the North could only think White: “But now he seems only to think black.” Reston drove to a scathing conclusion: Young was a propagandist and provocateur, not an ambassador. No other cabinet official was allowed to shoot off his mouth and show up Carter, “but Andy Young has the blacks on his side, and seems to think he can do and say what he pleases.”41 Others piled on and Young tried to make amends. Most of his offending statements, he noted, hadn’t been planned. They came in reaction to some annoying presumption that irritated him. Why did Whites fiercely resist learning how Black people perceived them? But Young allowed that the available language was problematic. There needed to be a word somewhere between “racism,” which connoted only personal bigotry to many, and “ethnocentrism,” which was too vague and bland to name the evil at issue. The ideal was not to be blind to racial difference, an “ideal” that never got around to interrogating the culture of White supremacy. It was far better to be like Carter, who grappled with the evils of racism in his context and therefore perceived that racism is

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subtle and pervasive. Young said Russian officials were palpably uncomfortable around Black people, unlike Carter. It was hard to talk about this, so people looked away, and then blamed him for trying.42 At the General Assembly he was more cautious and conventional, reciting the usual pieties about working together, solving practical problems, eschewing ideological conflict, and building a better world. Young routinely ended a recitation of the world’s problems with an exhortation about remaining hopeful and idealistic, which nearly always led to a quote by King or an allusion to Young’s experiences with King. Sometimes listeners objected, saying that Young relied too much on the moral authority of the civil rights movement, an exceptional episode in a rich nation far removed from the misery of the poor in developing nations. Young was sympathetic but undeterred, persisting with the civil rights references and analogies. A meeting of the UN Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA) provided a case in point. Young said the ECLA embodied King’s belief that human beings possess the ability to choose the community of shared goals and interests over the destructive ravages of chaos. Moreover, his few months of experience as a UN ambassador persuaded him that the world was bending toward justice: “I have come in recent months to believe that we are living at the early dawning of a new period of hope in human history—after a period of confusion, struggle, and some despair.” Young said it was becoming realistic again to believe “that democracy is viable, that human rights can be protected, and that the rule of law through international institutions can become more significant.” He realized how that sounded in Guatemala. Many had told him the King movement “just happened to be lucky” and didn’t apply to many contexts. Young conceded the point and took it back: “I know that much of what we did and experienced is not relevant, but a lot of it may be, too.” At least the King movement “freed a lot of people.” He reasoned that since the American civil rights movement was one of the very few such movements to succeed, it deserved to be a source of inspiration and guidance to oppressed people everywhere.43 Admittedly, the movement proved that civil rights are not enough. Young went to Guatemala to say that civil rights and economic justice can go together— and must do so. Every possible way of increasing the interface between these two objectives is worth pursuing. Every society has a deep stake in making freedom and justice work together to make a better world. Young said organizations like ECLA helped integrate freedom and justice, which broke the “sterile impasse” between capitalism and socialism. What matters is to create socially accountable institutions on both sides of the capitalism-versus-socialism divide. Any institu-

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tion that becomes socially accountable can serve the common good: “Even the much-maligned transnational corporation, some of which have undoubtedly contributed to social problems, can—and have on occasion—become instruments of helpful diffusion of technology, the allocation of development resources, and the promotion of social justice.”44 Young and King had agreed to disagree about capitalism. Some of Young’s best friends were corporate bigwigs, and Young equated procapitalism with political realism in Reinhold Niebuhr’s fashion. The political imperative is to blend capitalism to public purposes and human rights, a viewpoint that Young attributed to the U.S. government. When the SCLC faced difficult obstacles, he recalled, “we would gather together to rediscover and reaffirm our unity of purpose, and our mutual commitment and support.” Ideology was not unifying; even charismatic leadership was unifying only to a degree. “What fed us, and kept us marching, through many a long and hot day under southern skies, was hope.” That was like this: “It may just be the preacher in me, but I honestly believe we stand on the threshold of a new period of hope.” Sometimes Young said it very personally. Who would have believed, in 1967, that ten years later the executive director of the SCLC would be the UN ambassador? Who imagined that a president like Carter would come out of rural Georgia? Young said these were evidences that a new synthesis of freedom and justice was waiting to be born, and on the way.45 He reframed the comparative issue whenever an audience allowed it, contending that the civil rights movement, though already “successful,” was still ongoing. The world anti-apartheid conference in Lagos convened in August 1977. Two years earlier, Nigeria’s President Olusegun Obasanjo had refused to allow Kissinger to land in Lagos. Now the Nigerian military ruler welcomed Young with enthusiasm, and a friendship began. Young said he appreciated Obasanjo’s recognition that the Black freedom movement continued in the United States. He had not come to Nigeria with a smug presumption of superiority. Still, by the time he spoke, Young had endured a lot of anti-America bashing: “I have been interested and somewhat amused—as I have listened to the many speeches—to find that my Government, along with many others, has been condemned, blamed and blasted for its imperialism, neo-colonialism, capitalism or what have you.” Young said most of this criticism was a ritualistic recital of past misdeeds, and some of it was still relevant. The future mattered far more, “realistically facing the path that is before us.” The U.S. government, he argued, was far more sympathetic to the conference than the South African government. Vorster accused Carter of trying to strangle South Africa. Young said he felt closer to Obasanjo than to the conference or Pretoria. Just as he

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refused to accept “the condemnations of this Conference,” he did not accept the condemnations of Pretoria.46 The constructive way forward was to rationally assess the problem in South Africa and find a realistic solution to it. The challenge was to harness South Africa’s trillion-dollar economy for the benefit of all South Africans. Young said he knew something about how that could happen: “The majority of my life was lived under a very rigid and violent system of apartheid.” He was passionate about apartheid and knew a great deal about “the sickness of racism.” He would not be silenced by the claim that his experience was irrelevant outside the United States. This country had “made tremendous progress in the past few decades,” which now figured to accelerate with Carter in the White House. Young said the conference had an ally in Carter. They needed to work together to abolish apartheid without igniting a bloodbath.47 Five months into Young’s tenure as ambassador, the Conservative Caucus launched a campaign to expel him from office. New Hampshire’s Governor Meldrim Thomson chaired the 300,000-member Conservative Caucus, the leading political action group in the Republican Party. Thomson charged that Young was pro-Communist, obsessed with racism, prejudiced against America, and infatuated with Communist Cuba. Worst of all, he said, Young befriended Robert Sobukwe and took care of his children. To Thomson, the ANC was a compound of two evils, Black radicalism and Communism. Since Sobukwe incited revolution in South Africa, he was an enemy of the United States, and since Young befriended “Communist butchers and terrorists,” he had to be fired. Thomson’s action kit contained a hyperbolic cover letter, an anti-Young brochure, a postcard addressed to Carter, and a bumper sticker: “Andrew Young Must Go!”48 Young took it in stride that he was the right’s favorite fund-raising target. Sometimes the right derided him as a token Black lacking any qualification to be the UN ambassador. More often it opted for fire-alarm material painting Young as a Black Power radical with a dangerous fondness for Communists. In August 1977 he took a ten-nation tour of Caribbean nations. At every stop Young stressed that the Carter administration marked a new day for U.S. policy because it was serious about human rights. Jamaica’s Prime Minister Michael Manley had alienated the Ford administration by touting his democratic Socialism and backing the Cubans in Angola. Young smoothed things over with Manley, forging a stronger relationship between the two countries and eliciting a pledge from Manley to stick with a Social Democratic path between capitalism and Communism. In Mexico, Young endorsed a proposal to legalize millions of undocumented Mexican immigrants in the United States. In Guyana he

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repaired another relationship that was strained under Nixon and Ford. In Haiti he sharply criticized dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier, warning that if Duvalier didn’t stop imprisoning his political opponents, U.S. aid to Haiti would cease. At every stop Young praised the proposed Panama Canal Treaty returning the canal to Panama in 1999, which Carter signed in September and Congress approved in April 1978.49 The Caribbean tour got rave reviews, but September was cruel. Young and Owen flew to Zambia to push Owen’s plan for an independent Zimbabwe based on one person, one vote. They made headway with guerrilla leaders Joshua Nkomo and Robert Mugabe, but Smith’s Rhodesian Front Party won a landslide election on September 1 that strengthened his pursuit of an “internal settlement”—cutting a deal with Bishop Muzorewa that excluded Nkomo and Mugabe. Meanwhile, South Africa exploded with uprisings and repression. Biko was hauled to jail, beaten with a hose, and head-slammed against a wall, which killed him. He was thirty years old and was eulogized profusely. Carter and Young began to backtrack on opposing economic sanctions on Pretoria. The 31st Session of the UN General Assembly reconvened and Young gave an optimistic speech arguing that it should be possible to agree about the equal participation of developing nations, stabilizing prices and supplies of raw materials, facilitating transnational investment and the spread of technology, and improving access to markets in developing nations. The world needed a new international order. The General Assembly, however, fell into wrangling and ran out of time, and Young lamented that political will and shared understanding were sadly lacking.50 There was a poignant, bittersweet, ineffably overloaded occasion in September, the admission of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam to the UN. Young said nothing whatsoever about U.S. forces attacking Vietnamese insurgents and villagers with AC-47 rapid-fire miniguns, Huey Cobras, flamethrowers, and artillery, poisoning and incinerating the Vietnamese with chemical defoliants, napalm, and white phosphorus, and turning entire villages into lakes of fire. He opted for a happy-talk ending focused on King and himself. The struggle of the Vietnamese people for independence, Young observed, “was accompanied by a profound struggle within the nation which I represent.” King joined the peace movement in 1967 to end the war in Vietnam. Five years later, “I was elected by the citizens of Georgia to the 93rd Congress of the United States,” and Congress subsequently cut off funding for the Vietnam War. The moment was surreal and impossible. Young’s speech was both ludicrous and the most he could say as an American official: Welcome to the United Nations! The nation that bombed and tortured and slaughtered and incinerated you welcomes you!51

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In November 1977 the UN imposed a mandatory arms embargo against South Africa, the first time it had ever imposed mandatory sanctions against a member state. Security Council Resolution 282, enacted in 1970, was voluntary and ineffective because the United States refused to support a mandatory embargo. Resolution 418 was swiftly different, canceling the delivery of submarines from France, a missile boat from Israel, and enriched uranium fuel from the United States, as well as curbing South Africa’s ability to buy modern fighter aircraft. Young rejoiced at representing the American president who got the United States in line with the rest of the Security Council. He said the Carter administration was not out to destroy South Africa, isolate it from the world, or impose a specific type of government on it. The White House sought only to thwart South Africa from exploding a nuclear device and to sanction it for oppressing Black South Africans: “A dialogue must be started among all the peoples of South Africa with a view to achieving a more just and stable society. Failing that, we can only see heightened danger and a continuing threat to the security of all in the region.” Young cited three banned South Africans—Percy Qoboza, C. F. Beyers Naudé, and Donald Woods—and one martyred South African—Biko—on the lateness of the hour and the urgent necessity of abolishing apartheid. He said the ideals of these four freedom fighters would prevail, “though they may be silenced,” because the ideals were implanted in human beings by God.52 Every week Young encountered the crossfire between two conceptions of human rights. The founders of the UN sought to show that it is possible for a diverse community of nation-states to affirm cultural and political pluralism and a normative basis of justice concerns. Three years after they founded the UN in 1945, they propounded the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The UN was dominated by a handful of Western powers before it developed into a worldwide community contesting two traditions of human rights. The liberal tradition of the West emphasized the civil and political liberties of speech, association, press, and religion and the juridical guarantees of habeas corpus and due process. The Communist and Socialist traditions held that the rights to gainful employment and economic security are more fundamental than personal liberties. A generation after the UN was founded, the Roman Catholic Church replicated the UN experience of striving to become a global institution instead of a European one with missionary outposts. The church refused to choose between the two competing traditions of human rights theory, affirming the rights enumerated in both traditions. Pope John XXIII, in Pacem in Terris (1963), set a breakthrough standard, endorsing the rights to life, bodily integrity, food, clothing, shelter, rest, medical care, and the social services necessary to protect these

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rights; the rights to education, information, and freedom of speech and press; the right to religious freedom; the rights to marriage and procreation; the rights to gainful employment, a just wage, humane working conditions, worker participation in management decisions, and ownership of private property; the rights of assembly and association, and the right to organize; the rights to freedom of movement and migration; the political right to participate in public affairs; and the juridical right to constitutional protection of all other rights, including habeas corpus and due process.53 Christian social ethicists across the Catholic and ecumenical Protestant traditions amplified this approach to the ethics of human rights, often invoking John XXIII and the moral authority of King. An ecumenical consensus began to emerge in the 1970s, contending that somehow the rights of liberal political theory and the Christian language of sacred human dignity and ethical responsibility must be reconciled. The more specific that liberal theory becomes about persons and what their dignity requires, the more it turns into a comprehensive understanding of the human good, which contradicts what liberal theory claims about its narrow focus on individual rights. On the other hand, the very concept of sacred individual personhood is a Christian idea, and Christian ethics makes universal claims about how persons should be treated under any system of government. The moral theologians who took up this work sustained ecumenical traditions of ethical discourse that remain ongoing. Usually they make concrete social and political problems in secular terms, keeping explicitly theological claims to a minimum when such claims are not essential to arriving at practical agreement.54 Young took seriously the fledgling ecumenical tradition of human rights theory. He was a major player in debates about the scope of human rights and its role in U.S. foreign policy. As a protégé of King, steeped in King’s personalist idealism and the modern ecumenical movement, Young sympathized with the expansive understanding of human rights that increasingly characterized ecumenical ethics. But Young represented the U.S. government, not the National Council of Churches or the Society of Christian Ethics. Thus, it became his job to hold off the very trend in the UN that gained influence in ecumenical Christian ethics. In December 1977 the UN General Assembly debated a resolution titled “Alternative Approaches and Ways and Means with the United Nations System for Improving the Effective Enjoyment of Human Rights.” It was a species of the both-and approach, laced with stray statements that could be read as favoring Socialism. Young said the United States could not support any resolution that relativized the rights of individuals or opened the door to doing so: “Under

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no circumstances can the recognition and implementation of human rights be delayed or circumvented with the excuse that a particular economic system must first be in place.” The individual rights not to be murdered, tortured, raped, starved, silenced, banished, and the like are indivisible and must not be subordinated to some scheme of group rights. Young said the U.S. government accepted the concept of economic rights. What it did not accept was a group conception of it that overrides the rights of individual persons. He tried to turn the table on the usual UN debate, declaring that the greatest champions of human rights did not get tied up in the quandaries over group rights that paralyzed the UN. To Sobukwe and Winnie Mandela, the distinction between individual and group rights was a meaningless abstraction. Young put it sharply: “For people who are really suffering a denial of human rights, the kind of thing that is dividing us is totally irrelevant.”55 He said Carter had never decided to persuade Americans to embrace the human rights approach; it was more like the other way around. Americans hated that their government overthrew other governments and supported military dictatorships. They conveyed their disgust to Carter when he ran for president, asking what he would do to end America’s shameful behavior. Young put it colorfully; Carter did not set out to be the human rights president: “We in our Government got trapped into human rights.” This trope helped Young counter the constant accusation that the United States, having overthrown the governments of Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), Congo (1960), the Dominican Republic (1961), South Vietnam (1963), Brazil (1964), and Chile (1973), was in no position to wail about human rights. In all seven cases the United States backed dictatorships. Young said he was sensitive to the hypocrisy issue, and he could not change the past. All he could say was that it’s never too late to stop doing the wrong thing; every nation begins where it is.56 The year ended with the Owen-Young plan seemingly in ruins. In late November Smith’s security forces pursued Nkomo and Mugabe in Mozambique, killing a thousand fighters and leaving behind mass graves of women and children. Nkomo and Mugabe formed a loose alliance called the Patriotic Front (PF) that fixed on a desperation play: Maybe the Anglo-American Plan could save them. Owen and Young were willing, meeting with Nkomo and Mugabe in January 1978 in Malta. Young enthused that nearly all the PF leaders were educated in Christian missionary schools. Nkomo was a Presbyterian, Mugabe was a Catholic, and both spoke the Christian language of spiritual struggle against oppression. At Malta, Young befriended Nkomo over beer, bonded less warmly with Mugabe over orange soda, and befriended military commander Josiah Tongogara over the Oakland Raiders; Tongogara had become a Raiders fan dur-

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ing his doctoral studies at the University of California–Berkeley. There were no breakthroughs at Malta, except for the personal relationships. The PF wanted a dominant role in the transition period between a ceasefire and the elections, which Young and Owen could not guarantee. No settlement was reachable without Smith. Young rejoiced at persuading PF leaders to confer with British Field Marshal Richard Carver, a polarizing figure for having crushed the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya in the 1950s. Carver was slated to become resident commissioner in the hypothetical transition to an independent Zimbabwe. The AngloAmerican Plan, to judge by Malta, was not quite as dead as it seemed.57 Smith reached a tentative agreement with Muzorewa in February 1978, and Senate Republican leaders Robert Dole and Orrin Hatch hailed it as a magnificent achievement. Pressure built up in Congress for Carter to terminate the Anglo-American initiative. The Salisbury Plan, officially sealed by Smith and Muzorewa in March, called for elections after a one-year transition during which Whites would retain control of the police and military, martial law would prevail during the elections, 28 percent of the seats in Parliament would be reserved for Whites, and PF soldiers would be prohibited from voting unless they renounced their armed struggle. Nkomo and Mugabe rejected the plan outright. Britain voted against it in the UN Security Council, joining a 10–0 vote, although Owen said he could support a version that included Nkomo. The United States abstained, and Young explained that its position had not changed: The United States still supported the Anglo-American Plan, including the PF in the transition to an independent Zimbabwe. Defending this position in American politics became very taxing for Young. Jesse Helms led the opposition to Young and Carter in Congress. Helms had moved up in North Carolina politics as a television pundit who railed against the civil rights movement, which he said was Communist; then he inveighed against opponents of the Byrd Amendment. Young and Carter called for an all-parties conference and elections that included the PF, and Helms narrowly lost a Senate vote to lift the sanctions against Southern Rhodesia.58 Three things helped Young withstand the Young-is-a-Communist noise and keep the Anglo-American alternative in play. Carter had his back, a point Carter tersely confirmed when reporters and cabinet officials pressed the question. Second, Young gave bravura tours of African politics in his testimony to Congress, complicating the Cold War frame. He stressed that Tanzania, Nigeria, Cameroon, and Senegal wanted to play leading roles in a nonaligned Africa, that most Angolans didn’t want to depend on Russia or Cuba, and that Mozambique turned down a Soviet plan to build a naval base. To be sure, Cuba butted into the war between Somalia and Ethiopia, but Young didn’t see any payoff coming from it.

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He urged Congress that the United States needed to start treating African nations respectfully as self-determining nations. Third, the Anglo-American Plan never quite died partly because Young’s winsome sincerity rubbed off on Smith. Smith couldn’t stand Owen and refused to deal with him, whereas he liked Young, appreciating that Young treated Muzorewa and him with no whiff of derision. At the same time, Young was not circumspect like Vance, so Smith trusted him more. On one occasion after Vance cut off Young in mid-sentence, Smith confided to Young, “You’re far too honest to make a success at this game of politics.” Young’s personal bond with Smith helped the Anglo-American Plan survive its many obituaries.59 In July 1978 Young was due for another burst of “gaffe” candor. He had an aversion to accusing anyone exclusively; when Young criticized someone, his reflex was to spread some blame closer to home. This time the subject was the odious treatment that Russia meted out to dissident Jews. Young told a French interviewer it was bad; the Soviet Union had upwards of “tens of thousands” of political prisoners. But he added that other nations violated the rights of dissidents, too. For example, “We still have hundreds of people that I would categorize as political prisoners in our prisons.” Young allowed that America did not imprison people merely for criticizing the government; however, there were different kinds of political prisoners: “I do think there are some people who are in prison much more because they are poor than because they are bad. There are problems in our system which send intelligent, aggressive, poor people to jail and in which intelligent, aggressive and rich people have opportunities.” That set off another firestorm of outrage against him. Some of Young’s usual defenders looked the other way; Young survived a House impeachment resolution, 293–82, and Carter told Young the part about American political prisoners distressed him. Young apologized for going too far. Once again he was burned for giving White Americans a peek at a commonplace Black American perception. But this time he undercut Carter’s attempt to shame Russia into treating its dissidents decently, which Young regretted.60 The war for Zimbabwe escalated. Smith’s forces sent poisoned clothes to refugee camps and bombed two refugee camps in Zambia, one of which consisted almost entirely of women and girls. Nkomo downed two passenger jets over a six-month period, and Smith bombed Nkomo’s home in Lusaka. PF representatives accused Young of doing nothing for them while their families were terrorized; Young gamely replied that more than thirty PF leaders held degrees from U.S. schools, so the United States couldn’t be all bad. Somehow they had to get back to an all-parties conference yielding an all-included election. In January 1979 Vietnam invaded Cambodia, aiming to overthrow the

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genocidal Khmer Rouge regime of Pol Pot. A few weeks later, China invaded Vietnam as payback for infringing on its control over Cambodia. Neocons said this is what came of America’s capitulation in Vietnam; Young said this is what came of America taking over the colonial role in Vietnam. He called on Vietnam and China to withdraw their forces from Cambodia and Vietnam.61 In April 1978 Smith sought to consummate his internal settlement by holding an election. The U.S. Senate voted overwhelmingly to send election observers, and the House voted narrowly not to send observers. Muzorewa’s party won fiftyone of the seventy-two parliamentary seats designated for Blacks. Now the Carter administration had to decide whether to recognize the first Black prime minister of Rhodesia. Young said the election was no more legitimate than America’s pre1966 Deep South elections. Carter, however, vacillated. He said the election was a step in the right direction and not the answer, so he needed to think about it. For six weeks he ruminated while Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party took over in England and pondered the same quandary. Thatcher wanted to recognize Muzorewa’s government, but the Foreign Office dissuaded her from settling for it, warning that it was not worth offending the United States and Nigeria. The Black Caucus urged Carter to continue the sanctions, as did Jesse Jackson and Coretta King. On June 7 Carter finally announced that he would keep the sanctions in place until an all-parties settlement was reached. It was the high-water mark of Young’s diplomatic career. Helms, Byrd, and Muzorewa said Carter made the wrong decision to please Young and the Black Caucus. Proponents said Carter made the right decision by paying heed to Young, the Black Caucus, and one highly energetic House Democrat, New York’s Stephen Solarz. Zimbabwe-Rhodesia might have turned out very differently had Young and Carter stayed out of it. As it was, Thatcher took over the Anglo-American Plan with Owen, leaving out the Americans. In August 1978 she convened an allparties conference at Lancaster House in London at which Thatcher called for a new constitution, a cease-fire, and British-supervised elections. Her foreign minister, Peter Carrington, ran the negotiations that ended the civil war and the various sanctions regimes. The new constitution reserved twenty of one hundred seats for Whites, Britain agreed to supervise new elections, and ground rules for the cease-fire were adopted. There were howls of protest in Congress and a dissenting note in the Carter administration. In Congress, the political right assailed the deal as an unbelievable capitulation to African Communism and Moscow. In the White House, Brzezinski objected that Young and Vance downplayed the Cold War: “It seemed to me that we had underestimated the Eastern bloc connection in the region and that Andy and Cy, along with most of those at State, took an excessively benign view of the Soviet and Cuban penetration of Africa,

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underestimating its strategic implications.” Brzezinski said the United States needed to support majority rule in Africa without frightening White Africans. But he gave Young due credit on Zimbabwe, acknowledging that the United States was very short on good relationships with Black African nations before Young took over as UN ambassador. Creating Zimbabwe was a breakthrough achievement on the way to dealing with the much harder cases of South Africa and Mozambique.62 Young’s last year in the Carter administration was sprinkled with omens of the issue that suddenly ended his appointment. He was known to believe that the official U.S. policy of shunning the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) was misguided, so there was jockeying on both sides to get Young to say it publicly. In January 1979 he observed that PLO leaders wielded great influence in the Arab world. Any nation that wanted to have constructive relations with the Palestinian people needed to view the PLO realistically as the leading organization of the Palestinians, not as an untouchable pariah. Most nations took this position for granted, but the United States had pledged in 1975 to Israel that it would not undertake direct talks with the PLO as long as the PLO did not recognize Israel officially. Young believed—off the record—that this policy contributed to PLO violence by shutting off nonviolent means of allowing Palestinians to express their grievances and claim their rights. In August, the dog-days month when nothing usually happens at the UN, Young was due to serve as Security Council president. In July the UN Committee on Palestinian Rights surprised him by asking to present its new report the following month, when Young would be presiding. Generally speaking, Young believed the Middle East was too fraught, complex, and emotional to be handled by a multilateral forum in New York City. The Middle East was Washington’s problem, as Cooks often said. But the Committee on Palestinian Rights was the only venue available in the United States to Palestinians, and they were tired of being ignored. Young read the report with surprised delight. Authorized by PLO leader Yasser Arafat, it did not bash Israel in customary developing nations fashion. For the first time, a PLO document offered to accept all previous UN resolutions on the Middle East, including the resolutions that created the state of Israel. Thus, it implicitly recognized the right of Israel to exist. Young was thrilled, except the report also called for a Palestinian state, which could not be approved by the United States, lacking a carefully negotiated agreement on the powers and borders of the new state. Young did not want to vote against a report he appreciated and supported. So he asked the UN ambassadors from Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Kuwait to support his call to postpone it. The five ambassadors were willing, on one condition—Young had to meet with the PLO representative to the UN, Zehdi

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Terzi, reasoning that Young should personally assure Terzi he wasn’t trying to avoid the issue and was willing to raise it at a more appropriate time. Vance was then immersed in the SALT II negotiations, and the Carter White House was reeling from stagflation misery. Young was wary of igniting a controversy, having never pressed the issue of Palestine or sought to meet with Terzi. Still, he reasoned that as president of the Security Council, he was obligated to meet with all parties to any dispute the council took up. He assumed there would be no peace for Israel without making peace with the Palestinians. Israeli Labour Party leader Shimon Peres and Foreign Minister of Israel Moshe Dayan had both said so to Young in recent private meetings. The Arab ambassadors said it constantly after Carter negotiated a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt in September 1978 at Camp David. On the one hand, Young reflected, the PLO was obviously using him to draw attention to its plight. On the other hand, he felt compelled to do it by professional responsibility and called to do it by eminent Israeli leaders. So he met with Terzi at the home of the Kuwaiti ambassador, Abdullah Bishara; Terzi agreed to ask Arafat to accept a delay; and the Security Council voted to postpone the report.63 Young was taking a personal risk for peace. He turned over and over in his mind the concept of risking something for peace. The closest American analogy to it was something entirely different from it—raising children to sacrifice their lives for their country at war. Young couldn’t think of anything comparable in American culture about risking one’s career and reputation for the cause of peace. Peacemakers must be as brave as soldiers in struggling for peace, but there is no societal reward for peacemaking. So why should he risk his career? He recalled the charge that Congregational pastor Homer McEwen delivered at his ordination to the ministry: “Preach with your bags packed, for if you’re ever fortunate enough to be used by the Spirit to share the full power of the gospel, you will probably be run out of town.” Young repeated it on his way to Bishara’s home, accompanied by his six-year-old son, Bo. The charge was to him, he reasoned, so the risk needed to be his alone. The State Department knew that such a meeting might occur, but Young did not ask for guidance or clearance. Too many bureaucrats would have to approve, putting them on the hook or, more likely, forcing someone to block the meeting. The meeting itself was banal. Young said it was a bad time to raise the issue; could the report be put off for a while? Terzi said he would ask Arafat to hold off, and Arafat did so.64 Most UN work occurs in private meetings, though the UN is very bad at keeping secrets. Young hoped his meeting with Terzi would remain private, but two weeks afterward a Newsweek reporter based in Israel received a tip that Young had met with Terzi. The following day a reporter pressed the State Department for details. Bill Maynes, assistant secretary for international organizations, applied to

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Young for information, who replied that the meeting was an accidental encounter at which nothing official was discussed. Perhaps Young could have saved his position had he not briefly tried to cover up what had happened. As it was, he admitted the following day to Israeli ambassador Yehuda Blum that it was a planned meeting at which postponing the report on Palestine had been dis­­ cussed. The Israeli government filed a formal protest to the State Department, Vance demanded an explanation from Young, a media furor ensued, Young’s original deception was highlighted, critics brushed off his contention that it was merely a procedural meeting, and Vance told Carter and Young that Young had to resign. Young wrote a gracious letter of resignation expressing his embarrassment that his well-intentioned efforts might have hampered the peace process. He had always acted with good intentions, he said, which hadn’t prevented him from embarrassing the Carter administration several times.65 Carter wanted very much not to accept Young’s resignation. He appreciated that Young enhanced the moral reputation of the United States and his administration, saying so profusely in a handwritten letter to Young. A few of Young’s gaffes had ruffled him, but Carter could be similarly caustic about human foibles, and he usually saw the point of a Young eruption. No one needed to remind Carter that Young had been immensely important to his election victory. He did not want to face a 1980 campaign without Young, and he did not believe that Young had done anything seriously wrong in the Terzi affair. Carter judged that Young had not violated the U.S. agreement with Israel about refusing to deal with the PLO. A merely procedural meeting over Security Council business that Young oversaw could not have been out of line. Young’s only mistake, Carter reasoned, was his failure to apprise Vance of his intention to meet with Terzi. Young had alienated his boss, Vance, who no longer trusted him; he had enraged the Israeli government, the political right, American Jewish officials, and the neocon wing of the American Jewish community; then Senate Majority Leader Robert Byrd came out against him. So Carter accepted Young’s resignation “with deep regret.” Carter recalled in his memoirs, “A mountain was made of a molehill.” It was a bitter memory, because Carter still believed that Young had been his best cabinet officer.66 FRAC TU RED A L L IA N C ES, CU LTURAL P OLITICS , A N D TH E WA R OF IDEOLOGY

The fallout was angry, immediate, damaging, and long-lasting. The Black Leadership Forum, a group of mostly SCLC veterans headed by Coretta King and Vernon Jordan, president of the Urban League, immediately issued an

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impassioned statement decrying Young’s mistreatment and Carter’s capitulation to it. Young had served the nation with great dignity, the authors said. The outcry against him was prejudiced and ridiculous, his stellar contributions would be remembered, and the abuse visited on him would not be forgotten. The group protested that if meeting with a PLO official was a damnable offense, why was America’s ambassador to Austria, Milton Wolf, not fired for meeting three times with PLO official Isa Sartawi? If American and Israeli officials could treat a distinguished Black diplomat with such contempt, what was to prevent an outright rift between the Black and Jewish communities? Two Jewish organization officials had called for Young to resign, but the American Jewish Congress (AJC) stressed that it had not done so, grasping the sensitivity of the Young issue. The AJC said Young determined his own fate, and it worried that relations between Blacks and Jews were growing toxic.67 Washington Post columnist Joseph Kraft presented an influential case for making Carter the issue. Far more was at stake, Kraft argued, than the career of any Carter appointee, even this one. Young’s initiative alarmed the Israeli government and all who opposed dealing with the PLO because it reflected Carter’s agenda. The difference between Wolf operating through normal channels and Young failing to do so did not matter, notwithstanding the fact that Young was forced out for it. What mattered, Kraft said, was that both ambassadors carried out Carter’s agenda of legitimizing the PLO. The unstated Carter objective was to ease the PLO into the negotiating process. Kraft pointed to a reported dinner conversation in July 1979 at which Carter likened the PLO to the civil rights movement. All insiders knew, Kraft wrote, that the policy of the Carter administration was to be “nice to the PLO.” Thus, the scapegoat theory pushed by Black leaders was right about Young being singled out and wrong about the double standard for Blacks. Young got burned because he pursued Carter’s policy in a way that crossed a stated line, which offended Israel and embarrassed Carter, not because he was Black or an outlier in the administration. Kraft urged that a serious response to the Young fiasco focus on the gradual legitimization of the PLO that was taking place on Carter’s watch. The real threat to Israel’s security was Carter.68 Jesse Jackson flipped this argument. A policy shift was under way, Jackson said, and Young was the fall guy for it. In Jackson’s version, Young did Carter’s bidding, Carter caught the furious reaction of Israeli and American Jewish leaders, and Carter sacrificed Young to tamp down the fury. Many took this line, sometimes more harshly. Wyatt Walker said the perception on the street was that “the Jews did this to Andy Young.” Herbert Daughtry’s Black United Front demonstrated in front of the Israeli consulate in New York, protesting that “Zionist racists” pushed

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Young out. New York radio personality Julius Lester said Black Americans were sick of hearing about the sacrifices that Jews once made for Blacks. Lester and James Baldwin argued that Black Americans had long histories of being exploited by Jewish landlords and store owners, and it was wrong to conflate Black antiSemitism with the European fascist kind. Recent clashes between Blacks and Jews over the 1967 Six-Day War, long-standing Black pro-Arab sympathies, and the New York City battles over community control of schools were rehashed. The SCLC gathered two hundred Black American public figures to issue what psychologist Kenneth B. Clark called “our declaration of independence.” Clark observed that things were pretty bad between Blacks and Jews before Young was pushed out. Now it was time to say what went wrong. He and the SCLC group stressed three things. Israel maintained repugnant ties with South Africa, being one of its biggest arms suppliers and trading partners. American Jews were foremost among the opponents of affirmative action for Black Americans, striking at the heart of the aspirations of Blacks for success. And Jewish leaders had become insensitive and contentious in general about issues that Black Americans cared deeply about. The group declared that Young’s forced resignation was a consequence of this troubled history and, especially, that White Americans judged Black leaders by a double standard. Black Americans, no matter how high they rose, were always counted as unworthy and not quite belonging.69 Joseph Lowery had succeeded Abernathy in 1976 as the SCLC president. To him the Young controversy was a wake-up call for the organization. Lowery seized the moment, conducting a public dialogue with Terzi and a follow-up dialogue with Blum. Blum was offended at the suggestion of moral equivalence, so he offended SCLC leaders by claiming they were ignorant about the Middle East. Lowery clearly sided with the PLO. Alexander M. Schindler, president of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, protested that Black leaders were fixing on the wrong things, distracted from Carter’s duplicity. Schindler conveyed the aggrieved feeling of Jewish officials that Carter subtly legitimized the PLO before saying nothing in defense of Jewish officials while they were blamed for Young’s downfall. Neocon stalwart Carl Gershman, in Commentary, wrote that the double-standard complaint was “ludicrous.” The only supposed evidence for it was the Wolf example, which did not prove what Black leaders said. Unlike Young, Gershman explained, Wolf did not deceive the State Department, engage in substantive talks with the PLO, provoke “a confrontation with Israel,” or deceive the public about what he did. The only actual double standard benefited Young: “Far from discriminating against him, it gave him license, because of his race, to behave more independently than other diplomats—a license he indulged throughout his tenure as UN Ambassador.”70

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This often-quoted riposte helped seal the rift. Black respondents lingered over “ludicrous” and the dismissal of their experience. Commentary writers countered that Black leaders demanded unique privileges on the basis of bogus claims of victimization. The civil rights movement, on this telling, was about attaining the demand of justice that race should not matter, but the new racial justice awarded unjust privileges to Blacks codified under affirmative action. Sociologist Nathan Glazer made the benchmark case for this position in his book Affirmative Discrimination (1975), contending that affirmative action grievously made racial discrimination a permanent feature of American social policy, now in “reverse.” The two flagships of the neocon movement, Commentary and the Public Interest, amplified this contention through the 1970s with polemical fire (Commentary) and in sociological dress (Public Interest). The New Republic, edited by Martin Peretz, also published a great deal of neocon criticism, especially concerning Israel and the political left, particularly by the scathingly polemical Peretz. Neoconservatism was a rebellion of former liberals and Social Democrats against the antiwar, Black Power, and feminist movements. Gershman exemplified the flank of neocons that moved from the Socialist Party to the Reagan camp while claiming not to have changed. It was liberalism that changed, they charged. The old liberalism fought against Communism, championed individual rights, was strongly pro-Israel, and loved America. The new progressivism turned against these liberal causes. Gershman said the Young affair added something ominous to the escalating tensions between Jewish and Black leaders: For the first time, leaders of mainstream civil rights organizations declared their solidarity with the PLO.71 No mainstream civil rights organization had ever crossed the line from vague sympathy for the Palestinians to outright support of the PLO. King had identified with the liberal Christian Zionism of Niebuhr and John C. Bennett, which had room for vague sympathy for the Palestinian people. Bayard Rustin’s organization, Black Americans to Support Israel Committee, was the default vehicle for leaders of the SCLC, NAACP, and the Urban League until Young was pushed out. The Black United Front was vehemently pro-PLO and anti-Zionist but not considered mainstream. The Progressive Baptist Convention called for a Palestinian state but was ambivalent about the PLO. The Young episode set off something new—mainstream Black leaders contending that the United States should recognize the PLO. Carter appointed Young’s lieutenant Donald McHenry to succeed him at the UN, which mollified nobody at the SCLC. Lowery led an eleven-member SCLC delegation to the Middle East. Fauntroy, Julian Bond, and NAACP leader Benjamin Hooks were in it, following Lowery to Libya, where Lowery hung a Martin Luther King Jr. medal on Libyan dictator

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Muammar Gaddafi, and to Beirut, where the group met with Arafat and his military commanders. Arafat joyfully hugged and kissed the entire U.S. delegation, telling them he was willing to accept Israel’s right to exist. They professed to believe it, linking arms with Arafat and his lieutenants to sing “We Shall Overcome” for the cameras. Incredulous journalists asked Fauntroy if he believed the PLO, currently waging terrorist strikes in Lebanon, supported the nonviolent approach of King. Fauntroy said he saw no reason not to believe it. The story and pictures evoked cries of alarm in the United States far beyond the usual organizations. To many it seemed that Lowery was reviving the SCLC and elevating himself by swinging the organization far from King’s spirit, though none of these three impressions was true or lasting.72 Jesse Jackson did not allow Lowery and the SCLC to upstage him. He arrived in Beirut just after the Lowery group left, offering to mediate between the PLO and the Carter administration. Jackson met with Arafat and declared it would be a crime against decency and civilization for Black leaders not to advocate U.S. recognition of the PLO. The next chapter will describe Jackson’s contributions to the Young controversy, some of which he came to regret. But he poignantly expressed what it felt like to watch Young go down. Jackson said the Jewish allies who once sought to share decent treatment with Black Americans were not willing to share power with them. The difference between mere decency and sharing power yielded feelings of betrayal and alienation on both sides: “We’re hurt and we’re going to express it. It took us a long time to get an Andy Young.”73 Being famous, accomplished, valuable, and distinguished did not save Young from being dumped by a president who wanted and needed him. By August 1979 Carter had lost almost the entire progressive wing of the Democratic Party. White liberals urged Ted Kennedy to run against him. Then Carter dropped Young to satisfy Vance and the people pressuring Vance, which hurt Carter badly; the Black Caucus blistered him as a failed president with bad economic policies. White liberals streamed to Kennedy when he announced in November 1979, Black Democrats sorted out uneasily between Carter and Kennedy, and Carter failed to rally the liberals after he defeated Kennedy. It didn’t matter that Carter ran in November 1980 against the icon of the right-wing backlash, Reagan. Carter was hapless and unlucky. Just before Young was forced to resign, Carter gave an earnest speech on the energy crisis that critics ridiculed as “America’s malaise.” The following November the U.S. embassy in Iran was overrun, and the month after that the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. Carter spent the rest of his presidency trying to rescue American diplomatic hostages from Iran, hiking military spending, leaving behind his dream of a coexistent peace with Russia, and fending off the Kennedy challenge. Had Young finished out

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Carter’s term, it wouldn’t have mattered. The last year of the Carter administration revolved around things very different from those Carter and Young had sought to remedy. Young tried sincerely to help Carter and to lighten the damage on both sides of a controversy over his tenure at the UN. He did not want his legacy to be that he ended, however inadvertently, the era of political cooperation between Black and Jewish Americans. In fact, he did not end it; the fighting words between organizational leaders did not stop vast majorities of Black and Jewish Americans from supporting similar policies in Congress, contrary to claims in neocon journals that American Jews were turning to the political right. Neoconservatism was a broader phenomenon than its Jewish wing, and the Jewish neocons who joined the Republican Party never represented a large group, despite attracting considerable attention. Leaders of mainstream Black civil rights organizations still routinely acknowledged that Israel was America’s foremost ally in the Middle East and a bulwark against Russian domination of the Middle East, and that the PLO employed terrorist violence. Now Young was free to express his opinions on these subjects. He claimed he didn’t regret having to resign, didn’t believe that American Jewish leaders forced him out, and didn’t blame Carter either. Young had believed all along there was no way forward in the Middle East without the PLO. Now he was liberated to say it. He told reporters he had a Black perspective, viewing the world through a lens that privileged Black American experience. Fundamental to it was the relation between oppressed and oppressor. The color line nearly always marked the relation, while White Americans persistently underestimated their racism. Gershman replied that this worldview, though coherent, was “really ‘black’ only in the sense that it shared the general ideological orientation of the so-called nonaligned movement.” The Third World, he said, was a patsy for Soviet manipulation, and it wailed in the UN against “Zionist racism” and oppression. Gershman found it sickening to watch civil rights veterans turn in this direction; thus, he somehow counted himself qualified to pronounce that Young’s worldview was not Black. Young told five thousand guests at a Black Caucus dinner that Blacks “always supported the underdog” against oppressors. The “constant bombing of Palestinians in Lebanon,” he argued, was an obvious example of the oppressor-oppressed relation. Israel had become an oppressor that drove the Palestinians in “despair and desperation” to the terrorism of the PLO. Moreover, Black Americans no longer accepted a subordinate status in paternalistic political coalitions. The audience heartily applauded Young, sadly to Gershman, who said the rift was terribly real, important, and historic.74

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The rift briefly energized the SCLC after a decade of decline. Abernathy had floundered at the helm, and the SCLC never redefined its distinction from the NAACP and the Urban League. In December 1971, Abernathy accused Jackson of siphoning funds from the SCLC to build up a separate organization of his own, and Jackson dramatically broke from the SCLC. In Atlanta, SCLC veterans thwarted Coretta King from playing the role she wanted. Briefly she served on the SCLC Board of Directors and sought to build a leadership training school. But she had never been an organizer and Abernathy blocked her, resenting the fact that she got more media calls than he. Abernathy could not compete with Jackson’s brilliance, and Coretta King threatened him, too. He diminished the SCLC by driving her away. She later recalled, “I stopped attending meetings because I was treated with such disrespect.” It wasn’t just Abernathy, she stressed; the entire Baptist leadership of the SCLC believed that women didn’t belong in leadership positions. Coretta King concentrated on campaigning for a King holiday and building the MLK Center for Nonviolent Social Change.75 The verdict on Abernathy’s legacy came in the summer of 1976, just in time for him to cover up what had happened. Longtime SCLC board member and fund-raiser Chauncey Eskridge asked Abernathy, casually, to meet with him, Lowery, and two others at the Atlanta airport Hilton Inn. Lowery was chair of the SCLC board and pastor of Central United Methodist Church in Atlanta. Abernathy did not anticipate what was coming. Eskridge said the SCLC was floundering, but Abernathy didn’t take it as a judgment on his leadership. At the meeting he was floored when Eskridge told him they would fire him if he didn’t resign. Abernathy had offered to resign at the recent SCLC convention in Indianapolis, and the crowd shouted it down. Why would the board humiliate him afterward? Eskridge said they appreciated Abernathy’s service, but he had failed. If he didn’t step aside for Lowery, the board would have to fire him. For several weeks Abernathy reeled with shame, refusing to tell anyone, even his wife, Juanita Abernathy. He resolved to find an excuse for resigning that would deceive everyone, including her. He found it when Carter named Young to the UN, opening Young’s congressional seat. Abernathy announced his candidacy for Young’s seat and his resignation from the SCLC presidency. He waited ten years to tell his wife or anyone else what had happened. Abernathy mortgaged his house, borrowed $50,000, ran an energetic primary campaign, and finished third, behind Wyche Fowler—a White liberal—and John Lewis.76 Losing the primary hurt Abernathy, but nowhere near as much as losing the SCLC, which the primary campaign covered up. Lowery became acting presi-

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dent, promised not to run for the position at the next convention, deferred to Hosea Williams, changed his mind, and cut a deal with Williams that gave him a paid position as executive director and kept Lowery in the unpaid position of president. Abernathy seethed through all of it, enjoying a bit of schadenfreude when Lowery fired Williams. He rued that he never had enough friends in the SCLC and that the insiders who never respected him pushed him out. Abernathy stewed about it, turning politically. Every Black church had a flank that did not support the welfare state, affirmative action, and school busing. It spoke the language of conservative self-sufficiency and was often skittish about racial integration or outright opposed to it. Self-sufficiency conservatives were usually nostalgic about the self-determined Black communities that had existed before King integrated America. Abernathy had handled them for many years, always commending the virtues of independence and personal responsibility while holding fast to welfare rights, affirmative action, school busing, and job quotas. Now he let out the inner conservative that had always been there. Abernathy believed in the ethic of self-sufficiency more than anything else, disliking the welfare programs that came out of the New Deal and the Great Society. Welfare, he believed, made an entire generation of poor Blacks dependent on the government, exactly as conservatives objected. Abernathy resolved to build a model program “to help black people break the chains of welfare and find a new freedom in self-sufficiency.” It was a training program to instill a work ethic in welfare recipients and get them off the dole. He asked the usual civil rights benefactors for start-up money, with no success. He said it was a scandal that third-generation welfare families existed. Didn’t liberal Democrats and moderate Republicans see what they were creating? Most Democrats viewed the welfare system as “a benign thing,” Abernathy observed; he viewed it as “a millstone around the neck of the black population.”77 Reagan caught his attention by cutting the welfare rolls in California and demonizing women whom he called “welfare queens.” Abernathy did not perceive Reagan’s welfare-shaming as racist or vicious. To him it was more like the opposite; work confers personal dignity and welfare destroys it. On this ground Abernathy made his way to the Reagan for president campaign of 1980, which made minimal use of him. He formally endorsed Reagan, posed for pictures, got few requests for much else, and was stunned by the angry, incredulous, aggrieved outcry that came from Young, Lowery, Jackson, Coretta King, and almost everyone else he knew at the SCLC. They said it was unbelievable that Abernathy would confer moral respectability on Reagan, who rode his contempt for Black people into the White House. Nine years later, in his memoir, Abernathy reflected that he wouldn’t have done it had he anticipated the firestorm of

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resentment he provoked. He said it had never occurred to him that he could lose his SCLC friends over a mere political disagreement. His former friends were political in a way he had never quite fathomed—until the end. Shortly after Young resigned from the UN, in September 1979, he led a trade delegation to Tanzania while Carrington conducted the all-parties conference on Southern Rhodesia in London. The conference agreed in September that the British would supervise the elections leading to an independent Zimbabwe. Negotiations over the ground rules for the cease-fire dragged into December. Carter lifted the sanctions on December 16; the next day Mugabe agreed to the deal, and the cease-fire went into effect on December 28, 1979. In January 1980 Mugabe returned to his homeland, and the following month he became the first prime minister of Zimbabwe. Mugabe’s party won fifty-seven seats in Parliament, Nkomo’s party won twenty, and Muzorewa’s party won three. Zimbabwe celebrated its creation in April at an independence festival at which Young led the U.S. delegation. He was praised, thanked, and toasted, believing with a certain buoyance that his postcolonial worldview had been vindicated. Black postcolonial politics, in his case, was happy to do capitalist business, a conviction he espoused with exuberant zeal on his next stop. T H E WORL D A S V IEWED FROM ATLANTA

Three months before Reagan crushed Carter in the 1980 election, Young returned to Atlanta. He wasn’t sure what to do next, appalled by the ascendancy of Reagan. After Reagan won the Republican nomination, he flew straight to Philadelphia, Mississippi, where the Klan had murdered SNCC workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner in 1964, and where the murderers had taunted King the following summer. Philadelphia was a symbol of vile racism and brutality. There Reagan announced that he believed in states’ rights. Young replied that Black Americans knew racist code when they heard it and knew what Philadelphia symbolized. Paula Jean Young entered Duke University, Lisa Young began her senior year at Howard, Andrea Young prepared for the Georgia bar exam, and Young hit the lecture circuit, feeling anxious. Maynard Jackson, reaching the termlimited end of his mayoral run, urged Young to succeed him. White business leaders wanted a White mayor, and Jackson realized it would take a powerhouse candidate to beat them. He sponsored several dinners aimed at convincing Young to run. Young hesitated, fearing that the Reagan era would be hellish for mayors. Previous federal administrations put money into cities; Reagan vowed to cut it off. A dinner at the Omni Hotel settled the issue for Young.

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Jackson gave a sweeping overview of Atlanta’s situation, warning what could be lost. Susie Labond, president of the Public Housing Tenants Association, following Jackson, spared no personal admonition: “Andy, when you came to Atlanta you wasn’t nobody. We took you in and made you somebody. We sent you to Congress, you been Ambassador to the UN, but now we need you to be mayor. If you ain’t learned enough to help us, can’t nobody help us, and Lord knows we sho need help right now. . . . We made you somebody and now we need you and you turn your back on us? We done wasted our time on you!”78 She stalked out of the room and the crowd sat in stunned silence. Young realized he could not refuse Labond, especially now that racial polarization was spiking in Atlanta. White business leaders wailed that Atlanta was on the same downward path as other cities with Black mayors. Carl Stokes in Cleveland, Richard Hatcher in Gary, Indiana, and Kenneth Gibson in Newark, New Jersey, were the nightmare examples, running cities that dried up from lack of business investment. Atlanta was slightly better, on this telling, only because Jackson had inherited a better situation than Stokes, Hatcher, and Gibson. The White bigwigs warned that another Black mayor in the Jackson mode would ruin Atlanta. Charles Loudermilk, head of Aaron Rents, reached out to banker Robert Strickland in Young’s behalf and got an earful: “Over my dead body. This is our last chance of having a white mayor.” Young tried to assure the bigwigs he understood the importance of working with them. Running against longtime state legislator Sidney Marcus, a White liberal, Young eschewed the racial frame, except to say that Whites and Blacks needed to work together to make Atlanta work. Loudermilk handled White business outreach, Jesse Hill gave his customary full-service support, and Young stressed that he believed in leveraging private capital for public ends, which he called “public purpose capitalism.” He won the election with 55 percent of the vote, immediately convening the White business leaders at the Top of the Mart restaurant. If he failed in the job, Young said, they would suffer far more than he; he would just move on to his next job. They needed for their own sake to help him succeed.79 Young promised to make himself personally accessible to the business establishment, and he did so for two terms. He promised to drum up business for Atlanta, and did so on a global basis, traveling constantly to bring business investments to Atlanta. His trade-deal trip to Tanzania in September 1979 had set the template for the kind of mayor he turned out to be—more like a secretary of commerce or state than a mayor. Young secured $1 billion of signed contracts for Westinghouse, Kellogg’s, and Archer-Daniels-Midland in Tanzania, Nigeria, and Kenya. Theodore Adams, president of Unified Industries, told the Washington Post that Young’s star power helped his company accomplish in two

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days in Liberia what would normally take a year. Young appointed a White police officer, Morris Redding, as chief of police, touting that Redding had walked a beat on Auburn Avenue and was respected on it. Young said progress occurred only when Blacks and Whites both felt secure. White guilt never created progress anywhere, and neither did anybody’s anxiety. In Atlanta, he argued, the job of the mayor was to make sure that Whites got some of the power and Blacks got some of the money. Young was fond of saying that money, not politics, controls the world. If progressives really wanted to make the world better, they needed to understand and accept how money works and why it works.80 Reagan replaced federal funding to cities with block grants to states. Atlanta’s budget fell off a cliff and Young energetically made up the deficit by selling his vision of public-purpose capitalism. He said Atlanta needed to become an American version of Luxembourg, providing a place for Germans, Japanese, and Saudis to park their money. Atlanta needed the capitalist class to fund things that benefited the entire city—further expanding the airport, building a new sewer system, refurbishing the Underground Atlanta nightlife network, and winning the bid to host the 1996 Olympics. To do that, Atlanta needed to be smart, global, pragmatic, and ambitious. Young cut deals with private contractors to build and manage development projects for which they did not make a profit until the capital debts were paid. He told audiences that Atlanta could get anything it wanted if it wedded capitalist profit making to public ends. In 1983 he led a trade mission of the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce to Jamaica and Trinidad. The next year he led the group to Scandinavia. In 1985 they went to Britain and France. The following year Young led them to Japan, China, and Hong Kong. In 1987 they went to Italy and Switzerland, in 1988 to Japan and Taiwan, and in 1989 to the Soviet Union. He also made trips with the Atlanta Visitors and Convention Bureau, the Atlanta Business League, and the Atlanta Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games. Always Young met a parade of manufacturers and bankers, boasting that Atlanta was the commercial center of the United States and the global market. They could not afford not to come to Atlanta.81 Young smoothed the way for companies to come by creating a one-stop shop; every investor was assigned a city employee to manage the permitting process. He stressed that New York had nothing like it; investors went to New York and got lost in out-of-scale bigness, bureaucracy, and invisibility, as well as politicking for tax breaks. In a few cases Young sealed a deal with a tax break, notably in promoting housing downtown and an urban industrial park, Peachtree Center. Sometimes he secured deals for Atlanta companies with foreign nations, such as making $1 million of satellite equipment for the Nigerian government. Mostly he sold the pledge that Atlanta wanted to do business and would make

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it easy to do so. The capitalist class and the middle class thrived under Young. Others got pushed aside, while Young offered mournful gestures about the fate of the poor. To the Democratic Party he proved his mettle as a political leader by lifting Atlanta into a commercial powerhouse and enjoying his power. Young told dinner banquets his administration had its own foreign policy based on commerce, cooperation, and goodwill, not Cold War militarism. A Democratic alternative to Reaganism was on display in Atlanta. Carter tried in the last days of the 1980 presidential campaign to awaken a sense of revulsion about Reagan by reminding Americans of his ugly opposition to the civil rights movement. That was futile; the overwhelming majority that elected Reagan was finished with feeling bad about African Americans, Vietnam, the poor, and the United States. Besides heaping vile ridicule on Black “welfare queens” of his imagination, Reagan told Americans their country was in economic decline because labor elites strangled productivity while liberals created government jobs for themselves. Liberals coddled America’s criminal class (coded Black) and welfare class (also coded Black). The poor became “the underclass,” a coded term meant to repel. The word “liberal,” on Reagan’s watch, became an epithet in American politics. Three celebrated books epitomized the Reagan ideology that the rich should be rewarded and the poor should be punished: George Gilder’s Wealth and Poverty (1980), Charles Murray’s Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980 (1984), and David Stockman’s The Triumph of Politics (1986), though Stockman had entered reconsideration mode by the time he wrote his book. Gilder said politicians fixed too much on the poor and the middle class. The Americans who mattered were the long-suffering capitalists who produced the nation’s wealth and were never thanked for it. He thanked them profusely for “the enriching mysteries of inequality” and “the multiplying miracles of market economics.” Stockman, briefly famous as Reagan’s budget director, ecstatically lauded Gilder’s book just before Stockman slashed Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) and other welfare programs. Reagan cut AFDC by 11.7 percent, food stamps by 18.8 percent, and other food programs by 13.3 percent. Bob Dole told Reagan and Stockman that somebody “besides welfare recipients” needed to take a hit, if only for the sake of appearances. But that never happened.82 Murray spent the early Reagan years honing his case that Reagan was cutting welfare too timidly. Then he argued in Losing Ground that the entire federal welfare state should be abolished. Welfare, he contended, persuades nonachievers to get on the dole instead of working. It exacerbates class and race tensions by taxing wage earners to provide handouts for the lazy, and it creates a culture of dependency. Far from going too far, Reagan had barely begun to attack the

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welfare state. Far from being immoral, the Reagan cuts were deeply moral. The poor would be better off if they had no alternative to getting a job and leaning on their families or local charity. Losing Ground was a product of right-wing think-tank politics, in this case the Manhattan Institute. It lowered the Beltway bar on what politicians could say about welfare recipients with impunity. Stockman later recounted that he disappointed Dole by failing to change the appearances, gouging only the poor. The poor were always first in line because they made “weak claims.” Everybody else had lobbying power, which Stockman called, in now-I-get-it mode, “the triumph of politics.”83 Gilder popularized the theory of supply-side economics, on which Reagan’s policies were supposedly based. It was a pure fantasy that captivated the Republican right in the late 1970s, championed by economist Arthur Laffer, Wall Street Journal editorial writer Jude Wanniski, and Buffalo’s House Republican Jack Kemp. The “Laffer Curve” purportedly showed that massive tax cuts generate far more revenue than they lose in cuts. For a half century, Republicans had scolded that Democrats were bad because they handed out a free lunch at taxpayer expense. Republicans were the party of fiscal responsibility and Democrats were the party of irresponsibility. Reagan turned this tradition on its head by embracing the magical world of supply-side deliverance. Now Republicans offered a freelunch bonanza to all taxpayers, especially the rich. Everybody except the poor got something, and the tax cuts would generate a historic windfall of economic growth. The Reagan White House had to forecast how the economy would develop as a basis for calculating its proposals. Supply-side advisors wanted a very high figure for real growth in gross domestic product (GDP) in order to prove that their proposals worked. Monetarists wanted a low “in money” GDP (real GDP plus the rate of inflation) to prove that their policies held down prices. The two camps figured out what would have to happen to make their contradictory policies come true; then they claimed it would happen. Stockman subsequently provided a mind-boggling account of the unhinged mentality that tripled the nation’s debt in eight years. Every prediction of the Reagan White House failed, except the political one that tax cuts are wildly popular.84 Reagan led the Republican Party and a host of enabling Reagan Democrats into temptation by persuading both that deficits don’t matter because tax cuts more than pay for themselves. He tripled the national debt by cutting the marginal tax rate from 70 percent to 28 percent, cutting the top rate on capital gains from 49 percent to 20 percent, and dramatically hiking military spending—an additional 4 percent increase on top of the 5 percent increase for 1981 authorized by Carter. This staggering splurge of social engineering fueled a huge inequality surge, which Reagan officials described as a return to the economic

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state of nature. The promised trickle-down effect of Reaganomics never materialized because only corporations and the wealthy gained new disposable income. Nationwide, savings declined under Reagan, and the United States went from being the leading creditor nation to being the leading debtor nation.85 Reagan could not have done it lacking Democrats in Congress who went along with tax cuts for the rich and the corporations, austerity for the cities, gouging the poor, and fantastic increases in Pentagon spending. The only organized group in Congress that persistently, loudly, and angrily condemned this entire agenda was the Black Caucus, which could not find enough White liberal allies to keep Reagan from getting his way. For three years, Democrats believed that a bad economy would save them from a second Reagan term. Unemployment was slightly under 7 percent when Reagan took office. By November 1982 it was just under 11 percent, the worst since the Depression, while safety net assistance was slashed. Many of the four million Americans who lost their jobs lost well-paying industrial jobs that never came back. Liberals crowed that Reagan was sure to be a one-term failure like Carter. The Democratic establishment played it safe by limiting its 1982 Philadelphia midterm convention to party appointees and officials, thwarting the progressives. That was shortsighted and arrogant, just before the defense buildup, tax cuts, consumer spending on credit, and low interest rates kicked in. All of it was on the backs of the poor and downsized, but Republicans had that figured. Reagan ran happy-talk ads boasting it was “morning in America.” An eightperson Democratic field shrank to three during the primaries. Former vice president Walter Mondale rallied the party’s traditional base of trade unionists and elderly regular Democrats. Colorado’s Senator Gary Hart pitched his campaign to a younger generation of neoliberals eager to make their way in a world of global markets and shrinking unions. Jesse Jackson coalesced the social movements of the 1970s, a “Rainbow Coalition” looking beyond the Great Society and opposed to neoliberalism.86 Mondale won the Iowa caucuses handily with a front-runner campaign, Hart upset Mondale in New Hampshire, and the two candidates slugged it out for six months of primaries and caucuses in which each polled in the mid-to-high thirties. The nomination was not settled until “Super Tuesday III” in June, partly because Jackson ran a strong third with 20 percent of the vote, winning four state contests. Jackson’s candidacy put Young in an awkward position. He and Jackson were friends who socialized together and defended each other in public controversies, but Mondale came from the Hubert Humphrey mainstream of the party, holding strong support in the Black community. Young urged Jackson not to run. Democrats needed to unite against Reagan, he argued; anything that

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hurt Mondale in 1984 could only benefit Reagan. Mayor Coleman Young of Detroit put a similar point more aggressively, contending that a Jackson candidacy would infringe the earned right of elected Black officials to broker Black political interests. After Jackson ran anyway, Atlanta Young and Detroit Young criticized him for suggesting that Blacks should vote for him because he was Black. That was a bad message in 1984, they believed. But Jackson’s spectacular performance put immense pressure on Black politicians and officials, including Atlanta Young, who began to say by March 1984 that it wasn’t his place to say that Jackson couldn’t win the nomination and presidency.87 Jackson finished strong, winning 26 percent of the vote in New York, 24 percent in New Jersey, and 19 percent in California. He arrived at the Democratic convention in San Francisco with 384 delegates, enough to demand influence over the party’s platform. Jackson pushed for the eradication of primary runoffs, which he said were racist because they eliminated Blacks in the first round. Young countered that runoffs are not inherently racist. He had benefited from the runoff system in 1981, winning a very slim plurality in the first primary against a Black contender and a consensus White candidate before winning the November election handily. In a jurisdiction with a slight Black majority, the second primary system protects Black candidates. So Young tried to explain. Jackson’s supporters jeered and hissed as soon as Young began to speak. The jeering got louder; Young struggled to get to the end, barely finished, and left the stage humiliated and shaken. Jean Young was sobbing when he got to her offstage. The next day Coretta King scolded the Jackson supporters for mistreating Young, and they booed her too. It was left to Jackson to deliver admonition. He took the podium to tell his supporters they had no business deriding Young, his friend of many years, and Mrs. King, whose home was bombed and whose husband was assassinated for their sake.88 Young worked hard for Mondale, warning that four more years of Reagan would be a catastrophe for America and the world. Reagan scorned Mondale as a tax-and-spend liberal and for warning about Reagan’s deficits and militarism. Jackson gamely worked for Mondale too, rightly contending that Mondale’s only chance of defeating Reagan was to bring out a tidal wave of new voters, which didn’t happen. Mondale united all the forces in the usual Democratic coalition and still got blown away by a brief economic recovery. To most progressive Democrats, this was harder to take than Carter’s defeat because Mondale was a good candidate. Three weeks after Reagan was reelected, TransAfrica applied the sit-in technique to the anti-apartheid movement. Randall Robinson led a sit-in at the South African embassy in Washington, DC, announced that TransAfrica would

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keep protesting until every political prisoner in South Africa was free, and set off a gusher of demonstrations. The following March the movement was still ascending when Young began speaking for it, and violence in South Africa dramatically spiked. Young told a rally in Atlanta’s Central City Park that running Atlanta had not diminished his passion to abolish apartheid. The following day—March 21, 1985—nineteen anti-apartheid demonstrators in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, were massacred point-blank by police. Ron Dellums (D-California) responded with a call for comprehensive economic sanctions on South Africa that prohibited U.S. bank loans, new U.S. investment, and computer sales to South Africa, plus sales of Krugerrands in the United States. The twenty-member Black Caucus pushed for the Dellums sanctions, and Young told the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations that some South African officials wanted apartheid to end. A strong sanctions regime would give them cover to do the right thing. If the civil rights movement could change American society without ending the careers of segregationist politicians, the same thing should be possible in South Africa. Young said South Africa needed to be pushed to a better place by an outside authority—such as the U.S. Senate.89 In June the House approved a sanctions bill, and in July the Senate passed a weaker version. Reagan said he was willing to swallow a ban on bank loans and computer sales, and nothing more; a comprehensive ban was out of the question. His Executive Order 12532, issued in September 1985, limited the sanctions to these two categories and did not mandate that more would be imposed if South Africa failed to reform. Dole followed suit by dropping the sanctions bill from Senate consideration; for a while it was dead. Young stressed two points as Congress debated the issue: One, only Nelson Mandela held the requisite moral authority to keep the anti-apartheid rebellion from spinning into a chaotic nightmare; the U.S. should do what it could to support the imprisoned ANC leader. Two, as mayor of Atlanta, Young knew something about Blacks and Whites sharing power and money. His door was open to South Africans who needed convincing.90 Young won a second term in 1985 in landslide fashion, capturing 83 percent of the vote. He boasted of expanding the airport, obtaining new flights from Italy, Japan, and Switzerland, and luring loads of capital to Atlanta. On a Chamber of Commerce trade mission to West Germany he put a number on Atlanta’s recent success, reporting that the city had attracted $30 billion in new investments over the previous two years. The trade mission went forward despite the Atlanta group’s anxiety that it might make an inviting target for terrorists, specifically Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. The United States had launched air strikes against Libya to punish Gaddafi for sponsoring terrorism.

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Young said the real threat to U.S. security was Islamic extremism, not Gaddafi, and the United States should isolate Gaddafi, not make a martyr of him. He wanted the United States to work out collective security agreements with the neighboring Arab and African states to contain Gaddafi, reducing him to the insignificance he deserved. Instead, Reagan made Gaddafi a hero to extremists. Young pleaded that real security against terrorism requires patient, painstaking, grinding diplomacy, assembling coalitions against bad actors. Unilateral strikes are shortcuts that never work in the long run.91 His consulting firm, Young Ideas, specialized in this work, conducting conferences to build relationships among developing nations officials, business leaders, academics, and their American counterparts. In June 1986 Young organized a fund-raiser for his organization, a $200 a plate dinner in Washington, DC. The entertainment was supposed to be a roast of Young, but it turned into a lovefest. Fauntroy lauded Young as “a visionary and a genius.” Young’s former House colleague Patricia Schroeder said Young was “one of the most non-sexist males in the House,” humane to the point of being “gentle.” Senate Democratic leader Richard Gephardt said if Reagan had listened to Young, “we wouldn’t be pushing this mindless, immoral policy in Nicaragua.” Jesse Jackson bear-hugged Young and proclaimed, “I’m basically here because I love Andy.” The dinner confirmed that Young was still a player in national politics and that Young Ideas—or a rebooted version of it—had a bright future beyond Young’s run as mayor. Completely unknown, but already being asked, was whether Young was strong enough to run statewide in Georgia, either for governor or the U.S. Senate.92 The struggle in South Africa intensified, and Young called in July 1986 for an international embargo on all commercial flights to South Africa. He urged Congress to revive the comprehensive sanctions bill, conferring with members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The following month he wrote that a comprehensive airline embargo could be singularly effective. It was specific enough to be measurable and closely monitored; it would hurt White South Africans while doing no harm to Black South Africans; and it would force the touted “passive majority” of White South Africans to take sides on the apartheid issue. For all these reasons it was smart, targeted, creative, and even redemptive. Meanwhile, Coca-Cola got ahead of the political curve by divesting from South Africa. In Atlanta, the savvy of Coke connoted to many that “pro-business” and “cosmopolitan” were synonymous terms, exemplified by Atlanta’s leading corporate contribution to the world, Coca-Cola.93 In September 1986 Young led a trade mission group to Japan and saved it with some forgiving diplomacy. Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone waxed expansive

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in a public forum just before the trade group arrived, opining that Japan had far higher levels of intelligence and educational achievement than the United States because Japanese society was racially homogeneous and committed to achievement. In case anyone doubted what that meant, he elaborated that the average level of intelligence and education in the United States was quite low because the nation had so many Blacks and Hispanics. Nakasone had to find out from a media firestorm that purveying his racism so publicly was no longer acceptable. Young was indulgent, telling reporters the prime minister probably didn’t know very much about U.S. society, so his unknowing comments should be forgiven. Nakasone issued a public apology and met with Young, and Young praised Nakasone for apologizing. Young recommended more contacts between Japanese officials and Black Americans; Nakasone, eager for damage control, said he would welcome further dialogue. The next day Young made his usual pitch for business investment in Atlanta at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan. The business leaders cheered him appreciatively.94 Years later he recalled with a touch of whimsy how he had pitched Atlanta to the global investment class. The Japan trip was typical. A major corporate conglomerate, Marubeni, hosted him and the Atlanta group: “They’d have their automobile people coming in in the morning; they’d have the plastics people coming in at 10:00; they’d have the textile people coming in at 11:00, and usually at 12:00 they had the bankers, you know, the big money people for lunch.” In an average day Young would meet with more than a hundred companies. He told them Atlanta was the center of the U.S. market and the global market because the United States was obviously the center of the global market and Atlanta was reachable within two hours by 80 percent of the American market. “So in terms of your executive travel time, you have much more access and much less flying time in and out of Atlanta.”95 He touted his personal savvy and goodwill: “This savvy and goodwill translated into tremendous international access for Atlanta business leaders.” John Portman, the owner of the Top of the Mart restaurant who later built Peachtree Center, said his foreign business trips with Young were very different from all others. In France, Young introduced the Portman-led Chamber of Commerce group to his vast network of friends and associates, including President François Mitterrand: “Andy got us in everywhere and everybody treated Andy like he was, you know, visiting royalty.” Portman said he had come to France for years, approached the Elysée Palace, and was “always one of those guys out there looking through” the window. In Young’s company, Portman toured the palace as a dignitary; nobody seemed out of reach from being too high up.96

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In his last years as mayor, Young focused on a legacy achievement, vying to host the 1996 Summer Olympics. He lobbied the Japanese and Swedish representatives on the International Olympic Committee (IOC), hosted a splashy dinner for King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden, and in April 1988 won the U.S. Olympic Committee’s designation of Atlanta as the U.S. nominee. In the summer and fall he oscillated between lobbying the IOC and campaigning for Michael Dukakis, the Democratic nominee for president. Athens was the top contender because it had hosted the first modern Olympics in 1896. Toronto, Melbourne, and Belgrade were considered stronger nominees than Atlanta because the 1984 games had taken place in Los Angeles. Young and attorney Billy Payne were undaunted, describing Atlanta as a thriving, fascinating, cosmopolitan city. Young campaigned for Dukakis in California, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and across the South, exhorting audiences to spurn the poor imitation of Reagan nominated by the Republicans, George H. W. Bush. In November the poor imitation won forty states and Young tacked back to the Olympics, now as board chair of the Atlanta Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games. He spent 105 days on the road in his last year as mayor, 1989, super-promoting Atlanta until the end.97 He acknowledged there must be such a thing as too much business travel, but every trip he took paid off for Atlanta, so which ones should he have refused? Crime rates rose on his watch and Young claimed the police did a better job of catching criminals than previously; only the appearances were worse. Affordable housing became scarce on Young’s watch and he knew it marred his legacy. Activist groups that worked hard for him in 1981 were disgusted with him by 1986. Young made personal gestures to show that he cared about the plight of the homeless, the unemployed, and the working poor. In January 1987 he walked the streets for two days disguised as a homeless man, accompanied by a local newscaster. The newscast portrayed Young favorably, but it registered that the bustling commercial and suburban expansion of his city, sprawling in every direction, pushed aside the poor. When Young’s tenure expired, Atlanta’s poverty rate was the second worst in the nation. He said he regretted the worsening trends of homelessness, income inequality, unemployment, and wealth inequality. Young stressed that no major city escaped this fate under Reagan, and he brushed aside the reality that catering to the upper echelon always exacerbates inequality at both ends. He could sympathize, genuinely, with the advocacy groups that gave him failing grades. I once heard him try to lighten the mood by saying he began his career by pleading like Moses for freedom, but later he became Pharaoh. That impression played a role in ending his political career. In 1990 Georgia and Tennessee were the only states in their neighborhood with a Democratic

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governor. Rural and small-town Georgians would still vote for the proverbial yellow dog if nominated by the Democrats. The growth of suburbia, however, changed this equation enough to make Young or a Republican viable statewide. Several counties making up the “donut” along Atlanta’s perimeter highway had recently elected Republicans, and Young expected the donut vote to choose the winner in November 1990. He launched his campaign for governor in November 1989, aiming first at his weakest demographic, rural White voters. It wouldn’t be enough for him to win the metropolitan areas and college towns if he were crushed in rural areas, so Young tried to hold down the vote against him. That was a mistake, wasting the entire spring. Young pitched his vision of global capitalism to rural and small-town voters across the state, promising to apply his rainmaking magic to every little community that made something. He would do the same thing for Georgia that he had done for Atlanta. This message practically wrote the script for the Democratic front-runner, Lieutenant Governor Zell Miller, who ran a shrewd campaign managed by a fellow swaggering southerner, James Carville. Miller and former governor Lester Maddox said Young should have paid more attention to Atlanta’s crime and less attention to foreign bigwigs. There was no mention of race in the first round of primary voting, ostensibly out of civility.98 Young finished second in the general primary with 29 percent of the vote, barely making it to round two. Miller crushed him among White rural voters, who surged to the polls, and won 20 percent of Black voters, who did not turn out. Racial voting was still the story of the primary, no matter that the candidates did not mention it. Young faced up to it in the three weeks separating the general primary from the runoff. He spoke on Black radio stations, preached in Black churches, and implored every Black civic, professional, and activist group he could find to turn out for him. It didn’t work. Only Black professionals and White liberals turned out strongly for him. Maynard Jackson, back in the mayor’s seat, refused to endorse Young, conveying the view of many Atlanta Blacks that Young had done little for them during eight years of mayoral catering to business interests. Black turnout remained low in the August 7 runoff, and Miller routed Young statewide by 62 percent to 38 percent. Young took it graciously, refusing to blame racial voting, even though he got barely any votes in the White districts he had courted for months. He said it was a new day for Georgia when he could run statewide and never hear a racial slur. That was not wrong, but it put a happy face on a sad reality. Tamar Jacoby, a journalist, observed: “Young just could not get his message of forgiveness and inclusion across. The old assumptions about prejudice ran too deep.”99 Young viewed the crucial verdict on his mayoral legacy as still to come. The IOC announced its decision concerning the 1996 Summer Olympics on

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September 18, 1990. Billions of dollars and an ocean of publicity for Atlanta were at stake. Atlanta prevailed over Athens by an IOC vote of 51–36, and Young was hailed for an immense personal victory that no one else could have delivered. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution said it jubilantly, noting that Young wooed IOC representatives even as he campaigned for the governor’s seat. Without Young, the games would have gone to Athens; Atlanta would not have been in the running. Young rejoiced with gratitude, remarking that the Lord opened a door after closing a window. Winning the Olympics was a bigger deal than gaining the governorship.100 Many expected Young to parlay his Olympic success into his next political venture. But Young had reached his political glass ceiling, his boosterism for Atlanta had not enriched him, and upon stepping down as mayor he joined an engineering firm, the Law Companies Group, as a consultant. Law Companies had extensive international development projects, plus ambitions for greater involvement in Africa. That suited Young perfectly. He lost his health insurance the day after his mayoralty ended, which Law Companies remedied. Then his life exploded. Jean Young fell ill in July 1991 just after returning with Young from a business trip to Zimbabwe and a quick vacation in the Bahamas. She had never been seriously ill. Young later recalled that serious illness “was beyond our comprehension.” He took her to the emergency room at Crawford Long Hospital in Atlanta, learning that a tumor was blocking her intestine and she needed emergency surgery. He was hopeful as she went into surgery, refusing to imagine a bad outcome. Jean Young had colon cancer that had metastasized to her liver. The verdict was that she had probably six to twelve months to live. Young was devastated, falling to his knees at the hospital chapel. “I had been somewhat prepared for Martin’s death,” he later wrote. “He never let us forget what was at stake. I was even very philosophical about the possibility of my own death. I had been happy and surprised to turn fifty, but I could not live without Jean. Her leaving us was a tragedy that no one could consider.”101 Young’s religious faith had always been predominately social ethical, the social gospel. Jean Young’s was the same. They taught their children to pray for justice and that God “can make a way out of no way.” The way was about keeping hope alive that God would prevail in the struggle for equal rights, peace, justice, and inclusion. Young reflected, “Our personal faith was tested in the course of our efforts to engage in the social aspects of the gospel, and while this required a tremendous amount of personal prayer and soul searching, there was always the idea that what we were doing was a matter of our own choosing to interpret the will of God in a particular manner.” People hear the gospel in different ways, and there are different kinds of Christian ministry. Young realized

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all along that he might have chosen a different kind of ministry, focusing on another kind of challenge, had the social gospel not been his doorway into ministry. Only on social gospel terms could his entire career be construed as a ministry; Young respected that many pastors had a different story.102 Jean Young’s facing a death sentence was a challenge with no escape. Young heard Psalm 103 for the first time, moving past “Bless the Lord, O my soul,” now lingering over “Who forgives all your iniquities, Who heals all your diseases.” He prayed fervently to God to heal Jean. She got superb care from a team of specialists at Johns Hopkins Medical Center put together by surgeon Levi Watkins, a veteran of the Montgomery Boycott and former member of Dexter Avenue Church under King. Jean Young developed a regimen of prayer and meditation, and she fought the disease for three years. She told Young they should be grateful for forty years together, since Martin hadn’t made it to age forty. Young wrote his spiritual memoir just before she turned for the worse in the spring of 1994. He said he and Jean believed she would be healed, but their faith did not depend on it. “Thy will be done” had become central to her spiritual life, and he was trying to get there. Jean Young fell into unconsciousness in August 1994 and died in September. The funeral at the Atlanta Civic Center was a three-hour outpouring of grief and affection. Billye Aaron, wife of baseball slugger Hank Aaron, said Andy and Jean Young went together like cake and ice cream. Lisa Young Alston eulogized her mother by declaring that her parents were romantic partners to each other and each other’s best friend.103 Bill Clinton, elected president in 1992, rightly surmised that Young would best manage his grief by plunging into work that mattered to him. In October 1994 Clinton appointed Young to oversee his administration’s new $100 million South Africa Development Fund. Clinton made the announcement during a White House reception for Nelson Mandela, the new president of South Africa. Young’s job was to find and support promising small businesses in southern Africa—seed money for economic development. He welcomed the work, which complemented his job with Law Companies, though Young gave first place to pulling off the Atlanta Olympics.104 He and Billy Payne had founded the Atlanta Organizing Committee in 1987 and the Atlantic Committee for the Olympic Games, a bid organization, in 1988. They compiled a splashy two-volume bid boasting that Atlanta had the ideal access, accommodations, ability, athletics, and attitude to host the Olympics. Maynard Jackson, inheriting the Olympic bid after returning to office, vowed to work with Young to ensure that hosting the games would benefit the entire city. Public financial support for the Olympics was very limited. Jackson failed to get a special tax on sporting events and a sales tax through the Georgia legislature, so

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the Atlanta games were forced to rely on the same funding streams that financed the Los Angeles games—ticket sales, sales of broadcast rights, and corporate sponsorships. There were 110 official corporate sponsors headed by BMW, Nissan, General Motors, Swatch, and Vidalia Onion Vinaigrette. Jackson and Young worked together to obtain a 40 percent minority-contracting requirement for Olympic contracts. The Atlanta Olympics were a boon for minority businesses before and after the games took place.105 In December 1995 the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce bestowed on Young a signal honor overflowing with symbolism, naming him its chair. Now he was officially the leader of the White power structure that admitted no Black members in 1960 and vehemently opposed his mayoral candidacy in 1981. No one disputed by 1995 that Young was the incomparable advocate and leader of the Atlanta business community. The following year he married a schoolteacher neighbor, Carolyn Watson; Young told audiences his new wife was a Sunday school superintendent, so he couldn’t travel with her until they were married. The wedding occurred in March 1996 in Cape Town, replete with a blessing from Anglican Bishop Desmond Tutu. From there Young hustled back to Atlanta to help with the final preparations for the Olympics. He organized a program allowing athletes from Brazil, Mozambique, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Zambia, and nine other nations to train for the Olympics in fifty communities spread across Georgia. LaGrange, Georgia, previously a racist cauldron that Young avoided during his SCLC days, warmly welcomed four hundred Olympians. Young told the story of LaGrange wherever he went, building enthusiasm for the games. Thirty thousand employees and forty thousand volunteers geared up for the crush of ten thousand athletes, fifteen thousand journalists, and two million spectators from two hundred nations. Young pronounced the official welcome to the games, the Olympic torch made its next-to-last stop at King’s grave, Muhammad Ali lit the giant torch in an unforgettable opening ceremony, and more than a million visitors flocked to Centennial Olympic Park during the first few days.106 A buoyant beginning turned cruelly tragic on Saturday, July 27, when a pipe bomb in Centennial Park killed two people and wounded over one hundred. The mood of the games turned fearful; the bombing echoed the terrorist attack on the 1972 Olympics in Munich. The park was closed for three days, until Young preached an emotional memorial service to an overflow crowd. He said they were there to celebrate “a triumph of the human spirit,” not to grieve in despair. Alice Hawthorne and Melih Uzunyol, the American and Turkish citizens killed by the bomb, had come to Centennial Park to celebrate the prospect of global cooperation, peace, and prosperity. Young reported that he and Jesse

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Jackson had toured the local hospital the previous day and heard not a single denunciation or despairing word from wounded patients. The wounded did not regret having come to Centennial Park. They loved it for being a place where everyone was welcome and people from every nation came. Young lamented that somebody apparently felt uninvited, lashing out murderously at strangers. He invited the gathered listeners to accept their welcome: “There is nothing that keeps you out except an unwillingness to open your heart, and open your mind to the love and fellowship that this planet offers to all of its citizens.”107 The games concluded a week later, closing out the usual Olympic drama of medals won and hardships overcome. A lone terrorist, Eric Rudolph, was apprehended and prosecuted. IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch conferred faint praise on the Atlanta Olympics, and a chorus of IOC leaders and other critics decried three things: transportation was too difficult, security was lax, and commercialization was excessive to the point of being suffocating and ridiculous. Young was mildly regretful on the first two points; the organizers had done their best. The third point was harder to negotiate. Not even the patriotic gore of the Los Angeles Olympics rivaled the over-the-top huckstering of the Atlanta games. IOC leaders were appalled that crassness prevailed at Atlanta. Young acknowledged in the glare of early criticism that there were too many vendors, the scale of commercialism was too much, and visitors from Socialist and Communist countries were surely overwhelmed by it. But he countered that this is how the United States finances the Olympics. Twice in twelve years, the IOC had chosen the colossus of world capitalism to host the Summer Olympics. Since the games were financed by corporate sponsorships, it was hard to say how commercialism might have been tamped down. Meanwhile, Young was proud of the generally successful Atlanta Olympics. In subsequent years he dropped the apologies and emphasized the good parts.108 D O I NG W E LL A N D DOIN G GOOD THROUGH CAP ITALIS M

Crass commercialism was the social and cultural price worth paying for the blessings of corporate capitalism. Bulldozing poor neighborhoods to make way for so-called progress was another price, which tempered Young’s appetite for electoral politics when his former allies resented him. He tired of wrangling with those who didn’t share his admiration of corporate capitalism. After the Olympics, Young teamed with Hamilton Jordan and Canadian banker Carl Masters to found what they called a “visionary capitalist” consulting firm, GoodWorks International. Established in January 1997 in Atlanta, GoodWorks said it matched “fast-growing countries” with “forward-thinking multinational

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companies” to facilitate economic development. To get the best out of neoliberalism, forward-looking nations needed to partner with like-minded enterprises brokered by skilled consultants. GoodWorks brokered relationships between its client corporations and the national governments and local businesses of foreign countries. Young intended from the beginning to focus on Nigeria, where he had close friends and allies. But his first project was to assess Nike’s factories in Asia, which did not go well, except for Nike.109 Young founded GoodWorks just as protests against Nike spread to the United States. Nike workers in Vietnam staged walkouts over bad workplace conditions, Nike workers in Indonesia rioted over low pay, and American solidarity activists demonstrated against Nike in New York, Seattle, and Los Angeles. In February 1997 Nike hired GoodWorks to assess whether it was violating its Code of Conduct in its Asian factories. Nike CEO Phil Knight announced that Young and his team would have open access to all areas and workers of their choosing. They could go anywhere, see anything, and speak with any Nike employee. GoodWorks inspected twelve Nike factories in Vietnam, China, and Indonesia over a fifteen-day period. Young relied on translators provided by Nike and averaged slightly over three hours per visit, disastrously. All serious factory inspections provide their own experts, as required by the International Law Association, and conduct multiple separate inspections. Young worried privately that Nike officials snowed him, but there was no hint of this anxiety in his official report, which lauded Nike as a model company that could improve in a few areas. The Code of Conduct could be better conveyed to managers, worker representatives could be established, the grievance system could be improved, Nike could achieve better relations with human rights organizations, and it could establish an external monitoring system. But these were quibbles for the sake of balanced appearance. The report commended Nike so resoundingly that Knight triumphantly ran full-page ads adorned with Young’s words of praise.110 Reaction by actual experts was swift, scathing, devastating, and sometimes presumptuous. Human rights groups blasted Young for his quick visits and reliance on Nike translators. The Asia Monitor Resource Centre and Hong Kong Christian Industrial Committee stressed that Young said nothing about how subcontracting worked in China. Much of the work occurred in small township and village enterprises called TVEs that were notoriously abusive. Meanwhile the workers whom Young interviewed surely assumed that the well-dressed foreign stranger introduced by Nike management worked for Nike. New York Times columnist Bob Herbert was incredulous that Young made no mention of Nike’s low wages, which in Vietnam were below the subsistence level. Herbert said the kindest possible reading of Young’s report was that he was astoundingly

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naive. The Washington-based Campaign for Labor Rights said that paying decent wages and accepting independent monitoring were fundamental necessities, not side issues. Nike was a prime example of the race to the bottom, using its power to pay starvation wages in poor countries, in sweatshop throwbacks to the 1880s. Moreover, hiring GoodWorks and accepting independent monitoring were very different things. Auditors from the accounting firm Ernst & Young visited some of the same plants as Young a few weeks after he left, detailing the abusive conditions it found. A nervy company insider leaked the report, refuting Young’s rosy picture. Most critics pointed to inhumane conditions and practices that Young somehow missed, without impugning his character. New Republic writer Stephen Glass, however, presumed to know what really happened. Glass said Young whitewashed what Nike was doing in order to attract other powerful clients to GoodWorks.111 Herbert’s scorching takedown of Young in the paper of record was widely quoted and recycled. Young replied sharply to Herbert that “naive” never described him, a fighter for human rights throughout his career. On the wage issue, he said he was not competent to judge whether Nike wages were decent in Asian contexts, so he put it aside. Otherwise he responded to the first wave of criticism by defending the essential soundness of his report. “The United States and the world need a globally integrated economy,” Young argued. In his telling, this was the crucial point of difference between his critics and him. He was realistic about what it takes to create a world economy, and they betrayed workers in the former Third World by invoking ideals. The succeeding waves of criticism yielded a few more concessions from Young. Repeatedly he was slammed for making single quick visits, using Nike translators, ignoring the subcontracting system, brushing aside the wage issue, ignoring inspection standards, and providing advertising copy for the global corporation that paid for his investigation. Young admitted that his methods did not meet industry standards and that the report was rushed. It wounded him to witness what became his legacy on this subject—the GoodWorks report on Nike is Example A in the literature on the “reputation racket” in global capitalism. Young allowed that his report missed a few things, but he doubled down on his corporate path.112 In the late 1990s Young used a Ford Foundation grant to organize a National Summit on Africa. He gathered a coalition of civic organizations that planned regional conferences throughout the United States to educate Americans about Africa, aiming to mobilize a pro-Africa constituency. It culminated in a national conference in Washington, DC. The first regional meeting convened in May 1998 in Atlanta, where Carter gave a keynote address, former Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere took a bow, and Young waxed enthusiastic: “I believe that

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the National Summit on Africa is the most important movement to come along since the civil rights movement.” There were small group sessions on economic development, education, environmentalism, and democracy, and a plenary session on the group’s policy agenda. The following year Young’s old friend Olusegun Obasanjo became president of Nigeria, and Young got very specific about the summit agenda. Obasanjo had served as military head of state from 1976 to 1979. Returning in 1999 as president of Nigeria was a personal triumph for him and a milestone for the cause that he shared with Young—to enact an African version of Clinton’s North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).113 Clinton was a liberal-leaning Democrat who prized his ability to pull his party to the center and pass legislation, often by coopting Republican policies. Triangulation defined his presidency; nearly every policy issue was a candidate for it. The exception was neoliberal economics, on which Clinton was a true believer who sought to persuade. So-called free trade was the one issue that Clinton did not spin or triangulate. It was a passion with him. He converted skeptics to his belief that eliminating trade barriers would yield wealth-explosion benefits far outstripping whatever labor and environmental costs they incurred. Clinton whipped enough Democratic votes to pass NAFTA in 1993, establishing a trilateral trade bloc in North America that immediately abolished tariffs on most goods produced by Mexico, the United States, and Canada. NAFTA was a realized fantasy for corporate America. It accelerated corporate outsourcing and the outright flight of American companies to cheap labor, low-tax, so-called free enterprise havens in the former Third World. In the beginning it was a vision of corporations creating spectacular wealth that trickled down and spread around, proving that Democrats were good for big business. Shrinking trade unions no longer had much say in the Democratic Party. They couldn’t even stop NAFTA, despite coalescing with environmentalists and liberals.114 Young had the Clinton role in the civil rights community. NAFTA set off a flutter of new economic activity and played a major role in creating a Mexican middle class. Both things were exactly what Young sought in Africa, where trade unionist opposition was not an issue. He went full-bore for the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), which was pending in Congress when the National Summit on Africa convened its five-day national conference in February 2000. The five keynote speakers were, in order, Clinton, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Young, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, and Jesse Jackson. Clinton gave a rousing speech on economic opportunities in Africa, the crisis of AIDS ravaging Africa, and the urgent necessity of doing something for Africa. Albright gave an overview of U.S. foreign policy toward South Africa and Nigeria, the focal points of the United States’ relations with

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the African continent. Young began by singling out Coca-Cola and Chevron for sponsorship thanks and exemplary practices. He rejoiced that a new generation of African leaders had role models in Mandela, Nyerere, and Obasanjo, urged African leaders to court African Americans for tourism and investment, and hailed the new direct flight from Atlanta to Johannesburg. At the end he swung back to Coke and Chevron, cheering both companies for their numerous young Black executives. That was the template for the National Summit; Powell and Jackson followed with versions of it. Three months later Congress passed the AGOA and Clinton signed it joyfully, his first major trade pact in five years.115 The AGOA provided eligible sub-Saharan African nations with duty-free access to the U.S. market for numerous goods. It targeted the textile industry, eliminating quotas and duties on imports of African cloth, and mandated the usual neoliberal eligibility requirements, restricting eligibility to nations maintaining a market-based economy, the rule of law, minimal barriers to U.S. investment, poverty reduction programs, and the protection of (select) human rights. Young said it wasn’t a problem that the AGOA was geared to benefit corporations because corporations are indispensable engines of economic opportunity, innovation, and growth, besides being better for human rights than the groups that inveigh against corporations. He said it vehemently as the 1990s ran out, stressing to the Journal of African Business in 2001 that he had built Atlanta into a global powerhouse by privatizing the city and its services. Hartsfield Airport alone generated more revenue per year as a renewable resource than Nigeria earned each year selling its nonrenewable petroleum. Nothing compares to the big corporations as vehicles for improving roads, schools, and other social services—in Atlanta and Nigeria.116 The demoralization of the liberal left under Clinton embattled Young during the same period. Progressives despaired that Wall Street Democrats dominated the Democratic Party and diminished the left to a sideshow. Clinton proved resoundingly that Democratic governance was good for Wall Street and the corporations. Once he was reelected in 1996, he didn’t need to pretend that he felt pressured by his party’s left wing. Clinton had prevailed over it, being the first Democrat to win successive terms on his own since Franklin Roosevelt. There was no denying that the neoliberals had triumphed; Clinton redefined what it was to be a mainstream Democrat. Young symbolized this political turn as much as anyone except Clinton. But Young had come from the progressive wing of the party and sometimes he still showed up when it convened. His immense moral authority and prestige carried him to gatherings where he tangled with the panel and the audience. Tense politeness gave way to somebody exploding angrily that Young was not merely wrong or inexplicable; he was a sellout who provided

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moral cover for his corporate paymasters. I witnessed two such encounters just before and during the period that Young served as president of the National Council of Churches (NCC). Joan Brown Campbell, the general secretary of the NCC, was a veteran of SCLC campaigns from Cleveland and a longtime friend of Young’s. They had come up together in the struggle, found their voices in NCC antiracist activism, and supported the same liberal and liberal-leaning Democrats. In the late 1990s Campbell floated the idea of asking Young to serve as president of the NCC. There were awkward discussions between NCC veterans for whom Selma was the highlight of their lives and younger activists for whom Young was a symbol of corporate rule. I knew hardly anyone in the younger group who thought that corporations were our friends or allies, to put it mildly, and it grew harder for the younger group to keep reminding itself that Young was a cultural icon. Methodist pastor Jeffrey Newhall, chair of the NCC nominating committee, landed Young fresh from Young’s success raising $21 million for the United Church of Christ’s endowment fund. Young’s term as president of the NCC began in November 1999 at the general convention in Cleveland celebrating the organization’s fiftieth anniversary. The NCC boasted of Young’s board memberships at Delta Air Lines, Argus, Marriott, Archer-Daniels-Midland, and Cox Communications. Maybe he could do for the NCC what he had done for his denomination? The NCC was running a $4 million budget deficit and desperately needed saving, crippled by the constant shrinking of the mainline Protestant denominations, a downfall entering its thirty-fifth consecutive year. Young said there was plenty of money out there to save something as valuable as the NCC, so he was sanguine about the budget deficit. His worry was that the churches would keep shrinking, erasing their social influence. Young shuddered to imagine an American society in which the ecumenical Christian churches were minor players or less. He lent his immense prestige to the cause of saving the ecumenical organization that launched his movement career.117 He told interviewers he had always regarded himself chiefly as a pastor, approaching all his jobs from the perspective of a pastor: “I viewed being in Congress . . . like I was pastor of a 435-member church.” Now he was the pastor of the thirty-five Protestant and Orthodox denominations bound together in the NCC, chairing its board. Young urged denominational leaders to buck up, endured a bout with prostate cancer, and reflected religiously on both struggles: “It’s only when we’re at the end of our power and are almost in despair over our own human weakness that we are open to God’s power in our own lives and in our institutions and culture.” He wanted to give back to the ecumenical move-

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ment that changed his life: “Because the NCC shaped my ministry, I think of the passage, ‘to those to whom much has been given, of them much is required.’ All of the gifts of the churches to my life now require me to make an effort to share those gifts, testify about those gifts, and to remind the churches that the gifts of God are still there if we seek them together.” Young said the NCC helped him transcend his southern roots, perceiving religion as a global force. This experience got him into trouble in the Carter years, “because my view of the world was from the perspective of the Christian mission, putting me into conflict with the Cold War analysis being advocated by our government in those years.” He had never viewed Russian Communists, African postcolonialists, and Central American liberationists as his enemies because he was an ecumenical Christian.118 Young hoped to expand the NCC roster of members by luring Black and White Pentecostal denominations into it, which didn’t happen. He hoped to put the NCC on a strong financial basis, which didn’t happen, either. Often he applied a lesson from his SCLC years to the NCC. When the mission and message of the SCLC were clear, he recalled, the money came in. When either the mission or the message was unclear, the money faltered, too. “I have seen that when the church gets a clear vision, it is empowered by the Holy Spirit to change the world and help make all things new.” Young failed to revive the NCC, but he was the best candidate for trying.119 His close ties to Obasanjo and lucrative lobbying in Nigeria made him controversial in Nigerian politics. Young earned millions of dollars through his lobbying efforts for Chevron, General Electric, Motorola, and other big firms in Nigeria, and he profited immensely from his holdings in Nigeria’s oil industry, as did GoodWorks chief executive Carl Masters. Critics charged that Young enriched himself by exploiting his relationships with Obasanjo and other government officials. Young made two kinds of replies. One, it is not illegal for U.S. firms that lobby for foreign governments in Washington to hold business interests in the nations for which they lobby. Two, he scrupulously avoided conflicts between his governmental and corporate clients, he didn’t pay anyone under the table, and his clients won their Nigerian contracts by outbidding their competitors. He and Masters refused to work with anyone involved in questionable payments or relationships. Young said he and Masters grew rich because they helped Nigeria and its corporate investors grow rich. Nigerian critics charged that Young’s business entanglements were far more beneficial to him than to Nigeria. Young countered that this charge was merely political; he was a lightning rod in Nigerian politics, but not because he did anything illegal or unethical.120

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Young’s moral reputation helped him fend off charges that he exploited his reputation in Nigeria. In February 2006 he doubled down closer to home. WalMart, arguably the worst corporate predator on both sides of the Pacific, established a semi-independent advocacy group called Working Families for Wal-Mart. The group’s mission was to trumpet Wal-Mart’s purportedly beneficial contributions to American society. It claimed to be autonomous, but Wal-Mart provided most of its funding. Half the steering committee had direct business ties to WalMart, including Young, who served as chair of the Working Families board. Three months after the group was founded, Wal-Mart announced that it was creating an organization to pressure its suppliers to support Working Families for Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart definitely needed somebody to improve its image. It did more to depress the wages of working people than any company in the game, and its devastation of local family businesses was legendary. WAOK-AM in Atlanta, airing the announcement that Working Families existed and Young chaired it, gave Young morning time to respond to reactions from its predominately African American listeners. They were overwhelmingly negative, incredulous, and vehement. They inveighed against Wal-Mart’s record of driving down wages, discriminating against women and people of color, crushing unions, driving out family businesses, and dumping its health-care costs onto the public sector while reaping government subsidies and tax abatements for its thousands of stores. People who had indulged Young’s fondness for Coca-Cola did not buy his claim that Wal-Mart was much like Coke. Several asked Young plaintively how he had moved from Martin King to shilling for Wal-Mart. Bruce Dixon, editor of the Black Commentator, summarized the back-and-forth with a scathing judgment. It was past time to stop asking what happened to Andy Young, Dixon argued. Young cashed out his freedom movement chips long ago, aimed to get rich, flacked for his corporate clients, and ended up where he wanted. He had become “nothing more nor less than a corporate whore.”121 That got the sequence, motivation, and rationale wrong. Young never cashed out from the Black freedom movement. He held the same antiracist postcolonial convictions at the end that motivated him from the beginning, and he hustled corporate money for Atlanta long before he made any for himself. His only taste of a big income before 1990 occurred the year after he got bounced from the Carter administration, when he made $300,000 on the corporate lecture circuit. Young raised his four children on the salaries of a public official and a teacher. He tried to keep his political career going in 1990, and he was nearly sixty years old when the corporate money began to flow into his bank account. He was an apostle of corporate capitalism long before it enriched him.

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Then he ended his career admonishing his critics that there is nothing wrong with being rich; he wished more Black Americans were rich. Sometimes he said it in ways that should have been out of character for him, and in fact were out of character—except that he signed up to defend the likes of Wal-Mart. Six months into his Working Families campaign urging people of color and civic leaders to accept Wal-Mart stores in their neighborhoods, Young made a demagogic attack on Jewish, Asian, and Arab business owners that terminated his association with Working Families. In August 2006 an interviewer for the Blackowned Los Angeles Sentinel asked Young about Wal-Mart’s record of routing family stores. Young said Wal-Mart performed a commendable social service by doing so. “You see, those are the people who have been overcharging us—selling us stale bread, and bad meat and wilted vegetables. And they sold out and moved to Florida. I think they’ve ripped off our communities enough. First it was Jews, then it was Koreans and now it’s Arabs, very few black people own these stores.” Wal-Mart was contrite: “We are appalled by these comments.” The Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, having recently led a successful coalition campaign to keep Wal-Mart out of Inglewood, said Young’s racist comments were “not only an affront to the religious and ethnic groups he attacked, but to the growing multiracial movement in Los Angeles and other cities that has a starkly different vision than Young and Wal-Mart’s ‘any job is a good job’ mantra.” Young, realizing he had screwed up, apologized and resigned. Wal-Mart was a huge blessing to Black Americans, he insisted, and far better than the stores it replaced, but he shouldn’t have said it in “racist shorthand, which was wrong.”122 He shut down GoodWorks when he turned eighty, in 2012, but kept giving after-dinner talks that stitched together words of Martin and lessons learned. Young said he wanted to believe in the church more than he believed in the corporate business community, but alas, nothing compares to the business community as a creative social force. Corporations are innovative, global, cosmopolitan, and forward-looking. They are geared to solve problems and make progress; they discard bigotries that impede commerce and corporate culture, and they create global citizens. Had Young forged his political career anywhere else, he might have sung less zealously of capitalist deliverance. In Atlanta, neoliberal salvation was real for many, but not for the poor and working-class people who sent Young to Congress and elected him mayor. In a different way than he intended, Young became a living symbol of the reality that antiracism and postcolonial internationalism are not enough.123

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THE BLACK SOCIAL GOSPEL AS RAINBOW POLITICS

The idea that many are called to take up Martin’s Dream has long been a staple of Black social gospel preaching and politics. The idea that someone was called to be King’s successor was too audacious for almost anyone to consider. James Bevel came undone while trying to imagine it, and Ralph Abernathy was humiliated in trying to do it. The one person who claimed the call and had the requisite ego, energy, brilliance, ambition, and restless yearning not to be overwhelmed by it was Jesse Jackson. He grew up poor, denigrated, and insecure, but also buoyantly self-assertive, in Greenville, South Carolina, needing a father and a name. He found himself through sports and the student sit-in explosion, taking over the historic eruption against Jim Crow in Greensboro, North Carolina. He found his role model in King, took over Operation Breadbasket in Chicago as Bevel’s protégé, and later created Operation PUSH (People United to Save Humanity) after falling out with Abernathy. Then he conducted two spectacular campaigns for the Democratic nomination for president, championing a “Rainbow Coalition” of social movements that dramatized the dream of an intersectional liberationist movement. Jackson is an American Original, like Walt Whitman, containing multitudes. King arose on the wings of a historic eruption, building an organization on its success, but Jackson kept the idealism of the social gospel alive in a period of disillusionment and apathy. Throughout his career he has burned too brightly and aggressively not to incur mighty resentments at every stage. No one thing defines him, contrary to the many critics who reduce him to megalomania, or race-hustling egotism, or a similar tag. Jackson is generous, compassionate, empathic, and magnanimous, especially to the poor and vulnerable. He also 104

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has a history of turning mean, selfish, and vindictive, especially in his early career, particularly to subordinates or someone who crossed him. For many years he hurtled through life at a breakneck pace, cramming every week with speaking engagements while a flow of friends, associates, activists, celebrities, and hangers-on coursed through his Chicago home. One characteristic comes closest to defining him, having no flipside in his case, holding together his complex array of traits. Jackson has always been unceasingly morally intense, fired by the ethic of the social gospel to show up, testify, fight, mediate, and prophesy, believing in the sunlike irresistible force he calls “the moral center.” He was born in 1941 to a teenage mother who was born to a teenage mother, a beginning he described to countless high school assemblies: “I understand.” Jackson’s mother, Helen Burns, was a sixteen-year-old student at Sterling High School in Greenville when her next-door neighbor Noah Louis Robinson, a thirty-three-year-old married man with three stepchildren by his wife’s previous marriage, decided he wanted a child of his own. Robinson’s wife wanted no more children, so he commenced an affair with the girl next door, conceiving Jackson. Helen Burns was a soprano and head majorette with scholarship offers to music colleges when Robinson impregnated her. Her mother, Matilda “Tibby” Burns, worked as a maid; Helen Burns seemed to be destined for Broadway until her adolescence suddenly ended. She considered her doctor’s advice to have an abortion until her Baptist pastor implored against it. Matilda Burns had been thirteen when she gave birth to Helen. The father was a racially indeterminate grocer from a nearby community. Matilda later married a man named Burns who treated her badly and did not stay, and Helen Burns grew up believing that Burns was her father, taking it hard when she learned otherwise. Matilda Burns had devastated her mother, Cora, when she became pregnant with Helen. Then Helen rocked her the same way. Matilda Burns dealt with her heartbreak by pouring herself out for her grandson Jesse Burns, filling him with her dreams for him.1 At that time Greenville was a small, leafy town tucked away in the Piedmont uplands of South Carolina, approximately halfway between Atlanta and Charlotte, North Carolina. African Americans numbered 10 percent of the town, mostly in poor neighborhoods. Greenville was only normally racist, not a seething cracker hellhole like places where the Klan ruled. No local Klan was needed, or existed, in Greenville to remind Black Americans that their lives did not matter. Noah Louis Robinson stood out in Greenville for taking no abuse from Whites and being respected for it. He was tall, muscled, and self-confident, a former boxer who won most of his bouts in Greenville’s Textile Hall by knockout. He was

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proud and successful, holding a relatively prosperous position as a cotton grader for a White-owned textile mill, John J. Ryan and Sons. On two occasions that entered local lore, Robinson punched out White men who had it coming, with no repercussions. Instead, his boss, Ryan, favored him. A self-proclaimed ladies’ man, Robinson lacked any remorse for taking up with a teenaged girl, though for many years he had to withstand the anger of his wife over it. Helen Burns had no say in what her child would be named. Robinson arranged with Matilda Burns that if the child were a girl she would be named Ella, after Robinson’s mother, and if a boy he would be named Jesse, after Robinson’s father, a Baptist minister. Jesse Robinson was half Cherokee; his wife, Ella, was a former slave fathered by an Irish planter and Greenville County sheriff. After Jesse Jackson became famous, Noah Louis Robinson told reporters his son was hot tempered and combative, “always on the warpath,” because he had “all that Irish and Indian blood running through his veins.”2 Helen Burns was the star soloist at Springfield Baptist Church at the time of her pregnancy. The congregation banished her; months afterward she pleaded for forgiveness, her infant son in her arms. The congregation relented slightly without really forgiving her, so she joined a smaller congregation, Long Branch Baptist Church. In 1943 she showed her toddler son a picture of an army soldier in uniform, Charles Henry Jackson, telling him this was his father, who would soon be furloughed for a few weeks. It was Jesse Burns’s first memory. Helen Burns had met Jackson in a downtown barbershop. They married in 1943, and he returned to Greenville after World War II, working as a janitor. Charles Jackson was generally easygoing, cordial to Jesse Burns, and carefully cordial to Noah Louis Robinson. Jesse Burns did not know until he was seven or eight years old that Robinson was his father, and Jackson did not adopt him until 1957, when Robinson began to take an interest in his sports star son. Jesse Burns was wounded, and motivated, by his chaotic family drama. Charles and Helen Jackson had a child of their own, Charles Jackson Jr., so Jesse Burns was forced to live apart from his mother, with the grandmother he called “Aunt Tibby,” until he was thirteen. Robinson, meanwhile, had three sons with his wife, patched up his marriage, and moved to a large home in upscale Fieldcrest Village. Tibby Burns was the dominant figure in the pushedaside, cocky, covering-up adolescence of Jesse Burns. When Jesse Jackson told his story he stressed that his family was poor, his mother and stepfather did the best they could for him, he related to both of his fathers as a son, he had no yard for playing in, White Greenville told him he was nobody, Black kids taunted him that he was a nobody who had no father, and he would not have made it without the irrepressible love of Tibby Burns. To friends he confided that he

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held ambivalent feelings about Helen Jackson, his mothering came from his grandmother, and he took a certain consolation in learning that the strong, proud, athletic, highly able Robinson was his father. Noah Louis Robinson inspired awed fascination in Greenville for being the only accepted local exception to Jim Crow humiliation. He inspired the devotion of Jesse Burns mostly by ignoring him. Robinson was a bystander to the childhood of Burns, who solicited signs of fatherly recognition and interest that did not come until he was a sports star. Sometimes Burns would stand in the backyard outside Robinson’s home, which seemed like a mansion to him, gazing into the window. On one occasion Robinson waved to him and Burns ran away, embarrassed. On the few occasions that they conversed, Burns listened to Robinson with rapt attention, seemingly mesmerized. Burns sought to be included when the Robinsons took their sons, Noah Jr., George, and Tony, on vacations, but that never happened, mainly because Robinson’s wife was vehemently opposed. She wanted Jesse Burns to be nowhere near her sons and herself. The tension between the two families did not abate until Burns was sixteen, the year that Charles Jackson adopted him. B ECOM IN G JESSE JA CKS ON

Years later, on the stump, Jesse Jackson featured two stories about how he became himself. The first occurred when he was eight years old. He bustled into a corner store, whistled to gain the attention of a White grocer, and called out: “Wait on me, Jack. I got to go right away and I got to have some candy.” The grocer pulled out a .45 caliber gun, stuck it in Burns’s face, and snarled: “Goddamn you, don’t you ever whistle at a white man again, you hear.” This story had slightly different versions featuring the n-word and not, depending on the context. The second story was a composite of the playground taunts that Burns was a nobody who had no father. He first learned of this father issue at a playground. Nearly every Jackson sermon expressly countered the message of his boyhood that he did not matter.3 Jesse Burns calmly told those who taunted him that someday he would be important. He never went through a phase in which he wanted to be White, often telling classmates he looked down on Whites for their stupidity and ridiculous pretensions. The White world felt menacing, strange, and unchangeable to him. Whites and Blacks gathered at the cigar store to hear radio broadcasts of the latest Joe Louis fight. Burns carefully did not cheer for Louis, an iconic figure to Black Americans, knowing that White Greenville would not put up with it. Helen Jackson worked in a beauty salon, sang in the choir with Charles

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Jackson at Long Branch Church, and took her son to church, where Jesse Burns felt supported. His emotional mainstay was Matilda Burns, who loved him, disciplined him, believed in him, took care of him, knew when he was lying, and told him he could be somebody if he believed it. Nothing was impossible for those who loved the Lord. Nobody would ever respect him if he didn’t respect himself. She made him promise her constantly that he would always love the Lord and would someday be somebody. On the corner hangouts of Greenville, however, Jesse Burns was a hustler and con artist called “Bo-Diddley.” He played pool and blackjack for money, ran bootleg liquor, hustled baseball tickets, and spat in the food he served to Whites at the Poinsett Hotel. Across the street from the hotel, Greenville had a plaque enshrining the memory of archetypal segregationist John C. Calhoun. Spitting in the food of Calhoun’s descendants was a tiny slice of private revenge. Catering to Whites was at least a paying job, something Aunt Tibby required. Coming from the street was essential to Jackson’s identity and, later, his appeal. He said he got off the street corner only by the grace of God and his grandmother’s moral crusade to save him. Charles Jackson took offense at hearing that his adopted son talked openly about being deprived and needing to hustle. He rebuked Jackson for not considering how his complaints, con jobs, bootlegging, and demeanor reflected on Charles and Helen Jackson. If he wouldn’t shut up about being deprived, he was free to leave. Jackson swallowed his pride and took the rebuke. He knew he didn’t hustle to keep from starving. He did it to hold off meaninglessness, boredom, invisibility, and despair, surviving by the con instinct. It was one of his strengths after he joined the SCLC in 1965, radiating the street that was still in him. If he had to exaggerate his impoverished background to win credibility points, he was willing. Unlike King, who grew up in bourgeois Ebenezer Church and Morehouse College, befriending cultivated Morehouse men, Jackson grew up with junkies and hustlers who ended up in prison. Jackson said he would have had the same fate if not for God, his grandmother, and, in his school years, sports. Aunt Tibby was persuasive that being the best street hustler led nowhere. Jackson always wanted to stand out. He thrived at Long Branch Baptist Church, befriending its gatherings of maids, cooks, teachers, yard workers, and mill laborers. He loved the robust democracy of Black church life. Jackson’s mother sang the solos, he got his first taste of public speaking, and pastor D. S. Sample poured out high-voltage sermons on the biblical drama of bondage in Egypt, Moses beseeching Pharaoh, the prophets railing for justice, and Jesus dying to save the world. Jackson said he first heard the gospel of liberation at Long Branch Church and never heard a higher truth afterward. At school he was an

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average student who masked his insecurity with impulsive bravado, though many noticed that he lost some of it after he learned about his father situation. At Sterling High School, life improved dramatically for Jackson, mostly through baseball and football. In baseball he was a hard-throwing pitcher who turned down an offer from the New York Giants. In football he was a quarterback who mostly kept the ball and ran with it. Jackson was the celebrity of Sterling High. He wore spiffy suits and ties to school, playing the dandy, earned average grades, and ran for every office that enhanced his sports fame. He won so much notice that Noah Louis Robinson showed up for games to catch some that’s-my-boy attention. Noah Robinson Jr., a stronger student than Jackson but not a star jock, felt himself slipping in his father’s comparative esteem. He existed in the first place as compensation for the existence of Jesse Burns; later it caught up with him, when he excelled at the wrong things. Jackson came out of high school believing that his very high aspirations for his life were being realized. But his next stop was frustrating and brief.4 His dream was to play quarterback in the Big Ten. Sterling High played its football games on Thursday nights at the Furman University stadium in Greenville. Furman was a fixture of the White order in Greenville, off-limits to Jackson, but Furman football coach Bob King saw Jackson play several times and took an interest in him. King urged his former employer, the University of Illinois, to offer Jackson a scholarship. Illinois coach Ray Eliot came through with an offer, which solved Jackson’s dilemma about whether he should sign with the Giants. It helped that Big Ten schools looked down on White southern schools like Furman and Clemson. Jackson rejoiced at soaring above the local White university that barred him. He enrolled at Illinois and was briefly thrilled to be there, expecting the land of Lincoln to be much less racist than Greenville. As Jackson told the story, he wanted very much to be the first Black quarterback at Illinois, never mind that Mel Meyers, a Black quarterback from Booker T. Washington High School in Dallas, was the team’s starter in 1959. Jackson’s not-quite-right version of what happened reflected how he felt about what happened. Urbana, Illinois, was not the interracial oasis he had expected; athletes lived apart from other students, and his quarterback status lasted only a few weeks. Urbana felt foreign and unfriendly to Jackson. Black athletes got brusque treatment from classmates, were not invited to social events, and got leaflets in their mailboxes warning them not to socialize with White coeds. Athletes were expected to be devoted solely to their sport, relating only to other athletes. Halfway through the season, the coaches decided that Jackson was really a running back; later they decided he was really an offensive end. One year of disappointment was all he could stand. Northern racism

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repelled him, he failed to overcome the stigma on Black quarterbacks, he felt lonely and isolated, and his academic work faltered. Many claimed afterward that Jackson flunked out, and an anti-Jackson biographer, Kenneth R. Timmerman, piled on that the Black-quarterback prejudice was “just an excuse” and not real. Both claims are wrong. Jackson was burned by the racism he experienced at Illinois and he would have been eligible to return for his sophomore year, albeit on academic probation. Instead, he applied for a transfer to North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College (A&T) in Greensboro, which had recruited him fervently in Greenville.5 Jackson applied in person to the A&T registrar’s office, where his transcript was derided. Public Relations Director Ellis Corbett rushed to A&T’s President Samuel Proctor, pleading that “those jackasses” in the registrar’s office were making a terrible mistake. Would Proctor please intervene? This guy played for Illinois! Proctor calmed Corbett down, straightened out the registrar, and welcomed Jackson to A&T. Founded in 1891 as the “A. and M. College for the Colored Race” and funded under the second Morrill Act of 1890, the college changed its name in 1915 to “Negro Agricultural and Technical College of North Carolina.” In 1928 it began admitting female students, and in 1959 it earned full accreditation. The following year Proctor was inaugurated as president, which launched A&T on its way to becoming one of the top-ranked historically Black universities. A&T was in the fall of 1960 a very modest enterprise compared to the University of Illinois. It consisted of a few low, redbrick buildings stretched across the rough-grassed site of a former World War II army camp. The previous February, four A&T students had reignited the civil rights movement by asking to be served at the Woolworth’s lunch counter, but Jackson was not there to be an activist. He was there to feel at home, play quarterback, and get an education.6 He stuck to that plan for two years, refusing to join the sit-ins. Jackson had joined a protest in Greenville in December 1959 to integrate the public library, but that was a one-off episode during Christmas vacation. Erasing the embarrassment of his Illinois experience was paramount to him. A&T was his second chance, not to be wasted on protests that he felt were dangerous and distracting. Too much demonstrating might ruin the career chances of A&T students. In football he was compelled to sit out his first year as a transfer student; then a leg injury cost Jackson the next season. In academics he earned respectable grades with a major in sociology. Socially he was instantly a Big Man on Campus, joining an elite fraternity—Omega Psi Phi, winning a national post in it, and attaching himself to Proctor. Campus chaplain A. Knighton Stanley asked Jackson to join the sit-ins, which Stanley led; Jackson glibly replied that he was for standing up, not sitting in. He might have stuck with that answer had he not fallen

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hard for a vivacious classmate who disdained his political caution, Jacqueline Lavinia Brown. Jackie Brown had an outsized personality comparable to Jackson’s and a similar story of overcoming hardship. Born to a sixteen-year-old migrant worker in Fort Pierce, Florida, she spent her first six years with her mother, never knew her father, and was whisked away by her forceful Aunt Juanita after a fight over who would make the best mother. Her aunt was rough, combative, and formidable, weighing three hundred pounds. She ran a moonshine business, using Brown as a runner and scout, and died when Brown was in high school. That sent Brown back to her mother, then living in Newport News, Virginia. Jackie Brown’s brilliance and exuberance carried her to A&T, where she was thrilled to be done with parental figures. She talked a blue streak, wore brightly colored clothes, admired Fidel Castro, and boasted of having the greatest body in the world. She was also deadly serious about protest politics, which she conceived in global Du Boisian terms. The first time Jackson saw her, he called out that someday he would marry her. Brown was slightly intrigued and mostly turned off. Her first impression was that Jackson was too full of himself, like his snobby fraternity friends. Jackson went to work on her, courting her assiduously, refusing to be discouraged. He was appalled by her radical politics, and she was appalled that he went to church. Brown was hot and flashy on the dance floor, which embarrassed him, as he told her sternly. For a while she hated him for admonishing her and trying to manage her. But Jackson wore her down with his patience and knowing what he wanted. He told her they shared a desperate need to soar beyond their origins. He was keen to marry her, she resisted, and in fall 1962 she became pregnant. They married on New Year’s Eve, and Jackie Brown Jackson merrily said afterward that Jackson got her pregnant because he knew it was the only way she would have married him.7 The newlyweds returned to A&T just as the Greensboro demonstrations began their fourth year, in February 1963. Jackson still held off from the protests, but less adamantly. He had finally been able to play football the previous fall, after missing two seasons. Much has been said that is not true about Jackson’s running roughshod over lesser athletes at A&T. In 1962 and 1963 he split time with quarterback Cornell Gordon, never quite winning the starter position outright, and he also occasionally played linebacker. His prominence on campus did not depend on how many touchdowns he scored; Jackson stood out long before he finally stepped on the field. Stanley and student leader Robert Patterson coveted him for the protest movement, and Jackson listened to them. Later it frightened him to recall how close he came to missing out. He often talked to Proctor, who talked constantly about King, but Jackson was a product of the southern

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Black church culture that mostly found King threatening and disruptive. The movement in Greensboro had sprawled in the fall of 1962 beyond lunch counter sit-ins; now it demanded the integration of all public facilities and the right to equal treatment by employers. But it was sputtering. The best student leaders had graduated, CORE struggled to keep the Greensboro movement going, and Jackson reluctantly agreed to attend a meeting of Greensboro CORE. He was known to deride how Greensboro CORE was faring. At the meeting the leaders asked Jackson to explain what he thought they should do differently. This shrewd question pulled him into their problem. Jackson suggested that Greensboro CORE was not trying as hard as it believed. The leaders could feel where this was going. Should they turn to him? Did it matter that he had sat on the sidelines? Could they trust him? Was it conceivable that Jackson could be a team player? Or did they have to accept that he would hog the spotlight if they turned to him? The CORE leaders opted to risk the latter prospect, and Stanley was sent to enlist Jackson, who agreed to come aboard. Jackson’s Rubicon moment occurred at his first demonstration, in February 1963. CORE organized a mass demonstration in downtown Greensboro, and A&T administrator L. C. Dowdy called the leaders to a meeting just before the march began. He had received a call from the state capitol in Raleigh warning that if A&T didn’t shut down the demonstrations, the school would lose its accreditation and its diplomas would be worthless. Dowdy told the student leaders it was their decision to make; he would not tell them what to do. The march convened at a church, the leaders vowed to push on, and Jackson waited his turn to speak, not knowing what he would say, feeling conflicted. He respected his elders and loved Proctor. He cared very much about A&T’s accreditation. The speakers were earnest and Jackson repeated to himself, “Not my will but thine be done.” His will was to head back to campus. But when Jackson stepped forward to speak, he heard himself say that history was upon them. They had to carry forward the demonstration without hesitation, risking jail without bail. The crowd cheered his rhyming oratory and Jackson’s movement career was launched.8 He promptly took over the leadership of Greensboro CORE, pushing hard into segregated theaters and restaurants. For ten months Jackson led streams of demonstrators every day. Usually they massed in the late afternoon, heading toward the center of town in silent protest marches, in larger numbers than King rallied during the same period in Birmingham. Jackson developed a canny jujitsu in which he provoked a crisis he proceeded to mediate. The silent marches at dusk conveyed a deep feeling of grievance. Confronting defiant White business owners, Jackson was calmly polite and firm, never resorting to

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insult. On the stump he was defiant, theatrical, quotable, and aggressive, vowing to march tomorrow and the next day and the next day without ceasing, taking over the city. Then he would mediate between the police and the protesters when either side got riled up. Street toughs tried periodically to gin up some violence; Jackson talked them down from it, relying on his street savvy. White Greensboro took pride in being civil and having a gentlemanly chief of detectives, Captain William Jackson. There were no police dogs in Greensboro that ramped up the press coverage. But the demonstrations grew very large. On a hot May afternoon in 1963, the Greensboro police herded four hundred students into an abandoned polio hospital after running out of jail space. Jackson led a march to the former hospital, delivering a poetic spellbinder on the justice of their cause. Stanley asked him to repeat it for publication and Jackson said that would not be possible; he had no idea what he just said. He had gone into a trance while the words poured out. The following month Jackson led a march downtown that flooded the streets surrounding City Hall. He improvised a lie-in at the main intersection and was charged with inciting a riot. The police allowed Jackson to address a mass gathering before he was arrested. He thundered that he was ready to be jailed and to serve on a chain gang—though he got no jail sentence, and North Carolina had no chain gangs. His first brush with a national spotlight occurred when he emerged from the church to be arrested. His head was down, chastened at being in trouble. One thousand supporters stormed into downtown Greensboro to protest his arrest. Jackson later recalled to Marshall Frady that the roar of the crowd turned his disconsolate feeling into a deep sense of peace. He was fulfilling his calling. He tried to imitate King by scrawling a “Letter from a Greensboro Jail,” but Jackson lacked King’s intellectual foundation and was soon released anyway.9 Proctor told him repeatedly there was no substitute for what King got in seminary. Jackson’s street savvy and southern-church folk values would only take him so far; he needed the undergirding of a seminary education. The Greensboro demonstrations lumbered on, winning several modest breakthroughs against segregation. Jackson bonded with CORE national leaders James Farmer and Floyd McKissick, joined Young Democrats of North Carolina, and won the presidency of the newly founded North Carolina Intercollegiate Council on Human Rights. North Carolina’s Governor Terry Sanford reached out to Jackson and Stanley, first through Sanford’s aides in clandestine meetings, and later in personal meetings. Sanford liked Jackson and sought to help him, urging him to aim for law school and a Democratic political career. Shortly before Jackson graduated in 1964, he was named field director of CORE’s southeastern operations. The

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SCLC and CORE organized workshops on nonviolent resistance at which Jackson met King. To King, Jackson was one student leader among many others; to Jackson, meeting King was a turning point. He had dreamed since his early teens of leading an army across the waters like Moses. Robinson told Jesse Burns that Moses might be out of reach, but he could surely be a leader as a minister. Proctor exhorted Jackson that ministry is far better than the legal profession for making a difference. Lawyering is mostly about sitting in courtrooms and helping clients keep their property. Moreover, seminary offered a much broader education than law school. Law school was just about lawyering; seminary put all the disciplines and the entire world in play, as King exemplified. Jackson stewed over Sanford versus Proctor-King. He could picture himself as governor of North Carolina, which pointed to law school, but that was a lesser calling than being like King. The choice came down to Duke University School of Law versus Proctor’s choice, Chicago Theological Seminary (CTS), a liberal seminary of the United Church of Christ. Jackson had a Rockefeller Fellowship that he could take to CTS or to Duke University Divinity School, but Proctor worried that Duke professors would coddle him. Jackson needed to steep himself in theological scholarship, under teachers who were accustomed to Black students, and away from North Carolina, where movement politics consumed him. Jackson asked Proctor if wanting to be like King was a sufficient reason to choose seminary and the ministry. Proctor said yes and Jackson chose CTS, believing it was the reflective option. In Chicago, he reasoned, he could take a breath, study, think, and become like King.10 Instead he got to Chicago just before King took the struggle north to Chicago. Jackson and Jackie Jackson arrived in August 1964 with their infant son, Santita, and a glowing recommendation letter from Sanford. The letter earned him a meeting with Chicago’s Mayor Richard Daley and an apprenticeship in Daley’s political machine. Jackson slogged through machine service for a few weeks in a South Side precinct, waiting for a job offer, and was outraged when Daley offered him a post as a toll collector with the transit system. That was nowhere near Jackson’s estimate of his worth; he doubted that any other toll collector had a recommendation from a governor. He landed a job with publishing baron John Johnson, hustling Ebony and Jet to newsstand dealers. Jackson was very good at it. He learned about the city’s Black neighborhoods through the job, greatly impressing Johnson, who appreciated that Jackson had a compulsive personality much like his own. Meanwhile, Jackson vowed to become a reflective scholar like King, which did not happen. CTS had a close relationship with its nearby neighbor, the University of Chicago Divinity School (UCDS), where White cleric W. Alvin Pitcher taught

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social ethics. Pitcher was a social gospel Socialist and a grizzled stalwart of civil rights activism who taught ecumenical social ethics, the useful parts of Reinhold Niebuhr, and Chicago School social theory. He had earned his undergraduate degree at the University of Chicago in 1934, served in various ecumenical and community ministries as a Congregational pastor, taught at Denison University in the late 1940s, joined the UCDS faculty in 1952, and earned his Ph.D. in social ethics at UCDS in 1955. In Chicago he was the chief lieutenant of Black schoolteacher Al Raby in Chicago’s coalition of activist groups, the Coordinating Council of Community Organizations (CCCO), led by Raby. CCCO had a militant flank led by Chicago CORE and the Chicago Area Friends of SCLC, and a moderate flank led by the Chicago Urban League and the Chicago Catholic Interracial Council. At the time it focused on ousting School Superintendent Benjamin Willis. Pitcher had been searching for a big personality who would reenergize CCCO. One meeting with Jackson convinced Pitcher he had found the one he was seeking.11 Jackson held back at first. He told himself he had come to Chicago to study, not to reenact his Greensboro experience. He gave to Pitcher and Raby as much time as he could afford, working with churches as a part-time organizer, and allowed Pitcher to introduce him to Chicago activists. CCCO combined forty-three activist groups to form the strongest racial justice organization in Chicago. It marched on City Hall, demonstrated in the Loop, staged school walkouts, and debated shutting down the Dan Ryan Expressway, though Raby balked, fearing that Chicago highway drivers would mow down the protesters. CCCO had no history of exerting economic pressure. It only protested, aiming for something achievable—a new school superintendent. Jackson worked just enough with CCCO to see how Daley thwarted progressive activism. This experience was important to King when Jackson caught King’s attention, just after Bloody Sunday on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. Jackson watched Bloody Sunday, March 7, 1965, on television by himself in Chicago, while Jackie Jackson awaited the birth of their second child in Greenville. The vicious pummeling of Black marchers by Alabama troopers repulsed Jackson and prodded him to action. The next morning he barged into the student cafeteria at CTS, stood on a table, and urged the students to accompany him to Selma, validating with their lives the theology they were learning. The following morning, twenty-two students—all of them White except Jackson—and one-third of the faculty formed a car and van caravan to Selma. When Jackson told this story, he was the organizer of the caravan to Selma, not mentioning that the seminary’s president, Howard Schomer, was a veteran of the civil rights movement, a friend of King and Proctor, and the actual caravan

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leader. Jackson was at CTS in the first place because Proctor trusted Schomer. Many of the CTS students were terrified as they neared Selma, on the very night that Boston Unitarian cleric James Reeb was beaten to death by a White mob in Selma. Jackson intervened aggressively in Selma. He regaled sidewalk gatherings with mini-speeches, enlisted Schomer to reintroduce him to King, and implored Abernathy to hire him on the SCLC staff. Andrew Young was flabbergasted that Jackson refused to line up with other protesters; instead, he called out directions to demonstrators who had been there for weeks. SCLC staffers made speeches to the crowd gathered on the lawn, so Jackson mounted the steps of Brown Chapel and gave one too, annoying the staffers. Who was this kid? Young resented that the newcomer with a porkpie hat bounded forward uninvited, held forth as though he were in charge, and won the crowd. Jackson caught his reaction, telling Young he admired his pamphlet on the Bible and the ballot. Young succumbed to being flattered, agreeing with King that Jackson stood out as a prospect for the SCLC. King liked Jackson’s aggressive self-confidence and his lack of SNCC-like romanticism about the proletariat. Jackson was eager to be a leader in the Baptist social gospel preacher mold. He advised King to strike next in Chicago, with Jackson’s help, and King listened respectfully. Jackson was there for the second march to the Edmund Pettus Bridge, which King halted in a maze of confusion; then Jackson headed back to Chicago after only two days in Selma, missing the epic March to Montgomery. Two days in Selma had changed his life, making King aware of him. Young caught that Jackson viewed King as a father figure, which would never work: “While neither Martin or I had any trouble being a brother to Jesse, we were struggling ourselves with our own identity development and in no position to play a fatherly role.”12 Selma marked four historic turning points. It led to the Voting Rights Act, ended King’s influence over Black militants in SNCC, made King the political leader of millions of White Americans, and ended King’s willingness to demonstrate only in the South. King and Young narrowed the list of northern city candidates to Chicago, Cleveland, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC. Meanwhile the Watts section of Los Angeles erupted in rioting, Lyndon Johnson massively escalated the war in Vietnam, and the antiwar movement skyrocketed. King called the SCLC brain trust and senior staff to Atlanta to discuss whether to campaign in Chicago. The question was passionately debated. Bevel was the leading pro-Chicago advocate, contending that the SCLC needed to show that nonviolent activism worked in the North. Bayard Rustin was the leading dissenter, warning that the SCLC would be humiliated in Chicago, which dwarfed Birmingham and Selma. The two sides argued

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whether Chicago was too big, sprawling, foreign to the SCLC, and complex to be worth the risk. King said he would pray about it and the anti-Chicago group was crestfallen, knowing what that meant—King had settled on Chicago.13 To push into Chicago, King needed an aggressive personality who knew the city and sought leadership roles. That brought Jackson onto the SCLC staff as Bevel’s protégé and the SCLC’s liaison with CCCO, one semester short of graduating from CTS. King had almost no entry to Chicago’s Black churches, which Daley controlled, but Jackson joined Fellowship Missionary Baptist Church and swung its pastor, Clay Evans, toward King and the SCLC. Jackson worked with Bevel on the action committee of CCCO, which yielded an SCLC staff position for Jackson six months after he ventured to Selma. At CTS, much of the faculty was done with Jackson by the time he dropped out. He skipped so many classes and assignments that the faculty debated whether he should be asked to withdraw. Jackson earned a gift “D” in a preaching course, refused to write any of the assigned papers for an ethics course, and demanded special treatment, putting it plainly to one professor who tried to admonish him: “You have to understand. I’m special.” But he was indeed special, as Pitcher reminded his colleagues. Pitcher judged that Jackson’s mind was too brilliantly active to sit still for academic learning; moreover, the egotism that offended professors was a mask for Jackson’s insecurity. Jackson’s chief defender on the CTS faculty, ethicist Ross Snyder, concurred on both counts. Snyder viewed Jackson in mythic terms as an outcast embarked on a hero’s journey, perpetually engaged in the existential act of becoming. Jackson did not consult books to decide what he should do. He created something out of nothing, knowing that no book would describe what it was. He believed in the irresistible power of creative moral action, which he later called the “moral center.” King promised Jackson that he would learn more theology in the movement than by finishing seminary. Jackson pondered the irony of receiving this counsel from King, but Jackie Jackson urged him to believe it, realizing it would be absurd for Jackson to miss out on the SCLC coming to Chicago.14 The Chicago campaign began in January 1966 and focused on the housing issue. King called it a struggle against a structure of economic oppression “crystallized in the SLUM,” which he described as “a system of internal colonialism not unlike the exploitation of the Congo by Belgium.” Bankers, Realtors, small businesses, business corporations, city government, churches, trade unions, and welfare boards played key roles in perpetuating this structure of oppression. Bevel described the campaign more simply as a “war on slums.” Jackson and other field-workers organized block meetings to mobilize tenants, and Bevel organized a protest campaign.15

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The work in Chicago was grinding, slow, and overmatched. The SCLC and CCCO faced a powerful foe in Daley and a forbiddingly interlocking social system. Black ministers prized their roles in the Daley machine and didn’t warm to the outsiders from Atlanta. Daley kept voting rolls low, spurning King on voter registration, and tightened his machine, spurning King on open occupancy and changing Chicago. King exhorted White Chicago to abolish segregation and got violently hostile responses in Gage Park and Marquette Park, places where Irish, Italians, and Poles had moved to get away from Blacks. White mobs pelted protesters with rocks and bottles. There were Confederate flags and go-back-to-Africa chants. An enraged mob of ten thousand in Gage Park screamed curses at King, hitting him with a rock. Three days before a summit negotiation, Bevel led four hundred demonstrators through Jefferson Park, Jackson led three hundred through Bogan Park, and Raby led five hundred through Gage Park and Chicago Lawn. Two summits later Daley pretended to believe that Realtors should rent and sell to Black people, and King felt obliged to take yes for an answer. Daley got what he wanted, an end to the marches, and King got thrashed for signing a worthless deal that Daley soon dismissed as merely aspirational. King’s only alternative was a bloody war against Daley’s Democratic machine.16 The only ray of hope to come from the Chicago campaign was Jackson’s success with Operation Breadbasket, an SCLC version of a pressure group approach pioneered by Mississippi physician T. R. M. Howard and Philadelphia Baptist pastor Leon Sullivan. Howard organized boycotts against service stations that refused to provide restrooms for Blacks; then he moved to Chicago and supported Breadbasket. Sullivan pressured White businesses to hire Black workers and purchase goods and services from Black contractors. Fred Bennett ran the first SCLC Breadbasket program, in Atlanta, modeling it on Sullivan’s program. The Chicago version was modestly successful; it had a rotating chair until King tapped Jackson in 1966 to run it.17 The very competitive SCLC preachers did not consider Jackson a threat to them, since he had no church base, hadn’t graduated from seminary, and wasn’t ordained until June 1968. If he reached too high, he could be cut down—or so they believed. Most of the lieutenants were opposed to the Chicago campaign in the first place and didn’t want to stay there after it ended. Jackson was different in believing that Chicago would make a good home for him. It didn’t matter if he fought racism in the North instead of the South; racism was similar in both places, and he had the zeal to fight it everywhere. He was routinely called “the kid” when the remains of the Chicago campaign fell into his lap. Audiences debated whether the kid already compared to King as a podium spellbinder or was maybe better.

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Jackson shared King’s belief that in Chicago, the private sector was far more malleable than the government. The SCLC had never confronted a political machine until it got hammered in Chicago. Jackson took over the only thing that worked in Chicago, the quietly growing Breadbasket program, a band of ministers and activists held together by one staff executive employed on a rotating basis. He hired a White seminary classmate and minister, David Wallace, to run the operation, aiming first at the dairy industry because it was vulnerable. Milk has to be sold fast or the store loses out. Jackson and Wallace targeted a crass, patronizing, racist company, Country Delight Dairy, sending a hard-nosed Baptist preacher, Hiram Crawford, to meet with its executives at their corporate headquarters. Crawford told the dairy executives he wasn’t there to argue; they were meeting to solve the evils of American society. The executives were incredulous; surely Crawford was kidding? They were in business to make money and had no interest in working with Crawford. He assured them he was terribly serious. Crawford didn’t see any Black employees, the executives said they had some, and he replied that janitors didn’t count. He was looking for Black secretaries, keypunch operators, and drivers. Breadbasket picketed forty of the Certified Grocery stores that carried Country Delight products, and Jackson won his first victory. He swept through four more dairy companies in similar fashion, winning jobs for Blacks in the Borden Milk Company, HawthornMellody, Wanzer Dairy, and Bowman Dairy. Next, he and Wallace tore through the soft drink industry, boycotting Pepsi-Cola, which yielded thirty-two jobs from Pepsi, thirty jobs from Coca-Cola, and fifty-seven jobs from 7 Up. Jackson adopted Sullivan’s method of targeting stores on the basis of a sliding vulnerability scale. He selected companies with strong competition, stores with few retail outlets, businesses not conducted by phone or mail order, and companies that worked at projecting a good image. If a company prized its reputation for decency, it was vulnerable. The Sullivan program had three phases—negotiation, demonstration, and reconciliation. Jackson honed them to an art form. Negotiations began with prayer, moved swiftly to demands by two ministers who rebuffed all early offers, and took place only with company executives authorized to make decisions. Negotiating with underlings was pointless. Executives were not allowed to appeal to their good intentions or stray from the issue of jobs. Often that was enough to win significant gains, so demonstrations were unnecessary. The demonstration phase consisted of boycotts, picketing, and winning the support of community groups. The reconciliation phase ended the boycott, convening public ceremonies in which new jobs or contracts were announced, company officials posed for pictures, and moral approval was conferred.

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By the end of 1966, Breadbasket had won nine hundred jobs for Blacks in the dairy, soft drink, and retail grocery chain industries. The following year Jackson expanded the staff, hiring Pitcher, his White seminary classmate Gary Massoni, and Black United Methodist Church minister Calvin Morris. Jackson and Morris had become friends in 1962 shortly before Jackson joined the Greensboro CORE campaign, meeting at an Omega Psi Phi Glee Club concert. Morris was born in 1941 in Philadelphia and raised by his mother, a hotel housekeeper, and her parents. He won a scholarship to an elite Quaker school, Friends Select High School, earned his college degree in 1963 at Lincoln University in Philadelphia, and earned the second of his two seminary degrees in 1967 at Boston University School of Theology. In the summer of 1967 he moved to Chicago to begin work on a doctoral degree, but Jackson had other plans for Morris, roping him into Breadbasket business as an associate director. Jackson told Morris the Ph.D. could wait; it would be foolish to miss this opportunity at Breadbasket. King judged within a year of turning over Breadbasket to Jackson that he was building it into a personal operation. That was not what King wanted; Breadbasket was supposed to build up the SCLC, not Jackson. He said so sharply to Jackson several times.18 The lieutenants disliked Jackson, and King stewed over his misgivings about him. It galled the staffers that Jackson relentlessly importuned King for special attention, monopolizing King’s downtime. Often he asked a question and then interrupted King to answer it himself, straining to impress King with his insight. On one occasion King sharply told Jackson to leave him alone and Jackson reeled with a look of despair, pleading, “Don’t send me away, Doc, don’t send me away.” King was more empathic than the staffers about what that meant. He entreated them to remember that Jackson grew up without a father—“Jesse compulsively needs attention.” But Jackson’s compulsion wore King out, yielding King’s despairing declaration that it prevented Jackson from knowing how to love. Meanwhile, Jackson opposed the Poor People’s Campaign and the Memphis campaign, contending that both were distractions from what the SCLC should do—expand the Breadbasket model across the nation and organize a national boycott of General Motors. King seethed over Jackson’s showing him up while professing to love him. The last substantive words that King spoke to Jackson were a reproach: “If you’re so interested in doing your own thing that you don’t do what this organization is structured to do, if you want to carve out your own niche in society, go ahead. But for God’s sake, don’t bother me!”19 King’s clash with Jackson cast a pall over King’s final days in Memphis. Jackson was smarting from it when King told Abernathy on April 3, 1968, that he was too exhausted to speak at Mason Temple. Abernathy suggested that Jackson

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speak in his place, and King tartly replied that no one spoke for him. Abernathy asked if he could take Jackson along, and King said okay, “but you do the speaking.” The crowd was huge, clamoring for King, which Jackson thought provided an opening for him. He pleaded with Abernathy not to call King; King was exhausted and Jackson wanted to speak in his place. Abernathy made the call, King said yes, Jackson was deflated, and King reached down to give the Mountaintop Sermon. Afterward a glowing Jackson called Jackie Jackson to tell her that Martin had just given the most brilliant sermon of his life.20 The following terrible night, Jackson descended the staircase at the Lorraine Motel and King called out cheerily to him from the balcony, inviting Jackson to join the group heading for dinner. For a moment, the tension of recent days broke. King leaned forward on the green iron railing, Jackson introduced King to Breadbasket bandleader Ben Branch, King asked Branch to play “Precious Lord” that night at a rally, and King’s driver, Solomon Jones, advised King to get his topcoat. King straightened up and was assassinated. Abernathy and Young rushed to him, sprawled on the balcony. Abernathy cradled King and spoke to him, and Young felt King’s pulse. Jackson was on the ground in the courtyard. These details came to matter greatly to the lieutenants because Jackson disseminated a story centering on him. In his version, he cradled King in his arms at the end, he was the last person to whom King spoke, and King’s blood soaked into Jackson’s olive turtleneck sweater. Jackson left the lieutenants behind in Memphis, returned to Chicago, and wore the sweater the following morning on the Today show and at a meeting of the Chicago City Council. King’s death, he said, was a crucifixion. His chest bore the stain of blood from King’s head. This version of the death scene infuriated the lieutenants. Williams said it was deeply offensive for Jackson to capitalize on King’s death. Eskridge said the bloody sweater, besides being a damnable deception, was also a sacrilege. Abernathy said Jackson got away with lies to reporters he would never say to Abernathy’s face. Bevel said Jackson’s self-aggrandizing lies were “the most gruesome crime a man can commit.” For many years Young said the bloody sweater and cradling stories mystified him; he sympathized with the anger of the lieutenants and loved Jackson nonetheless. For many years Coretta King refused to speak to Jackson, sharing the offended feelings of the lieutenants. Branch and Eskridge tried to explain how Jackson might have had King’s blood on his sweater; they figured he smeared some blood from the balcony on it after King was placed in the ambulance.21 The Jackson version was repeated constantly, often in articles that described Jackson as King’s successor. Anger about both things coursed beneath the surface when the lieutenants quarreled at Resurrection City, the tent city in Washington,

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DC, erected by the Poor People’s Campaign. Abernathy awarded Jackson the title of mayor and subsequently fired him, which played to Jackson’s favor after the occupation went badly. Abernathy got blamed for all that went wrong at Resurrection City. Meanwhile Jackson benefited from the story he told— and suffered for it. The suffering showed when reporters asked him about the seething condemnations of the lieutenants. Jackson shut down whenever the question came up. He was shamed and frustrated by it, usually reproaching the reporter who asked about it. His friends said he didn’t talk about it privately either. The entire subject became off-limits to Jackson, except to vow that he would outlive it. He could have defended the story he purveyed. Billy Kyles, who was with King when he was shot, recalled that several people rushed to the balcony and handled King. He was one of them, and Jackson was another. There was blood everywhere, and Kyles said he saw Jackson touch it with his hand and wipe it on his shirt. Many years later, Young confirmed this account, adding that when Abernathy returned to the Lorraine Hotel from the hospital he held up a jar of King’s blood and cried out, “This is Martin’s precious blood. This blood was shed for us.” These were ministers who preached and sang about the power in the blood of Jesus, believing that blood power is transferable. Saving the blood of martyrs is an ancient religious practice, and the lieutenants were traumatized by King’s murder. Jackson lay in bed for two days afterward, wearing the bloody sweater, telling Jackie Jackson he would never take it off because this was Martin’s blood.22 B UIL DIN G PUSH A N D PUS HING HARD

Jackson sensed the moment and responded to it. He asked CCCO publicist Don Rose if he should take on King’s mantle; Rose said Jackson was the only one who should try. On the Saturday preceding King’s assassination, four hundred people had attended the Breadbasket service. The following Saturday there were four thousand, who rocked the auditorium with tumultuous shouting for Jackson. He skyrocketed as a local and national figure. To Morris it felt like Jackson’s persona was zooming into the stratosphere. People flocked early to the Saturday meetings, carrying folding chairs, waiting outside the Parkway Ballroom to get a seat. Morris said many of them felt guilty for not coming when King was alive. The contrast between Atlanta and Chicago struck him. The SCLC was deflated in Atlanta, but in Chicago, Breadbasket was soaring. Jackson made a sensational performance at Resurrection City on the day before it was obliterated. The crowd was furious, shouting about burning down DC.

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Jackson reached for King’s “I am somebody” litany, assuring the protesters they hadn’t lost everything. They still had their humanity, integrity, and will to be somebody: “If I am somebody, I don’t go out and burn up and tear down. People who are somebody gather up their strength for another fight for the good of their people. Tearing down the neighborhoods where the people have to shop to get their amenities, that’s not the way for a person who is somebody to be.” He turned the crowd with King-like moral authority. Black journalist and lawyer Roger Wilkins, looking on, said it was the damnedest thing he ever saw, preaching the riot out of a crowd bent on rioting.23 Breadbasket migrated through a series of sanctuaries, ballrooms, and auditoriums, becoming a place to be seen on Saturdays, to be lifted up, to get involved, to see a celebrity—sometimes Bill Cosby, or Muhammad Ali, or Sammy Davis Jr. The SCLC had almost no experience with gangs, but Jackson enlisted the Blackstone Rangers to provide security at his events and protect Breadbasket from other gangs. Jackson boasted of handling Ranger leader Jeff Fort, even getting him to church, which didn’t stop the El Rukn gang, two name changes later, from graduating to drug trafficking and murder. In 1967 Jackson launched a trade fair at CTS called the Operation Breadbasket Business Seminar and Exposition. The following year it evolved into Black Expo (the Black Minority Business and Cultural Exposition). By 1969 it was a cornucopia of Black business, culture, politics, and show business celebrities held at the International Amphitheater. The theme in 1969 was “From Chains to Change.” The following year it was “Rhythm Ain’t All We Got.” In 1971 it was “See the Dream Coming True.” Black Expo was very much in the Booker T. Washington business of celebrating economic and cultural achievements. Cosby, Davis, Roberta Flack, Aretha Franklin, the Jackson 5, and Flip Wilson were mainstay performers, mixing at receptions with Richard Hatcher, Joe Louis, and Carl Stokes. Daley-machine Black politicians spoke at workshops, White politicians showed up to be seen, and some years there were equal numbers of Black and White business exhibitors.24 There was definitely a problem with the money. The amphitheater was usually full at Black Expo, so Abernathy wanted to know why the SCLC received only half as much as projected. Was Jackson skimming the profits? Were the Rangers wildly extorting him? Abernathy pressed for answers, perhaps knowing that the Rangers extorted the Red Rooster chain for protection from other gangs. Jackson deflected inquiries from Abernathy, explaining that he admitted young people who couldn’t afford a ticket. In November 1971 Chicago Tribune reporter Angela Parker discovered in state records that Jackson and his sponsors had registered Black Expo in September 1970 as a nonprofit foundation, incorporated it in September 1971, and created the Breadbasket Commercial Association (BCA) to

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run the enterprise. Noah Robinson Jr. ran the BCA, which consisted of the Black Expo sponsors. Its ostensible mission was to train prospective business owners in marketing and finance, but in fact it existed to raise money for Black Expo apart from the SCLC and cut off the revenue to the SCLC. Jackson founded it mostly at the behest of the sponsors. Parker informed Abernathy in Atlanta that Black Expo no longer belonged to the SCLC. Abernathy was apoplectic. He had known something was wrong because Breadbasket accounting consisted of paper bags of canceled checks and receipts, mostly the former. He had resented that Jackson supplanted the leadership roles of SCLC ministers with business bigwigs Alvin Boutte (Independence Bank), George Johnson (Johnson Products), Daryl Grisham (Parker House Sausage), Celious Henderson (Marion Business College), George Jones (Joe Louis Milk), and Cecil Troy (Grove Fresh Orange Juice). But hijacking Breadbasket Abernathy had not imagined.25 Jackson threatened to resign from the SCLC if he wasn’t appointed president or vice president and if Abernathy did not stop accusing him of malfeasance. He had a breakaway vehicle in place, the BCA, while denying it existed. On December 3, 1971, Abernathy and the SCLC board met at the O’Hare Airport Marriott to settle the issue. Jackson called the press and showed up to make his case. He was forced to wait for three hours outside closed doors; he then was told he was suspended for sixty days. He responded by making a vicious attack on Parker to a roomful of supporters and reporters that included Parker: “Dr. Abernathy is not the problem or the issue. The issue is that last Friday a black woman reporter left Chicago with her mission being to separate great black men. She took a plane from the Tribune Tower to Atlanta. Now you know who your enemy is.” Jackson’s supporters showered Parker with boos while he carried on for fifteen minutes about “the treachery of black women.” He compared Parker to the deranged woman who stabbed King in Harlem. The crowd shouted against Parker, driving her to her apartment, where pickets and demonstrations commenced. Parker received death threats and months of abuse, fled Chicago, and gave up her career. Barbara Reynolds witnessed this persecution with dread and fright, fearing the same thing might happen to her. After Reynolds published her landmark book, Jesse Jackson: The Man, The Movement, The Myth, in 1975, Jackson warned her that Parker couldn’t hold up her head anymore, and he would do the same thing to Reynolds if she didn’t back down from crossing him. The same thing did happen to Reynolds, except that she refused to give up her career.26 Jackson had already weathered a turbulent year when Abernathy confronted him with Parker’s evidence. In March 1971 Jackson announced that he was founding a new political party, the Liberation Party, to nominate an African

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American for president in 1972 or perhaps settle for a Black vice presidential candidate at the Democratic convention. The Black Caucus vehemently opposed the party idea and blasted Jackson for floating it. John Conyers indulged overtures from Jackson, so the Black politicians censured him, too. They were still fuming about it when Shirley Chisholm announced that she would run for president whether they supported her or not, which extinguished Jackson’s vision of a kingmaker role in a new party. Then he bade farewell to the SCLC on December 18, announcing the birth of PUSH. Losing him was devastating to the SCLC, as Jackson took Breadbasket’s files and equipment, its entire staff of twenty-five, and all but five of its thirty-five board members. The Chisholm campaign galled Jackson and the Black Caucus for contrasting reasons. It wiped out months of Jackson’s planning while presenting the Black Caucus with a spoiler version of the same thing. In private, Black politicians said Chisholm was an egotistical pawn of New York’s Mayor John Lindsay and her only constituency was Ms. editor Gloria Steinem, New York Representative Bella Abzug, and other White feminists. In public the Black politicians bit their tongues, miffed at Chisholm but preferring not to say it. Electing a good Democrat, they argued, was imperative. Conyers, Julian Bond, and Coretta King announced early for George McGovern, in March 1972. Ohio Representative Louis Stokes headed a group supporting Hubert Humphrey. Jackson held off until April, threw in for McGovern, and compensated by declaring that he hoped McGovern would pick Chisholm as his running mate. Chisholm blistered all of them for dismissing her candidacy out of hand. Jackson and Chicago alderman William Singer challenged Daley’s delegation to the Democratic convention, charging that he violated the party’s new reform rules. Daley said he always selected whichever uncommitted delegates he wanted and would not defer to a bunch of liberals. There were months of wrangling over it until the JacksonSinger group prevailed at the convention. Daley missed his first Democratic convention in thirty years, an earthquake in Democratic politics. Conyers and Fauntroy whipped Black delegate support for McGovern, and Chisholm joined the Stop McGovern group that rallied around Humphrey. Reynolds sharply criticized Chisolm’s candidacy and last resort: “Mrs. Chisholm started on the wrong foot with the women’s lib group and ended on the wrong foot with the HumphreyWallace-Mills-Muskie alliance to elect anybody but McGovern.”27 To most of the Black Caucus, McGovern was the most progressive candidate ever nominated by the Democratic Party, and opposing him was a nonstarter. Chisholm diminished her standing with her Black congressional colleagues by joining regular Democrats and the Wallace wing to stop him. McGovern tried to unite the party after he was nominated. He reached out to Daley, who loathed

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him, and the AFL-CIO hierarchy, which voted to endorse no one. It didn’t matter that McGovern was the most pro-labor candidate ever nominated by the Democratic Party. He was a symbol of the middle-class idealism that opposed the Vietnam War and controlled the party, so the labor bosses loathed him, too. McGovern offended Jackson by meeting with Daley several times—without meeting with him. McGovern had to reckon with the fact that Daley was far more powerful in Chicago’s Black community than Jackson; the Black ward dealers whom McGovern needed were Daley lieutenants. But McGovern did not stiff-arm Jackson; it was more like the other way around. McGovern asked Jackson to appear with him at campaign events, but Jackson had his own standing to protect, and McGovern never got what he wanted: Jackson and Daley working together to win Illinois in November. Jackson did the minimum for McGovern, confirming to many observers that Jackson was plotting his own run. PUSH was Breadbasket with an unleashed Jackson. Every Saturday morning at ten o’clock, a hundred thousand Chicago-area radio listeners tuned to station WJPC to hear the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Workshop—a blend of worship service and rally attended by one thousand congregants. It featured the hundredmember PUSH choir and a sermon by Jackson without competing with Sunday services. Jackson returned to PUSH every week regardless of where he was on Friday. The workshop wandered from site to site in nomadic fashion until Lucille Loman, a PUSH staffer, spotted a synagogue with an administrative annex for sale on the South Side. Jackson’s bevy of financial angels went to work, and PUSH acquired a home. PUSH was an economic patronage machine adorned with board luminaries —Howard University president James Cheek, Motown Records president Berry Gordy, composer Quincy Jones, Proctor and Gardner Advertising president Barbara Proctor, Manhattan borough president Percy Sutton, and Sivart Mortgage Company president Dempsey Travis. It never had a real budget, so Jackson staffer Richard Thomas spent a lot of Fridays jetting to major benefactors for a check to cover Saturday’s payday; Playboy mogul Hugh Hefner was Jackson’s number-one bailout angel. Jackson got Gulf Oil to handle the publicity for Black Expo ’72, financing it with a $750,000 loan from the Ford Foundation. He ramped up the Breadbasket tactic of threatening to boycott companies that stiffed him, which usually worked. PUSH persuaded companies to increase their business with Blacks, distribute the products of Blacks, and donate money to Black organizations, notably PUSH. It dedicated Black Expo ’73 to “Save the Black Colleges,” though officials of the United Negro College Fund (UNCF) charged that the reality was the other way around. UNCF board member Earnest E. Fair Sr. angrily objected that Expo charged Black colleges

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to participate without delivering any revenue to them. The protests over Expo ’73 heightened the pressure on PUSH to keep real financial records. PUSH ran up a $600,000 deficit in 1973, and the board demanded at its December meeting that Jackson curb his travel bills for his entourage.28 Jackson weathered repeated controversies over the PUSH finances by stressing that his lifestyle rested on the generosity of rich friends, his salary was $1, he signed no checks at PUSH, and all civil rights organizations had similar problems. But King’s moral heroism and extremely modest lifestyle deflected attention from the financial chaos of his organization. Jackson lived in a spacious nine-room apartment provided by funeral director A. R. Leak until his patrons bought him a fifteen-room, Tudor-style, South Side mansion in 1970 through a secret land-trust arrangement. Located on Constance Avenue in a swanky neighborhood, the house was set up by Jackson’s donors to conceal their names. Jackson devised a complex network of companies and personal finances that kept his finances opaque, his donors unknown, and his income and assets unknowable. He worked closely with lawyer John Bustamante, who handled court filings for Jackson’s many companies, and financial planner Cirilo McSween, who managed Jackson’s personal and corporate accounts. One of their shrewdest moves incorporated a PUSH foundation in Ohio to keep the origin of PUSH funds secret from Daley. Moreover, the lavish treatment that Jackson received from his patrons did not extend to his staff. To work for Jackson, you had to accept that sometimes you didn’t get paid, he often berated his staff, and he tolerated no encroachments on his authority. A succession of high staffers tried to carve out a niche for themselves and were punished for it. Some were humiliated by the time they resigned, while Jackson treated the resignations as a personal betrayal. The only way to succeed at PUSH was to defer to Jackson and try to respond to his whirlwind spontaneity. PUSH was always overextended. Officially it had a fifteen-point program, advocating a comprehensive economic development plan for Blacks and the poor, humane alternatives to the welfare system, a revived labor movement, bills of rights for children and the aged, automatic voter registration as a right of citizenship, political activism to elect good candidates, prison reform, a bill of rights for veterans, adequate health care for all based on need, universal quality education, strong ties with African nations, justice-focused political coalitions, liberation theology, and Black excellence. These planks oscillated up and down as priorities according to Jackson’s feelings of the moment. Massoni argued gamely in The Challenge of Blackness (1972) that Jackson and PUSH were complementary to each other, each pushing the other to expand into new struggles for justice. But no activist organization constantly expands its agenda. PUSH

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gave itself specific goals to achieve, the goals kept growing, and staffers struggled to institute Jackson’s latest inspiration. The organization celebrated more victories than it achieved, always anxious to prove its value, and lacked followthrough on the victories it won, leaving compliance monitoring to the media.29 Jackson’s authority could not be questioned in PUSH. “There’ll be no voting here,” he would say. He was called by God to create PUSH and to carry on King’s redemptive mission, so voting would be profane: “I am anointed, not appointed.” PUSH officers pleaded that they could not manage the organization if they lacked any leadership authority of their own. Jackson put them down, and they resigned. Morris, Robinson, and Wallace fell out in this fashion. Morris and Robinson clashed with each other until they realized that Jackson was pitting them against each other. Both resigned after concluding that Jackson led solely by a divide-and-conquer strategy. Morris returned to Boston University to earn his doctorate; Robinson took a fateful path into trouble; and Wallace burned out. Many others fell out similarly, including Arthur Perry, David Potter, Harold Sims, Richard C. Thomas, Thomas N. Todd, Alyce Tregay, and Paul Walker. The few who stuck with Jackson through the 1970s—Massoni, Pitcher, James Fields, George E. Riddick, and, most important, Willie Barrow—accepted that they were dispensable functionaries in Jackson’s organization.30 Todd replaced Morris as Jackson’s top lieutenant and failed to persuade him to nurture a core of leaders. Reynolds catalogued this story in 1975 with colorful quotes from the leading players. They said Jackson was too devoted to authoritarian divide-and-conquer to achieve his dream of PUSH chapters across the nation. According to Wallace, Jackson bluntly told staffers there was no room for them to be leaders in PUSH, so they should focus on growing spiritually. Robinson said he thought being Jackson’s brother would give him more leeway than the others, only to learn otherwise. Jackson stressed to reporters that none of his protégés went on to become important players on their own. They were bound to move on sooner or later, and it couldn’t be his job to keep their wings flapping. The color line was a factor in the staff instability of Breadbasket and PUSH. From the beginning there were protests from Black volunteers that Jackson seemed to trust only Wallace and Massoni. How could they advance the cause of Black self-determination if Jackson trusted only his White minister friends to build the organization? Jackson was especially close to Wallace, a quietly intense Texan with whom Jackson had a telepathic-like rapport. Jackson would initiate something and Wallace would carry it out, right up to the day in 1973 that Wallace resigned. Jackson broke Wallace by berating him repeatedly in front of the staff. He replaced Wallace as a White confidant with Church of God minister Frank Watkins, who got the same treatment without breaking

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down. Jackson told Morris and Robinson not to trust each other, since he didn’t. They chafed that the White staffers were too willing to take orders from Jackson and unwilling to take orders from them. Morris never overcame the tendency of White liberals to esteem one Black figure above all others. Robinson chewed out Jackson in front of the entire staff, which got him banished from Jackson’s life for several years. Robinson was a special case because of sibling jealousy and a criminal turn that destroyed his life, but nearly all who broke from Jackson told a story of needing to save their dignity by fleeing his treatment.31 On the other hand, some staffers prized Jackson for enlarging their lives and taking them on trips. Mabel Walker and Lucille Loman virtually lived in Jackson’s home through the years when crowds of notables and activists milled about the house awaiting his arrival. They loved the constant churn of activity that surrounded him and their roles in it. Barbecue and fried fish were plentiful in Jackson’s home, Marvin Gaye and Cannonball Adderley blasted over the speakers in every room, celebrities popped in, and serious types held meetings in corners. Jackson wanted the train of guests around him every night that he was home, keeping the banter going until he fell asleep from exhaustion. His five children with Jackie Jackson—Santita (1963), Jesse Jr. (1965), Jonathan Luther (1966), Yusef DuBois (1970), and Jacqueline Lavinia (1975)—grew up in the swirling sociality that was his life, held together by the care and irrepressible buoyancy of Jackie Jackson. Willie Barrow was the outstanding PUSH officer who stayed and thrived. She grew up in Burton, Texas, organizing her first demonstration against segregation in 1936, when she was twelve years old. Four years later she moved to Portland, Oregon, to study for the ministry, where she cofounded a Blackcongregation Church of God and was ordained in it. Barrow met her husband, Clyde Barrow, while working as a welder in a Portland shipyard. They moved in 1943 to Chicago, where Willie Barrow studied at Moody Bible Institute and threw herself into civil rights activism. In the 1950s and 1960s she was a field organizer for the SCLC, earning a nickname matching her feisty, fearless personality, “The Little Warrior.” She was a founding member of Breadbasket and PUSH, a fixture at the Saturday services, an icon in the Chicago civil rights community, and a co-pastor of Vernon Park Church of God. In 1984 Barrow was appointed CEO of Operation PUSH, the first female executive director of a civil rights organization. She was blunt about what it took to work with Jackson, and why so many failed: “If you can’t pull it, you can’t work with Jesse. He isn’t going to give you much help. He announces some Saturday morning that we’re going to organize against Ford, then gets on a plane and goes to Seattle—all he wants to do is articulate what the situation is and lead it, but his team has to put

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it together. If he sees it, you ought to be able to catch it and move it and make it happen. Grow it. If you can’t, Jesse can’t deal with you.”32 Barrow could roll with Jackson’s tirades and spontaneity. Those who broke from being berated usually left quietly and got no more calls from Jackson. PUSH never stuck to a specific agenda, or routinized the charisma of its founder, or had a definite political line. It reflected Jackson’s gyrating responses to events and trends. Many took for granted that he was heading into politics, but Jackson was slow to take a political turn because he built Breadbasket and PUSH on Black capitalism. PUSH’s Political Education Director Alyce Tregay, a lobbyist at the state capital in Springfield, conducted workshops on how to run political campaigns and develop issues. She wanted PUSH to emphasize political activism, an argument she lost repeatedly with Jackson. He knew what worked for him, so he denied that Black capitalism is conservative. Black capitalists, Jackson reasoned, have better values than White capitalists. It is not conservative to transform capitalism with the power of Black love. The system is going to be capitalist whether or not Black Americans get higher into it. Jackson played a significant role in helping Black Chicagoans develop a financial base, which by 1974 counted six banks, three savings and loans, and two insurance companies. Too much politicking would undermine PUSH’s best work—developing Black capitalism. But his political itch was never hard to see, and to many young Black leftists looking for something to join, Jackson represented the indispensable third way between a too tame civil rights establishment and the political nowhere of Black nationalist and Marxist sects. Politically, Jackson was never radical, but in cultural politics he was significantly to the left of the civil rights establishment— collaborating with Black nationalists, praising Malcolm, and in 1971 calling for a Black party and delivering a keynote address to the National Black Political Convention. Many of the youthful Black leftists who joined PUSH could not imagine Jackson selling out Fannie Lou Hamer and the Mississippi Freedom delegation as King had done in 1964, or sidelining James Baldwin at the March on Washington, or refusing to debate Malcolm. Jackson was proudly Black, as they were, giving them a place to stand. They didn’t have to join a sect to pull the civil rights movement to the left. Jackson may well have stuck with his dream of a Black party had Chisholm not wiped out months of effort by running on her own. In the mid-1970s the memory of that failure burned in him. Meanwhile, the recession of 1974 wiped out half of Chicago’s Black-owned businesses, which staggered PUSH and eliminated Black Expo. The years of lavishly funded entourage travel ended swiftly, just as the IRS began to poke into PUSH’s accounting practices. PUSH was broke, and Jackson fixed on a fresh inspiration: school evangelism.

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His speaking engagements at public high schools had alarmed him. Jackson said he met students who couldn’t read or write but brimmed with pop-culture trivia. They carried no books and did no homework, while taunting students who did. He sympathized with teachers who told him what it was like to teach at schools plagued by vandalism, decay, drug abuse and addiction, unsupportive parents, and violence. Jackson got a Ford Foundation grant to speak to inner-city high school assemblies across the nation, reasoning that PUSH could reinvent itself as an educational service organization. His stock speech began by telling the boys to remove their caps. Next, he recounted the story of what it took to open American society so that Black Americans had equal rights and opportunities. What was the point of gaining equal rights if Black Americans denigrated education and achievement, too drunk or too high to stagger through an open door? Jackson built to an altar call: You have to fight your way out of poverty; no one will hire you if you can’t read or write; you can’t make it anywhere if you don’t respect yourself and others; your mind is a God-given pearl that can learn anything; “Nobody will save us . . . for us . . . but us!”33 He got standing ovations and teary testimonials wherever he went, winning major media attention. Jackson shucked off accusations that he blamed the victim, moralized in church mode, went too easy on Whites, and recycled Booker T. Washington. These were the same self-defeating things that critics said about Black capitalism, only more was at stake in the schools. If you blow your chance at school, Jackson warned, you have no chance of succeeding at anything good. He said it forcefully, colorfully, and constantly. He was out to save a generation of inner-city kids from blowing the only chance they had. Jackson enlisted students to pledge two hours of study per night; a later version asked parents to monitor the pledge, turn off the television and radio, confer with teachers, and personally pick up report cards. Jackson preached an ethic of self-respect and being respectable, in Black church fashion, with a social gospel slant. In 1975 he told PUSH convocation participants in Memphis they had to summon the courage to speak plainly about things going wrong in Black American neighborhoods. Somehow, Jackson said, children disrespecting their parents had become part of Black culture. An entire generation was being lost to self-destructive attitudes and addictions. The following year he repositioned himself politically just as Democratic primary voters were choosing the obscure, moderate, southern Jimmy Carter over famous White liberal candidates. Jackson said it was time to reexamine the causes of the social and economic plight of Black Americans, especially the poverty of Blacks in northern cities. The United States had 130 Black mayors: “We blacks have populated the cities; we must now learn to run them.” Urban

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Black Americans had terrible problems—“the ethical collapse, the heroin epidemic, the large numbers of our people who are out of work and on welfare, and the disruptive violence in our schools.” The need to solve them was urgent.34 He was blunt and direct: “The thrust of my argument is that black Americans must begin to accept a larger share of responsibility for their lives. For too many years we have been crying that racism and oppression have kept us down. That is true, and racism and oppression have to be fought on every front. But to fight any battle takes soldiers who are strong, healthy, spirited, committed, welltrained and confident. This is particularly true when the enemy is as tough and elusive as American racism.” Black Americans, he warned, will never “produce strong soldiers” by moaning about the evils that White Americans inflict on them: “It is time, I think, for us to stand up, admit to our failures and weaknesses and begin to strengthen ourselves.”35 He got very specific. First, welfare programs played too large a role in Black life and Black politics: “There is a definite welfare mentality in many black communities that derives perhaps from slavery but that must now be overcome.” Second, Black Americans had become dangerously apathetic politically: “Only 7 million out of 14 million eligible black voters are registered to vote. Yet politics is one key to self-development.” Third, many Black Americans were too quick to deride successful Blacks: “We too often condemn blacks who succeed and excel, calling them Toms and the like, when the ideal ought to be for all of us to succeed and excel.” Fourth, many Black Americans wrongly refused to condemn Black criminality: “We are allowing a minuscule minority of criminals in our midst to create disorder, ruin our schools and sap the energy we need to rebuild our neighborhoods and our cities.”36 He spurned the taboo against saying such things in public. Jackson said the tradition of reserving these topics for Black-only contexts was harming Black Americans: “The decadence in black communities—killings, destruction of our own businesses, violence in the schools—is already in the headlines; the only question is what we should do about it.” He was against blaming the victim and against the reflexive charge that all such talk blames the victim. Jackson denied that he placed too much pressure on the victims of historic wrongs. Liberation struggles are won through struggle, suffering, and sacrifice, not through “tears and complaints.” Moreover, Black and White liberals had fallen into the desultory habit of always demanding more federal aid to solve social problems. Jackson said more federal money alone would “not significantly change the welfare system, reduce crime, build enough new houses, improve education, restore stable families or eliminate drug abuse.” Anyone who doubted it, he argued, should consider the many federal antipoverty and urban

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renewal programs that accomplished very little. America needed more federal aid for programs that actually worked.37 Developing nations crawling out of colonialism had much to teach in this area. Jackson pointed to the new leaders in Saigon, stressing that they did not carry on against the Americans who bombed and burned their country: “Instead, they have concentrated on rebuilding, putting people to work, inculcating new values and attitudes.” The Vietnamese rebuilt their country with military authority and a liberated spirit. In Black America, rebuilding depended on moral authority and a liberated attitude. The civil rights movement had both things in abundance—a disciplined struggle fought with moral purpose and a passionate will to be free. Jackson tried to imagine how the spirit of the civil rights movement might be rekindled. What if Mayor Coleman Young of Detroit challenged a packed house in Tiger Stadium to produce the next generation of physicians, lawyers, electricians, and nurses? What if Young got parents to pledge to keep their children home every night to study, and into bed by ten o’clock? Jackson observed that Jomo Kenyatta (Kenya), Fidel Castro (Cuba), and Samora Machel (Mozambique) exerted their moral authority in this fashion. Somehow American leaders thought they were above it.38 Jackson pledged to provide a model, announcing that he would embark on a nationwide crusade in the fall of 1976. He said he spoke every week to young Black people whom the political class ignored. He stressed the parallels between the experiences of young Black Americans and formerly colonized peoples in developing nations. Real self-determination was just beginning in these developing nations. Jackson said the same struggle against oppression and dependency applied to the United States, except that chattel slavery was worse than colonialism, segregation was a distinctly vicious form of neocolonialism, and Black Americans had the civil rights and Black Power movements at their backs. Black Power was magnificently therapeutic, fostering racial pride in people dehumanized by racism: “But some black students became so caught up in the symbolism of black nationalism and black liberation that they forgot about such basic skills as reading, writing, and thinking.” Jackson was emphatically bothand on this subject: “When I stand in front of an audience of 3,000 black highschool or college students and we chant back and forth, ‘I am somebody, I am somebody,’ I can feel them telling me: ‘I need to be told I am somebody, I need to know I am somebody.’ But shouting ‘I am somebody’ is only the first small step toward independence.” He said too many Black Americans scoffed at education, obsessed over Super Fly, played the lottery, and chose welfare over a job. “But it is time to cut that now. That backward trend goes against our own best traditions.”39

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He ate at restaurants run by the Nation of Islam because Black Muslim waiters were courteous, efficient, professional, and proud of being Black. On the other hand, Jackson said, he knew Black contractors who went out of business because the Black workers they hired took pride in being bad employees. Jackson espoused Black Caucus liberalism on every policy issue, especially the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Bill and the termination of policies that penalized welfare recipients for taking part-time jobs. On the other hand, he said liberals relied too much on defending the welfare state, because the welfare mentality was terribly real, producing multigenerational families for whom the dole was a way of life. Equally real was the terrible violence plaguing predominantly Black urban schools. In Chicago, Boston, New York, Los Angeles, St. Louis, and Washington, DC, he argued, the Black public schools “are largely out of control.” Violence and drug abuse were rampant, pushers operated freely, the gangs ruled, and police roamed the corridors to impede the pushers and gangs. The community control movement had come and gone, never quite addressing the role of parents in the lives of their children. Jackson announced that PUSH was about to intervene in this situation, launching a national program, PUSH-Excel, shorthand for “PUSH for Excellence.” It was simple. Jackson proposed to place Black men from local neighborhoods into the school corridors, replacing the police, and on the street corners, impeding the pushers and gangs. PUSH-Excel enlisted parents to reserve the evening hours for their children’s schoolwork. It trained student leaders to help school principals and teachers maintain discipline. And it implored the Black media to renew their forsaken moral seriousness.40 This was the template for thousands of Jackson speeches and sermons for years to come. It reintroduced him to the broad American public and repositioned him politically. Jackson said he understood why middle-class U.S. Americans across the color line feared cities, fled from them, and sent their kids to private schools. PUSH-Excel was a singular exception to his history of launching projects that spiraled in various directions and fell into debt. It pulled PUSH out of debt, starting with a $100,000 grant from the Ford Foundation for pilot studies in Chicago, Kansas City, and Los Angeles, which yielded tax-free grants from the Lilly Foundation and the Rockefeller Fund, which yielded a whopping $400,000 grant from the Los Angeles Board of Education and a crush of positive media attention. CBS featured Jackson in December 1977 on its program 60 Minutes. There was a clip from one of his speeches to high school students: You know, I look at a lot of these theories that many social workers come up with, like, now the reason the Negro can’t learn is his daddy’s gone, his

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momma is pitiful, there’s no food in the refrigerator, it’s rats all in his house . . . and that’s the reason he can’t learn. Then we go to school and the teacher—standing there reeling the guilties—says, “These poor and pitiful Negroes got all these trials and tribulations. Now I have to stand up here and teach them how to read and write and count.” Well, if we can run faster, jump higher and shoot a basketball straighter off of inadequate diets, then we can read, write, count and think off those same diets. The challenge is mobility.

At the rallies, though not on the 60 Minutes clip, this run usually led to a signature Jackson rhyme: “Children must know that it is not their aptitude but their attitude that will determine their altitude.”41 More than three thousand letters poured into CBS, nearly all positive. Hubert Humphrey, dying of cancer, called Jackson to his bedside and praised him profusely. Humphrey urged Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) Secretary Joseph Califano to team with Jackson; a week later Jackson got his first HEW grant, a $55,000 beginning. The HEW money poured in for the next three years, totaling $3 million. The foundations added more than $1 million, and Califano unearthed $400,000 from the National Institute of Education. Some Jackson watchers were not happy for Jackson or the schools. Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page blasted Carter for financing Jackson’s latest boondoggle: “This benevolence persists even though almost no one can explain what PUSH-Excel really is. . . . PUSH-Excel is so elusive, so amorphous, that it is called a ‘program’ only as a matter of semantic convenience.”42 Chicago Defender reporter Robert McClory charged that PUSH-Excel was a ploy to co-opt the rightward turn of American politics. McClory said the authority on Jackson was Reynolds, who documented the facts that Jackson lied about his anointing, created a ramshackle organization devoted to his ego, abused his staff and anyone who criticized him, and was a relentless opportunist, “at base a puppet of the white-dominated business and political establishment . . . Booker T. Washington in bell bottoms.” Moreover, Black leftists like Reynolds were not the only ones to say so; the New York Times described Jackson as safe copy and no threat to established institutions. McClory was tempted to leave it there, but fairness prevailed. He acknowledged that nobody compared to Jackson as a promoter of Black businesses and performers, nobody built a more impressive social action organization than the 100,000-member PUSH, and no Black American came close to Jackson as a national moral leader and spokesperson on current events. McClory concurred with Reynolds: If Jackson were to acquire some humility, he might soar as high as he dreamed.43 Stagflation ended the expectation that the next generation would live better than the previous one. Cities decayed from lack of business investment while

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middle-class professionals fled to the suburbs. Jackson lamented this bleak situation every week in high schools, civic organizations, and churches. He described graphically the world that young Black Americans were inheriting, imploring churches and educators not to leave behind the young people growing up in cities. PUSH-Excel gave him entry to countless high schools, where he spoke constantly about staying in school, doing your homework, pulling up your pants, respecting others and yourself, and being somebody. He denied that his emphasis on deportment, virtue, and succeeding in American society was conservative in a bad sense. Jackson invited the charge to refute it. What was the alternative to education and succeeding? He said it was displayed everywhere that dropout rates exceeded 40 percent, drug abuse was rampant, unwed teenage pregnancies were commonplace, and welfare was a way of life. Jackson was fond of saying that people who love Black people want to see them flourish. Du Bois said it resoundingly, and had Martin lived into the 1970s, he would have, too. Jackson’s willingness to carry on the King tradition of activism made him the prime target of two trends in Black political thought. One disputed that Black Americans needed or wanted public leaders; the other said legitimate leaders are democratically elected. Roger Wilkins was a forceful advocate of the first view, putting it negatively: “What we don’t need is a new, media-appointed leader.” Political scientists Ronald Walters and Robert Smith championed the second view, contending that the rise of an elected Black political class regularized the participation of Black Americans in democratic politics. The Voting Rights Act displaced the ministers, intellectuals, and civic movement professionals who had previously held sway on the needs and political interests of Black Americans. Now that elected Black politicians existed, they were rightfully the chief adjudicators of Black politics, being more accountable than anyone else. Fauntroy combined these arguments. As the nonvoting delegate from Washington, DC, to the House of Representatives and chair of the Black Caucus, he naturally held a high view of the importance of Black politicians, but he also said the time had passed in which any individual should speak for all Black Americans on a variety of subjects: “We do not have a single black leader, nor do the times dictate that there be.”44 Jackson irked Democratic leaders, Black and White, by chiding them for acting like politicians. It was their job to be politicians; meanwhile, they surmised that Jackson aspired to be one. He ripped Carter for carrying on about human rights—it was pretty rich to pose righteously when three of four U.S. American prisoners were non-White. Violating human rights, Jackson said, was very much a U.S. problem. Yet Jackson treasured his friendships with Carter and administration officials, hoping for a position in a second Carter adminis-

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tration. By the end of the Carter years, only Young compared to Jackson as a Black American political figure of national prominence. A few years later, even Young did not compare to Jackson.45 The fallout from the Young affair of 1979 propelled Jackson to the Middle East just after Lowery and the SCLC ended their rendezvous with Arafat in Beirut. Jackie Jackson, former SCLC official Jack O’Dell, and twelve other activists associated with the Palestine Human Rights Campaign opened a direct channel with Arafat in July 1979 by traveling to Beirut. O’Dell was a former Communist whom President Kennedy forced King to fire from the SCLC staff because the FBI claimed he was still a Communist. He had extensive contacts in the Middle East, which Jackson prized. Jackson aide Bernard Lafayette, a Gandhian Christian and former Lawson disciple, implored Jackson before he departed not to let Arafat grab him for a photo-op hug. Jackson vowed to use his height and reach to keep Arafat at bay. Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin spurned his advisors by refusing to meet with Jackson, who replied that Black Americans held fifteen million votes, they decided presidential elections, and “we tend to support people who support us.”46 He improvised a same-day visit to the Kalandia refugee camp on the West Bank and the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem. At the camp Jackson declared that as a Black American, he identified with the Palestinians. At Yad Vashem he bustled through the museum and set off a media firestorm. Philip Blazer, publisher of the Los Angeles magazine Israel Today, was a member of Jackson’s delegation. Newsweek reported that Jackson told Blazer, “I am sick and tired of hearing about the Holocaust and having the United States put in the position of a guilt trip.” According to Newsweek, some tense back-andforth ensued in which Jackson added that Yad Vashem helped him understand “the persecution complex of many Jewish people that almost invariably makes them overreact to their own suffering, because it is so great.” The first quote was offensive, and the second made it worse. Jackson later claimed he was misquoted concerning “sick and tired” and he didn’t mean to be insulting in the persecution quote. Blazer and Raymond Mallel, the chief organizer of the Israel tour, angrily quit the tour before it reached Jordan. Israeli officials similarly fumed that Jackson seemed determined to cast them in the George Wallace role. David Zucker, a leader of Peace Now whom Howard Schomer arranged for Jackson to meet, lamented that Jackson behaved badly in Jerusalem: “He was arrogant, used questionable language, and he had not done his homework.”47 Cluelessness cut both ways. Jackson’s Israeli hosts tried to show him some Christian enclaves attacked by the PLO, naively believing that an American Baptist minister would be swayed in their favor. Jackson told them he didn’t have

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time for such sectarian pleading. It didn’t matter that the Israeli officials who wanted Begin to meet with Jackson had hatched the Christian ploy. Israeli journalists took note that Jackson dispensed soul-brother handshakes to Palestinians, brushed past Israelis, and picked a hopeless quarrel with an Israeli host over the singular horror of the Holocaust. His hosts wanted him to say that the Jewish Holocaust stood out as an ethnic genocide that annihilated millions of Jews as an official order of the government. Jackson persisted that the Holocaust, though atrocious, was not unique in history. He proceeded to Nablus, an Israelioccupied city on the West Bank, where Israeli soldiers strung barbed wire to close the bridge behind Jackson’s delegation. Jackson said the soldiers gave him “an evil feeling.” In Nablus he was mobbed with joy. Palestinians hoisted him on their shoulders and praised him as the American Arafat. Jackson told them they were very close to achieving their goal of a self-determined homeland. They should take the American civil rights movement as their model, he said, which meant they had to break the cycle of terrorism and suffering.48 He proceeded to Beirut and a two-hour meeting with Arafat, where Jackson failed to hold off Arafat’s bear hug and ended up in a picture that plagued him for the next decade. The New York Times reported that Arafat called Jackson “my friend and the friend of justice and humanity.” There wasn’t much more to the story, except Jackson’s announcement that he proposed to mediate between Arafat and the U.S. government. There was never any chance of that; Carter couldn’t even keep Young in the UN. The story was the picture, which the Times mercifully confined to page 7. It set off a blaze of anger aptly summarized by anti-Jackson scholars Thomas Landess and Richard Quinn: “American Jews were outraged. They had been cofounders of the movement out of which Jackson had sprouted. Now he was trading his organization’s history and prestige to aid an international terrorist.” Walter S. Wurzburger, the president of the Rabbinical Council of America, put it in high-road fashion: “Obviously Jews resent the fact that Jesse Jackson, a religious man, can visit the memorial in Jerusalem for victims of the holocaust and say only that he now appreciates why Jews ‘overreact’ to so much of their suffering. But Jews have the responsibility to keep on struggling for dignity and human rights, and not to let disillusionment undermine their efforts.” Resentments later to explode piled up. Lafayette chastised Jackson for doing exactly what he had warned against, and Jackson said it couldn’t be helped: “He just ran right on up to me.”49 Jackson deeply resented the media coverage of his trip and said so, singling out three Chicago newspaper columnists and one television pundit as unfair Jewish critics. He said the coverage was spiteful because the newsrooms in question had Jewish reporters and no Palestinian reporters. He added that Blazer turned out to be a spy, so he regretted letting Blazer set up meetings for

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him with the Israeli left. Jackson vented his anger partly from the elevated importance he felt at being taken seriously by Arab leaders. Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat met with him and flew him back to Beirut to ask Arafat to suspend violence operations against Israel, after which Jackson conferred with Syria’s President Hafez al-Assad. Nothing came of it for the usual reasons, except that Jackson was elated to be asked. He caught a glimmer of a career as a high-stakes mediator on a global stage. Jackson put a personal spin on Psalm 118:22: “The stone that the builders rejected has become the chief cornerstone” (NRSV). This statement recurs five times in the Christian testament, describing Jesus as the cornerstone. Black church preaching often described King or the Black church as the Jesus-like rejected stone. Jackson applied it to himself: “A rejected stone like me could very well become the cornerstone of our global policy.”50 In 1980 he campaigned strenuously for Carter, in twenty-nine states, warning against a Reagan catastrophe. The Reagan victory was a calamity for PUSH. There were calls to “defund the Left” and debates over which groups headed the list, but PUSH was always near the top. The new White House began by freezing a $2.5 million grant to PUSH-Excel from the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act and demanded a $56,000 repayment on a $250,000 grant. In 1980 the Education Department had commissioned a performance review of PUSHExcel. Charles Murray, four years before publishing Losing Ground, chaired the report, claiming that Jackson’s only accomplishments were self-promotional. That triggered immediate cuts to PUSH-Excel from the Education Department and the termination of Jackson’s contract. More audits followed, always with bad news for Jackson. The White House charged that PUSH-Excel misspent $1.7 million of the $4.9 million in federal grants it had received, and it eventually demanded a reimbursement of almost $1.5 million. Jackson reeled from the blows to his organization, stressing that he had very good company in being defunded by a right-wing administration, notably progressive unions, the ACLU, the Urban League, Planned Parenthood, and the Gray Panthers.51 The coming of Reagan was a fire-alarm emergency for the left and a survival emergency for Jackson. He lingered over the fact that Reagan had won many states by margins smaller than the number of unregistered Black voters. Seven million eligible African American voters were unregistered. Three million were in eight southern states that Reagan won by a combined total of 182,000 votes. In Arkansas, where Reagan defeated Carter by 5,000 votes, 85,000 African Americans were unregistered. Frank Watkins advised Jackson that this pattern presented a political opportunity: He should run for president in 1984, conducting the kind of campaign that Wallace ran in 1968 and Reagan ran in 1976, except from the opposite standpoint.

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Actually, Watkins wanted Jackson to run against Carter in 1980, but Jackson put him off, feeling indebted to Carter. He didn’t want to be responsible for costing Carter the election, leaving that role to Ted Kennedy. Watkins persisted afterward that Jackson should run for president, Lafayette agreed, and Jackson stewed over the voter registration argument. In 1982 Watkins drew up a ten-page plan for a Jackson candidacy. There were three planks: (1) No conventional White Democrat would make a sustained effort to register Black voters; (2) Running a conventional “realistic” Democratic campaign against Reagan was a surefire loser; (3) There was an opening for a left-Democrat to create a new electoral reality by registering millions of Black Americans and appealing to the poor, the marginalized, and the forgotten. Watkins stressed that getting merely a quarter of the unregistered Black voters to vote might end the Reagan nightmare. Jackson had spent the 1980 campaign urging Black Americans to register to vote, and to vote for Carter. Now he considered that he might be the answer to the registration problem. RU NN IN G F OR PRESIDEN T AND BUILDING TH E RA IN BOW C OALITION

In the summer of 1983, Watkins and Lafayette lined up rallies for Jackson in six southern states. They worked him hard, holding forty rallies per week, nearly all in Black churches. A congregation would take in Jackson’s entourage, feed them, take up a collection, and send them to the next church. The Jackson tour fed off the despair of Black Americans at acquiring a president who plainly spurned them. There were policy arguments to make and defend, but Jackson emphasized the aggrieved feeling in the sanctuary: this guy cares nothing for you and doesn’t bother to pretend otherwise. Reagan had won the White House because Black Americans hadn’t registered to vote. Jackson said Reagan was Goliath, there were rocks lying all around to bring him down, and a freedom train was coming, but they had to register to ride. The hands that once picked cotton could pick the next president. Day after day he built to a rhetorical cascade of “Our time has come!” priming the crowd to roar in reply, “Run, Jesse, run! Run, Jesse, run!” If he ran, Jackson said, he would unite all the people put down in Reagan’s America—the desperate, the disinherited, the disrespected, and the damned. He surged in the polls above all prospective Democratic candidates except liberal stalwart Walter Mondale, who feared that Jackson would take primary votes from him, and the technocratic Gary Hart, who stood to benefit from Jackson’s candidacy. Many Black Democrats feared exactly this outcome. “The Family,” shorthand for “The Leadership Family,” a floating group of fifteen Black leaders

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supplemented by twenty or so local Black leaders from wherever the group convened, held several meetings to discuss the prospect of a Black candidate. Most members were not interested in supporting a Black candidate and nearly all were opposed to a Jackson candidacy. Young, Lowery, Coleman Young, Coretta King, Benjamin Hooks, Los Angeles’ Mayor Tom Bradley, and Birmingham’s Mayor Richard Arrington urged the group to get behind Mondale. Jackson had three supporters in the core group—Richard Hatcher, Percy Sutton, and Mayor Marion Barry of Washington, DC. So he played a careful hand, showing up at a June 1983 gathering of the Family at the O’Hare Airport Hilton in Chicago. His rallies and splashy media coverage had put Black politicians on the defensive. Jackson argued that somebody in the room should run for president, taking advantage of the new voters. He went one by one around the table, asking if anyone was ready to run. No one said yes. Jackson replied that in that case, he would run. The group squirmed and equivocated, declaring that it supported the principle of a Black candidacy, but not necessarily him. Jackson proceeded to a rally of four thousand Black Baptist ministers in Memphis. “If you run,” he declared, identifying them with him, “you might lose. If you don’t run, I guarantee you’ll lose! If you run, your friends can’t take you for granted and your enemies can’t write you off.” The crowd thundered, “Run, Jesse, run!” Jackson needed to hear it because he knew what was coming if he entered the race: Who are you to run for president? You’ve never held any elected office! What do you really want? Nearly all Black officials are opposed to your candidacy! How will you finance a presidential campaign? The last question poked at Jackson’s opaque maze of business contracts, infusions from Cosby, Gordy, Hefner, Quincy Jones, television mogul Norman Lear, and Los Angeles real estate investor A. Bruce Rozet, and patronage from Syria and Libya funneled through the Arab League. Above all, Jackson could not imagine King vying to be commander in chief, a steward of the American empire who could be trusted to defend the nation’s economic and military interests.52 At the Chicago meeting, Jackson shied away from pressing the Family not to carve him up with snarky quotes to the press. Soon he regretted it, getting a torrent of snark from Atlanta. Julian Bond said Jackson had no chance of being competitive outside perhaps a few select southern states. Family stalwarts fed reporters anecdotes about Jesse-the-egomaniac, especially the details that he stayed in five-star hotels while his staff got pay deferrals and that Jackson indulged himself sexually. Jackson’s reputation for casual trysts and his affairs with singers Nancy Wilson and Roberta Flack had dominated the Family discussions. His rumored affair with Wilson dated to 1969, and his affair with Flack yielded her love ballad, “Jesse,” on her 1973 album Killing Me Softly. Reynolds summarized

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the pertinent lore, noting that “Jesse” conveyed “many good reasons why Jesse should ‘come home.’ ” Jackson deflected questions about his affairs by saying that his marriage was stable, honest, and private. In 1974 he said, concerning Flack: “Until such time as I’m ready to concede some formal relationship I refuse to deny it. I’m not going to plead the Fifth. . . . Roberta is a close personal relationship and I refuse to have it muddled.” Jackie Jackson backed him: “I am not a slavemaster over his body or his commitment and neither is he over mine. Jesse loves and so do I.” Family regulars recognized that Jackson’s stablehonest-private description of his marriage was true. They recalled that Jackson was brazen in the 1970s about his extramarital affairs and judged that lately he had been more circumspect. Previously, PUSH staffers were compelled to cover up for him, and some resented it, especially David Wallace. Lately Jackson had pulled back, like someone who was serious about running for president.53 It took several months to land a campaign manager until Arnold Pinkney, an Ohio political broker, belatedly took the job. Jackson resigned from PUSH, leased a wobbly turboprop, and announced his candidacy in November 1983 in Washington, DC: “I seek the presidency to serve the nation at a level where I can help restore a moral tone, a redemptive spirit and a sensitivity to the poor and the dispossessed of this nation.” This was not a Black campaign, he said: “It’s a campaign through the eyes of the hurt, and the rejected, and the despised, those left naked before the Lord in the wintertime. Blacks, women, Hispanics, workers, Indians, Chinese, Filipinos—we must come together and form the rainbow coalition.” Watkins’s fund-raising plan rested on forty thousand Black churches contributing $250 apiece, building a $10 million treasury. Jackson never came close to it, partly because National Baptist Convention president T. J. Jemison was opposed to helping him. For six weeks the campaign sputtered in disarray, kept alive only by the force of Jackson’s personality and fame. Then fortune struck—in Lebanon. On December 4, U.S. fighter jets from Sixth Fleet warships supporting the U.S. forces based in Beirut clashed with Syrian forces in eastern Lebanon. Two U.S. Navy A-6 Intruder jets were shot down, Lieutenant Robert O. Goodman Jr. was hauled to a military prison in Damascus, and Assad declared that Goodman would be held until the U.S. removed its marines from Beirut.54 Goodman, an African American, was in danger of being abandoned. Reagan had blistered Carter for doting mournfully on the hostages in Iran, which purportedly made America look weak. He seemed willing to leave Goodman to rot, opining that Goodman could not be considered a prisoner of war since there was no declared war between the United States and Syria; the Geneva Accords did not apply to him. That was not right; the Geneva Prisoners of War Convention of 1949 requires only the existence of an armed conflict, not a declaration of war.

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Reagan’s position threw into question whether any law applied to how Assad should treat Goodman. Jackson stewed over Goodman’s plight, cabled Assad asking for his release, received no reply, and told Jackie Jackson on Christmas Eve that he was flying to Damascus to rescue Goodman. He took with him nine staff members, a Secret Service contingent, his two oldest sons, twelve journalists, and a band of clerics that included Wyatt Walker and Chicago’s Nation of Islam high minister Louis Farrakhan. For three days Jackson held tense discussions with Syrian officials, who lectured in frosty, officious language that it would demoralize Syrian troops if Assad released an American who had bombed them. The only thing that seemed to go well was that Farrakhan opened several sessions by singing prayers from the Quran in Arabic. Reagan officials claimed that Jackson was jeopardizing Goodman’s life and their brilliant strategy. On New Year’s Eve, Jackson was allowed to visit Goodman, which felt like a breakthrough. The following day he met with a PLO official in Damascus who agreed to urge Assad to release Goodman to Jackson. The succeeding day Jackson met with Assad, in a friendly meeting that seemed promising, although Jackson couldn’t be sure. He told Assad this was a precious opportunity to break the cycle of violence and to take the high moral ground. If Assad took a risk for peace, the American people would see him differently. If Assad wanted the United States to remove its troops from Lebanon, releasing Goodman would be the best way to build political pressure for it. Jackson flew home with Goodman in the Air Force VC-137 once assigned to Kissinger. He was ecstatic during the flight, hugging everyone in his entourage, glowing with elation and relief. Within moments of landing at Andrews Air Force Base in DC, Jackson’s jubilation vanished. He hadn’t known that his intervention played badly in the press. Jackson got a stunning taste of it at a press conference. The first questioner wanted to know who paid the hotel bill for his entourage. (It was one of his financial angels, a North Carolina business executive.) Other reporters took the White House line of recent days that Jackson meddled dangerously where he did not belong, and Assad used him to embarrass Reagan. The New York Times was both harsh and not. The editorial page blasted Jackson as a self-promoting opportunist whose mission to Syria was shallow, cynical, and contemptible, a mere play for television time. Columnist Howell Raines countered that Jackson demonstrated the “skill and audacity” of a big-time political gambler, pulling off a daring intervention that rocked the Beltway “like a thunderclap from the clear sky.” Reagan gave credit where it was due, good-naturedly cheering Goodman’s release, so he was happy—enough to welcome Goodman and Jackson to the Rose Garden. He said Goodman flew a mission of peace, Jackson conducted a personal mission of mercy, and both

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were worthy of praise. Reagan had no quarrel with success. Jackson was not supposed to speak, but he grabbed the microphone from Reagan to hold forth on taking risks for peace.55 The Goodman rescue was a supercharger for Jackson’s presidential campaign. Suddenly his phone rang constantly as old friends asked how they could help. Two generations of movement activists swelled the campaign just before it entered the voting phase. Veterans of the generation that marched with King returned to rekindle the civil rights movement. The younger generation of activists that came along after King also surged into the Jackson campaign. I was in the latter group, an Episcopal cleric in Albany, New York, with leadership roles in three peace and solidarity organizations—cofounder and president of the local Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), founder and president of the diocesan Episcopal Peace Fellowship (EPF), and lead speaker of the local Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES). I also served on national committees of these organizations. All three organizations were bustling at the time with activity and a dream of movement synergy, but these were very different groups within the progressive left. The Jackson campaign was the first opportunity since the end of the King era to build a significant coalition. Those of us who had gone to college in the 1970s and yearned for the 1970s to begin were finally in something that might scale up. I volunteered for Jackson campaign duty and was crestfallen at my assignment—“recruit your own people.” That was not what I wanted to do, though it was precisely what people like me needed to do. DSA split between its union-based leaders and cadre who settled early for Mondale and its activists based in social movements who joined the Jackson campaign. EPF stuck to moral-witness activism in the churches and steered clear of formal involvement in electoral politics. CISPES was far-left and young by comparison to DSA and EPF, attracting many anarcho-syndicalists, proCommunists, and independent radicals for whom American democracy was an imperialist fraud. All three organizations gave some individual activists to the Jackson campaign, but all had defining organizational reasons to be skeptical of Jackson personally, and for the Mondale realists, 1984 was about one thing above all—replacing Reagan with the most viable Democrat, Mondale. Jackson sought to change that perception while debating seven wanly conventional White competitors for the Democratic nomination—Mondale, Hart, McGovern, Senator John Glenn of Ohio, Senator Alan Cranston of California, Florida’s Governor Reuben Askew, and Senator Ernest Hollings of South Carolina. He had ditched his Afro and dashikis during the school evangelism tours, donning stylish dark-blue suits. On the night before the first debate in

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New Hampshire, Jackson called Proctor, who told Jackson to climb to the highest ground he could find. The politicians, Proctor said, would carve up each other on small points that mattered only to them. He urged Jackson to call the nation to great things, venture into the deep, and spurn wonky-talk and bluster. Jackson tried to stick to that plan but was felled by a journalistic thunderbolt from the Washington Post. On February 13 Post reporter Rick Atkinson and staff writer Milton Coleman published a lengthy article titled “Peace with American Jews Eludes Jackson.” Coleman had bantered casually with Jackson in an airport cafeteria, and Jackson took it to be off the record, protected by his racial bond with Coleman. Deep into the article, in the thirty-seventh paragraph, Coleman quoted Jackson as having referred to Jews as “Hymie” and to New York as “Hymietown”; he also complained that Jews were disrupting his campaign.56 This report fell like a bomb into the Jackson camp. Jackson was roundly denounced as a bigot whose prejudice against Jews was so virulent he couldn’t keep himself from exposing it. Compressed resentments about the Arafat hug, the howlers in Jerusalem, his hero’s reception in Nablus, and his financial pipelines to Syria and Libya spilled into the story, connecting his pro-PLO sympathies to his supposed animus toward Jews. Jackson staggered at the vehemence of the attacks on him. He denied that he was anti-Semitic and that he used the epithets quoted by Coleman. The charge that he harbored an anti-Jewish sentiment hit Jackson harder than any accusation he had ever incurred, and it angered him. Surely, he contended, the vitriol against him was self-refuting, wasn’t it? The story and the campaign hurtled wildly from one accusatory forum to another. A group called Jews Against Jackson demonstrated at campaign events, wielding placards reading, “Ruin Jesse Ruin!” ADL leader Nathan Perlmutter circulated a nineteen-page compilation of ostensible Jackson quotes that supposedly proved Jackson’s anti-Semitism. Jackson countered that he never uttered the famous “sick and tired” quote or treated Israel and the PLO as morally equivalent. On February 19 Jackson clung to his denial, on Face the Nation, that he said the denigrating things quoted by Coleman. He couldn’t fathom why so many people were eager to believe it. The following day Mondale won the Iowa caucuses in a blowout, Hart finished second, Glenn was the big story by finishing poorly in fifth place, and Jackson barely registered, failing to reach 1 percent. On February 21 Jackson took the question mark off his counteraccusation, charging that he was being “hounded by certain members of the Jewish community.” How was it not a story that he was targeted, cursed, threatened, and persecuted for something he did not say? He stuck to that line for five miserable days before confessing dramatically to a New York City congregation, Temple Adath Yeshurun, that he had indeed uttered the offending words to

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Coleman. It was southern slang in a private conversation, Jackson explained, not proof of anti-Semitism. As far as he could tell, he was being punished for his claim in Jerusalem that the Holocaust was not unique. Jackson said it should be possible for Jews to understand why a Black American would be stubborn on this point. The congregation warmly applauded him, and Jackson remarked gratefully that suffering brings redemption.57 The episode hurt him deeply. Friends said it was the only time they ever saw him wounded by self-doubt. Jackson’s appearance at Adath Yeshurun got him past the worst week of his life, but at a steep price: nearly his entire senior staff was adamantly opposed to an apology. Wilkins and Hatcher sympathized ambivalently with Jackson’s dilemma, and field director Donna Brazile, younger and a newcomer, was appalled that Jackson lied to his staff for seemingly endless days before admitting the truth. But nearly all the passion among the insiders was on the side of “hell, no.” Many of them barely tolerated in the first place the demands of running in Democratic primaries; Jackson’s candidacy was the only thing separating them from despairing completely of American politics, like the SNCC activists who bolted from the Democratic Party after the 1964 convention. Herbert Daughtry and Jackie Jackson cautioned Jackson that begging for forgiveness would be intolerable and severely demoralize the campaign. They said he was not the one who should apologize. Appeasing his opponents would be humiliating to his supporters and a godsend to his opponents. It wouldn’t stem the attacks on him; it would merely legitimize more attacks that further damaged the campaign. That was exactly what happened. “Jackson is an anti-Semite” dogged him for the rest of the campaign, and far beyond it. Jackson’s apology deflated every top staffer, embittering some. Perlmutter, reflecting on the irony of the “Hymie” affair, observed that “Hymie” was low order on the scale of insults, yet this was the slur that opened the opportunity “for somebody like myself to be heard on a dimension of Jesse Jackson’s character. He could light candles every Friday night, and grow side curls, and it still wouldn’t matter. He’s still a whore.”58 That verdict hardened for many anti-Jackson critics when Jackson took shelter in the incendiary defenses of Farrakhan. By the time that Jackson ran for president, he and Farrakhan were habituated to a delicate dance in Chicago. Both were preachers of self-help moral righteousness and Black pride, and each respected the star power of the other. Moreover, Farrakhan supplied Jackson with bodyguards. When Jackson entered the campaign, Farrakhan made a rare intervention into electoral politics, buoyantly declaring that he would register to vote for the first time and that all Muslims should support Jackson. For years Jackson had carefully brushed aside Farrakhan’s claim that Whites are a dirty and degen-

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erate race. Jackson did not presume to tell people who were hurting how they should holler, and he believed it was not his responsibility to censure Farrakhan for adhering to a Nation of Islam doctrine about Whites that was a nonstarter for Christians. But the “Hymie” controversy shook Jackson and trapped him. Farrakhan continued to serve as a warm-up speaker for Jackson, portraying him as a victim of bullies and traitors. In Chicago, Jackson stood mutely next to Farrakhan at a rally at which Farrakhan vowed: “We are going to make an example of Milton Coleman. We are going to punish the traitor. . . . One day soon we will punish you with death! This is a fitting punishment for such dogs.”59 Editorialists, Democratic Party officials, and a gusher of others pressed Jackson to repudiate Farrakhan, and he refused to do it. He said he opposed violence and threats of violence by everyone, including Farrakhan. But he would not condemn Farrakhan personally because he didn’t believe in it. Jackson believed in redemption and reaching out. He had already been burned once over the “Hymie” remark, offering a confession that wounded his supporters. He was damned if he would do it again. No Black American came close to Farrakhan at drawing a crowd. Though barely visible to White Americans, he was the only Black American who could pack a stadium with forty thousand people on short notice. Many who attended his spectacle performances did so for the sheer thrill of hearing him cuss out White people. They loved him for expressing Black rage against Whites with no apology whatsoever. Jackson was determined not to put down Farrakhan—and doubly determined after so many demanded it. But Farrakhan hurt the campaign, especially in the threat against Coleman. Jackson tallied the costs and asked Farrakhan to cut the incendiary material. Instead, in a Sunday radio broadcast, Farrakhan described Judaism as a “gutter religion,” declaring that the founding of modern Israel was an “outlaw act” aided by “criminals in the sight of Almighty God.” Now Jackson had no choice. Mondale, Hart, DNC chair Charles T. Manatt, and dozens of newspapers demanded a renunciation, and Jackson delivered one on June 28, 1984, citing the radio broadcast: “I find such statements or comments to be reprehensible and indefensible. I am a Judeo-Christian and the roots of my faith run deep in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Such statements and thoughts have no place in my own thinking or in this campaign.” Jackson said he would not allow Farrakhan to divide the Democratic Party and that Farrakhan was not a member of his campaign. Immediately there were protests that this denunciation did not go far enough, since it made no specific comment on the “gutter religion” slur and it repudiated only certain words of Farrakhan’s, not Farrakhan himself. Perlmutter dolefully remarked that it “took a very, very long time” for Jackson to utter a bare-minimum reproach.60

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Heading into the Democratic convention in San Francisco, Jackson pleaded that “reprehensible” and “indefensible” should have been enough to end the story. He and Farrakhan, he said, “no longer bear the burden of each other’s political points of view.” Farrakhan added that over the years he had said very few things about Jews specifically: “White people, yes, but Jews in particular, no.” Recently it seemed otherwise, he said, “because Jews had been on the attack” against Jackson, so he came to Jackson’s defense. Jackson urged the press to stop purveying the impression that Farrakhan played a major role in his campaign. A few warm-up speeches did not compare to being chair of the Jackson campaign, like Hatcher, or vice chair, like Marion Barry. There was still time for Jews, Christians, and Muslims to come together to create a better world, if the press would allow him to talk about it.61 The stakes were high because Jackson had run a stunning campaign. He hung on through the overwhelmingly White early states, as the also-rans began to drop out in late February, and Jackson broke through in the southern states he had transformed in his registration drives. In eleven southern states, Black registration ballooned by nearly 30 percent from its 1982 levels; in nine of them, there were twice as many new Black voters as new White voters. Jackson won the contests in South Carolina, Louisiana, and Washington, DC, and one of the two contests in Mississippi. He won 24 percent of the vote in New Jersey and just missed a big delegate haul in California by winning 19 percent. In New York he held four or five rallies per day in churches, leading congregations in mass marches to polling places to register for the April primary, where he won 26 percent. He headed to the convention with 3.3 million votes, 18 percent of the total in primaries and caucuses, four contests won, and 358 delegates. His haul of the delegates would have been much higher had the party not required that a candidate win at least 20 percent of a primary or caucus vote to win any delegates at all. Jackson scared Mondale and bewildered him. Mondale had paid his dues in the political trenches and carried on the Humphrey tradition. He believed he knew what politics was, and he greatly admired the movement activism of King, whom he had befriended. He could not, however, fathom Jackson. Jackson was not a politician, had never run for office, had no chance of winning the nomination, and surely didn’t want to help Reagan, so why was he running? He was running to transform the Democratic Party and run again in 1988. Jackson was civil, courtly, and shrewd through primary debates that got very heated between Mondale and Hart. He respected Mondale’s old-school Humphrey liberalism but judged that 1984 was its last hurrah. He didn’t like Hart’s yuppie neoliberalism but realized it had a future. The race was not

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decided until six states voted on June 5; then Jackson used his leverage to change the rules for 1988. He protested to Mondale’s campaign manager Bob Beckel and Mondale operative Bert Lance—Carter’s buddy—that the 20 percent threshold was unjust. Beckel held off Jackson for 1984, needing to secure Mondale’s first-ballot victory, and Lance agreed with Jackson that the rule should be changed. Jackson and Lance commenced a deep friendship during the dickering over the San Francisco convention. The threshold for 1988 was lowered to 15 percent, and Jackson wrested a prime-time speaking slot from a very reluctant Beckel. These were the two concessions that Jackson wanted most. On most issues he lost the argument, especially on eliminating runoff elections, reducing the military budget by one-fourth, and renouncing any nuclear first strike, which infuriated his delegates. They put these issues on the floor at the convention and lost again. Many Jackson delegates wanted to bolt from the convention and form their own party. Jackson talked them down; he was fighting to get into the party. The Mondale team was terrified that Jackson would use his speech to skewer them. Jackson said they would have to wait like everyone else to learn what he would say. He came to San Francisco fresh off another prisoner rescue. During the weekend that Farrakhan had erupted about Jewish religion, Jackson persuaded Castro to release twenty-two Americans held on drug charges and twenty-six Cuban political prisoners. This time Reagan declined to congratulate Jackson, snapping that he didn’t have time “to talk about things like that.” Secretary of State George Shultz charged that Jackson specialized in scandalous propaganda stunts for America’s enemies. Jackson anticipated a press conference in which he called for a new U.S. policy toward Cuba and Nicaragua, but when he returned to Dulles Airport from Cuba he got a barrage of shouted questions about Farrakhan. James Reston chided that Jackson had no business interfering with the rights of the president and the Congress to conduct foreign policy. Reston reprised his hobbyhorse theme that all talk about race is divisive and Black politicians should not tout their blackness. Jackson, he said, was a chief offender, grievously dividing America. The more that Jackson talked about race, the more he provoked White resentment: “Nobody blows the whistle on him. He complains that he has been victimized by the white press. The opposite is the truth: No Presidential candidate in recent memory with so little support has had so much attention from the press or so little investigation into his past personal or financial records.” The Washington Post, at least, remembered there were forty-eight rescued human beings to write about, reporting that they “appeared shell-shocked, glassy-eyed and disoriented, as though they had awakened from a nightmare.” Many broke off their sentences in mid-thought, some

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broke into tears, and all spoke with the hurried anxiety “of men who feared that they would be silenced at any moment.”62 On a Tuesday evening, July 18, 1984, Jackson took the podium at the Democratic convention. People of color had never played a major role at a Democratic convention. The Jackson delegation changed what the party looked like and how it conducted its business. Jackson said they gathered out of their faith in God, their love and respect for their country, and their devotion to the principles of the Democratic Party. Democrats were not a perfect party and “we are not a perfect people,” but all are called to the “perfect mission” to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, house the homeless, teach the illiterate, find employment for the jobless, and choose “the human race over the nuclear race.” Many delegates, Jackson noted, were new to party conventions, coming from the ranks of “the desperate, the damned, the disinherited, the disrespected, and the despised.” They came into the Democratic Party seeking relief and invested their faith and hope in it. He vowed to stand for them, imploring the party not to let them down. Jackson said his campaign had been worth conducting if it healed some wounds of those previously neglected by the party and kindled their hope. He turned it over: If, in my low moments, in word, deed, or attitude, through some error of temper, taste, or tone, I have caused anyone discomfort, created pain, or revived someone’s fears, that was not my truest self. If there were occasions when my grape turned into a raisin and my joy bell lost its resonance, please forgive me. Charge it to my head and not to my heart. My head—so limited in its finitude; my heart, which is boundless in its love for the human family. I am not a perfect servant. I am a public servant doing my best against the odds. As I develop and serve, be patient. God is not finished with me yet.63

The crowd hushed as Jackson rolled through this confession. The television cameras panned over tears streaming down the faces of delegates, and delegates reaching out to each other. The crowd erupted with emotion when Jackson got through it, shouting for reconciliation and applauding it. In my gathering across the continent in Albany, Jackson’s riveting humanity came through to insiders who knew too much and to outsiders just tuning in. It felt more like church than party politics, a point registered by Florida’s Governor Bob Graham, who told the convention after Jackson’s address that anyone not moved by what they just heard might be beyond redemption. But Jackson still had forty minutes to go when he got through his petition for reconciliation. He talked about visiting Humphrey just before he died, who said the crucial thing in life is to forgive each other, redeem each other, and move on. Jackson said this summary was

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exactly right. Americans needed to forgive each other, redeem each other, and move on, recognizing that “our nation is a rainbow—red, yellow, brown, black, and white—and we’re all precious in God’s sight.” America was like a quilt with many patches and colors. He ran through the canon of recent martyrs who died for a better America—Malcolm, King, Robert Kennedy, John Kennedy, Viola Liuzzo—building up to a run about Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney bludgeoned to death in Mississippi and dredged from the depths of a river. This was a set piece in nearly all Jackson’s stump talks. It sent young listeners to learn what he was talking about, and in San Francisco it set up his special word about Blacks and Jews struggling together for justice.64 They had to revive the spirit that once impelled Blacks and Jews to work together, Jackson said, and they had to do it with a broader ecumenical spirit than previously: “We must return to higher ground. We are bound by Moses and Jesus, but also connected with Islam and Muhammad.” The three great monotheistic religions had to learn how to work together, battling against racism, sexism, militarism, anti-Semitism, scapegoating, and being scapegoated. “We must turn from finger pointing to clasped hands.” Jackson declared that the Rainbow Coalition was doing it. It was making room for Arab Americans, who knew the pain of racial and religious rejection, and Hispanic Americans, currently threatened by the Simpson-Mazzoli bill to criminalize any employment of undocumented immigrants (which became law in 1986). Others were briefly listed—Asian Americans, disabled veterans, young people, small farmers, and gays and lesbians. Jackson lingered longer over Native Americans, “the most exploited people of all, a people with the greatest moral claim among us.” The Democratic Party had to support Native Americans as they sought the restoration of their land and water rights and the preservation of their ancestral homelands: “They can never receive a fair share for all they have given us.”65 When Jackson spoke in churches, he deftly skewered Reagan’s attempts to invoke church idioms he did not understand. This was a fertile field, since Reagan pretended to be religious and Jackson had a slew of counterfactuals. The one he chose for San Francisco mocked Reagan’s use of the invocation “Let us pray.” It seemed to him that Reagan misunderstood the structure of prayer. Reagan, Jackson said, cut energy assistance to the poor, lunch programs for children, and funds for job training before announcing to an empty table, “Let us pray.” Jackson deadpanned that this is not how religious people pray: “You thank the Lord for the food that you are about to receive, not the food that just left. I think that we should pray, but don’t pray for the food that left. Pray for the man that took the food to leave. We need a change. We need a change in November.”66

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Many Democrats who gleefully welcomed this species of ridicule in San Francisco were hearing it for the first time. Some believed that ministers should stay out of politics and that Democrats should leave religion to the Republicans. Jackson compelled them to consider how ridiculous and self-defeating this secular mentality seemed to religious veterans of the civil rights movement. The Democratic Party was improving, he said. In twenty years, it had gone from abusing Black Mississippi delegates in Atlantic City to welcoming the Rainbow Coalition in San Francisco. Some planks were still missing, but the party had a solid foundation on which to build. Jackson did not mention that he had to battle with party officials who wanted Blacks to vote Democratic and leave them to run the party. He tweaked a saying of Jesus: “We must not save the world and lose our souls.” In this context, saving was winning elections by exploiting racism and losing was selling out the Voting Rights Act. Jackson said the soul of the party was at stake in the struggle to enforce voting rights everywhere at every level: “When one of us rises, all of us will rise. Justice is the way out.” He reached back to his childhood pastor, D. S. Sample, who loved to preach on the saying of Jesus, “If I be lifted up, all shall be drawn to me.” As a youth, Jackson didn’t understand what this meant. He was a minister before he grasped that when truth is raised up, it has a magnetic power to draw people upward.67 The campaign had begun with Jackson’s registration chant in southern Black churches, “Our time has come.” In San Francisco he dispensed with rhyming oratory but doubled down on “our time has come,” singing it nine times in his closing run, interspersed with religious maxims: “Suffering breeds character. . . . Our faith, hope, and dreams will prevail. . . . Weeping has endured for nights, but now joy cometh in the morning. . . . No grave can hold our body down. . . . No lie can live forever. . . . We must leave racial battle ground and come to economic common ground and moral higher ground. . . . We come from disgrace to amazing grace. . . . There will be a change because our time has come.”68 Television pundits fumbled for worthy analogues at party conventions, reaching back to William Jennings Bryan’s “cross of gold” barnburner of 1896. As a marker that the civil rights movement was alive and growing, nothing compared to Jackson’s oration since King’s Mountaintop Sermon. Jackson came in for a downpour of praise, knowing his life had changed. All the hectic striving of Breadbasket and PUSH to keep something going had been worth it. He heard it constantly, though not by his closest allies, and only grudgingly by the Mondale team. Daughtry and most of the senior staff protested that Jackson had lurched overboard with conciliatory gestures and begged for admission to the party establishment. Hatcher surmised that Jackson did it because he wanted to be Mondale’s running mate.

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Nobody on Jackson’s team believed he had any chance of being tapped by Mondale. Only Jackson believed it, clinging to a fantasy. Mondale selected New York Congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro as his running mate, and Jackson fumed at not being considered for it. Brazile joined Ferraro’s staff and Jackson raged that Brazile had betrayed him. Yet Jackson threw himself into the campaign, working harder for the Mondale-Ferraro ticket than either of them did. He crisscrossed the country, crammed his schedule with campaign events, and gave bravura performances. He bristled at being excluded from Mondale’s inner circle and said so, which irritated Mondale and produced some poor-Mondale sympathy from the White press. Reston described Jackson as “a proud and arrogant” loner who played by his own rules, conducted a Black campaign while denying it, and compelled Mondale to grovel to him. According to Reston, Jackson built his career on a shakedown threat that he now applied to Mondale: “It is in the power of my hand to do you hurt.” In other words, “One demand leads to another. Give him a hand and he asks for an arm.” Reston wavered on whether Jackson’s overflowing rallies were worth the downside for Mondale. The crowds that thronged to hear Jackson were a foreign country to Reston. Mondale, at least, recognized that Jackson was his only hope of beating Reagan in many states.69 Jackson seized the moment, playing to the largest crowds of his life, basking in the attention of the broad public he had long sought. He brushed off the aides who recoiled at his desire to be an insider and admonished the Mondale aides who kept him at arm’s length. On the campaign trail he was treated mostly with awed respect. White Democrats told Jackson they cried during his convention speech. To Black audiences, Jackson was routinely introduced as “our president” and “our great prince of Black America.” California State Assembly Speaker Willie Brown hailed Jackson as the Jackie Robinson of politics. Wilkins said Jackson was to politics “what Duke Ellington was to jazz and what Magic Johnson is to basketball.” James Baldwin applauded Jackson for showing Black youngsters that it was not utterly hopeless for them in the racist United States. Even the SCLC eminences in Atlanta came around, congratulating Jackson for breaking through. One by one, starting with Coretta King, the King veterans in Atlanta told Jackson they were proud of him. All was forgiven. Jackson was deeply grateful to hear it and to be treated in Atlanta with respect. Still, he nursed the memory that they had rejected and harmed him.70 He sustained a running argument with supporters who had wanted to bolt in San Francisco, and a month after that, and a year later, and ten years later. To them, the fall of 1984 was the moment to found a liberationist party. They believed he could become a historic figure only if he leveraged his fame to create

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a third party. Robert Lucas, a stalwart of militant Black politics in Chicago, kept waiting for the militant Jackson to emerge and was sorely disappointed; he concluded that Jackson lacked political courage. Political scientist Adolph L. Reed Jr. said the deeper problem was that Jackson synthesized everything wrong with Black politics. According to Reed, the Jackson campaign was a ritualistic exercise, “a media-conveyed politics of symbolism” distracting from what Black politics should be about—opposing the hegemony of capitalism. Jackson skyrocketed because the media could not tell the difference “between a social movement and a group of people shouting in a church.” Black politicians understood the difference, but Jackson’s media power blew them away. The politicians were vulnerable because they accomplished very little for most Black Americans, so they climbed on the bandwagon, pretending to believe that Jackson had immense grassroots support. Reed put it sharply: “A groundswell was created with mirrors as the mass media colluded in reducing the terms of black interest in the 1984 primary season to the status of Jackson’s candidacy.”71 Jackson soared because Black politics was weak and confused, the Black politicians capitulated to him, the media loved him, and the White left rolled over, too. Reed said the regnant myth of the Black church was a chief cause of this sorry picture. It exaggerated the role of the church in the civil rights movement and the church’s ostensible centrality in Black life. Reed knocked down strawfigure claims that the church was the primary authorizing force of the civil rights movement. Many Black churches opposed the movement, he recalled. Convening power and authorizing power are two different things, and many who worked through the churches in the 1950s and 1960s were not there for religious reasons. Reed observed that Black elected officials increasingly came from the ranks of secular professions such as law, teaching, and engineering. This salutary development held the promise of developing a substantive Black politics not dependent on the idioms, ethos, and emotionalism of the church. But minister-politicians like Young, Fauntroy, Gray, and, especially, Jackson were throwbacks to the generations when a Black political leader had to speak the language of the church. To put it concisely, the Jackson phenomenon “represents a resurgence of the principle of clerical political spokesmanship.”72 Reed was dead against a resurgence of that. Thus, he described the ascension of Jackson as a baleful retrogression. To be sure, he allowed, many hurting people responded to “the cathartic nature of Jackson’s appeal, along with the correlative ideological mystique of a church-based politics.” Reed countered that Jackson’s project was capitalist and elitist long before he decided to run for president. Jackson was the foremost proponent “of the most elite-centered tendency in contemporary racial advocacy.” He switched to a mass agenda “only after fail-

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ing to generate a consensus around support for his effort in internal elite circles.” Shaking down corporations to create Black elites took Jackson only so far, so he ran for president, skipping the usual offices further down. Anything further down would have felt beneath him. Reed argued that Jackson’s turn to the grass roots might have done some good if not for three things: (1) It was a Black church enterprise hyped by the media; (2) the Rainbow stuff was window dressing for a Black campaign; and (3), most important, Jackson “proposed no substantive departure from the morass in which black political elites are trapped.” According to Reed, driving up the registration numbers of Black Americans was not a serious rationale for a political campaign. He stressed that Jackson had no ideology, having merely thrown together a grab bag of policies. Reed surmised that Jackson might be incapable of growing in this area, constrained as he was by his “idiosyncratic opportunism, inconstancy, and self-aggrandizement.” But more important, Jackson won spectacular success in Black politics by exemplifying and exploiting all that was wrong with Black politics.73 Reed rightly insisted that targeting corporations is the least progressive form of economic justice activism and that Jackson was lamentably averse to ideological analysis and conviction. The undertheorized hyperactivity of PUSH passed into the Rainbow, where Jackson threw together a policy agenda befitting a grassroots campaign, dumping the elite orientation of PUSH. But Reed wrongly denigrated Jackson’s achievement. Changing the Democratic Party was far more important than espousing Reed’s neo-Marxism or anything like it. Reed belonged to DSA, which brimmed with intellectuals and sophisticated critiques of capitalism. Had Jackson’s policy advisor and deputy campaign manager, Ron Walters, drawn on DSA policy briefs, the Jackson campaign would have made a stronger case for its positions on economic restructuring, labor policy, and military spending. Jackson, however, achieved exactly what DSA failed to do—recruit and mobilize masses of Black Americans. DSA had Black intellectual stars like Reed, Michael Eric Dyson, Obery M. Hendricks Jr., bell hooks, Manning Marable, Corey D. B. Walker, and Cornel West, and precious few African Americans who were not academics. Unlike DSA, the Democratic Party convention of 1984 looked like America, because of Jackson.74 Jackson reasoned that he was not so different from King, who stuck with his movement base while pushing to open up the political system. But Jackson dragged his movement base into the political system, picturing himself as the first Black president. Those of us who accepted this inner-outer dynamic and worked in Jackson’s campaigns usually did not conceive the Rainbow as merely the vehicle of his desire to be president. Some, to be sure, were essentially Jackson fans, and some made a home in the Democratic Party. But many of us

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who hung on for two campaigns conceived the Rainbow itself as the answer to the inner-outer impasse. The promise of the Rainbow was to change the reality on the ground, insinuating the ethos and values of the movement into the system, just as the left wing of the social gospel had always advocated. We were out to change the system fundamentally by breaking into it, more or less in Jackson’s fashion, without his skittishness about democratic Socialism. Reed brushed aside the fact that many Rainbow activists were as deeply committed as he was to achieving structural alternatives to capitalism. He could not take seriously those who hitched their political hopes to Jackson or, worse yet, shared his religiosity. But Jackson was dead serious about aiming for the presidency, and we were serious about building the Rainbow movement whether or not it led to the White House. The party owed Jackson after the 1984 election. Ten million Black Americans voted for Mondale, 90 percent of Black voters. Jackson’s campaign brought a new generation of Black organizers into Democratic politics, notably two young field directors, Brazile and Minyon Moore. He continued his voter registration barnstorming into the 1986 interim elections, which played a decisive role in winning back Democratic control of the U.S. Senate. John Breaux in Louisiana, Wyche Fowler Jr. in Georgia, Terry Sanford in North Carolina, Alan Cranston in California, and Richard Shelby in Alabama won elections in which they lost the majority of White votes. Jackson’s registration drives also figured significantly in the elections of Barbara Mikulski in Maryland, Bob Graham in Florida, Tim Wirth in Colorado, and Tom Daschle in South Dakota. These Democratic victories deprived Reagan of the congressional votes he needed to complete his second-term agenda. Giving credit where it was due usually did not occur. Democratic operatives were chary about what they owed to Jackson. Bob Beckel was an exception, acknowledging that many White Democrats owed their careers to Jackson. Jackson was fond of saying that White progressives could win only if Black Americans turned out to vote. He made it work for others while eyeing 1988 for himself. A IM IN G F OR TH E WH ITE HOUS E

He planned all along to run again, though Jackson had to overcome the passionate opposition of Jackie Jackson, who was against enduring another round of death threats and bulletproof vests. The specter of being cut down in a moment had shadowed Jackson since King was assassinated. Plots to kill him were discovered in 1969 and 1974, and the PUSH staff heard about other threats

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over the years, until Jackson ran for president, when the death threats exploded into the hundreds. His run for president triggered countless unknown potential killers. Jackson heard about it every week in 1984 because his Secret Service contingent kept him apprised of its concerns. He knew it would be worse the second time around, telling his family he would not let the dream busters win.75 The Rainbow Coalition geared up for a different kind of campaign. It held conferences on deindustrialization, corporate flight, agribusiness, family farming, and labor policy, vowing to confront the economic violence of neoliberalism. Large delegations of farmers began to show up at Rainbow conferences, along with the Socialist leader of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, William Winpisinger, and workers cast aside by outsourcing companies. Michael Harrington, America’s leading democratic Socialist and the cofounder of DSA, made his way to the Jackson camp, no longer believing that Social Democrats should align with the fading Mondale wing of the Democratic Party. Jackson enlisted two savvy politicos to steer his 1988 campaign, Bert Lance and Ann Lewis. Lance worked his friends in the party establishment, telling them the party was overdue to embrace Jackson. Lewis, the political director of the Democratic National Committee from 1981 to 1985 and a major player in Jewish civic organizations, ran Jackson’s 1988 campaign. Enlisting Lewis was a measure of Jackson’s seriousness about winning the White House. She told interviewers the 1984 candidacy was a crusade and the 1988 candidacy would be a real campaign.76 The second campaign built on the achievements of the first. Now Jackson commanded the support of nearly all Black American voters, although the entire Black Caucus kept carefully distant from him and the heavyweight Black mayors—Andrew and Coleman Young, Lottie Shackelford of Little Rock, and Harvey Gantt of Charlotte—were still against him. Jackson lured Robert Borosage from the left-wing Institute for Policy Studies to be his issues director, determined to put economic justice front and center. He still lacked money, but he flew in a DC-9. The prospect of a large field favored Jackson, suggesting that 30 percent totals in the early primaries and caucuses might build an insurmountable lead. Reagan got embroiled in a damaging scandal over his administration’s sale of weapons to the Iranian government to fund the Contra rebels in Nicaragua. The Iran-Contra scheme was illegal on both sides, violating an arms embargo on Iran and a congressional prohibition on funding the Contras. Democrats piled into the 1988 race, believing that Republicans were vulnerable. Hart was the early front-runner, but he flamed out over tabloid accusations of extramarital affairs. That left Jackson with the largest core of support through the entire 1987 run-up season. Senator Joe Biden of Delaware and Representative

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Patricia Schroeder of Colorado dropped out in September 1987, he because of a plagiarism scandal and she because of fund-raising failure. Jackson’s competition slimmed to a liberal-leaning technocrat, Massachusetts’ Governor Michael Dukakis, three heartland moderates—Representative Richard Gephardt of Missouri, Arizona’s former governor Bruce Babbitt, and Senator Albert Gore of Tennessee—and one unreconstructed liberal, Senator Paul Simon of Illinois. Dukakis touted his cerebral acumen, Gephardt ran a neo-protectionist campaign targeting Japan and South Korea, Babbitt advocated a national sales tax, Gore stressed his electability as a southerner, and Simon gave professorial lectures about poverty and economic fairness. Gephardt, Babbitt, and Gore were leading players in the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), which sought in the wake of Mondale’s blowout defeat to pull the Democratic Party to the center or center-right. Jackson did not get front-runner treatment. The media still treated him as a race-hustling burlesque figure—shallow, ambulance chasing, and marginal. It was slow to notice that he was building a broad base that made winning imaginable. Jackson went to places where people had lost their farms and manufacturing jobs. He talked about companies moving to tax havens, laid-off workers searching for jobs, poorly paid domestic workers taking the early bus, and millions of people lacking health insurance. He connected with angry, anxious, hurting crowds of people, often turning them into standing throngs shouting, “Win, Jesse, win!” He said that Blacks and working-class Whites had to come together to claim their right to a decent life. Repeating a symbolic gesture from his previous campaign, in July 1987 Jackson made a call on George Wallace. Wallace had survived an assassination attempt during his 1972 presidential campaign and was bound to a wheelchair. In 1983 he was much diminished by pain and paralysis, but still sharp, reflecting dolefully on the dangers of running for president and playfully reminding Jackson to keep the hay down where the goats could get it. Four years later Wallace was shrunken, racked with pain, prone to bouts of lacerating sorrow over his career, and defeated. Jackson prayed for his healing, and Wallace cried out, “Jesse, thank you for coming, and I love you.” Jackson told reporters that Wallace regretted the hateful parts of his legacy. The first visit had smacked of cringe-worthy opportunism, but by 1987 Jackson had spoken so many times about the troubles of working-class Whites that he was known for it; even Wallace could see his sincerity.77 In the debates he struggled at first to find the right tone. The first Democratic debate was held on July 1, 1987, in Houston and moderated by conservative icon William F. Buckley Jr. There were six candidates, already announced, plus Jackson, still to announce. Gephardt denied defensively that this group deserved

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the name already hung on it, “the Seven Dwarfs.” Nobody shone at the first debate. Jackson droned his talking points, sounding like the others, and flubbed Buckley’s question about which portrait he would remove from the Oval Office. Jackson said he would take down Herbert Hoover because the Palmer Raids of 1919 grossly violated the rights of Americans. Hoover was not responsible for the Palmer Raids; meanwhile, the others dodged the question, miffing Jackson. Jackson got better after that, becoming the only one who was buoyant, not anxious, and freewheeling, not scripted. The others hibernated with their advisors to prepare, rehearsing their lines; Jackson showed up and winged it, trusting himself to say what he believed. Opening up allowed him to flash his sense of humor. Biden tried to score points by assuring audiences he would never choose Jackson as his running mate. At a Washington roast of Senator Bill Bradley, a former Rhodes Scholar and New York Knicks star, Jackson got the crowd chortling by referring to Biden as his vice presidential running mate. He turned to Bradley, marveling that Bradley overcame great odds to become a basketball star—white skin, an upper-middle-class upbringing, Princeton. When Bradley was a child, Jackson said, he chanted, “I AM SOMEBODY.” The crowd roared with laughter, and Jackson gave Bradley a Black Power handshake.78 Voting season approached, and the candidates debated at the University of New Hampshire on January 24, 1988. Hart had rejoined the contest, regretting that he let the tabloids drive him out. He and Babbitt warned that Democrats had to change their tax-and-spend image or would lose again. The public didn’t trust them to pay the bills. The other candidates accepted the premise of this argument while contending for wiggle room within it; even Simon touted his fiscal sobriety. Only Jackson rejected the premise after seven years of massive Reagan deficits. Jackson and Simon had similar policies, but Jackson said the message was more important in 1988 than the policies. It was ridiculous for Democrats to worry that somehow they were still the party of deficits and irresponsibility. Reaganism was a party, Jackson declared—a roaring splurge of tax cuts for the rich combined with mindless military spending that created fantastic debts while gouging the middle class, the working class, and especially the poor. Jackson said he cared especially about the poor and the working class, and so should the Democrats. He put it personally, speaking calmly, with hands folded, wearing a natty gray suit, white shirt, and a dark red tie: Those who enjoyed the party should pay for it. Those who were not invited should not have to pay for it.79 This message got crowds cheering for Jackson to win wherever he went. He told them 11 million new jobs were created under seven years of Reagan and 6 million of those paid less than $7,000 per year. He riffed on speech drafts that Harrington

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wrote for the campaign, explaining that a massive structural economic shift greased by bad politics drove down the standard of living for workers and drove down prices for farmers. Jackson told his crowds wherever he went that their jobs didn’t go from White to Black, from male to female, or from New York to South Carolina: Your jobs went to South Korea and Taiwan and South Africa and Haiti and Chile. . . . Why did they take the jobs to South Korea? Is it because the American worker is not productive, is not literate, does not work hard? That’s not the case. Workers in South Korea don’t have the right to vote, can’t organize trade unions, can’t demonstrate legally. South Koreans did not take jobs from us, G.M. took jobs to them—with government incentives. They close down a plant in America, they get a tax break. They take a job to South Korea, they get another tax break. They took our jobs, our capital, our tax base, our hopes and our dreams. . . . Friends, you need Jesse Jackson for President.80

Jackson called on America to renew its social welfare programs and to repeal Reagan’s tax cuts for the rich. He proposed a new version of the Works Progress Administration to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure and to provide jobs for all Americans. He advocated a 15 percent cut in the Pentagon budget, an immediate freeze on the development and deployment of nuclear weapons, and negotiations with the Soviet Union for disarmament. He said America should stop punishing drug users with harsh mandatory prison sentences and start punishing money-laundering bankers. He called for a single-payer system of universal health care, ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, reparations for slavery, and New Deal–type programs supporting family farmers. He contended that South Africa should be declared a rogue nation and the United States should help create a Palestinian state. He called for a renewed federal commitment to public education, free tuition at community colleges, and stricter enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. Jackson’s positions on these issues forced the other candidates—except Simon—to squirm, equivocate, and prevaricate about why they sympathized but disagreed. Jackson was forthright and they were not. Dukakis, in particular, was forced uncomfortably to explain why Jackson’s positions would not end up in any Democratic platform supporting his candidacy. Primary season came and the money disparity was severe. Dukakis and Gore spent millions on television ads, while Jackson lacked money for ads or internal polling. His polls were the USA Today polls. Gephardt won the Iowa caucuses, Dukakis won New Hampshire, Jackson finished a strong second to Dukakis in Minnesota, and the following week Jackson ran a remarkably strong second to Dukakis in Maine and won in Vermont. Democratic officials blanched with

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anxiety. If Jackson ran this strong in lily-White states like Maine and Vermont, had the party miscalculated? Would the party’s Super Tuesday firewall keep him quarantined? In 1985 a group of centrist and center-right Democrats had founded the DLC, a nonprofit corporation created to pull the party toward them. Their model was the Coalition for a Democratic Majority, a neoconservative group founded in 1973 to oppose the McGovern wing of the Democratic Party. Virginia’s Governor Chuck Robb, Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia, Florida’s Governor Lawton Chiles, Arkansas’s Governor Bill Clinton, and party official Al From were ringleaders of the DLC, along with Babbitt, Gephardt, and Gore. From ran the organization after serving from 1981 to 1985 as executive director of the House Democratic Caucus. The group’s original objective was simple—ensure that the next Democratic presidential candidate was a southern conservative, preferably Nunn or Robb. The DLC invented Super Tuesday to attain this objective, selling party officials on it: twenty-one contests on the same early date, including the entire Deep South except South Carolina. The idea of Super Tuesday was to combine the wallop of the southern states to weed out the northern liberals. Gore threw in after Nunn and Robb declined to run, believing that being the only “real Southerner” in the race would favor him. The DLC and the party pros had enough clueless arrogance to overlook Jackson’s finishing first or second in 1984 in seven of the southern states they combined for Super Tuesday. They set up Super Tuesday to nominate a southern conservative, but, inadvertently, they set up Jackson.81 Jackson ran first or second in sixteen of the twenty-one Super Tuesday contests. He beat Gore in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Virginia to finish first. He beat Gore in Florida and Texas, which Dukakis won, and lost narrowly to Gore in North Carolina, finishing second in all three states. Overall Jackson won 27 percent of the vote in the South, more than anyone else, and claimed almost one-third of its delegates. He ran strongly in Hawaii, Idaho, Maryland, Massachusetts, Missouri, Nevada, Rhode Island, Tennessee, and Washington, finishing second. When the day was over, Jackson was the leading candidate in popular votes, and the party bigwigs were in full-panic mode. They whined on the record and off about their terrible predicament: They couldn’t win with Jackson and couldn’t win without him. Gore had enough money and powerful backers to stay in the race, but Super Tuesday, his supposed path to the nomination, demolished his chances. His message was that Dukakis was too liberal to win in November. Now the party officials began to favor Dukakis, their only alternative to Jackson. They consoled themselves that they still had a second firewall of their invention—the 645 unpledged “superdelegates” consisting

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of themselves and the Democratic members of Congress. If they had to defeat Jackson by defying the will of the primaries and caucuses, they were prepared to do it. The race narrowed to Jackson versus Dukakis, while Gore, Gephardt, and Simon hung on, hoping for a miracle or the vice presidency. Jackson won in Alaska, South Carolina, and Puerto Rico, and Dukakis won in Colorado, Kansas, and Connecticut. Gore didn’t win anywhere in the two weeks following Super Tuesday, and he barely qualified for any delegates. The Michigan caucuses felt like a very big deal by the time they occurred on March 26. Jackson still hadn’t won a big industrial northern state, because Simon had edged him in Illinois, but if Jackson could win the next big state, he might be unstoppable. So we said in Michigan, where I had moved in 1987. At the age of thirty-five I had begun my career as an academic, at Kalamazoo College in Kalamazoo, Michigan. This was a very different cultural and political landscape from the one I had known for eight years as a solidarity organizer and pastor in Upstate New York. But I had grown up in semirural mid-Michigan, and college-town Kalamazoo was a progressive oasis by comparison, an anomaly in the southwest region of the state dominated by very conservative, Republican, evangelical Grand Rapids. My introduction to Kalamazoo’s surprisingly vibrant left-liberal community occurred through the Jackson campaign. Larry Alcoff, a union organizer, and Linda Alcoff, a feminist social philosopher beginning her academic career, moved to Kalamazoo at the same time as I. Larry threw himself immediately into the Jackson campaign, helping build a local powerhouse from a modest network left over from 1984, sweeping his spouse and me into his marathon workdays. The Kalamazoo area had all the groups that Jackson targeted, especially antiwar activists, feminists, blue-collar unions, church activists, teacher unions, students, and academics. They had not come together since the Vietnam War, until the Rainbow Coalition of 1988 fused many of them. Michigan had been an open primary state until the galling disaster of 1972 drove the party to change its rules. Republicans flooded the Democratic contest that year, and Wallace won the Michigan primary in a landslide. The Democrats responded by instituting a caucus system that drew much smaller crowds. Our student volunteers were experiencing their first campaign. They asked if most campaigns were like this; we said no, this was different. We felt it through February and March—Jackson was surging, putting into question the customary default of the veterans, “What matters is the movement.” Many of us had spent twenty years trying to gin up something deserving of the word “movement.” We invoked the word for every little group we founded and felt the

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absurdity of it. The gestural practice of aspiring to mass movement status was a self-inflicted reproach, hardening our demoralization. Suddenly Jackson’s campaign was not only a movement; it was a serious bid to win the White House. Jackson came to Kalamazoo and packed our largest venue, Miller Auditorium at Western Michigan University. He didn’t soar or perform call-and-response in Black church style. He was intensely low-key, determined, serious, and encouraging. He intertwined set pieces with current events, telling us to believe what we were seeing—this thing was real. We could win Michigan, and if we won a big state like Michigan, there was no stopping this train. He crushed the field in Michigan. Jackson won 113,777 raw votes and eightytwo delegates; Dukakis won 61,674 votes and forty-five delegates; and the other three didn’t come close to winning a delegate, despite campaigning seriously. Jackson swept Detroit’s Black neighborhoods, winning some wards on the West Side by margins of twenty to one, despite Coleman Young’s endorsement of Dukakis. He won 20 percent of the White vote overall, four times what he had drawn in 1984, which the media had not seen coming. The New York Times was stunned that Jackson routed Dukakis in Flint, Lansing, and Kalamazoo, although the Times duly noted that Jackson drew “surprisingly large crowds of both blacks and whites in the last few days.” The Chicago Tribune protested that Michigan Democratic officials dragged out their official results because they choked on the news they were forced to report. Jackson commended the voters for “responding to authenticity and message and soul over just money and mechanics.” “Mechanics” was code for “how Dukakis talks.” The Tribune judged that Michigan had settled whether Dukakis was a “deeply flawed presidential candidate.” The answer, the paper said, was obviously yes. Voters liked him more or less, but Dukakis was too cerebral, technocratic, and calculating to inspire warm feelings in almost anyone, especially anyone with a blue collar.82 That was the magical evening of the Jackson campaign. The candidates headed to Milwaukee for a party dinner, and Jackson oscillated between ebullience and grave seriousness, feeling the weight of the moment. After thirty-one primaries and caucuses, he was leading the popular vote and only slightly behind Dukakis in delegates. Many considered for the first time, in panic or glee, that Jackson might win the nomination. Time captured the moment, putting a half-smiling Jackson on its cover, arms folded, under an all-caps headline, “JESSE!?” No Democratic official of any note had endorsed Jackson to that point, and none ever did. Not a single member of the Congressional Black Caucus stepped across the establishment line to support him. The mayor of Burlington, Vermont, Bernie Sanders, was the closest thing to an exception, except Sanders was not a Democrat. Lance organized a breakfast meeting just

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after the Michigan caucuses at which Clark Clifford, Frank Mankiewicz, John Kenneth Galbraith, and other nonpolitician luminaries met with Jackson in DC. No endorsements were requested or made. It was a breakthrough just to arrange some polite conversation among Jackson and some party eminences of the past.83 Wisconsin was next, and Jackson enthralled huge crowds at every stop. He proclaimed that Dr. King’s heart rejoiced at the spectacle, and the crowds roared in reply, “Win, Jesse, win!” Jackson blasted Chrysler’s recent decision to close an assembly plant in Kenosha that was previously owned by American Motors, railing passionately against plant closings. Meanwhile, he told his staff the time had come to stop thinking like mere campaigners. They needed to imagine themselves as members of a White House staff and behave accordingly. Jackson didn’t see what was coming. The crowds were enormous and buoyant, the polls moved in his direction, and Dukakis had anemic crowds that he bored. Underneath the appearances, however, it was gut-check time for voters who couldn’t picture Jackson as president. In Wisconsin, fear was surging, but quietly. It was too late in the process for many White liberal Democrats to risk a feel-good vote for Jackson. On voting day, April 5, Dukakis beat Jackson by 47 percent to 30 percent. It was a staggering blow to the Jackson team, yielding evidence of the “Bradley effect”: White voters cannot be trusted to vote for Black candidates even when they claim otherwise. Many Democratic politicians had held off endorsing Dukakis because that would look like a racially motivated drive to stop Jackson. Wisconsin gave them cover to come out for Dukakis. To the party establishment, Wisconsin restored a sense of normality to the race, and relief.84 Yet Jackson was still leading. Losing in Wisconsin hurt badly only because he had rocked the state all week and expectations were high. Two weeks separated the Wisconsin and New York primaries. Jackson was optimistic, remembering that his campaign rebounded in New York in 1984 after he survived the “Hymie” and Farrakhan controversies. He thought that was behind him and that Ann Lewis gave him cover. New York’s Mayor Ed Koch contended otherwise as the ballots were counted in Wisconsin, telling reporters that Jews would be “crazy” to vote for Jackson. Koch was a jaunty, combative, wisecracking street fighter who had become popular mostly by enjoying his job and spouting cheeky salvos to the press during a dismal period. The last thing he worried about was being unfair to Jackson. Koch cited Jackson’s support of Arafat and the PLO, and his supposed equation of the PLO with the Israeli government. His feeling about Jackson, he said, was very much like what Jackson would feel about any candidate who praised South African Prime Minister P. W. Botha.

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According to Koch, most Black Americans were anti-Semitic, and Jackson had an especially bad case of it. He vowed that Jackson would encounter plenty of New York Democrats who didn’t blanch at stopping the Black candidate.85 Some tried to warn Jackson what was coming. Ron Walters said he could understand why American Jews might dislike Jackson because he, Walters, was a Black nationalist who understood Jewish nationalism. If he were Jewish, he wouldn’t like Jackson either. Walters said there was no alliance between Blacks and Jews to repair or renew. There was only, for now, a struggle between them over the power that Jews held and Blacks lacked. When Black Americans achieved equal power, an alliance might be possible again. Jackson agreed that any putative alliance between Blacks and Jews had to be one of equals or, at least, an agreed aspiration to equality. He tried to finesse the issue in 1988 by relying on the latter caveat: When Blacks and Jews worked together, they almost always won. If New Yorkers saw his goodwill and his desire to repair the alliance, the New York campaign would go well.86 This fond hope was quickly dispelled. Jackson encountered a seething hostility in New York that stunned him and made him physically ill. Koch likened himself to Paul Revere, alerting the city and state against an enemy invader. He tried to revive Gore’s moribund campaign by endorsing him, and Gore played along, reciting the litany of Jackson’s putative offenses against Israel and Jews, adding that New Yorkers surely didn’t want a preacher in the White House. Koch prodded the press to ask Jackson about the Arafat hug, his welcome in Nablus, his friendship with Farrakhan, and even the bloody turtleneck in Memphis. The press, pro-Koch and not, badgered Jackson mercilessly, making nearly every campaign appearance a battleground. Borosage said the New York primary felt like a gang war—“Everyplace he goes, it’s anti-Semitism and Hymie-town, as if no other issues mattered.” It was so bad that Jackson declined to appear before any Jewish groups and even to walk in the Salute to Israel Day parade on Fifth Avenue. He reasoned that any such appearance would provoke an incendiary incident. Jackson got six death threats in eleven days and donned a heavy blue bulletproof raincoat for protection. Near the end he told a packed auditorium at the Manhattan Hilton that New York poured more hate on him than anyplace he had gone. Only in New York did a leading official raise “a race or religious litmus test as a basis for relating to our campaign.”87 The toll on him showed. Jackson’s face puffed up, he felt sick and exhausted; he dragged himself to podiums, and he faltered. The New York Times editorialized that Koch’s “loudly hostile” treatment of Jackson led Jackson’s supporters “to complain of racism,” but by historical standards, “this year’s New York Democratic primary has been a civilized affair.” Actually, it was ugly, raucous,

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polarizing, and uncivilized, except for Dukakis, who won by primly staying out of the crossfire. New Yorkers did not reward Gore for Koch’s ministrations on his behalf. They chose Dukakis with 51 percent of the vote, Jackson won 37 percent, and Gore bottomed out at 10 percent. Jackson won in New York City, receiving 98 percent of the votes cast by Blacks and 63 percent by Hispanics, which set up David Dinkins the following year to become New York’s first Black mayor by defeating Koch. The New York primary was a fight over the increasing power of Blacks in city and state politics. Jackson took belated satisfaction in his New York campaign after Dinkins won the mayoralty. But at the time he was battered almost to the point of physical collapse.88 New York effectively ended the battle for the nomination. There were thirteen remaining contests, but New York settled that the nominee would be Dukakis, who rolled to victories in Pennsylvania and California that carried him to a first-ballot victory at the convention in Atlanta. Overall, Dukakis won slightly over 10 million votes to Jackson’s nearly 7 million votes. Jackson believed his second-place finish entitled him to the vice presidential nomination. This time he said it loudly, wanting desperately to be chosen. There was never any chance of that. The low-key, analytical Dukakis would have been completely overshadowed by Jackson, so he took the same tack as Mondale, trying to keep Jackson at arm’s length without alienating his following. Dukakis played it coyly in early July, claiming to consider Jackson for the vice presidency. He and Kitty Dukakis hosted Jesse and Jackie Jackson on the Fourth of July at their home in Brookline, Massachusetts, where Jackson hoped that Dukakis would make the offer. Dukakis asked Jackson if he would accept it if offered. Jackson said yes, why did he ask? Dukakis said he was speaking to various candidates and would get back to him. Jackson was crestfallen and enraged, realizing this was a patronizing show; Dukakis had never considered asking him.89 Dukakis chose Senator Lloyd Bentsen of Texas, betting on Texas just as Kennedy did in 1960. Jackson assembled a caravan of seven buses called the Rainbow Express to make the convention journey from Chicago to Atlanta. There were rallies in Indianapolis, Louisville, Nashville, and Chattanooga trumpeting the fact that Jackson brought seven million votes to the convention. Gephardt and other party eminences urged Dukakis to find out what Jackson wanted; Dukakis couldn’t see why he should. He was the winner and this was his convention. But this was not his convention; Jackson overshadowed every part of it. Jacqueline Jackson, twelve years old, introduced her father, giving way in succession to Yusef Jackson, Santita Jackson, Jonathan Jackson, and Jesse L. Jackson Jr., who went longer, declaring that there is no shame in aiming high and falling short; what is shameful is not to aim high. This time Jackson gave a

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speech beginning with Rosa Parks, who came out for a bow; moved to the set piece on Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney; invoked King, whose grave lay only a few miles away; graciously saluted Dukakis, who “always resisted the temptation to stoop to demagoguery”; and moved on to his themes about common ground and working together. He ran through all the groups in the Rainbow and the issues on which they had to work together, commending the gay rights movement for its battle against HIV/AIDS and discrimination, “but your patch is not big enough.” No identity group can achieve justice on its own. Jackson was sufficiently succinct to leave time for something; the crowd could feel this speech was building toward it.90 He went personal, first about the poor, then about himself. Most poor people are not on welfare, Jackson said: “They catch the early bus. They work every day. They raise other people’s children. They work every day. They clean the streets. They work every day. They drive dangerous cabs. They work every day. They change the beds you slept in in these hotels last night and can’t get a union contract. They work every day.” People called them lazy and it wasn’t right, so someone had to defend them; Jackson said this was where he came in. People heard him carry on about being hopeful, studying hard, not giving up, and quitting drugs, and claimed he didn’t understand. Jackson begged to differ: “You see me on TV, but you don’t know the me that makes me, me. They wonder, ‘what makes Jesse run?’ because they see me running for the White House. They don’t see the house I’m running from. I have a story. I wasn’t always on television. Writers were not always outside my door.” When he was born, Jackson explained, he had no name; his grandmother had to give him her name: “So I wouldn’t have a blank space, she gave me a name to hold me over.” Where he grew up, the house had three rooms, the bathroom was in the backyard, there was a slop jar by the bed, and the wallpaper was to break the wind, not for decoration. “That’s why I understand you whether you’re black or white.”91 Jackson’s mother stood nearby with a dazed look. She had been asked to show up but had to find her way to the convention by herself. Some delegates in the front rows sobbed from the early bus on. Jackson spoke to them and reached to untold millions in the television audience: “Every one of these funny labels they put on you, those of you who are watching this broadcast tonight in the projects, on the corners, I understand. Call you outcast, low down, you can’t make it, you’re nothing, you’re from nobody, subclass, underclass; when you see Jesse Jackson, when my name goes in nomination, your name goes in nomination.”92 That ended a six-year run in which Jackson aimed for the White House and was constantly in the public eye. The campaign staff, the Secret Service agents, the

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entourage, and the multitude of others swirling around him suddenly vanished. Jackson went home to Chicago and sat for several days in the living room by himself, totally out of character. He jumped to answer the phone, waiting for a call from Dukakis or his campaign manager, John Sasso. Several weeks passed and many of Jackson’s supporters worked on him, urging him to bolt from the party. Jackson may have done so had Sasso not belatedly called for help. Dukakis was melting fast, watching his sixteen-point lead over Republican candidate George H. W. Bush fall to nothing. Two racist anti-Dukakis ads—one by a pro-Bush group and a follow-up by the Bush campaign—featured a Black furloughed felon named Willie Horton who had raped a White woman and stabbed her partner in Massachusetts. A Bush campaign strategist, Lee Atwater, vowed to turn Horton into Dukakis’s running mate. He pulled it off with viciously racist proficiency, which powerfully affected the election. Jackson suited up to save the Democrats, once again campaigning harder for the top of the ticket than it campaigned for itself. He urged Black Americans to turn out for Dukakis, warning against four more years of Republican rule and the kind of people who ran the Horton ads. Jackson helped turn around some worrisome polls indicating that Black Americans would stay home; in the end they turned out as strongly for Dukakis as they had for Mondale.93 But Dukakis was a bad candidate in a winnable election for Democrats. The Reagan backlash still ruled American politics, now without Reagan. Many critics said Jackson was too egotistical to settle for an office he could win, or he craved too much to be an insider, or both. But Jackson’s achievements were immense. He inspired hope in millions of Black Americans and a new era of Black political agency. He changed how the Democratic Party does its business. He compelled White Americans to notice that Black Americans lived in another country from the one that Reagan and Bush romanticized. His voter registration drives elected White liberals and moderates across the country in the House and Senate, drove up the number of Black officials in the House, regained Democratic control of the Senate, and later made it possible to elect Bill Clinton, who also stiffed Jackson. Through the 1980s, Jackson was the nation’s leading voice of progressive political conscience, reaching a broader spectrum of Americans than the other liberal titan, Ted Kennedy. In the immediate context of the 1988 campaign, Jackson’s liberal-left positions helped Dukakis burnish his liberal-leaning centrist image, the supposed path to the White House. Afterward, many of Jackson’s positions became mainstream Democratic causes. His later career was awkward mostly because he had soared too high to fit into political generations that twice elected Clinton and Barack Obama.

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D RI FT I NG C ITIZEN OF TH E (N EOLIBERAL) WORLD

Now he belonged to the world. Jackson told audiences that world television, symbolized by CNN, was the most momentous force on earth. Media proprietors Ted Turner and Reese Schonfeld founded CNN in 1980 as a twenty-fourhour cable news channel covering global news and politics. Jackson noted approvingly that world television didn’t just report what happened in faraway places; it created a cosmopolitan world awareness. It was a global congregation featuring a few (political) elders but no pastors. The pastor, he reasoned, speaks for all the people on Sunday, but no political leader can do that. Jackson sought to carve out a pastor role in the global congregation, leveraging his television fame and his claim to be a moral leader who happened to be Black, not a Black leader. He told lecture crowds that television brought all the yards closer to each other, expanding the idea of what it means to love your neighbor as yourself. Jackson thrilled at the enthusiastic welcomes he received in Russia, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. Crowds chanted his slogan about being somebody, people told him they loved his Democratic convention speeches, and heads of state treated him as a peer. Jackson usually gushed over the heads of state, gregariously treating them as pals with ordinary human desires and foibles, spurning courtly protocol. His tours raised tricky questions for U.S. diplomats unsure of what they should do with him. Jackson flattered them too, telling the field diplomats they should be running the State Department, while the bureaucrats in Washington should be in the field, the place to learn what the world is like. He was an evangelist of getting out there and meeting people. Reagan entered Jackson’s stump lecture on this theme after Reagan developed a relationship with Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev and began to unwind the Cold War. Jackson said Gorbachev could not have pulled off his policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (reformist restructuring) by himself. Gorbachev needed a diplomatic relationship with Reagan that eased Cold War tensions between the two nations, and Reagan could not have befriended Gorbachev had he stuck to his Soviets-are-evil ideology. Reagan was open enough to learn something from the world outside his ideological bubble. In January 1989 Jackson went to Russia to discuss a relief program for victims of the December 1988 earthquake in Armenia. He met with Kremlin leaders, held talks with Soviet dissidents, toured a makeshift hospital in the ruins of Leninakan, where fourteen thousand people had perished, and toured the Armenian town of Spitak, where survivors mourned the loss of 90 percent of their relatives.94

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Jackson praised Gorbachev for unilaterally cutting Soviet troops by 500,000, urging Bush to make a reciprocal cut. Gorbachev was on vacation, but Jackson met with senior Politburo member Alexander Yakovlev and other high Kremlin officials, walking a tightrope. He gratified them by praising glasnost and perestroika, annoyed them by defending the rights and demands of dissidents, and infuriated them by defending Armenian nationalism. Jackson challenged the Soviet leaders to turn Armenia “into a living monument to perestroika.” He bantered warmly with Vitaly Korotich, editor of the liberal journal Ogonyok, who declared that meeting Jackson was thrilling beyond words. Jackson met three young dissidents at Korotich’s office, conveying that he was sympathetic to them, but only to a point, since they were self-righteous and shortsighted. Give Gorbachev a chance! Acquire some humility and perspective! Not everything they wrote deserved to be published! Armenian party boss Suren Arutyunyan enthused that Jackson espoused a richer idea of perestroika than the Armenians and Soviets. Jackson said it helped to have a freedom tradition behind him. In Leninakan he hugged and comforted rows of hospital patients, telling them softly to hang in there, he loved them, God would take care of them. They loved him back, thanking him profusely for caring about them. Nurses wept openly as Jackson spoke to them. In Spitak he got his warmest welcome. Women and children poured out their gratitude to him, giving him red and pink carnations. Arutyunyan told Jackson, “That’s the first time the girls of Spitak have given flowers to anyone.”95 Frady accompanied Jackson on his foreign tours after the 1988 campaign, witnessing the “florid tapestries of acclaim” that Jackson nearly always unfurled upon meeting a government leader. In Zimbabwe, Jackson poured it on thick with President Robert Mugabe, who reciprocated only so far as his very courtly, fastidious manner allowed. Mugabe commended Jackson for a job well done on his presidential campaigns, well done indeed. Jackson escalated from Mugabe’s personal splendor to his global redemptive mission, telling Mugabe he was wildly popular in the United States and “the center of hope for reconciliation around the world.” He wanted Mugabe to conduct a Jackson-style tour across the United States, calling for a new day of friendship and unity between the United States and the entire African continent. Mugabe indulged the flattery to a point, but he worried how this tour would actually go. Wasn’t there a risk of a bad reception? Would people really behave as they should? Jackson sighed to Frady—this guy fought a guerrilla war in the countryside and now he was sensitive about having his feelings hurt! To Jackson, Mugabe epitomized the error of treating world leaders delicately. Somebody had to break through the protocols that shielded leaders from their own needs, vanities, blind spots, and humanity.96

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By 1989 Jackson had watched PUSH flounder for five years and needed to get away. He moved to Washington, DC, where he thought he would feel closer to the center of things, not realizing he would feel smaller. Washington is full of people who think they are important. As soon as Jackson got there, people urged him to run against the embattled incumbent mayor, Barry. Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee was the leading exhorter on this theme, telling Jackson it was the perfect way to shut up all the people who said he never did anything, all he did was talk. If he got Congress to help the nation’s capital and put it back on its feet, he could run for president in 1996 or 2000 with a real shot at winning. Jackson liked that scenario, but not his odds of being a successful mayor. He had never run anything except PUSH, and DC might have been a hopeless case. He let the story heat up for nearly a year, never really intending to run, but enjoying the attention and how he thought it made him look. Barry delivered a muchquoted zinger: “Jesse don’t wanna be no mayor. Jesse don’t wanna run nothing but his mouth. Besides, he’d be the laughingstock of America! He’d be run outta town if he ran against me.” Jackson belatedly declared that he had a larger destiny than running the District of Columbia. He got roasted in the media for deciding not to run, which surprised him, having failed to recognize how he was coming off. Many vowed they would never take him seriously again.97 He drifted confusedly, trying a television program, watching other Blacks ascend in politics, making another hostage rescue, trying another television program, and debating whether to run for president. In 1990 he hosted a Time Warner syndicated program produced by Quincy Jones called the Jesse Jackson Show. Jackson tried to focus on issues in talk-show fashion without veering into sermonizing, but he sermonized in every show. He could not play the host, let the guests talk, or dispense with moralizing. Neither could he put up with producers issuing directives in his earpiece, and he clashed with producers over the point of the show. If a program lacked redeeming social value, it was pointless. The show bombed and Time Warner dropped it after six months, which was fine with Jackson. He wanted to run for president anyway, and if his future was television, he preferred CNN. Jackie Jackson was adamantly opposed to another presidential campaign, while Jackson confronted the rise of Black officials whose careers he had made possible. L. Douglas Wilder became the nation’s first Black governor in 1989, in Virginia. The media hailed him as the voice of a pragmatic “post-Jackson” generation of Black political leaders. Wilder denied he owed any thanks to Jackson, never mind that Jackson swept the Virginia Democratic primary in 1988. Ron Brown, Jackson’s campaign manager for the Atlanta convention, promised to quarantine Jackson if he got to run the DNC—a pledge he fulfilled upon winning the job. Jackson had

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opened up the rules on delegate qualifications at the convention; Brown tightened the rules and urged Jackson not to run in 1992. In public, Jackson cheered the success of Wilder, Brown, and Dinkins; to friends he noted that only Dinkins had the grace to thank him. In September 1990, one month after Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, Jackson pleaded with him to release twenty American hostages. The prisoners were released and Jackson got his usual mixed reviews for intervening in a crisis. The election year approached, and Jackson decided reluctantly in September 1991 not to run, settling for another shot at television, this time a weekly talk program on CNN, which went better. His sons and daughters played a role in the former decision by telling Jackson his presidential campaigns harmed them emotionally. He formally announced his decision in November and immediately had second thoughts about it. This time Jackie Jackson insisted it was pointless to run again because the Democrats would never accept Jackson, and she refused to endure all the ugliness again: “I can’t even sing ‘We Shall Overcome’ anymore, it fills my heart with such pain.”98 Had Jackson gone for it, there might not have been a Clinton presidency. The field consisted almost entirely of centrist muddlers who refashioned Republican positions for Democratic voters: Clinton, Wilder, former California governor Jerry Brown, Senator Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, and former Massachusetts senator Paul Tsongas. Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa was the lone progressive. In Iowa, which Harkin won, Clinton fell short of 3 percent. In New Hampshire, Clinton got torched by one of his girlfriends, lounge singer Gennifer Flowers, and he was lucky to survive, rallying for a distant second to Tsongas. Clinton went on to finish third in Maine, third in South Dakota, and second in Colorado. The campaign moved to Georgia, where Jackson would have beaten Clinton; as it was, Clinton’s victory in Georgia saved his campaign. Jackson favored Harkin, and Clinton raged that Jackson was a dirty backstabber for reneging on his pledge to stay neutral. That was an omen, though less telling than Clinton’s action concerning Ricky Ray Rector, a Black death-row inmate in Arkansas who had shot himself through the temple after murdering a police officer and essentially lobotomized himself. Arkansas was due to execute the mentally disabled Rector when Flowers rocked Clinton’s campaign in New Hampshire. Jackson pleaded with Clinton to take the moral path; Clinton fixed instead on how the Bush team beat Dukakis. He flew home to Arkansas to preside over the execution, applying the Horton lesson to Rector: This Democrat would not be Willie Horton-ed.99 Super Tuesday, invented to elect Nunn or Robb in 1988, or at least Gore, worked in 1992 as it was supposed to because Jackson didn’t run. Clinton vaulted ahead on the strength of Super Tuesday southern votes and secured the nomi-

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nation. Jackson entertained his usual fantasy of receiving the vice presidential nod, until Clinton told him it would not happen. Jackson responded with a goodwill gesture, asking Clinton to speak at a Rainbow Coalition conference in Washington. He wanted the Rainbow Coalition to endorse Clinton before the Democratic convention in New York, which would thwart “What does Jesse want?” stories. Clinton seemed to be grateful, alerting the media that he would say something very quotable—don’t miss it. At the time, Jackson was trying to lure rap performer Sister Souljah into Rainbow politics. He admired her artistry and sought to dissuade her from performer nihilism, so he invited her to speak at a conference panel. She had recently told a Washington Post reporter, “If black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?” Clinton seized on the opportunity to send another Horton message. With no warning whatsoever, as Jackson sat next to him, Clinton attacked Souljah and the Rainbow Coalition, condemning her as a hatemonger and the coalition for giving her a platform. Jackson was shocked at being ambushed. He told reporters he respected Souljah and was surprised at Clinton; she told reporters that Clinton had grossly smeared her. Clinton got what he wanted, another Horton antidote, this time humiliating Jackson at his own conference.100 In public Jackson swallowed his pride and campaigned for Clinton. To friends he confided that he loathed Clinton. Perhaps he could work with Clinton, he said, but respecting him was out of the question because Clinton was utterly shameless. There was nothing to Clinton except lust for political power and sexual spoils. In August 1992, just before Jackson campaigned for Clinton, Noah Robinson Jr. was sentenced to life without parole for drug trafficking and conspiracy to murder. Robinson was a business tycoon with an outlaw mentality. He tried to dominate El Rukn after Jeff Fort went to prison in the early 1980s, getting the Rukn gang into drug trafficking, which brought down Robinson and them. His downfall cut Jackson deeply; even close friends avoided the subject. On the campaign trail Jackson argued that electing Clinton was crucial; the time for policy battles could wait. Clinton eschewed ticket balance by selecting another centrist policy wonk from the South, Gore, which journalists dubbed the “Double Bubba” ticket. Jackson scathingly told friends that Gore was his political hero. How could he not behold Gore in wonder? He had wiped the floor with Gore, up, down, and across the country, yet four years later, Gore was vice president of the United States! Jackson stewed for years over losing to the guy he had drubbed.101 Clinton owed him, so Jackson indulged his usual fantasy of a payoff, this time that Clinton would appoint him ambassador to the UN. He could picture

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himself taking up Young’s role as a magnet for ambassadors from the former Third World. That prospect was exactly why Clinton did not consider it. Clinton was wily, cunning, and able, always looking for a way to co-opt a Republican issue. He antagonized the progressive base of the party throughout his presidency, risking a schism on the calculation that progressives had nowhere to go. Jackson seethed that Clinton froze him out. Clinton fretted that Jackson would run against him in 1996, but he wagered that Jackson wouldn’t do it despite how he treated Jackson. In December 1993 Jackson told Time columnist Michael Kramer that Clinton was trying to diminish him by propping up other Black politicos: “It’s not working. Look at the polls; walk the streets. The other guys don’t have the juice. It’s only me.”102 The crack epidemic of the early 1990s set off a dramatic spike in violent crime. Politicians scrambled to do something, Black pastors called for federal action, and in 1993 Jackson barnstormed the country, reprising his school evangelism of the 1970s. He inveighed against pop culture nihilism, violence, schools without homework, homes without fathers, teenage pregnancy, and drug addiction, protesting that walking to school had become unacceptably dangerous. Some Rainbow organizers tried to dissuade Jackson from this crusade, objecting that it played into the hands of White enemies. Jackson said he would not look the other way or blame Whites alone for the epidemic of violence in Black communities. If that reflected the preacher in him, so be it. At a PUSH conference in November 1993, he said it with anguish: “There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery—then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved.” Jackson said the killing occurring on American streets was “not based upon poverty; it is based upon greed and violence and guns.”103 These comments set off wrenching debates in the Rainbow community and a shower of praise for Jackson in the mainstream media, much of it smug. New York Times columnist Bob Herbert, though scathing about White smugness, strongly commended Jackson, writing that violent crime had reached the level of a “national plague.” There was “almost no way to overstate the problem,” Herbert wrote, and the political wind against it was “blowing at hurricane force.” He made a widely quoted two-handed plea. Black Americans had to honestly address the plague of crime, and White Americans had to stop portraying violent crime “as strictly a black problem.” Violence was a colossal American problem, and a polarized America would not solve it.104 This political hurricane yielded the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994. Joe Biden drafted it, Clinton supported it, 58 percent of Black Americans endorsed it, many defended it with quotes from Jackson,

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and Jackson and the Black Caucus opposed it. The crime bill mandated life sentences for three-time offenders, funding for states to hire 100,000 police officers, and restrictions on death row appeals. It created sixty new death penalty offenses under forty-one federal capital statutes, banned select models of assault weapons, provided funding for new jails, and included the Violence Against Women Act. Jackson and the Black Caucus objected that this was not how to fight the upsurge of violent crime. The prison population had already tripled since 1980, so how would harsh prison sentences and more jails solve the problem? How was prison an appropriate response to drug addiction? Jackson and the Black Caucus called instead for massive investments in job creation and drug treatment, which actually prevented crime.105 The cause that fit Jackson’s aspirations never arose. Black capitalism, school evangelism, Rainbow multiculturalism, economic populism, citizen-of-theworld diplomacy, and anticrime legislation moved up and down his scale of priorities, depending on the political moment and his mood, but no cause defined him or kept him aloft for long. He told audiences he was not like conventional politicians, who retreat eventually to their homes and private lives. He had no private life and his home was the public world. Jackson’s two presidential campaigns, the highlights of his career, left him deeply disappointed. He lifted the party like no one else and was constantly told he was a problem for the party, useful only in isolation. The wonder was that he always came back for more, even with Clinton. Newt Gingrich (R-Georgia) spearheaded a Republican takeover of the House of Representatives in 1994, launching a brand of nihilistic attack politics that surged and mutated until it took over the Republican Party in 2016. Clinton’s dance with Gingrich consumed the middle years of his presidency, and Jackson wavered over one last big decision—should he challenge Clinton in 1996? White left-progressives detested Clinton; had Jackson run against Clinton, he might have hurt Clinton worse than Kennedy had hurt Carter. But Jackson was battle-weary, tired of Washington, DC, and not finished with Clinton. He had served as the shadow senator for the District since 1991, a job consisting almost entirely of advocating for its statehood. His son Jesse Jackson Jr. won a special election in November 1995 to the House of Representatives, representing the Second District of Illinois, which pulled Jackson homeward. The following month he moved back to Chicago and merged the Rainbow Coalition with PUSH. Rainbow-PUSH ratcheted Black capitalism upward, focusing on corporate policies and corporate boards. Jackson called it “the Wall Street Project.” The thrust of Breadbasket and PUSH had been that Black Americans should not

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buy where they could not work. Rainbow-PUSH applied this approach to the pinnacle of economic power, much like Andrew Young, but with a sharper edge. Jackson announced that he would rate the nation’s one hundred largest corporations on how they treated people of color, organizing pressure campaigns on bad actors. Texaco played the role for the Wall Street Project that Country Delight Dairy had performed for Breadbasket; Jackson extracted $100 million for pay increases and diversity training from Texaco’s board. Soon there was a Rainbow-PUSH office at 40 Wall Street, a seventy-two-story building that Donald Trump renovated for the Wall Street Project. Trump told the New York Times in January 1997 that he and Jackson were good friends and he believed in Jackson’s work: “He’s out there pushing for a lot of good things.”106 The following January, Jackson celebrated the Wall Street Project with a three-day bash on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Clinton, Trump, Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan, Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, and Stock Exchange Chair Richard Grasso headed a parade of celebrants. Clinton declared that if it was good for America to sell more and invest more around the world, it was good for America to sell more and invest more down the street. Jackson observed that nobody realized how great professional sports could be until athletes of color were allowed to play; the same thing was true of business, especially at the highest level of business power. Sometimes he described bank redlining as the paradigm of the racialized economy—excluding redlined areas from access to mortgages. Jackson argued that Black Americans were redlined from the highest-yielding segments of the economy as a whole: “My pitch to corporate America is, ‘You either are going to green-line redlined America and grow and profit. Or you’re going to pay not to grow. What do you choose?’ They will choose to grow.”107 Jackson struck gold with the Wall Street Project, enlisting a high-rolling capital management executive, Maceo Sloan, to run it, and building a vehicle that endured. In 1996, meanwhile, Jackson finally won the insider political status he had craved. Clinton spent the run-up to the November election pushing a welfare reform bill that terminated the New Deal guarantee of support for women and children. He signed the bill on the day before Democrats headed to Chicago for the party’s convention. Progressive Democrats arrived in Chicago in a seething mood. Four years of battle with Clinton had led to a spectacle convention showcasing Clinton’s ability to marginalize them. In Congress, Senator Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut led the fight against betraying the nation’s poorest children; outside Congress, Jackson was the face of the Democratic opposition. Jackson told reporters that Clinton’s so-called welfare reform deeply split the party, creating “great consternation across the board. But

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we must have the capacity to operate under one big tent.” The opening night featured conciliatory speeches by Dodd, who avoided the welfare issue, and Jackson, who lamented it briefly, declaring: “We can disagree and debate, and still work together. Diversity is the measure of this party’s strength; how we handle adversity, the measure of our character. We must find the bridge, keep our tent intact. And we must make the commitment to right the wrongs in this bill. Now that we have ended welfare as we know it, we must provide jobs and job training and education and day care as we ought to know it.”108 That was exactly what Clinton needed from Jackson in Chicago—a cathartic moment of protest, a show of diversity, and an appeal to pull together for the November election. Jackson campaigned as usual for the Democratic ticket; this time there was a payoff. Once Clinton was reelected, he had no Jackson problem to finesse. In October 1997 Clinton conferred a diplomatic title on Jackson, “Special Envoy for the President and Secretary of State for the Promotion of Democracy in Africa.” Clinton said it was high time that such a position existed; moreover, Jackson’s connections in Africa made him the best person for it. Jackson treasured the opportunity to visit Africa as an official representative of the U.S. government. In March 1998 Clinton made a historic twelve-day trip to Africa, taking a large delegation that included Jackson. Merely to spend so much presidential time in Africa was controversial. Many critics said it was a ridiculous waste of taxpayer money, political correctness run amok. Many participants said it was the most moving experience of their lives. In Ghana, visiting an infamous slave port, Clinton officially apologized for U.S. slavery, which set off a storm of protest in this country that Clinton had no business apologizing for the United States. Jackson rejoiced to hear a president say in Ghana that U.S. American slavery was a source of shame to the United States. The following November Jackson followed up in Nigeria, Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Ghana, reiterating Clinton’s themes that trade, not aid, should be the focus of America’s relationships with African nations and that African peoples deserve all the rights and freedoms of democracy.109 But Clinton, Black Caucus Chair Donald Payne (D-New Jersey), and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright had adopted a bad policy toward Liberia and Sierra Leone, and Jackson helped make it worse. Tyrants and warlords slaughtered each other in Liberia and Sierra Leone through the 1990s for diamonds, gold, and state power. The political catastrophe dated to 1980, when Samuel Doe, a military officer, seized power in Liberia from a democratically elected president, William Tolbert. Doe murdered and ritually mutilated Tolbert, displayed his body parts, and instituted a repressive dictatorship. Charles Taylor, a Doe lieutenant whom Doe accused of stealing from him, invaded Liberia in

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1989 from the Ivory Coast, setting off a civil war that consumed the nation for eight years. The carnage was staggering. More than two hundred thousand Liberians were killed, in a nation of three million. Taylor was a theatrical marauder educated in the United States—flamboyant, vicious, a diamond thief, and a Baptist preacher holding a degree in economics from Bentley College in Massachusetts. In 1991 he took the Liberian war into Sierra Leone, aiding the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) of Sierra Leone, which financed its war by taking over the diamond mines. Taylor pitched himself to Clinton as the only alternative to chaos and its violence in Liberia. He wagered that Clinton would not risk the kind of intervention that killed eighteen American soldiers in Somalia in 1993. Taylor used thirteen peace treaties as opportunities to rearm, until a treaty in 1996 forged by the UN and the Organization of African Unity yielded a fraudulent election in July 1997 that he “won.”110 Taylor won more than 75 percent of the vote; Unity Party reformer Ellen Johnson Sirleaf garnered 9.6 percent, and the State Department knew what that meant: Liberians were too terrified of Taylor to thwart him. His army was long on youthful zealots whose parents he had tortured and murdered. Clinton judged that there would be no peace without co-opting Taylor, and that Jackson might be the ideal person for it. The plan was to mainstream Taylor, who played along by enlisting in his camp a former political prisoner under Doe for whom Jackson had advocated in the 1980s, Romeo Horton. Jackson was relieved to see one person he knew, Horton, when he met Taylor in February 1998. Everything that Jackson did for the next two years in West Africa was predicated on the assumption that winning over Taylor and his subordinate, RUF commander Foday Sankoh, was the key to ending the West Africa wars. But Taylor and Sankoh were the two most rapacious mass murderers in this entire tragedy. Sirleaf’s coalition of reform parties and organizations pleaded with the State Department not to reward the worst actors. But her group had fallen short of 10 percent of a terrorized Liberian voting public. Taylor kept meddling in Sierra Leone through his RUF underlings, while cultivating a relationship with Jackson. In April 1999 Jackson convened a conference at the Rainbow-PUSH headquarters in Chicago that was billed as a reconciliation meeting. The State Department ensured that the groups opposed to Taylor’s government were represented, though Jackson invited no opposition leader to speak. Taylor boomed the keynote address via satellite from Monrovia, his wife, Jewel Howard Taylor, led the Liberian government delegation in Chicago, and ten government officials gave Stalinesque speeches about the shining oasis built by the Taylor government. The opposition leaders bitterly resented this treatment by U.S. officials. In October 1998 Sankoh was convicted

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of treason, and the RUF went on a murderous rampage against the democratically elected government of President Ahmad Kabbah. Jackson forged a nonaggression pact between Taylor and Kabbah that spared Sankoh from being executed. In January 1999 the RUF massacred over 6,000 villagers in three weeks, which drove Kabbah to release Sankoh, at Jackson’s urging. In May, Jackson brokered a cease-fire between Kabbah and Sankoh, and the following month the State Department brokered a peace accord in Lomé, Togo, that made Sankoh the vice president of Sierra Leone with governing authority over the diamond mines. The RUF had terrorized its way into the government, enabled by U.S. diplomats who assumed the same thing about Sankoh as they believed about Taylor—only Sankoh could end the slaughter in Sierra Leone, and only then if Taylor was willing.111 The peace accord fell apart in May 2000, when UN peacekeepers, mostly from Zambia, approached the diamond fields of Kono and Tongo in Sierra Leone. The RUF was unwilling to have its business interrupted. Business consisted of RUF commanders carrying diamonds to Liberian military helicopters that ferried the diamonds to Taylor. The RUF captured five hundred peacekeepers as hostages, murdering six of them. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan called for help, Clinton asked Jackson to mediate, and the State Department lied about brokering the deal that put Sankoh in the vice presidency. State Department spokesperson Philip Reeker declared on June 5 that the United States had no role in the Lomé accord. He seemed to forget that Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Susan Rice, her deputy Howard Jeter, and other officials drafted entire sections of it, and that Jackson and U.S. Ambassador Joseph Melrose urged a reluctant Kabbah to sign it. Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights Harold H. Koh, Ambassador at Large for Human Rights David J. Scheffer, and Assistant Secretary of State for Refugees Julia V. Taft had pleaded against allowing Sankoh into the government, but they lost the argument in the State Department. New Republic editor Ryan Lizza, with appropriate harshness, said the Lomé accord “forced the democratic president of Sierra Leone to hand over much of his government and most of his country’s wealth to one of the greatest monsters of the twentieth century.”112 Jackson announced that he would negotiate with Sankoh in Freetown, Sierra Leone, and with Taylor in Monrovia. He cautioned that were no cleanhanded African players; all had blood on their hands. Had he stopped at this point, Jackson might have made it to Freetown, but he could not resist an atrocious analogy, claiming that Sankoh was the Nelson Mandela of Sierra Leone. To the people of Freetown, comparing Mandela to a local mass murderer whose forces raped their children and ripped the arms off babies was unbearable.

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Government officials warned Jackson to stay away, since they could not guarantee his safety from an outraged populace. Jackson tried to retract the offending remark, to no avail. He called on Taylor, who greeted Jackson warmly and agreed to release the UN peacekeepers. The American officials noted that RUF commander Sam Bockarie was utterly deferential to Taylor. The following year the UN placed sanctions on Liberia and a UN-backed court indicted Taylor for war crimes. He fled to Nigeria in 2003, Sankoh died of a stroke in 2003 while awaiting a war crimes trial, Sirleaf was elected president in 2006, Taylor fought off extradition, and in 2012 UN officials finally dragged Taylor to The Hague, where he was convicted of terrorism, murder, rape, slavery, mutilation, and other crimes against humanity.113 T W I LI G HT SETBA C KS A N D SPOT LIGHT DEMOCRACY

This was a very chastening piece of diplomatic experience. Jackson said he merely carried out the policies of the State Department; officials countered that he ardently supported the policies. Fortunately for American officials, Liberia and Sierra Leone received very little attention from the American press. Jackson avoided this subject while campaigning for Gore in the 2000 presidential election. He fashioned a stump speech on the theme that Democrats were the party of inclusion and Republicans were the party of exclusion. A mere glance at the party conventions, he said, made this point vividly: Democrats were the “allAmericans team” and Republicans were the “some-Americans team.” All was forgiven between Gore and Jackson, as Jackson gave more than 150 speeches on behalf of Gore and the DNC. It helped that the Gore of 2000 was considerably more progressive than the previous Gore. Jackson had a political action committee called Keep Hope Alive that shared office space with his other organizations. The name acquired new meaning when the election yielded a national drama over dimples and chads in Florida.114 George W. Bush was said to edge Gore by 537 votes in Florida, which would have delivered the national election to him. Jackson cried foul, pointing to numerous voting obstacles, including the systemic disenfranchisement of Black voters. He exhorted Gore supporters, “Keep hope alive!” and conferred with Gore’s team every day for the next month. Gore contended that 180,000 votes in Florida were wrongly thrown out; Jackson conducted rallies demanding a recount of the Florida vote, declaring: “We know where the broken machines were. We know where they ran out of affidavits. There’s no honor or legitimacy when the loser wins.” The Gore team had no stronger advocate than Jackson. In December he demonstrated in front of the Supreme Court, until December

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12, when the Court ruled 5–4 that recounting the Florida vote was too much for Americans to handle. It was better to install Bush as president than to give democracy another week or two.115 The Bush presidency gave Jackson plenty to oppose. He cried out against two massive tax cuts for the rich, the invasion of Iraq, and a foreign policy of perpetual war, but he faded as a public force in American life, diminished by personal setbacks and the passage of time. The cascade of setbacks began in January 2001. National Enquirer, a supermarket tabloid, learned that Jackson had carried on a four-year affair with Karin Stanford, a political scientist and director of the DC bureau of Rainbow-PUSH. They had conceived a child, Ashley Jackson, during the period leading up to Clinton’s impeachment in a sex scandal, when Jackson served as Clinton’s spiritual advisor. Jackson got in front of the story just before the Enquirer published it, declaring that he loved and supported Ashley, and his family knew of the situation. He vowed to step back from the spotlight to reconnect with his spirit and family: “My wife, Jackie, and my children have been made aware of the child and it has been an extremely painful, trying and difficult time for them. I have asked God and each one of them to forgive me and I thank each of them for their grace and understanding throughout this period of tribulation. We have prayed together and through God’s grace we have been reconciling.”116 The political right erupted with glee. Radio superstar Rush Limbaugh took phone calls from crowing listeners while playing the Supremes’ hit “Love Child, Never Meant to Be.” The New York Post regaled its readers with details about initial paternity uncertainties, a paternity test, Jackson’s introducing his pregnant mistress to Clinton during the impeachment scandal, Jackie Jackson’s throwing Jackson out of her house, Jackie Jackson’s accusing Stanford of trapping Jackson, and the two women’s reconciling. CNN pundit Jack E. White blistered Jackson as a strutting hypocrite and preening loudmouth whose time had gone: “It’s time to give him another gold Rolex, thank him for his service and send him out to pasture.” Baltimore Sun columnist Susan Reimer said it was certainly a great day for right-wing White guys, but for women it was just another turn at the wheel: “He knew his affair would be discovered by the prying press, and he entered into it anyway. He knew what could happen as a result of unprotected sex, and he engaged in it anyway. He knew that inevitably his wife and children would have to endure public scorn, and he did it anyway.” Men like Jackson and Clinton, she argued, were too arrogant, selfish, and selfinflated to change their ways or care about the loved ones they hurt. They were in love with their own voices, expecting their words to echo through history, and “are self-important enough to think their staged apologies will carry the same

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resonance.” Reimer said Jackson’s retreat from the spotlight would not last because that was impossible for him.117 The mainline church press was generally more reserved. There were laments for Jackson’s lost moral authority and reminders that the church is in the redemption business. Susan Thistlethwaite, president of CTS, told the Christian Century that if Jackson made amends, it was not out of the question that he might regain his moral authority. Clarence Page said Jackson’s capacity to speak to mainstream older White Americans was badly damaged. Moreover, Jackson was no longer credible as a role model for young people on either side of the color line, which left him back where he started, competing with other Black leaders for the attention of Black audiences. Page knew it would cut Jackson to read this verdict.118 Now Jackson was bleeding in public. There had always been ample lore about his extramarital love life, but it stayed mostly out of print. This was different and damaging, which turned out to be perfect timing for Kenneth Timmerman, a veteran right-wing investigative reporter who had a book in the pipeline, Shakedown: Exposing the Real Jesse Jackson (2002). Timmerman said Jackson’s sexual scandal was a small matter compared to an entire career of lies and extortion that should have landed him in prison. The worst Jackson scandal was that he had never been prosecuted or even threatened with prosecution. Timmerman compiled a vengefully one-sided argument that Jackson was an utterly corrupt egotist who only pretended to be a minister, became famous by shouting about racism, and got rich by shaking down corporations and the government.119 Timmerman saluted Reynolds for preceding him by twenty-seven years. But Reynolds described a complex human being who had a Christian ministry and knew the difference between pressure tactics and extortion. Timmerman described a sociopath whose business model was extortion. On his telling, every plank of Jackson’s story and operation was false and corrupt, and the operation was criminal. Greenville was not racist, Jackson lied about being poor, he was never a real minister, he substituted left-wing politics for religion, and he built an empire on the only thing he was good at, accusing White people and companies of racism. Everything that enriched him in his later career was built on this foundation. Timmerman said Jackson’s up-from-poverty story was a lie because his stepfather was proudly middle-class—never mind that when Jackson talked about growing up poor, he fixed on his early years of living with his grandmother. Timmerman ran through the rest of Jackson’s life with the same brittle hermeneutic of hostility. If he could persuade readers that Jackson was a fraud, he could erase Jackson’s moral credibility to condemn racism and to distinguish between pressure tactics and extortion.

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Shakedown radiated Timmerman’s resentment that Jackson became rich and famous by exposing American racism. Exposure and resentment were very much the point, in reverse. The book rumbled through chapters claiming to show that Jackson had no thoughts about world politics—he merely cribbed them from Jack O’Dell; and he didn’t care about the hostages he freed—he cared only about himself. There was a lot of smear-by-association, scaring readers with the names of Black militants and former Communists whom Jackson befriended along the way; meanwhile the book obsessively belabored the fall of Noah Robinson Jr. The best chapters were the boring ones, where Timmerman pored over government audits showing that Bustamante sometimes could not say where the money went; he showed that Jackson guarded his assets just like the business bigwigs who looked out for him. Much of Shakedown was otherwise paint-by-numbers right-wing formula writing: The United States is the greatest nation ever; the United States is not racist; only Communists and other anti-Americans believe otherwise. Timmerman had dust-ups on Stanford, the Noah Robinson thread seemed never to end, and he reminded his readers how much they hated Jackson during the season of dimples and chads. To Timmerman, Jackson was never compassionate or ethical, only cunning, and he was never even eloquent, only blustery. The morally complex subject of the book never came into view, but the book made a splash. Jackson had to fend off countless hecklers and hostile interviewers wielding it. The later Jackson refuted the warhorse convention that he was incapable of sharing the spotlight. He took his turn at conferences, no longer needing to be the headliner, encouraging young activists coming up. Sometimes he would bring a conference back to political reality by devoting his time allotment to voter registration. I saw him do it several times. It’s nice to have fashionable concerns, Jackson would say, but what is the point if people cannot vote? He always knew the current data about voter suppression and participation. Jackson could imagine an American nation that tried to become a realized democracy. He said there was a role for finance capitalism in it, so he leaned into the Wall Street Project. Rainbow economics was the coming together of labor unions, regular Democrats, Republicans with a conscience, the financial class, and all the groups represented by Rainbow-PUSH under one big tent overlooking Wall Street—the capital of capital. Social critic Michael Eric Dyson reflected that this vision was probably an overreach and that Jackson fell short of King’s “democratic socialist mantle.” It could not be said that Jackson’s “herculean efforts to tame capital” paid off for poor and struggling people. But Dyson cautioned that nobody has a solution to inequality and the reign of hyper-capitalism.

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Whatever shortcomings Jackson displayed in this area, he cared about economic equality.120 In the late 1990s Jackson had a mildly warm friendship with his Chicago neighbor Barack Obama. Each was careful with the other while teasing about their generational differences. Obama had sailed through Columbia University and Harvard Law School and had already published a memoir. In 1996 he was elected to the Illinois Senate, representing the South Side. State politics bored him. In 2000 he aimed higher, challenging former Black Panther Bobby Rush for his First District seat in Congress. To Rush’s constituents, Obama reeked of Harvard. They smacked him down hard, and Jackson’s early impression was that they were right—Obama had no street cred and wasn’t Black enough. Obama had to run statewide for his outsized political talent to show through. He won the Democratic nomination in 2004 for Illinois’s open U.S. Senate seat, gave a sensational speech at the Democratic National Convention that nominated John Kerry for president, and was launched as a political superstar. After entering the Senate, Obama drew enormous, mostly White crowds across the country that begged him to run for president, to which he yielded. In 2007 he threw his hat in the ring and a tidal wave of young White progressives rushed to his campaign. Obama’s ascent was so meteoric that hardly anyone comprehended who he was or what was happening. Catching up had to be hurried, fragmentary, and uncertain. Jackson was ambivalent about Obama; meanwhile, he chafed at the familiar feeling of being stiff-armed by a leading Democrat. Four things stood out to Jackson. Obama did not come from the civil rights generation, did not radiate a Black consciousness, kept Jackson at a distance, and shot to prominence by inspiring White liberals. These things weighed on Jackson in 2008 as Obama marched through the Democratic primaries. Jackson’s intervention against winner-take-all primaries made Obama’s nomination possible. Hillary Clinton won the big state primaries in 2008— California, Texas, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York. Under the old rules that handcuffed Jackson in 1984, Clinton in 2008 would have been awarded all the delegates of the big states and cruised to the nomination. Obama piled up delegates proportionally to the votes he received, racking up a lead that Clinton could not erase no matter how many big states she won. He stood on Jackson’s shoulders while sailing past his achievements, saying as little as possible about race. That would have grated on anyone in Jackson’s position. After Obama sewed up the nomination, Jackson made a vulgar remark during a break on Fox television that was supposed to be private. His microphone was on while Jackson muttered that he wanted to “cut the nuts off” Obama because he talked down to Black people. Obama had angered Jackson by deriding the personal short-

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comings of caricatured Black men, but that was not how it played in a media furor. Jackson looked like a jerk for denigrating Obama just before the Democratic convention.121 Jesse Jackson Jr. said it vehemently, declaring: “I’m deeply outraged and disappointed in Rev. Jackson’s reckless statements about Senator Barack Obama. . . . I thoroughly reject and repudiate his ugly rhetoric.” Jackson Jr. was a national cochair of Obama’s campaign. He loved his father, he said, but hated his father’s “divisive and demeaning comments.” Jackson apologized contritely, noting that he supported Obama’s campaign and never meant to cause it any harm. Al Sharpton came down on both sides of a fraught moment. To CNN, Sharpton said Jackson’s remarks were “most unfortunate,” and he was glad that Jackson apologized. To Newsweek, two days later, after some dust had settled, Sharpton tilted the other way: “It’s unfortunate that it had to come out this way, but it did have to come out. There’s definitely a generational divide going on in the black community, and it’s been happening for a while. People who deny it aren’t seeing clearly.”122 Sharpton had made his generational move in 2004. Born in Brooklyn in 1954 and ordained as a Pentecostal preacher in his youth, Sharpton came up as a Jackson protégé, appointed by Jackson in 1969 as youth director of the New York City branch of Operation Breadbasket. Two years later Sharpton founded the National Youth Movement, but he spent most of the 1970s as tour manager for singer James Brown. Sharpton had the Jackson role in New York City, leading countless demonstrations against racial injustice and abuse. In 1991 he scaled up, founding the National Action Network, which focused on voter education, economic development, and police violence. Sharpton was confrontational and sometimes inflammatory. He skewered police, government leaders, and, pointedly, Jewish officials with over-the-line remarks that inflamed racial and ethnic tensions in the city. Jackson and Coretta King told him his penchant for invective damaged his efficacy. Gradually, Sharpton curbed his rhetoric without ceasing to roar for victims of police violence. In 1988 his revered Pentecostal bishop F. D. Washington died, and Sharpton converted to the Baptist Church. He ran for the U.S. Senate in 1988, 1992, and 1994, and for mayor of New York in 1997. In 2004 Sharpton ran for president. He said he viewed himself as sort of a disk jockey, working alone behind a console, spinning old hits into a contemporary beat: “The question is, can I bring it to the pop charts?” Somebody, he declared, needed to speak about affirmative action, police misconduct, and racial profiling. If Jackson was finished with running for president, Sharpton was willing to play the Jackson role.123 But Jackson pointedly endorsed no one, and Jackson Jr. supported former Vermont governor Howard Dean. In the early primaries, Sharpton’s best race

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was a third-place finish with 9 percent in South Carolina. Black American voters were done with symbolic Black campaigns. On Super Tuesday, when Kerry locked up the nomination and John Edwards finished second in most places, Sharpton’s best finishes were 8 percent in New York and 6 percent in Georgia. He said he raised issues that Kerry and Edwards avoided, albeit while falling short of Jackson’s influence. Sharpton made a successful career turn, becoming a media commentator with a still-active National Action Network behind him, dispensing daily judgments on radio and television about the rise of Obama, nearly always in praise of Obama.124 On November 8, 2008, it was sunny and cool in Chicago. By nightfall, over 100,000 people were headed to Grant Park in a festive mood. People sang and danced in anticipation of Obama’s victory; hip-hop blared from speakers across Michigan Avenue; reporters reached for analogies to the feeling and moment. November 9, 1989, was a good one—the night the Berlin Wall came down. Obama’s victory was announced, and the crowd of 140,000 joined in a boisterous recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance. Oprah Winfrey clutched a stranger, weeping joyfully. Jackson was there too, also by himself, also shedding tears of joy. Many pundits opined that joy was surely not the cause of Jackson’s tears. His moral center had eluded them again.125 Jesus and King were the lodestars by which Jackson sought to discern the moral center. He puzzled that churches usually deny that Jesus had political views. King modeled for Jackson how to hold fast to the politics of Jesus: “Dr. King recognized that politics could be redefined, society turned inside out and upside down, if people—poor people, working people, and especially young people—acted on behalf of the moral center.” This was Jackson’s name for the refusal of Jesus and MLK to accept the overlapping premises, conventions, and structures of regnant forces. American slavery had comparatively kind slavers who protected the value of their property and mean slavers who hated Black people too much even to protect their economic value. But the argument between kindness and hostility did nothing to abolish slavery; abolitionism was the moral center that ended the system. Jackson invoked King on three approaches to the moral center. Vanity asks if a position is popular. Politics asks if a position can win the day. Morality asks if a position is right. The best reason to be involved in politics is to struggle for the right thing, refusing conventional and reductive approaches.126 The measure of the moral center is the one taught by Jesus—how does a given structure, position, or system treat the “least of these”? Jackson stressed that King’s dream changed every year over the last five years of his life, applying the Jesus question to shifting social and political circumstances. In 1963 the

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dream was a counterword to the barbarism of its time, when a Black person could not swim in the city pool, serve as a juror in the South, or rent a room at the Holiday Inn. In 1964 the dream was to make racist barbarism illegal by passing a Public Accommodations Act and allowing Black Mississippi delegates to vote at the Democratic convention. In 1965 the dream was to restore the right of Black Americans to vote. In 1966 it was to win the right to open and fair housing. In 1967 it was to break the American addiction to racism, militarism, and materialism. In 1968 it was a multiracial and intersectional movement of the poor and oppressed: “I was blessed to be with him, to watch him and listen to him in the moment of ecstasy in 1963 and in the morning of agony in 1968. He felt the air was leaving the balloon of his dream. He felt that our propensity for the arrogance of war was undermining our moral authority in the world.”127 Jackson said he witnessed two shining moments after King was cut down: Mandela winning the presidency of South Africa and Obama winning the presidency of the United States. But even with Obama in the White House, Jackson protested, America still bullied smaller nations through its military empire, starved public schools and the entire public sector, and expanded the world’s largest prison system. All the dreams are under attack, he warned. The later Jackson coped with Parkinson’s disease and stumped for presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, contending that the crucial word in democratic Socialism is “democratic.” Democratic, he said, is the substance; “Socialism” is just a label. Jackson grew accustomed to being venerable, but he never shrank from the messy and draining social gospel struggle. The one thing about him that had no flip side was his morally centered passion for justice.128

4

THEOLOGIES OF BLACKNESS WITH A LIBERATIONIST BENT

The social gospel revolutionized theology by protesting that the church had operated for centuries with the wrong hierarchy of topics. The teaching of Jesus resounds with social ethical maxims and concerns that were never mentioned in the ancient Christian creeds. The founders of the social gospel charged that Catholic and Protestant orthodoxies expunged the prophetic heart of biblical faith, extinguishing any recognition of what it means to pray, “Thy kingdom come.” Lutheranism and Calvinism recovered Pauline doctrine, but not the social ethical religion of Jesus. It took modern historical criticism and the social gospel to get back to Jesus, discarding theological constructs that a spiritualizing and dogmatizing church made up. In White Protestant churches this argument had to overcome the authority of Reformation theology. In Black churches the Reformation barrier was much lower and often nonexistent, because Black Americans came into Christianity mostly through Methodist and Baptist revival preaching. The Great Awakening of 1730–1760 and the Second Great Awakening of 1795–1830 made little reference to Reformation doctrine; meanwhile the antiracist Christianity that Blacks received from Awakening religion was not what was usually given. The Black congregations that began to emerge in the 1760s had one thing in common— opposition to racism, a social ethical belief. They were liberationist before they were anything else, holding a social ethical viewpoint before the social gospel existed. To the Black social gospel founders, this nonracist identity should have made Black churches amenable to social justice religion. Repeatedly they learned otherwise; the road was very hard for the founders. They spent their

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entire careers struggling to establish social gospel beachheads in the denominations, lamenting the otherworldliness of evangelical-revival piety. In Europe the social gospel plummeted after World War I; in the United States it plummeted in White theology during the Depression. Meanwhile the Black social gospel kept building. To Mordecai Johnson and Benjamin Mays, the social gospel had barely begun; to suggest that it was over was ridiculous. White Protestant seminaries gyrated through varieties of neo-orthodoxy that derided the social gospel as too liberal, idealistic, rationalistic, and political. Swiss theologian Karl Barth, in the 1920s, and American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, in the 1930s, led the attack on all varieties of liberal theology and the social gospel. Barth went on to become the most influential theologian of the twentieth century. He was still a towering figure when James Cone wrote a dissertation on Barth’s anthropology and graduated in 1965 from GarrettEvangelical Theological Seminary/Northwestern University. Three years later Cone was still a Barthian and J. Deotis Roberts was a social gospel liberal when they set out to develop a Black theology. The differences between Cone and Roberts yielded two Black theologies, both calling themselves liberationist. Soon there were others. Not all liberation theologies were Black, since there were Latin American and feminist liberation theologies, and not all Black theologies were liberationist, since one could privilege Black consciousness without being liberationist. Cone and Roberts reserved the name “Black theology” for those who treated blackness as a self-conscious point of departure for theological thinking. Cone traced its birth to an ad hoc group of African American clergy, the National Committee of Negro Churchmen (NCNC). Stokely Carmichael, in June 1966, electrified the Memphis-to-Jackson Meredith March Against Fear by calling for Black Power. The following month the NCNC, spearheaded by Presbyterian official Gayraud S. Wilmore, responded with a manifesto in the New York Times calling for a theology of Black Power. The group said it was done with practicing Christian ethics without power, the approach of the social gospel. Wilmore’s group described racial integration as a defining goal, since most of the group still identified with social gospel liberalism. But the NCNC cheered the rise of liberationist rhetoric, wanting King to accentuate what was good about Black Power ideology.1 Cone granted originator status to the NCNC, remembering the excitement he felt at reading its manifesto. Roberts first imagined the idea of a Black theology on the day after King was killed; it was a recognition, as he fought off his despair, that the social gospel he shared with King would not be enough now that King was gone. The social gospel had to be supplemented by something more self-consciously Black and political—a liberationist emphasis on the struggle of

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Black people to overthrow oppression and dependency. Liberal theology, Roberts believed, had a role to play by addressing modern critical disbelief, applying the historical-critical method to the Bible, and gearing theology to social ethical goals. Cone vehemently disagreed. He had never been theologically liberal and wanted no part of it as a liberationist. He rejected the liberal commitment to engaging critical disbelief, putting God in question, searching for the historical Jesus, and making claims to ethical universality. Since Roberts brought his theological liberalism into Black theology and gave high priority to reconciliation with White Christians, Cone denied that Roberts qualified as a liberationist. “Liberal liberationist” was oxymoronic, a confused or temporizing failure to decide. Black theology began there, with an agreement about the deficiencies of Black religious thinkers of the past and a fundamental disagreement about whether the social gospel and liberationist approaches might fold together. But if Black theologians didn’t exist before the Meredith March, what were William Simmons, Henry McNeal Turner, Reverdy Ransom, Benjamin Mays, Howard Thurman, and King? Simmons came from the abolitionist movement, roared for Black liberation after the Civil War, theologized about the God of the oppressed, and put State University (Louisville) on his shoulders. Turner came from the abolitionist movement, evangelized much of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church into existence after the Civil War, championed Black nationalism, studied the academic theologies of his time, and taught that God is Black. Ransom succeeded Turner as an AME bishop, neoabolitionist, and theologian, espousing a Socialist theology of liberation. Mays and Thurman wrote landmark works of Black theology, combining Black consciousness, academic learning, and the social gospel. King led America’s greatest liberation movement and was a professionally trained theologian. Samuel DeWitt Proctor, a revered Black pastor, educator, and theologian, implicitly pressed the “didn’t exist” question in books detailing how he became an eminent expositor of African American faith without expounding what Roberts and Cone called Black theology of liberation. The question of what qualified as Black theology was not merely academic, because Proctor represented thousands of Black congregations that mobilized for the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. Theological convictions mattered greatly to many of these congregations. Joining the political struggle for civil rights had been brutally polarizing for many of them. The social gospel was still controversial to them—beyond the pale to many for being too activist, political, and theologically liberal. Black liberation theology made substantial headway in the academy long before it achieved much of a presence in congregations. It was offered in liberal seminaries and divinity schools where a sprinkling of faculty taught it as a cur-

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riculum addition to the social gospel and neo-orthodox traditions. There were no liberationist seminaries. Union Theological Seminary in New York and Interdenominational Theological Center (ITC) in Atlanta, a program uniting six denominations, played leading roles in establishing Black liberation theology, teaching a broad range of theologies. For many years there were hardly any liberationist pulpits either; liberationist graduates of progressive seminaries had to aim for positions in social gospel congregations. Cone’s political theology of Black Power was greeted with hostility by many White theologians, which he brushed off, and with heavy fire by Wilmore, religious historian Charles H. Long, and Cone’s brother Cecil Cone, which he took very seriously. Wilmore said Black theology should be an activist discourse of Black cultural identity within Black religious thought. Long said it should not exist, since theology is inherently colonizing. Cecil Cone said it should be wholly reconstructed as African. Vincent Harding said systematic theology is imported from Europe; leave it aside. These critiques engendered approaches to Black theology or Black religion favoring cultural identity over political struggle. The rise of the womanist movement in the late 1980s, the subject of chapter 5, enhanced the swing toward cultural liberation, emphasizing what is saving and enabling to Black women. The leading second-generation Black theologian was Dwight Hopkins, who combined Cone’s reconstruction of traditional Christian doctrines, Wilmore’s appropriation of liberating themes in non-Christian sources, and womanist criticism. Hopkins worked with five sources—slave religion, Black female experience, Black folk culture, Black politics, and social criticism—privileging the founding efforts of enslaved African Americans to make sense of biblical narratives and Christianity. Cone was deeply shaken and influenced by the critiques of Wilmore, Long, and Cecil Cone. He overhauled his position in response to them and made further adjustments in response to feminist, womanist, socialist, developing nations liberationist, and postmodern critics. In his later career he welcomed the remarkable range of Black theologies that his declaration of independence from White theology set off. But Cone never stopped being the fiery apostle of Black Christian liberation who privileged the political struggle for justice and believed that ontologizing blackness was his strength, not something to overcome. B LAC K AM E RIC A N FA ITH IN TH E F R EEDOM S TRUGGLE: SA M UEL DEWITT PROCTOR

Samuel DeWitt Proctor was eminent among the church leaders who preceded King and grieved at succeeding him. Born in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1921 and raised in its Huntersville district, Proctor grew up in a nurturing family

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devoted to education and the Baptist faith. He loved to tell the story of his paternal grandmother, Hattie Ann Virginia Fisher Proctor. Born a slave in 1855 in Chesterfield County, Virginia, she worked in the home of a tobacco plantation family, the Fishers. She learned to read by looking after the Fisher children, joining their tutorial schooling from an Episcopal priest. At eighteen she went off to Hampton Institute, a stronghold of Congregational and Presbyterian abolitionists founded by Union General Samuel Armstrong. Booker T. Washington taught Native American students at Hampton during her junior year. Fisher radiated the Hampton faith that working hard and being a good Christian were the keys to achieving the equality that God wants for all people. Graduating in 1882, she married a formerly enslaved barber and musician, George Proctor, moved to Norfolk, and taught school like most Hampton graduates. Hattie Ann and George Proctor had eight children, all born two years apart, raising them to love education, music, Jesus, and the Yankee missionaries who founded the Black colleges. George Proctor died young, leaving his wife to get their eight children through high school, which she did. One was Proctor’s father, Herbert Proctor, who met his wife, Velma Hughes, while they were students at Norfolk Mission College, founded in 1883 by the General Assembly of the United Presbyterian Church. Later it was renamed Booker T. Washington High School, the city’s only public high school for Black students. Hattie Ann Proctor was a fixture in the home of her grandson Samuel Proctor, whose father worked at Norfolk Naval Yard. Proctor later recalled that he could never imagine his grandmother as a slave because she was the most refined person he knew: “Her speech was perfect, her spelling and penmanship flawless, and her expectations of her children and grandchildren demanding. Grandma had a frightening piety about her. She was never tentative or ambiguous about anything. Her own early suffering had generated strength.”2 Hattie Ann Proctor epitomized the African American faith that Proctor described in countless sermons and writings. She sought to rescue Black Americans from centuries of oppression and dehumanization, sanctifying the ground on which her parents and ancestors suffered, struggled, and died. With nothing to go on but faith, she and her generation of redeemers imagined a better future, trusting that God was with them in their journey to equality. Her son George and daughter-in-law Velma passed this faith to their children, believing in the ideals of American democracy and a better future, joining the small group of African Americans who got through the door opened by Reconstruction. George and Velma Proctor had two infant children who died of whooping cough. Afterward they raised six more, coping with their grief; Samuel Proctor was number three of the six who survived. His parents steered warily through a

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viciously racist society, reserving their dreams of equality for church, the place where faith was rekindled. They said there were two kinds of people—those who lived with moral accountability and those who did not. Proctor was everlastingly grateful to have been raised on this maxim. In later life he grieved for children who were not nurtured by their parents to trust their parents and aspire to moral ideals. He gave short shrift to Carter Woodson’s objection that the New England teachers and the Black teachers they trained were instruments of assimilation and accommodation. Proctor’s grandmother and parents cherished the Yankee teachers who bore the hatred of White locals, devoted themselves to emancipated Black southerners, chose a life of poverty and service, and expected their students to succeed. The Black teachers they trained spoke habitually in the subjunctive mood—not what was, but what may be with enough faith. Proctor waxed lyrical on this subject from remembrance, gratefully counting himself a beneficiary of African American faith. As a youth he watched with awe as his grandmother taught at the Cumberland Street School. He felt something “reaching for my soul” when he read Washington’s memoir of walking penniless from the Blue Ridge Mountains to the Chesapeake Bay to beg his way into Hampton Institute. Bank Street Baptist Church, the family congregation, was mostly working-class, with some physicians and managers as well. Its preachers were seminary-educated and eschewed revival preaching; those who wanted to attend revivals had to visit neighboring churches. Proctor accepted Jesus as his savior several times but kept putting off being baptized, never feeling ready.3 He puzzled at the shameless racism of White Christians, wondering what they got out of Christianity. It was a very rare occasion when a White Christian treated him as a human being. Sparks White Melton, a prominent Baptist pastor, was the leading local exception during Proctor’s high school years, standing out from Melton’s racist business-class congregants, though Melton confined integration to the realm of interpersonal relationships. Proctor sailed through school and skipped most of the eighth grade, which made him sixteen when he enrolled at Virginia State College, accepting a music scholarship. He was too young and immature to be there. He daydreamed through classes, floundered, partied at fraternity houses, played alto sax for a dance orchestra, and took too much delight in carrying around more money than the professors. The everserious professors impressed him, especially historian Luther P. Jackson, but Proctor did not heed their appeals to buckle down. It surprised him that Black professors with doctoral degrees existed; he could not imagine himself as one. He heard about Mordecai Johnson, Benjamin Mays, Howard Thurman, and Adam Clayton Powell Sr., grateful that Black social gospel ministers existed. But self-dramatizing, egotistical preachers repulsed Proctor, and he judged they

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were the norm. So he ruled out the ministry and admonished himself to stop thinking about it. He was in college to study but didn’t study. He took a job in September 1939 with the Naval Apprentice School, which afforded a steady income and exempted Proctor from the upcoming military draft. In his sophomore year he pledged to a fraternity, struggling with his conscience. The fraternity severely hazed initiates, violently beating them fifty or sixty times with oak paddles the length of baseball bats. Proctor survived his initiation, stewed about it, and implored his fraternity brothers to curb the hazing rituals. He got nowhere; everyone told him to shut up. He prayed about it, went to church—violating a fraternity prohibition—got baptized, and proceeded to the dean. Proctor reported the abuses and was instantly a pariah at Virginia State. No one would speak to him; he was completely ostracized. In the summer of 1940, working for the navy, Proctor concluded that a call to the ministry had chased him down. The moral decision he made at Virginia State was evidence of it, as was the encouragement he received from Bank Street’s new pastor, D. C. Rice. Proctor resigned his comfortable job to enroll at Virginia Union University to become a minister.4 Virginia Union was a Black Baptist school founded as the National Theological Institute in 1865 by the American Baptist Home Mission Society. Separate branches were set up in Richmond, Virginia, and Washington, DC, shortly after Union troops took control of Richmond. In 1899 Richmond Theological Institute and Wayland Seminary of Washington, DC, merged to create the renamed Virginia Union University. To Proctor it was an oasis of liberal arts education studded with inspiring teachers, especially English literature scholar Arthur W. Davis, French literature scholar Mary E. Johnson, sociologist Henry J. McGuin, philosopher of religion Richard I. McKinney, and university president John M. Ellison. Proctor later sprinkled these names into countless speeches, always noting the distinguished schools from which they had earned their doctorates. He first heard the language of the social gospel from McKinney and Ellison. He loved Virginia Union and excelled there. Proctor rejoiced at having close friends, not being distracted by keggers, knowing the professors personally, and preparing for seminary. Melton secured a full-tuition scholarship for him at Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania, where Melton was a trustee. There Proctor was the only Black person on campus, a lonely condition that clueless administrators worsened by assigning him to the only kitchen job on campus.5 Proctor entered Crozer in September 1942, six years before King enrolled there. There were striking parallels between their experiences. Both soaked up the evangelical and Chicago school traditions of liberal theology that defined

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the seminary. Both took refuge in the local ministry and mentoring of J. Pius Barbour. Proctor worked under Hannah Moitz in the kitchen, who was still there when King attended Crozer. King fell deeply in love with her daughter Betty Moitz, who later recalled that he was extremely talkative, exuding enormous confidence that he would change the world, which attracted her. Proctor was not so buoyant. It hurt him deeply that Crozer consigned him to the kitchen. Moreover, King had ten Black classmates at Crozer and was better prepared for its theological liberalism, having been mentored by Mays and George Kelsey at Morehouse. King already knew the historical critical approach to Scripture and doctrine when he got to seminary. It was new to Proctor, who absorbed Crozer’s hard-edged Chicago school version.6 Proctor told this story in a frank version and a happy version. The frank version described the trepidation he experienced in his first year at Crozer, shocked that seminary was not what he had expected. Formally, Virginia Union taught Proctor that nothing is off limits to critical inquiry, but he arrived at Crozer not knowing how scholars deconstructed the scriptural text. It stunned him how far they went: “My sacred Bible was subjected to assaults from all corners.” The physical sciences, cultural anthropology, and biblical criticism left nothing in place. Every class felt like a demolition. Seemingly straightforward biblical narratives turned out to be multi-authored mythical, legendary, midrashic, or figurative constructions. Proctor reeled from what happened to the book of Job. At church, Job was an inspiring story about overcoming undeserved suffering. At Crozer, the inspiring ending was a scribal failure to accept what Job is really about—how to be faithful whether or not losses are recovered. In the frank version of his story, Proctor said he would not have made it through his first year without the writings of Harry Emerson Fosdick, the eminent liberal preacher who let science explain the physical world and interpreted the Bible as a book of faith in the living God of history: “He let the light of history, science, physics, archaeology, and psychology come shining through. I ended up with a Bible better understood and a warmer faith in that God who was the source of all truth.”7 The happy version brushed past his first year, skipping straight to the outcome in which Proctor embraced liberal deliverance, delighted to be relieved of having to believe in unbelievable things. He said he wasn’t like his classmates who were devastated to learn what modern scholarship does to the Bible and theology. He cheered at learning that religious historians are real historians, not apologists of an inherited orthodoxy: “Hearing them was like walking through a verdant forest with a mild breeze, birds chirping from every direction, and a crystal stream of clear water singing and dancing on solid, ancient rocks. I loved

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it.” Seminary, Proctor enthused, ripped the plastic covering off the Bible, making Scripture interesting and real to him. If he didn’t have to interpret the Bible as literally as every preacher he heard in his youth, he could read it without feeling anxious anymore. Black Baptist churches, he reflected, were never fundamentalist in the bad way of White fundamentalism—bigoted, dogmatic, and far from Jesus. But they were fundamentalist in teaching biblical literalism and an antiscientific mentality: “I am so thankful that my seminary delivered me from such views while leaving my faith in God and the centrality of Jesus firmly in place. Intellectually and spiritually I had a bath, a new awakening.”8 Edwin E. Aubrey, Mays’s former mentor at the University of Chicago, became the president of Crozer during Proctor’s senior year. He was a pure Chicago naturalistic theologian for whom Baptist Crozer was a precious outpost of liberal theology. If Aubrey’s brand of theology had a future, it had to succeed at places like Crozer. His appointment set off tremors among Crozer alums that this time the seminary had gone too far; why did they have to join Chicago at the far edge of the modernist spectrum? Proctor was of another mind entirely by his senior year. “Liberal,” he judged, means two things—the unstinting search for truth and a generous response to human suffering. He welcomed Aubrey and Gladys Topping Aubrey, a YWCA executive, to Crozer in 1944 just after Proctor married his Virginia Union classmate, Bessie Louise Tate, who came from a prosperous business family. The Aubreys were accustomed to extensive conference and lecture travel. They had two young children, so they needed live-in assistance, for which the Proctors volunteered. Observing upper-middle-class White intellectualism up close was a revelation to Proctor. Edwin and Gladys Aubrey surrounded themselves with books and art, never listened to radio, except opera, had no idea who won the World Series, and made no local friends. Their only friends were people like themselves in England, Wales, Boston, and Chicago. The Proctors and Aubreys were considerate to each other, curious about each other, and mutually respectful. That was it, as far as Proctor knew for many years. Aubrey died young, and his widow moved to California, sometimes writing to the Proctors. On one occasion Proctor visited Gladys Aubrey, and she wept with joy at seeing him. She showed him a scrapbook of news clippings she had compiled for forty years. It was a record of his achievements—appointment announcements, news stories, reviews of his books, and the like. She cried as she leafed through it and Proctor was floored; he had no idea what he had meant to her. It became an illustration of his stock theme that racial barriers are artificial and dehumanizing.9 Proctor proceeded to Pond Street Baptist Church in Providence, Rhode Island, and the doctoral program in social ethics at Yale Divinity School. His

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son Herbert, however, was born with a congenital heart defect—blue-baby syndrome—so Proctor transferred to Boston University School of Theology to be closer to his home in Providence. Here again he preceded King, while lacking King’s time to concentrate on school. Herbert required extensive attention, as did Pond Street. Proctor raced through his doctoral work on the side, focusing on New Testament Studies. When he recalled his doctoral years in Boston, Proctor remembered his ecumenical work with the churches of Rhode Island and came up blank on the seminary’s trademark tradition of post-Kantian personalist philosophy. That didn’t matter to Ellison. As soon as Proctor completed his course work in 1948, Ellison urged him to come home to Virginia Union. The following year Proctor began his teaching career at Virginia Union, thrilled to be joining his former teachers. In 1950 he graduated from Boston University, writing a dissertation on the modernist versus fundamentalist clash in the northern Baptist church. Proctor cheered that the modernists prevailed and lamented that the fighting of the mid-1920s inflicted lasting damage on the denomination. He said he was personally grateful to have been trained by northern Baptists to walk in the new freedom of historical criticism “unafraid and competent.”10 The same year he gave a chapel address at Crozer and was told about a remarkable student currently studying at the seminary. Proctor proceeded to King’s dormitory room, introduced himself, and was struck by King’s immense self-confidence. It seemed to him that King was the epitome of the Morehouse Man, “delivering every sentence with Delphian assurance and oracular finality.” King asked Proctor which books had most influenced him. Proctor cited Niebuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society, Fosdick’s The Modern Use of the Bible, and several books by Walter Rauschenbusch. King nodded approvingly and moved on to Black church leaders. What did Proctor think of Joseph Jackson, Mordecai Johnson, Vernon Johns, John Ellison, Richard McKinney, Adam Clayton Powell Sr., and Adam Clayton Powell Jr.? It seemed to Proctor that King was already measuring himself against them, “staking out his own turf for later.” It was the middle of the day in the middle of the week in a dormitory room, yet King was dressed in a suit and spoke “with a kind of Napoleonic assurance. He looked like a major event about to happen.” Proctor perceived that King was “very career oriented” and fixed on the future, planning to succeed Mays as president of Morehouse. A deep friendship was kindled, with a lot of reciprocal joshing. After King took the pastorate at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, he was fond of bragging that his congregation had thirty-nine Ph.D.’s. Proctor always wondered how many of them were Christians.11 Virginia Union went all-out to keep Proctor, promoting him in rapid succession to full professor, dean of the School of Religion, vice president of the university, and

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in 1955 president of the university, succeeding Ellison. There was no time for scholarly books. The university put itself in Proctor’s hands in record time, trusting that he was too smart and compulsive to let himself fail. His inaugural address as president riffed on Isaiah 54:2: If they lengthened their cords without strengthening their stakes, the next strong wind would blow their tent away. Virginia Union was called to lengthen the ropes, enlarge the tent, and drive the stakes in deep. Proctor grew accustomed to living in the public eye, frequently quoted in the local papers. But being the boss of his former teachers was awkward, and hard things were sometimes said. Proctor looked for an exit, moving to North Carolina A&T in September 1960, eight months after the Greensboro Four ignited sit-in wildfire. He played a careful hand, accepting a role. Proctor said he supported quiet diplomacy to advance civil rights, not demonstrations. He said it to many lecture audiences, White and Black, church and secular-civic. To White audiences it was always a variation of the same talk: America had become a nation with a huge underclass, a large prison population, and a poverty rate of 35 percent. One option was to reap the social consequences of allowing so much suffering and exclusion. The other option was to invest in America’s large, hurting, wanting-to-succeed Black population.12 Proctor befriended John Kennedy in 1959 at a United Negro College Fund event, which opened new opportunities for him after Kennedy was elected president. His first government job made him a subject of national media attention, associate director of the Peace Corps in Africa (1963–1964). From there Proctor moved on to the presidency of the National Council of Churches (1964–1965) and to a special advisor post in the Office of Economic Opportunity (1965–1968). He believed deeply in the Peace Corps and the Great Society, resigning from A&T in 1964 to give himself wholly to the war on poverty. It was grinding work that marked Proctor as an establishment insider to the generation that called for Black Power and spurned the Democratic Party. In January 1968 Proctor had a moment of reckoning about his career trajectory. Vice President Hubert Humphrey made a nine-nation trip to Africa, and Proctor went with him, along with Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. The group proceeded from Ivory Coast to Liberia, Ghana, Congo, Zambia, Ethiopia, Somalia, Kenya, and Tunisia. The drill was the same wherever they went. They met with oligarchs and plutocrats, endured elaborate protocols left over from colonialism, and made home visits, cooing over the luxury on display. Proctor rued that his hosts ignored the escalating anger and desperation in their cities: “Resentment of the ruling class was as obvious as the stench from moldy garbage, open sewers, and street urine.” Meanwhile, his group feasted on steak, scotch, and caviar. Proctor pined for the trip to end. His career had led to this junket with the vice president, and it made him ill.13

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Very near the end of King’s life, Proctor helped a retired White Baptist missionary, Martin England, break through the wall of King’s entourage to press a question: Did King have life insurance? For two months, England tried and failed to reach King. Proctor breached the wall just in time for England to enroll King in the American Baptist Health and Pension Plan, soon a godsend for the King family. This initiative of England’s lodged in Proctor’s heart; he said it was the kind of gesture that made him immune to hard cynicism about human beings. Proctor soldiered on through the heartbreak of losing King, working for Humphrey in the 1968 campaign. It felt very lonely out there. The country was ripped apart, the King coalition was destroyed, “all of our friends seemed to disappear,” and Richard Nixon seized the advantage. Proctor did not wait for Humphrey to lose before embarking on a new career. In September 1968 he moved with his wife, Bessie, and their four sons, Herbert, Timothy, Samuel, and Steven, to the University of Wisconsin at Madison.14 Wisconsin was spearheading a program to increase the number of African American academics, especially scientists, and to help the historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs). It teamed with other Big Ten schools to train one hundred new Black doctoral graduates, who would strengthen the faculties of the HBCUs. Proctor was thrilled with the program and the offer to run it. He went to Wisconsin as its newest dean and was immediately, vehemently rebuffed by the students he came to direct. Many had been recruited to very White Madison from Black neighborhoods in Chicago and Milwaukee. They had not expected to become doctoral students anywhere; they felt threatened and out of place; they believed the university should adjust to them, instead of making them study a Eurocentric curriculum; and they didn’t trust Proctor, pegging him as a 1950s Negro favored by the White establishment. Proctor tried to sympathize. He understood far better than the White administrators what the school was up against. He tried to bridge the cultural and generational chasm between the students and him, but that proved to be impossible, and Proctor was not open to being shamed or put in his place. When the students claimed he had nothing to teach them, he was prone to windy refutations. One year of resentful back-and-forth was all he could take. Harvard offered him a deanship, and Proctor prepared to take it—until Rutgers offered the Martin Luther King Jr. Chair in education. Proctor rejoiced at returning to the classroom, telling his family he was done with changing hats and forcing them to move.15 He had a message geared to the moment, dispensing it every week in college chapels across the nation: Civil rights liberalism was not wrong or dying. Certainly, it was bleeding and out of fashion, Proctor allowed, but the belief in U.S. American ideals that fired the civil rights movement was still the hope of

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the United States and the world. He put it personally, stressing that his life would not have been possible anywhere else. The African American faith that shaped, inspired, and sustained him was a sturdy vessel built for the long haul. Politically, it was a bulwark of freedom and democracy, fixed on helping America fulfill its professed ideals. Theologically, in Proctor’s version, it rested on three sources: the Hebrew prophets, especially Micah, Amos, and Isaiah; the life and teaching of Jesus; and the Pauline theme that one becomes a new creature in following Jesus Christ. Proctor said he gladly left aside biblical texts that fell short of the religion of the prophets, Jesus, and Paul. On the other hand, he preached about prophetic religion, the social gospel of Jesus, and Pauline regeneration wherever he went, just like King. Proctor reasoned that any school that invited him to speak wanted to hear from him, not a pale secular version of him. He cared about liberal democracy and public education because he believed in the prophets, Jesus, and being transformed by the renewal of one’s mind (Romans 12:2). He loved his new regimen of teaching at Rutgers on weekdays and hitting the road on weekends, preaching in big-steeple congregations and college chapels. Proctor was the leading circuit-riding preacher of the social gospel, delighting in his opportunities to meet new people and spread the message. Often he subbed for Powell Jr. at Abyssinian Church, since Powell spent most of his time, in his last years, in Bimini. In 1971 Abyssinian asked Powell to retire or return. He declined to reply, Abyssinian declared its pastorate vacant, and the following year Powell died. Proctor preached the funeral eulogy, calling Powell an incomparable “warrior for justice.” He anticipated that comparisons were soon to become his daily bread. Abyssinian asked Proctor to succeed Powell, and he agreed on the stipulation that he would continue to teach full-time at Rutgers. Proctor returned to pastoral ministry, his first such post since Rhode Island. Two highly able associates, Marvin McMickle and Calvin O. Butts III, made it possible for Proctor to concentrate on Sunday preaching.16 Succeeding Powell could have worked only for someone as deeply centered as Proctor. He admitted that the comparison to Powell tugged at him constantly, tempting him to be more confrontational and political, like Powell, which he resisted. Nearly everyone at Abyssinian had grown up with Powell. Many had watched him succeed his father, and most embraced the public mission that Powell inherited from his father and expanded. Now the congregation had to adjust to a pastor with no political ambitions. In fact, Proctor became less political than he had been. He had long conceived of education as the number-one catalyst for creating community in American life. Nothing compares to education as a necessary, creative, life-giving vehicle, universal in its mission, since no

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one gets anywhere without it. Proctor had moved from university administration to government service because he believed he could do more for antiracist, educational, and antipoverty causes as a public official. But it didn’t feel that way after he became a government player. Public policy work, he learned, is lonely and futile without the moral support of the public. Circling back to the pulpit, Proctor found himself dwelling on the kindling, formative, nurturing, challenging role of congregations in creating community. He believed in education as much as ever, but now he stressed the indispensable work of religious communities in supporting public education and progressive social causes. Proctor graded communities on a scale from the superficial to the “genuine.” Most forms of association in U.S. American life, he argued, are superficial. They make no demands, are merely commercial or transactional, and do not last. Cheering for the New York Yankees might be slightly more meaningful to some, but not by much; the community of Yankee fandom does not signify anything profound. Neighborhoods are more profound, binding people through shared space, social class, and other identity markers, but living in a given neighborhood is usually low on moral choice. Proctor said the real thing requires a moral basis and choice: “Genuine community is limited by choice, not by other arbitrary constraints. It is volitional, not circumstantial.” In his memoir My Moral Odyssey (1989), Proctor built to a discussion of genuine community. He greatly admired the genuine community that exists among high-level scientists, observing that scientific relationships span the world and involve something important. You have to be a credentialed scientist, however, to join. That was too selective to be a model. Proctor believed in the coming, integrated, multiracial community that King called the beloved community: “My moral understanding culminates with a commitment to a kind of community that builds on acknowledging one another’s total personhood, looking upon persons as equal to ourselves and not as our pawns or instruments of our designs. Each person is endowed with rights that are inherent and with worth that is conferred by God, our Creator. The immediate conditions of their lives do not diminish their worth or render them any less significant as persons.”17 The chief regret of his later life was that creating moral community got harder and harder. Proctor did not so much rail against social ills as bewail them, grieving that drug abuse, violent crime, family disintegration, and physical destruction were rampant in cities marked by half-empty churches. At Abyssinian, the pews were never empty, but the work was exhausting. Proctor observed that Powell Senior and Powell Junior had created an expectation that Abyssinian “had to have some kind of answer to every crisis.” It was a high privilege, and very taxing, to lead a congregation that accepted the social gospel

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calling “to be the voice, the eyes, the hands, and the feet of Jesus in this present world.” Nothing was ever settled, and the work kept expanding. Proctor was keenly mindful that his polished sermons and the refined ethos of Abyssinian alienated the congregation from much of its neighborhood. The sermons, ethos, and contrasts were fundamental conditions of Abyssinian’s existence, he argued. They were not reasons to become a different kind of congregation; Proctor refused to sneer at bourgeois conventions: “Blacks who have harnessed themselves with education, pride, discipline, and ambition have found themselves clustering in black middle-class churches. And the masses are not interested in fellowship with them. The worship styles are different. The training of the pastors and leaders is different. The use of the English language is different. Hence, the churches with the strong role models and the resources are inhibited in their access to the persons whose lives are most troubled: the poorly educated, the underemployed, the street ‘crack’ dealer, and the mothers who are still children themselves.”18 He told a signature story on this theme. On one occasion Proctor’s secretary informed him that a half dozen young men, lacking an appointment, had come to see him. They wore T-shirts bearing “violent slogans” and were not interested in being cordial, announcing that they came to transact the people’s business. Abyssinian was purchasing an organ for $250,000; the young men were outraged, demanding that the money be given to the poor of Harlem. Proctor conceded nothing. If they divided the money among 250,000 people, he said, all could buy the hamburger special at McDonald’s, the money would be gone, and everyone would be hungry again in four hours. On the other hand, this organ was terribly important to the people of Abyssinian Church. They came up from poverty, but their parents loved them, their teachers cared, and they loved this church. The organ was their testimony of thanksgiving and praise. Moreover, they loved to hear it. The music cleansed and uplifted their spirits, working for them. They were not hungry, because they had an organ in their lives! Proctor advised the young men to round up all the people they knew and bring them to Abyssinian. They wouldn’t stay hungry for long; going to Abyssinian would change them from within. Before long, they would find themselves worrying about poor people the world over, just like the members of Abyssinian. Proctor winked at readers when he told this story: “I admit, when I have an audience, it’s hard to stop me.”19 For years he had taken a handful of sermons on the road, riffing local and timely variations in King’s fashion. At Abyssinian, Proctor had to write a new sermon every week, and he didn’t feature political commentary on current events as Powell had done. He found himself thinking a lot about preaching

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itself. There are five kinds of preachers, he said. The “comfort dispenser” tries to stop the pain; the “pedantic dilettante” floods the sanctuary with scholarly points; the prophet condemns the injustices of society; the Bible expositor brings biblical scenes and teachings to life; and the ideal preacher does all four things plus something more, leading congregants into a personal relationship with Jesus. Proctor urged preachers to struggle with the scriptural text, not push it aside, and to be straight about what they do, not make congregants guess. The authority that Scripture contains is far greater than that which the old doctrines of plenary inspiration and inerrancy tried to secure. Proctor put it personally: “It is hard to believe that the God who was revealed in Jesus Christ commanded all that killing in the Old Testament, but the Bible is the book that records God’s reach for humanity and humanity’s reach for God.” That is what makes the Bible a work of religious authority, the encounter between God and humanity in the Bible: “It traces our spiritual ascent from crude human sacrifice and using women as property to the revelation of God in Christ and all persons as precious in God’s sight.”20 Every sermon should have a single driving point, he taught. Every topical, narrative, exegetical, or thematic sermon should fix on the word that God has given for that moment. It should be clear enough to be stated in one declarative sentence, and the preacher should be obsessed with driving it home. Proctor despaired of preachers who brushed aside the worldview chasm separating the biblical writers from contemporary Christians. So many preachers invoked biblical stories as though science doesn’t exist, instead of interpreting God as acting through the real things described by science. God, Proctor urged, wants us to turn the world upside down, not pretend that all biblical descriptions are literally true: “With a drug culture destroying our youth, casual sex ruining family life, violence on television devaluing the worth of persons, and corruption in government making a mockery of the democratic process, we need to reorder our priorities, change our agenda, and turn the world upside down.”21 In the 1980s he celebrated women’s entry into the ministry in unprecedented numbers. Suddenly, female perspectives were being heard on biblical texts that male-only gazes had dominated for centuries. Proctor commended a book on this subject, Women: To Preach or Not to Preach (1991), by Ella Pearson Mitchell. She wonderfully conveyed the gain that churches experienced by welcoming Black female voices into their pulpits, which complemented the emphasis of her husband, Henry Mitchell, in his book Black Preaching: The Recovery of a Powerful Art (1990), on the unique style of Black preaching. Characteristically, Proctor swiftly added a caution: “We cannot be found saying that God gave black preachers something that was withheld from white or Chinese or

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Lebanese preachers.” Anything that might be distinctive in Black preaching cannot be ontological or biological: “It is due to the history of oppression. That rhythmic cadence, that guttural whine, that sonorous moan, that picturesque language, and those moving images all come out of a cauldron of pain, indignation, sorrow, and self-generated hope.” The marks of Black preaching, Proctor insisted, are vapors of a moving faith given to the entire church.22 He paid very little attention to the new Black theologies. There were two chief reasons: Proctor held deep reservations about the new perspectives, and he pretty much stopped reading theology anyway after he earned a Ph.D. in it. Proctor began his career with a sound theological position and never saw the point afterward of questioning or revising it. He had grown up in an all-Black world, found his way, embraced the universal principles of social gospel Christianity, and helped others find their way. He preached at Abyssinian until 1989, but he did not engage the nearby founders of womanist theology and social ethics at Union Theological Seminary. He took a similar pass on Afrocentric biblical interpretation, which also had nearby pioneers at Union. He read enough of Cone, Roberts, and Wilmore to say what he didn’t like about the new Black theology, which discouraged further reading along that line. Religious historian Adam Bond, in his excellent study of Proctor, The Imposing Preacher, puts it aptly: “His theological bibliography shrank after his graduate school days.” Proctor believed that he and King had the same reason not to keep reading theology after they finished graduate school. What mattered was to apply the theology they shared to the world. After King was gone, that did not change for Proctor.23 Proctor’s work radiated his love and experience of blackness, but he worried that Cone, Roberts, and Wilmore were chauvinistic about blackness, were too radical politically, and teetered on denying the universality of Christian faith. Had Roberts been the leading Black theologian, Proctor might have engaged with Black theology more seriously. As it was, Cone lashed White people in Malcolm’s fashion, and Proctor turned away. The gospel is not narrow or provincial, Proctor contended; therefore, Christian theology must not be narrow or provincial: “There is nothing angelic about being Black. Much of general theology applies to all Black people, as it does to everyone else.” Proctor objected that the new Black theologies fossilized the circumstances of a passing moment. If Black theologians fixed wholly on their racial identity, what would become of Black theology when theology moved on to global conversations and crises? Black theology in the prevailing narrow sense, Proctor judged, was selfnegating: “Black theologians should be the first to rejoice to see their witness become irrelevant and the ‘metes and bounds’ of Black theology get lost and

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erased in a new emergence of strong and convincing movement toward a genuine community in the world.”24 This was the voice of the ongoing Black social gospel in a broad stream of the Black church. Other scholars in this line, such as Major J. Jones, Richard I. McKinney, and Preston N. Williams, wrote more extensively than Proctor in criticism of Cone. Jones wrote books on the theology and ethics of Black awareness that closely resembled the Roberts version of Black theology. A former doctoral classmate of King’s at Boston University, Jones affirmed select aspects of the new Black consciousness while stressing the universality of Christian faith and ethics, much like King and Roberts. Proctor, the preeminent theologian in this line, was not only eminent, but beloved. In 1997 Gardner Taylor eulogized his friend at Proctor’s funeral. Proctor’s parents, Taylor said, were “vaccinated against racism by the Spirit of Christ.” Then the inoculation passed to Proctor, “a man who by the very gifts of nature looked like a prince and talked like a poet.” Proctor influenced more Black pastors than anyone teaching at a seminary. In 2003, three Black clerical leaders—Iva E Carruthers, Frederick D. Haynes III, and Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.—founded the Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference, which soon became the gold standard organization of Black church activism and witness, superbly directed by Carruthers. Adam Bond, writing in 2013, observed that most contemporary scholars brushed aside “the content of a black social gospel tradition,” caring only about the post-King trends to which the social gospel led. To some extent, Bond allowed, Proctor invited his own erasure by refusing to engage the new theologies: “Proctor held on to his social gospel roots and saw no adequate replacement for them.” But the Black social gospel, as Bond affirmed, was and is a tradition of immense significance and variation, evolving into forms that give Proctor his due recognition.25 I NVE NTIN G B L A CK L IBERATION THEOLOGY: C ON E A N D ROBERTS

Proctor was a symbol, voice, caretaker, and theologian of the old guard who carried King’s vision into the 1990s. Everything he wrote implicitly refuted the idea that Black theology was invented in 1969. Roberts carried out the blend of Black social gospel theology and liberation theology that he first imagined on April 5, 1968, as a pioneer of global ecumenical theology centered in Africa. Cone began as a political theologian of Black Power and made a major adjustment in the mid-1970s and several more adjustments subsequently without changing fundamentally. Wilmore pioneered a third form of Black theology that subordinated theology to the category of Black religious thought.

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Roberts was slow to imagine himself as a theologian of the Black experience. Born in 1927 in Spindale, North Carolina, to working-class parents, he graduated from Johnson C. Smith University in 1947, earned bachelor of divinity degrees from Shaw University and Hartford Seminary Foundation, studied Platonism at Cambridge University, and completed his doctorate in philosophical theology in 1957 at the University of Edinburgh. Like King, Roberts was drawn to the battle of ideas in philosophical theology. In his case the key mentors were Edinburgh theologian C. S. Duthie and Cambridge theologian Charles E. Raven. Roberts tried to land a position at a seminary, tried to find someone like himself at any prestige seminary, and failed. He taught at Georgia Baptist College and Shaw University until 1958, when he joined the faculty of Howard University as a field education supervisor and seized the chance to teach theology and philosophy of religion.26 Until the night that King was assassinated, Roberts viewed himself as having taken the academic path that King eschewed. Losing King shattered him. Roberts had thought it was important to show that Black theologians could teach Platonism, Kant, and William James just like White theologians. In a moment that career rationale was eviscerated. He tried to listen to a lecture at Duke University by German theologian Jürgen Moltmann, whose “theology of hope” attracted great attention. Roberts asked Moltmann what his theology had to say to Black Americans whose hope had been smashed. Moltmann said that he forged his theology after he and his nation emerged from World War II and that Americans had to rethink the meaning of Christianity for themselves. That sounded right to Roberts; if he were to start over, he would formulate a specifically Black theology.27 Roberts conceived Black theology as an alternative to Black Power ideology that appropriated the best aspects of the new Black consciousness. Carmichael’s call for Black Power launched a new era in Black American history; Roberts said a season of “Black Rage” had descended on the nation. Theology, to speak to this moment, had to channel Black experience, reject the violence and separatism of the Black Power movement, and bolster the new Black pride. Roberts stressed that he had no theological forerunner: “Nothing like a systematic formulation of the Christian faith by a Negro writer has ever appeared. There has been no system of theology informed by a profound grasp of theology and Christian history projected by a Negro.” He put it more aggressively, citing religious historian Joseph Washington for support: “Three hundred years of American history have not witnessed one major Black theologian.”28 Now Roberts knew what his life and career needed to be about: “Black Theology must be radical and militant. It must move men to act upon the ethi-

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cal imperatives of their faith. To the assertion that ‘Black is beautiful,’ it must answer Amen, but to the call for violence it must say No. Black Theology must be informed by biblical exegesis and historical theology.” Roberts asserted that Black Americans like him were able to relate to all people by virtue of their long acquaintance with subjection: “The easy identification of the Negro theologian with all races and classes will lead him to a universal theological position.” Latin American liberation theology, just emerging at the time, won sympathetic attention in divinity schools and the ecumenical movement. Roberts found it “amazing” that many White North American progressives showed deeper concern for Latin Americans than for North American Blacks: “The theology to make human life human for the American Negro has not been written. This will be the task of a Black Theology.”29 To Cone, Black theology was precisely a theology of the Black Power movement, not a theological alternative to it. Born in Fordyce, Arkansas, in 1938 and raised in nearby rural Bearden, Cone was deeply scarred by the racism that assaulted his churchgoing mother, Lucy Cone, and bodily threatened his militant father, Charles Cone. His father taught him that Blacks could not survive White oppression without constant struggle and that no Black person should ever expect to be treated justly by anybody White. I heard Cone tell his story countless times. Nearly always he said that in his youth he avoided White people as if they were poisonous snakes. Sometimes, in private, when he said something caustic along this line, he would pause to say, “That’s Charley talkin’.” He studied at Philander Smith College in Little Rock, where Black history enthralled him, except that Cone wanted to change the world through religion. The past interested him only as a clue to how things got the way they were; he did not want to live there. In 1958 he and his brother Cecil Cone enrolled at Garrett Biblical Institute (later Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary). Both were immediately disillusioned, realizing that racism was as vile and pervasive in the North as in the South. Cone found a mentor in Barthian theologian William Hordern, under whom he completed divinity and doctoral degrees, mastering German and Germanic-Swiss theological systems. Cone rued the fact that his teachers fixed wholly on German debates, imitating their favorite German theologians; American Christian racism had no standing as a theological topic. He read King and Malcolm X on the side and wrote a dissertation in 1965 on Barth. Cone liked Barth’s attack on liberal theology, and the fact that Barth wrote twelve massive volumes of Church Dogmatics. Surely the Dogmatics prepared him for a theological career: “I hardly knew who I was as a theologian; I was a graduate student who mimicked white male Europeans and Americans.”30

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For two years he taught unhappily at Philander Smith, stewing over the irrelevance of his training; in 1966 he moved to Adrian College in Adrian, Michigan, where Cone pondered whether to return to graduate school to study Black history. He was teetering on yes when Detroit exploded in 1967 and Cone resolved to make the most of his training in theology. Whatever he had to say, he would say as a theologian. He found his voice upon hearing White theologians and pastors admonish Blacks to follow Jesus instead of resorting to violence: “I was so furious that I could hardly contain my rage. The very sight of white people made me want to vomit. ‘Who are they,’ I said, ‘to tell us blacks about Christian ethics?’ ” How did Whites muster the gall to lecture Black Americans about love and nonviolence? “My rage was intensified because most whites seemed not to recognize the contradictions that were so obvious to black people.”31 That was the wellspring of emotion and conviction that produced his electrifying first book, Black Theology and Black Power (1969). The Theological Commission of the NCNC, chaired in 1968 by Wilmore, had taken furtive passes at formulating what it called a Black theology or a “gospel of Blackness,” but it produced only individual drafts anchored in the conventions of social gospel liberalism. Cone ripped the bark off that project, describing Black theology as an enterprise unequivocally identified with Malcolm and Black Power: “Complete emancipation of black people from white oppression by whatever means black people deem necessary.” Black Power, he wrote, used boycotts when necessary, demonstrations when necessary, and violence when necessary. Cone’s first book contained the liberationist principle of repudiating oppression, dependency, and the rendering of oppressed people as nonpersons. Neither personhood nor the word liberation, however, was a key concept for him as yet. He focused on why Black Power rejected White liberalism and Black reformism. White liberals, Cone observed, took pride in their liberality toward Blacks and howled with wounded defensiveness when he and Carmichael placed them “in the same category with the George Wallaces.” Cone told them to deal with it. Invoking Malcolm’s analogy of the rapist asking his victim to like him, Cone said it was pathetic for White liberals to ask Black people to like them. Some Whites told Cone that things were better in their town because they supported the civil rights movement. Cone replied that all Whites were responsible for White oppression and American Whites had always had “an easy conscience.”32 Black Power was an announcement that all Whites are responsible for the oppression of Black people. Cone reflected that King seemed less threatening to Whites, so many Whites claimed to admire him, never mind that King was hated in his time for threatening White supremacy, until greater threats

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emerged: “What whites really want is for the black man to respond with that method which best preserves white racism.” Cone preferred Malcolm on the basic problem of American society, who was “not far wrong when he called the white man ‘the devil.’ ” American society was gripped by demonic forces, which so controlled the lives of White racists that they seemed incapable of distinguishing themselves from the alien power.33 Was that reverse racism, as many charged? Cone wrote, “While it is true that blacks do hate whites, black hatred is not racism.” Racism, he explained, rests on two pillars: (1) Biological race is a determinant of psychocultural traits and capacities; (2) One race is thus superior over others, possessing the right to dominance over them. Cone countered that Black Power makes no assertion of racial superiority or right to dominance. It is simply an assertion of the right to liberation from White oppression.34 Black Power is precisely the repudiation of integration, especially its humiliating assumption that White institutions are superior. Cone said the last thing that Black people need is to be assimilated into White culture. White liberals, to the extent that they acknowledged White racism, sought to cure their culture of it by integrating Blacks into it. They claimed to believe that race should not matter; White liberal Christians added that Jesus is above race. Cone replied that race matters everywhere in the real-world United States, assimilation is deadly for Blacks, and in the U.S. American context of Black oppression, Christ is a Black liberator. The riots in Detroit and Newark threw many pastors on the defensive, activating their moralizing impulse. Cone admonished Black pastors to stop apologizing for the rioters; a relevant Black church must be defiant: “It cannot condemn the rioters. It must make an unqualified identification with the ‘looters’ and ‘rioters,’ recognizing that this stance leads to condemnation by the state as lawbreakers. There is no place for ‘nice Negroes’ who are so distorted by white values that they regard laws as more sacred than human life. There is no place for those who deplore black violence and overlook the daily violence of whites. There is no place for blacks who want to be ‘safe,’ for Christ did not promise security but suffering.” Instead of draining the Black community of its rebellious spirit, Black churches needed to embrace the new era of Black Power: “It is an age of rebellion and revolution. Blacks are no longer prepared to turn the other cheek; instead, they are turning the gun.” The Black revolution was already happening; the only question was whether Black churches would join it.35 Black Theology and Black Power was a sensational debut that won a large readership and changed Cone’s life. Union Theological Seminary religious historian C. Eric Lincoln was Cone’s crucial supporter in his early career, urging

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Cone to write his first book, opening doors to lecture invitations, job offers, and publishers, and smoothing the way for Cone to become his colleague at Union. Lincoln began a book series on Black religion with Lippincott and asked Cone to write another book. Cone pleaded that he had just poured out everything he had to say—how could he write another one? Lincoln waved off the pleading, and Cone fell back on his training as a systematic theologian, writing A Black Theology of Liberation (1970). In Black Theology and Black Power, Cone had affirmed that he equated Black Power with the Christian gospel, which opened him to the charge that he reduced the gospel to an ideology. Since Cone was still a Barthian, part of him agreed that equating the gospel with an ideology is problematic. Barth said liberal theology contaminated the gospel by accommodating it to modern cultural agendas. On the other hand, Barthian theology did nothing to abolish racism, so Cone looked past his Barthian misgivings, vowing to let out the anger raging inside him. A Black Theology of Liberation launched the North American tradition of expounding what it means to interpret Christianity from a Black liberationist perspective. Cone was unaware of similar stirrings in Latin America and South Africa, but he defined blackness as a symbol of oppression extending beyond the North American context. The object of Black theology, he declared, is “liberation from whiteness.” Black theology is “theology of and for the black community, seeking to interpret the religious dimensions of the forces of liberation in that community.” Cone stressed that Whites are “in no position whatever” to make judgments about the truth claims or legitimacy of Black theology. The very point of Black theology is to “analyze the satanic nature of whiteness” and offer a liberating alternative to it. No White theologian ever took White America’s oppression of Blacks as the point of departure for theology: “Apparently white theologians see no connection between whiteness and evil and blackness and God.” Even White theologians who wrote about racial injustice failed to attack racism in its totality. Thus, White theology was not Christian theology at all, but its enemy. Every Christian theology worthy of the name is a liberation theology, and in a North American context, Christ is Black.36 Cone stressed that Black theology is of and for the Black community, “accountable only to the black community.” Black theology does not claim a universal starting point or aim. It is intrinsically communal, refusing to be separated from the Black community of faith. It identifies liberating activity with divine action, rejecting all abstract principles of right and wrong, and operates by a single principle, liberation, which is always partial and contextual: “There is only one principle which guides the thinking and action of black theology: an unqualified commitment to the black community as that community seeks to

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define its existence in the light of God’s liberating work in the world.” The test of truth in Black theology is whether a statement or action serves the end of Black liberation.37 His version of Black theology operated with six sources—Black experience, Black history, Black culture, revelation, Scripture, and tradition. Cone ontologized blackness in the sense of identifying blackness with qualities of being, contending that “the black experience is possible only for black persons.” White musicians tried to play like Johnny Lee Hooker or B. B. King, but they could never replicate Black soul: “Black soul is not learned; it comes from the totality of black experience, the experience of carving out an existence in a society that says you do not belong.” The Black experience is about struggling for survival under racist oppression, loving “the spirit of blackness,” and hearing soaring sermons on God’s love in Black congregations. It was also, Cone wrote, the rush of feeling that one got from bombing a White-owned building “and watching it go up in flames. We know, of course, that getting rid of evil takes something more than burning down buildings, but one must start somewhere.”38 Barth claimed to start with the revelation gleaned from hearing the Word of God in Scripture, the only appropriate authority in Christian theology. Cone replied that the sources of theology are interdependent, even if one claims to start with revelation. What matters about revelation is its content, not its methodological priority: “As a black theologian, I want to know what God’s revelation means right now as the black community participates in the struggle for liberation. Revelation is a black event—it is what blacks are doing about their liberation.” In Scripture and revelation, God is a partisan, liberating power. The God of the Bible calls Blacks to liberation, not to redemptive suffering: “Blacks are not elected to be Yahweh’s suffering people. Rather we are elected because we are oppressed against our will and God’s, and God has decided to make our liberation God’s own undertaking.”39 If liberation is the essence of the divine nature, God is Black. Cone drew the sharpest contrast between his theology and that of his teachers at this point: “White religionists are not capable of perceiving the blackness of God, because their satanic whiteness is a denial of the very essence of divinity. That is why whites are finding and will continue to find the black experience a disturbing reality.” For Blacks, evil is anything that arrests or negates liberation; salvation is liberation. For Whites, evil is normal life, their benefiting from the privileges of whiteness; salvation would be the abolition of whiteness. White theologians, preferring their privileges, pleaded that color should not matter. Cone replied, “This only reveals how deeply racism is embedded in the thought forms of their culture.” Black liberation was not a relative option in theology: “Those who

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want to know who God is and what God is doing must know who black persons are and what they are doing.”40 How could Whites do that? Cone did not claim to take the question seriously: “This question always amuses me because they do not really want to lose their precious white identity, as if it is worth saving.” But salvation is not moral anyway, he cautioned. Cone said Black theology had to break from the reformist moralism of social gospel liberalism and its academic agenda. Liberal theology fixed on justifying religious belief in the face of scientific, historical, and philosophical criticism, “but most blacks never heard of Aristotle, Anselm, Descartes, or Kant, and they do not care about the interrelationship of theology and philosophy. Unless God’s revelation is related to black liberation, blacks must reject it.” The test of Black theology is whether it reflects the religious experience of oppressed Blacks and contributes to their liberation. This claim was original to Cone, although it soon gained wide currency as the defining principle of Latin American, feminist, and other liberationist theologies.41 Cone was the apostle of the revolutionary turn in American theology that privileged liberationist questions. There was no feminist movement in theology when he began writing, and until the late 1970s Cone dismissed it as a farcical attempt to change the subject. Two early feminist judgments on his project, however, outlasted in importance the complaints of White male theologians that Cone was narrow, dogmatic, and hateful. Mary Daly in 1973 panned Cone’s theology as a fiercely patriarchal and vindictive “cry for vengeance.” It had biblical support, but it was bad for women. It transcended religion as a crutch but settled for “religion as a gun.” Daly argued that Cone’s simplistic either-ors and “will to vindication” never got beyond the sexist dualisms that Western selves and societies internalized. Thus, he had a one-dimensional solution that never got to the root of racism.42 Rosemary Radford Ruether in 1972 criticized Cone on two points, the first of which she applied subsequently to Daly: Any theology that denigrates or denies the humanity of any group does not deserve to be called liberationist. For a theology to be liberating, it must condemn the demonic powers that possess oppressive groups, but always in the name of an emancipating community reality that lies beneath the alienating power. Liberation loses its moral basis when it dehumanizes the oppressor. Ruether acknowledged that Cone occasionally suggested the possibility of a universal salvation, but his constant rhetoric of destroy-the-oppressor gave “the overwhelming impression that theological categories have been wedded to racial identities in such a way that denies the humanity, as well as the false power, of white people.” By identifying whiteness with the demonic, Cone failed to distinguish between whiteness as the

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nature of White people and whiteness as the destructive power possessing White society.43 The second problem with Cone, Ruether said, was that his theology was not very Black in a cultural sense. The idioms, theology, and preaching of the Black church are rooted deeply in African American experience, but Cone was alienated from the Black church. Black church preaching is hopeful, unself-conscious, involved in ordinary politics, and universalistic, but Cone was none of these things. He represented a “black intelligentsia in theology” that lacked a living relation to Black culture, which left him with no communal basis for doing Black theology. Ruether argued that although Cone condemned White theology, he lived in it and through it, promoting an abstract theory of blackness that had more to do with German theology than with the Black experience: “The result of this reversal in the thought of a man like Cone is that his ‘blackness’ and ‘whiteness’ are peculiarly flat and ‘formal’ in character. There is little living black culture reflected in Cone’s sense of blackness.” Just as Black people are more than the oppressed, White people are more than oppressors.44 This critique was not original to Ruether, since she had heard variations of it from many of her faculty colleagues at Howard University, notably Roberts. Roberts protested repeatedly that Cone’s preeminence was undeserved because he represented only himself and gave the movement a bad image. According to Roberts, Cone was wrong to denigrate racial reconciliation, his language was too violently anti-White, his theology was too Barthian, his thinking as a whole was narrow and exclusive, and he was disastrously cut off from Black culture, the Black church, and African sources of Black religion. In a signature work, Liberation and Reconciliation (1971), Roberts implored: “The narrowness that Cone has sought to impose upon Black Theology must be rejected. This must be done for the sake of Black Theology itself.”45 Roberts insisted that liberation and reconciliation go together and are equally indispensable. Greater polarization is not an acceptable outcome; he grieved at “the drifting apart of the races.” White racism pervaded American society; its quiet forms were no less toxic than outright bigotry, and Black Americans were giving up on integration. Roberts told them not to settle for separatism: “I am aware that some blacks have elected themselves judges and executioners of whites for their evil deeds. For these prophets of hate, revenge and revolt have become their only creed. My understanding of the Christian faith leads me to reject this path.” Black theology, he urged, had the “awesome task” of speaking for Black emancipation from white oppression at the same time that it admonished Blacks against believing they had no sins to confess: “It must speak of reconciliation that brings blacks together and of reconciliation that brings

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blacks and whites together, both in a multiracial fellowship of the body of Christ and within the world where a multiracial society must be built.” Black liberation is a precondition for racial reconciliation, but Black Christians must be willing to advance the cause of Black-White fellowship and cooperation.46 Cone replied that all such talk was premature, ridiculous in the present context, and liberal. The liberationist option is precisely the refusal to beg White oppressors for reconciliation. If Roberts did not conceive liberation unequivocally as the normative principle of Black theology, he was still a liberal, no matter how much he wrote about being a liberationist. Cone argued that interracial cooperation is the acid test. To work with Whites on religious and political causes is to sabotage the cause of liberation by forfeiting the right of Blacks to define for themselves the meaning of liberation and reconciliation: “Reconciliation and liberation on white terms have always meant death for black people.” Cone said the Black Power radicals who expelled Whites from SNCC and CORE got this exactly right. Black liberation, the defining objective of Black theology, must be definable only by Black liberationists.47 Roberts agreed that liberation must be the primary goal of Black theology; what he rejected was Cone’s separatist concept of it. He believed it is never too soon to advocate racial reconciliation, and the immediate problem of human estrangement is larger and more complex than that of White oppression versus black liberation. His exemplar was King, who exposed the racist hatred underlying White society without spurning the hope of reconciliation. Roberts sympathized with ministers who told him that nonviolent resistance was self-disrespecting and ineffectual. At the same time, he urged that King’s brinkmanship was still the best option: “What we need is a constructive, deeply motivated, long-range, massive reorientation in black-white relations.” America needed more nonviolent crusaders of King’s type who healed and destroyed at the same time, pressing hard for social change but short of violent rebellion: “Even blacks themselves are not safe in the hands of those who hate sufficiently to destroy whites. Hate is blind whether it comes from blacks or whites.”48 These were the arguments that founded two streams of Black liberation theology in the early 1970s, the endpoint of my discussion in Breaking White Supremacy. When Cone talked about his career in public lectures, he devoted up to 90 percent of the lecture to his first two books and rapidly summarized the others. In private, especially with me, it was the opposite. The part of his career that he replayed repeatedly, relived, and reconsidered was the decade after Wilmore, Long, and Cecil Cone shook him to his core, when he absorbed similarly powerful critiques by Latin American liberationists, Cornel West, and a fledgling womanist movement. Cone could recite certain critiques of his posi-

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tion verbatim from memory. Sometimes he would shudder at remembering how he felt upon first reading them. He always went through two stages of reconsideration. First came the period of absorbing a critique and deciding whether he needed to change his viewpoint. Then came the harder work of rethinking his position without retreating from anything that fired his first two books. Cone struggled into the 1980s with the memory that he would have quit theology in 1967 had Detroit not exploded. He wasn’t sure that he wanted to stick with this cast of characters and subjects, even as he sent doctoral graduates into the field. The book that saved his career in theology was God of the Oppressed (1975), which responded to early critiques of his work, dispensing with key Barthian tropes. But even that book was a holding action, not the answer. The answer came to him in the classroom, confronting Union students who expected him not to really care about Christian theology. Cone got clearer to himself and to them that he was in the right field after all. G AY RAU D WIL M ORE, JEREM IA H A. WRIGHT JR., A N D TH E BL A C K TH EOLOGIES

Many White theologians conveyed the judgment that Cone was too emotional and accusatory to be a real academic; Cone brushed them off, rarely bothering to reply. White theologians lacked the Black context defined by slavery and colonization, so they were in no position to assess Black theology, even in sympathy. Cone was grateful for his friendships with William Hordern and White Barthian theologian Paul Lehmann, but they were exceptions to his experience that White theologians were untrustworthy even when they tried to engage with his work. Similarly, Cone’s disagreements with Black pastors and liberal Black academics were predictable to him. Most Black pastors were religiously conservative, while theological critics like Major Jones and Preston Williams stuck with social gospel liberalism. Jones misinterpreted Cone as a human-centered ideologue, missing his insistence on the divine initiative and imperative for liberation. Williams criticized Cone for denigrating the role of reason and the temperate weighing of evidence in theology; Cone shook his head that Williams “could be so grossly misguided” as to take White rationality seriously.49 Charles Long, Gayraud Wilmore, and Cecil Cone were far more challenging to Cone. Long vehemently opposed the very idea of a Black theology, arguing that theology is inherently the power discourse of a privileged class, defining cultural categories. Culture gives birth to religion, a name for the cultural structures through which human beings apprehend the holy, but theology is an

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imperialistic morphology not salvageable by emphasizing blackness. Wilmore accepted Black theology as a plausible discipline but subsumed it under the non-Christian category of Black religious thought. He wanted Black theologians to throw off Christian theological orthodoxy, ground their enterprise in Black religious thought, and pursue an activist agenda. Above all, he opposed Cone’s two-track employment of “Black” as something specific to Black people and a symbol covering all who are oppressed. Wilmore protested that the latter usage disastrously empties Black oppression of a specific religious meaning. Cecil Cone said the only defensible Black theology is a theology of African theism. Blacks survived American slavery for centuries by praying to the almighty sovereign God of their African heritage, not to the God of White Christianity. Vincent Harding eschewed theology as a White European construct that misnames what matters—the rise of spirituality within the Black community. All four argued that Black religious thought is a deeper and richer tradition than Black Christian theology, and Long, Wilmore, and Cecil Cone sharply contended that Cone’s liberationism was too dependent on European theology and Black Power radicalism. His conceptual categories were European, not African. He substituted radical politics for Black religion. And his position was too reactive, overdefined by White racism, which left him with a concept of liberation as the mere negation of whiteness.50 Cone was staggered by these critiques: “To find out from my black colleagues that I was still held captive by the same system that I was criticizing was a bitter pill to swallow. What then was I to do? Deny the obvious or give up in despair?” He took a third option—deepening his roots in African American culture, which allowed him to relinquish much of his dependence on Barth and Paul Tillich, but also doubling down on his claim that the Christian gospel is true, which validated his work as a Christian theologian and moved him to adopt King’s emphasis on redemptive suffering. Cone reasoned that genuinely Christian theology is liberating because liberation is the central motif of the gospel. His theology derived from his experience of growing up in the Black church and being oppressed as an African American, but he refused to say that the gospel is liberating only for Blacks, and he acknowledged that his books relied too heavily on Barth and Tillich. His first pass at deepening his roots in African American culture was a meditation on the spirituals, The Spirituals and the Blues (1972). Meanwhile he labored intensely on a constructive theological work, God of the Oppressed, which intertwined the liberation trope in Scripture and African American history. Cone still argued that God’s revelatory act must be the basis of theology and that a single narrative line runs through the Bible to liberation theology. He preserved the authority of the biblical witness and the centrality of

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a divine-human Jesus on neo-orthodox terms. He still flatly rejected how King conceptualized the problem of violence and nonviolence. God of the Oppressed, however, cut back on the Barthian warnings against beginning with human questions, proclaimed that Black religion is distinctly faithful to the liberationist God and values of the Bible, and reclaimed King’s Christian trope that suffering can be redemptive. Cone pressed both sides of a Christian affirmation that Jesus takes the suffering of Black people on himself and that “Christians are called to suffer with God in the fight against evil.” Suffering that occurs as a consequence of struggling for liberation is a liberating sign of the presence of Jesus: “When suffering is inflicted upon the oppressed, it is evil and we must struggle against it. But when suffering arises out of the struggle against suffering, as in the fight against injustice, we accept it as a constituent of our calling and thus voluntarily suffer, because there is no freedom independent of the fight for justice.”51 He took other critiques one at a time. Christian socialists and “Third World” (developing nations) liberationists challenged his silence on political economics, asking if Black theology wanted a new economic system or merely a bigger slice of the American capitalist pie. In 1975 North American Black theologians and Latin American liberation theologians confronted each other for the first time at the Theology in the Americas conference in Detroit. The Latin Americans charged that Black theology wrongly fixed on one thing, racism, failing to offer a serious critique of capitalism. Cone led the countercharge that Communist nations were no less racist than the capitalist West, so there was nothing to gain by including a structural critique of capitalism. Afterward he began to hedge on that reply. It stung him that Latin American liberationists tagged him as a narrow, bourgeois, Black nationalist; then Cornel West joined the Union faculty in 1976 and befriended Cone. Cone began to say that Black theology could not establish solidarity with Third World revolutionary movements if it did not acquire an economic message. Moreover, economic oppression in the United States cried out for correctives. In October 1977 Cone spoke at the Encounter of Theologians conference in Mexico City, enjoying friendlier conversations with Latin Americans. In 1980 he wrote a pamphlet for the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC), declaring that he stood “against capitalism and for democratic socialism, for Karl Marx and against Adam Smith, for the poor in all colors and against the rich of all colors, for the workers and against the corporations.” Perhaps the emancipatory vision that was needed would blend prophetic Black religion and Marxist criticism: “Together black religion and Marxist philosophy may show us the way to build a completely new society.”52 That suggested a politics of democratic Socialism within multiracial organizations such as DSOC or its successor organization, Democratic Socialists of

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America (DSA). West played a leading role in DSA, but Cone never crossed this line, and afterward he wrote only occasional asides about political economics. His engagements with Third World liberation movements kept to a theological plane, including addresses to the Pan-African Conference of Third World Theologians in December 1977 and the Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians (EATWOT) in August 1981. At the EATWOT conference in New Delhi, India, Cone affirmed his solidarity with Third World movements and decried the fact that African theologians Harry Sawyerr, Edward W. Fasholé-Luke, and John Mbiti opposed Black American liberation theology. Mbiti objected that Black theology was “full of sorrow, bitterness, anger and hatred” and too absorbed by radical politics. Cone replied that his African critics were too otherworldly; Jesus died on the cross to overcome human suffering, not to transcend it. The politicized radicalism of Black theology, Cone argued, was not alien or irrelevant to Africa, as evidenced by the Black liberation movement in South Africa. South Africans Desmond Tutu, Manas Buthelezi, and Allan Boesak approached theology in his fashion as a discourse of social and political liberation. Meanwhile, Cone rethought his opposition to feminism.53 For years he regarded the rise of feminist criticism as a disastrous attempt to change the subject: “I rejected it as a joke or as an intrusion upon the legitimate struggle of black people to eliminate racism.” As a youth he had feared to be in the presence of a White woman, “because her word alone could get a person lynched, legally electrocuted, or confined to prison for life.” Years later the feminist rhetoric of violation reminded Cone of the racist fear-mongering of his youth. White feminist complaints about male supremacy struck him as frivolous at best: “Unfortunately, my early reflection on women’s liberation was so completely controlled by black males’ fears that I could not think straight regarding the complexity of the problem. It was easy for me to say that if white women are oppressed by their men, it is not the fault of black men. We black men certainly are not oppressing white women.”54 He had to hear otherwise from Black women before he changed his view of feminism. There were only eleven Black women in the entire student body at Union when I studied there in 1977, but two were doctoral students advised by Cone, Jacquelyn Grant and Delores Williams. They worked on him. Grant organized the first forum at Union, in October 1976, bringing together Black men and women to discuss women’s equality. She enlisted Cone to speak at the forum, where he made a very cautious speech that later embarrassed him. That put him on the path of conceding that sexism needed to be an issue in Black theology: “Black women’s silence began to end at Union and other places, because black men misused their silence by refusing to even consider that sex-

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ism was a real problem in the black community. Black men continued to claim that ‘black women have always been free.’ As I listened to black women articulate their pain, and as I observed the insensitive responses of black men, it became existentially clear to me that sexism was a black problem too.” Cone’s change of heart made it possible for him to train and support Black women who assumed leadership roles in churches and founded the womanist movement.55 The Black Theology Project of the Theology in the Americas program held its first national conference in August 1977 in Atlanta. It was the catalyst for what became in 1979 the first edition of a documentary history, Black Theology, edited by Cone and Wilmore. The book was a treasure trove of pronouncements, analyses, and constructive pieces of the founding generation, coming out barely in time to include two landmark essays of 1979 that marked the coming of a second generation. Grant, in “Black Theology and Black Women,” blasted the founding generation for perpetuating the invisibility of Black women. She said Black theology, so far, was really just Black men talking about themselves. West, in “Black Theology and Marxist Thought,” lamented that Black theologians had yet to produce a single substantive critique of the primary cause of Black oppression, monopoly capitalism. Grant, at the time, was writing her comprehensive exams. West went on to write his first book, Prophesy Deliverance! An AfroAmerican Revolutionary Christianity (1982), declaring that he was a philosopher of religion who had a strong word for theologians: “The more black theologians discard or overlook Marxist social criticism, the farther they distance themselves from the fundamental determinant of black oppression and any effective strategy to alleviate it.”56 Cone supported the Black women at Union who founded womanism, without incorporating womanist criticism into his thought, and he commended West for branching into political economics, leaving it to him. In the 1980s Cone immersed himself in a project of transcendent personal interest to him, mining the legacies of King and Malcolm. He was fond of saying that Martin taught him how to be Christian and Malcolm taught him how to be Black. When Cone needed a quick read on a White colleague, he would ask what the colleague thought of Malcolm. Cone had never doubted Malcolm’s luminous greatness; as for King, Cone was a major player in the recovery of the radical King. For ten years, Cone labored on his book Martin & Malcolm & America (1991). It was a magnificent obsession for him, the most intensely gratifying research experience of his career. He didn’t want it to end. Meanwhile, every time he taught his course on Black theology, he began with the same advisory word. I heard it the first time after I joined the Union faculty in 2005; by then it had ritual status at Union: “The most important thing to take away from this

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class is to remember it’s about anger. This anger sits at the center of Black Liberation Theology, as defined by Malcolm X. The black in Black Theology comes from Malcolm; Malcolm gives it its blackness. It is the blackness that makes it angry, mean, and uncompromising.” Union classes heard him say through the 1980s, before there was a book version, that Malcolm and Martin were revolutionary prophets cut down by the very forces they sought to change. Malcolm was killed by the Blacks he loved while seeking to liberate them from self-hatred, and King was killed by the Whites he loved while seeking to free them of racism. King, Cone allowed, had a more profound understanding than Malcolm of the weakness of violence, but even the later King did not attain the level of Black rage that Black theology needed, and he talked about integration to the end of his days. Martin & Malcolm & America put King’s Christian universalism and Malcolm’s Islamic Black nationalism side by side, contending that Malcolm and King complement each other positively and serve as correctives to each other. Malcolm corrected King’s dangerous and emotionally unhealthy fixation with Blacks loving their White enemies, while King corrected Malcolm’s fixation with Black versus White. Cone urged, “We need both of them and we need them together. Malcolm keeps Martin from being turned into a harmless American hero. Martin keeps Malcolm from being an ostracized black hero.” Cone stood with both of his heroes in looking beyond them: “We must declare where we stand on the great issues of our time. Racism is one of them. Poverty is another. Sexism another. Class exploitation another. Imperialism another. We must break the cycle of violence in America and around the world.”57 He had begun with a blend of Black Power politics and radical neo-orthodox theology. Then his thought grew into a multistranded liberationist perspective that outstripped, without negating, its origins in Black revolutionary nationalism. By 1990 Cone was habituated to a fourfold admission that his early work wrongly dismissed feminism, contained no global analysis of oppression, had no class analysis of oppression, and depended overmuch on Barth. These admissions were welcomed at American Academy of Religion conferences, where Cone’s friendly effervescence confused many White peers. Had he grown less angry? Some removed the question mark, convinced that he must have regretted his scalding early writings. In truth, Cone burned for the rest of his life with the same infuriated fire. But Black Power became hard to remember in the 1980s and 1990s, and Cone negotiated the same cultural politics of the Reagan and Clinton eras as the doctoral graduates he put into the theological field. Mass movements against racism, poverty, militarism, the failure of the Equal Rights Amendment, and class privilege no longer existed. The organizational vehi-

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cles that supported liberation theology outside the academy folded. Neoliberal corporate cosmopolitanism, touting its “diversity,” was the only electable form of progressive politics. At the same time, graduates of the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s poured into the academy and made a home there. Cone was conflicted about founding a theological enterprise that thrived only in the academy— and there only as a menu option propped up by liberal administrators touting their diversity. On the one hand, he was passionate and vehement about wanting his doctoral graduates to become academics; he hated it when some of them opted for ministerial careers. The founding of the Society for the Study of Black Religion, in 1970, helped establish Black theology as an academic discipline. On the other hand, Cone greatly feared that the academy had no trouble colonizing Black theology as a diversity option. The twentieth anniversary of A Black Theology of Liberation came in 1990, and Orbis Books published an anniversary edition, adding postscripts by prominent theologians and a new doctoral graduate of Union, Delores Williams. Williams said it was nice that Cone no longer dismissed the reality of gender oppression, but he pointedly did not draw on womanist thought: “Not a single woman is named, quoted, or given credit for contributing to the transformations Cone says he has made in his thought and style in the last twenty years.” Ruether made the same point more broadly, contending that Black communities routinely silenced Black women and that Cone should oppose it with more than a formal word against sexism. Wilmore made a bellwether assessment of Black theology from the standpoint of his close friendship with Cone and his cofounder role in Black theology. He yearned for something far greater than what existed.58 Born in Philadelphia in 1921 and educated at Lincoln University, Wilmore was ordained to the Presbyterian ministry in 1950 and served a congregation in West Chester, Pennsylvania, for three years. He worked for the Presbyterian Church’s Department of Social Education and Action for five years, taught social ethics at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary from 1959 to 1963, and headed the Presbyterian Commission on Religion and Race from 1962 to 1972. He was the spiritual leader of the NCNC group that first dreamed of a new Black theology, and he later teamed with Cone to produce two volumes of its documentary history. From 1972 to 1974, Wilmore taught at Boston University; then he taught for nine years at Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School and for three years at New York Theological Seminary before moving in 1987 to a chair in church history at ITC. No one knew the Black theological landscape better than Wilmore. He forcefully implored Cone to ground his theology of blackness wholly in specifically Black culture and history, letting go of his relativizing second-track concept of blackness as a symbol of oppression. Being oppressed,

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Wilmore said, does not deliver anyone into the experience of blackness “any more than putting on a blindfold delivers one into the experience of being blind.” He cofounded organizations that did not last, deeply influenced the Black theology movement, and fought off what he called its “creeping deradicalization.”59 Wilmore said four things thwarted Black theology from becoming what it should have been. First, the movement never developed the institutional infrastructure it needed to grow in local congregations. The National Council of Churches (NCC) courted the leaders of the historic Black denominations and other Black moderates, channeling funds to their caucuses instead of supporting the renamed National Council of Black Clergy (NCBC). Consequently, the NCC gave lower priority to antiracism work than to ecology, women’s liberation, and nuclear disarmament. Second, the spectacular rise of conservative White evangelicalism had a devastating effect on the social witness of the Black churches, yielding alliances between Black church leaders and the evangelical right. The new White evangelical leaders differed from their parents in knowing how to exploit Black evangelicalism, and in doing it. Third, the death of Elijah Muhammad in 1975 eliminated the competitive pressure from Black Nationalism. Black churches were better off when they had to compete with the Nation of Islam for members and loyalty. Fourth, the right-wing turn in U.S. politics made every kind of radicalism obsolete in American life, starving Black liberation theology of social and political oxygen. Wilmore was very bleak: “Today the almost complete breakdown of the family, the disorganization of black labor constantly on the verge of economic catastrophe, the trivialization of black music, entertainment, and other forms of our culture, and above all the losing battle against crack cocaine at every level of our communities, are all signs of deculturation, demoralization, and the alienation of a confused black middle class from its traditional role in the vanguard of the race.”60 Yet he still believed that Black liberation theology was “the most viable expression of progressive religion in North America.” Black liberation theology was right to emphasize blackness and to replace the social gospel with something radical and disruptive. Then it rightly called for a critique of capitalism and declared its solidarity with Third World movements. In one area, Wilmore observed, Black theology was doing pretty well—the academy. Most of the time when Wilmore spoke on this point, he was scathing. He hated that Black theology was mainly an enterprise in which highly educated professors wrote for tenure and promotion. On the anniversary occasion he strove to be nice, observing that the academic success of Black theology was a mixed blessing. The more that Black theology made its home in the academy, the more distant it became from

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the poor and from congregations. But Wilmore pointed to something promising: The upcoming generation of Black theologians was different for including women. Five womanists had recently completed their doctorates—Williams, Grant, Katie Cannon and Kelly Brown Douglas at Union, and Toinette Eugene at Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. Nobody knew, Wilmore wrote, what their influence would be, but the rise of a womanist theological community might be “the most important innovation on the American theological scene since 1969.”61 In 1999 Dwight N. Hopkins organized a conference at the University of Chicago to reflect on the thirty-year legacy of Black Theology and Black Power. Hopkins had studied under Cone in the 1980s, began his teaching career at the University of Santa Clara, and moved to the University of Chicago Divinity School. In the late 1990s he taught a three-course series on the first generation of Black theology, the second generation, and, teaming with his wife, Linda E. Thomas, a third course on Black theology and womanist theology in dialogue. By the end of the 1990s Hopkins was the leading theologian of the second generation, refashioning Black theology as a fusion of Cone’s Black political liberationism, Wilmore’s Black cultural radicalism, and womanist thought. He organized the Cone conference to reflect the state of the field. Cone and Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. represented the first generation, very critically in Wright’s case; Hopkins, Thomas, and Grant represented the second generation; Ruether and Catholic theologian David Tracy added local White perspectives; and Wilmore reprised his role from the previous Cone anniversary occasion. Wright was the pastor of a spectacularly thriving Afrocentric congregation in the Washington Heights community on the South Side of Chicago, Trinity United Church of Christ. Born in Philadelphia in 1941, he proceeded from the Marine Corps to undergraduate and graduate studies at Howard University, where in the late 1960s he studied the African American spirituals under musicologist John Lovell, and he earned a doctor of ministry degree in 1990 at United Theological Seminary in Dayton, Ohio, where he studied under Proctor. His research at Howard on the African roots of African American Christianity was fundamental to the theology he preached at Trinity Church, a point he made aggressively at the Cone conference. In Black Theology and Black Power, Cone reprised the Frazier side of the historic debate over African retentions between E. Franklin Frazier and Melville Herskovits, asserting that Blacks under American slavery “were completely stripped of their African heritage.” Wright said that was dead wrong: “When you start from the wrong place, you are going to end up in the wrong place. Or put another way, faulty assumptions lead to faulty analyses; and faulty analyses inevitably produce

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faulty conclusions.” Wright ran through the Frazier versus Herskovits debate, deriding Frazier as a “Merchant of Venice historian.” Frazier and Cone, he said, were wrong from so many standpoints that it was difficult to summarize them concisely. One could start with Lorenzo Dow Turner on Africanisms in the Gullah dialect, or subsequent research on linguistics, or ethnomusicology, or studies of early childhood education, or a combination of approaches, or “let the enslaved Africans speak for themselves,” reading the slave narratives. From every standpoint, Cone was wrong to claim that slavery destroyed the African cultural heritages of African Americans. His wrong contention about African retentions led him to the equally disastrous verdict that most of the spirituals were essentially otherworldly and compensatory. Wright ran through his favorite counterexamples, lingering over “Go Down Moses” and “I Got Shoes,” not mentioning that Cone made a similar argument in The Spirituals and the Blues.62 Wright allowed that academic theology and radical politics could be fashioned into a liberating Black theology—only not on Cone’s terms. Starting in 1619, or 1919, or with “the pitiful work of Joseph Washington” would never cut it. Black theology is liberating only if it mines the African roots of African American Christianity: “Without an understanding of the roots, there will never be any understanding of the fruits!” The Black church, Wright stressed, was far more African before the Civil War than Cone imagined, and it was far more creative after the Civil War than Cone claimed. Wright built Trinity Church into an 8,000-member powerhouse on the strength of the “underground theology” he derived from his research. Hopkins and Thomas were active members of Trinity when Hopkins invited Wright to address the Cone conference. Wright commended his approach to the scholars gathered in Chicago: “What I have tried to implement (or ‘embody’) in my ministry is the truth that I have discovered in my research. At Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, we have a worship service each week which affirms our African-ness (our Africanity) and our having roots on the African continent and in the African experience. Our Bible classes are taught from an African-centered perspective, starting from the premise that Christianity did not start in Europe. It started in Africa.”63 That was harsher than Cone expected because he admired Wright’s ministry and acknowledged that he spent much of his career repairing the scholarly deficits of his White seminary training. Since Wright did not claim that theology is inherently colonizing, Cone did not regard his differences with Wright as incommensurable, aside from the fact that Wright hammered him unfairly. It remained for Wilmore, once more, to assess the state of Black theology in a way that included all the players and assessed what had gone wrong and right. Wilmore aptly noted that for all of Cone’s oft-criticized narrowness and exclu-

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sive language, he launched the Black theology enterprise pretty much by himself. Cone’s early work, though not as deeply rooted in Black religion as it might have been, nonetheless tied the liberation theme so strongly to Black folk culture that he implicitly invited Black women—the primary preservers of African American culture—to write themselves into Black theology. Wilmore reprised his previous anniversary argument that Black theology was thwarted by its lack of infrastructure, the rise of a “regressive form of black religiosity,” the eclipse of the Nation of Islam, and the triumph of backlash politics. But this time he chucked aside mixed-blessing optimism. Wilmore had assailed the academic trajectory of Black theology from the beginning, which he called captivity. Many at the conference had heard him in full-scold mode, realizing where this talk was heading. Wilmore said it was nice that the White academy accredited Black theology for seminary and university teaching. But he grieved that Black theologians were “flattered and then distracted” by their pleasant jobs in the academy. Aiming for careers and tenure prevented them from grappling directly with “the urgent problems of the poor and disinherited black people who needed them the most.” He denied that he expected too much. Wilmore had never expected Black theology to spark a mass movement like the Garvey crusade, the civil rights movement, or the war on poverty. The leading Black theologians, he said, were middle-class academics “satisfied with their own selfworth and view of reality.” They were “too well-placed in their own niches and too obsessed with their own personal advancement in the church and community” to be radical or disruptive. In a word, he said, Black theology is basically self-satisfied. In that case, it should aim for an achievable goal, trying to become a “center of contagion” that infuses organizations and the public with its beliefs about power, African-centeredness, Black nationalism, and God’s liberating care for the marginalized and oppressed: “Such a school of black thought and action does not require mobilizing masses of shouting, fist-clenching people at rallies, marches, or polling places. But it does require extrapolating political, economic, and cultural positions from theological assumptions, and making those positions available to diverse groups of influential people.”64 Wilmore lamented that the Society for the Study of Black Religion had become an academic guild, not an intellectual think tank for religious activists. Had it developed into an activist think tank, it might have given Black theologians a place to take stands on social issues. As it was, there was no such place; there was only the activist model of Jesse Jackson and Louis Farrakhan. In other words, Black theology had the same problem as the middle-class Black churches, prizing its bourgeois status. Wilmore stressed that Cone, Roberts, and Williams were very far from being “public movers and shakers.” All were creatures of the

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library and the classroom, expecting students to come to them. He challenged the Cone conference to imagine a policy think tank and action program that targeted the crack cocaine crisis, police violence against Blacks, the attacks on affirmative action, and the disintegration of public schools: “It is precisely these so-called ‘secular’ issues that black theology promised to deal with in the 1960s but has not effectively addressed in the 1990s.” Only the Rainbow Coalition was still mobilizing significant numbers of Black church activists: “Most of us have become so old, middle-class, tenured, and disoriented by personal greed and the irresponsible use of power, that we have permitted the radical tradition in African American culture and religion to become weakened and trivialized.”65 It killed him to say it; Wilmore mourned to see the Black radical tradition he loved become so hollowed out. The NAACP and the Urban League, though liberal, had distinguished traditions; now both were reduced to “gala award banquets financed by white corporations.” Some congregations had notable social programs, but they were nearly always led by charismatic clerics such as Wright and Queens AME pastor Floyd Flake. Wilmore yearned for Black theology institutions that did not rely on somebody’s charisma and did not stick to denominational or theologically orthodox grooves. The organizations that were needed would draw together Black Protestants, Catholics, Muslims, and secularists, “all focused on developing a theology and praxis of pan-African liberation and elevation.”66 Cone concluded the conference by retelling his story. He didn’t care that everyone there had already heard it. This story was the backstory to the book they had gathered to discuss, and much of the conference back-and-forth about academic points bored him. He respected Wright but felt wronged by him. Wilmore was his treasured friend, but Wilmore did expect too much and he looked down on theology. Cone was proudly a Christian theologian because the Christian gospel is liberating. What repelled him was that White theologians still managed at the end of the twentieth century to treat racism as a low-priority concern: “What deepens my anger today is the appalling silence of white theologians on racism in the United States and the world.” White theologians, he observed, would never push aside the problems that critical reason poses for Christian belief, yet somehow, they still ignored racism. It didn’t matter that they had better manners than Reinhold Niebuhr, who prattled about the “cultural backwardness” of Black Americans. Cone declared: “As long as religion scholars do not engage racism in their intellectual work, we can be sure that they are as racist as their grandparents, whether they acknowledge it or not.”67 He drove to the finish line, blandly commending second-generation Black theologians and womanists for “moving in the right directions,” leaving aside

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that he did not draw on their work. He reprised his Martin-and-Malcolm argument, waited until his next-to-last paragraph to reply to the conference speakers, and delivered a thunderbolt: “We have opposed racism much too gently. We have permitted white theological silence in exchange for the rewards of being accepted by the white theological establishment.” That was a pitiful bargain, he scolded: “This is a terrible price to pay for the few crumbs that drop from the white master’s table. We must replace theological deference with courage, and thereby confront openly and lovingly silent white racists or be condemned as participants in the betrayal of our own people.” Theology needed a radical race critique far more than it needed postmodern musings about essentialism and a few endowed chairs. What Black theology needed most of all was to lift Malcolm to the level of King, in theory and practice: “We did not wrestle with Malcolm long enough. We quickly turned to Martin King. The mistake was not in moving toward King but rather in leaving Malcolm behind. We need them both as a double-edged sword to slay the dragon of theological racism.”68 Cone allowed that Black theology needed to move beyond the dialectic of nationalism and integration represented by Malcolm and King. But the way to do it was to work with the best that the African American heritage has to offer. Cone returned to the secular Black writers who had nearly lured him from theology at the outset of his career, asking why they were stronger critics of lynching than Black theologians, who rarely discussed it, and White theologians, who hardly ever mentioned it. For seven years he labored on an answer. Meanwhile, Roberts ranged widely, writing about African and Asian religions, African American folklore, and interreligious dialogue. He embraced the principle of Anglican theologian William Temple that either all occurrences are revelatory or revelation does not exist; there is nothing that is not revelation. On that ground he rejected Cone’s Christocentrism, judging that Cone stuck too rigidly to a dogmatic lens: “He often seems indifferent to sound historical criticism and careful exegesis. Even a black theology should be oriented toward the unity of the Bible and the whole gospel.” Roberts protested that Cone still spoke from the standpoint of a dogmatic position, not an inductive search for truth and wholeness, his various adjustments notwithstanding: “What we have is a monologue. What we need is a black ecumenical theology and an operational unity.”69 That was the model that Roberts set for himself and Black theology: “I am pleading for a theology of the black experience that grows out of the soil of our heritage and life.” Black theology needed to refuse the dichotomy between the sacred and secular, in the manner of African religion. To say “Jesus means freedom” is to affirm that Jesus is the Lord of all life and that his salvation applies to all cultures and civilizations. Black theology, Roberts argued, must be Christian

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without being provincially American or European: “We have been lured away by our white teachers to seek religious insights from the Euro-American tradition, which has never given birth to a great religion. Our black fathers had a rich religious heritage in Africa when the Norsemen were living in caves.”70 Roberts believed in this agenda before he believed in his capacity to pull it off. In his early career he judged that African religions were too diffuse in their tribal customs, languages, and religious systems to be manageable. Then he read Mbiti and E. Bolaji Idowu, who convinced him that his first impression was wrong. Roberts explained: “I discovered that African religion, at the core, is similar across Black Africa. The beliefs in a supreme god, lesser spirits, and reverence for ancestors are held in common. These are the esse, the vital core beliefs of African traditional religion.” Drawing on the ethnotheological analyses of Mbiti and Aylward Shorter, Roberts stressed that African religion is monotheistic, contains myths of redemption, and conceived God as a provident creator long before Judaism and Christianity existed. These aspects of the African religious worldview reinforced his Christian faith; Roberts urged students and colleagues not to fear that studying African religion would weaken their devotion to Jesus. Like Shorter, Roberts commended the sense of wholeness and relation in African religion, its emphasis on symbolism, its belief in a spiritual connection between the living and the dead, and its celebration of the fecundity and sharing of life.71 Like Mbiti, Roberts lamented that African religion lacks any sense of the future or eschatology. In African thinking, time consists of events, which occur only in the past and present; only these dimensions are real. The future is nothing because it is not experienced. Roberts believed that African religion has much to gain from biblical religion in this area; in particular, the Christian doctrine of the communion of saints improves on the African notion that every death takes place by the will of ancestors. Surprisingly, Roberts did not focus on ancient North African Christianity, which included Clement, Origen, Cyprian, Athanasius, and Augustine, or subsequent African Christianity, which produced the very integration of traditions he sought. He stuck to a harder project, arguing that traditional African religion and biblical religion hold similar conceptions of the nondualistic sense of the wholeness of things. To interpret Christianity from an African perspective is to cut through the Greek dualism and German dialectics that turned Christianity away from its holistic biblical roots. Roberts emphasized that Black theology is novel. Mays, Thurman, Johnson, and King, he said, were essentially social gospel thinkers, and Black theology is too radical and political for many Black Christians, especially the fundamentalists who repeat “the same shibboleths as the whites they admire.” Roberts rea-

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soned that Black theology, though novel and threatening, drinks from a venerable wellspring, seeking to renew the spiritual heritage rooted in African American sermons, folklore, art, spirituals, gospels, and blues. In addition, it offers a rich antidote to the soulless secularism of White culture. Europe never gave birth to a great religion or developed much spiritual creativity. Under modernity its spiritual stock dwindled to almost nothing, and “today the heirs of Euro-American culture are searching diligently in the non-Western world for spiritual riches.” Roberts implored Black readers not to follow American and European Whites into the spiritual wasteland of disbelief: “We blacks are heirs of one of the most spiritually abundant cultures in the world.”72 From 1974 to 1980 he served as editor of the Journal of Religious Thought, a periodical founded by the Institute of Religion at Howard University’s School of Religion. In 1980 Roberts assumed the presidency of ITC; three years later he moved to Candler School of Theology as an adjunct professor of theology, and in 1984 he accepted a distinguished chair in philosophical theology at Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, where he taught until 1998. Roberts ended his career as a professor of theology at Duke Divinity School. Repeatedly he made the case for an open-ended, ecumenical, dialogical approach to theology. Having admonished White theologians that Cone was not the only Black theologian, he took to heart the admonition of African scholars that Mbiti was not the only African theologian. Roberts said the key difference was that Cone spoke only for himself, whereas Mbiti portrayed and reflected the spiritual reality of a multitude.73 Roberts admired the old liberal theologians who laid the groundwork for a global ecumenical theology: William Temple, Rudolf Otto, Friedrich Heiler, and Nathan Söderblom. The ecumenical pioneers made real progress toward interfaith thinking within and beyond Christianity, showing “the possibility of a two-way conversation between Christians and religionists of other traditions.” The Barthian onslaught, he lamented, devastated this liberal ecumenical tradition: “For almost half a century this significant pre-Barthian theological tradition among Protestant theologians has been in a state of hibernation, and only a few mute attempts have been made to reestablish that august tradition.” Roberts allowed that some versions of neo-orthodoxy were somewhat open-ended, notably those of Niebuhr and Emil Brunner. But neo-orthodoxy as a whole lifted doctrine above history, and Barth’s sola scriptura positivism was a disaster for theology, denigrating the very idea of interfaith understanding.74 Roberts lauded the religious philosophers and historians who kept alive the interfaith ideal—Mircea Eliade, W. Cantwell Smith, W. E. Hocking, and S. Radhakrishnan—and the theologians who stubbornly kept working on a theology

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of religions—Paul Tillich, Nels Ferré, John Hick, and John B. Cobb Jr. He said he belonged to this line of liberal thinkers that interpreted Christianity in world religious terms: “The exclusive Christology that is prepackaged in the cultures of the North Atlantic theological community must now become inclusive so that the God who is in Christ as ‘Emmanuel’ can be known and confessed as ‘Lord of all.’ ”75 But Roberts cautioned that White liberal theology is weak in precisely the areas that Black American Christianity is strong. Many White liberal Christians are passionate about social causes but lukewarm about religion, intellectualizing and politicizing religion to the point of draining it of spiritual feeling: “Liberal theology is frequently complex and abstract, over-awing the average churchgoer. Liberals raise disturbing issues out of the gospel while often neglecting to comfort and reassure their seeker.” By contrast, Black churches hold in balance evangelical piety and the social gospel, making Black churches less prone to fight over conservatism versus liberalism.76 He was fond of saying that King was the crucial influence on him, “but I am not locked into the King era.” Roberts treasured King’s liberal theology, devotion to equal justice under the law, commitment to social justice, blend of evangelical and social gospel motifs, and emphasis on reconciliation, and he regretted that King emphasized racial integration. Roberts stood for a third way between integration and separatism that was more political than King’s civil rights campaigns, affirming “black ethnicity within a pluralistic culture.” The Black theology ideal, he argued, is to appropriate the best elements of the civil rights and Black Power traditions, “using the power acquired within the ‘system’ to make it more humane.”77 Roberts had a strong sense of political and theological accountability, which he expressed in a schoolmaster’s voice. His sharpest critiques of Cone were usually in this area, protesting that Cone made “reckless and irresponsible” statements about using “any means necessary,” which smacked of “ethic of no ethic” to him, if not outright moral nihilism: “They asked for bread; he cast them a stone.” Cone viewed his militant spirit as a source of strength in a hostile society; Roberts replied, “What shall I say, ‘one man’s meat is another man’s poison’?”78 But Roberts and Cone had important affinities, and Cone cheered when Roberts attained a late-career appointment at Duke. Both theologians ruled out a nondivine historical Jesus and a panentheistic God of process. In Black theology, Roberts declared, “there is no ‘quest for the historical Jesus.’ Jesus is present as a divine Friend.” On this view, Black theology honored the Black church’s longtime commitment to Jesus as divine cosufferer and redeemer. There is no historical Jesus to find behind the gospel picture of the suffering redeemer who showed himself to be divine; White liberal theology went too far in searching

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for a hypothetical historical Jesus behind the gospel narratives. Process theology, Roberts argued, is equally out of play: “We need a God who is being and not becoming. We need a God who suffers for and with the weak and the helpless. We need a God whose power matches the divine will for good. We need a God whose love is undergirded by God’s justice.” Black Unitarian humanist William R. Jones argued that if an all-powerful God exists, God must be a racist. Roberts said this logic is a nonstarter for Black theology. There is no alternative to believing in an absolutely righteous and all-powerful God; otherwise, the promises of God for oppressed people are lost. As Roberts construed Black theology, it held fast to the vision of God’s almighty power over death and against injustice.79 The later Roberts wrote ministry-oriented books that supported Black feminism, took a vaguely evasive line on the rights of gays and lesbians, and re-spelled Afrocentrism as “Africentrism” to make a closer etymological connection to Africa. He welcomed women into the ranks of ordained pastors and upbraided the sexism of many church leaders: “It is one of the major sins of black male leadership in the church. For this sin, we need repentance and forgiveness.” He dodged the issue of sexual equality, while assuring that it “must be addressed.” Roberts urged church leaders to concentrate on strengthening heterosexual relationships and two-parent families, warning that “it will be unfortunate if black womanist theologians do not address family life concerns.” Womanist theologians lifted survival issues above liberationist politics and affirmed the equal rights of gay, lesbian, and queer persons. Roberts countered that the paramount survival issue was the crisis of heterosexual Black families—a fundamental moral, practical, and Africentrist issue.80 Africentrism reframed his deepest feelings and convictions. To Roberts, it was the best successor to Pan-Africanism, the Négritude movement, the Harlem Renaissance, the civil rights movement, and Black Power nationalism. Like the Pan-Africanism of Du Bois, Africentrism promotes African self-determination and unity. Like the Afro-French Négritude movement of Aimé Césaire and Léopold Senghor, it advocates a consciousness of racial solidarity among all Blacks. Like the “New Negro” Harlem Renaissance of Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes, it seeks to facilitate a cross-fertilization of artistic and intellectual activity. Like the civil rights movement, it advocates large-scale mobilizations for equal rights. Like Black Power nationalism, it emphasizes self-definition and Black pride.81 Roberts argued that Africentrism is the next step beyond these movements. It embraces various aspects of the Black empowerment ideologies, but its heart is an updated philosophy of Pan-Africanism. It recovers the historic importance of

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ancient African cultures, especially those of Egypt, Nubia, and Cush, making Africa the center of its worldview and story. It calls for a decision to adopt African cultural practices and to espouse Africentrism as a belief system. Roberts explained, “Africentrism gets behind our preslavery past in the Africa south of the Sahara into the Africa that goes back to at least 10,000 B.C.” His version of it did not claim that “civilization” originated in Africa or that Cleopatra and Socrates were Black, but he stressed that the Nile Valley had an advanced civilization thousands of years before Jesus. Roberts espoused Africentrism with the same logic he applied to the Black Messiah. The historical details are less important than the existential power of formative myths and symbols, yet a basic historical claim is indispensable. Ancient Africa had a wrongly overlooked civilization, and Jesus was a really existing Savior, not merely a symbol. Biblical scholars Cain Hope Felder, Clarice Martin, Renita Weems, Thomas Hoyt, Randall Bailey, and Vincent L. Wimbush developed Afrocentric approaches to their field. Roberts grieved that Black theologians did not keep up with the Bible scholars, and the leading Afrocentrists were secular academics lacking any interest in Black theology or biblical scholarship. Thus, a precious opportunity was lost.82 He called for new Black theologies that bridged the gap between secular Africentric scholarship and the United States–centered evangelicalism of most Black churches: “Africentrism enriches our sense of worth through our African roots. If we allow others to define us, we will be swallowed up in the amorphous perspective known as pluralism or diversity. ‘African American’ will be meaningful only if we are able to see it for ourselves. An inclusive version of Africentrism also allows others to affirm who they are.” Africentrism is compatible with multiculturalism, he reasoned, but not with the regnant idea of pluralism that regards the liberal democratic culture of the United States and Europe as normative. Multiculturalism, rightly conceived, is the refusal to melt down: “If multiculturalism recognizes the diversity of cultures and at the same time allows each cultural group to appreciate the richness inherent in itself, then we can be Africentric and at the same time be equal participants in a multicultural society.”83 Roberts was an explorer, not a deep driller or system builder. His thought roamed in various directions and acquired new influences as he moved along: “I tried to bridge the two generations of Dr. King and the one of the new black power and black consciousness movement. I’m on both sides of the fence.” Had Roberts trained doctoral students, the field would have gained expansive Afrocentric theologians of his type much sooner. As it was, he remained too much a lone player to achieve the academic legacy that he deserved and that the field needed.84

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DW I G HT HOPKIN S A N D TH E SECOND GENERATION

Dwight Hopkins was, and is, the opposite of Roberts in the career sense and on the bellwether question of liberal-liberation fusion. He landed early in his career at the University of Chicago, where he trained numerous doctoral students. Born in 1953 and schooled in the segregated public elementary schools of Richmond, Virginia, Hopkins studied for five years at the very elite Groton Preparatory School in Groton, Massachusetts, graduated from Harvard College in 1976, earned his first Ph.D. under Cone at Union in 1988, and a second Ph.D. in 1999 at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. Primed for achievement by an intellectual, working-class father, Robert R. Hopkins Sr., Hopkins writes about Black theology with a sense of grateful inheritance and a commitment to explore the cultures of global Black religion.85 He grew up churched at Cedar Street Memorial Baptist Church in Richmond, but was on his way to a secular career when a friend handed him an article by Cone. If there was such a thing as Black liberation theology, maybe he should consider theology at Union. Hopkins met with Union’s Dean Milton McCormick Gatch Jr., discussed Cone’s article, and enrolled in 1981 in Union’s master of divinity program, assigned to Cone as an advisee. He entered the doctoral program after graduating in 1984, serving on the side as an associate minister at Bethany Baptist Church in Brooklyn. At the time Cone was immersed in the ten-year process that yielded Martin & Malcolm & America. Hopkins was immersed in it, too, doing research assistance for Cone along with two other doctoral students, Mark Chapman and JoAnne Terrell. He ran down news articles and tape recordings and heard Cone speak extensively on Malcolm and Martin. Cone told his classes that the later King grasped what was wrong, though Malcolm said it much better—the liberal fantasy of racial integration humiliated Black Americans. In 1986 Hopkins organized an EATWOT conference at Union that focused on affinities between the Black theology movements in the United States and South Africa—the subject of his forthcoming dissertation. Though steeped in Martin and Malcolm, Hopkins was forwardlooking and had a strong generational consciousness. The question for him was always where Black theology was heading. He stressed that his generation came of age in a dismal political and theological landscape. White churches divided between a resurgent fundamentalism and an insular ecclesiological establishment, on the one hand, and a retreating liberalism on the other. Black churches lapsed into historical amnesia after the assassination of King, flirting with “a passive form of survivalism.” Black theology, retooling for its second generation, teetered on “liberation theology

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liberalism”—a mish-mash of liberation theology and social gospel liberalism. Hopkins vowed to resist this outcome.86 He could see how the old social gospel or Christian socialism might be fused with Black theology, which would diminish the blackness that fired Black theology. To head off the trend toward liberation theology liberalism, Hopkins highlighted the distinctiveness of Black theology, compared the U.S. and South African traditions of it, and proposed to fuse the best parts of Cone, Wilmore, and womanism. Cone was right to privilege the liberating Christian gospel and formulate a radical theology of blackness, Wilmore was right to discard orthodox frameworks and emphasize the folk culture and ethical norms of the Black community, and the womanists mercifully rescued Black theology from male heterosexual captivity, though womanism was just beginning. Hopkins divided the field between proponents of predominantly political and predominantly cultural concepts of liberation. Cone, Roberts, William Jones, and Black nationalist pastor Albert Cleage emphasized the political struggle to abolish White supremacy and attain racial justice. Cleage preached at the Shrine of the Black Madonna in Detroit that Jesus was a dark-skinned revolutionary zealot dedicated to war against the White oppressor, Rome. The true Christian church is the Black church charged with the mission of building the Black Nation. Cleage’s Black political theology, Hopkins observed, rested entirely on his ecclesiology: All Black people belonged, in theory, to the Shrine of the Black Madonna, the hub of the emerging Black Nation. Hopkins moved from Cleage to Cone, noting that the early Cone fixed mostly on political liberation and the later Cone intertwined political and cultural liberation as necessary to each other, while still favoring the political sense. On the Christian gospel, there was no difference between the early and later Cone; he treated the gospel message of liberation as normative, which underwrote his political theology of liberation.87 Jones challenged Black theologians to make theodicy the controlling category of religious thought, as he did. He argued that if God is the sum of God’s acts, God must be a White racist. Hopkins commended Jones for compelling Black theologians to justify their belief in God’s transcendent power, but Jones rigged the game by confining God to past actions, or lack of action, and he was unlikely to persuade many Black Christians to become Unitarian humanists. Roberts exemplified the liberal-liberation option, which Hopkins vehemently rejected: “One cannot bridge or balance two conflicting movements—the Civil Rights and the Black Power movements—without taking a stand. The civil rights era fought to integrate Negroes with white people by acknowledging white power and values as the norm. The black power era fought for the libera-

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tion—the power to implement self-determination politically, culturally, and economically—of black people.” Hopkins said it is impossible to accept normative elements from White theology and simultaneously achieve liberation from it. Every conceivable form of liberal-liberation betrays liberation theology.88 Wilmore, Long, Harding, and Cecil Cone were advocates of communal solidarity and recovering Black cultural resources. All owed debts to Du Bois, but contended that Black political theologians wasted too much effort reacting to Whites and stewing over the White American part of Du Boisian double consciousness. How could Black theology attain liberation if it internalized, like Du Bois, White Euro-American tropes originated by Hegel, Marx, Emerson, James, and German biblical criticism? Du Bois problematized his double consciousness as a Black man and an American, but he emphatically denied that he should strip Hegel, Marx, James, modern historical criticism, and ancient Greek philosophy out of his head. The Black theologians of culture rejected this aspect of Du Bois’s legacy and often did not call themselves theologians. They called for a Black religious cultural discourse that put theology in its subordinate place, at most, and that excavated primordial Black worldviews. Hopkins embraced this agenda to the extent that a Christian liberation theological protégé of Cone’s could do so. His project was to take the cultural approach as seriously as Wilmore, Long, Harding, and Cecil Cone without discarding the Christian theological framework and without taking the Roberts option.89 Wilmore was the key to this synthesis, since Wilmore granted a role to Christian theology and shared Cone’s political aims. The way to save theology on Black liberation terms, Wilmore argued, is to recognize that Black Christian theology grew out of an older and richer tradition of Black religious thought. Black Americans were doing creative theology long before any Black American Christian knew what passed for theology in White seminaries and churches. Black religious thought is always about freedom. Wilmore delineated four sources of it—the folk religion of poor Black communities, the sermons and writings of public leaders, the folk religion of Black life in slavery, and the traditional religions of Africa. The first three sources filter the Christian Bible and tradition, always normed by the struggle for freedom. Wilmore argued that Black American religion retains from Africa a holistic rejection of sacred-secular dualism, a pragmatic approach to religious life, an emphasis on family and communal solidarity, a tradition of whole-bodied worship integrating mind, body, and spirit, and an affirmation of divine spiritual presence. Like Cone, he tied political and cultural liberation closely together, except Wilmore ranked cultural liberation higher because it is unequivocally redemptive, whereas political liberation by itself would be an empty victory.90

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Hopkins drew less from Long, Harding, and Cecil Cone. Long said there is no reality behind, underneath, or beyond the language we use. Language itself is the primal phenomenon, virtually synonymous with culture, not a mirror reflecting something else that is real. Religious language is the religious substance out of which theology develops, but Black people never had the cultural privilege or economic status to establish the cultural categories named “theology.” Therefore, Black scholars should not try to succeed at a game invented by their oppressors. Doing so is inherently self-negating in opposing the White theology that gave rise to Black theology. Long and Cecil Cone stressed that Black Christianity emerged from the struggle of slaves to limit the damage of the Christian Bible to their well-being; Cecil Cone reasoned that what matters is to know the almighty sovereign God of Africa. Harding took a pass on formal theology, a diversion from the struggle of Black people for freedom. He respected Cone, but theology did not arise from the religious experiences of Black people, so why should Harding care about it? What matters is Black spirituality, the life of the life-giving spirit blowing where it will and setting people free. Hopkins regretted that Long downgraded political struggle and the efficacy of Black Christian liberation theology in it. Political salvation and cultural salvation go hand in hand, but Long played with one hand. Cecil Cone was not much better in this area, stripping the divine of political import in the African context and the context of Black U.S. experience. Harding wrote beautifully about the spontaneous spirituality of Black folk religion, but is there really no role for systematic theological reflection on it?91 Hopkins ran through Black South African theologians in similar fashion, describing Christian Institute Lutheran theologian Manas Buthelezi, Dutch Reformed theologian Allan A. Boesak, University of South Africa Lutheran theologian Simon S. Maimela, and Institute for Contextual Theology theologian Frank Chikane as political theologians devoted to the abolition of the apartheid state in South Africa. Hopkins commended their racial justice bravery, but he faulted their tendency to plant antiracist criticism in a broad critique of capitalism. South African Black political theologians were too fixed on politics, eager to blame racism on capitalism and imperialism, skittish about standing on racial solidarity, and indifferent to Black music, dance, folklore, art, theater, poetry, and traditional African religions. The leading Black cultural theologians, Hopkins judged, were Bonganjalo C. Goba, a Congregational cleric and former president of Albert Luthuli College; Itumeleng J. Mosala, a Methodist biblical scholar; Takatso A. Mofokeng, a Dutch Reformed cleric and theologian at the University of South Africa; and Desmond Tutu, the Anglican archbishop of Cape Town. Here, Hopkins lauded a shared determination to

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fight the theology of White settler colonialism, and a shared emphasis on the sacredness of land for Black people. He also commended Mosala and Mofokeng for repudiating White ethical idealism. But Hopkins had two large reservations about the cultural theologians. They did not clearly state the conditions on which reconciliation between Blacks and Whites might occur, or treat Black songs, folklore, poetry, and literature as primary sources for Black theology. “Authentic black liberation theology,” Hopkins contended, emerges only from such sources: “One has to dig deeper into the black reality to break with the white missionary way of doing theology.”92 That was his project. Hopkins agreed with Cone against Wilmore that Black theology depends on normative Christian claims, and with Wilmore against Cone that Black songs, folklore, poetry, and the novels of Richard Wright should qualify for scriptural status. Wilmore rightly opposed Cone’s binary language of true faith versus heresy, and Cone rightly opposed Wilmore’s relativizing of the gospel. But more important, Hopkins argued, Cone and Wilmore were similarly committed to the total liberation of the Black community and the poor and oppressed throughout the world. Hopkins had to cheat a bit to include Wilmore in the latter claim, since Wilmore rejected the symbolicoppression concept of blackness. Hopkins negotiated this difference for years to come, sticking to his original aim of combining the best parts of Cone and Wilmore, while emphasizing the role of biblical religion in slave religion. Always he negotiated the danger that one side of the political liberation versus cultural liberation dialectic might consume the other. By the mid-1980s, the cultural-identity side not only was stronger, but verged on routing the field. His first book concluded that Black theology at its best affirms the unique identity of Black people, rejects the convention that theology is entirely the work of the Christian church, and spurns the modern White Christian fixation with challenges of critical disbelief. White theology never ceased obsessing over science, the death of God, and the marginalization of religion. Black theology is consumed with freedom and does not care about the anxieties that drive White theologies.93 Blowing open the Scripture-and-tradition canon put Black theology in conversation with the entire cultural and political range of Black experience, especially popular culture and the religious experiences of the poor. Hopkins pulled Black theology in this direction, partly by collecting writings on diverse cultural topics by authors also beginning their academic careers. Cut Loose Your Stammering Tongue (1991), co-edited with theologian George C. L. Cummings, gathered theological and ethical commentaries on interviews with formerly enslaved people. It was the first theological work of its kind, interpreting the slave interviews

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conducted between 1936 and 1938 as a project of the Folklore Division of the Federal Writers’ Project. Hopkins cautioned that these materials must be interpreted cautiously. Memories can be unreliable over time, and proslavery advocates used some of the interviews to bolster their myth of the contented Negro slave. Nonetheless, he argued, Black theology was overdue to let the originators of African American Christianity speak for themselves.94 The slaves created a distinct form of Christianity by combining their own African sacred beliefs with the religion introduced to them by White missionaries. Hopkins stressed that they dared to think theologically “by testifying to what the God of Moses had done for them.” Though prohibited from holding religious gatherings, they created an “invisible institution,” as Albert J. Raboteau II called it in his landmark book Slave Religion: The Invisible Institution in the Antebellum South (1978). Later it became the antebellum Black church, a vehicle of Black faith. If Yahweh used Moses to free the Hebrew slaves from bondage in Egypt, surely Yahweh was the force behind all the liberation movements in history, including the American Revolution against Britain. Hopkins noted that enslaved and formerly enslaved African Americans perceived no distinction between the sacred and secular realms. To them, God was the omnipotent holy ruler who willed their freedom from slavery and oppression, and Jesus was a friend of the oppressed—a suffering human figure and a divine warrior. Black theologians, Hopkins advised, “need to be thankful that God spared a few formerly enslaved African Americans to pass on this black theological tradition.”95 The first edition of Cut Loose Your Stammering Tongue included a chapter by Cummings on how formerly enslaved Blacks talked about the Holy Spirit, a chapter by ITC religious historian Will Coleman on the retention of African ancestral beliefs in Christian and non-Christian slave narratives, and a chapter by Howard University ethicist Cheryl J. Sanders on the ethical assessments of slavery that former slaves offered in their conversion stories. Soon this was a crowded field. In 1993 Riggins R. Earl Jr. published Dark Symbols, Obscure Signs: God, Self, and Community in the Slave Mind. Theophus H. Smith followed in 1994 with Conjuring Culture: Biblical Formations of Black America. Coleman in 2000 published Tribal Talk: Black Theology, Hermeneutics, and African/American Ways of “Telling the Story.” Hopkins was the first and most prolific contributor to this generational turn in Black theology, following up Cut Loose Your Stammering Tongue in 1993 with a programmatic and constructive text, Shoes That Fit Our Feet: Sources for a Constructive Black Theology.96 He went straight for the theology problem, conceiving Black systematic theology in Cone’s fashion but chastened by Long, Wilmore, and the budding womanist community. Hopkins said theology is first and foremost a critical

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investigation of the belief in the divine that a given community espouses. This belief in a divine object of life-and-death ultimate concern is usually instinctive and unrefined. The task of systematic theology is to make a believing community “more self-conscious and deliberate about the sounds, feel, nuances, and requirements of an instinctive theology.” Some theologies gravitate toward a liberating faith and many do not, but all Black theologies do so. Black theology heightens the intentionality of the instinctive drive of Black faith toward liberation, making the Black community accountable to the liberating demands of its faith. The Black church plays the dominant role in Black faith, but Black theology is more than a discipline of the Christian church. Black theology addresses the entire Black community and belongs to it, highlighting relevant trends in Black life, reflecting theologically on the struggle of African Americans for freedom, and extending the latter concern to the global poor: “The black theologian stands at the crossroads, the spot where the power of liberation beckons the African American poor to walk this way toward freedom.”97 Hopkins reprised his signature claim that Black theology at its best intertwines the political struggle against racist structures of power with the cultural struggle to build strong Black institutions and develop Black resources. Neither agenda can get far without the other. The slave religion of the antebellum Black church is the plumb line for Black church theology. He ranged over slave religion, representations of poor Black women in the fiction of Toni Morrison, and classic tropes, figures, and forms of African American folk culture, sifting through foundational resources for Black theology. He went on to interpret Du Bois, Malcolm, and King as social movement leaders steeped in the liberation faith of the folk. Shoes That Fit Our Feet recounted that enslaved Blacks had to sneak off at night to hold church and talk to Jesus. If they couldn’t find a standing shelter, they constructed a bush arbor for their forbidden prayer meetings, mounting shrubs on four poles. Others created worship spots by digging deep holes in the fields. Some were allowed to attend segregated sections of White churches, but ex-slave Emily Dixon recalled, “Us wanted ter go whar us could sing all de way through, an’ hum ’long, an’ shout—yo’ all know, jist turn loose back.” What was the point of a church service that stifled the liberating spirit? The spirit moved enslaved Blacks to “turn loose back.” Hopkins cited Susan Rhodes: “We used to steal off to the woods and have church, like de spirit moved us—sing and pray to our own liking and soul satisfaction.” Churchgoing Christians were the most vicious of the slavers. Mrs. Joseph Smith explained succinctly: “A card-player and drunkard wouldn’t flog you half to death. Well, it is something like this— the Christians will oppress you more.” Oliver Wendell Jackson remembered

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that enslaved Blacks who went to Sunday school got an extra dose of hatred, where they were told they “had no more business in heaven than a hog had to be a preacher.” Hopkins built up to a story about Uncle Silas, a hundred-yearold slave who demanded to know from a White preacher if enslaved Blacks would be free in heaven. The preacher deflected to a rote maxim—Jesus would save those who were free of sin. Uncle Silas said that was not an answer. If he got to heaven, would he be free? Heavenly salvation interested him, but not as much as freedom; he remained standing for the rest of the service, waiting for an answer that never came. Hopkins described the scene: “On the one hand stood a white male, symbolizing theological degrees, recognized Christian ordination, patriarchy, racial privilege, economic power, and Satan. On the other stood Uncle Silas, poor, black, unlettered, and a child of God.”98 Morrison told stories of poor Black women manifesting God’s liberating spirit in their values and traditions. She distinguished between “the Thing,” a sterile spirit that oppresses poor Black women, and “the Funk,” the spirit of liberation that enables Black women to survive, freeing them from the demonic grip of the Thing. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), described the Thing through the eyes of a narrator, Claudia, who recoiled at a light-colored new classmate with green eyes. The Thing marked the new girl as beautiful and girls like Claudia as not beautiful. To Morrison, the Thing was a symbol of the totality of Black women’s oppression. It was political in depriving Black women of the power to flourish in the world and cultural in imposing a toxic identity on them. Claudia rued that everybody was in a position to dominate poor Black girls like her. White women, White girls, White men, and Black men routinely issued orders to her. The Bluest Eye conveyed that Black women suffer from sexism as victims of White and Black male dominance, from racism as victims of White male and female supremacy, and from poverty as victims of economic exploitation. Hopkins observed that Morrison’s Black women in Beloved (1987), Song of Solomon (1977), Sula (1973), and Tar Baby (1981) share the unique spiritual pain of being triply oppressed, confronting triple expressions of the spirit of the Thing. Nearly all were trapped in a web of economic inequality that forced them into relationships with people who abused and exploited them.99 With so much arrayed against them, who would speak for these women? Who would defend their unique cultural identities and support their political liberation? For a Christian, Hopkins remarked, this is the question whether God has turned away from the cries of the oppressed. Morrison’s answer was that God’s grace has always given to poor Black women the liberating spirituality of the Funk. The Funk repels the oppressive attacks of the Thing with spiritual resources planted by the Spirit of the divine. Morrison’s novels portray

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Black women rebelling against gendered, racist poverty, transgressing the boundaries imposed by the Thing. Sethe, in Beloved, defies her boss, daring to talk back to him. Sula Peace, in Sula, catches a glimpse of a different life, decides to educate herself, leaves her small hometown, and welcomes her new life as a free-spirited risk taker. Claudia and Sula already love themselves before society tries to convince them they should hate themselves. Morrison described the self-connectedness of Claudia and Sula and their connectedness to other Black women as shielding, saving, and emboldening. Hopkins observed that in Morrison’s novels, “a black sister’s concern for another sister demonstrates spiritual power to laugh and be in this world as God intended for all the poor.” Womanist spirituality extends beyond one’s family and immediate community, lifting up the love, compassion, and harmony that connect African Americans as a whole to each other: “More specifically, freedom and well-being of the poor sector of the wider neighborhood of black folk set the tone for all who claim membership among the folk.” God loves the Black poor without limitation, willing the freedom of all humanity through the liberation of triply oppressed Black women.100 African American women, Hopkins argued, have a uniquely saving role in the entire Black community and for humanity as a whole. Moreover, the spirituality Morrison described needs to be theologized because the God depicted in it is the same God that Moses, Jesus, and the enslaved founders of the Black church experienced. Morrison portrayed God as acting in the Black church and beyond Christianity, and so does Black theology. The God of Black theology is an incarnational life giver who tabernacles with the poor. Morrison’s powerful continuity of perception harnessed Hopkins’s discussion of womanist spirituality, but his interpretation of classic tropes could sample only folklore that “gushes forth in all directions.” He ran through the Way Maker, the Way Made, two tricksters deriving from West African mythology (Brer Rabbit and the Signifying Monkey), fictional human characters Uncle Wallace, Shine, Stackolee, Karintha, and High John the Conqueror, and the “getting over” trope conveyed in freedom songs, work songs, and the blues. The Way Maker is the ultimate power in African American folk culture, a creator deity who made all things and holds the power to do anything whatsoever. The Way Made is the place that folk believers want to end up. Hopkins lingered over the Way Maker’s emissary, Brer Rabbit, the smartest of the forest creatures. Brer Rabbit gibes and provokes, nettling authority figures and playing the powerful against each other, often with a snarky quip. He thwarts the Elephant and the Whale from running roughshod over everything else, risking his life to help smaller creatures survive. Hopkins fixed on tales in which Brer Rabbit has a

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definite moral aim. The Signifying Monkey also uses clever wordplay to confound the powerful and help the lowly. Signifying is a wordplay strategy of indirection—needling someone with an indirect gibe, or goading someone with an over-the-top put-down. Often it exploits the difference between the denotative and the figurative meaning of a word. The Signifying Monkey uses hearsay to trick the Lion and the Elephant into confronting each other, humbling both with a few cunning words. Hopkins observed, “Tales of weak creatures trapped in life and death situations abound in which the potential victim simply speaks a few words to mystify and terrify the oppressor bully.”101 He interpreted freedom songs as “getting over” vehicles of survival and emboldening. The sheer repeated singing of coded, repetitious lyrics helped many enslaved Blacks get to Detroit or Canada. Work songs, too, were expressions of survival, defiance, and solidarity, getting over from the old to the new. Often they began with a protest against misery-as-usual before yielding a turn, or the hope of one. The worker casts aside his hammer and runs for freedom: “Dis ole hammer that I bin usin’ is killing me, oh, yes!” Hopkins construed the hammer as the entire system of being owned, victimized, and worked to death: “To surrender that hammer implies transformation from death to life.” He interpreted the blues as the third song form of getting over, sitting with the perpetual contradictions endured by American Blacks—joy in sorrow, hope in despair, persisting in looking for a way past barricades and oppression. Blues singers position themselves in their own consolation. They have to do something, so they sing about what they feel. The blues itself is doing something that might bring some consolation: “The blues is a faith act because it can only blossom when African American singers feel deep within their souls that the only thing left for them to do on earth, short of death, is to create a blues melody.” Here, Hopkins registered downside moral ambiguity that he left aside in other areas. The blues can be so depressing and heavy that they break your heart: “That is the reality of certain parts of folk culture. Human purpose turns into a dog-eat-dog survivalist confrontation. Personhood is violated and folk seek deadly revenge.”102 Insightful interpretations of the religion of Du Bois were rare at the time. In the same year that Hopkins published Shoes That Fit Our Feet, Rutgers historian David Levering Lewis published the first of his two biographical volumes on Du Bois. Both volumes were magnificent, but Lewis was tone-deaf to the vibrant, yearning, heterodox spirituality that surged through Du Bois and his work. Lewis could not see Du Bois as religious, much less as Christian. He reinforced the customary scholarly verdict that Du Bois’s profuse religious imagery was ornamental, a kind of literary affectation reflecting his childhood

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background in New England Congregationalism. In the 1980s the outstanding exception to getting Du Bois wrong on this subject was West, who told lecture audiences that Du Bois did not play with religion—he had a deep religiosity and loved the Black church enough to criticize it strenuously.103 Du Bois had a social gospel theology, though Hopkins didn’t put it that way. In 1940 Du Bois lashed Wilberforce University at its commencement ceremony for clinging to a shabby, fearful, repressive religious orthodoxy. He admonished the university to aim higher: “Christianity means sympathy; the realization of what it costs a human being to live and support a family in decency. Christianity means unselfishness; the willingness to forego in part one’s personal advantage and give up some personal desires for the sake of a larger end which will be for the advantage of a greater number of people.” Du Bois revised the Pauline maxim that faith, hope, and love are the greatest gifts of the Spirit, and the greatest of these is love. He said that work, love, and sacrifice are the greatest gifts of the Spirit, and the greatest of these is sacrifice, through which the true religion of Jesus aims to achieve radical democracy. West caught this religious wellspring of Du Bois, but West did not write about Du Bois, so the scholarly deficit remained. Hopkins sought to fill the deficit, claiming Du Bois for Black theology.104 Du Bois imbibed town-meeting democracy as a youth in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. He said he learned about democracy by watching the town conduct its government business in open public meetings, at first surprised that respected town leaders bothered to listen to poor, unkempt, cranky citizens. Democracy felt unnatural to him, but also deeply impressive—at bottom it was the discipline of listening to everyone. This was a formative experience for Du Bois, as Hopkins noted, but Hopkins moved straight from it to the claim that Du Bois was a lifelong radical democrat from his schooldays onward. That passed over enormously important factors that Du Bois struggled for years to sort out—his romantic identification as a college and graduate student with imperial conquerors; his training at Harvard in laissez-faire economics, German historiography, Hegelian idealism, social gospel idealism, and the pragmatism of William James; his bewildered encounter in Berlin classrooms with Socialist theory; the Social Darwinism he took for granted in the 1890s and early twentieth century; and his early career emphasis on Talented Tenth Black achievers.105 Du Bois was always recognizably Du Bois in trying to limit the harm that Social Darwinism inflicted on African Americans. But the early Du Bois took Social Darwinism for granted as a scientific description of how the world works, his intellectual elitism was terribly real, and his debts to Hegel and James shone through for his entire career. His emphasis on the Talented Tenth, though

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aimed sincerely at enabling Black Americans to survive Darwinian weeding out, cannot be described as radical democracy, or even vanilla democracy. Du Bois did not begin to shed the romantic, pro-imperialist, procapitalist, Social Darwinist, and elitist aspects of his thought until he belatedly studied democratic Socialism in 1905 and gingerly entered what he called “the socialist path,” acting on Socialist tendencies he had long felt within himself but still hesitated for three more years to claim. Then he waited until the 1920s to seriously study Karl Marx, a thinker of staggering genius and self-sacrifice whom Du Bois admired enormously. Hopkins bypassed all that to get to the religion of Du Bois. Here again he cited a memoir anecdote without explaining that Du Bois fictionalized parts of his early life to salve his wounded feelings about his family. More important, Du Bois idealized the story to substantiate his doubly conscious self-understanding as an outsider who understood the dominant society from within and without. The town leaders of Great Barrington took pride in having fought to abolish slavery. High school principal Frank Hosmer, a descendant of the Congregational abolitionist families who ran the American Missionary Association and the Freedmen’s Bureau, picked out the brainy Du Bois for achievement stardom. In his youth Du Bois was Episcopalian like the Burghardt family, but in the late 1870s he followed his mother into the Congregational Church and also attended the AME Zion Church, impressing both Sunday schools with the Greek he learned in high school. Hopkins brushed past these factors, beginning with a signature Du Bois remembrance: “I grew up in a liberal Congregational Sunday School and listened once a week to a sermon on doing good as a reasonable duty. Theology played a minor part and our teachers had to face some searching questions.”106 His religious upbringing was practical and ethical, not theological. Du Bois deeply absorbed the New England Congregational conviction that liberty is the conformity of one’s will to moral duty. Truth is a moral absolute transcending mere actuality, a Puritan belief the social gospel took over to say that true religion is essentially ethical. Du Bois believed it his entire life, dismissing theology as an abstract distraction about a heavenly sphere separate from human action. Hopkins observed that since Du Bois cared only about ethical effort, “one can understand the definitional conclusions he draws about theology.” That is, Du Bois was wrong to reduce theology to otherworldly speculation, but he had a commendable reason for being that way. Moreover, being that way did not prevent him from writing profoundly about God and Jesus. Du Bois construed God and Jesus as being involved in the struggles of the poor and oppressed for justice. The calling to sacrifice for justice was theological for him, notwith-

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standing that he never put it that way. Orthodox religion suffocated the divine calling to sacrifice for justice with theological dogmas and ecclesiastical distractions, so Du Bois hated every form of church orthodoxy. Hopkins appreciated that Du Bois strenuously wanted the Black church to live up to his social ethical aspirations for it.107 Du Bois blistered White Christianity as a fraudulently racist enterprise that blasphemously claimed to serve God’s will. Hopkins noted that the emphasis on blasphemy registered intense moral and spiritual feeling; would an atheist say it so passionately? The God in whom Du Bois believed was a spiritual force manifested in the struggles of the poor and oppressed for justice. Du Bois took for granted that hypostatizing God outside the realm of being is childish superstition. He had no tolerance for speculative talk about an entity-God separate from God’s movement in the human struggle for freedom. He chafed at Black church preaching that fixed on an otherworldly God. Hopkins described the entity-God as an idol of the religion of whiteness: “The white church’s systemic lineage and practice of racism call forth the Devil and certainly do not reveal a just God.”108 Du Bois was fond of saying, “Love Is God, and Work Is His Prophet.” He also put it negatively, “There Is No God but Love, and Work Is His Prophet.” Hopkins sifted through articles, poems, and prayers in which Du Bois added that God is Black and hell is White. In 1916 Du Bois interpreted Exodus 18 as teaching that God favors oppressed races and authorizes them to bring liberating democracy to the world. He noted that Moses had an Ethiopian wife, Zipporah, and his father-in-law, Jethro, was an Ethiopian priest. When Moses verged on burnout in the wilderness, Jethro told him to set up a democratic government for the people of Israel. When the people criticized Moses for having a dark wife, Yahweh burned with anger against their racism. Sometimes Du Bois feared that God might be White and fiendish. In September 1906 he trembled at the thought of it after Whites in Atlanta erupted in a race riot. Du Bois begged God not to be silent while Whites whipped themselves into a murderous frenzy: “Surely Thou, too, art not white, O Lord, a pale, bloodless, heartless thing!” There was no hope for Black people if God was anything like White people. The following year Du Bois wrote in “The Song of the Smoke” that blackness is eternal and absolute, whiteness is a fall from darkness, and ultimately the night will triumph over hellish whiteness.109 Hopkins summarized what he took from Du Bois theologically: “God is associated with the velvet night and with Ethiopian fathers and mothers in the Bible because God is black.” He noted that Du Bois condemned theological orthodoxies for two reasons: They are childish fairy tales that thwart believers from

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exercising their rational faculties; and they are reactionary idols that thwart believers from carrying out the struggle for justice. Hopkins winced at Du Bois in the former mode, not sharing his rationalism. Hopkins lingered over the second argument, an ethical claim about the struggle for liberation. Du Bois said it would be hard to exaggerate the “moral disaster” of the theistic belief that a benevolent God of power changes the course of events if petitioned to do so with humility. He gave no quarter to Heilsgeschichte, the idea of a divine history above the history of the world. Hopkins treaded cautiously on Heilsgeschichte, which theologians deploy to wring religious meaning out of biblical narratives that are not credible as straightforward history. His own developing theology was planted in the Bible and the testimonies of formerly enslaved Blacks, making claims about the omnipotence and omniscience of God that Du Bois would have rejected as entity-God holdovers. Du Bois took no interest in the hermeneutical problems that preachers face in preaching historically problematic texts. What mattered is that the transcendent God of the Bible who listens to prayers and intervenes in history is the enemy of human freedom, negating collective ethical action. That kind of religion was a moral disaster that could not be cleaned up for liberationist purposes.110 Du Bois told Communist historian Herbert Aptheker that for many years he was open to the possibility “of some God also influencing and directing human action and natural law.” But he found “no evidence of such divine guidance,” while finding ample evidence that human beings possess moral agency. So he grew accustomed to repelling “most persons” on this subject. The selfdetermined liberation of Black people meant everything to him, though Du Bois did not object to divinizing the struggle for it. It was fine with him to describe God as the divine spirit of freedom or a spiritualizing factor in the battle for justice. He had done so for many years, and he remained sympathetic to those who colored the world religiously in this fashion. Du Bois reminded Aptheker that for two years at Harvard he absorbed the neo-Hegelian idealism of Josiah Royce and the pragmatism of William James. Aptheker construed Jamesian pragmatism conventionally as a useful hypothesis. Du Bois corrected him; James taught that pragmatism logically works if its truth is assumed. Religiously musical people heard the difference; work and sacrifice were sacred to the pragmatic, ethical idealist Du Bois. Hopkins claimed as much affinity with Du Bois as he could, stressing that Du Bois never relinquished the idea of God as “an incomprehensible holiness grounded in human affairs and empowering humanity to take initiative in social transformation.”111 Du Bois pointedly affirmed that his religious philosophy was Christian. Jesus Christ, to him, was the revelation of God achieving radical democracy through

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Black people and the poor. Hopkins noted that Du Bois never embarked on this theme without first remarking on the absurdity of White Christianity, a racist structure of power that betrayed Jesus and misrepresented him. Jesus poured himself out for the poor, the lowly, and the persecuted. He incarnated selfsacrifice, the very essence of religion to Du Bois, who protested that White Christianity not only distorted and negated the religion of Jesus; it even taught Black Christians to fix their eyes on an otherworldly heaven, doubling the White Christian betrayal of Jesus. In December 1911, contemplating Christmas, Du Bois said it was pointless to look for Jesus in White churches and neighborhoods, places of spiritual desolation. The only place to meet Jesus is where the lowly and despised make their home. In Darkwater (1920) Du Bois condemned “the white world’s vermin and filth,” the White “shameless breeders of bastards, drunk with the greed of gold,” and the White proponents of “the white man’s burden of liquor and lust and lies.” He truly hated them, he wrote, just as he hated hell itself.112 Hopkins observed that Du Bois “painted Jesus black” when he referred to Jesus crucified and Jesus risen. The lynching of Jesus on a cross was almost too directly relevant for Black Americans to bear, yet they sang about it and gathered at the cross. The resurrection of the Black Christ symbolized the hope of a new world of freedom. Du Bois said the White South crucified African Americans with impunity, calling its White northern compatriots to view the grave: “But suddenly the Word was wings and the voice of the Angel of the Resurrection beat like a mighty wind athwart their ears.” Hopkins built up to Du Bois’s fictional essay, “Jesus Christ in Georgia.” Jesus converses with a White judge, colonel, naval officer, and rector, evoking little or no recognition. But a Black convict laboring over a pile of stones recognizes him and drops his hammer; a Black butler falls on his knees prayerfully; and a Black nursemaid reaches out for his cloak in faith. Later an escaped convict looks into the face of Jesus and proclaims with surprise, “Why, you’re a n———, too.”113 Hopkins stressed that Du Bois understood and believed the gospel—God comes to earth in the form of blackness and lowliness to join the oppressed in their struggle. Radical democracy was never merely political to him; it was spiritual, true Christianity at work: “Work, for Du Bois, positions us on holy ground. It holds profound theological importance because God calls us with purpose. Divine intent requires both a workstyle and a lifestyle that pursue sacred goals.”114 Du Bois named the evils of White supremacy with lacerating anger, roaring against the entire racial caste system. Hopkins said the most pressing need in Black theology is “to name more clearly the evils of this world and to chart the type of future Kingdom on earth for the poor.” If enslaved Blacks and Du Bois

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could describe U.S. American slavery “as the work of white devils,” what stopped Black theologians from being equally clear and forceful? Hopkins declared, “The precise characteristics of the Thing and white devils remain a task unfulfilled for a constructive Black theological agenda.” The three most helpful intellectual sources for this work, he asserted, are Du Bois, Malcolm, and King. King is helpful for select parts of the Black theology agenda, Malcolm is very helpful for most of it, and the fledgling womanist movement corrected the sexism of Malcolm and King.115 Malcolm said what is reasonable to White oppressors is not reasonable to oppressed Black people. Trying to reach a rational agreement with oppressors is suicidal; the oppressed need their own system of reason. Hopkins agreed that this is the essential point. Malcolm struck the keynote of Black theology, not hesitating to describe Whites as devils who employ so-called reason to justify their evil. Malcolm “spoke the truth about white theology and white Christianity,” describing both as racist to the core, and dared to criticize Black churches for perpetuating racist White religion, which Hopkins called “otherworldly spookism.” A religion based on flying up to heaven after you die is otherworldly spookism—in this case, a secondhand conspiracy to keep Black people down. Malcolm scathingly condemned the middle-class Blacks who celebrated their advancement in White society, and King blasted the preachers who bragged about their fancy automobiles, a foretaste of the prosperity gospel. Hopkins observed that the later King decried the economic powerlessness of most Black Americans and perceived that the civil rights movement engulfed Black Americans in “a form of cultural genocide.” Black theology is a bulwark against the age-old White conspiracy to make Black people hate themselves. Malcolm said it best, five days before he was gunned down: “When you teach a man to hate his lips, the lips that God gave him, the shape of the nose that God gave him, the texture of the hair that God gave him, you’ve committed the worst crime that a race of people can commit.”116 Thwarting cultural genocide is fundamental to Black theology. Hopkins cautioned, however, that restricting liberation to cultural identity is not faithful to King or Malcolm. For example, Black theologians fell woefully short of critically analyzing capitalism. Their very use of the term “liberation” was dangerous when they used it to describe wholly cultural projects of criticism and interpretation: “Black theology runs the grave danger of fooling itself under the name of ‘liberation,’ when most black theologians and preachers do not apply a liberation analysis to the sinister dimensions of the monopoly capitalist system. How can we continue to raise such a ruckus about white racism without realizing that American monopoly capitalism engenders white supremacy?”117

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This is the frontier, Hopkins said, for Black theology. Attacking racism no longer cuts it if Black theologians look past the capitalist system that gives them tenure and professorial comfort. The second generation of Black theologians was compelled to learn economics and social theory. Economic criticism is distinctly global because monopoly capitalism remakes the entire world in its image, exporting the racism of the major powers. Hopkins cited King’s Riverside Address on overturning capitalist materialism, militarism, and racism, and a sharper word from Malcolm, who said he never met a White capitalist who was not a racist: “You can’t have capitalism without racism.” Malcolm said the only White people he ever met who were not racist turned out to be Socialists. Hopkins added that the only kind of Socialism that interested him, and Malcolm, was African.118 Shoes That Fit Our Feet offered an agenda for the second generation, defending the integrity of theology in Cone’s fashion while taking up Wilmore’s demand to develop a hermeneutic of the Black religious tradition. Hopkins shared Cone’s aversion to philosophical accounts of Black experience, but he compensated by conceiving culture expansively, interpreting various modes of being as cultural. He made a case for holding high the liberating message of Scripture, preserving the specific blackness of Black theology by restricting it to Black sources, focusing on the Black poor, and lifting the class-poverty problem to the top of the Black theology agenda, which opened Black theology to other economic justice movements. Hopkins determinately cut out the White intellectual influences on Du Bois, King, and West, keeping White names out of it. Black theologians, he argued, should engage five sources: slave religion, Black women’s experience, Black politics, Black folk culture, and Black social analysis and social vision. The slave narratives, in particular, are a powerful remedy for the corrupting effects of even the best White thought. In Cut Loose Your Stammering Tongue, Hopkins said Black theologians “write our way back home” when they retrieve the voices of enslaved Blacks and the Black religious tradition.119 He played the caretaker role with grace and generosity, writing a primer titled Introducing Black Theology of Liberation (1999) that was scrupulously fair to firstgeneration teachers and to second-generation peers. There was no pedagogical resource like it until Hopkins put aside his own constructive project to write it. The previous resort had been the 1979 edition of Black Theology, or the twovolume revision of 1993. Both were hard to use with college students. The 1979 edition featured little-known historical documents, and the 1993 edition was bulky, diffuse, and long on programmatic declarations. Wilmore advised readers that to grasp the ethos of the formative period, they had to read the original edition; the revised edition gave highest priority to representing diverse perspectives.

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Black theology, he wrote, “will doubtless have its day and fall into oblivion,” but it still had disruptive work to do in the academy and church. Cone rued that some Black theology founders had disappeared comfortably into the White academy, some bailed out of theology altogether, and some lost interest in Black theology after they retired. He said it is very difficult to keep a movement like Black theology going. More precisely, “It is difficult to overcome theological fatigue and self-hatred without a clearly defined community of support and resistance.” Cone exhorted Black theologians to focus on their primary audience: Black people who struggle against White supremacy and the various sites of oppression intertwined with it. It is possible, he argued, to be race-specific and universal simultaneously, writing about the African American community and the human community. In fact, doing so is imperative for Black theology: “The more we write about Black people, the more we write about everybody. If what we say is not good for everybody, then it cannot be good for Black people.”120 Hopkins held a similar conception of the relation of blackness to universality. When he discussed theologians specifically, he worked hard at representing them fairly, but he also claimed that Black theology has a specific unifying mission that happens to describe his version of it. On his telling, Black theology is a prophetic theology of liberation, the first truly radical Christian theology ever conceived in the United States. Liberation is the essence of Black theology, not one aim among others such as survival, notwithstanding that womanists said otherwise. Black theology mines the Bible and Black sources to liberate Black people, which makes it relevant to the struggles of the poor throughout the world, building God’s new commonwealth for the materially and spiritually poor of the world. In other words, “the unique contribution of black theology is discovering the core message of personal and structural liberation in the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures and connecting this message with God’s presence in African Americans’ movement for justice.”121 That was precisely his position. Hopkins wrote many sentences in which “black theology” was the subject of verbs, sometimes personified, and a very specific enterprise matching his perspective. He said Black theology proceeds by tracking the liberation stories in the Bible, the prophetic aspects of slave religion and the Black religious tradition, and the prophetic witness of religious and secular Black leaders. He described Black theology with his signature terms and formulations, explaining that its work “is to help build on earth God’s new Common Wealth for the poor—those who are both materially without wealth and spiritually poor.” Had Hopkins said, “Black theology at its best” or “in my version of it” or some such qualifier, he might have elicited less pushback. As it was, there were many dissents from Black religious thinkers not represented by

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his biblically centered Protestant version of Black theology, notably Roberts, West, Williams, Victor Anderson, Anthony Pinn, Diana L. Hayes, J. Kameron Carter, and later, Vincent Lloyd, notwithstanding that whenever Hopkins described a specific Black theologian, he described with consummate fairness, deftly surveying the field without hiding his position.122 Human beings write theology, he affirmed, but theology is a response to a call from God to liberate the oppressed. Until the advent of liberation theology, the people who wrote theology operated from positions of racial, cultural, and class privilege that pushed aside the voices of the poor. Black theology is a reminder that God has a will for the world that oppressed people feel and hear. The same God who liberated the Hebrew slaves from Egypt wills the liberation of the poor and oppressed today: “Black theology helps the African American oppressed claim their blackness and their freedom as children of God.” Hopkins admonished that Black theology did not arise as an abstract intellectual pursuit and it must make deeper inroads in Black Christian congregations. The movement needed very much to study “the pockets of passionate resistance in the African American church and the broader black experience” to Black theology. If Jesus is with the oppressed in their struggle, how can it be so hard to convey that Black theology is good for the Black church?123 Perhaps the biggest problem is theological, an echo of the Joseph Washington thesis that Black churches never had theology in the first place, all they had was a folk religion that coped with their racist exclusion from White churches. Hopkins recites the Washington argument repeatedly in his books, mining the part he likes while rejecting the rest of it. Washington argued that the separated existence of Black churches created a different faith from the Christianity of the White churches. He said it to criticize White church racism, but the upshot of his position, as he confirmed, was that Black churches are sub-Christian. Washington urged Black churches to merge into the White Protestant denominations, trading their folk faith for Reformation theology. The founders of Black theology denounced Washington’s prescription but embraced his thesis that Black Christianity is a different faith. Hopkins wrestled with the ironies of the Washington argument and its legacy. He reasoned that the best refutation of Washington is to unpack the Christian theology in the Black religious tradition that Washington wrongly denigrated, a theology lacking Reformation tropes but passionate about the liberating God of the Bible. Perhaps Black theologians would make deeper inroads in Black churches if they led with theology—the very thing that Washington wrongly said Black churches do not care about.124 Hopkins put his theological cards on the table in Down, Up, and Over: Slave Religion and Black Theology (2000). The first half of the book compared and

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contrasted two parallel themes in U.S. history, drawing on the scholarship of Sydney E. Ahlstrom, Lerone Bennett Jr., John W. Blassingame, Eric Foner, Winthrop D. Jordan, Benjamin Quarles, Forrest G. Wood, and Donald R. Wright. The second half presented his theology of the Spirit of liberation for us (God), the Spirit of liberation with us (Jesus), and the Spirit of liberation in human purpose. The first historical theme began at Plymouth Rock in 1620 with the arrival of the Pilgrims, which yielded colonizers bent on imposing the British Protestant way of thinking, feeling, and acting on the entire planet, creating a new and subordinate class of people, African Americans. The parallel theme began in 1619 when kidnapped Africans were condemned to American slavery in Jamestown, Virginia. Resisting their enslavement and dehumanization, African Americans formed themselves into a people and created a “second layer within Protestantism and American culture” by knocking down, breaking up, and jumping over the structures, customs, worldview, and theologies of White American Protestantism and culture. They did it, Hopkins wrote, by acquiring self-knowledge and practicing self-care, “seizing sacred domains, actualizing the divine right to resist, and institutionalizing a syncretized religion.” Against the recent tendency of cultural theologians to play up nonChristian slave remembrances, Hopkins lined out an explicitly Christian argument, interrogating the relationships between slave religion and the dominant White culture, on the one hand, and a normative liberationist theology of Black faith, on the other.125 Down, Up, and Over was lucid and not, mixing cogent description and argument with gnarled jargon borrowed from currently fashionable French deconstructionists, especially Michel Foucault. Hopkins interwove biblical citation, slave interviews, and hyphenated deconstructionist tropes, explaining: “Our basic claim is that, based on the Bible and the faith experiences of enslaved black folk, a constructive black theology today understands, feels, and lives out the Spirit who manifests total liberation in macro-, micro-, linguistic, and racialcultural identity realities in the dynamic of co-constitution of the self for a full spiritual and material humanity (goal or telos).” There were many sentences of this kind, causing Diana Hayes to lament that Hopkins repeatedly lapsed “into a jarring form of postmodern rhetoric” that drove away students and ordinary readers. Another reviewer, Dan McKanan, said the same thing more sharply, remarking that he could have done without the “vaguely Foucauldian jargon about ‘macropolitical economy, micro everyday ordinary life, racial cultural identity, and language’ ” that hit the reader on page 3 and kept coming. McKanan noted that the numerous sentences loaded with deconstructionist rhetoric did almost no analytic work. Both reviewers regretted that Hopkins

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obscured his important message with turgid jargon tolerable only to postmodernized academics.126 But the most jargon-laden passages usually came at summary time, either introducing or concluding a section of historical or theological argument. This was a clue to McKanan’s observation that they did no analytical work; the actual work concerning macro, micro, linguistic, and racial-cultural identity realities came between the summaries. Hopkins took from Foucault the framing theme that disciplines of creativity yield knowledge of the self and are sites of caring for the self. He pressed an argument about two layers of U.S. American culture with a two-layered discourse regime of his own, using deconstructionist shorthand to frame and summarize his arguments, contending that God is the Spirit of total liberation for the poor and all humanity, Jesus fulfills God’s promise to be the Spirit of total liberation, and the Spirit of total liberation is the force within human purpose. Here he employed only two sources, the Bible and the religious experiences of enslaved Black Americans. Hopkins asserted that God is the Spirit of total liberation for human subjects in God’s being and acts. The great “I AM” of Exodus 3:14, God telling Moses, “I AM WHO I AM” and instructing Moses to tell the Israelites, “I AM has sent me to you,” expresses that God is both present for human subjects and future present. Henry Bibb told a Federal Writers’ Project interviewer that just before he boarded a steamboat to flee slavery, “I kneeled down before the Great I AM, and prayed for his aid and protection, which He bountifully bestowed even beyond my expectation; for I felt myself to be unworthy. I then stept boldly on the deck.” To Bibb, I AM was the Spirit of aid and protection that enabled him to be bold. Kate Drummond recalled that God was a father and a mother to her in her years of enslavement, always there for her when she fled to God. The Great I AM was gender inclusive and holistic to her. Hopkins gleaned from these testimonies that the being of God is cocreative with those who are marginalized and oppressed. God is a holy and just being whose justice is partial to the oppressed. God is like the sun, radiating with unified and glorious brilliance, shining forth in signs of liberation.127 Only God, Hopkins declared, is both all-powerful and merciful. God is the all-powerful Spiritus Creator who makes, preserves, rewards now and then, knows all things, and exerts God’s will through nature, sometimes striking a slaver dead with fire or an ice storm, as former slaves fondly recalled. Hopkins was emphatic that Black theology has no use for any God who is less than the all-powerful, all-knowing, and merciful ruler of nature and history: “It is an omnipotent God of mercy who grants the power of the poor in history. For it is impossible for the One to forsake the little ones; this is contrary to God’s being,

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acts and revelation. To be the only force who is all power is an awesome beingness. Yet it is omnipotence ruled by compassionate mercy.” The very nature of God is I AM all-power for the afflicted and oppressed. Though God knows everything, Hopkins averred, God knows and cares especially about the feelings of the abused and the worldly causes of harm to them. William Summerson testified that just as the slave traders were determining a price for him at a courthouse, God put a plan into his head that allowed him to escape the following day to freedom. Hopkins explained: “A divine plan flows from the all-knowing God always willing to extend sacred wisdom into the depths of the very mind of the individual victim caught and held for unjust punishment.”128 The salvation of Jesus is holistic and total, Hopkins argued. It encompasses all the macro, micro, linguistic, racial-cultural, material, spiritual, private, and public dimensions of the being of the poor and oppressed, shredding the distinction between the sacred and the profane. Jesus announced that a new age of freedom is coming. In the meantime, Hopkins remarked, “the poor need to act in response to the divine gift of Jubilee by conducting themselves already as if the new Common Wealth has arrived.” He lingered over Matthew 25:31–46, stressing that the eschatological parable of the sheep and the goats is the only place where the Bible explains how the Last Judgment will play out. Those who feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, welcome the stranger, clothe the naked, care for the sick, and visit the prisoners will enter heaven. The rest will suffer eternal estrangement from God. In other words, “Whoever works with the Spirit of liberation to alter oppressive macro, micro, linguistic, and racial cultural identity formations will receive salvation from Jesus at the bar. This is the presence of the Spirit and humanity working to co-constitute the old self into a new spiritual and material humanity.”129 In two footnotes, Hopkins observed that the Roman Catholic record of defending racist White American privilege does not differ significantly from that of White Protestantism. American Catholicism produced no notable abolitionists, and it was every bit as effective as White Protestantism at blocking Jesus from being known. Black Boston abolitionist David Walker famously charged that White Christian clerics routinely cast Jesus aside. Hopkins cited Walker and moved to the theological point: “Against the demon of whiteness, the Spirit affirms that black is beautiful because, like all others, black is created by God. Therefore, to stand in solidarity with Jesus’ presence with the black oppressed is to stand with Jesus. Black folk who are free with Jesus know that the liberating Spirit co-labors with African American working people to the very end.” Divine revelation occurs whenever Jesus struggles with the marginalized to help them “co-constitute themselves into a new liberated full humanity.”130

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Down, Up, and Over drove to an excursus on the Spirit of total liberation in liberated human beings—God breathing the Spirit of liberation into Adam and Eve, the estrangement from God depicted in Genesis 3:8–9, the keen sense described by enslaved African Americans that slavery violated their sacred dignity and the rights of their natural state of freedom, and the drive of the Spirit of liberation to create human communities based on sharing, as described in Acts 2:44–46. At the macro level, the Spirit of total liberation confronts unjust structures of economic power. At the micro level, the Spirit enables personal acts of resistance to being degraded and dominated; Hopkins cited slave narratives in which humor was deflecting or saving. In the realm of racial cultural identity, the Spirit calls oppressed people to liberate themselves from the chains of self-hatred, subservience, and internalized colonization: “God has a special word for black folk because God abhors the oppression of African American people who suffer from the heresy of white racism.” The good news of the Christian gospel is that all humanity benefits when the poor and oppressed “overcome internal demons” and share communally in the wealth that God wills all to share.131 Hopkins took a distinct satisfaction in producing a work of systematic Black theology, announcing that more would follow. Reviewers puzzled that he said nothing about theodicy, especially since he defended so strenuously the doctrines of divine omnipotence and omniscience. Is it credible to cast aside theodicy as a White liberal preoccupation? Doesn’t every theological tradition grapple with this problem, including the formerly enslaved persons whom Hopkins quoted extensively? Reviewers noted that William Jones rated no mention in Down, Up, and Over or even in Introducing Black Liberation Theology. Hopkins replied that he had responded to Jones in previous works, and his constructive theology was not the place to take up apologetic concerns; this was a book on the liberationist faith of the African American Christian tradition. He told a University of Chicago interviewer, “My area of scholarship, black theology of liberation, is most alive as a form of questioning posed to those who practice in the tradition today. It’s meant to get people to reflect on whether or not they’re being faithful to the objectives of the tradition with which they’re engaged.” Hopkins conveyed with deep integrity that he and his work were primarily accountable to the Black faith tradition.132 His friendship with Wright and his membership at Trinity Church yielded a course at Trinity on Black theology that became no less taxing than those he taught at UCDS. Trinity members demanded to be treated like university students and Hopkins obliged them. He said there was a key difference, however, between teaching in these two contexts. His divinity school students were

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steeped in academic approaches to the study of Black religion. At Trinity the discussions were immediately and persistently existential. Wright prized the capacity of Hopkins to bridge these two audiences: “His work covers what has transpired over the past 30 years in the area of black theology. The developments he covers are a ‘must’ for Generation X-ers.”133 I M AG IN IN G A B L A CK C H RISTIAN METAP HY S IC: J. KA M ERON C A RTER

The imprint of Hopkins on Black theology is so strong that assessments of its second generation routinely focus on him—especially the landmark critiques. Vanderbilt ethicist Victor Anderson described Hopkins in 1995 as the quintessential proponent of a misguided and reductive hermeneutics of return-toAfrican sources. Duke theologian J. Kameron Carter in 2003 devoted his entire bellwether essay on the state of Black theology, “Contemporary Black Theology,” to Hopkins. Argentine liberation theologian Ivan Petrella in 2008 described Hopkins as the preeminent second-generation Black theologian and the leading exponent of the grievously mistaken monochromatism that Wilmore bequeathed to Black theology. Anderson will be discussed in chapter 6; Petrella continued the Latin American liberationist tradition of protesting that North American Black theology is reductively obsessed with race; here we pause only for Carter, who made a bid for Hopkins-like status in the third generation by making a larger argument than Anderson and Petrella about what went wrong in the judicious, learned, ambitious, balanced but too-modern-Protestant approach of Hopkins. Carter was just beginning his career when he took on Hopkins. He had graduated from Temple University in 1990, earned a Th.M. at Dallas Theological Seminary in 1995, completed his Ph.D. at the University of Virginia in 2001, and joined the Duke faculty that year. He said Hopkins epitomized the problem that Black theology settles for too little and thus gets dammed up. Although Hopkins called for a true Protestantism that beckons toward a new humanity and an eschatological Common Wealth of liberation, he ended up with a mere counter-gesture still enclosed within modern White theology. Carter countered that Black theology needs to overflow the banks of its New World history, aspiring to catholic significance. Black being could be theologized as a reciprocal enfolding and enfolding within the phenomenality of being. But this capacious concept of Black theology, Carter argued, is out of reach as long as Black theologians perpetuate Cone’s disdain for metaphysical reason and try to fill the void with cultural

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analysis. He put it aggressively: “The problem is that the reinterpreted syncretic Christianity that Hopkins imagines, and so the multifarious strivings of the African religious spirit on which such a syncretic faith is grounded, remains enclosed within and determined by the very Protestantism and American culture against which black faith, in general, and early Afro-Christianity qua Christianity, in particular, resists and thus transcends.” One kind of premature enclosure, Carter said, leads to another, because the African religious spirit on which Hopkins ostensibly based his reinterpreted Afro-Protestantism is bounded by White U.S. American culture and religion. Hopkins construed Black faith as the only truly Christian and radically democratic Protestantism in the United States. Carter acknowledged that this argument has an ample history in Black church preaching. He implored Black theologians to aim higher than merely repeating the old boast that Black Americans are the true Christians and Americans. Surely there is something in the ethos and structure of Black faith that makes it decidedly not Protestant American.134 To account for Black existence through the phenomenon of Afro-Christianity, one must look beyond the modern Protestant frame. Christian revelation, Carter argued, is a far more expansive horizon than historic Protestantism and its modern liberal and neo-orthodox theological traditions. The bias against metaphysical reason that Black theology inherited from Barth and neoorthodoxy, and behind that from Kant and most forms of liberal Protestant theology, must be set aside, risking a new speculative Black theology that partners with rigorous forms of African American philosophy and meta-anthropology steeped in scholarship on slave religion and early Afro-Christian faith. Carter called for an experiential philosophical theology that conceptualizes Black being through Afro-Christianity and against its broad horizon of revelation. A speculative Black theology would be more catholic than any version of Black theology espoused or described by Hopkins. Carter regretted that Hopkins cut off Black theology from the things-in-themselves of Black Christian faith, committing it to the impoverished horizon of liberal, neo-orthodox, and evangelical theologies. In his case, Black theology was decidedly liberal, its antiliberal gestures notwithstanding. Hopkins persistently interpreted slave testimonies as showing that slave religion inspired hope and resistance. Carter objected that this strategy is not theological; it is the old Protestant liberalism redeployed. Hopkins came closest to being theological, risking a claim about ontological content, when he took up the “I AM” of Exodus 3:14. But he drove to his usual verdict that slave religion expressed the human desire for liberation, and nothing more. Carter observed: “I AM, for Hopkins, is an anthropological, not a theo-logical, declaration, albeit, a liberating one.”135

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Slave religion was inspiring. Carter regretted that Hopkins stuck to this level of social ethical assertion, a commonplace of the social gospel: “He cannot give an account of what is inspiring about it, or rather who inspires it.” Or rather, having absorbed the antimetaphysical bias of modern Protestant theology and the secular academy, he declined to try. Had Hopkins plumbed deeper into the connection between Black faith and Exodus 3:14, he might have shown that Black faith is theologically and philosophically significant, unveiling what it means to be in the world. Carter said he might have risked the dogmatic claim that the participation of Black faith in the incarnate Word of God is a revelation of the divine name, albeit not an exhaustive revelation. The very light of God shone in the Black experience of New World darkness. God’s luminous darkness shone through the incorporation of Black existence into God’s revelation in Jesus, “the proper bearer of God’s light and the revelation of the divine name.”136 Black theology could take the form of a theo-ontology in which Black existence is conceived as a ray refracted through the prism of the Word incarnate. This was Carter’s ambition for it. God is revealed in the poor because the triune God is what God is like, entering a suffering world in Christ. Carter judged that Hopkins and Cone were at their best when they teetered on this affirmation, grounding Black being in God. He wished that Hopkins had followed through, grounding Black theology and Afro-Christianity in an ontology of freedom, resting in the divine One to whom the slaves prayed. To the extent that Hopkins leaned in this direction, Carter noted, he offered a postmodern gloss on left-Hegelian idealism or Whiteheadian process thought—two forms of dynamic monism that render the divine as the process made present in the poor and their liberation. God needs the poor in order to be God. That was not the way to go. Carter protested that the process theodicies of the left-Hegelian and Whiteheadian schools bind God and the world together in relationships of necessity and identity, shortchanging real freedom and real difference. Liberation construed on left-Hegelian or Whiteheadian terms is a process internal to the world. Carter’s alternative was a robust metaphysic imbued with the full wealth of Christian conviction: Liberation is an interior bursting of oppressive structures “in order to exist transcendently beyond them through the wounds of Christ’s flesh.” It is the transforming personal and social condition of being conformed to Christ.137 All this could be said another way, highlighting an obvious point that Carter held until the end: Hopkins had no theology of the Holy Spirit. Carter put it stringently, claiming that Hopkins conceived Spirit only as the human spirit and the vibrancy of the field of creaturely Being as a closed reality. Hopkins had no conception of God acting to lift creaturely being out of itself to find its true

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being. He had no conception of the Holy Spirit recapitulating the saving act of Christ in creatures and creation. Thus, he had no theological account of freedom, no doctrine of the church or the sacraments, and no theology of preaching as a sacramental act. All he had was an ethic of liberation. Carter’s broadside against the leading Black theologian of the second generation announced that a third generation of Black theologizing had commenced, though it was hard to say what Black theology would be if Carter represented where the field was heading. His forthcoming first book, Race: A Theological Account (2008), a revision of his dissertation, was a major contribution to the field of theology, but not the Black Christian metaphysic for which he called. Carter made an argument about how theology came to abet modern racism, contending that the problem began when ancient Christianity tried to sever itself from its Jewish roots and the Jewish body of Jesus. Jews were racialized as a people of the Orient, a race group contrasting with Western Christians. Christian Gnosticism tried mightily to abolish everything Jewish in Christianity and nearly succeeded—the essential first step toward what became the racist imagination of modernity, White supremacy. Carter said Anderson was right that Cone and Hopkins wrongly ontologized a reactive concept of blackness, conceiving blackness as the opposite of whiteness. The racial imagination itself is the problem, which Cone worsened by reproducing “the aberrant theology of modern racial reasoning.” White theology, Carter argued, is, in fact, balefully White. But what makes it White? His early work pressed this slippery, momentous, shape-shifting question against Cone and Hopkins. Carter was not certain that his Black Christian metaphysic, once it existed, would be called Black theology. In the meantime, he criticized Hopkins for treating womanism as a watershed development in Black theology that earned stand-alone status. Carter doubted that womanists should be distinguished from their Black male counterparts or White female counterparts, notwithstanding that leading womanists did so routinely.138 This “gendered reading,” he argued, prejudged what might be significant in the thought of any female or male Black theologian. Moreover, it was simply untrue to suggest that womanists dragged Black theology into a secondgeneration understanding of cultural difference as the horizon against which liberation must be conceived. What about West, who compelled Black theologians to deal with his neo-Marxian account of Black existence? What about Anderson, who wedded Black theology to a theologically liberal aesthetics of the grotesque? What about Anthony Pinn, whose Black religious humanism amplified the William Jones version of Black theology? All three drew on American pragmatism to confront cultural difference, including the difference

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of gender, complicating what counts as a liberationist account of Black being. All three were no less committed than any womanist to allow the whole of being to be visible in its many varieties.139 Carter outlined an ambitious and influential agenda for Black theology that remains to be achieved. Meanwhile he allowed that no group of Black theologians matched the womanists for persistently holding together the troika of race, gender, and class, and for doing so subsequently in ways that gave equal weight to sexual orientation and sometimes to ecology. The womanists held together these sites of liberation with a persistence that allowed them distinctly to enter the communities of poor Black women. He could have added that when they belatedly broke into the academy, they didn’t just talk about community. They created communities of self-care and caring for others in academic spaces known mostly for competitive rivalry.

5

WOMANIST INTERVENTIONS AND INTERSECTIONS

The womanist intervention was coming for years before it yielded a gusher of womanist and Black feminist theologians with doctoral degrees. I was a witness to the incubation period by studying in the 1970s at Harvard Divinity School, Union Theological Seminary, and Princeton Theological Seminary. White women entered theological education in large numbers and had few Black female classmates. All the Black theologians we studied were male and all the female theologians were White, as a proverbial saying later put it; at Union the chasm was remarked on. Sometimes Black women pointed to the absence of people like themselves in Black theology. More often, others raised the issue in their presence, which was better than not raising it, but usually problematic. Our Black female classmates were often asked to declare whether their race or gender took higher priority for them. Those who pressed for an answer were usually Black male or White feminist classmates, and sometimes the men questioned why Black women were studying for ordination in the first place. At Union, students of my generation expected that Black women would change the discussion in theology and ethics once they entered these fields. We did not know what they would say, but the “higher priority” question was a clue. The discursive tradition that Black women created refused to make an either-or answer. Training students for ordained ministry, a variously tangled or straightforward process, is the bread and butter of theological seminaries, and thus the usual road into theological education for most seminarians. For White women the usual road before the 1970s was Christian Education, a form of ministry not requiring ordination. For Black women, even this field was usually not an 261

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option. The African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church ordained its first female minister in 1948, Martha J. Keys, and a trickle of others afterward into the 1970s. The New York Conference of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church ordained revival preacher Julia Foote to the diaconate in 1884, and a trickle of others afterward to small church ministries. The Christian Methodist Episcopal (CME) Church ordained its first woman in 1970. The Holiness and Pentecostal churches had female clerics, but they usually did not study at ecumenical or Black denominational seminaries. The Black women who enrolled at seminaries in the 1970s often encountered classmates who had never met a female minister or even a female Christian Education director. At Union, Black women felt embattled and lonely. Three Union graduates of this period— Jacquelyn Grant, Katie Geneva Cannon, and Delores S. Williams—are usually counted as the founders of womanist theology and ethics, though Kelly Brown Douglas was also a founder. These four women were too spread out from each other in their programs at Union to have taken classes together, but they knew each other as doctoral candidates. Grant and Cannon completed their doctoral dissertations in 1985, Brown in 1988, and Williams in 1990. One of their doctoral classmates, JoAnne Marie Terrell, master’s degree classmate Linda E. Thomas, and a future Union professor, Emilie M. Townes, joined them in embracing an identity marker—womanist—coined by novelist Alice Walker in 1979 and declared by Cannon in 1985. The call for a Black feminist response to Black theology and White feminism preceded the naming of what it would be. Grant had the pathbreaker role.1 Born in 1948 in Georgetown, South Carolina, a town thirty-six miles south of Myrtle Beach, Grant was one of nine children born to Lillie Mae Ward Grant, who ran a beauty salon from a storefront attached to the family home, and Joseph Grant, who preached at Arnett AME Church. Her town and family instilled in Grant a milder version of the Gullah dialect, which locals called “Geechee,” than that spoken by nearby neighbors in Pawleys Island, Murrells Inlet, and Sandy Island. Grant did not realize her accent was light on Gullah melody until her eighth-grade teacher commented on it, causing Grant to puzzle over the efforts of Georgetown locals to strain out their accent. The church was a refuge for her from the suffocating racism of the South Carolina Lowcountry. Grant attended a public high school, Howard High School, taking summer classes at a Black women’s college in Greensboro, North Carolina, Bennett College, where she enrolled in 1966 after graduating from Howard. She majored in French and envied a classmate from the Charleston area who spoke beautifully melodic Gullah English. In her junior year, Grant vowed to make the Black church more relevant by writing better literature for it. The AME Church

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was her lifeline, but it was stuck in the 1950s, needing to recover the old AME emphasis on freedom. Specifically, the church needed literature in Christian Education not written by White people. Grant took these convictions to Turner Theological Seminary in Atlanta after graduating in 1970 from Bennett.2 Turner Seminary was founded in 1894 as a department of Morris Brown College. In 1900 it became a seminary bearing the name of AME icon Henry McNeal Turner, and in 1958 it played a cofounding role in establishing the Interdenominational Theological Center (ITC). It had seven female students in 1970, out of two hundred, and one female faculty member, inevitably in Christian Education. Two professors stood out to Grant: Church and Society scholar George Thomas, who later founded the Religious Heritage of the African World project and changed his name to Ndugu T’Ofori-Atta, and New Testament scholar Thomas Hoyt Jr., who later became a CME bishop. She thrilled at meeting Vincent Harding, who ran his Institute of the Black World two blocks from the ITC campus. But ITC mostly disappointed Grant, driving her to conclude that the problem cut far deeper than Christian Education. The AME Church needed theology that roared for freedom and seminary professors who were women. Many of Grant’s classmates assumed that women studied at ITC to learn Christian Education or to find a husband. Over twenty years after Martha Keys was ordained, women with ministerial callings still felt like pioneers in the AME Church. Moreover, Christian Education lived downstream from what happened in theology. Grant graduated from Turner in 1973, was ordained the following year in the AME Church, and enrolled in the doctoral program at Union to study under Cone. At the time, Cone was writing God of the Oppressed, struggling with the critiques of Wilmore, Long, and Cecil Cone, and had not ceded anything to Socialist or feminist criticism. Grant was among the first Black women to set him straight about sexism in the Black community. Later she recalled, “I began to pursue these questions of gender and you know, just as Black people were asking questions about discrimination against Black people in the larger society and in the larger church, in the universal church, in the white church, the same kinds of questions were becoming relevant for women, cause some of the same practices that were happening with regard to Black men in the larger churches were also happening to Black women in the Black churches, and so the whole question of gender becomes important.” Congregations, she reflected, were up to 80 percent female, “but you don’t want us to lead.” Less than 1 percent of AME clergy were Black women. Grant found her calling in this struggle, leading a delegation of ordained female AME pastors in 1977 that addressed the AME General Conference. Later she recalled, “So much of my work, actually,

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since my graduate school days the preponderance of my work has been with challenging patriarchal structures that perpetuate male dominance and female subordination.”3 In 1977 she helped Harvard Divinity School get its Women’s Studies in Religion Program off the ground. Grant gave two years to Harvard, contributing to ecumenical and academic conferences that built the feminist theology movement. That gave her a ground-floor expertise on what became her doctoral dissertation subject—the differences between White feminist theology and the perspectives of Black churchwomen: When I began my gender explorations, I actually began by looking at what white feminists were doing—some of the issues that feminists were raising in theology. . . . But as I was studying the work of feminist, you know, theologians . . . I was increasingly struck by the lack of me, the lack of my presence, the lack of African American female presence as I studied feminist analysis, the whole notion that women’s experience has been ignored historically in the doing of theology and in the doing of any other disciplines as well and the notion that women’s experience really essentially has been defined by men and in the interest of men.4

In 1979 Wilmore and Cone published the first edition of Black Theology. It contained four previously published essays by Black women and an essay Grant wrote for the book. Veteran New York City feminist activist Frances Beale wrote that being Black and female carries a double jeopardy. Ecumenical official Theressa Hoover, an associate general secretary of the Women’s Division of the Board of Global Ministries of the United Methodist Church, said Black women negotiated a third jeopardy if they were active in religious communities. Feminist legal scholar Pauli Murray, ordained in 1977 to the Episcopal priesthood, offered a survey of recent Black male liberationist and White feminist theologies, favoring Deotis Roberts and Major Jones over Cone, and Rosemary Radford Ruether and Letty Russell over Mary Daly. Wilmore and Cone included a 1974 Ms. article by Alice Walker, who reflected poetically on the “gardens” of mothers gone and little known, especially her mother, who had two children by the age of twenty and six more afterward, Walker being the last. Cone and Wilmore knew that Walker’s description of a distinct Black female spirituality rooted in southern folk traditions was making an impact on seminarians they taught. Grant readily identified with Walker’s description. She spoke for the Black women of her generation who chafed at being spoken for by Black men and White women, in both cases in the name of liberation theology.5

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To judge from reading Black theology, Grant observed, Black theologians either assumed that Black women had no place in Black theology or that “Black men are capable of speaking for us.” Both notions, she wrote, were utterly false. After slavery ended, Black men increasingly won a place in U.S. society, while Black girls and women continued to endure “the stereotypes and oppression of an earlier period.” Black males benefited from cultural privileges granted to males, judging Black women by the sexist norms of White American culture. Grant urged Black theologians to ask themselves how a White society based on Black enslavement, colonialism, and imperialism was somehow qualified to prescribe norms for Black women. Black pastors recycled White American sexism from the pulpit every Sunday, usually invoking the apostle Paul. Grant said Cone was wrong to describe Black liberation entirely as a struggle against racism: “If the liberation of women is not proclaimed, the church’s proclamation cannot be about divine liberation. If the church does not share in the liberation struggle of Black women, its liberation struggle is not authentic.”6 Grant described the repression of women in Black churches as nothing less than a “conspiracy to keep women relegated to the background.” This was a long story in the AME Church going back to founder Richard Allen, who refused to ordain Jarena Lee. Black women, Grant declared, were not outsiders “looking into the Black experience, the Black Church, and the Black theological enterprise.” Black women were the poorest of the poor, the most oppressed of the oppressed, and the heart of every Black congregation. If liberation theology was for anybody, it had to be for them. When Black congregations said they didn’t want female ministers, Black theologians needed to stand behind the female ministers. Grant cited Sojourner Truth addressing the First Annual Meeting of the American Equal Rights Association, imploring American feminists in May 1867 not to let women be excluded from the Fourteenth Amendment: I feel that if I have to answer for the deeds done in my body just as much as a man, I have a right to have just as much as a man. There is a great stir about colored men getting their rights, but not a word about the colored women; and if colored men get their rights, and not colored women theirs, you see the colored men will be masters over the women, and it will be just as bad as it was before. So I am for keeping the thing going while things are stirring; because if we wait till it is still, it will take a great while to get it going again.

Now the issue was going again, Grant declared. She was with Sojourner Truth, all in for the battle against sexism.7 Grant’s career beckoned before she completed her doctoral dissertation. She joined the ministerial staff of Flipper Temple AME Church in Atlanta in 1980

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and founded the Center for Black Women in Church and Society at ITC in 1981, developing mentoring and development programs for women. She stayed in touch with Cannon, Douglas, and Williams, trying on the womanist name and wearing it. Her teaching career and promotions at ITC eventually led to her appointment as the Fuller E. Callaway Distinguished Professor of Systematic Theology. Helping Black women find their way in the ministry and academy was, and still is, her passion. In 1985 Grant completed her doctorate with a dissertation bearing a pedestrian title, “The Development and Limitations of Feminist Christology.” The book version, immediately a fixture in the Black theology canon, had a landmark title: White Women’s Christ and Black Women’s Jesus: Feminist Christology and Womanist Response (1989). Her book introduced many students to the claim that Black women refused to be drawn into the reductionist debates of the regnant liberation theologies. Grant argued that racist, sexist, and economic oppression, to Black women, are not separable categories: “Black women must do theology out of their tri-dimensional experience of racism/sexism/classism. To ignore any aspect of this experience is to deny the holistic and integrated reality of Black womanhood. When Black women say that God is on the side of the oppressed, we mean that God is in solidarity with the struggles of those on the underside of humanity.” Womanist theology issued a “challenge of the darker sister” against the White supremacy of White feminism.8 Ruether, Russell, Daly, and other White feminists invoked the authority of the experience of women, describing their own experience. Grant called a halt to this offensive commonplace: “White women’s experience and Black women’s experience are not the same. Indeed all experiences are unique to some degree. But in this case the difference is so radical that it may be said that White women and Black women are in completely different realms.” She said the customary solidarity language of White feminists was absurd. White women had no business speaking for Black women, not even recognizing the chasm that separated them from Black women: “When we read narratives of slaves and ex-slaves, current ‘sisterhood’ rhetoric appears simply as one of two possibilities: (1) a crude joke, or (2) the conciliatory rhetoric of an advantaged class and race.” Womanism was a declaration that Black women were averse to pseudo-solidarity feminism.9 Womanism was also averse to heroic male versions of liberation. Grant endorsed Walker’s theme that womanists prize survival above liberationist visions of radical transformation. As Grant put it, “A womanist is one who has developed survival strategies in spite of the oppression of her race and sex in order to save her family and her people.” Black women are the mainstays of Black families, churches, and communities. Historically they “held up the sky

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with a broom,” as the folk saying put it, taking responsibility for the survival and well-being of their families, churches, and communities. This strong caretaker role, Grant argued, shapes how womanists construe the significance of Jesus: “For Christian Black women in the past, Jesus was their central frame of reference. They identified with Jesus because they believed that Jesus identified with them. As Jesus was persecuted and made to suffer undeservedly, so were they. His suffering culminated in the crucifixion. Their suffering included rape, and babies being sold.” Womanist theology, as she conceived it, honored the memory of slave religion, carried on its commitment to Jesus as divine cosufferer and redeemer, and held fast to the hope of liberation registered in the resurrection of Jesus: “The condition of Black people today reflects the cross of Jesus. Yet the resurrection brings the hope that liberation from oppression is imminent. The resurrected Black Christ signifies this hope.”10 Conferred with the honorific title of Community Mother at ITC, Grant built ITC’s Center for Black Women in Church and Society into an anchor of the womanist movement that nurtures Black female ministers and conveys a strong Afrocentric ethos. Meanwhile, womanism became something named and developed at Union, especially by a doctoral graduate in social ethics, Katie Geneva Cannon. Cannon and Grant were classmates and friends at Union in the mid-1970s, pondering what Black feminist theology would be. For Grant, however, the academic field was never in question. She came to Union to study systematic theology, studied under Cone, immersed herself in White feminist theology, reflected on the Black feminist challenge to Black theology and White feminism, and carved a career path by doing exactly what she came to Union to do. For Cannon the field issue was far more difficult and uncertain. Then she became the first African American woman to earn a doctorate at Union after becoming the first African American woman to be ordained a minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA). C RE ATIN G WOM A N IST SOCIAL ETHICS

Born and raised in Kannapolis, North Carolina, Cannon came to Presbyterianism by family heritage, to her “firsts” through an urgent desire to grow beyond her roots, and to womanism by claiming her southern extended family heritage. The Klan was an oppressive force in Kannapolis, a segregated rural town near Charlotte. From an early age, Cannon plotted her escape from it. Her mother, Corine Lytle Cannon, worked as a domestic. Her father, Esau Cannon, was a truck driver. In addition to their seven children, the Cannons lived among large groups of relatives. Corine Cannon was the nineteenth of

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twenty children, each of whom had at least seven children, and her husband’s family was almost as large. The slave tradition dichotomy between house servants and field hands was a palpable reality to them. The Lytle family was churchly, literate, and inclined to look down on the field-laboring, hard-partying, less religious types from which Esau Cannon came. The Lytles lamented that Corine Cannon married beneath herself, while the Cannons regretted that she was dark skinned. Cannon later recalled, however, that she knew little of her father, because her mother claimed him exclusively: “That was her man. ‘He’s mine, get your own man,’ she’d say. We were appendages to their marriage; we could never come between them.”11 Cannon was a legendarily buoyant and expressive teller of her story, and a fierce defender of the womanist tradition. I heard her story many times, in different versions depending on the audience and occasion. To womanist gatherings she embraced her role as the mother of womanist ethics. To church groups she aimed at the next generation coming up. To my doctoral students she once argued that no job is worth feeling depressed by or put upon. If it turns out that being an academic doesn’t bring joy, please find another line of work; we don’t need more desultory professors. Always she lit up when describing the family clan in Kannapolis, as Cannon did during an interview by Sara LawrenceLightfoot: “We all live there. . . . We dominate the place. . . . There are thousands of us.” Her buoyancy came through even as she recounted a family drama of sprawling chaos, including many alcoholic relatives. School and church helped Cannon cope with family alcoholics and disorder. She liked school and church because both had rules and structures: “I was overendowed with Christianity. This was linked with education.” In her world, Black women worked as domestics or teachers, or later, in the mills. Cannon aspired to be a teacher, but she also fantasized about saving Black Americans from self-destructive behavior. For most of her youth she judged that African Americans were poor and backward because they were promiscuous: “I figured this whole thing out—the curse of blackness had to do with SEX. . . . We drink, we party, we dance, we have children out of wedlock—all of this animalistic behavior—no wonder we are enslaved.”12 If that was the problem, salvation was deliverance from licentiousness. Cannon resolved to be a missionary, perhaps a nun: “The energy needed to be controlled. . . . I’d go to Africa. . . . I’d save us!” In high school, however, she discovered to her astonishment that White youths got drunk and fornicated just like her Black classmates: “That is when I became a militant.” If Whites behaved the same way with no apparent social consequences, there had to be another reason why Blacks suffered “so brutally.” Cannon’s remembrance of November

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22, 1963, was, to her, a marker of the difference. President John Kennedy was assassinated when Cannon was a ninth grader at George Washington Carver High School. “It was a comical day at Carver,” she recalled. Her civics class, watching the television coverage of Kennedy being whisked to a Dallas hospital emergency room, laughed at the attempts of “these white people to . . . do this resurrection thing on Kennedy.” Cannon and her classmates were not candidates for the great national grieving over Kennedy: “Our lives were worth nothing to these white people. In ninth grade, we were already working on organically critiquing society. We knew the country was evil and violent. None of us really mourned Kennedy’s death.” Social criticism had begun to trump moralistic reproach.13 Throughout her adolescence and for most of her life she described her body as her enemy. In certain settings Cannon lingered over this part of her story, with a watchful eye on reactions in the room. On her twelfth birthday she went to bed as a flat-chested preadolescent and the following morning she woke up as a 36D, mortified. For many years she pined to escape what she called the “ugliness” of her body, hating that her round and buxom appearance always made the first impression. Cannon was a first-year student at Barber-Scotia College, a liberal arts college seven miles from her home, when MLK was assassinated. She and her classmates were infuriated at the government, taking for granted that King was killed by a conspiracy, not a lone assassin: “Naiveté has never been our privilege.” Swiftly she converted to Black Power radicalism: “I had on my dashiki. I had my Black Power fist dangling from my neck. . . . It was like a transfusion of blackness. I was high on it. I loved it.” She consumed Black Power literature, but fell into depression and had a second transforming experience as a college intern at Ghost Ranch in Abiquiu, New Mexico, a Presbyterian retreat. Luxuriating in the spectacular beauty of the ranch’s 23,000 acres, Cannon became physically active for the first time in her life, met friendly Whites for the first time, and realized that getting out of Kannapolis was a genuine possibility for her: “The ranch is what gave me hope. . . . It opened up the horizon and pushed it toward the sun.”14 James Costen, a Black Presbyterian minister and president of Johnson C. Smith Seminary at ITC, recruited Cannon to study for the ministry. He embodied two possibilities that were new to her—a literate Black man who urged her to picture herself as a pastor. Sometimes when Cannon told this story she added that she loved her father dearly, but meeting the literate and distinguished Costen was a breakthrough in her life. Enrolling at Smith in 1971, Cannon felt freakishly exceptional. There were four women in her class, a first for the seminary. All were single and in their early twenties. At first the seminary housed the

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women in guest rooms in a male dormitory, not knowing what else to do with them. Then they were moved into trailers behind the married-student apartments. One-third of the male students were Vietnam veterans, one-third were trying to avoid being sent to Vietnam, and it felt to Cannon that the other onethird had been raised all their lives to be ministers. Hardly anyone supported the women for being there. Even Christian Education directors were supposed to be male. Cannon majored in Hebrew Scripture, which took her to an archaeological dig in Israel, where she reeled at being frontally denigrated. She met virulently racist Israelis and racist U.S. Americans who iced her when she failed their pro-Zionist litmus test. Cannon had never been called the n-word until she got to Israel. There she heard it many times. She was stunned at the bigotry, feeling intensely lonely, driven to the wilderness: “You know, you give up your slave experience and depend upon God.” Crossing into Jordan, she got a completely different reception, warmly welcomed by Jordanian Arabs. Cannon returned to seminary still wanting to study Hebrew Scripture, though with conflicted feelings. Meanwhile, the social experience at Smith/ITC got better. Cannon thrived in the high-spirited unpretentiousness of ITC. By the end of her three years of study, she relished that ITC seminarians loved to party, were far from sanctimonious, and gave her room to provoke, doubt, and emote. They applauded her ordination to the ministry of Word and Sacrament in 1974 and were perplexed that the Presbyterian Church made no fanfare about it.15 Cannon held on to God through the Hebrew Bible. She had loved the Hebrew Bible since she was three years old, memorizing stories her grandmother read to her, and still wanted a Ph.D. in it, notwithstanding her deeply hurtful experience in Israel. In 1974 she won admission to the doctoral program at Union, not realizing that Hebrew Bible was the most old-school of Union’s doctoral fields. As soon as she arrived at Union, Cannon felt completely humiliated. The entire institution felt impossibly arid, erudite, White, and elitist to her. Her doctoral classmates talked about their areas of specialization and the books they planned to write. Most were steeped in languages and historical critical methods, often without much Bible content. Cannon was stunned that her Black classmates were so professorial and elite-schooled. She tried to “cut through the bullshit,” as she put it, only to be swiftly put down with rolled and averted eyes. She pleaded, “Let’s be real,” but this was their real world. Cannon was the stranger who didn’t belong: “I had no understanding of white culture or educational culture. None. None. None. Students from Bangladesh were more acculturated than I was.” The White world was completely alien to her, and White academic culture felt impossibly alien.16

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This section of Cannon’s story would run long or very short, depending on the audience. She knew what it meant to students when she opened up on this subject, but Cannon would cut it short if she spotted professors she didn’t know. In 2005 and 2006, Union’s President Joe Hough and I tried to persuade her to join the Union faculty. The first time she said she treasured being close to her family and planned to finish her career at the “other” Union Theological Seminary, in Virginia, now Union Presbyterian Seminary. The second time she added that her wounds at Union–New York were deep. For two years, nobody in Hebrew Bible supported her, even to renew her Ford fellowship. The students shunned her too, refusing to admit her to their study groups. Telling this story, Cannon would say that the ground broke open and she fell into a hellish abyss. It tortured her that her scholarships at a school she hated exceeded the combined incomes of her parents. Cannon poured out her grief to Corine Cannon, who said if she really hated it so much, she could come home to Kannapolis and work in the mill. Otherwise, please hang in there. Two hang-in-there decisions kept her at Union long enough to allow womanism to save her. The first was Cannon’s reluctant decision to accept admission to a field that didn’t interest her, Christian ethics. Roger Shinn, the second holder of the Reinhold Niebuhr Chair of Social Ethics, and Beverly W. Harrison, a Presbyterian former college chaplain just beginning to make her mark as a feminist social ethicist, invited Cannon to switch to their field. With a heavy heart, she gave up her dream, settling for Union doctoral candidacy in something. At the same time, Cannon’s roommate advised her that she was much too depressed to get through Union without therapeutic help. Cannon was desperately weary and couldn’t stop crying. She made an appointment with her roommate’s therapist, a White female psychologist with a practice on Third Avenue—the East Side, another alien world. The therapist told Cannon she had a severe case of White trauma. White society was a menacing world to her; Union’s culture of academic whiteness was doubly menacing; Cannon had to learn how to engage the White world in a way that made it tolerable. It began with recognizing that not all Whites are alike: “I would say, ‘All white people,’ and she would say, ‘Well, wait a minute, Katie. Not all white people.’ Our work together helped me start to make sense out of this big ball of whiteness that was scaring the hell out of me.”17 She made a breakthrough by warming up to feminism. Cannon was surprised that the therapist’s emphasis on individual freedom and equal rights for women made sense. There was something in this White feminist worldview that felt right. Cannon loosened her exclusive identity with blackness, while her Black male classmates caused further loosening. They disliked her dramatic

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persona, disputed her right to be ordained, and told her she lacked the requisite temperament and intellect to be an academic. This experience was a touchstone for the founding womanists. Grant had similar encounters at Union, as did Douglas and Williams when they got to Union in 1979 and 1977, respectively. Douglas’s reaction to the Black male students at Union radicalized her; Cannon was just trying to survive. She coped by turning her back on the Black male students who denigrated her, joining the seminary’s Women’s Caucus. At least the White women respected her right to be at Union. Cannon keenly felt the irony, troubled at finding her primary community of support among White women. Wasn’t this precisely what Malcolm called mind rape, getting along by joining the enemy? Cannon never denied it. She was saved at Union by learning to live with her stew of pain, trauma, irony, and contradictions, which she soon called womanist survival, following Walker. Had Cannon not moved at Union “into this honorary white kind of position,” the teaching career she passionately loved would not have happened. Her upbringing had taught her to see the evils of White supremacy, “but nobody had conscientized me in terms of what it meant to be born a female, a black female.” In her later career she reflected that her trust of select White feminists made her career possible and puzzled the Black women she taught: “Now as I talk with womanist scholars, most of them are either suspicious of or in awe that I’ve found white women I trust. Because they say they’ve never had a positive experience with a white woman.”18 Shinn was supportive and Harrison was life-altering, urging Cannon to write from her own experience. Cannon couldn’t believe it, not trusting Harrison. She wrote a paper sprinkled with quotes from Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, and other White eminences. Harrison advised her to stop with the Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein business. There were many good books out there on them; Cannon was not going to outperform the White scholars on their turf. The same thing happened on a subsequent paper, this time adorned with quotes from Niebuhr and Tillich. Harrison grew emphatic; we already know about Niebuhr and Tillich, she said. When Cannon told this story to students, she accentuated Harrison’s phrase “We got that already.” Harrison told Cannon the academy didn’t have what she knew. Cannon was incredulous—did Harrison really want her to write about Black women in Kannapolis? Yes, the oral tradition that Cannon heard all her life, that’s what Christian ethics needed. Cannon fretted that this White woman must be out to destroy her. Who would give her a Ph.D. for writing about the kitchen-table sayings of her mother and grandmother? But Harrison was serious, waging her own battle at the time with Union faculty colleagues who opposed her promotion to full professor. Walker

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was a godsend for Cannon, writing womanist prose before she coined the term, and drawing attention to a mostly forgotten Black novelist of the 1930s, Zora Neale Hurston.19 Hurston was born in Notasulga, Alabama, in 1891, and moved with her family as a toddler to Eatonville, Florida. Many of her short stories portrayed the lives of Black Americans in early 1900s Eatonville. Trained in anthropology and ethnography at Barnard College and Columbia University, she wrote vivid accounts about the contributions of folklore to the identities of African American and Caribbean communities, and she was a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance, mostly for her short stories of the 1920s. Politically, Hurston was a libertarianRepublican who admired Booker T. Washington, advocated Old Right antiinterventionism, detested the New Deal, and clashed with left-wing Harlem Renaissance luminaries. On matters religious she cast herself as a nonbeliever who didn’t need the consolations of religion. In the 1930s Hurston wrote three novels in rapid succession, Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934), Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), and Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939). She also wrote a betterknown study of African American folklore in North Florida, Mules and Men (1935). Hurston’s novels won little attention until Walker published a landmark article in Ms. in 1975 titled “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston.” Walker resurrected Hurston’s literary renown in the process of soaring to her own literary fame.20 Born in 1944 in Eatonton, Georgia, Walker was the youngest of eight children born to sharecroppers Willie Lee Walker and Minnie Tallulah Grant Walker. At the age of eight she was blinded in her right eye when her brother accidentally shot her with a BB gun. Losing her right eyesight turned her into an introverted reader and writer. Walker recoiled at the scar tissue in her eye until she was fourteen, when it was removed. She sailed through Butler Baker High School at the top of her class, entering Spelman College in 1961 on a full scholarship. Spelman had two left-wing White professors, historians Howard Zinn and Staughton Lynd, who influenced Walker’s antiwar politics. But Zinn was fired from his tenured position at Spelman in 1963 for inspiring student protesters like Walker, Lynd left Spelman in 1964 to run the SNCC Freedom Schools in Mississippi, and Walker transferred in 1963 to Sarah Lawrence College after Zinn was fired. In 1964 she registered Black voters during Freedom Summer in Georgia and Mississippi, which deepened her political radicalism. At Sarah Lawrence, Walker wrote poems on the turbulence of the time, her life, and her psyche. Some were harrowing accounts of her senior-year abortion and her subsequent bout with suicidal desires. Walker’s mentor at Sarah Lawrence, feminist poet Muriel Rukeyser, passed the poems to her literary agent. Three

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years after Walker graduated from Sarah Lawrence in 1965, her collected poems were published by a major house, Harcourt, Brace and World, under the title Once (1968).21 Her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), set in rural Georgia, was an excruciating story about a poor Black sharecropper, Grange Copeland, his son Brownfield Copeland, and three generations of systemic and familial violence. Grange Copeland, caught in the virtual slavery of cotton-era Baker County, runs away from his debts and his family in search of a better life in the North. Brownfield Copeland, following his father to the North, becomes sexually involved with a brothel owner, her daughter, and the owner’s niece, and eventually beats the niece to death. Walker said she tortured the book out of her head, compelled to depict the systemic violence of White supremacy and the violence it generated in the Black community. In 1973 she joined the editorial staff of Ms. magazine; its founder, Gloria Steinem, insisted that feminism was not only for White professionals. Walker was a symbol at Ms. and a voice for applying feminist criticism to Black American life. Just before she published a breakthrough novel in 1976, Meridian, set during Freedom Summer in Mississippi, Walker told Ms. readers that Hurston was wrongly forgotten.22 In 1979 Walker coined the term “womanist,” explaining that it was a gloss on her childhood memory of being admonished, “You’re acting womanish!” Strong Black girls loved to talk back, acting like women. They admired their outspoken mothers, so the admonition to stop being “womanish” didn’t restrain them. Walker dropped the term into an article contending that many Black men kidded themselves about their consumption of pornography. It was not progressive, no matter how many White women’s bodies were thus made available to them. Pornography polluted their desires and cut them off from the Black women in their lives. Walker told a story about a Black woman who confronted her husband about his pornography habit. This woman was not a feminist, she said, “though she is, of course, a ‘womanist.’ A ‘womanist’ is a feminist, only more common.” Two years later, reviewing a reader on the nineteenth-century Black Shaker Rebecca Jackson, Walker chided the book’s editor, Jean McMahon Humez, for describing Jackson as a lesbian. Shakers were celibate, for starters; moreover, Walker said the term “lesbian” never really fits Black women. Lesbos was an island of separation; Black women needed a term that affirms the connectedness of Black women who choose to love other women sexually. Walker argued that using a term she had recently coined, womanist, would be much better than speaking of Black lesbians. Black women needed to name their own experience in their own way. Women sexually loving other women is not the

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same thing in Black culture as in White society; “womanist” is a sign of the freedom of Black people to name themselves.23 The following year, 1982, Walker published the book that made her famous, The Color Purple. It was a stunning tale about a fourteen-year-old southern Black girl in the early 1900s, Celie, who writes letters to God because her stepfather, Alphonso, beats and rapes her. Alphonso marries off Celie to a man named Mister who wanted to wed Celie’s twelve-year-old sister, Nettie. Mister violently abuses Celie, sexually and verbally, and Nettie flees for her life. Celie endures vicious treatment until her husband’s lover, a flamboyant blues singer named Shug Avery, sweeps into her life. Celie tells Shug she stopped writing to God—what did God ever do for her? Gave her a lynched daddy, a crazed mother, a vicious stepfather, and took away her sister. Shug replies that God gave her life and is the life within her. She helps Celie see her own beauty, love herself, and demand to be loved. Nettie becomes a missionary in Africa, sending unreceived letters to Celie bearing Afrocentric themes. The Color Purple sang and soared through Celie’s luminous folk voice, steering to a happy ending. The book’s graphic violence and its depiction of a life-saving sexual relationship between Celie and Shug set off years of contention that made Walker a controversial symbol of Black feminism. The movie version of 1985 heightened a broiling debate about whether the novel reinforced racist stereotypes about Black male violence. Walker replied that male violence against women is terribly real, and not only among Whites. Moreover, she said, the book is really about theology—did anyone notice? Walker wished for readers who caught the spirituality of the book. She found them in the theologians, social ethicists, and religious thinkers who embraced the womanist name.24 One year after Walker published The Color Purple and won the Pulitzer Prize, she featured the word “womanist” in a celebrated collection of articles, essays, reviews, and statements titled In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983). The book included her first published essay, a reflective piece asking in 1967 what the civil rights movement had accomplished. Walker said the movement would have been worthwhile had it only given King to the nation or compelled Black Americans to stop watching White television shows. In an entry from 1971, Walker said if it were not for King, “I would have come of age believing in nothing and no one.” In a tribute to King published in 1973, Walker put it poignantly: “He was The One, The Hero, The One Fearless Person for whom we had waited.” She had not realized how desperately she waited for King until he burst on the nation. Walker recalled that her mother prayed for MLK every night. It seemed to her that the prayers of people like her parents “who had bowed down in the struggle for such a long time” kept King

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alive, until they didn’t: “For years we went to bed praying for his life, and awoke with the question, ‘Is the Lord still here?’ ” In the title essay, written in 1974, Walker said she realized only recently that most of the stories she wrote came from her mother. Minnie Tallulah Grant Walker was an artist in the sublime way she told stories, like the mothers of other Black female writers. These women of the South had an intense, deep spirituality that was so unconscious “they were themselves unaware of the richness they held.” In search of her mother’s garden, Walker wrote, “I found my own.”25 The book’s prologue, not quite one and a half pages long, famously offered a four-part definition of a womanist. First, she was a serious, responsible, courageous, audacious adult, as in the Black folk expression of mothers to female children, “You acting womanish,” like a woman. A womanist was a Black feminist or feminist of color who wanted to know more than people thought was good for her. She was always in charge and was often considered to be willful. The term was also interchangeable with the folk expression, “You trying to be grown.” Second, a womanist was a woman who loved other women, “sexually and/or unsexually,” preferred women’s culture and the personal qualities of women, and sometimes loved individual men, sexually or not. She was committed to survival and the wholeness of people and was not a separatist, “except periodically, for health.” Third, a womanist loved music, dancing, the moon, the Spirit, love, food, roundness, struggle, and herself, regardless. The last word was an allusion to her book review call in 1981 for a term that affirmed the connectedness of Black women to their community “regardless” of who loves whom sexually. Lastly, Walker wrote, “Womanist is to feminist as purple to lavender.”26 Walker and Hurston helped Cannon read herself into Christian social ethics, not caring that Walker was a religious humanist and Hurston looked down on religion. Womanism was the key that opened a goldmine of riches. The term was philosophically and emotionally healing for Cannon, naming the elements and contours of her experience and spiritual sensibility, expressing her preference for the company and folkways of Black women, and providing an alternative to the default label “Black feminism.” In 1982 she told Carter Heyward, a White feminist theologian who graduated from Union in 1980, that she felt compelled to complete her doctorate to repay the Black women who nurtured her and were counting on her. It tormented her, Cannon said, to realize how little was written about Black women and their wisdom. All she had was “a skeletal framework of the past” and the sayings of her grandmother: “My grandmother, who lived from Reconstruction until 1975, told me many of the tales I have pieced together like quilted patchwork.”27

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On five weekends between September 1982 and February 1984, Cannon met with eight feminist theologians called together by Heyward and calling themselves the Mud Flower Collective. The other six participants were Harrison, Williams, Mary D. Pellauer, Ada María Isasi-Díaz, Nancy D. Richardson, and an eighth member who dropped out at book time. Pellauer was a White Lutheran social ethicist specializing in the study of sexual violence against women; IsasiDíaz was a Catholic Cuban exile just beginning her master of divinity program at Union who later expounded a perspective she called Mujerista theology; Richardson was a White codirector of the Women’s Theological Center in Boston and, by her reckoning, the only non-theologian in the group. The name of the group originated from a poem that Williams wrote to Harrison. Heyward, an Episcopal cleric teaching at Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Williams, entering the dissertation phase of her doctoral program, were personally close to Harrison, who humbly sought to learn from two Black women, one Hispanic woman, and four White women how feminist theology needed to change. Heyward selected only women who recognized that White feminists had to interrogate the history and current manifestations of feminist racism. Together they declared, “Contemporary feminism has inherited both the courage of the feminist abolitionists and the racism of the white women who sold out black people in a futile attempt to climb the ladders of success put in place by white men of privilege.”28 The Mud Flower women vowed to trust each other enough to have difficult, painful, honest discussions worth pursuing. There had to be a level playing field, notwithstanding that Harrison was a major figure in social ethics and half the group had dissertations yet to complete. They succeeded admirably, trusting each other enough to bruise each other’s feelings and to pioneer a model of dialogical feminist theology. Though they agreed to interrogate feminist racism, they did not share a core definition of feminism or agree that one-factor feminism isn’t feminist. To Pellauer, feminism was “simply the struggle against sexism.” To Heyward it was also the refusal “to compromise the well-being of women.” To Cannon, feminism did not have “anything to do with women; it’s the commitment to end white supremacy, male domination, and economic exploitation.” To Isasi-Díaz, feminism was the belief that sexism is “the paradigm of all oppression.” To Williams, feminism made no sense if it was not “preceded by the word black” and did not oppose “the trinity of sexism, racism, and classism.” To Richardson, feminism began with women’s experience and contended for the well-being of all women. To Harrison, feminism began with a woman’s assertion of her power: “It’s not, in the first instance, a theory, but a very personal act.”29

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Cannon told Pellauer, “I’ve always had this feeling that, for you, racism always comes in third, behind gender and class. And for me it’s always first. And I’ve never understood before why, for you, it’s third.” Pellauer replied that the chronology of one’s life makes a formative difference. She was compelled to deal with the evils of male and class privilege long before she knew much about racism: “Somehow, I think, we trust more deeply those things we experience first. Understanding racism experientially is very important to me, but I have to work very hard at it, and I try to do this.” Cannon said this sincere explanation helped her greatly. Racism affected her so profoundly it was hard to imagine how Whites didn’t see it. To Harrison, the Mud Flower discussions were painful and liberating. She recalled her family’s anti-Semitism and its indifference—despite living less than thirty miles from the Pipestone Reservation in Minnesota—to the extermination of Native Americans. Cannon told Harrison the progressive seminary she wanted to love had denigrated her racially and made her feel invisible. Williams confirmed that Union felt very White to her, and Isasi-Díaz said her experience as a White Cuban exile at Union was similar. Harrison later recalled: “Initially I felt trapped by these terrible contradictions. I was ashamed and confused. I think many white women start where I started. Our silence about racism is maintained because of an agonizing guilt about it.”30 Harrison’s painful discussions with Cannon, Williams, and Isasi-Díaz revealed to her that her guilt about racism thwarted her from breaking its power over her. She needed to work through the guilt that came from interrogating whiteness. White Presbyterianism had taught her to substitute God for her own life and powers. God’s will is found through self-denial; Christians are supposed to deny themselves to do God’s will. From Harrison’s “somber, sad religion” she had learned to look for God in that which was not herself or in her experience: “I learned that so deeply—God would be what I was not!” Walker’s description of finding God in herself and the color purple helped Harrison claim her own powers of being. More important was Harrison’s experience of feminist community with Black women who knew what Walker meant: “Finally, of course, that’s precisely where I found God—in myself/my community.” To Harrison, the experience of spiritual connection with feminists and womanists was transforming: “Women’s community has been the place where honesty, pain, and struggle have drawn me into a sense of God. . . . Increasingly in my life it has been women who were really struggling to live, women who would not let their lives be denied, who have been the deep source of the grace I’ve experienced.”31 The Mud Flower discussions yielded a book, God’s Fierce Whimsy: Christian Feminism and Theological Education (1985), that prepared Cannon for similarly strange reactions to come. For many years she met people at conferences

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who told her they admired the book and were helped by it. Yet aside from Christianity and Crisis, a magazine closely connected to Union that ran two reviews, the book received exactly two reviews. The Jesuit magazine America posted a polite notice, and the journal Lesbian Contradictions ran a substantive, mostly positive review. Cannon was shocked. It was her first experience of a possibility she had not previously considered, which later played a role in her lecture circuit story: What if you make an important intervention and they just ignore you?32 She graduated in 1983 with a dissertation titled “Resources for a Constructive Christian Ethic for Black Women with Special Attention to the Life and Work of Zora Neale Hurston.” It was a thoroughly womanist work that did not yet invoke the term. Two years later Cannon employed the womanist concept for the first time in a reader edited by Letty Russell on feminist interpretations of the Bible, remarking, “Black feminist consciousness may be more accurately identified as Black womanist consciousness, to use Alice Walker’s concept and definition.” Meanwhile she taught at Episcopal Divinity School, fainted in 1985 in front of a large audience at the American Academy of Religion, and prepared the book version of her dissertation, Black Womanist Ethics (1988). Despite using the womanist term as her organizing title frame, Cannon did not incorporate it in the body of the text. Black Womanist Ethics made a pathbreaking argument about the virtues of Black women drawn from Cannon’s experience, Walker, and the novels of Hurston.33 African American women need distinctive virtues, she argued, and have them. White Americans prize self-reliance, frugality, and industry and judge others by their attainment of these virtues. White ethicists naturally provide philosophical and religious reasons for prizing these virtues because they work for Whites and facilitate their success. But Cannon said these virtues do not work for Black Americans. To subscribe to White values is to legitimize the power that Whites hold over Blacks, deepening Black humiliation. In racist America, the game is rigged against African Americans who try to acquire finance capital or climb a career ladder. Even when Black Americans adopt White individualism and frugality, they are put down anyway, which adds to their denigration and the “evidence” of their supposed inferiority. Cannon declared: “Racism does not allow Black women and Black men to labor habitually in beneficial work with the hope of saving expenses by avoiding waste so that they can develop a standard of living that is congruent with the American ideal.”34 Cannon stressed that Black women work for lower wages than men and White women, doing jobs that others refuse to do. For Black women, to embrace work as a prime value is to risk their emotional and physical health. In addition,

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the range of the moral agency that exists for Black American women is severely limited by racism and poverty. White theologians describe a self with a wide capacity for moral agency, taking for granted that each person is free and selfdetermining. The assumption that each person holds self-determining power underwrites the White Christian idea of Christian virtue, which prizes the choice of bearing one’s cross. White Christian ethics treats voluntary suffering as a moral norm. The virtuous Christian chooses to follow Jesus to the cross, making personal sacrifices as a voluntary commitment. The Christian follows Christ by choosing to suffer for the sake of others. Cannon said none of this applies to the situation of Black women. Suffering is not a choice or a desirable norm for African Americans, especially for Black women. It is a repugnant everyday reality to overcome: “The vast majority of Blacks suffer every conceivable form of denigration. Their lives are named, defined and circumscribed by whites.” Since African Americans never experienced the moral agency and freedom of Whites, Cannon argued, the ethic of voluntary suffering should not apply to them. Being subjected to sermons on this theme is obscene. Black Americans owe their lack of moral agency and freedom precisely to the oppression they suffer at the hands of Whites. Cannon described Black faith and liberation ethics as responses to the conditions of White oppression, helping Black Americans to “purge themselves of self-hate” and throw off the judgment of an ethic that should not apply to them: “The ethical values that the Black community has construed for itself are not identical with the body of obligations and duties that Anglo-Protestant American society requires of its members. Nor can the ethical assumptions be the same, as long as powerful whites who control the wealth, the systems and the institutions in this society continue to perpetuate brutality and criminality against Blacks.”35 What kind of Christian ethic works for African Americans who refuse to internalize the ethical standards of White society? Cannon pointed to Walker and Hurston, who showed that Black folk culture has a distinct ethical character. Womanist ethics begins with the experiences of Black female survivors, deriving its moral norms from studies of Black female culture and experience. Black Womanist Ethics did not get to the work of ethical construction, pointing only to how it might be done. Cannon wrote, “For too long the Black community’s theological and ethical understandings have been written from a decidedly male bias.” Womanist thought, though a type of liberation theology, privileges the distinctive experiences and moral agency of Black women.36 Cannon walked a fine line between stressing the objective ravages of racism and denying that Black women were emotionally stunted by it. To a degree she lauded Hurston on the latter theme, though Cannon would never say, as

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Hurston said of herself, that she lacked any interest in “the race problem.” Hurston wrote in 1928: “I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not belong to the sobbing school of negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are hurt about it.” Cannon had a different voice, her politics were closer to Walker’s than to Hurston’s, and she identified with the religious feelings of Black churchwomen, unlike Hurston, who said religion is for people who need security and consolation: “It is simply not for me.” But Cannon loved Hurston’s saucy flair and her thick descriptions of complex, strong, psychologically integral Black women.37 Hurston’s characters labored long hours, held families together, danced and partied, had affairs, protected vulnerable Black males, and loved and raged at them, all with little sense of being defeated or victimized. Since Hurston did not experience Black people or herself as humiliated or degraded, her portraits of Black Americans refused these overworked tropes. She portrayed emotionally healthy characters who paid little attention to Whites, did not think of themselves as a “problem,” and refuted the inferiority slander. Literary scholar Mary Burgher wrote that Black women writers turned their lost innocence into “invisible dignity,” sustained a “quiet grace” despite being refused the possibility of feminine delicacy, and converted their unchosen responsibilities into “unshouted courage.” Cannon said that perfectly described Hurston and the virtues of womanist spirituality.38 Suffering, Cannon observed, is an everyday reality for Black women, not something to be prized as a moral value. Hurston was at her best on this theme, denying that virtue is about experiencing suffering and enduring it nobly. She portrayed virtue as a robust, self-respecting, feisty affirmation of one’s life and life itself. Hurston was long on “unctuousness,” one of Walker’s favorite words— the virtue of taking the good and bad together in stride. Hurston called it “soaking up urine and perfume with the same indifference.”39 The invisible dignity of Black women enables them to maintain self-respect despite being treated as the “mules of the world.” Their quiet grace enables them to persist against forces that deny their humanity. Their unshouted courage enables them to calibrate the effects of human wills besides their own and to accept accountability for occurrences beyond their control. In all this persisting and resisting, Cannon stressed, Black women acquired over decades of struggle a wily sense of the relativity of truth, using whatever means they found to hold off the threat of violence and death: “For Black people the moral element of courage is annexed with the will to live and the dread of greater perpetrations of evil acts against them.”40

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Cannon allowed that Hurston ended badly, lurching further to the political right and walling herself off from others. Literary critic Henry Louis Gates Jr. judged that Hurston wrote well in her heyday and poorly afterward. Cannon stressed, however, that Hurston’s best work superbly depicted the folk wisdom of Black women: “Across the boundaries of her own experience, Hurston wrote about the oppressive and unbearable, about those things that rub Black women raw. Her richness and chaos, her merits and faults witnessed to an ethic that can be lived out only in community.”41 The image of being rubbed raw was a staple of Cannon’s vivid speaking style. From the beginning she was a legendary teacher who strove to make every voice in the class heard and encouraged every student to “fill the container,” as she put it, with whatever the student brought to the course. Cannon was not there to penalize them with a bad grade for something they did not learn. That approach had never worked for her and she didn’t believe in it, no matter how many faculty colleagues and deans admonished her to hand out some C grades. To the end of her days, Cannon told stories of being chided on this point at every school at which she taught. In the 1980s she taught at Episcopal Divinity School, where her charismatic teaching attracted students across the nineschool Boston Theological Institute. But Cannon disliked the White, anxious, radical, often toxic culture of EDS. Douglas advised Cannon to treat her experience at EDS as research on the ways of White people—step back from the place and don’t let it get to you. Cannon got through her last years at EDS by holding fast to this counsel. In 1993 she moved to the Department of Religion at Temple University, where her womanist doctoral graduates included Stacey Floyd-Thomas and Angela Sims. From 2001 to her death in 2018, Cannon taught at Union Presbyterian Seminary in Richmond, Virginia. Always she said that teaching was her ministry. To equip students and empower them were her passions, helping them live into the graces and gifts they were given. Cannon was fond of Hurston’s self-description that she tried “to hit a straight lick with a crooked stick.” This saying described, to Cannon, how she wrote womanist ethics. On the one hand, she spoke as a Christian social ethicist about “the universality of the human condition,” transcending her blackness and femaleness. On the other hand, as a womanist ethicist, her blackness and femaleness were fundamental to every aspect of her life, thought, teaching, and being. Womanist liberation, she argued, is determinately situated, deconstructive, and perspectival: “In other words, my role is to speak as ‘one of the canonical boys’ and as ‘the noncanonical other’ at one and the same time.” In 1987 she told a Society of Christian Ethics (SCE) conference that canonical notions about ethical scholarship have “nothing to do with the realities of Black women.” To

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qualify for membership in the scholarly guild of Christian ethicists, one is supposed to demonstrate proficiency in abstract theory, philosophy, and the classical canon of ethical texts and problems. Cannon put it ruefully: “To prove that she is sufficiently intelligent, the Black woman as Christian ethicist must discount the particularities of her lived experiences and instead focus on the validity of generalizable external analytical data.”42 This was her dilemma as a womanist ethicist, a member of SCE, and a mentor of theological students, including doctoral students. If she spoke the canonical language of abstraction and Euro-American concerns, she risked betraying Black women. If she spoke purely as a womanist, she risked being devalued by the guild as “a second-class scholar specializing in Jim Crow subject matter.” Admitting Black women into the field is one thing, Cannon observed. Respecting Black women’s moral reasoning as an important aspect of the field is something else. Both ideas were new in 1987, and mere inclusion was hard to come by. But the greater prize was to gain real influence, changing how the field included and responded to Black women. Cannon rued that the experience and scholarship of Black women were habitually ignored, even in Black theology. On the rare occasions when Black women were mentioned, their moral agency was hardly ever respected or accurately described.43 Cannon conceived womanist ethics as a corrective enterprise that works within and outside the guild, interpreting traditional paradigms from the perspectives of previously excluded Black female subjects. As a critical enterprise, womanist ethics points to the silencing and denigration of Black women, including the sexist content of Black male preaching. As a constructive enterprise, it describes the genius of Black women in creatively shaping their destinies: “The womanist scholar stresses the role of emotional, intuitive knowledge in the collective life of the people,” studying the consciousness of Black women as reflected in their literature and institutions.44 The womanist intervention was tremendously successful—and not. When Cannon enrolled at ITC, the total number of African American women enrolled in seminary doctoral programs was one. The trickle of the 1970s yielded the gusher of the 1980s and 1990s. The first generation of womanists, led by Cannon, Grant, Townes, and Williams, included M. Shawn Copeland, Toinette Eugene, Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, Diana Hayes, Clarice Martin, Jamie T. Phelps, Marcia Riggs, Cheryl J. Sanders, and Renita J. Weems. The second generation of womanists, sometimes only slightly younger than their first-generation classmates and teachers, included Douglas, Cheryl A. Kirk-Duggan, Karen Baker-Fletcher, Barbara Holmes, Joan Martin, Rosetta Ross, JoAnne M. Terrell, Linda E. Thomas, and Daphne Wiggins. They dramatically changed what Black theology looked like,

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sounded like, and was. Yet the first- and second-generation founders did not feel respected or even welcomed. Cannon grieved in 1992 at what they endured: “Even with the requisite credentials for matriculation in hand, we were constantly barraged with arrogance and insults, suspicion and insensitivity, backhand compliments and tongue-in-cheek naiveté. The worlds of divinity school, denominational headquarters, regional adjudicatory offices, and local parishes, between which we negotiated, demanded different and often wrenching allegiances. But we continued to study, struggling for our rightful places in the church and in the academy.”45 The question about Black-only sources that divided Black male theologians was an issue in womanist theology and social ethics, where it played out differently. The womanist commitments to gender criticism, sexual equality, and women’s culture made womanists averse to chauvinist versions of Afrocentrism or Black male culture. For womanists the question was whether they should cite the work of anyone who was not a womanist. Moreover, the very enterprise of building a theological tradition on Walker’s definition of womanism raised an inclusion question of another kind: Can conservative evangelical, Pentecostal, and neo-Pentecostal women be womanists? If a basically secular, vaguely spiritual, humanistic outlook that explicitly endorses lesbian sexuality defines womanism, what happens to the authority of Christian revelation in womanist theology? These questions were contested through the 1980s and 1990s as womanism acquired movement status. One figure was foremost in pressing them: Cheryl Sanders. To Sanders, womanist humanism was very problematic as the basis of a theological perspective, but it was commendable and liberating for womanists to cite only womanists. She offended Cannon on both points, because Cannon dearly loved womanist theology and was committed to drawing on White feminist criticism. Sanders was a doctoral graduate of Harvard Divinity School, an ethicist at Howard University, and a Church of God pastor. She was not against womanism—far from it. She belonged to its community of Black female scholars and was welcomed in it. In 1989, however, she argued that womanism does not work as a foundation for Christian theology and ethics because it is basically a secular construct, whereas Christian theology is a normative enterprise: “The fact is that womanist is essentially a secular cultural category whose theological and ecclesial significations are rather tenuous. Theological content too easily gets ‘read into’ the womanist concept, whose central emphasis remains the selfassertion and struggle of black women for freedom, with or without the aid of God or Jesus or anybody else.” Sanders judged that womanism works slightly better as Christian ethics because ethics can be done somewhat independently

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of theology. But everything that womanists say in advocating moral autonomy, liberation, and sexual freedom can be said with no reference to the Christian God or Christian anything. Womanism, Sanders said, reduces to one claim— Black women are entitled to name their own experience. She stressed that Walker’s definition made no claim about God’s willing the liberation of the oppressed. Walker sought to “supplant” Christian ideas, not to provide a basis for Christian theologizing. It was nice that womanists commended Sojourner Truth, but Truth was an evangelical Christian dedicated to following Jesus, not an apostle of sexual freedom. Sanders argued that Walker-style humanism does not preach in Black churches, where congregations plead for a word that supports “the survival and wholeness of black families.” She could imagine a womanist spirituality based on Christianity. In fact, she contended, almost everything that womanists celebrated in “our audacious, serious foremothers” came from the foremothers’ deep wells of Christian conviction. Sanders wanted the womanist movement to ground itself in Christian faith. As it was, she lamented, “the term womanist theology is in my view a forced hybridization of two disparate concepts and may come to resemble another familiar hybrid, the mule, in being incapable of producing offspring.”46 Cannon replied that Sanders made her so angry it was hard to think clearly: “In preparing to write this response, I found myself repeatedly stopped by waves of anger at Dr. Cheryl Sanders’ treatment of womanist as a secular terminological issue.” She struggled to determine her own purpose. Should Cannon implore womanists to soldier onward in their fight against the patriarchal sexism of the Black church? Should she write something aimed at the onlooking White academic audience? Should she rethink how she appropriated Walker? In sum, “Was I angry with Cheryl Sanders, the white academy, or the African-American theological guild? Well, all of the above.” Cannon reached for Harrison’s signature maxim that women need to transform the power of their anger into the radical work of love. Much as Sanders offended her, there was such a thing as hearing her critique in a generous, loving, womanist fashion. The crucial thing was to sustain the womanist community as a group that supported each other through whatever disagreements it generated. Second, Cannon disagreed with Sanders about the usefulness of Walker’s womanism for theology. Walker provided a framework by which African American women identified their moral agency and expunged whatever thwarted them from claiming it. Her framework was too enabling and clarifying to be cast aside in favor of an old orthodoxy. Womanist theology, Cannon observed, asks “new questions of the Black Church community.” Why does so much Black church preaching put down Black women? What happens to Black women when the church they love

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degrades them? What are the power relations in the Black church that perpetuate its sexism? Cannon rebuffed any theological orthodoxy that did not pursue these questions: “A Black womanist liberation Christian ethic is a critique of all human domination in light of Black women’s experience, a faith praxis that unmasks whatever threatens the well-being of the poorest woman of color.”47 Sanders replied that Cannon and other womanist theologians were clearly averse to being pressed about what Christianity meant to them. It wasn’t just that they didn’t trust Sanders’s motive. They resented any vigorous consideration of the Christianity question. Sanders acknowledged that she should have put her theological cards on the table. Her identity with the holiness tradition was precious to her, being a third-generation member of the Church of God on both sides of her family. She recognized that leading womanists didn’t want to debate liberal versus conservative theology, but they needed to face up to it. This issue matters very much in congregations. In the Church of God, “our commitment to Christian unity causes us to look with suspicion upon any effort to define church in terms of race, gender, class or denomination.” Moreover, in the Church of God, anything that contravenes Scripture is ruled out; the Bible is the Word of God. Sanders, however, also made an argument aiming for womanist commonality—except with Cannon. It delighted her, Sanders said, that womanists referred only to each other in their scholarship. Nearly all the footnotes in womanist scholarship cited the writings of Black women. Sanders said this footnote test proved that most womanists were free of self-hatred: “In a racist society, self-hatred manifests itself as unmistakably in the academy as in the ghetto when we were pressured to employ our oppressors’ criteria to evaluate our own work and worth. To see black women embracing and engaging our material is a celebration in itself.”48 Cannon took the last argument as a direct personal attack. This was not a womanist unity point to her because she had made a target of herself by drawing on White feminists who were helpful to her. Cannon reasoned that appropriating feminist thought was consistent with her twofold commitment to mining womanist particularity and doing justice to human and Christian universality. It was true that many womanists cited only Black women. Meanwhile, she sprinkled her writings with references to Harrison and White feminist theologian Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza. Did that make her a self-hater? Worse yet, “Did it make me a fraud?” Cannon implored womanists to reject the path of exclusion and insularity. If womanism was to remain a liberationist discourse that supported the emancipation of “a whole people,” it could not cut itself off from White feminist thought. The same thing was true of its relation to Black theology, though Cannon mentioned only feminism: “As one of the senior womanist ethicists, I am issuing advance warning to new womanist scholars,

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both actual and potential, that Sanders’s devaluation of credibility consequent on such a conservative framework of Black-sources-only encourages guesswork, blank spots, and time-consuming busy work, the reinvention of the proverbial wheel over and over again.” Womanism would not flourish as an intellectual or spiritual departure if it imposed purity tests on the sources that womanists could cite. Cannon urged womanists to take the long view, and an open one: “Staying open-minded as heterogeneous theoreticians may prove to be the most difficult ethical challenge in securing and extending the legacy of our intellectual life.”49 Some womanists, notably Townes and Douglas, half-welcomed the French deconstructionist tide that swept the U.S. academy in the 1990s. Cannon was much more dubious of it. Deconstructionists derided identity concepts and the appeal to experience as essentialist. Cannon protested that there are far worse things to oppose than essentializing a racial or gender identity. Womanism was born in the refusal of Black women to choose between their racial and gender identities because both were fundamentally defining to them. She felt she had barely withstood one form of being marginalized when the next academic fashion marginalized her again. Being Black and female were equally, profoundly important to her. Womanist ethics, Cannon argued, refuses to surrender to either-or dichotomies that spurn the necessary, difficult, messy work of appropriation and reciprocity. It draws on the “rugged endurance of Black folks in America” to fulfill new possibilities of human flourishing, attending persistently to the intersections of race, gender, and class.50 Cannon felt keenly the generation gap between herself and the young Black feminists she addressed who were steeped in postmodern idioms favored by the academy. She named the issue directly, striving for womanist unity that didn’t have to use the word. She said that if Black women who came of age in the 1990s favored hip-hop, an iconographic aesthetic, and hybrid identities, she would not tell them they had a moral obligation to be womanists. Sometimes, in certain contexts, she allowed that perhaps the womanist language of blackness was too essentialist. Womanism, she said, was a “self-naming sensibility,” not something handed down by coercion. On the other hand, she cringed at the term “post-womanist,” asking young scholars not to spurn twenty years of labor: “Those of us who have been busy doing womanist work from the moment that we enrolled in seminary believe we have built a solid womanist foundation. We officially began constructing this womanist house of wisdom in 1985, and as intellectual laborers we continue to work day in and day out so that our scholarly infrastructure is built on solid rock instead of shifting sand.”51 She pleaded for some historical perspective—it’s a very serious thing to erase the liberationist work of previous generations. If womanism seemed too stodgy

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and smacked too much of 1980s polemics, that could be fixed; it did not have to be stuck in the 1980s. The womanist house of wisdom is an ongoing project: “The real challenge before us is not to become ‘post-womanist’ but to investigate feasible ways to actualize the definition of womanism.” The idea of building on the wisdom of ordinary Black women could not be wrong and was not outdated. It was the ultimate example of taking liberation theology seriously in a North American context.52 Sometimes Cannon put it plaintively. In a showcase forum, Stacey FloydThomas’s reader Deeper Shades of Purple (2006), Cannon said the academy was structured to ignore and demean womanist scholarship: “From 1983 until now, storms of opposition, bigotry, and suspicion mount. . . . Womanist projects in our various disciplines of study are punctuated with utter silence in the sacred halls of the majority of the accredited colleges, universities, and seminaries. . . . Far too many of our professional colleagues, who are defenders of androcentric, heteropatriarchal, malestream, white supremacist culture, experience our very presence as colleagues as a cruel joke.” Every week she had to defend the existence of womanism from “golden boy-mindguards in professional learned societies.” This same academy somehow believed it had surpassed womanist scholarship about blackness and Black female identity. To whom was Cannon to turn when told that her truth was made up? How were womanists to express their everyday realities in an academy that worships itself and its quantitative methods? She observed: “Our existential situations are oftentimes classified as questionable, anecdotal evidence; our genuine perceptions and factual registration of cutting-edge issues end up encoded as sporadic wanderings, downloaded as rambling, make-believe, episodic soap operas flowing into the institutional sea of forgetfulness. It is as if this true Womanist story never happened.”53 But the womanist story had definitely happened and was thriving. Cannon’s cry of the heart reflected her acceptance of the leader-caretaker-defender role of the tradition she had founded. At womanist gatherings, buoyant Cannon took over, spreading cheer, welcoming newcomers, teasing old-timers, being the founder-mother, and urging one and all, “You have to do the work that your soul requires.” This deep-down conviction was Cannon’s mainstay and maxim, to herself and others. She said it so often that audiences sometimes joined her in finishing the sentence. No matter how much hostility and passive aggression they encountered in the secular academy, the theological academy, and the churches, it was only marginally important. What matters is to be faithful to what is saving and life-giving. She wrote postcards as a form of ministry, dropping them in the mail to friends who needed an encouraging word. Cannon never tired of saying that the call to teach was like a fire in her bones. To her, woman-

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ism was a way of knowing; the classroom was the ideal place to explore whatever sustains life and wholeness. On the first day of a class she would announce: “There are no value-free spaces in this classroom.” She was all-in, giving the best she had, remembering where and how she entered, owning what her constellation of particularities made her, and expecting no less of every other person. Back at the clash between Cannon and Sanders in 1989, Emilie Townes observed that womanists did not define lesbian sexuality as a constitutive feature of womanism, contrary to Sanders. To Walker, what mattered was to support the survival and flourishing of the entire African American community. Womanists made a point of affirming women-loving-women relationships only to establish that such relationships are not less morally worthy than heterosexual relationships. If human equality under God is the only principle uniting the Black churches, the churches needed to stop violating their only absolute ethical norm. Whenever churches denigrate or condemn the gay and lesbian relationships of Black persons, they betray the ethic of the church and the well-being of the Black community. Contrary to Sanders, who read Walker’s pro-lesbian motif as an endorsement of moral autonomy, Townes stressed that Walker described a whole integrated person who did not hold any part of herself as distinct “from the wholly, holy, round woman she is.” Moral autonomy, on this understanding, is the ability of an integral self to celebrate herself and her community as moral agents of a human community. Sanders charged that womanists fell into solipsism; Townes countered that womanists held dialogues with their ancestors, something she knew about: “Having been a participant in such a dialogue in my youth, I can attest that the mother involved is far from resigned to such independent behavior. As a true mentor, she endeavors to encourage, restrain, and guide assertions of moral autonomy, liberation, and sexuality in a hostile society.”54 Townes worried that readers of Sanders might take too seriously her description of Walker as a secular thinker. Walker was deadly earnest about spirituality and God; in The Color Purple, Shug tells Celie: “God is inside of you and inside of everybody else. You come into the world with God. But only them that search for it inside find it. And sometimes it just manifest itself even when you are not looking, or don’t know what you are looking for.” Townes acknowledged that this “radically immanent concept of the divine” has very little history in African American religion. The closest approximation to it in Black church religion is the trope about Jesus walking with you and sharing your burdens and knowing your sorrows. Townes might have noted that Howard Thurman, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., and Pauli Murray preached about the immanent divine, but she settled for a commendation, writing that Williams was right—the African American religious community needed a theology of the Spirit.55

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Townes was on her way to achieving much of Cannon’s dream for womanist social ethics, an ambition she accepted from Cannon personally. Like Cannon, only more so, Townes stressed that womanism is not about individuals bidding for academic stardom. It is about Black women interpreting Christianity, seeking justice, and being whole human beings in the churches, society, and the academy. S O C I AL ETH IC S OF TH E CU LTURAL P RODUCTION OF EV IL : EM IL IE TO WNES

Emilie Maureen Townes, the daughter of two college professors and administrators in Durham, North Carolina, surprised herself by becoming an academic. Her mother, Mary Doris McLean Townes, was the first Black woman to earn a Ph.D. in molecular biology at the University of Michigan, and taught at North Carolina Central University for forty-four years, retiring in 1994 as dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. Her father, Ross Emile Townes, taught physical education at North Carolina Central University for thirty years and was a devoted member of the United Methodist Church, teaching weekly Bible classes and serving at the conference level on numerous committees. Townes was born in 1955. As a little girl seated in the hall outside the classroom, she listened to her mother lecture on biology. After she became a minister, Townes wrote her sermons in the meticulous fashion of her father’s Bible class notes, on the unlined side of vertically turned index cards. At Sunday school she absorbed the message that God is love. Townes was so convinced of it that when she heard a guest minister preach about a God of vengeance, she felt sure the minister was wrong. At home she heard future U.S. senator Jesse Helms rail on television that Black people were violent derelicts and northern liberals were out to destroy southern civilization. She was too young to understand the references to northern liberals, but the part about Black people was bewildering, not remotely describing anyone she knew. At segregated Fayetteville Street Elementary School, Townes stared at pictures of Black American icons affixed to the classroom walls. Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett got her special attention, since the others were male. Her teachers implored students not to waste the freedom that the heroes on the wall had won for them. Townes took this admonition to heart, later recalling: “They became our silent judges, our measure of excellence. They rejoiced with us when we got arithmetic problems right or a new spelling word mastered. They were relentless in their demand for excellence and cheerleaders for our education. I hold those pictures firm in my memory.”56

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In 1973 she graduated from Hillside High School and enrolled at the University of Chicago, which inspired no second thoughts about an academic career. Townes graduated in 1977 with a degree in religion and the humanities, earned a two-year master of arts degree at the Divinity School, joined the American Baptist Church, and was ordained in 1980 to the Baptist ministry. Church ministry beckoned, but not yet. She didn’t want a Ph.D., but she enrolled in the Divinity School’s doctor of ministry program. Townes was the only Black woman in residence at the Divinity School until her last two years. She coped with her loneliness by vowing that she would help lonely seminarians of color when she began her ministerial work. Completing the D.Min. in 1982, she taught Field Education at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary in Chicago and managed the bookstore at Northern Baptist Theological Seminary in Lombard, Illinois. To her surprise, Townes enjoyed teaching. Perhaps she was meant to be an academic after all. She had just begun to consider it, planning to wait a few years, when she met Cannon at a conference. Cannon exhorted Townes not to wait. Did she realize there were only five Black women with earned doctoral degrees teaching in theological education in the entire United States? Townes heard this plea as another call to accountability. Enrolling at the joint Garrett Seminary/Northwestern University doctoral program, she worked with Garrett historian Rosemary Skinner Keller and Northwestern historian Josef Barton, plotting a social ethical dissertation on a historical subject. Townes found her subject in Wells-Barnett, writing a dissertation while serving for three years as pastor of Christ the Redeemer Metropolitan Community Church. Ministering to a gay-identified congregation threw Townes into the very public work of urging churches to work through their hang-ups about gay sexuality. Meanwhile, she immersed herself in the life and times of Wells-Barnett.57 Townes judged that Wells-Barnett deserved better books than the existing literature about her. Paula Giddings had not yet published her magnificent biography of Wells-Barnett, nor Linda O. McMurry her solid biography. The feminist practice of dropping “Barnett” had not begun either, so Townes referred to her as “Wells-Barnett,” explaining that she was hooked by her autobiography, Crusade for Justice, written in 1930 and finally published in 1970: “As I read, a strong, determined, arrogant woman emerged. Here was a woman who lived her life and witness in one breath.” Wells-Barnett, Townes wrote, was abrasive, complex, brave, a loyal friend to many, and prophetic: “She was a leader, but often could not work with others. She held this nation and all its people to a high moral standard and challenged her contemporaries to breathe life into the ideals this country espoused.”58

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This description of an awesomely brave figure who faltered at working with others framed Townes’s interpretation. She said Wells-Barnett would not loom so large in history had she been less “regal, intolerant, and impulsive,” which she shared with other outsized personalities: “Wells-Barnett was not unusual in her inability to work in coalitions. Many who are on the cutting edge of leadership are unable to work in partnership.” Townes argued that both sides of her integral life are important for womanism. Wells-Barnett succeeded at prophecy, and not at pastoral tasks. Citing Cannon, Townes refused to treat suffering as an ethical norm. Womanists conceive power positively as “power with,” Townes explained. Power derives from decision, moral responsibility, and the ability to work with others, which emerges from the shared struggles of people, not as something imposed on them. People experience power within whenever they interact in ways that produce value. Power summons individuals to develop capacities for nurturing, empathy, and relation, aiming for justice and the flourishing of life. Townes observed that Wells-Barnett chafed at leaders who abused their authority, yet she abused her own: “Time and again, Wells-Barnett was unable to understand why others found different pathways to effect social change once she had blazed the trail. Her penchant for unilateral action and impulsive confrontation was an anathema for many of her peers such as Mary Washington, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Mary Church Terrell.”59 Townes swung back to the suffering issue, rejecting Cone’s contention that Christians are called to suffer with the Black God in struggling against evil. Cone said Christians are liberated sufferers with the Black God known in Christ, and Black theology smacks of novelty only because White theologians are racists who apprehend suffering as spectators, not as victims. Liberation theology, on Cone’s rendering, was about liberating oppressed people from their suffering through suffering. Townes was not for that, preferring the distinction between pain and suffering of Black feminist poet Audre Lorde. Pain is a dynamic process usable for transformation. Suffering is unmetabolized pain, a static process of reliving pain constantly that leads to oppression. Christianity, Townes argued, is about believing in the redemptive resurrection of Christ, who banished suffering and triumphed over death. Suffering is evil, not something God wants for us. God breaks into history to transform suffering into wholeness—“to move the person from victim to change agent.”60 She put it categorically—any theology or worldview that accepts suffering as good, providential, or redemptive is a tool of oppression. Pain is a prod to liberation and wholeness, but suffering shuts down the capacity of the victim to imagine liberation. Wells-Barnett opposed suffering by railing against lynching and injustice, refusing to be victimized by injustice. On one occasion, visiting

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twelve Black men unjustly jailed in Elaine, Arkansas, she chastised them for talking, singing, and praying about dying. Didn’t they want to be free? Didn’t they believe that God would set them free? “Quit talking about dying; if you believe your God is all powerful, believe he is powerful enough to open these prison doors, and say so.”61 Townes loved the Wells-Barnett who bravely condemned injustice and suffering and tried sincerely to work with others. She lamented that Wells-Barnett was not good at the latter: “She could not accept the humanness of being human. She could understand structures, but because the pastoral voice within her was not developed, she could not fully consider the need to care for the people behind the institutions.” Wells-Barnett had to have her own way, upbraiding others as weak and cowardly, so the same conflict kept recurring: “One is able to see her inability to grasp how her unilateral actions could hurt or anger others.” Townes concluded that it made her bitter instead of yielding self-examination about why this kept happening. This part of her legacy, Townes wrote, cannot be called a success; Wells-Barnett was very human and fallible. She was also, through and through, a womanist. Townes ended with familiar words needing no citation: “She did engage in outrageous, courageous or willful behavior. She wanted to know more and in greater depth than was considered good for one. She was responsible, in charge, and serious.”62 Completing her Ph.D. in 1989, Townes joined the faculty of Saint Paul School of Theology in Kansas City, Missouri, teaching social ethics. Her argument about the womanist approach to suffering and evil loomed as an obvious subject of a second book. Townes started to write it—and reconsidered: Whatever she said about the womanist approach would be more convincing if many womanists were in the book. Townes called on thirteen fellow womanists to write one chapter each. A Troubling in My Soul: Womanist Perspectives on Evil and Suffering (1993) showcased a burgeoning community of scholars. Grant’s chapter argued that pious Christian language about “servitude” nearly always reinforces the tyranny of servitude for U.S. American Black women. Cannon said Black women perceive God’s presence in their resistance to evil instead of beginning in male fashion with a doctrine of divine omnipotence. Williams outlined three Black theological conceptions of sin—alienation from God, self, and others; failure to join in the struggle for liberation; and the denigration or defilement of Black womanhood. Cheryl A. Kirk-Duggan, a doctoral student at Baylor University, interpreted the spirituals as Afrocentric versions of theodicy responding to the actuality of evil. M. Shawn Copeland, a Catholic theologian at Yale, gently resisted the editorial line. Copeland grew up in Detroit and graduated from Madonna College, a Felician Sisters school in

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Livonia, Michigan. She earned her doctorate in theology at Boston College in 1991, taught at Yale for five years, and later taught at Marquette University for nine years and at Boston College for sixteen years. Copeland said there is such a thing as a womanist theology of suffering. It grows “in the dark soil of the African-American religious tradition.” It repels “any ersatz spiritualization of evil and suffering.” It retells the lives and suffering of Black women who came through, affirming that resistant suffering has always been and still is redemptive—“They make meaning of their suffering.” Townes emphatically disagreed: “Suffering is outrageous. Suffering does not ennoble, enable, or equip this generation or future generations of Black people. A life based on survival and reaction does not produce healthy minds, bodies, or souls. The fragmentation of the spirit and the witness prevents the Black church from living in the new Jerusalem.”63 The second single-authored book in an academic’s career is a big deal. The first book is usually the dissertation that academics have already written to enter the profession. A Troubling in My Soul was a multiauthored collection, so Townes still faced the question of how she would mark her trajectory in social ethics. She settled on womanist spirituality, the wellspring of womanism, applied to social ethics. In a Blaze of Glory: Womanist Spirituality as Social Witness (1995) began with Walker’s definition of womanism, explained its four parts, and asserted: “Womanist reflection is individual, communal, and pithy in its critique and acceptance of love and analysis. Womanist wisdom springs out of the experience of African American women as they have been daughters, wives, partners, aunts, grandmothers, mothers, other mothers, comrades, worshipers, protesters, wisdom bearers, murderers, and saints in African American culture and society—and in the life of the church.”64 Townes said womanists yearn for the glory of a new heaven and a new earth. Womanism is emphatically embodied, personal, particular, and communal, not objective or value-free. If she spoke any universal truths, it was by accident while she spoke from her very particular experience in a Black Methodist family and several Black churches: “It is the particularity of my grandmother, my father, my mother, my aunts, and my uncles. It is the particularity of Cousin Willie Mae, Mrs. Wynne, Mr. Butler, Miss Rosie, and Mrs. Montez. It is the particularity of the Black Church and the women and men who craft it.” Womanism is something lived, she observed, not found in books, though books containing the moral wisdom of Black women are useful: “This wisdom can be found in autobiographies, speeches, novels, poems, sermons, testimonies, songs, and oral histories—in their lives.” Townes struggled at first to write a book on this subject. She sorted through speeches, sermons, and the like to find an

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authorial angle, and failed. How to begin? How to show that womanist Christianity is about growing into the wholeness of spirit and body? Then she read a sermon in Toni Morrison’s Beloved that evoked a poetic response. That was it: “In utter frustration, I turned to my own poetic voice to break the silence. . . . The way had revealed itself!” If she began each constructive chapter with a prayer-poem on the themes of the chapter, she could get rolling. She only needed to allow herself to do it: to be called beloved is to be called by God to be called by the shining moments be called deep within deep.65

This prayer swiftly yielded a two-handed excursus on postmodernism. Townes argued that a womanist should say yes and no to deconstructionist criticism. On the yes side, deconstructionism is radically historicist and particular, rightly skewering the Enlightenment conceits of objectivity, universal rationality, and value-free knowledge. It commendably unmasks the struggle for power and privilege that lurks behind all liberal and not-so-liberal appeals to reason. On the no side, Townes recoiled at the deconstructionist attack on subjectivity and feeling, protesting that it destroys any basis besides empathic inference for caring about, or even being aware of, anyone else’s feelings and experiences. Postmodern antihumanism erases real human subjects, flattening out racial identities and the richness and complexity of cultural difference. Townes countered that particularity, historicity, locality, and context matter primarily because real human persons are represented by them and exist within them. Deconstructionism sees only the material and cultural relations of power of depersonalized bodies: “Black folk become one dark stroke across the landscape of hegemonic discourse. The promise of postmodernism fails its liberative agenda.”66 Black conservatism similarly merited a two-handed approach, at least on one side of the issue. In the Black church, Townes said, there is something commendable about conservative preaching on obeying the commandments, doing your homework, and being faithful to your spouse. Pulpit conservatism has helped Black Americans cope with their oppression, though on the other hand, it has also purveyed baleful lessons about gender roles and sexuality. As for secular versions of Black conservatism, Townes said they were bad only. Economist Thomas Sowell and essayist Shelby Steele won adoring White audiences for condemning affirmative action and blaming African Americans for their sorrows. Townes said there is nothing to be said for Sowell-type conservatism, a species of Black self-denigration, or Steele’s slicker version of it: “We

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have learned to hate ourselves without even realizing the level of our self-contempt. In loving ourselves, developing our hearts, we must become our own best critics and our greatest cheerleaders for justice and hope.” Sowell and Steele celebrated predatory individualism and corporate capitalism, dismissing structural aspects of social inequality as poor excuses: “They represent modernist notions of individualism and an ease with systems that promise diversity, but are structured to deny diversity’s concrete demands for change.”67 Colorism is another deadly species of self-denigration in the Black community. Townes observed that discriminatory practices favoring light-colored Blacks have long standing in elite Black culture. Du Bois’s Talented Tenth had twenty-one male leaders and two female leaders, all but one of whom were light skinned. Light-colored Blacks predominated in twentieth-century African American politics and activism, and many Black businesses discriminated on the basis of skin color. Townes reflected that “Black Is Beautiful” rhetoric mitigated some of this problem in the 1960s and 1970s, but not by much: “The mournful legacy of colorism is relentless.”68 In person Townes was, and is, kindly, generous, gracious, and deep-souled. On the page she could also seem despairing. In her preacher voice she wrote, “The Black Church of a lived spirituality cannot content itself with protestations of holiness if there is nothing holy present in how we hold one another and act as partners with God in shaping a witness in the lives of those folk who have not yet experienced the transformation of death and grace.” A friend admonished her in reply, “Em, when are you going to do happy?” Townes responded, “I’m an ethicist—I don’t do happy!” Upon reflection, she winced at giving a poor answer: “It began to haunt me. In parts of the African American faith tradition, being haunted is not considered bad or negative. It simply means that God is trying ‘to get a word through’ to you, and one needs to be still and listen.” In the pulpit Townes spoke of hope and the promise of salvation; in her academic work these themes were in short supply.69 She vowed to close the gap, even as she wrote about a distressing topic, the crisis of health care in the Black community. Townes observed that African American life, especially in this area, is often painted “in absolutely grim and hopeless colors.” To judge from the dominant media images, there is “nothing healthy or whole” in everyday African American existence. She appealed for balance and empirical sense, observing in 1997 that more African American males were in college than in prison, vastly more Black mothers were selfsupporting than on welfare, there were more Black accountants than Black athletes, and slightly more Black families headed by married couples (47 percent) than by single mothers (46 percent). Moreover, drug addiction was no more a

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Black problem than a White one—“Too much of the rhetoric from pulpit to podium has painted the impact of drugs on Black life as a near-hopeless devastation”—and Black infant mortality rates were improving. On the other hand, Townes stressed, the picture in health-care service was distressingly bad and unequal. Middle-class Black families suffered higher mortality rates than middle-class White families, Black Americans got less advanced treatment than Whites, and 60 percent of the African American population lived in communities holding one or more uncontrolled toxic waste sites. Townes implored: we are called to love ourselves to one another to love God hard if we are to live out the pouring of God’s spirit in our lives we must reach out to our brothers and sisters and touch creation with our hearts and souls.70

She taught at Saint Paul for ten years, developing courses titled “Christian Ethics and Moral Values,” “Feminist and Womanist Ethics,” “Formative Texts in Christian Ethics,” “African American Critical Religious Thought,” “Voices of Protest—Songs of Hope,” and “The Church as Caring and Reconciling Community.” Her weekly sermonizing in Chicago tapered back to a half dozen sermons per year, though Townes usually wrote new sermons instead of recycling one from her barrel. On the road she gave lectures on womanist ethics and spirituality, glossing themes from her books, but in the mid-1990s one subject played a larger role in her lecturing than in her books—the devastating HIV/ AIDS crisis. Townes had a searing lecture titled “And All the Colored Folks Is Cursed: The Impact of HIV-AIDS on the African American Community.” She said the church’s long-standing repressive approach to sexuality was literally killing Black people caught between their gay sexuality and a disapproving church. She played a role in the desperate work of that time to comfort ravaged gay communities and to devise religious ceremonies that spoke to the moment. In 1999 Harrison retired as the Carolyn Williams Beaird Professor of Christian Ethics at Union, and Townes was the obvious person to succeed her, having earned fullprofessor status at Saint Paul the previous year. At Union her candidacy lecture in 1998 was titled “Comprehending Absurd Metaphors and Transforming Fragmented Communities.” It was a foretaste of the new course and book that was the centerpiece of her six years at Union.71 At Union her courses on womanist ethics and African American religious thought were a godsend for an institution that deeply identified with its role in

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creating the womanist tradition yet lacked courses about it. Meanwhile, Townes developed a legendary course with a forbidding title, “The Political Economy of Misery.” The book version was titled Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil (2006), which Townes published one year after she moved to Yale Divinity School as the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of African American Religion and Theology. Losing Townes to Yale was a devastating blow to Union; I experienced the loss personally in arriving at Union just as she left. Her move to Yale and subsequent appointment as associate dean of academic affairs at the Divinity School enhanced the academic prestige of the entire womanist tradition, even as Cannon grieved that the customary treatment of womanists in the academy was rude and denigrating. Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil explored what Townes called “the deep interior life of evil and its manifestations.” Theological books on theodicy, she observed, usually traffic in concepts and theories. Townes got much more from Morrison, Baldwin, and the stereotypical storytelling of decidedly lesser writers. Blending Foucault’s understanding of imagination and the fantastic with Antonio Gramsci’s understanding of hegemony as ideological domination, Townes explored how the “fantastic hegemonic imagination” of White Americans played with history and memory to construct five influential stereotypes: Mammy/Aunt Jemima, Sapphire, the Tragic Mulatta, the Welfare Queen, and Topsy.72 Foucault celebrated the subversion of Western rationalism and naturalism by imagination, especially the “fantastic” consciousness of other worlds besides the mundane landscape of science. Focused on books and literary consciousness, he described the imaginary as something that grows in the intervals between studying texts, not as something that necessarily opposes reality. Townes added that imagination and the fantastic are at play in everyday experiences of uncertainty about the actuality of a perception or experience. Ghosts and shifted realities are examples of the fantastic; so are structures of domination and subordination. Moreover, the fantastic becomes an everyday reality for those who live in it. From Gramsci, Townes took the idea of hegemony as the set of ideas that dominant groups employ to legitimize their rule. Hegemony is the cultural process by which a ruling class makes its domination appear natural. Townes argued that the stereotypes of the Black American experience constructed by the “fantastic hegemonic imagination” exemplify the cultural production of evil.73 The Mammy figure, a nineteenth-century fiction invented by southern slaveholders to show how slaves loved their owners and were loved by them, exemplifies the problem of identity as property and commodity. Originally she

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was invented as a response to abolitionist charges that slave owners exploited their (usually light-colored) female slaves. Apologists for slavery pictured the slave-owning household as an integral unit that included an old, obese, darkskinned, desexualized, happy woman whom no slaveholding male would have desired sexually. The “living proof of miscegenation,” Townes observed, told a different story; moreover, there is very little evidence for Mammy, since Black women rarely lived past forty-five and the household servants were nearly always young and light-colored. After slavery ended, the Mammy figure soared to new heights of popularity as the perfect counterpoint to the sweet, innocent, White, beautiful Southern Belle, who needed someone fit for household labor. Later she morphed into Aunt Jemima, the jolly queen of pancakes. In the early twentieth century the United Daughters of the Confederacy and other White groups erected monuments to the “old Black Mammies of the South,” despite Black opposition. Townes remarked: “Despite the facts, the belief that White owners loved their Mammies became ingrained in U.S. culture.”74 Townes belonged to the generation that rebelled against Aunt Jemima, Uncle Tom, Topsy, and other White stereotypes demeaning Black identity. She recalled of the protests against Aunt Jemima: “We thought we had banished her with raised black gloved fists and self-empowerment and affirmative action and an emerging Black middle class.” But mere rejection is inadequate, she cautioned. Sixty years of protests against Aunt Jemima finally yielded an updated pancake queen adorned with pearls and styled hair. Instead of merely rejecting the latest instantiation of Mammy as commodity and property, Townes spoke for countermemory, the reconstitution of history: “Countermemory is the patient and persistent work of mining the motherlode of African American religious life.” It defangs cultural stereotypes like Aunt Jemima by critically interpreting and refashioning them, turning the tables on White prejudices and anxieties. The Black minstrel tradition, though loaded with stereotypes, contained knowing put-downs of White arrogance and indirect protest messages. When White minstrel performers recycled the same material to ridicule Black life and culture, they usually missed the critical thrusts aimed at White bigotry. Thus, they unknowingly lampooned themselves. Townes stressed that countermemory both exposes and copes with the cultural production of evil: “The spirituals, gospels, blues, work and protest songs, jazz, R&B, soul, hip hop, all have within them segments that have taken a long, hard look at the nature of subjugations in our lives and have something to say about it and the ways to lessen, if not eradicate, the many wounds inflicted on Black lives on a minute-by-minute basis.”75 Treating identity as property is a major form of the cultural production of evil. Townes described “uninterrogated coloredness” as another, the tendency

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to restrict references to race or discussions of racial justice to dark-skinned Blacks. Uninterrogated coloredness gives Whites a pass from dealing with the privileges and characteristics of whiteness, and it allows darker-skinned racial ethnic groups to ignore their own color-based caste systems. Here the pertinent stereotype was Sapphire, the malicious, loud, bitchy female who emasculated Black males. Based on the character Sapphire Stevens in the Amos ’n’ Andy television show of the 1950s, Sapphire is dangerous for the White imagination because Whites have no “safe” place for a Black woman who spurns White culture and cares for her own family chiefly through her penchant for domineering hostility. The fact that Sapphire is a creation of the White imagination did not stop many Black Americans from treating her as something terribly real. Sapphire became a symbol of blackness lacking any explicitly White counterpart, for whiteness is too dominant to be visible to Whites. Townes contended against the White resort to color blindness, which masks the cultural significance of race and the sheer predominance of White privilege: “Avoiding the messiness and complexity of race in the quest for a color-blind stance only serves to make palatable a bootlicking selective engagement with our genuine differences—differences that are assumed to be divisive rather than enriching.” To eliminate racist privilege, White society must acknowledge its existence and struggle morally with it. Whiteness is homeland for the fantastic hegemonic imagination; evocations of neutrality and objectivity simply hold the “gigantic superego” of White supremacy in its unacknowledged dominant place: “To ring ourselves around a deadly May pole of uninterrogated coloredness is to dance, literally, with the devil. We fool ourselves if we believe that continuing to obscure whiteness eradicates it or erases its history and deadly effects.”76 As for countermemory, Townes noted that sapphire is also a precious stone. Sapphire, the stereotype, is tough, relentless, and more inclined to demand accountability than to assign blame: “Sapphire urges us to be relentless in our analysis and inclusive in our recovery of history and sociopolitical analysis when prying open and interrogating the previously uninterrogated.” Townes wrote that the womanist trilogy of race, gender, and class, though fundamental, must be supplemented with critiques of heterosexism, ageism, the color caste system, and all forms of exclusion, including “the Pandora’s box around issues of beauty.”77 Part of the beauty issue is the racist favoring of light skin over dark, a prejudice tangled in the United States with empire and miscegenation, which correlates with the stereotype that Townes called “the Tragic Mulatta.” Invented by White abolitionist writer Lydia Maria Child in 1842, the Tragic Mulatta quickly became another stock type in U.S. White and Black consciousness. Usually the

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daughter of an enslaved mother and a slave-owning father, she was nearly always beautiful, virtuous, and culturally refined by White standards. Often she had no consciousness of being Black until her father died. In many abolitionist stories she was cast as the heroine, albeit one afflicted by self-hatred, depression, alcoholism, suicidal tendencies, sexual perversion, and, often, the death of a White husband. The Tragic Mulatta showed the terrible ravages of slavery in ways that worked on the feelings of White readers. Her whiteness evoked sympathetic identification in White readers, while her pathologies showed what slavery did even to the most sympathetic character. In other renderings, racist White writers depicted her as depraved without qualification; sometimes she was a self-hating nihilist who passed for White. Townes stressed that the Tragic Mulatta is a product and commodity of the White imagination. Lacking any historical basis, she was tragic to White audiences because she was “near White but not White.” Her “almostness” made her both pitied and shunned. In the nineteenth century, especially in sentimental abolitionist versions, she represented the tragic deceit of slavery; more recently she represented the tragedy of empire: “Her contemporary siblings in almostness are poor peoples, darker-skinned peoples, peoples who live outside of the West (which means most people), immigrants, and sexual minorities.”78 The journey of the Black community ranges beyond its boundaries. Townes stressed that modern Americans live in many communities, sometimes simultaneously, which makes them a deeply historical people, although White American culture pushes all Americans toward ahistoricism and one-dimensionality. Living off the spoils of empire, Americans make false consciousness synonymous with good Americanism: “We live off the bitter fruits of a fantastic hegemonic imagination that caricatures and pillages peoples’, all peoples’, lives—our thoughts, our culture, our religion, our isness. We have logoized versions of ourselves: Native Americans are reduced to spiritual, Blacks are reduced to hip-hop, Asians are reduced to intellect, Latinos/as are reduced to salsa, and Whites . . . well, Whites have no culture, no is-ness, they are simply . . . White.”79 She had, and still has, a movement sense about womanism, and a caretaker’s love of it. Townes counters the claim that womanism is provincial and selfreferential, a retreat from liberation theology: “Some Black male colleagues in the liberationist tradition go about their intellectual work as though womanist discourse is a fad, a passing fancy, or a momentary bout of theological indigestion.” Too often, she protests, courses on liberation theology, modern theology, and the Black church never mention the womanist tradition. Others mention it only to put it down: “Some lecture on the faddishness and soon-to-be deadness of womanist thought.”80

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These insults, she reflected in 2004, have a way of getting back to those who are put down behind their backs. She pushed back with words, just before she began to push back with administrative deeds, scaling the administrative ladder. Some charged that womanists replace a radical vision of liberation with their own sentimentality and folk sayings. Townes replied: we talk amongst ourselves and listen to what we have to say    no room of our own    no solitary mind at work in a concrete world spinning out abstractions      who hopes to save      but ultimately cannot.81

As for the future of womanist theology and ethics:   alice walker sure didn’t know what she was fixin’ to start     but some of us are brave   won’t you join us?82

At Yale she served in 2008 as president of the American Academy of Religion. In 2013 she began a four-year term as president of the Society for the Study of Black Religion and was inaugurated as dean of Vanderbilt Divinity School and the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Professor of Womanist Ethics and Society. One year before Townes took over at Vanderbilt, she and her partner, Laurel Schneider, a distinguished White feminist theologian, were married in Connecticut. Both were somewhat surprised to discover that their relationship was a marriage, but no other name or legal status quite registered what they sought for it. Townes said she and Schneider sought to breathe “new air and life into what it means to be married not only by the state, but even more so in the eyes of the Holy Spirit.” Besides vowing to be committed for a lifetime, they wanted “to grow old and be those kinds of old ladies that we so admired when we were children—truth tellers, wise, independent, but fiercely engaged in the communities they were a part of.” It is no small thing, Townes observed, to live out vows marked by the word, “forever.” It is also joyous: “One of the many emotions I carry with me about my marriage ceremony and the marriage we are building as two people who are also lesbians in a mixed race couple is joy.”83 When she summarized womanism ethically, Townes said all are called to be justice-seeking, whole human beings. When she summarized it poetically, she said, “We cannot live our lives in the folds of old wounds.” We must pay attention to the wounds without letting them determine who we are and how we treat people. Womanism has an ethical cast and influence partly reflecting the prominence of Townes and Cannon in it and their moral eloquence. For the

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branch of womanist thought that belongs to the field of social ethics, the relationship of womanism to the social gospel is disciplinary, theological, and social ethical. It is disciplinary because the field of social ethics was founded by social gospel academics. Social ethics has no historical or theoretical basis not linked to the social gospel. Like the social gospel, womanism is also theological and social ethical in its approach to theology. The historic role of Union in womanist theology is no less historic and ongoing than in social ethics, for Williams and Douglas were trained at Union, taught at Union, and in the case of Douglas, still teach at Union.84 S I S T E RS I N TH E WIL DERN ESS: DELORES S . WILLIAMS A N D WOM A N IST TH EO LOGY

Womanism is like the social gospel in being social ethical before it acquired theological definition. Walker’s God-within, Grant’s threefold intersectionality, and Cannon’s rejection of redemptive suffering marked it theologically before any womanist advanced a distinctly womanist interpretation of the Bible and Christian tradition. Williams worked on it from 1977 to 1990 as a doctoral student at Union. She was a second-career graduate student who made vital contributions to a developing womanist discourse before her dissertation, “A Study of the Analogous Relation Between African-American Women’s Experience and Hagar’s Experience,” offered a womanist theological hermeneutic. Three years later, in 1993, the book version bore a perfect gem of a title, Sisters in the Wilderness, replete with a stunning cover photo of three young head-scarfed Black women.85 Williams was born in 1937 amid the brutal racism of Louisville, Kentucky. She and her husband, Robert C. Williams, raised four children—Rita, Celeste, Steven, and Leslie Williams—while Williams worked as a journalist and Robert Williams taught as a religion and philosophy professor successively at Central State University in Wilberforce, Ohio, at Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio, at Wagner College on Staten Island, New York, at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, at Fisk University and then Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, and as dean and academic vice president at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania. He was also a Presbyterian minister who served as a chapel dean at Oberlin and Fisk. He was teaching at Vanderbilt in 1977 when Delores Williams began her doctoral program at Union, taking her youngest daughter, Leslie, with her. In 1985 Robert Williams moved to his career capstone appointment at Muhlenberg. He was on a study tour of educational institutions in Israel in 1987 when he died of a heart attack, at the age of fifty-one.

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Williams was an extremely private person who rarely told friends anything about herself, a reticence I shall respect in this discussion. Her husband’s career and her growing children absorbed her for many years, including his work for the Intercultural Research Programs of the National Endowment for the Humanities, summers with the Peace Corps in Africa, and his service on foundation boards. The void that he left upon dying so suddenly in the prime of his career must have been searing. Williams worked at first with Cone at Union, but they did not get along and she moved to cultural theologian Tom Driver. She told puckish stories to her classmates about growing up across the street from Muhammad Ali and knowing him as family, as one of her sisters married him. Williams was a magnet for Black female students. She spoke in a soft, southern, lyrical voice that caught students immediately. She was older than some of her professors but didn’t sound like any Union professor. She sounded like the archetypal strong, overcoming, keep-it-real womanist mother. Her mutually frosty relationship with Cone created breathing room for some at Union before and after she joined the faculty. Williams was a force in the Mud Flower Collective, where she wrote under one of her pseudonyms, Bess B. Johnson. In the mid-1980s, while working on her dissertation, she taught religion and literature at Fisk. In 1985, two years before Williams described herself as a womanist, she blasted Rosemary Ruether for perpetuating White supremacism. Christianity and Crisis reprinted Ruether’s Seventy-fifth Anniversary Lecture at a recent meeting of the American Academy of Religion. She said feminists “must be consciously pluralistic” and willing to learn the lessons of their history. Asian Christian feminist, Muslim feminist, Jewish feminist, and Black Christian feminist theologies were sure to arise, she observed. These theologies would undoubtedly have “distinct problems and will come up with different syntheses,” but whatever differences emerge, “the legitimacy of encountering the divine as goddess” was “not at issue in feminist theology.” Feminist theologians must accept the legitimacy of pagan feminism and the renewal of ancient female-centered religion. Ruether warned that feminist theology had a history of reinventing the wheel. The discoveries of pre-twentieth-century feminists were lost because feminists never controlled the definition of the Christian tradition. The challenge of contemporary feminist theologians was to redefine theology itself, refusing to reinvent the wheel. Feminist theology is not about winning a piece of the pie. It is about rewriting the recipe and baking the pie in a feminist fashion. Ruether advised feminists not to rely on the churches, seminaries, and professional guilds, “but we must claim them nonetheless. We have no choice. Women are not a separate community or a separate class. We have

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few resources of our own. We are men’s daughters, mothers, and sisters. For better or worse, we are one family.”86 Williams said Ruether’s prescription was relentlessly White and professional class, “as exclusive and imperialistic as the Christian patriarchy she opposes,” and “glaring” in failing to fathom what women of color care about: “When Ruether speaks of women not being a separate community, she obviously is not speaking of black women who are and always have been a community separate from white male (and white female) institutions.” Williams translated Ruether’s “we” statement: “We [white feminists] are [white] men’s daughters, mothers, and sisters. For better or worse, we [white feminists and white males] are one family.” She did not interpret Ruether’s statement about welcoming new and different kinds of feminist theology as a sign of inclusion and respect. Since feminism, to Ruether, really meant White feminism, Williams said her putative pluralism was colonizing and arrogant, the opposite of respectful: “This imperialism is obvious from the beginning.” Though Ruether was critical of goddess religion, she argued that accepting its legitimacy was a point of unity among feminist theologians. Williams countered: “But this is exactly the problem. The ‘divine as goddess’ is a concern emphasized in white feminist theology.” Only White women wrote about needing the goddess to feel whole and affirmed. Williams said she felt offended and excluded as soon as she began reading Ruether’s article. The feeling got worse as she turned the pages. The article blared White, White, White to her, and the editors piled on by running an illustration of a White goddess.87 To Williams, Ruether seemed blithely unaware that racism played an important role in the experiences of Black women with White feminists. Ruether’s moral pride as a prominent White feminist thwarted her from acknowledging that the whiteness in White feminism cut to its core. Williams expanded on this point in the Journal of Religious Thought, telling two stories about being asked to explain feminism to groups of Black Christian women. Both groups were dubious about feminism. Someone in the first group told Williams that feminism was like a size 5 dress in a fancy store. It looked pretty in the window, “but there just ain’t enough in it to fit me.” Someone in the second group observed that every victory for feminism in American history reinforced White supremacy, so how was the pro-feminist Williams not an advocate of White supremacy? Williams said she wanted to believe that contemporary feminism was better on racism, but she couldn’t pretend to believe it. White feminists ardently attacked patriarchy, but this term lost its identity and emotive force if Black women defined it, including in it the White women who benefited from it: “The failure of white feminists to emphasize the substantial difference between

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their patriarchally-derived-privileged-oppression and black women’s demonicallyderived-annihilistic-oppression renders black women invisible in feminist thought and action.”88 That was a foretaste of Sisters in the Wilderness. Williams said she grew up in a church where Black women testified that God was doing something through their lives. Faith taught her to see the miraculous in everyday living, “the miracle of ordinary black women resisting and rising above evil forces in society.” What sustained her was watching Black women do what they do: “Holding the family and church together; working for the white folks or teaching school; enduring whatever they must so their children can reach for the stars; keeping hope alive in the family and community when money is scarce and white folks get mean and ugly.” Williams grieved that Black churches colonized so many Black women she loved. The Black denominations were “two-edged swords” that gave emotional space to women and shackled their minds. She was grateful to witness the rise of womanist theology: “As I see it, womanist theology is a prophetic voice reminding African-American denominational churches of their mission to seek justice and voice for all their people, of which black women are the overwhelming majority in their congregations.”89 She acknowledged that liberation theologians have one strand of the Bible that supports their position—God delivering the Hebrew slaves from bondage in Egypt and Jesus describing himself as the liberator of the poor and oppressed. But Williams pointed to a second tradition of Black American biblical appropriation that emphasizes female activity, plays down male authority, and revolves around Hagar—a female slave of African descent forced to be a surrogate mother. She cited a page-long list of poets, writers, preachers, and others who fixed on Hagar, the slave of Abraham’s wife, Sarah, who bore Abraham’s child because Sarah was barren and Hagar had no say in the matter. These interpreters noticed the parallels between the Hagar story and the story of African American women. Black women were abused by White men, raped by White men, and forced by White men to serve as sexual surrogates for White women, very much like Hagar. Williams said the Hagar-centered tradition of biblical appropriation cannot be called liberationist or any part of a liberation hermeneutic. Hagar fled from slavery and God tracked her down in the wilderness, telling her to return to Sarah and slavery. God helped Hagar and her son Ishmael survive her doomed escape to freedom. Later in the story, God helped Hagar and Ishmael figure out how to survive their banishment from the home of Abraham and Sarah. Certainly, Williams observed, the Hagar story shows God helping Hagar to survive and to achieve a minimal quality of life by her initiative. But it has nothing to do with liberation.90

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She called this female-centered interpretation “the survival/quality-of-life tradition of African American biblical appropriation.” Williams ran through Egyptian customs of the ancient world, the history of motherhood and surrogacy in Black American life, the role of skin color in North American ethnic relations, and the parallels between Hagar and Black American women in the wilderness. She stressed that taking the Hagar tradition seriously precludes any claim that God always works to liberate the oppressed. There is a decidedly nonliberating thread running through the Bible. It shows through whenever the reader identifies with non-Hebrews who are female and male slaves: “There is no clear indication that God is against their perpetual enslavement.” In the Bible, Williams observed, slavery “is a natural and unprotested institution in the social and economic life of an ancient society—except when the Jews are themselves enslaved.” Williams protested that Cone and other liberationists worked with only one strand of the Bible and apparently did not notice the fates of the oppressed of the oppressed in it. Did liberation theologians identify so thoroughly with the election of Israel that they did not see the most oppressed figures in Scripture? “Have they identified so completely with Israel’s liberation that they have been blind to the awful reality of victims making victims in the Bible?”91 These questions, Williams contended, expose why liberation theology does not work for Black women. It does not fit them and it leaves them out, rendering them invisible. Williams did not say that liberation theologians should stop appealing to Moses and Luke 4. She said they need a second hermeneutical lens that makes visible the victims screened out by liberation theology. It is a womanist hermeneutic of “identification-ascertainment” operating in three modes—subjective, communal, and objective. In the subjective mode, the theologian analyzes her own faith journey to discover with which biblical figures and elements she identifies. In the communal mode, the theologian analyzes the faith journey of her religious community, looking for the biases in church sermons, songs, testimonies, and rituals. In the objective mode, the theologian gathers the yield of her research, drawing a conclusion based on the evidence. Williams charged that Black liberation theology shares with Black denominational churches a tendency to overuse a selfserving approach to the Bible. The exodus from Egypt is a holistic story with liberating elements and the extermination of the Canaanites and the taking of their land. Liberation theologians needed to linger over God’s sanctioned genocide in the promised land of Canaan, correcting “the awful models of God projected” when they identified wholly with Israel. Williams said it cannot be that Black theologians should fix on the same texts and tropes that worked during the abolitionist period. Cecil Cone claimed that Black religious experience was the same after the Civil War as before the Civil War. Williams said everything is at stake in

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rejecting this view. If Black religious experience “has not changed since slavery,” the implications are disastrous for Black women.92 Since “something called the black experience” is the point of departure for every Black theology, theologians must clarify what they mean by it. If racial oppression created the Black experience, and blackness is a qualitative, symbolic, and (in some renderings) sacred aspect of it, what are the active constituents of the holistic reality called Black experience? Williams discerned four answers in the regnant Black theologies. The horizontal encounter is the interaction between Blacks and Whites that yields Black suffering. The vertical encounter is the meeting between God and oppressed people that sustains hope and meaning. Transformations of consciousness are positive when they enhance the collective self-worth of oppressed people and negative when oppressed people lose hope and identity. An epistemological process of processing data and determining modes of action takes place in all three of these categories.93 Williams observed that Cone conceived the horizontal encounter as unremittingly hostile to Blacks, emphasized the church’s vertical encounter with God in relation to God’s liberating activity in the world, and touted liberationist consciousness as a way of knowing. Roberts conceived the horizontal encounter as both negative and positive, agreed with Cone that the vertical encounter is the most salient feature of the Black experience, contended that Black experience is affected by certain transformations of consciousness, and described reconciliation as intrinsic to the gospel. Cone and Roberts thus conceived Black history as an ongoing social and political struggle “between black and white people over the issues of enslavement and the dominance and prevalence of racial oppression in white-black relations.”94 This language of struggle, Williams contended, is thoroughly androcentric. It suffuses Black art, religion, and culture, yielding the masculine concepts of personality and victimization that “dominate the language and thought of black liberation theology.” Back at the beginning of the womanist intervention, Grant was right about Black liberation theology. It presupposed and perpetuated Black androcentrism, describing a Black experience and theological agenda that left women out, negated their historical agency, and rendered them invisible. Williams called for a Black theology that pays attention to the “re/production history” of Black women. It would include birthing children and caring for families, but also “whatever women think, create, use and pass on through their labor for the sake of women’s and the family’s well-being.” The survival strategies of Black women created modes of resistance, sustenance, and uplift that saved and enabled entire Black communities. The re/productive history of Black women is the context in which Black women and Black men together survive the wilderness experience.95

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Williams argued that the contrasts between androcentric liberation theology and womanist theology run across the spectrum of categories. The horizontal encounter in liberation theology features Black males facing off against White males. Horizontal encounters in the womanist wilderness are mostly femalemale and female-female. In liberation theology, Black people suffer almost entirely at the hands of Whites. In the womanist wilderness, there is no evading the suffering that Black women experience in their families. In liberationist renderings of the encounter with God, God confers divine sanction on sexist gender roles, moral norms, and cultural forms. In the womanist encounter with God in the wilderness, women are empowered to persevere in spite of trouble and to find a way where no way is apparent. One crucial aspect of finding the way is to identify the ways that Christian doctrine harms Black women. Here there are weighty theological issues to negotiate. Williams reflected that “more often than not,” Black churches teach that Jesus died on the cross in the place of human sinners, taking their sin upon himself. The same Black churches that spurn the Reformation language of justification by faith take for granted the Reformation teaching that Jesus is the ultimate surrogate figure, standing in the place of sinful humankind. Williams moved straight to the womanist problem: Does the image of a surrogate God hold saving power for Black women? Does this doctrine not reinforce the very exploitation that Black women have experienced as surrogates? How can any construal of Jesus crucified as a sacrificial victim be saving for Black women? Williams ran through the classic atonement theories of ransom (God paid a ransom to the devil), satisfaction (atonement satisfies God’s honor), moral influence (the cross manifests God’s love), and the Reformation doctrine of substitution (Jesus bore the punishment for human sin as a substitute). All were fitted to the concepts of law and political order of their time, and all are unacceptable for Black women. If Jesus is saving for Black women, it cannot be as a surrogate or an example of sacrificial love. Jesus is saving to Black women only because he resisted being victimized, providing a model of resistance for oppressed people.96 Jesus came to show people how to live, not to be crucified for their sake. Williams said the cross is an image of defilement, “wanton desecration.” Nothing in it is redeeming. The same God who did not will the condemnation of Black women to surrogate slavery did not will the execution of Jesus. The redemptive vision of Jesus, Williams reasoned, was ministerial, devoted to righting the relations among body, mind, and spirit on individual and communal levels. Jesus cast out demons, performed healings, called people to wholeness, and raised the dead. The cross on which he died represented nothing but “historical evil trying to defeat the good.” Jesus conquered sin when he was tempted

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in the wilderness, not when imperial power tortured him to death on a cross. The ministerial life of Jesus and his resurrection are what is saving in Christianity. Through Jesus, God gave humankind “new vision to see the resources for positive, abundant relational life”—a vision of holistic relations and flourishing described by Jesus as the kingdom of God.97 Roberts said the cross of Christ is a symbol of unmerited suffering and a healing balm. African Americans need no sermons about seeking the cross and following its way of sacrificial love, because they know from their history that the cross finds them—it follows and haunts them. Black people inherit a cross at their birth and are never unburdened of it. They come to God through the Black Messiah, who entered the Black experience through his suffering and love. Williams ran two long quotes on this theme, countering sharply: “Black women should never be encouraged to believe that they can be united with God through this kind of suffering. There are quite enough black women bearing the cross by rearing children alone, struggling on welfare, suffering through poverty, experiencing inadequate healthcare, domestic violence and various forms of sexism and racism.”98 Williams prized the stories about Wells-Barnett and Rosa Parks resisting and enduring. She knew why church people loved these stories, but she cautioned about the downside. The Black church, she wrote, was built on the exploited labor and love of Black women. The theology, ethos, and institutions of the Black church perpetuated “sexist oppression within the African-American denominational churches and within the African-American community.” There is too much truth in the Black folk saying that Black men headed the liberation struggle and Black women were the feet that kept the movement going. Williams said the women who propped up male preachers enabled the Black churches to become “unproductive endurance structures.” The Black denominational churches are basically women’s communities—about 85 percent female, Williams estimated. She urged Black churchwomen to confront their exploitation, including the roles that the cross theology of suffering and ethic of endurance contribute to it. Whenever the Black church mobilizes for liberating and enduring work, Black women are in the forefront and the background, “making sure the efforts succeed.” Collectively, Black women are the “medium” through which the Black church makes an effect on the wider Black community. But the church’s theology of sacrificial love plays a mighty role in keeping Black women down.99 Williams stressed that Black women are in a position to change how the Black church theologizes its mission, operates internally, and operates in the wider Black community. The Black church is not something hopelessly frozen

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in time: “It can indeed be transformed from within if the sisters decide to do so, since they control the purse strings of the church.” Moreover, there is no reason for Black congregations to perpetuate a White theology of redemption through the cross and suffering. Williams surmised that the cross fixation is probably more deeply rooted in Black Christianity than any belief by Black women that their suffering is redemptive. Many Black women strongly identify with Jesus on the cross, which makes Christianity real to them. Perhaps this identification usually yields the view that suffering is redemptive, though Williams said the empirical jury was out on both issues, especially the second one: “We do not have enough scientific studies of what black women believe doctrinally to answer the question of what black Christian women believe about suffering. We will just have to wait until more evidence is in to say, with any degree of certainty, what black women in the churches believe today.”100 Driver retired from Union in 1991, and Williams took his position, an appointment weighted with historic significance. She and Harrison co-taught a course titled “Emergent Issues in Feminist and Womanist Theologies,” assigning chapters of what became Sisters in the Wilderness. Shortly after the book was published in 1993, Williams played a featured role at a storied liberal Christian conference of November 1993 in Minneapolis titled “Re-Imagining: A Global Theological Conference by Women: For Men and Women.” Over 2,200 participants crowded into the Minneapolis Convention Center. Onethird were clergy; eighty-three were male; sixteen denominations were represented; all the speakers were women; and the crowd was overwhelmingly White liberal Protestant, reflecting the powerful inroads that feminist theology made in the mainline Protestant denominations in the 1980s. The Women’s Ministry Unit of the Presbyterian Church (USA), the Women’s Division of the United Methodist Board of Global Ministries, and three Minnesota councils of churches provided most of the financing and staffing. All got burned in a media controversy over what was said in Minneapolis and who paid for it.101 “Bless Sophia,” a chant invoking the biblical reference to Sophia as the personification of Wisdom, was sung throughout the conference, inspiring by itself much anti-Re-Imagining commentary on goddess worship in liberal Christianity. There were thirty-one featured speakers spread over three days who called for reimagining religious imagination, God, Jesus, Creation, the church, women, community, Christian language, sexuality, ethics, and worship. Catholic lay theologian Mary Bednarowski, who taught at United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities, kicked off the conference by inviting participants to reimagine the central symbols of Christianity. Ecumenical theologian Chung Hyun Kyung, a Korean doctoral graduate of Union, observed that Korea had five

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thousand years of shamanism, two thousand years of Taoism, two thousand years of Buddhism, seven hundred years of Confucianism, and one century of Protestantism, all of which radiated within her, especially her three favorite goddesses. Kwok Pui-lan, a theologian from Hong Kong who taught at Episcopal Divinity School, said the nineteenth-century colonizers needed a White Jesus, but contemporary Christians needed to be saved from White Christianity. Joan Martin, a Black Presbyterian pastor and doctoral student at Temple University, said spirituality is about right living, not right doctrine; if your spirituality does not move you to oppose racism, classism, homophobia, and imperialism, it is worthless.102 Many speakers said quotable things that shocked readers of denominational magazines, but Williams was by far the most quoted speaker. She told the conference that Black Americans were well acquainted with the imperative of reimagining Jesus. The White Jesus who condoned slavery and racism could not be a savior to Black people. Williams rehearsed her signature argument that Jesus conquered sin in the wilderness, not on the cross. The Spirit came into the world through the womb of a woman, the mother of Jesus. Jesus was faithful to God in his life and teaching. Any doctrine that makes the cross of Jesus saving is an offense against Black women. In the postlecture discussion, Williams was asked how atonement doctrine should be reimagined. What is the good theory of atonement the church should teach? She said there is no such thing. Atonement theology is an unfixable mistake. Jesus came to show us how to live, not to suffer and die on a cross: I don’t think we need folks hanging on crosses, and blood dripping, and weird stuff. We need the sustenance, the faith, the candles to light. Jesus’ mandate is that we pass on tough love, love that’s whipping the thieves out of the temple. I don’t see that the cross does that. I think the cross ought to be interpreted for what it was, a symbol of evil, the murder of an innocent man and victim. When we confront the status quo as Jesus did, when we raise questions about the poor and empowering people who’ve never had power before, we’re more than likely going to die for it.103

The conference set off a furor against the sponsors and speakers that raged for months. The Presbyterian Layman, a bimonthly conservative Presbyterian newsletter boasting 500,000 subscribers; Good News, a conservative Methodist activist organization; and the Institute for Religion and Democracy, a neocon think tank that attacked progressive trends in the Presbyterian, Methodist, and Episcopal churches, played the leading roles in condemning it. Repeatedly they excoriated the conference as a pagan travesty that ridiculed Christian teaching

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and misspent the money that faithful Christians gave to their denominations. There were furious protests that lesbian, bisexual, and transgender women were called to the stage in a show of solidarity and celebration. Mary Ann Lundy, director of the Presbyterian Women’s Ministry Unit, was fired for embarrassing the denomination. For years to come, conservative wings of the ecumenical churches condemned the conference as Exhibit A of feminism-destroysChristianity, a reaction that reinforced Union’s feminist and womanist identity. Two Union faculty members, Williams and Harrison, and two future Union faculty members, Hyun Kyung and Lutheran pastor Barbara Lundblad, spoke at the conference. Union proudly identified with the Re-Imagining project, which pushed back by building an organization that lasted until 2016. The firestorm affected Harrison and Williams differently, however. Harrison was protected by stature and tenure and was not quoted ad nauseam by critics. Williams was just beginning her academic career; this was her introduction to the national religious press. She had an inkling at the conference of what might happen, remarking that she was violating one of the survival maxims of African American life: “Never pass up an opportunity to keep your mouth shut.”104 Her picturesque language at Minneapolis was the trigger for conservative Christians. It was not exactly news that most liberal Protestants do not believe in ransom, satisfaction, or substitutionary atonement. A great deal of mainline Protestantism rejects the atonement doctrines that Williams rejected. Liberal Protestants often espouse a progressive version of moral influence theory, but many churches quietly avoid atonement doctrine altogether. Williams gave offense by not being quiet about it and by seemingly mocking it. For years to come she knew her reputation preceded her when she spoke to church groups. Williams wanted to be known for the painstaking argument she made in Sisters in the Wilderness for a second hermeneutic, not for an offhand remark that, out of context, sounded flippant. It was a cruel irony for someone so intensely private, habituated to decades of survival performance, that she became the face of feminist apostasy in the churches. As usual, her friends were never quite sure how much it bothered her. Williams kept her feelings to herself, concentrating on her classroom teaching. She took few speaking engagements and wrote no more books, despite stating in Sisters that this book was methodological and her constructive book would follow it. Union students loved her, crowding into her classes, laughing when she said that teaching at Union was not a bad job, but if she ever hit the lottery, she would resign instantly. JoAnne Terrell, her first teaching assistant at Union, called Williams “the premier womanist.” Terrell agreed with Columbia Theological Seminary ethicist Marcia Riggs that Williams was a “womanist’s womanist.” Linda Thomas,

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whom Williams taught as a teaching assistant from 1979 to 1981, said Williams made it possible for her to become a professor by showing her how to be a womanist professor. Lakisha NyHemia Williams, representing the last generation that Williams taught at Union, said she was “the bridge that carried us over,” partly because she was “among the bravest of us.”105 Calling out White evil, repudiating centuries of Christian teaching, blasting White feminism, rejecting much of liberation theology, standing up to Cone, and spotlighting the hidden oppressed of the oppressed required bravery of a high order. Williams and Cone managed their conflict with civil professionalism and tried not to drag students into it. Williams liked Union better when Harrison was there; after 1999 it got harder. She yearned to retire, and students pleaded with her to stop talking like that. Surely, she could hang on until seventy-five, in 2012! But Williams felt slighted by the administration and certain faculty colleagues, and she grew to resent the place. She told friends she would answer no more calls from Union when she left, except for those from friends. Williams stuck to that vow after she retired in 2004 and returned to Louisville. The administrators changed, Union begged her to return for ceremonial events, conferences, and doctoral dissertation committees, and she still refused; she was done with Union. Williams struggled with failing health until her death in 2022, but she spoke elsewhere until 2015. Harvard Divinity School and Douglas at Goucher College each snagged her once. Her friends mostly stopped hearing from her, trying and failing to reach her. Even Harrison grieved that Williams cut her off. None of this self-isolating behavior diminished her standing in womanism. To the contrary, Williams soared higher, routinely described as the greatest of the womanist thinkers. At Union she became the symbol of the womanist alternative to liberation theology, the one who epitomized womanism in thought and style. Sisters in the Wilderness had a movement spirit, a realigning argument, an ambitious reach, and a perfect title. It brilliantly called for theologies that spotlighted the invisible women, Canaanites, Native Americans, Palestinians, and lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender-queer persons obscured in canonical liberation theology. Today, many students who come to Union to learn about womanism know only about Williams when they arrive. To them, womanism is the interpretive theological argument about Hagar, wilderness, liberation theology, women, Canaanites, atonement, and spiritual Christianity that Williams expounded. Above all, as Lakisha Williams registered, Williams is a symbol of bravery. After Williams retired, much of the graduate school traffic moved from Theology to Religious Studies, often combined with African/ African American Studies. Many who take this route consider Williams to be their forerunner.

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Riggs argued in 2004 that the womanist community definitely had a problem with insularity and territorialism. Womanists, she said, needed to reach beyond their hard-won homeland and stop repelling others from crossing into their turf. Williams, to Riggs, was a model of accountability on this subject. Emory University Black religious historian Dianne M. Stewart commended Williams for deconstructing the liberating God of liberation theology, but she objected that Williams absolved God too swiftly of requiring the sacrificial death of Jesus and the sacrificial suffering of Black women. Anthony Pinn agreed that Williams wrongly granted God a pass on centuries of indefensible suffering and bad theology. Pinn reasoned that Williams short-circuited her own critique because she could not bring herself to doubt that God is on the side of the oppressed. Stewart judged that Pinn was right about the problem but not the explanation for it, since Pinn interpreted Williams too much on his terms. Pinn defined God in classic Western metaphysical fashion, interpreted Williams as defending the Western God, and rejected Western theism. Stewart countered that Williams’s God was not the metaphysical One of Western theism; it was more like the classic African Divine Community, exhibiting a wide variety of theistic personalities and behaviors. In either case, Stewart concluded, Williams pushed womanist thought to the cutting edge of Theology and Black Religious Studies.106 Renee K. Harrison, in 2004 a doctoral student at Emory, later a religious historian at Howard University, said the Hagar hermeneutic didn’t work for her because it left Black women stuck in the wilderness of Hagar’s experience, “an experience latent with limited resources and suppressed agency and human wholeness.” Black women needed a strategy of resistance against oppressive biblical texts—a “hermeneutic of rejection” that repudiates harmful biblical teaching. Harrison said the story of Celie in The Color Purple was far more life-giving to her than anything in the Bible, certainly Hagar. She was for appropriating only the sources within African and African American experience that value the thriving of Black women—in literature, poetry, speeches, stories, spirituals, blues, R&B, rap, hip-hop, jazz, African oracles, and art. Many who entered the burgeoning field of Black Religious Studies agree with her. Some count Williams as their last stop out of theology.107 But Williams was emphatically a theologian who wanted Black women to convert the Black churches to womanist theology. She inspired many Black women to enter the ministry with this aim. No womanist founder was willing to settle for influencing the Religious Studies Department. Black social Christianity from Ransom and Wells to King and Murray, to Cone and Williams took up the struggle for justice in religious, academic, and public contexts. It responded to social crises of the moment while taking for granted that doing so is not optional.

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The founding womanist with the foremost record of responding to social and ethical crises is Kelly Brown Douglas. Every book she wrote after her first one was something she did not see coming. She did not expect to become a lightning rod on the crisis of sexuality in the Black church. But people were dying of HIV/AIDS, and one of them was her dearest friend. Black churches shunned gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer persons, and Douglas questioned her faith and why she loved the Black church. She responded with womanist theology that drew deeply from Cone and James Baldwin, habituated from the beginning to the Black church question by virtue of belonging to it through the Episcopal Church. B LA CK BODIES A N D TH E BLACK CHRIS T: KEL LY BROWN DOUGLAS

Born in 1957 in Dayton, Ohio, Kelly Brown Douglas was loved and nurtured by churchgoing parents, a womanist-prototype grandmother, and a Black Episcopal congregation from birth onward, unconditionally in the cases of her parents and grandmother. Her father, William Brown, was an official in the Dayton court system. Her mother, Mary Brown, raised a family of three girls and one boy in a Midwest town harshly divided by race and economic status. Douglas revered her maternal grandmother, Helen Vivian Dorsey, “Mama Dorsey,” who ran an elevator at the local post office. Mama Dorsey returned home each evening to care for her second husband, who suffered from multiple health problems. Afterward she sat on the front porch with a cup of coffee, a bowl of rice, and, often, Douglas’s head in her lap. Douglas savored her grandmother’s maxims and queries. On one occasion she reported from school that Thomas Jefferson was the father of democracy; Mama Dorsey asked if the teacher also discussed Jefferson’s ownership of slaves. On the porch, Mama Dorsey thanked Jesus for bringing her to another night. Douglas believed her grandmother’s faith must be unusual: “Mama was certain that this Christ cared about the trials and tribulations of an ordinary Black woman. Christ empowered her to get through each day with dignity.” Years later, Douglas learned that many Black women were like her Mama Dorsey.108 She was six years old in September 1963 when she heard the adults whispering about some horrible bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, that killed four Black girls. Someone said “the White man” who did it probably would not be caught, and even if he was caught, nothing would happen to him. This was the summer that television news replayed the images of police dogs attacking Black children in the Birmingham demonstration of April–May. Douglas didn’t know what she was watching, “but those images were seared into my mind.” A third memory

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from that summer folded into the others. In June, Mississippi NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers was assassinated in his Jackson, Mississippi, driveway for advocating civil rights and voting rights. Douglas heard her parents discuss the terrible shame that Evers was gunned down in front of his family. They expected no justice for Evers either. Douglas asked her father why White people were so mean to Black people. There didn’t seem to be an answer, so she thought about it, weeks later picking up the conversation, telling her father on the porch she had found the answer: “We didn’t do anything. They just treat us like this because they want to. It could be anybody; it just happens to be us.” There was nothing wrong with Black people, and something very wrong with White people.109 A second formative memory occurred the following year. Riding in the family car through downtown Dayton, Douglas noticed a little boy and girl crossing the street together. They looked like her except they looked poor, hungry, improperly dressed for the cold, rainy weather, and disheveled. Douglas cried at imagining what their lives must be like. She vowed that someday she would return to rescue these two children from the blighted disorder of Dayton. For years she fantasized about doing it as a teacher. She kept thinking of them after she realized they were growing too; by the time she was a teacher, it would be too late to rescue them. Somehow, Douglas thought, she had to find a vocation that allowed her to be of service to others. Her love of Jesus was motivating and guiding to her. Douglas grew up at St. Margaret’s Episcopal Church, the only Black Episcopal congregation in Dayton. On Sundays she attended two morning services, and Sunday school in between. If her parents weren’t planning to attend service some week, too bad; they had to drive her to church. St. Margaret’s sang sedate hymns from the hymnbook and an occasional spiritual; Father M. Bartlett Cochran gave reflective homilies about following Jesus; and Douglas loved the calm, gentle, serene services lacking any hand-clapping or amen-shouting: “It was just the way I liked it. It resonated with my spiritual personality. I liked my church because it was where my quiet spirit grew.”110 But her beloved church wounded her by telling her she could not be an acolyte and should not dream of the priesthood; girls did not belong at the altar. Douglas harbored this memory of rejection in 1974, when three Episcopal bishops “irregularly” ordained eleven female deacons to the priesthood, and in 1976, when the Episcopal Church officially approved the ordination of women to the priesthood. She wanted St. Margaret’s to support her candidacy for ordination, but she feared to ask. Douglas knew that many male congregants would be opposed. She cringed at risking another rejection from the church that raised her and the rector who baptized her.

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From 1975 to 1979 she studied at nearby Denison University, an elite liberal arts college in Granville, Ohio, majoring in psychology. White feminist students urged her to join them, “but I did not want to be with them.” How could they not see what they were asking? David Woodyard, a theologian and a Union alumnus, assigned Cone’s Black Theology of Liberation. Douglas was blown away by it. This is Christian theology? Some theologian out there condemns White Christianity, lauds Black Power, and describes God as a Black liberator? What was this White professor trying to do to her by assigning this book? Douglas resolved that if Cone taught at Union, she had to go to Union. She arrived in the fall of 1979 and was promptly radicalized by her Black male classmates, inadvertently in their case. They told Douglas if she loved the Episcopal Church, she wasn’t Black. Moreover, women didn’t belong in ministry anyway. Douglas had not, in fact, asked her rector to support her for ordination candidacy. She was at Union to study under Cone and to stew about her ordination dilemma. In 1981 she screwed up the nerve to call Cochran on the phone and ask for his support. Douglas declared that she felt called to ministry. She was still telling her story when Cochran cut in, saying he would write to the bishop to get the process started. Douglas gasped with elation: “My eyes filled with tears of joy and peace. In that moment, I felt whole again. I felt I had a church once again, a place where I could be fully black, fully female, fully Christian— fully ME. This for me was what a black church was about.”111 Years later, when Douglas told her story, she always said she was not a feminist “until these guys at Union radicalized me.” They also helped her solve her church problem. If she listened to them, she was lost. When she listened to herself, she felt whole—a Black woman who identified with the Black church she experienced in the Episcopal Church, a global communion with a membership ranging across the African diaspora. In 1982 Douglas earned her master of divinity and entered Union’s doctoral program. The first time she read Walker’s definition of womanism, “I jumped out of my chair and leaped into the air shouting, ‘This is it! This is it!’ ” Tears flowed down her cheeks at being understood and affirmed: “It affirmed me in all of my uniqueness. It let me know that it was all right to be black, female, and me. ‘Womanist’ allowed me to affirm myself. It, thus, gave me a place from which to speak. It gave me a voice. It gave me the voice to speak out of my own experience of pain and struggle. It gave me a place to stand. It allowed me to stand with my black female sisters as they also struggled to find their way, their voice, and their place.” Douglas, Grant, Cannon, and Williams gauged each other’s reactions to calling themselves womanists. In 1985 Douglas was ordained a priest at St. Margaret’s Church. In 1988 she completed her doctorate in systematic theology under Cone’s mentorship.112

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Douglas taught for one year at Edward Waters College in Jacksonville, Florida, until Howard University called in 1987. Ruether had taught at Howard for ten years and failed to win a place for feminist theology. Douglas and Cheryl Sanders resumed the battle for gender criticism at Howard that Ruether lost. Not calling it “feminism” was helpful, though only slightly. Many of their senior male colleagues told Douglas and Sanders their concerns about “women’s issues” were low priority at best. Moreover, as far as criticizing Black church preaching against gay sexuality was concerned, Douglas was on her own. In 1989 she was asked to respond to Sanders’s critique of womanism, but she declined because Sanders was her Howard colleague. In 1991 she married Lamont Douglas, a train mechanic for the Washington Metro system. Three years later the book version of her dissertation, The Black Christ, said the Black church had a noble history of fighting for Black people against White oppressors, and a recent history of failing to address problems “that go beyond race.” The church was losing its capacity to address young people ensnared in the scourge of drug addiction. People were dying of HIV/AIDS, Douglas observed, while Black ministers preached that gay sex was a perversion yielding the AIDS crisis. Above all, Black churches still conspired against their own female members: “Black churches have been notorious in their refusal to recognize women’s calls to a full-fledged ordained ministry.” If the church stuck to its blatant sexism, there was no hope for it.113 This indictment prefigured most of her subsequent corpus. The Black Christ, however, was theological, “telling the story of the Black Christ from a womanist perspective,” focusing on the presence of Christ in Black lives and the challenge of Christ to all Christians. Douglas said Roberts erred in basing his theology of the Black Christ on God’s act of becoming incarnate, contending that God can be any color. That nullified, to Douglas, the liberationist insistence that Christ identifies with the oppressed and therefore cannot be White. The only Black theology deserving of the name repudiates the White Christian shaming of Black people with a White Christ. Douglas commended Cone for liberating Black people from this shaming legacy, but she faulted him for failing to describe the Israelites as a Black people hailing from Africa, which made Cone reluctant to stake anything on a claim about the African blackness of the historical Jesus. To Cone, and to Cornel West, the connection between Israel and Black people was existential, not genealogical. Some of Cone’s reluctance in this area carried over the historical skepticism of Barthian theology, and West was steeped in postmodern historicism, but Douglas took no interest in the debates of White scholars about the limits of historicism. She said Cone’s approach failed the challenge of Malcolm: If White oppressors founded

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Christianity, it cannot be cleaned up for Black people. Douglas wrote, “Attention must be given to Jesus’ color as well as his ancestral heritage. The most thorough and effective version of the Black Christ is one that confronts the Blackness of the historical Jesus, as well as the Christ of faith.”114 Nothing less than a full-fledged theological affirmation of physical blackness, cultural blackness, and existential blackness is liberating for Black people. Douglas said it as strongly as possible before turning it over: Not everything that is Black is liberating for Black people. She objected that Black theologians said almost nothing about oppression within Black communities. Wilmore came closest to doing so, but he said Black theology failed to break into the churches because Black theologians did a poor job of combining the radical and conservative aspects of Black Christianity—prophetic liberation and pastoral faith. Douglas said whatever was true in Wilmore’s account would be corrected only when women rewrote the norms in Black churches. She lauded Williams as the “most strident and unrelenting” of the womanist critics, placed Sanders at the other end of the womanist continuum, and observed that womanists shied away from criticizing the worst part of Sanders’s argument, its “homophobic implications.” The womanist responses to Sanders delicately danced around the problem that she sanctified heterosexism. Douglas said womanists were overdue to add heterosexism to the troika of racism, sexism, and classism, catching up to Walker. Douglas was bifocal and multidimensional—bifocal in concentrating on what harms the Black community from within and without, and multidimensional in adding a fourth site and form of oppression.115 Writing and speaking so bluntly about the very things that roiled Black religious communities in the 1990s made Douglas a lightning rod at Howard. She discussed sexuality in several courses and taught a course titled “Sexual Issues and the Black Church” that put the divisive issues front and center. It was hard work that often made the classroom feel like a battleground to her. Douglas got a steady diet of pushback: “Homosexuality is an abomination.” “Gay sex goes against nature.” “I can hate the sin without hating the sinner.” “Homosexuality is a white perversion.” “God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.” “Africa had no homosexuals before Europeans went there.” “I can tolerate gays and lesbians who aren’t so vocal and pushy about their rights.” “Homosexuality harms the Black family.” Twelve years into her teaching career at Howard, Douglas summarized her classroom experience on this subject: Many students seem to have no inhibitions in expressing their disgust with gay and lesbian sexuality. They speak about gay and lesbian persons as sinners, abominations, perverts, and diseased. They often carry on their tirades

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as if gay and lesbian people do not deserve love and respect as human beings, although they paradoxically proclaim that as Christians they love everybody. Many of the students express themselves with little regard for whether or not they are inflicting deep pain on other students, gay or nongay, in the class. Because the discussion surrounding homophobia is frequently so venomous, I find myself questioning the wisdom of including it in my syllabus.

Every semester posed a new opportunity to lay off the subject and give herself a break. But Douglas was conscientious and accountable, so she kept volunteering for classroom combat: “Year after year I do, convinced that homophobia is a subject that the Black community must confront.”116 She stressed the influence of slavery, racial caste, hateful propaganda, and racist terrorism on her subject. Douglas noted to her classes that she had contemporary Christian allies concerning gay sexuality, notably Townes, Eugene, Karen Baker-Fletcher, Jesse Jackson, and NAACP Executive Director Ben Chavis. But one thinker spoke to her like no one else: James Baldwin. It surprised Douglas that Cone settled for a Martin-and-Malcolm dialectic, not incorporating Baldwin in his teaching and writing. Baldwin brilliantly connected White oppression to the crisis of Black sexuality, explaining that attacks on Black sexuality are intrinsic to White culture. He famously stressed that White Americans are exceptionally sick and dangerous, having turned that way on their way through Ellis Island, where the “price of the ticket” for “Giorgio” to become an American named “Joe,” and “Pappavasiliu” to become “Palmer,” was to become White. The melted ethnics who adopted the White American national identity dehumanized Native Americans, Black Americans, and everyone else who did not pass as White. The whitened Americans created a culture that was too ubiquitous for them to see, except by contrast to Native American culture, Black culture, and Hispanic culture, which they denigrated with exceptionalist contempt.117 Douglas took from Baldwin a strong emphasis on the importance of naming and repudiating White culture. It is terribly real, she argued. White culture is not creative or life-affirming in any way. It derives its immense power from its capacity “to promote the sanctity of whiteness by devaluing that which is nonWhite.” White culture is precisely racism—the assertion of the supremacy of whiteness amid and through “social, political, and economic systems that also privilege whiteness.” In Baldwin’s metaphor, whiteness is the ticket to social, political, cultural, and economic status in the United States. Douglas said White culture spews White supremacy from one end of the spectrum, Klan bigots who capitalize White with self-affirming fervor, to the other end, liberals desperate for innocence who deny they have a culture.118

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She acknowledged that some White Americans who deny the existence of a White culture recognize the baleful existence of White hegemony. It is possible, even commonplace, to oppose racism without seeing it as a totalizing cultural system. Douglas listed three notable forms of denial. Some liberals try to escape responsibility for the “vile nature” of their culture, clutching at shreds of innocence. Other liberals are willing to criticize their hegemonic whiteness as long as they continue to reap benefits from it. Marxism is a third form of refusal, denying that White culture exists; what exists are White power, privileges, and prerogatives within capitalist society. Douglas graded Marxian sophistry higher than liberalism, but only slightly. If culture is the totality of a society’s way of life, including its language, ideas, values, customs, traditions, forms of organization, artifacts, and symbols, how can the United States not be said to have a White culture? Whiteness, Douglas declared, is “virtually synonymous with American culture.” Thus, she capitalized White too: “White culture with its secretion of White supremacist values and ideology serves as a safeguard for a White, racist, patriarchal hegemony in America.”119 In the spirit of Baldwin, Douglas said the only redemptive path for White Americans is to reclaim who they were before America made them White, renounce the “shameless privilege and arrogant elitism” that define whiteness, and accept their culpability for the terrible price that non-Whites pay for the perpetuation of American whiteness. In the words of Baldwin, “Go back to where you started, or as far as you can, examine all of it, travel your road again and tell the truth about it.” Douglas added Foucault to Baldwin, adopting Foucault’s conception of power as omnipresent relations of power. Foucault argued that power is not coercive or repressive. It ascends from the bottom upward, always met by multiple points of resistance that constitute the relations of power. Wherever power exists—which is everywhere—resistance exists. There is no single locus or source of resistance. Revolutions are possible by strategically codifying numerous points of resistance, not by mobilizing the great refusal of a proletarian class or a postcolonial mass. Douglas took over Foucault’s signature contention that power is disciplinary, pervasive, and productive, compelling people to behave in given ways. The disciplinary function of power offers status awards to conformers and condemns nonconformers with punitive labels—criminal, insane, perverted, deviant. Sexuality is integral to power as the axis where the human body and social reproduction come together. Foucault stressed that sexuality is a distinctly effective medium for controlling people, determining how they perceive their bodies, and holding down designated groups. Douglas said White American Christianity is supremely effective at maligning Black people by impugning their sexuality.120

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She recounted centuries of plantation rape, men and women bartered at slave markets with bodies exposed, families ripped apart at auctions, vicious stereotypes about depraved Jezebels and violent bucks, a mania for racist lynching, and a century of Jim Crow denigration. Throughout American history, the sexuality of Black Americans has been used as a weapon to enforce their oppression. The accumulated upshot in Black families, schools, churches, and civic associations is to run from Black sexuality like the plague, condemning the places where it is flaunted: clubs, bars, dance halls, and streets. Douglas said it was imperative for the Black community to “initiate a comprehensive form of sexual discourse,” throwing off the repressive force of White culture on Black bodies without lurching to nihilism or amorality. She ran through pages of reactive antimorality in popular Black culture, citing rap lyrics laced with misogyny, violence, and nihilism, and films by Spike Lee, Melvin Van Peebles, and John Singleton that denigrate Black women. The films of these heralded Black directors, Douglas protested, recycle many of the worst White stereotypes of Black mothers as overbearing or irresponsible, and of other Black women as objects of sexual exploitation somehow deserving to be slurred as “hoes” and worse.121 “Clearly, there is trouble between Black men and women.” Douglas said it was hard enough to address the toxic treatment of Black women in popular culture, but the discussion had to include antigay prejudice in the Black community. Her best-known book, Sexuality and the Black Church (1999), was an intervention on this subject, driven by a deeply personal memory. As an adolescent Douglas had a best friend she called Cousin Lloyd. They knew each other through Jack and Jill of America, Tots ’n Teens, and other social outposts of the Black middle class. They bonded over the scorn they both incurred for their gender nonconformity. Douglas was ostracized as a tomboy for preferring sports, jeans, and reading instead of dolls, dresses, and play. Lloyd was labeled a sissy for preferring fashion, tennis, and schoolwork instead of football, basketball, and baseball. Douglas later recalled, “I empathized with Lloyd from afar, because I too was often the source of ridicule, even by those closest to me.” A deep friendship grew between them. They moved to New York for separate reasons, and from 1982 to 1984, when Douglas was a doctoral student at Union, she and Lloyd shared an apartment at Union’s Van Dusen Hall. There she learned from Lloyd what it was like to be a gay Black man in the early years of the HIV/AIDS crisis. In 1993 Douglas gave birth to a son, named Desmond after Desmond Tutu, and enlisted two godfathers for him—Tutu and Lloyd. A year later Lloyd died in July from complications caused by HIV/AIDS. Douglas grieved for her friend, and for others she knew who had died of HIV/AIDs, hating how the church treated Lloyd: “He loved the church, but his church did not

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love him back.” She asked herself how she could love a church that treated him so badly.122 That was the question that drove her to write Sexuality and the Black Church. Douglas made a two-handed argument. On the one hand, the fealty of Black Christians to the Bible is a commendable reflection of the longtime struggle of Black Americans to find themselves, gird themselves, and survive the racism of a hostile society. On the other hand, considering that the Bible was wielded as a weapon against them, “it seems abhorrent for Black people to be so steadfast in their use of the Bible against other Black persons, in this case, gay men and lesbians.” Douglas cited biblical scholars Robin Scroggs, who said that Jesus and Paul had no concept of sexual identity, and Vincent Wimbush, who said that early Black Americans loved the Bible because it provided a language world through which they interpreted their dislocated existence. She argued that the historic Black Christian test of biblical authority should be applied to the gay sexuality debate: Does a given text or interpretation support the life and freedom of all Black people?123 If they could agree that this historic test still asked the right question, the debate could move from the-Bible-says to the well-being of the Black community. Douglas knew from her classroom battles that this is where the argument is often won or lost. Many of her students were passionately convinced that accepting gay sexuality would grievously harm the Black community. Some claimed that gay Black Americans existed only because they were corrupted by White culture. Some insisted there were no gays or lesbians in Africa until the colonizers arrived. Popular Isis Papers author Frances Cress Welsing was much quoted for her broadsides against “effeminate” Black males. Molefi Kete Asante pitched Afrocentrism as a cure for gay sexuality: “We can no longer allow our social lives to be controlled by European decadence. The time has come for us to redeem our manhood through planned Afrocentric action. All brothers who are homosexuals should know that they too can become committed to the collective will.” Sociologists Nathan Hare and Julia Hare warned in The Endangered Black Family (1984) that growing tolerance of gays and lesbians was a fateful sign of “family disintegration” in a “decaying and decadent society” that portended the “coming extinction of the Black race.” Douglas countered with Audre Lorde on fear-baiting and using the master’s tools. Lorde said the inflated rhetoric about killing the race reflected “acute fright” and faulty reasoning: “This position supposes that if we do not eradicate lesbianism in the Black community, all Black women will become lesbians. It also supposes that lesbians do not have children. Both suppositions are patently false.” Douglas observed that Lorde’s famous saying, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s

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house,” applies perfectly to the antigay discourse of the Black community: “A discourse of resistance will stress that Black well-being is not fostered by adopting the oppressive, destructive, life-negating tools of White culture. The community must be constrained in its dialogue and action by its concern for the flourishing of Black life.”124 Womanist theology, Douglas stressed, is not the kind of thought that advances by attacking people. It does not shame Black people who succeed in White society, nor does it look for reasons to divide one Black person from another. It is moved by a love for all Black life, willing that all shall flourish and be whole: “It does not mount an attack upon Black men, the Black middle class, or any other segment of the Black community that may enjoy some modicum of privilege within a White patriarchal hegemony.” In only one sense, she argued, is womanist Christianity a fighting creed. It assaults the structures of racism, sexism, classism, and heterosexism that divide the Black community against itself.125 Sexuality and the Black Church defined Douglas for years in the field of theology, just as her teaching on this subject and womanism already defined her at Howard. The book was repeatedly called a groundbreaking text and the first of its kind. It was also her last book at Howard. In 2001 Douglas was lured to Goucher College in Baltimore, where she taught first as the Elizabeth Connolly Todd Distinguished Professor of Religion and later as the Susan B. Morgan Professor of Religion. Before Douglas published Sexuality and the Black Church, her identity in the field revolved around being the womanist theologian closest to Cone’s position and to him personally. She threw the latter marker into question with her next book, What’s Faith Got to Do with It? Black Bodies/Christian Souls (2005). Here the frame was the entire Western Christian tradition, not merely the struggle of the Black church to survive the evils of the White United States. Douglas wasn’t sure when she started the book if she would still be a Christian when she completed it. What’s Faith Got to Do with It? was a reflection on the Christian propensity to provide theological cover for violence against Black bodies: “Is there something in Christian theology that provides a pastor with the temerity to initiate the extralegal slaughter of a black man? How is it that Christianity has indeed forged a legacy that tolerates acts as depraved as lynching?” Since Christian history is littered with “wicked attacks against black bodies,” Douglas observed, it is imperative to ask what it is in Christianity itself that permits and even sanctions such attacks.126 She made a three-pronged argument about Christianity itself, condemning the historic Christian theologies of monotheism, sexuality, and the cross. Douglas argued that Christianity turned the strict monotheism of its inherited Hebrew faith into a closed monotheism in which no other gods or religions were

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tolerated. Christianity did not make an advance on Judaism by aspiring to universality. The Christian God condemned everything in the non-Christian world as pagan and demonic, rendering the entire planet and the heavenly realm as battlegrounds between the Godly forces of righteousness and the forces of evil. Second, Douglas argued, almost the entire Western Christian tradition is infected by a pernicious hostility against embodiment and sexuality. Jesus espoused stern ascetic principles without crossing the stigmatizing line into spiritual dualism. Paul crossed the line by inveighing against sexual passion, pitting body and soul against each other. The Christian church fatefully exacerbated the worst aspects of Pauline teaching, turning Christianity into a deadly religion that divinizes the soul and demonizes the body. Douglas judged that Platonism and Stoicism played the chief roles in polluting the Christian imagination; the Manichean and Gnostic movements played secondary roles to the same effect; and all of it fell disastrously on Black bodies when Christianity blessed the enslavement of Africans. The third pillar of Christian violence is the symbol of the Christian religion that enslaved Black persons, a crucified savior.127 Douglas took a light pass at scholarship on the history of Christian monotheism and sexual ethics, relying on Henry Chadwick’s classic survey, The Early Church (1967), and two recent books by Princeton scholar Elaine Pagels. Her third argument hit closer to home, revisiting the womanist critique of atonement theology, where Douglas shocked Cone by lining up wholeheartedly with Williams and Townes. Cone was mindful that Douglas played this issue carefully in The Black Christ. There she offered a one-paragraph summary of Williams’s argument that Jesus is important for his life and ministry, not his death, ending with a careful-leaning sentence: “Williams aptly asserts that humanity’s redemption is to be found in life, not in death.” That was what Douglas believed, too, but Cone came late to realizing it.128 Douglas said the crucifixion obviously plays a central role in the Christian story and just as obviously perpetuates human suffering. The unjust execution at the center of the Christian story has always been difficult to theologize, “especially for those people whose bodies are often violently and unjustly harmed.” She replayed the controversy over the Re-Imagining conference and agreed with Williams that the blood of the cross contains nothing divine. Douglas lingered over JoAnne Terrell’s book Power in the Blood? (1998), a benchmark text that navigated adeptly between the positions of Cone and Williams. Terrell’s argument was a model for Douglas, except Douglas landed much closer to Williams.129 Terrell, an ordained elder in the AME Zion Church, studied at Rollins College, adopted the cosmological perspective of her Rollins mentor, Arnold

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Wettstein, and graduated from Rollins in 1981. In the 1990s she studied under Cone and Williams at Union, earning her doctorate in 1997 with a dissertation on the atonement issue. The book version came out just after Terrell began her teaching career at Chicago Theological Seminary. It reflected exactly what Terrell’s situation had been at Union, working with Cone and Williams, both of whom she admired, while tilting on the crucial issue toward Cone. Terrell embraced most of Williams’s critique of cross theology, but she argued that Williams shortchanged the existential meaning of the cross for Black women. To Black women, Terrell said, the crucifixion is an important symbol and reminder that God is with them in their suffering. The Christian language of sacrifice, if conceived in a sacramental sense, should not be out of play in womanist theology. The cross witnesses sacramentally to the loving character of God; the suffering death of Jesus empowers those who suffer to live their lives in the loving way of God. Terrell brought to womanist theology an eclectic, cosmological, interreligious sensibility and a deep commitment to the AME Zion Church. She noted pointedly that she had a deeper stake—like Douglas and Grant—in the “received story” of the Black church than did womanists like Williams who were not ordained. The womanists who said the church should throw out all versions of cross theology in the name of greater inclusivity and wholeness made a plausible case, Terrell allowed, “yet it is in fact more daunting than it appears.” The cross is in the gospel, and not merely as a repugnant historical setup for the resurrection. Terrell was grateful for another signature position of Williams—that womanism “is a variety theology” committed to whatever sustains and liberates Black people.130 Douglas appreciated that Terrell had a mediating spirit and made a strong argument about the Black church tradition of theologizing the cross. To completely reject the idea of redemptive suffering is no small matter. Terrell made her case, Douglas judged, that Williams swept away too categorically a tradition of piety and feeling on this subject. The crucifixion can be said, from a womanist standpoint, to reveal God’s compassionate solidarity with the oppressed. Black Christians have a long history of relating intimately to the cross as they navigate “the harsh realities of black living in America.” But Douglas said Williams was right to claim that cross piety has been mostly “detrimental” to African Americans. As for cross theologies, Douglas was categorical like Williams: Every attempt to construe sacrifice as divine or redemptive, including Terrell’s, must be rejected. Those who opposed Jesus crucified him. God did not condone or sanction his death. Even if the cross may be said to show that God identifies with the oppressed, it must not be said to be an instrument of redemption. God’s response to the death of Jesus was to raise Jesus from the dead. The only

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redemption in the axis of Good Friday and Easter is that God raised the body of Jesus to life.131 So-called orthodox Christianity, Douglas concluded, is actually a heretical and oppressive concoction of the White imagination. It worships a totalitarian God of domination instead of the loving God of Jesus Christ. It negates the doctrine of the incarnation by violating the sacredness of the human body. It repudiates the compassionate ministry of Jesus in favor of a theological doctrine of redemptive suffering and sacrifice. “In short, white Christianity represents a theological abomination and, hence, a perversion of Christianity itself.”132 Douglas expected Cone to endorse most of her argument and overlook the rest. Instead, he blistered her over the part he rejected, on redemptive suffering. Cone believed that bearing the cross for the sake of liberation is the essence of the gospel. He was astonished that Douglas repudiated the cross of Jesus as a central doctrinal subject. Black Christians had gathered at the cross for centuries. How did Douglas imagine that her way-of-Jesus moralism, a throwback to liberal theology, was more profound? Did she even claim anymore that she was a systematic theologian? Cone pressed both questions very strenuously, feeling betrayed and repulsed. Douglas was important to him. He had thought she was more like him than any Black theologian. Her allegiance to the Episcopal Church was somewhat off-putting, but Cone thought her Anglicanism was a brake on the womanist tendency to make up your own doctrines. Her book alarmed and distressed him. He felt he had lost her to shallow humanistic religion, in her case on womanist grounds. He told her so in one of his epic harangues, and Douglas held her ground, stunned, but knowing her mind. She also knew him well enough to wait. Cone’s humanity ran much deeper than his temper. He admired Douglas too much to stay angry with her, and he had urged her from the beginning to pay attention to her experience as a woman, telling her that it had to make a difference that she was a woman. Cone knew from his history of urging Douglas to find her voice that he had to walk back his tirade against her. He did so graciously, to her relief.133 T HE CROSS A N D TH E LYNCHING TREE

Meanwhile, Cone stewed over the arguments of Douglas, Terrell, Williams, and Townes on this issue. He had stopped writing theological books during the thirty-year period that the founding womanists studied at Union and created the womanist tradition. There had been nothing systematically theological since God of the Oppressed. Martin & Malcolm & America was a landmark that defined his middle career, but it was an argument about the politics of Black

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theology. Otherwise Cone published works that tended to his legacy and that of Black theology: For My People (1984), a commentary on trends in liberation theology; My Soul Looks Back (1986), a reprint of his 1982 memoir; Speaking the Truth (1986), a collection of lectures; Black Theology (1993), now in two coedited volumes; and Risks of Faith (1999), a selection from his previous work. Cone took satisfaction in sprinkling doctoral protégés across theological education, and he was always willing to provide a supportive blurb for their books. But real theology, to him, was systematic theology, which he regretted that most womanists did not write. The fact that prominent womanists took much of Black theology in their direction, denying that the cross is theologically significant, got his theological juices flowing again, just after Townes left the Union faculty in 2004. Cone committed himself to a book project that was slow, painstaking, excruciating, reviving, and redefining for him. He knew from the beginning what the title would be: The Cross and the Lynching Tree. Every page was written with this title in mind. But he scrapped many pages along the way when the manuscript took twists and turns he had not expected.134 Throughout his career he had pressed one question that yielded a second question: How can it be that a religion based on the witness of Jesus and the prophets is so deeply implicated in the oppression of Black people? And how can it be that theologians gave short shrift to this question? Most leaders of controversial intellectual movements burn out after a few years. The demands are too exhausting; rivalries and jealousies are draining; there are too many hard-to-take encounters with offended souls; and Black theology, in particular, evokes reactive indignation. Only a figure of Cone’s immense moral dignity and rage at racial bigotry could have sustained, for forty years, the leadership role in a theological movement that persistently named and condemned the ravages of White racism. He took on all of it willingly. In the 1990s and early 2000s, Cone pleaded with theologians to stop exaggerating their fluid postmodern identities in a supposedly postracial society. He said it angrily at professional conferences, not caring that he interrupted politely urbane proceedings. Cone tolerated, as much as he could, the academic fashion that derided “racism,” “blackness,” and all other -ism and -ness words as retrograde essentialism. He drew the line at any suggestion that “essentialism” is the worst evil needing to be expunged from the academy. Sometimes he left an American Academy of Religion session steaming at academic fashions. He ditched the program book and changed his plans for that day. But Cone took to heart many of the critiques of his thought. The adjustments he made to them hampered his theological creativity. The issue that brought it back was the one he had repressed since his childhood, which womanist criticism helped him express.

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He had repressed the terror of lynching that he felt as a child, and its importance to his theological worldview. Though Cone blasted theologians for glossing over the slave trade, he wrote barely a word about lynching. Shortly after he began to write The Cross and the Lynching Tree, he realized why he had avoided this subject. Staring at the pictures of tortured Black victims was too much to bear on a weekly basis. Writing about them was slow and tortuous. On numerous occasions he had to push the manuscript away. He had written Black Theology and Black Power in four weeks, a book surging with revolutionary anger. It took him six years to write The Cross and the Lynching Tree, a slender book of haunting sorrow and beauty. I learned to stop asking if he was making progress on it. He could tell me only so many times he was proceeding “like a turtle.” But Cone was driven to clarify what he wanted to say about the cross of Jesus. He read womanist and White feminist critics, sympathized entirely with their ethical critiques, and rejected their conclusions. He grappled with the lynching tree through the cross, and with the cross through the lynching tree. In his youth Cone heard a great deal about the cross of Jesus. There were more hymns, gospel songs, spirituals, prayers, testimonies, and sermons about the cross than about anything else. He grew up singing, “Were you there when they crucified my Lord? Oh! Sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble.” Another hymn put it assertively: “I was there when they nailed him to the cross. . . . I was there when they took him down. Oh! How it makes my spirit tremble.” Cone first absorbed the dialectic of doubt and faith by singing, “Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen, Nobody knows but Jesus. . . . Glory Hallelujah!” The spirituals, gospel songs, and hymns conveyed that Jesus was a friend of oppressed people who knew about their suffering. Jesus achieved salvation for “the least of these” through his solidarity with them, even unto death. Black Christians, like Jesus, did not deserve to suffer. But keeping faith in Jesus was the one thing that Black Christians could do that Whites could not control or take from them. For Black Christians, Cone argued, merely knowing that Jesus suffered as they did gave them faith that God was with them, even if they ended up, like Jesus, tortured to death on a tree: “The more black people struggled against white supremacy, the more they found in the cross the spiritual power to resist the violence they so often suffered.”135 The crucifixion of Jesus placed God among a persecuted, beaten, tortured, and crucified people. Cone recounted that in the American version of crucifixion, women and children were often awarded the honor of torturing the victims first, burning their flesh and cutting off genitals, fingers, toes, and ears. The chief method of torture at a lynching party was to burn the victim, slowly, for

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hours. Revelers posed for pictures with the burned and dismembered Black victims, which were turned into postcards that hawkers sold to members of the crowd. Many lynching victims went to their deaths singing of Jesus. Sometimes a lynched minister preached his own funeral sermon, inducing the crowd to sing and pray with him. Just as Jesus was a victim of mob hysteria and imperial violence, Black Americans were victims of mob hysteria and White supremacy. Cone stressed that the cross and the lynching tree struck terror in the heart of the subject community. Terrorism was the point in both cases, terrorizing to enforce obedience and conformity. The only White religious thinker whom Cone truly liked and admired was Søren Kierkegaard, who wrote brilliantly about the sickness unto death, the hypocritical venality of Western culture, and truth as passionate subjectivity. But Kierkegaard wrote Christian philosophy, which Cone didn’t teach. The only White theologian whose work Cone taught was Reinhold Niebuhr, who qualified as the exception even though Cone stressed that he was not a strong antiracist and he never took a risk for a Black person. Niebuhr wrote a dozen articles condemning racist prejudice as a toxic form of self-worship, but he never elevated antiracism to one of his top-priority concerns, never featured this subject in any of his books, told King to slow down, and lectured King about the necessity of proceeding gradually. He also made racist slurs about the supposed cultural backwardness of African Americans, not counting such slurs as racism. Niebuhr qualified as the exception because he culled a profound theology of the cross from the Lutheran tradition and he had a record of condemning racial bigotry, unlike most White theologians of his time. He caught the tragedy and beauty of the cross—its terrible, paradoxical, and sublime blend of horror and redemption. Niebuhr said the cross is the “supreme symbol of divine grace,” bearing a “terrible beauty” that can only be expressed poetically: “Christianity is a faith which takes us through tragedy to beyond tragedy, by way of the cross to victory in the cross.”136 Cone said it requires “a powerful religious imagination to see redemption in the cross, to discover life in death and hope in tragedy.” It is possible to see this compound of terror and beauty without seeing what it means in one’s own time. Niebuhr, for example, despite grasping the paradoxical spiritual power of the cross better than most theologians, did not say that the violence of White supremacy invalidated the Christianity of White Christian communities. Billie Holiday’s sublime and horrific song, “Strange Fruit,” conveyed what White ministers should have said—the lynching tree was the cross in the United States of America. Cone said it should not have been so hard for White Christians to make the connection that Jesus was lynched every time a White mob lynched

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a Black person. But only a handful said it, notably Quincy Ewing, an Episcopal priest, and Edwin T. Wellford, author of The Lynching of Jesus. Moreover, secular Black writers like Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes were stronger critics of lynching than Black theologians, who rarely discussed it.137 To Cone, those who took risks for Black people—especially King, Malcolm, Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, Fred Shuttlesworth, and John Lewis—showed the power of redemptive suffering. He acknowledged that it took him many years to appreciate King on this subject, partly because he loathed customary misunderstandings of it. King’s idea of redemptive suffering had nothing to do with legitimizing suffering or sanctifying it. He tried to end racist harm in the United States, and he sacrificed his life so that others would not suffer. Having suffered much, King sought to make his suffering a virtue to save himself from bitterness and to call Whites to repentance. In his experience, unearned suffering offered the opportunity to turn suffering into something redemptive. Suffering itself was not redemptive, but suffering could be made redemptive when oppressed people struggled against it in the name, way, and spirit of Jesus. The cross, Cone reasoned, is indispensable to grasping the meaning of the lynching tree, and the lynching tree similarly interprets the cross. For U.S. Americans to speak of the cross without relating it to the lynching tree is evasive and unreal. It is to reduce the cross to an abstract sentiment, a contemplative piety. But the lynching tree without the cross is an abomination having nothing to do with redemption. Only those who stand in solidarity with the oppressed can embrace the cross of Jesus. Cone believed, like King, that God’s loving solidarity transforms even the hideous ugliness of imperial crucifixion and American lynching into occasions of liberating divine presence. For years Cone planned to build up to a concluding chapter where he interrogated womanist theologians point by point and made his case. This was the conversation that got him writing in the first place. But as the manuscript took shape, he pulled back on the back-and-forth. It wasn’t necessary to run through why he disagreed with Williams, somewhat less with Douglas, considerably less with Terrell, and so on. By the time there was almost a book in hand, he opted for a brief summary of womanist criticism. Cone agreed with Williams that the gospel should not be preached in a way that encourages Black women to accept their surrogacy roles. Moreover, he argued, there is nothing redemptive about suffering in itself. Atonement theory and liberation theology are incompatible, so it is pointless to belabor the finer points of atonement theology. All atonement doctrines turn the gospel of Jesus into a rational concept that is explained by a theory of salvation. Even moral influence theory perpetuates the logic of surrogacy, at least implicitly.138

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Cone allowed that too much Black church preaching takes the tack condemned by Williams, encouraging Black women to suffer for others as Jesus suffered for them. But Black Christians were not wrong in the past or the present to fix on the cross of Jesus. He noted pointedly that Terrell, Grant, and Copeland agreed with him. They, too, insisted that the cross is central to the gospel faith, not detachable from it, and central to African American Christianity for historical, religious, and theological reasons. Cone cited Copeland’s counterword in A Troubling in My Soul—the makers of the spirituals did not glory in singing of the cross of Jesus because they were masochists who enjoyed suffering. They sang of Jesus because he endured what they suffered. The cross enthroned “the One who went all the way with them and for them.” They saw in the cross God’s triumph over “the principalities and powers of death.”139 That was the point to which the entire book drove. Cone concluded: “The cross is the burden we must bear in order to attain freedom. We cannot separate the cross from the Christian gospel as found in the story of Jesus and as lived and understood in the African American Christian community. The resurrected Lord was the crucified Lord.” Cone said he looked to the experience of Black women fighting for justice to determine how he should construe the meaning of the cross. He looked especially to the “collective lives and struggles” of Black women in the civil rights movement. The cross does not “really” mean something other than what it meant to Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, and Diane Nash. The salvation of God, Cone wrote, “is a liberating event in the lives of all who are struggling for survival and dignity in a world bent on denying their humanity.”140 On this telling, the lynching tree is a metaphor for the crucifixion of Black American Christ figures, pointing the way to the redeeming presence of God and to King’s hope of a beloved community. Cone reset the debate in Black theology about which parts of biblical religion are harmful or liberating for Black people. Near the end of Cone’s life, but before we knew he had only a few months remaining, I asked him how he might have ended The Cross and the Lynching Tree had there not been any womanists who agreed with him. There was a long pause. Finally he said he would have made the same argument, but “it would have been harder to finish the book.” He paused again: “Much harder.” He was indebted to certain womanists for prodding him to write his best book in decades, indebted to others for helping him make his case, and grateful to write what felt like the capstone to his career. But Cone had one more turn to make, returning to the author who mesmerized him in graduate school, Baldwin, just before a searing succession of killings triggered a mass uprising proclaiming that Black Lives Matter.

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Traditions of liberationist struggle acquire new generations only by refashioning and renewing themselves. Black social Christianity owes its vitality to leaders grounded in strong religious communities and determined to be relevant to ongoing struggles for freedom and justice, undergirding multiple forms of church religion, academic reflection, activist politics, and interfaith organizing. By the end of the twentieth century, there were numerous fusions of Black social gospel, liberationist, womanist, and Black feminist theology that reflected deeply on racial justice, racial identity, culture, sexism, and heterosexism, and not very much on economic justice, interfaith dialogue, and the threat of ecoapocalypse. To the extent that anticapitalist struggle found a beachhead, it was on Gramscian turf, contesting the capitalist worldview at the cultural level. Right up to the financial crash of 2008, economic justice was a distinctly futile aspiration. Then Barack Obama made the nation look better than it was, a drama affecting every aspect of Black social Christianity. Historically, the greatest political tradition of the Black social gospel is the democratic Socialist stream of Reverdy Ransom, George W. Woodbey, W. E. B. Du Bois, Mordecai Johnson, Benjamin E. Mays, Martin Luther King Jr., and Pauli Murray. The recovery of the “radical King” in the late 1980s made it possible to fathom the significance of Black social gospel Socialism. But the triumph of neoliberal capitalism in the 1990s was very hard on individuals and organizations that held out against it. It was easier, as the saying went, to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. In Europe, the Social Democratic Socialism in which King believed achieved solidarity wage policies, universal health coverage, free education, generous parental leave, and worker codetermination within capitalist markets. It secured these gains by win-

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ning elections, building the welfare state, accepting the global market, discarding the language of class struggle, and, too often, relinquishing the vision of economic democracy. In the United States, even the modest achievements of European Social Democracy were out of sight as possibilities. Here the corporate class raced to the bottom of the global wage market in the name of capitalist freedom, enabled by compliant politicians in both political parties. The generation that inherited the triumph of neoliberal capitalism and rethought what Black social Christianity should be was short on economic answers. The battleground shrank to overmatched fights against neoliberal trade agreements and, more productively, the Gramscian struggle against White capitalist cultural hegemony, where Black Christian Socialists Cornel West, Michael Eric Dyson, Obery M. Hendricks Jr., and bell hooks carried out cultural interventions. M ARX I S M AN D SOC IA L IST A N TIRA CIS M: CORNEL WES T

Three previous chapters have registered West’s important influence on Black social Christianity from the beginning of his career. Here I shall focus on his arguments about Socialism. Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, West grew up in Sacramento, California, where his father was a civilian air force administrator. He honed his autodidactic brilliance while growing up in a totally segregated world, reading Malcolm, King, and Kierkegaard assiduously, and listening in on Black Panther meetings. Kierkegaard taught him that philosophy should be about the human experiences of living, suffering, and finding hope. The Panthers taught him that politics should combine the best available theory with concrete strategies. West absorbed Panther teaching about Malcolm and Socialism, but he viewed both through a Christian lens, steeped in the Black Baptist church and King. He entered Harvard at the age of seventeen, already fully himself, which, as he often said subsequently, was all he ever wanted to be.1 He sailed through Harvard in three years, which made him twenty years old when he entered the doctoral program in philosophy at Princeton. West studied under Richard Rorty, absorbing Rorty’s pragmatic historicism, and Sheldon Wolin, who persuaded West to study the Hegelian Marxist background to the Frankfurt school. He started with a dissertation on British neo-Hegelian T. H. Green, switched to the Aristotelian aspects of Marx’s thought, and switched again to what caught him in Marx: the ethical passion and ethical values of individuality and democracy lurking beneath Marx’s anticapitalism. West was twenty-three years old when he joined the faculty of Union Theological Seminary in 1976. There he befriended Cone and pushed him to deal with

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Socialist and feminist criticism. Cone deeply influenced West, but West would never say that Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel meant nothing to him.2 Liberation theology was at the heart of West’s pragmatic, postmodern, antiimperial, historicist, Christian Socialist work as a philosopher of religion. He told his classes that Marx is indispensable and they couldn’t understand Du Bois if they didn’t understand Marx, Hegel, Emerson, and James. In New York, West befriended Socialist theorist Stanley Aronowitz, who belonged to a tiny post– New Left Socialist organization called the New American Movement (NAM). Aronowitz espoused the classic Council Marxism of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Korsch. West wanted to join a democratic Socialist organization, but NAM barely existed in New York and West couldn’t picture himself in the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC), led by Michael Harrington. DSOC was too Social Democratic for him. West waited until NAM and DSOC merged in 1982 to form Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the same year he wrote his first, favorite, landmark book, Prophesy Deliverance! An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity.3 West said democratic Socialism is like liberal theology—a valuable project in its time that had outlived its usefulness. Both were stepping-stones to something better. Democratic Socialism, though a noble vision, repeatedly sold out Socialism by competing for votes in bourgeois elections. Liberal theology is similarly a creative project—of the bourgeois imagination. Both carried on long past their heyday and were superseded by liberation movements. West described six types of Marxism—Stalinism, Leninism, Trotskyism, Gramscianism, Social Democracy, and revolutionary councilism—assigning a theological analogue to each type. Stalinism, a total perversion of its founding symbols, is the Ku Klux Klan of Marxism. The Leninist and Trotskyist traditions are fundamentalist, marshaling proof texts for truncated versions of Marxist norms. West lauded Gramsci for his emphasis on cultural hegemony, but he cautioned that Gramsci was only slightly democratic, being too Leninist to defend freedom on the grounds of principle, not merely strategy. Gramscian Marxism is analogous to theological neo-orthodoxy, “an innovative revision of dogmas for dogmatic purposes.” West judged that Social Democracy has the same strengths and defaults as the old social gospel. Both produced impressive critiques of capitalism, but not a revolutionary praxis. Social Democracy sells out revolutionary consciousness, even when it retains the class struggle and the dialectic of history, concentrating on electoral reformism and anti-Communism. Like the social gospel, it accommodates bourgeois modernity too deeply not to be compromised by it.4 The best Marxism is the revolutionary councilism of Luxemburg, Korsch, and Anton Pannekoek, which West viewed as analogous to liberation theology.

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Council Marxism repudiates the class collaborationism of Social Democracy, conceiving revolutionary worker councils as prefigural incarnations of the new society. Instead of viewing workers as wage earners, voters, and consumers, it views workers as collective self-determining producers who prefigure the coming Socialist order. Council Marxism is about workers seizing power through revolutionary organizations that already prefigure a socialist society—“All power to the soviets.” The early Gramsci, in 1918 and 1919, was a Council Marxist who wanted Italy’s councils in Turin to take control of organizing production. He said the worker councils were Communist, not merely one organ of the revolutionary struggle against the bourgeoisie, and that Bolshevik leader V. I. Lenin agreed with him. But the worker councils did not develop into a national movement, Gramsci was accused of reducing Marxism to syndicalism, and he fell in line with actual Leninism. West believed that Gramsci should have stuck with prefigural democratic radicalism, the best of the Marxist traditions: “Councilism is to Marxism what liberation theology is to Christianity: a promotion and practice of the moral core of the perspective against overwhelming odds for success.”5 There was something exotic and exciting for seminary students of the early 1980s to be plunged into this discussion. For many it was their introduction to Marxist theory. All had been raised on scary lessons about Communism, and some had read Latin American liberation theology, which vaguely adopted select Marxian arguments. West reintroduced Marxian topics that had dropped out of American Christian theology in the early 1940s. His influence in this area was analogous to that of Reinhold Niebuhr. Union had been steeped in the social gospel for thirty years when Niebuhr got there in 1928, but Niebuhr connected Union students to sectors of the Marxian left that were previously off-limits to them. West had the Niebuhr role in Black social gospel and liberationist circles. He did not gently warm up students to Socialist theory. He plunged them straight into the secular American left’s most contentious ideological debates. His sensational speaking style featured torrential riffs that left audiences gasping, and edified, imagining a different world. West’s interpretive scheme was a highly effective way to teach seminary students about the varieties of Marxism, but it misrepresented the Marxian tradition, and its upshot was problematic. Orthodox Marxism, a tradition far more important historically than the Trotsky and Gramsci traditions, had no place in West’s scheme. Its unwieldy two-house structure of proletarian revolution and parliamentary Socialism led to the impasse in which the movement divided between Leninism and Social Democracy. Orthodox Marxism was the dominant socialist tradition for two generations, and it did not wither away after Socialist parties were compelled to

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choose between Leninism and Social Democracy. Moreover, the ostensible affinity between Council Marxism and liberation theology did not bode well for liberation theology, since Council Marxism was a utopian construct that never worked anywhere. The “overwhelming odds” were a serious problem if the point was to change society, not merely adopt a utopian position. The democratic Socialist tradition that West dismissed at least had actual parties and unions that changed society. Council Marxism, though an important variant of Socialist thought, existed only in the heads of Marxian intellectuals. West and Aronowitz pressed the argument in DSA for the superiority of Council Marxism, contending that “democratic Socialism” is a euphemism for the betrayal of revolutionary consciousness, settling too readily for Social Democracy. I countered that West’s radical democratic vision was unattainable on councilist terms, he was wrong to identify liberation theology with a single form of Marxism, and democratic Socialism does not reduce to the politics of defending the welfare state. It also includes guild Socialist and Social Democratic traditions that fight for economic democracy. Council Marxism needed democratic Socialism in the same way that liberation theology needed to be informed and limited by earlier forms of religious Socialism, especially those in the guild Socialist tradition.6 To a considerable degree West moved in the latter direction without relinquishing his preference for the Council Marxists. He tracked the growing literature of the 1980s on market Socialism and adjusted his position to it, conceiving democratic Socialism as economic democracy that allows the market to get prices right. West leaned on Croatian economist Branko Horvat, Polish economist Włodzimierz Brus, and Russian-Scottish economic historian Alec Nove, accepting that any feasible model of Socialism must accept market mechanisms and mixed forms of ownership. He said his “wholesome Christian rejection” of all oppressive hierarchies drove how he thought about Socialism—without quite acknowledging that Social Democrats had been right to make exactly the adjustment he made. West endorsed a mixed-model Socialism featuring “a socioeconomic arrangement with markets, price mechanisms, and induced (not directed) labor force, a free press, formal political rights, and a constitutionally based legal order with special protections of the marginalized.” His vision of democratic Socialism featured five major economic sectors: (1) state-owned industries of basic producer goods (electricity networks, oil and petrochemical companies, financial institutions); (2) independent, self-managed, socialized public enterprises; (3) cooperative enterprises controlling their own property; (4) small private businesses; and (5) self-employed individuals.7

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To his surprise, West found himself echoing Michael Harrington’s theme that some kind of collectivism is inevitable; the question is whether it will be democratic and bottom-up or authoritarian and top-down. He and Harrington conducted a DSA road show in the 1980s and influenced each other, though Harrington never quite absorbed what West tried to teach him about White privilege. On the road, West endorsed Harrington’s signature claim that the Socialist struggle is to democratize collective structures. In 1986 West put it programmatically: “The crucial question is how are various forms of centralization, hierarchy, and markets regulated—that is, to what extent can democratic mechanisms yield public accountability of limited centralization, meritorious hierarchy, and a mixture of planned, socialized, and private enterprises in the market along with indispensable democratic political institutions.”8 Sometimes he put the Harrington argument plainly: “The basic choice in the future will be between a democratic, or ‘bottom-up’ socialization, and corporate, or ‘top-down,’ socialization.” West commended Harrington for framing the issue in a way that transcended the distractions of everyday politics and noise. The point was to broaden the participation of citizens in the economic, political, and cultural dimensions of the social order “and thus control the conditions of their existence.” Harrington persuaded West that Socialists need to focus on democratizing the process of investment. By the end of the 1980s West could write that Harrington’s democratic Socialism was inspiring, “indeed visionary.” But West still favored Council Marxism, and he found Harrington ironically lacking at the cultural level. West shook his head that Harrington, the author of a famous book on American poverty, The Other America, devoted his subsequent books to economic analysis, social theory, and political strategy. Harrington lived too far above the everyday, grasping, vacuous, nihilistic, television-watching, sometimes violent culture of ordinary consumers to write about it. He was eloquent about the structural injustices of capitalism, but he passed over its equally devastating operations on the cultural level.9 That was never true of West, who wrote about popular music, television, sexuality, identity politics, Black culture, White supremacy, the culture of nihilism, and the cultural limitations of progressive organizations dominated by Whites. West’s pamphlet for DSA, Toward a Socialist Theory of Racism, was a signature statement for him and the organization. He delineated four types of U.S. Socialist thinking about racism, regretting that all four were blinkered by Marxian bias. Historic Socialist reductionism was the benchmark view; double exploitation was a major corrective view; Black nationalism was the third option; and Du Bois pioneered the best of the four theories, which was still inadequate.10

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West described Eugene Debs as the American icon of the first view, Socialism-is-the-answer reductionism. Debs subsumed racial injustice under the general rubric of working-class exploitation, conceiving racism as a divideand-conquer ruse of the ruling class. West said Debs was an honorable exemplar of color-blind socialism, but Socialist reductionism is too simplistic to be a serious answer. The second approach, usually taken by the Socialist wing of the union movement, stuck to the class exploitation thesis while acknowledging that Blacks are subjected to a second dose of exploitation through workplace discrimination and exclusion. This acknowledgment of racism as “super-exploitation” improved on Debs, but it still limited the struggle against racial injustice to the workplace. The “Black Nation” thesis operated differently, conceiving Black Americans as an oppressed nation within the United States. The Garvey movement, the American Communist Party, various Leninist organizations, and various Black nationalist organizations and individuals espoused it, often citing Stalin’s definition of a nation: “A historically constituted, stable community of people formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture.” West commended the Garvey movement and the Communist traditions for taking seriously the cultural dimension of the freedom struggle. In this respect, most Black nationalists were “proto-Gramscians.” But as theory, he said, the Black Nation thesis is shot through with ahistorical special pleading, and in practice the Backto-Africa campaign of Garvey was backward looking, if not reactionary.11 Du Bois and neo-Marxian theorist Oliver Cox formulated the fourth approach as an alternative to the Black Nation thesis: Racism is a product of class exploitation and of xenophobic attitudes not reducible to class exploitation. West commended Du Bois and Cox for contending that racism has a life of its own, depending on psychological factors and cultural practices that are not necessarily or directly caused by structural economic injustices. Du Bois and Cox, West argued, had the right project, pointing to the capitalist role in modern racism while stressing psychological and cultural aspects of the problem. The theory and struggle that are needed move further in this direction, stressing that the roots of racism lay in conflicts between the civilizations of Europe, Africa, Asia, and Latin America before capitalism arose, while retaining the Marxist emphasis on class exploitation. Moreover, all four of the dominant Socialist approaches operate largely or exclusively on the macro-structural level, concentrating on the dynamics of racism within and between social institutions. West called for a full-orbed theory of racism that deals with the genealogy of racism, the ideological dimensions of racism, and micro-institutional factors.12

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This all-encompassing Socialist theory of racism would be Gramscian, emphasizing culture and ideology, while extending beyond Gramsci’s formulations. It would assume that cultural practices of racism have a reality of their own that does not reduce to class exploitation. It would demonstrate that cultural practices are the medium through which selves are produced, and that cultural practices are shaped and bounded by civilizations, including the modes of production of civilizations. It would offer a genealogical account of the ideology of racism, examining the modes of European domination of non-European peoples. It would analyze the micro-institutional mechanisms that sustain White supremacy, highlighting the various forms of Eurocentric dominance. It would provide a macro-structural analysis of the exploitation and oppression of non-European peoples, tracking the variety and relationships between the various types of oppression. This was a project for theorists of a scholarly bent, a title that West declined. He explained that he was an intellectual freedom fighter, not a writer of scholarly tomes geared to disciplinary conversations. For decades he set a daunting, brilliant, inimitable standard of public intellectualism, averaging over a hundred lectures per year, showing up for television interviews, appearing in the Matrix movies, campaigning for U.S. senators Bill Bradley, Barack Obama (in 2008), and Bernie Sanders when they ran for president, and dealing with the downsides of his celebrity, incurring immense jealousy and ideological revenge. To social activists he often expounded on the cultural limitations of progressive organizations dominated by Whites. DSA was the primary case in point. DSA touted its gallery of Black intellectual stars, which did not change its ethos or image sufficiently to attract more than a modicum of Black members. The organization looked White and sounded White to the Black Americans it tried to recruit. West observed that this cycle of trying and failing ensnared progressive organizations like DSA in a vicious circle. Even when White progressives made serious attempts to diversify, they were too remote from the everyday lives of people of color to succeed. The remoteness was geographical and cultural, and the failure it caused discouraged White organizations from struggling against White supremacy, which further widened the cultural gap between people of color and White activists. West said the only way to break this vicious circle is for progressive organizations to privilege the issues of people of color, taking the liberationist option of siding with the excluded and oppressed. Strategies based on White guilt are paralyzing, both psychologically and politically, while strategies focused on making White organizations more attractive to racial minorities don’t work. The answer is for organizations to make a commitment of will to the specific struggles of people of color. West said it is pointless for such organizations to

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pursue diversity campaigns if they do not make the struggle against White supremacy their highest priority. There must be a transformation of consciousness that is practical, convinced that antiracism trumps other causes, and not overburdened with useless guilt: “What is needed is more widespread participation by predominantly white democratic socialist organizations in antiracist struggles—whether those struggles be for the political, economic, and cultural empowerment of Latinos, blacks, Asians, and North Americans or antiimperialist struggles against U.S. support for oppressive regimes in South Africa, Chile, the Philippines, and the occupied West Bank.”13 He invoked the term used in Latin American liberation theology, “conscientization”—a transformation of consciousness that occurs through an act of commitment, creating a new awareness of marginalization, exclusion, and oppression. Only by taking the liberationist option would White Socialist activists comprehend why they should privilege the struggle against racism. Bonds of trust across racial lines must be forged within contexts of struggle. West cautioned: “This interracial interaction guarantees neither love nor friendship. Yet it can yield more understanding and the realization of two overlapping goals—democratic Socialism and antiracism. While engaging in antiracist struggles, democratic socialists can also enter into a dialogue on the power relationships and misconceptions that often emerge in multiracial movements for social justice in a racist society. Honest and trusting coalition work can help socialists unlearn Eurocentrism in a self-critical manner and can also demystify the motivations of white progressives in the movement for social justice.”14 West is the longtime leading proponent of the democratic Socialist option that King wanted to take. He was, and is, the model public intellectual who inspired succeeding Black public intellectuals, notably Dyson, Hendricks, and hooks. Dyson and Hendricks grew up as church kids in Detroit and East Orange, New Jersey, respectively, diverged on very different paths in their twenties, and met each other in their thirties as doctoral students at Princeton. Dyson bonded with Jesse Jackson early in a mentor relationship, Hendricks later wrote a book with which Jackson deeply identified, and both were like West in applying King’s Christian Socialism to their time. C ULTU RA L C RITIC ISM A N D RACE RULES : M IC H A EL ERIC DY S ON

Dyson grew up amid Detroit’s flourishing Motown cultural vitality of the early 1960s and its devastation after the riot of 1967. Born in 1958, he had four brothers and four step-siblings supported by Everett Dyson and Addie Mae

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Leonard. Everett Dyson was a laborer at Kelsey-Hayes Corporation who adopted Dyson and his brothers; Addie Mae Leonard, Dyson’s mother, was a paraprofessional for the Detroit Board of Education. Dyson was raised to avoid trouble and follow Jesus. Lacking the church factor, he might not have made it out. In 1967 he beheld the riot with a stunned awe, catching the glee of looters who briefly reigned over a carnival atmosphere. An ominous new word to him, curfew, soon marked the fearsome division between safe and unsafe. A year later Dyson was watching television when a news bulletin interrupted, announcing that King had been shot in Memphis. Dyson had never heard of King or Memphis. His first clue that this mattered terribly was that Everett Dyson froze with a stricken look, unable to produce any sound except a groaning, hurting “humh.” The television networks replayed King’s Mountaintop Sermon of the previous night. Dyson recognized King’s words about the Promised Land, which had never evoked at his church the tumultuous response that King evoked. He caught that something magical was happening at Mason Temple. Dyson watched the program transfixed, somehow knowing he would never be the same: “King’s rhetoric electrified me, stood the hair on my arms at attention as he trumpeted a clarion call for freedom.” Then came the announcement that King had died in Memphis.15 Detroit erupted in rage and trauma. For months, Dyson feared to stand in front of a window or door at night. If King could be cut down, no Black person was safe. He bought a 45-rpm record containing excerpts of King’s speeches, quickly memorizing the entire record: “King’s death was my initial plunge into the tortuous meanings of racial politics, and I began to believe that the world was largely predicated upon color, its vain and violent ubiquity becoming increasingly apparent to my newly opened eyes. For me, King became the most resonant metaphor for the persistent conundrum of racial hatred, but he also served as a startlingly resilient symbol of the possibility of achieving meaningful life beyond the ruinous reach of racism.”16 Everett Dyson supplemented his factory job by hauling sod, plants, and dirt for a floral nursery. When Dyson was twelve, his father was laid off, so father and son scavenged for discarded iron and steel they sold to a junkyard. Detroit was tagged the “murder capital of the world.” The murder of Black men by Black men was a palpable reality to Dyson in his youth: “I witnessed firsthand the social horror that is entrenched in inner-city communities, the social havoc wreaked from economic hardship.” It was not as bad as the postapocalyptic nightmare he watched on local television: “Night after night, the news media in Detroit painted the ugly picture of a homicide-ridden city caught in the desperate clutches of death, depression, and decay.” Dyson had recurrent nightmares

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of waking up in the city portrayed on television. Meanwhile, flashes of violence in real-world Detroit “shattered my circle of friends and acquaintances.” His young next-door friend was stabbed in a card game and died. An acquaintance murdered a storekeeper in a robbery. Another acquaintance executed several members of a rival gang. A young man at a corner store, wielding a sawed-off, double-barreled shotgun, robbed Dyson when he was fourteen. Four years later it happened again, this time featuring a .357 Magnum revolver. Dyson appealed to the gun wielder, terrified, that he didn’t look like the type of brother who would be doing this. The man retorted that he was too broke to feed his family, and the previous week, he had been robbed in the same way. Dyson told audiences he understood why young Black men joined gangs and sold drugs, because he knew Black men who seemed to have no choice.17 When Dyson was sixteen he won a scholarship to Cranbrook, a prestigious boarding school in nearby Bloomfield Hills, thirty miles down Woodward Avenue from his home. Bloomfield Hills was just on the other side of the line dividing the White wealth that was protected in 1967 from the Black neighborhoods that were not. Dyson had never had White classmates, much less wealthy White classmates. He spent two years absorbing the absurd contrasts between Cranbrook’s lush surroundings and his nearby world. Then he opted for night school and a succession of jobs in maintenance, construction, and, at KelseyHayes, unloading brake drums. In 1977, when Dyson was nineteen, he got married, and his Baptist congregation ordained him to the ministry. The following year his son Michael Dyson was born. Two years later Dyson enrolled at Knoxville College in Knoxville, Tennessee, which lacked a philosophy department, so he transferred to Carson-Newman College, a Southern Baptist school in Jefferson City, Tennessee. There he got the training in philosophy of religion that he wanted, acquiring his first mentor, philosopher Don Olive. Dyson fed his voracious intellectual appetite at Carson-Newman, studying Western philosophy in classes and Black intellectualism on his own. In 1984 he heard Jackson preach an Easter Sunday sermon at Knoxville College. Dyson came forward to introduce himself and found a mentor. He made a visit to Union to meet West and religious historian James Washington, who strongly encouraged him, and graduated from Carson-Newman in 1985, winning admission to the doctoral program in religion at Princeton University. At Princeton he studied under ethicist Jeffrey Stout, religious historian Albert Raboteau, and philosopher of religion Victor Preller, before West arrived in 1988. West moved from Union to Yale in 1984, back to Union in 1987, and then to Princeton, where he stayed the first time until 1994. In elegant Princeton, Dyson looked like trouble to shopkeepers and bankers. It embarrassed him

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when his son Michael witnessed how he was treated, book bags or not. Dyson and I were active in the same organizations—DSA and the 1988 Jackson campaign—and wrote for some of the same magazines during his graduate school years. In the 1990s I ran a liberal arts program at Kalamazoo College that brought over one hundred speakers per year to the college. Shortly before Dyson graduated in 1993 with a dissertation on Malcolm and King, I invited him to Kalamazoo. Nobody in the entire 1990s lit up our crowd like Dyson. He was hyper-articulate and torrential in West’s fashion, fusing his street savvy and graduate education. The backbone of Dyson’s talk came from the Malcolm section of his dissertation, from which he veered into riffs on M. C. Hammer, 2 Live Crew, Public Enemy, Michael Jackson, Spike Lee, and John Singleton. He described hip-hop as the CNN of Black culture, explained that the capping-belittling techniques of “dissing” rap had a history in Black oral practices, and affirmed that he loved the bawdy humor of 2 Live Crew, while rejecting its misogyny. Rap musicians were the cultural griots and street preachers of contemporary urban life, refashioning the signifying parodies of Black folk culture. For those who love hip-hop, Dyson argued, it often compensates for the decline of the Black church. They hear the powerful religious message in it—often more prophetic than anything said in a local Black church. The lecture sparkled, gyrated, teased, and soared; it felt that Dyson could have kept going for hours. Later that year he published a book version, Reflecting Black (1993). It marked out the three crosscutting fields of his subsequent work: Black popular culture, the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, class, and politics, and Black religion. Dyson went only so far with Cone’s thesis that all Black people are united by Black suffering and struggle, epitomized by Martin and Malcolm. Dyson appreciated what Cone meant, but he stressed that King had more in common with Harrington than with Black conservatives like George Schuyler: “The complexity and diversity of racial experiences cautions against advocating racial unity based on the presumption of homogeneity.” Reflecting Black contained previously published pieces from a stunning range of periodicals—Z Magazine, Artvu, Tikkun, Cultural Studies, Christianity and Crisis, New York Times Book Review, Nation, Democratic Left, Emerge, Social Text, DePaul Law Review, and others. I read the acknowledgments page and let the intimidating evidence wash over me: He had barely begun and had already published this widely?18 Dyson was just getting started. In 1995 I brought him back to Kalamazoo to be our baccalaureate speaker. He was jovial through dinner, but blanched at the sea of White parents’ faces filling cavernous Stetson Chapel. I caught his reaction and urged him—do what you do, we don’t need your imitation of a

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White sermon. He was still skittish until I gave an introduction that described his personal background and sampled some of his writing in Reflecting Black and Making Malcolm (1995). Dyson gave me a nod, said, “Okay,” tucked his prepared text under his chair, and riffed for forty scintillating minutes. A student speaker and a reader had preceded him. Dyson stitched his improvised sermon around what he had just heard. It was sensational. There were set pieces along the way from sermons he had preached and Making Malcolm, but they were fashioned as a conversational response—gold-standard improvisational speaking. Stetson Chapel shook from the tumultuous reaction of the graduates, and I played flak-catcher with many of their outraged parents.19 Dyson exceeded West’s train of academic appointments, beginning at Hartford Theological Seminary, moving to Chicago Theological Seminary, and teaching in his early career alone at Brown University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Columbia University, DePaul University, and the University of Pennsylvania; later there were more academic stops. He poured out a gusher of books and somehow matched West’s blizzard of lectures and media appearances. Dyson loved the work, exuding his delight at not having missed his calling. He went from zero to ninety in what felt like five minutes. He achieved celebrity so fast that in 1996 he devoted a long chapter of his book Race Rules to its genesis, contours, perils, and ironies. Dyson said he was already accustomed to being “lauded and lambasted, admired and despised.” Some academics cheered his appearances on Oprah, Charlie Rose, and Nightline, but many blistered him with severe language about selling out, hogging the spotlight, and treating the academy as a hustle. Dyson cited some of the most accusatory hits, noting that West, hooks, Henry Louis Gates, and two or three others incurred similar fire. He delineated six types of accusation. Number one was the anointing issue—why did the media choose you? Number two was that he wrote pundit drivel for cash and fame. Number three was that the fame corrupted him. Number four was that he hoodwinked White audiences by posing as the arbiter of authentic blackness. Number five was that the academy gave him a pass from normal peer-reviewed scrutiny. Number six was that he competed with West, hooks, Gates, and the others to be HNIC (Head Negro in Charge).20 Dyson said there was some truth to some of these charges and, for certain HNIC candidates, “a lot of truth to many of these charges.” Ever since White people anointed Booker T. Washington, the anointing issue has hovered over Black intellectuals. It is a perennial problem that cannot be solved, and “if there’s one fact of black life in white America we can’t deny, it’s this: black folk go in and out of style.” Dyson stressed that consciousness about race runs hot and cold in White America. In 1996 it was hot: “Black bodies are ‘in’ now.” He

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was keenly aware that he would not have soared to ninety in a cold period. Dyson respected the Black academics who wrote scholarly books and didn’t have a publicity agent. He was a voracious reader who kept up with scholarly trends. Still, he argued, public intellectualism is important work. He could do it without losing his sense of humor, inaugurating the “First Annual Awards for Black Public Intellectuals and Their Critics.” Adolph Reed and Eric Lott shared the award for meanest and most insulting critic; Reed said Dyson was a mere hustler and Lott tagged Dyson’s work as “middlebrow imbecilism.” hooks won the Elijah Complex Award for repeatedly claiming she was the only Black intellectual who talked about class. Dyson awarded himself the Spike Lee/Terry McMillan Award for Shameless Self-Promotion, outing himself for chasing down media bookers and magazine editors. West won the Golda Meir Award for boasting of his humility; Dyson said it gently, but he tweaked his role model for wearing three-piece suits and complaining that Black intellectuals wore shabby clothes. For many years Dyson gamely tried not to be defensive about incoming fire; it grew harder over time.21 In October 1995 he attended the Million Man March and half-defended it on Nightline. Dyson got a torrent of angry, incredulous, accusatory condemnation—much of it from people he admired. Historian Paula Giddings, a dear friend whom Dyson idolized, blistered him as a stupid, spineless, shameless betrayer just before inviting him to address her Black feminist friends. Dyson told the group he took his son to Farrakhan’s spectacle in DC because he was desperate to see, feel, and drown in its ocean of Black brothers. He felt compelled to do something besides talk about the troubles of Black men. He spoke of his brother and nephews doing hard time in prison. He talked about Black male friends who were dead and others who were lost and defeated. He asked the women to recognize that in a patriarchal society, Black men represent a special challenge to the power of White males. Dyson had been slated to speak at the march, but his turn was scratched and no speaker expressed what he had planned to say about supporting feminist Black women and sexual equality. He admitted that his regrets about the march mounted after it ended. Facing Black feminists whom he respected, Dyson said he was not their enemy, but he accepted that to them, he had become a traitor. He hoped their bitter feelings would pass. They replied that the march reinforced every vicious stereotype about Black women. Black women and men needed to work together on the basis of shared, progressive, feminist principles. Dyson waited and waited for the memory of the Million Man March to fade.22 Progressive feminist principles were, in fact, axiomatic to him. Shortly after Dyson was grilled by Black feminists, he appeared on Oprah to discuss the film

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version of McMillan’s novel Waiting to Exhale, a story of four Black women bonding with each other over the trouble they had with the men in their lives. Dyson was expecting his usual Oprah experience—“Oprah was always fun”— when it turned out that Oprah had also invited a bitter critic of the film who claimed it was insulting to Black men and should be boycotted. Dyson rose to the occasion, pleading with defensive Black men to retire this trope. Toni Morrison, he recalled, had not victimized them, nor Alice Walker, Ntozake Shange, Michele Wallace, or now, Terry McMillan, even though all five women were castigated as man haters. Dyson said his sensitivity to the plight of Black men was amply documented; he discussed it “in every book I’ve written.” But the bashing of Black feminist writers was “mostly rubbish” and needed to end: “I think we’ve reached a limit with a particular kind of black male complaint.”23 He traded on his clerical status to say that the Black church needs a new social contract and a sex-positive theology of sexuality. Dyson observed that Black church worship is highly sensual, featuring a constant procession of swaying and grooving Black bodies; Black church preaching about sexuality is usually conservative and repressive, fixed on ridding the body of erotic thoughts; and the Black church has a long history of indulging sexual behavior it condemns in sermons, especially by Casanova preachers. It is too simple to say, he judged, that Black religion compensates for racial oppression, or that the displacement of Black sexual energy shaped what became the Black style of worship. But it is not too simple to say that the church’s combination of sensuality, repression, and outlet indulgence had outlived whatever function it once served. The sermons extol the importance of saving sex for marriage, which “hardly anyone does,” so guilty, silent, outlet sexuality prevails. The problem is the repressive ethic in the middle, a recipe for hypocrisy, sexism, teen pregnancy, body shaming, and antigay revulsion: “We’ve got to find a mean between sexual annihilation and erotic excess. Otherwise, the erotic practices of church members will continue to be stuck in silence and confusion.” Dyson said the problem far exceeds the Casanova pastor issue; he sealed the point with a long story about a church member’s attempt to seduce him. The same “erotic dishonesty” victimizes gay and lesbian Christians, Dyson observed, notably the gay soloist asked to sign “his theological death sentence” with a moving song that endorses the sermon.24 The old distinction between hating racism and hating racists passes too readily in the Black church to the distinction between hating what gays do and who they are. Dyson said the former distinction, unlike the latter one, is based on a real difference. To hate what gays and lesbians do sexually is to hate who they are, even if one steers clear, as he did, of reducing gay and lesbian identity to sexual acts. He drove to the verdict that the Black church needs to develop a

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theology of queerness: “If any group understands what it means to be thought of as queer, as strange, as unnatural, it’s black folk. A theology of queerness uses the raw material of black social alienation to build bridges between gay and lesbian and straight black church members. The deeply entrenched cultural and theological bias against gays and lesbians contradicts the love ethic at the heart of black Christianity. Virulent homophobia mars the ministry of the black church by forcing some of our leading lights into secret and often self-destructive sexual habits.” Dyson called his fellow Black clerics to extend to gays and lesbians the same incarnational ethic they routinely preach about imagining God as a hobo or a homeless person. The Black church still occupies the center of Black culture, he argued. Notwithstanding that most Black folk have never joined a church, the influence of the Black church extends far beyond its official membership. Dyson helped nudge the church in a queer-affirmative direction, always acknowledging the factor that made the biggest difference—the entry of Black women into the clergy.25 His book on King, I May Not Get There with You (2000), lifted him to West’s level of renown. Dyson played up several radical King tropes, especially democratic Socialism and King’s “enlightened version of separatism and Black Power.” He synthesized and extrapolated from recent scholarship about King’s sexual promiscuity, chauvinism, and plagiarized graduate papers, writing lengthy reflective excurses on these topics. Dyson stressed that he dearly loved and admired King—the most important influence in his life and the greatest American ever. He loved King’s social gospel, matchless oratory, and bravery: “He was the most courageous freedom fighter in our nation’s history, despite the mean and duplicitous treatment he was sometimes accorded by supposedly ‘blacker’ leaders.” Dyson hoped these assurances “would spare me the onslaught of the race protectors.” That was not to be. Dyson lamented that many Black readers could not tolerate criticism of any Black leader, especially King. He appreciated why race defenders existed, since he was usually counted as one of the best. Dyson enjoyed the praise he usually won for thrashing White conservatives on television. But his reflections on King’s promiscuity, bad treatment of women, and plagiarism were too much for many readers, and he doubled the offense by comparing King to Tupac Shakur and other rappers. It surprised Dyson how badly the latter theme went down. He learned a chilling lesson: “What struck me most about the vitriolic response to such a comparison is just how much revulsion there is to black youth in black communities.”26 Dyson detailed King’s strong preference for light-colored women, told stories about the extent of his promiscuity, and compared King to Notorious B.I.G. rapping in vulgar fashion about his woman-sharing hotel habits: “Not only were

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King’s sexual relations remarkably like hip-hop culture’s, but his views toward women were not much more enlightened. In fact, he was solidly chauvinistic.” He called King a “vigilant adulterer” and “desperate” hedonist, stressing that King claimed he fornicated for God—a claim exceeding mere rationalization, suggesting that King needed God’s sanction “in the lowest moment of moral alienation from his personal values.” Dyson argued that King’s emphasis on redemptive suffering and the impossibility of theodicy anticipated Notorious B.I.G., Tupac Shakur, Snoop Doggy Dogg, and Bone on the unavoidability of suffering and evil. Moralists moralize the problem of evil with pale maxims about good policing and reforming communities: “Hard-core rappers, by contrast, dismiss such remedies. . . . Paradoxically, the fact that rappers are struggling with suffering and evil proves that in fact they are connected to a moral tradition, one championed by King, that they have seemingly rejected.”27 Dyson recounted that King always called for the tape recorder to be turned off when he discussed democratic Socialism at SCLC meetings; he said if they ever quoted him, he would deny it. That was fine with the SCLC lieutenants, since most of them weren’t Socialists. Dyson tracked the legacy issue by comparing Young and Jackson, lamenting that Young became remarkably comfortable with his rich corporate friends, to the point of becoming a rich corporate type himself. It seemed to Dyson that Jackson retained his passion for economic justice despite stumping for Black capitalism and hanging out with Wall Street high rollers. Perhaps the Wall Street Project was quixotic, but Jackson deserved credit for trying to redistribute Wall Street wealth and power. Tavis Smiley featured Dyson’s book on his Black Entertainment Television program and reaped the angriest reaction he ever received, worse than his shows on the Klan. Dyson had moved back to Chicago and was teaching at DePaul. There he kept the flow of books coming, partly to change the subject. There was always a next book, or two, to ask about in his case, because Dyson is tirelessly prolific and engaged, relating disparate fields of intellectualism, culture, and politics to each other. In 2020, while Dyson taught at Georgetown University, a student charged that he made unwanted sexual advances toward her, and members of the university’s Black Survivors’ Coalition reported that they had experienced similar mistreatment from him. Georgetown launched an investigation that was still ongoing when Dyson denied the accusations, moved to Vanderbilt University as a University Distinguished Professor, and sought to put the controversy behind him. Dyson is habituated to controversy and has a long record of condemning sexual harassment, having been especially outspoken in the case of Bill Cosby, a record that helped him withstand the controversy at Vanderbilt.28

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G U E RRIL L A EX EGESIS OF TH E BIBLE: OBERY M. H EN DRIC KS JR.

The U.S. American invasion of Iraq in March 2003 was a colossal spectacle of imperial hubris and militarism rationalized by the administration of George W. Bush and its phony claims about keeping Americans safe. For two years I spoke every week against the invasion and occupation of Iraq. On May 18–19, 2004, the Clergy Leadership Network for National Leadership Change held its founding conference in Cleveland to organize a progressive religious campaign. This organization was the brainchild of Joan Brown Campbell, formerly general secretary of the National Council of Churches, and her former associates at the NCC. The clunky name reflected that the group sought to provide a progressive Christian counter to the Christian right in an election year. This outfit was not quite the Christian left, since it smacked too much of the NCC to be that. It was not affiliated with the Democratic Party, although the whole point was to oppose the Republican Party and prevent four more years of Bush as president. Nothing like this organization had existed during the catastrophic election of 2000, so Campbell launched a lecture tour vehicle, starting with a conference in Cleveland. How to worship ecumenically is a perennial problem for the Christian left. Campbell decided against the eclectic option and the Unitarian option, reasoning that the Christian left worships best when it relies on the Black church. The opening worship service featured Otis Moss Jr., a former King lieutenant and the pastor of Olivet Institutional Baptist Church in Cleveland, the largest Black church in Ohio. The opening program featured Pastor James Forbes of Riverside Church, who flashed his Pentecostal background more than he customarily did at Riverside. Born in Burgaw, North Carolina, in 1935 and raised in Goldsboro and Raleigh, North Carolina, Forbes joined the Union Theological Seminary faculty in 1975 as a professor of preaching and was installed in 1989 as the fifth senior minister of Riverside. He was a revered figure at Union and Riverside, renowned for his preaching eloquence and kindly dignity. By 2004 he was contemplating a post-Riverside national ministry. In Cleveland he gave a preview of it, declaring that the United States desperately needed a spiritual revival. Nothing less than a Great Awakening on the scale of the previous awakenings would save the United States from the corruption, materialism, and imperial militarism into which it had fallen. Meanwhile, at the level of prosaic politics, America needed new leadership.29 The next day there were four plenary speeches. Jesse Jackson gave a harrowing talk on how voter suppression works, where it was happening, and what

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needed to be done about it. U.S. Senator John Edwards, about to become the Democratic nominee for vice president, already played it safe, except when he talked about poverty. He was eloquent about the ravages of poverty. I gave a talk against imperial wars, and Obery Hendricks succeeded me, walking to the podium with a note card in one hand and a Greek New Testament in the other. My talk was very political for a while, turned Christian in the middle, and veered back to politics. Hendricks was the opposite of me. There was no prefatory banter whatsoever. He started off with a reading of Luke 4 that put Jesus front and center. The gospel tells us what the gospel is about, Hendricks said. It’s right there at the beginning of Jesus’s ministry. It’s good news for the poor, meant as a collective or class identity. The point of his ministry was to struggle for radical change, the only kind that makes a difference for the poor and oppressed. Jesus said that captives are to be released—political prisoners and people whose grinding poverty landed them in jail. Jesus advocated liberation for those oppressed by the crushing weight of empire. Hendricks admonished this crowd of ministers and lay leaders not to cite translations that softened the sense of crushing weight in the Greek text. Jesus ended by proclaiming the year of the Lord. So, the mission of Jesus was, and is, good news for the poor, struggling for radical change, freeing people from jail, opposing oppressive empire, and land reform. He went through Micah, Amos, and Matthew 25 in similar fashion, spelling out passionately what the Clergy Leadership Network needed to stand on: mishpat, justice; sadiqah, righteousness; and hesed, steadfast love. The principles of Jesus and biblical faith call for the establishment of just relationships and equal rights, the righteous fulfillment of the responsibilities of relationship, and the steadfast love of God and all others, especially the hungry and hurting. With that standard in place, Hendricks reviewed the past four years of Bush’s presidency. It was a tour de force on everything we had just lived through: the tax cuts for the rich; the campaign against the estate tax; the punitive cuts in assistance to low-income people ranging from Medicaid to housing assistance to school programs; and the invasion and occupation of Iraq. A gusher of books about American empire was just beginning in 2004. Hendricks chastised the celebrants of American empire as advocates of an evil vision. He granted that Bush was apparently sincere in his personal piety, so it seemed at first that Bush would escape scrutiny in this area. But near the end, Hendricks swung back to the personal issue; it turned out that his entire talk was geared to address the Christian church, not just the Christian left. He took Bush’s profession of Christian faith seriously enough to correct what was wrong in it. Bush signed 154 death warrants during his six years as governor of Texas,

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an all-time record for governors. He averaged fifteen minutes per case in considering whether to sign off on execution. Hendricks lingered in silence for a moment over this information—is that what Christian conscience looks like in power? There was also the sheer eagerness of Bush and his officials to smash into Iraq and set off wars with no end in sight, all on the basis of lies and phony evidence. Vice President Dick Cheney, symbolizing so much just by himself, took over the last part of this critique of the Bush administration. Hendricks said he shuddered to imagine a meaner and less Christian political leader than Cheney. The indictment of the Bush presidency was so comprehensive and hard-hitting, it was obvious that he had a book coming on this subject. The book version, The Politics of Jesus, came out two years later. The part we heard in Cleveland became a little bit of chapter 2 and the heart of chapter 6.30 Born in 1953, Hendricks was a latecomer to his theological career; The Politics of Jesus reflected on delaying factors in his life. His devout parents, Willie Beatrice Hendricks and Obery M. Hendricks Sr., raised him on the gentle Jesus of weekly Baptist religion. His father was a longtime church trustee, and his mother was so revered at church that she acquired the honored title of “Mother.” They taught him to love the gentle Jesus who never caused trouble to anyone except the greedy Pharisees and diabolical priests. Hendricks recalled, “They knew only a long-suffering Jesus who was concerned with the things of heaven.” This Jesus had no thoughts about justice, equality, or the oppression of the poor. Obery Sr. and Willie Beatrice Hendricks supported the civil rights movement, but they did not connect it to Jesus. As an adolescent in East Orange, Hendricks encountered old Garveyites at the barbershop and various exhorters, preachers, and nationalists on street corners, some capped with red fezzes with black tassels, all of whom talked about a Jesus who was militant in some way. But his parents assured him these unorthodox zealots did not know Jesus—a devastating dismissal. Anyone who does not know Jesus is not to be trusted and is bound for hell.31 Hendricks was caught between his attraction to the militant Jesus described by nationalists and his desire to be counted by his parents, his church, and God as a good Christian. In high school he was a follower of the Newark, New Jersey– born poet Amiri Baraka, formerly known as LeRoi Jones, who founded the Black Arts Movement as a vehicle of militant Black nationalism; later, in 1974, Baraka embraced a Maoist developing nations liberationist brand of Marxism. Hendricks enrolled at nearby Rutgers University in 1971, majored in political science, and confirmed to his parents that he had dropped Christianity. In 1977 he headed to Wall Street, working for two years as a registered representative for E. F. Hutton and Company. He read a book by Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic

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Gospels, that reraised his Jesus questions, albeit by vastly complicating what Hendricks imagined early Christianity was like. The book planted a seed; maybe he wasn’t done with Jesus. For four years Hendricks worked as an investment executive at Merrill Lynch and Company, followed by three years as an investment executive at Kidder, Peabody, and Company. Hendricks made a lot of money, and the sheer moral emptiness of it plagued him. In 1986 he left Wall Street to run the East Orange Economic Development Corporation, but that wasn’t the answer either. Princeton Theological Seminary was nearby. Hendricks earned a master of divinity degree at the seminary, working with New Testament scholar Christiaan Beker, who persuaded him that biblical scholarship is a form of ministry, and Early Christianity scholar Clarice Martin, who urged him to aim for a doctorate in Early Christianity. University of Massachusetts scholar Richard A. Horsley, in his book Jesus and the Spiral of Violence (1987), and independent scholar Ched Meyers, in a socioliterary interpretation of the Gospel of Mark titled Binding the Strong Man (1988), portrayed Jesus as the catalyst of a nonviolent revolution in the Roman imperial context of Jewish Palestine. Both books soon became classic additions to the genre of political hermeneutics pioneered by biblical scholar Norman Gottwald. Hendricks steeped himself in both works and befriended both authors; he also read West’s Prophesy Deliverance! For his doctorate he moved across the street to Princeton University, studying Early Christianity under Pagels and John Gager. Hendricks once told me, still with a glint of wonder, “Nothing I could do was too transgressive for them.” He wrote an article titled “Guerrilla Exegesis.” Friends implored him not to destroy his career before it started, Pagels and Gager cheered him on, and West declared delightedly: “You’re not just the cutting edge, you’re the knife!”32 Guerrilla exegesis became his trademark. He wrote a lot of it that pressed irreverent questions and rocketed around the internet: How could the demonic presence called “Legion” in Mark 5 not be the Roman military? How can Luke be more liberationist than Mark if Luke never condemns the social structures underlying the poverty and misery he highlights? Why do Bible translators insist on rendering Mark’s simple folk stories linked by “and then, and then” with stuffy Shakespearean words like “forthwith” and “thereupon”? Guerrilla exegesis, to Hendricks, was a way of using scholarly methods, not a method. It pressed the point that all methods express some ideology and serve it. From 1994 to 1997 he taught New Testament and Christian Origins at Drew University. From 1997 to 2001 he served as president of Payne Theological Seminary, risking an administration move before his books had begun. In 2002 he moved to New York Theological Seminary as professor of biblical interpretation.

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Hendricks’s late start in theological education yielded a late start in book scholarship after he agreed to run Payne Seminary. He was about to break through when he spoke at the conference in Cleveland. There was already a classic book bearing the same title, The Politics of Jesus (1972), by Mennonite theologian John Howard Yoder. Hendricks never mentioned Yoder, being influenced by Horsley, Meyers, and Walter Wink. Hendricks and Yoder were more different than alike, but the two books with the same title shared a profound insistence that the substantive norms of Christian ethics are in the gospel. Yoder said the history of modern Christianity is a trail of reasons not to make Jesus the norm of Christian ethics. Jesus taught an ethic of love perfectionism that offers no help for solving the problems of social ethics (Reinhold Niebuhr). Or, Jesus was a simple rural figure who personalized all ethical issues (Tolstoy). Or, Jesus was indifferent to social and political issues, caring only about individual salvation (evangelical revivalism). Or, Jesus was a radical monotheist who pointed people away from local and finite values (H. Richard Niebuhr). Or, Jesus entered the world to die for the sins of humankind, which lifted him beyond the category of teacher or exemplar (Catholic and Protestant orthodoxy). Yoder blasted these options as different ways of evading the actual norms in the gospel. Jesus is embarrassing, so we have to get around him.33 Yoder and Hendricks similarly described Luke 4 as the platform of Jesus’s teaching and interpreted Luke 6 as a reaffirmation of the platform. Yoder emphasized the pacifist Jesus of the peace church tradition. Hendricks was much more political in the ordinary democratic sense of the term, commending aspects of political liberalism that were out of play for Yoder. But there was a deep affinity between these two classic books on the politics of Jesus—the sheer willingness to struggle with the gospel and take seriously its claim to uphold ethical and political norms. One might call it the sheer audacity to do so—such as addressing an activist crowd in Cleveland armed with a Greek New Testament. In the book version, Hendricks said The Politics of Jesus was not a book about politics: “It is a book about the courageously loving humanity of Jesus of Nazareth.”34 Jesus was a political revolutionary who demanded “sweeping and comprehensive change in the political, social, and economic structures in his setting in life: colonized Israel.” Jesus wanted the Roman Empire and the ruling elites of colonized Israel to be swept from power, or “to conduct themselves very, very differently.” Not to get this about Jesus, Hendricks argued, is not to know him at all. Moreover, Jesus didn’t just dream of a new order. He acted strategically to realize the kingdom of God, a new order of transformed relationships and structures. Hendricks identified seven strategies that Jesus employed. The Lord’s

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Prayer treats the needs of the people as holy. The story in Mark 11 about Jesus entering the temple in Jerusalem illustrates giving voice to the voiceless. The parable of the vineyard in Matthew 20 exposes the workings of oppression. The story of the cleansing of the possessed Gerasene in Mark 5 calls the demon by name. The healing of the leper story in Mark 1 saves the anger of Jesus for the mistreatment of others. The eye-for-an-eye passage in Matthew 5 calls for nonretaliation. The loaves-and-fish story in John 6 illustrates the kingdom alternative. Hendricks moved back and forth between the gospels and the Bush record of denigrating the poor, catering to the rich, and defying the biblical opposition to empire. He stressed that Bush did all of it in the name of his evangelical faith: “Bush has played upon the heartfelt faith of millions of sincere Christians in order to mislead them into supporting an agenda of greed and uncaring and overt militarism that is condemned on virtually every page of the Gospels. In essence, George W. Bush and his political and religious cohorts have deceived the earnest Christians of America into endorsing what can only be called an anti-Gospel.”35 This was the verdict to which the book drove. The gospel tells us what the gospel is about, but Americans lived under the reign of an anti-gospel. Hendricks noted that King’s March on Washington speech was more radical than its Dream ending. King chastised White America for defaulting on its promises, and he scathingly rejected the appeal to gradualism—why were these tropes ignored in the many critiques of King’s “dreamy” oration? With an echo of Jackson, Hendricks said it is far more important to practice the politics of Jesus than to line up with political liberals against political conservatives. Hendricks didn’t mean that American political liberalism is bad. He supported every liberal achievement of the New Deal, the Fair Deal, and the Great Society. He commended Franklin Roosevelt’s Economic Bill of Rights of 1944, a quintessential liberal vision of economic justice for all, and Lyndon Johnson’s improvements on the New Deal and Fair Deal. Hendricks countered fashionable postmodern trashing of liberalism, detailing the many ways that political liberals made U.S. American life more equal, fair, and decent. But liberalism has three serious shortcomings, he said. Its emphasis on human freedom and liberation “can lead to self-indulgence.” It has a pronounced tendency to turn antireligious. Worst of all, liberals expend far too much energy fighting conservative policies, conservative principles, and conservatives. Hendricks could imagine a world in which sincere Christians of the left and right worked together—but first they had to be open to it.36 Jesse Jackson Jr., upon reading The Politics of Jesus, passed it to his father, who grasped that it explicated in scholarly fashion the biblical theology he

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preached, and even his argument about biblical faith as the moral center transcending liberal versus conservative politics. Jackson carried the book with him on his travels for years to come, grateful for its witness and scholarship. Hendricks came to regret that his signature book had no feminist or womanist critique, driven as it was by his interpretations of biblical texts, his critiques of the Bush administration, and the scholars he read. He knew that gender is always a fundamental category of analysis not to be neglected, a point that bell hooks conveyed in a Dyson-like profusion of books. BL A C K REL IGIOU S F EMINIS M: B EL L H OOKS A N D TRA CI WES T

Gloria Jean Watkins was born in 1952 in Hopkinsville, Kentucky. Hers was not a beautiful womanist story about being loved and nurtured by a wise mother and grandmother. She felt cared for by her parents, but not loved, in a family that mixed aggressive shaming and insults with affection, which confused and wounded her. Her father worked as a Post Office janitor and her mother as a maid. Both struggled to comprehend and control their brilliant, hurting, volatile, unhappy daughter. Watkins bridled at her father’s patriarchal rule and mood swings, both fearing and defying him. She had a closer relationship with her mother, but she described her family as dysfunctional. Her teachers in segregated schools, mostly single Black women, gave her role models of accomplishment but admonished against her penchant for “talking back.” At the age of ten she began to write searing poems, adopting her maternal greatgrandmother’s name, bell hooks, as a pseudonym. She later recalled that writing was how she carried out her desperate need to kill herself without having to die: “It was clearly the Gloria Jean of my tormented and anguished childhood that I wanted to be rid of, the girl who was always wrong, always punished, always subjected to some humiliation or other, always crying, the girl who was to end up in a mental institution because she could not be anything but crazy, or so they told her.” On one occasion she pressed a hot iron to her arm, imploring her parents and five siblings to leave her alone; she wore her scar as a brand “marking her madness.”37 Her brilliance marked her for college if she survived, but to her parents, any local college would do. They opposed her vehemently, especially her father, when Watkins won a scholarship to Stanford and accepted it. Stanford was even more foreign and bewildering than she had expected. Watkins barely survived, feeling impossibly isolated, unable to justify to herself her presence there. Various kinds of radical politics were prevalent on campus, yet she had White

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male professors who were unabashedly racist, sexist, and classist and others who would have been offended at being called racist or sexist but were both all the same. She took a Women’s Studies class with a leading White feminist scholar, Tillie Olsen, whose work focused on the silencing of women in Western literature. Watkins anguished at the complete absence of any mention of Black women. She confronted Olsen, who was remorseful, and the class, which resented Watkins for “spoiling their celebration, their ‘sisterhood,’ their ‘togetherness.’ ” She survived by working on a book about what was missing.38 Olsen’s remorse was completely unhelpful because Watkins was not looking for sympathy. She needed help with what was missing. Somehow, even in Women’s Studies, Black women did not matter; they had no history that qualified them for inclusion. She later recalled, “Attending such classes, I reached a very real point of desperation and urgency; I needed to know about black woman’s reality. I needed even to understand this feeling of difference and separation from white women peers.” Her manuscript was a response to the indignity of being rendered invisible. Her social reality as a Black woman made her different from her White male, White female, and Black male peers at Stanford, where Watkins met highly assimilated Black males who mystified her. She pored through the indexes of history and sociology textbooks looking for anything about Black women, finding almost nothing. She was nineteen years old when the first draft of Ain’t I a Woman reached five hundred sprawling pages of self-taught history and analysis: “The book emerged out of my longing for self-recovery, for education for critical consciousness—for a way of understanding black female experience that would liberate us from the colonizing mentality fostered in a racist, sexist context.”39 That put it in language she acquired in graduate school from Brazilian Christian socialist educator Paolo Freire, who fixed on Fanon-esque questions —What would liberationist anticolonial pedagogy be? How should education be conceived if it is not an instrument of colonization? These became burning questions to Watkins after she entered graduate school and anticipated her teaching career. As an undergraduate she had consumed the essays of Morrison and ransacked history books for clues about Black women. hooks was not political when she began to write Ain’t I a Woman. She was a lonely autodidactic Black female poet just trying not to drown. It took her seven years and many rewrites to finish the book. She worked for Bell Telephone after graduating from Stanford, tried to wrestle her unwieldy manuscript into shape, and got no encouragement from anyone. She tried to bond with exploited Black female coworkers, which deepened her discouragement: “I often felt an intense despair that was so overwhelming I really questioned how we could bear being alive in this society, how we could stay alive.”40

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It galled her that the literature on Black women celebrated strong superwomen, looking away from the suffering and oppression of Black women. Her pain at Bell drove her to graduate school, very unhappily. Watkins drifted from the University of Wisconsin to the University of Southern California to UC– Santa Cruz, studying English literature in departments where she never had a Black female teacher. She had one Black male professor at Stanford and one at USC, both of whom discouraged Black female students. She later recalled that she spent her entire graduate school career waiting for a discussion of critical pedagogy that never occurred; somehow graduate professors were not reflective about what they did every week in the classroom. She tried to take no courses from outright bigots, but that proved to be impossible: “It was often in the very areas of British and American literature where racism abounds in the texts studied that I would encounter racist individuals.” She found a godsend guide on the pedagogy question in the writings of Freire, who said exactly what she already believed: Education is never a neutral process. Education either integrates students into the dominant system, facilitating conformity to it, or is a practice of freedom that seeks to transform the system.41 Professors and classmates told Watkins repeatedly that she lacked “the proper demeanor of a graduate student.” Finally she stopped rewriting Ain’t I a Woman, sent it to a succession of publishers, and was rejected. She pushed it aside, concentrating on earning her doctorate at UC–Santa Cruz, “despite the prevalence of racism and sexism.” Her manuscript would have stayed in the drawer if not for three developments in 1980: White feminists began to talk about racism, hooks gave a bookstore talk in San Francisco that got a stormy reaction, and she learned at the bookstore that South End Press—a new left-wing publishing collective in Boston—was looking for manuscripts on race and feminism. At South End, the editors wanted the book, but they worried it was too angry. hooks said she wasn’t really angry; this was an issue of cultural difference distinguishing her intense Black culture expressiveness from the opaque indirectness of White culture. Ain’t I a Woman paid homage to the famous speech of Sojourner Truth in its title, underscoring Truth’s rhetorical question by dropping the question mark. It ranged over the impact of sexism on Black women during slavery, the denigration of Black women after slavery, Black male sexism, White feminist racism, and the politics of Black feminism. It skewered the toxic blend of Jim Crow racist and sexist stereotypes that demonized Black women for surviving. It protested that Black women were routinely marginalized in Black freedom movements and that White feminists reinforced the historic cultural stigmas put on Black women.42 hooks named names and talked turkey, angering many who did not appreciate being criticized. She ripped White lesbian feminist poet Adrienne Rich for

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lauding a nonexistent “strong anti-racist female tradition.” She rehearsed the story of nineteenth-century feminist racism and ran through the canon of modern White feminism from Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique to Barbara Berg’s The Remembered Gate to Zillah Eisenstein’s edited Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism. All perpetuated “racist ideology,” she charged, generalizing about American women entirely from the perspective of White women. hooks said an unspoken “force” allowed White feminists to ignore Black women without mentioning their own racial identity: “That force is racism. In a racially imperialist nation such as ours, it is the dominant race that reserves for itself the luxury of dismissing racial identity while the oppressed race is made daily aware of their racial identity.” She sympathized with Black feminists who joined separatist groups, but she said they were wrong, too; in fact, they allowed White racism to turn them into mirror-image reactionaries: “By creating segregated feminist groups, they both endorsed and perpetuated the very ‘racism’ they were supposedly attacking.” hooks lingered over the manifesto of the Combahee River Collective, charging that this Black lesbian separatist classic gave White feminists permission to care only about themselves and led Black women’s groups into political nowhere: “Many black women who had never participated in the women’s movement saw the formation of separate black groups as confirmation of their belief that no alliance could ever take place between black and white women.”43 That was a disaster for feminism, she argued. hooks pointed to Lorraine Bethel’s contention that White women were soft, privileged parasites living off White men and Black domestic workers. She disliked the trend among lesbian Black feminists to say that a real feminist cannot be heterosexual. Her draft delved into this issue, but the editors asked her not to go there, and she eliminated the entire section, except for one sentence stating that nothing good would come from attacking heterosexuality per se. hooks got furious replies from Cheryl Clarke, Barbara Smith, and other Black lesbian feminists claiming she insulted them without granting them the dignity of using the word lesbian. She regretted having deferred to her editors; at least her draft would have shown that she engaged with this issue seriously. Ain’t I a Woman drove to a plea for an interracial feminist movement that united against racism, sexism, and capitalism. The rebellious rhetoric of White feminism, hooks said, created an illusion of radicalism and militancy. Feminism needed to become radical by uniting against everything that feminists should oppose: “Women’s liberationists, white and black, will always be at odds with one another as long as our idea of liberation is based on having the power white men have. For that power denies unity, denies common connection, and is inherently divisive.” All feminists,

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she argued, must accept responsibility for abolishing the forces that divide women.44 Ain’t I a Woman was a sensational debut that opened career doors for hooks. It got many harsh reviews, some of which wounded her deeply. She said the hostile reviews nearly crushed her. The book version of her doctoral dissertation, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984), addressed the hostile reviews immediately, confessing that the attacks from Black feminists hurt most: “Some of the most outspoken black women active in feminist movement responded by trashing both it and me. While I expected serious, rigorous evaluation of my work, I was totally unprepared for the hostility and contempt shown me by women whom I did not and do not see as enemies.” hooks said she would not have been able to carry on had there been no positive response; later she recalled that it came mostly from readers outside the academy. Feminist Theory doubled down on her argument that all feminists need to band together to make feminism antiracist, antisexist, and anticapitalist. hooks decried that White feminism usually fit into capitalism with no problem, equating feminism with professional careers for White, middleclass women. It started with Friedan focusing on White suburban housewives “bored with leisure, with the home, with buying products.” The feminist mainstream still sounded like Friedan: “Racism abounds in the writings of white feminists, reinforcing white supremacy and negating the possibility that women will bond politically across racial and ethnic boundaries.”45 hooks denied that she said it to disparage “sisterhood is powerful” rhetoric; shaming White feminists out of aspiring to solidarity was the last thing she intended. “Sisterhood is powerful” was exactly the right idea, except for the racist and procapitalist ways that White feminists construed it. Feminist Theory revisited the issue of lesbian sexuality and her disagreements with Black feminist separatists. hooks said she was strongly pro-lesbian and that Clarke and others misread her. Her previous book had tried to make one point on this subject: “Feminism will never appeal to a mass-based group of women in our society who are heterosexual if they think that they will be looked down upon or seen as doing something wrong.” She had not meant to single out lesbian feminists for criticism, because other feminist groups also derided heterosexual relationships with men. hooks urged feminists not to condone any form of antilesbian prejudice or condemnation of heterosexuality: “As feminists, we must confront those women who do in fact believe that women with heterosexual preferences are either traitors or likely to be anti-lesbian. Condemnation of heterosexual practice has led women who desire sexual relationships with men to feel they cannot participate in feminist movement. They have gotten the message that to be ‘truly’ feminist is not to be heterosexual.”46

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It grieved her that when feminism went radical, it opted for some kind of separatism; meanwhile, White liberal feminists dominated what the media called feminism. It was not too late to build a radical feminist movement that approximated the sisterhood ideal. Feminism would fail if it did not forge an interracial united front to abolish racism, sexism, and capitalism: “Women must take the initiative and demonstrate the power of solidarity. Unless we can show that barriers separating women can be eliminated, that solidarity can exist, we cannot hope to change and transform society as a whole.” hooks built up to Freire’s theme that a liberationist movement must be infused with love and fired by it. Freire taught in Pedagogy of the Oppressed that domination reflects the pathology of love; the dominators become sadists and the dominated become masochists: “Because love is an act of courage, not of fear, love is commitment to others. No matter where the oppressed are found, the act of love is commitment to their cause—the cause of liberation.”47 Critics complained that hooks wrote too much and quoted Freire too much. She completed her Ph.D. in English literature at Santa Cruz in 1983, taught there in her early career, joined the Yale faculty in 1985, and moved to Oberlin College in 1988. Her three years at Yale were dramatic and scarring. Teaching in the English and African and Afro-American Studies Departments, she attracted large classes and took pride in confronting her students, but she also cultivated a feeling of personal informality, telling students to call her Gloria. Min Jin Lee, later an author, in 1987 a sophomore at Yale, said the temperature in the room seemed to change when Watkins entered “because everything felt so intense and crackling like the way the air can feel heavy before a long-awaited rain. It wasn’t just school then. No, I think, we were falling in love with thinking and imagining again.” Watkins and her writing self, hooks, deflated Yale’s selfcongratulatory pieties about itself. Yale president Benno Schmidt declared in his inaugural address of 1986 that Yale’s mission was to “preserve, disseminate, and advance knowledge through teaching and research.” That perfectly summarized what hooks rejected: “Again and again, academic freedom is evoked to deflect attention away from the ways knowledge is used to reinforce and perpetuate domination, away from the ways in which education is not a neutral process. Whenever this happens, the very idea of academic freedom loses its meaning and integrity.”48 Yale was obviously a bastion of privilege and elitism; what galled hooks was that Yale employed a superficial rhetoric of diversity and academic freedom to guard its privileges. It wasn’t just Yale; the academy as a whole is self-serving and conformist. hooks grieved at students who cared only about their prospective careers and at Black students who questioned whether blackness exists. Many

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believed that assimilating to the existing academy is the only way to succeed. She countered: “We must ask ourselves how it can be that many of us lack critical consciousness, have little or no understanding of the politics of race, deny that white supremacy threatens our existence and well-being, and act in complicity by internalizing racism and denigrating and devaluing blackness.” The logic of assimilation, she observed, rests on the White supremacist idea that eradicating blackness will allow Blacks to become White: “Of course, since we who are black can never be white, this very effort promotes and fosters serious psychological stress and even severe mental illness.” hooks grieved at the pain and confusion of her Black students at Yale. She told them that winning a perch in elite society is not worth killing themselves. She charged that Women’s Studies was becoming as careerist and elitist as the rest of the academy: “Feminist theory is rapidly becoming another sphere of academic elitism, wherein work that is linguistically convoluted, which draws on other such works, is deemed more intellectually sophisticated, in fact is deemed more theoretical.” Writing snooty, unintelligible articles in peer-reviewed journals, she chided, is not radical; it’s another version of becoming complicit in structures of domination.49 Embattled in her classes and lecture venues, Watkins wanted to be liked, but not enough to betray her liberationist commitments. The students knew her as hooks, anyway, before they entered her classes. She sympathized with students who thrilled at the feminist slogan that the personal is the political, remembering what it once meant to her. But Watkins pressed a critical question: What comes of beginning with yourself when your self is a product of sexist, capitalist, American, White supremacism? She cautioned that too many feminists reduced the political to themselves and their career aspirations. The 1960s feminists of Students for a Democratic Society had strong political convictions, but student feminists of the 1980s and 1990s mostly did not. The dominant culture and their own narcissism taught them to stick with the personal: “Then the self does not become that which one moves into to move beyond, or to connect with. It stays in place, the starting point from which one need never move.” Feminism cannot be transformative, she insisted, if it never becomes politicized.50 At Yale and later at Oberlin, she had to deal with select antagonistic colleagues who never grasped that she was not an exponent of identity politics. hooks plainly decried the separatist, individualistic, and narcissistic perils of identity politics, while affirming simultaneously that identity politics is right to roar for personal dignity and personality. Feminism, she argued, lost its way when it capitulated to capitalism. It had already happened when she came of age at Stanford: “Obsessive, narcissistic concern with ‘finding an identity’ was already a popular cultural preoccupation, one that deflected attention away

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from radical politics.” She exhorted students not to settle for capitalist success: “To challenge identity politics we must offer strategies of politicization that enlarge our conception of who we are, that intensify our sense of intersubjectivity, our relation to a collective reality. We do this by reemphasizing how history, political science, psychoanalysis, and diverse ways of knowing can be used to inform our ideas of self and identity.”51 That made her very much like West, who said the “major enemy of black survival in America” is nihilism, the lived experience of meaninglessness, hopelessness, “and (most important) lovelessness.” Many critics decried West’s emphasis on nihilism and the crisis of Black faith. hooks steadfastly supported him. “Nihilism is everywhere,” she said. It strikes deep into assimilated middleclass Blacks who feel a sense of loss and meaningless, cut off from themselves and their history: “These feelings of alienation and estrangement create suffering.” In 1991, hooks and West coauthored a dialogue book, Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life. She recounted a recent conference experience in which a fellow panelist, a privileged Black woman, mocked her emphasis on struggle while the audience cheered. hooks lamented that this speaker and the audience had no personal acquaintance with any justice movement. Thus, they did not know the joy of struggling for justice: “We must teach young Black folks to understand that struggle is process, that one moves from circumstances of difficulty and pain to awareness, joy, fulfillment.” She gave a personal example: “When I was here at Yale I felt that my labor was not appreciated. It was not clear that my work was having a meaningful impact. Yet I feel that impact today.”52 West lauded hooks for willingly paying the price for defying the selfperpetuating rules of the academy—braving the scorn of ensconced academics to reach a much larger public than the academy, calling out the “surreptitious self-loathing” that paralyzes much of the academy. He appreciated especially that she was an African American writer “without being an Afro-centric thinker,” grounding her work in Black life while refusing to conceive Black life in competitive relation to European or Euro-American life. Black U.S. American culture has a hybrid character, West observed. Since hooks was rooted in Black American life, “she feels no need to spend her energy fighting off White influences, extricating White elements, or teasing out only African sources for her thought.” hooks reflected in reply that she came of age at a “hot time” in the academy, when Women’s Studies was fresh and promising, and Black women demanded a place in it. It made her sad to see what came of academic feminism. She shifted away from it in reaction, rooting herself even more in Black life than she had intended when she began: “Feminist theory does not emerge

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as a discourse rooted in any kind of discussion of Blackness, so to some extent, Black women, like myself, who entered that discourse did not enter it through the door of gender, race, and class. We came to it in terms of gender alone and have been struggling ever since for recognition of race and class.”53 Her spiritual undergirding showed through in her early books, mostly between the lines. hooks said she survived her childhood only because she realized that life is not worth living without love. As a toddler, she was loved. In her preadolescence she lost the love of her family, no longer regarded as precious. Her parents conveyed their feeling that she was an unlovable burden to them. Living without love, hooks grieved through years of sadness and woundedness, struggling to survive, at least knowing what it is that she had lost. She wanted to go back, to recover the love she had lost. She was attracted to male partners who were emotionally wounded, only half-realizing that she chose them because they were incapable of vulnerable, honest, trusting, emotional intimacy. They wanted to be loved without giving love in return. She had the best sex with the worst ones, whom she later called “emotional terrorists, men who seduce and attract by giving you just what you feel your heart needs and then gradually or abruptly withholding it once they have gained your trust.” It took her many years of therapy to accept that she was trying to recover an unrecoverable first love, and the partners she chose were bad for her much as her parents had been, mixing care, affection, shaming, insults, neglect, and cruelty. hooks always thought she was ready to find new love, but in fact she was still mourning the love she had lost.54 Psychologist M. Scott Peck, in The Road Less Traveled (1978), defined love as “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” Peck said love is an act of will that is as it does, both as an intention and an action. Love is a nurturing choice, not an instinct. That seemed exactly right to hooks. She had never believed her parents when they described their harsh punishment of her as love. Peck helped her accept her own lifelong disbelief that love can coexist with abusive treatment. hooks would never find love if she did not accept that her parents had not loved her. Her mother was outraged that she spilled family secrets in public; hooks bore the outrage willingly, counting it as suffering toward a healing end. Peck described neurosis as the rejection of legitimate suffering, and the spiritual as the dimension of one’s core reality where mind, body, and spirit unite. hooks adopted these ideas, trying them out on lecture audiences that recoiled at the word “spiritual,” sometimes replying, “You don’t believe you have a self?” But that was bare minimum, and early in the process of her coming out as a spiritual person. hooks had a concept of spirituality as divine love. It was an echo of Saint

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Teresa of Avila praying that where Christ is, she wanted to be; what Christ suffers, she wanted to share; who Christ is, she wanted to be: crucified for love.55 Her later work stressed that there is a light of love in all living beings: “A culture that is dead to love can only be resurrected by spiritual awakening.” hooks had three guides on this theme: psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, Catholic mystical theologian Thomas Merton, and King. Fromm argued in his classic meditation, The Art of Loving, that the fundamental principles of capitalism and love are incompatible. Capitalism runs on selfishness, competition, and endless consumption, the antithesis of love. Commercial society crowds out the spiritual hunger that tells us we cannot be satisfied by buying more commodities. To hooks, the church failed from accommodating the values of capitalist culture, not from being too spiritual. Merton taught that human beings are made for communion and self-transcendence; we do not become truly human until we give ourselves to each other in love. hooks turned to Merton in the late 1970s, drawn to his emphasis on the practice of love as a means of spiritual fulfillment.56 King’s sermon collection Strength to Love (1963) and the ending of his Riverside Address were North Star texts to hooks. Strength to Love expounded King’s conviction that love divine is a spiritual force that sustains and holds together all life. The Riverside Address ended with King’s interfaith rendering of 1 John, expressing King’s “Hindu-Moslem-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief” that love is the key that unlocks the door to ultimate reality. hooks, a dualbelonging Christian and Buddhist, stressed that she first heard a theology of love in the Christian church, a counterword to the twisted message about love she absorbed in a dysfunctional family: “The mystical dimensions of Christian faith (the belief that we are all one, that love is all) presented to me as a child in the church were the space of redemption.” The biblical teaching that God is love and that faith is worthless without love sustained her as a youth. In graduate school, “striving to maintain a commitment to spiritual life in a world that did not value the spiritual,” she clutched the Christian love ethic like a life preserver. In her early career, hooks did not burden her secular lefty friends with the information that she went to church and maintained a Buddhist practice. It was her students at Yale, Oberlin, and, later, the City University of New York who gradually drew her out. They told her their lives were empty, hopeless, lonely, and loveless. She urged them to find a spiritual practice and give themselves to an ethic of love. It worked for her: “To return to love, to know perfect love, we surrender the will to power. It is this revelation that makes the scriptures on perfect love so prophetic and revolutionary for our times.”57 For several years, hooks told her lecture audiences she was looking for true love. Most people told her it doesn’t exist. The few who believed in it advised

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her not to look for it—if love is meant for you, it will find you. Watkins refused to believe it. On one occasion she saw her true love vividly in a dream; shortly afterward she met him at a conference. At dinner he gently let her down, telling her he was in a relationship. Watkins was puzzled at being led by the universe to this disappointment, but she was grateful for “a taste of true love.” Her audiences knew all this about her when they came to her lectures, often asking about her current romantic prospect. She generously played along, knowing that many were hoping for a happy ending in which she found true love with the right woman. As hooks grew older, audiences stopped asking, which was unsettling in its own way. She became more forthcoming that she was queerpas-gay. She had always been marked as queer, and pas is the right to precede, or a series of steps in dancing. hooks kept moving after transgendered people blew up the regnant categories and shifted the discussion.58 Yet her beginning never ceased to mark her distinctly; she began as a feminist and was always a feminist first, until her death in December 2021. In the academic world, hooks was an icon of cultural studies and a leading figure in the Black feminist tradition. In theological education, the womanist framework was and is so predominant that Black feminists have to justify why they are not womanists. Social ethicist Traci C. West does not allow her admiration of the womanist community to compromise her answer. Traci West studied under Harrison and Williams during their last years at Union, having come to Union from a childhood in Stamford, Connecticut, degrees from Yale University and Pacific School of Religion, and formative experiences with Black feminist icons. As a college student at Yale she sat in Michele Wallace’s living room and hung in “starry-eyed fashion” on Wallace’s every word. At Yale she belonged to a Black feminist group that cosponsored a speaking engagement by Angela Davis; West helped arrange bodyguard protection for Davis, who was twice in the 1980s the Communist Party’s candidate for vice president. At Pacific, West sat in an audience “spellbound” as Audre Lorde read her poems against U.S. imperialism. Later she worked at the Women’s Theological Center in Boston and carted boxes of Alice Walker’s Color Purple to a book party for Walker. West enrolled at Union in 1990, two years after Cannon put womanist ethics on the map with Black Womanist Ethics. The peer pressure to call herself a womanist was substantial at Union, where West took one of the first courses on womanist theology, taught by Williams. West treasured the womanist community for creating a vital space in the academy that privileges Black female subjectivity. But the problem of parochialism, she argued, is obvious in womanist writing. Womanism is an “exclusively black community-based tradition.” Both parts of this identity are limiting, and the

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womanist practice of telling a story pegged to Walker pushes aside the Black feminist pioneers whom West revered before she became a social ethicist.59 West took a second run at appreciation. She was deeply grateful for, and inspired by, “the womanist dedication to this canon building work, especially the drive to do ‘our own’ work that is directly relevant to ‘our own’ mothers, daughters, and lives in the church.” The womanist tradition is creative, validating, and space-claiming in ways much like the Black cultural nationalism of Ron Karenga, who founded Kwanzaa, and the Black feminism of Barbara Smith, who cofounded the Kitchen Table Press. But some of West’s commitments did not fit into the rubric of “ ‘our own’ womanist work by, for, and about black communities.” Her concept of ethical accountability extended beyond the Black community, and she drew on non-Black authors with no sense that she should apologize for it. Feminism, West observed, demands accountability to women’s lives across racial, ethnic, and national boundaries. It is a corrective to “cathartic declarations about a pristine ‘black women’s’ hermeneutic that cannot possibly be true.”60 She took a third run at appreciation. Womanist scholarship is all to be praised for its emphasis on redemptive self-love. It is a bulwark against malicious stereotypes of Black women, the mistreatment of Black women in Black churches, and being ignored by theologians and religious scholars. On her third run, the caveat was that womanists have a patchy record at best in speaking up for the rights of Black lesbians in the church and academy. West observed that the Black feminist icons who influenced her had a much stronger legacy on this subject. When they talked about self-love, they always affirmed women who loved other women sexually. The difference, West contended, is that Black feminists are not constrained by womanist communalism. The womanist emphasis on the wholeness of the Black community tends to restrain what womanists say in defense of gay sexuality. This was not a yes-or-no issue about belonging to the church. West is an ordained elder in the United Methodist Church and a former campus minister who chose to teach at a Methodist institution, Drew University School of Theology. The issue, to her, was about a feminist ethical commitment outranking a communal value. West’s first book, Wounds of the Spirit (1999), was about intimate violence against Black women. There were twenty pages of testimony gleaned from nonfiction literature followed by thirty pages of contemporary testimony from personal interviews that she had conducted. Much of it was excruciating; reading straight through the book was impossible. Some Black women were told by their church communities to put up with being raped or battered, “simply a hazard of being female.” Many had pastors who shied away from addressing the

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subject. In her book, which was her doctoral dissertation at Union, West cautiously registered her misgivings about the womanist commitment to Black communalism, stressing that many Black women are victimized by their religious communities: “For them, deep antagonisms toward church and community might be a consequence of the responses they received to their victimization.” Later she put it sharper, declaring that ranking Black communalism as highly as the wholeness of Black women is a nonstarter to her. West said the question of higher priority is often terribly real. There is always an argument to be made that pastors, officials, and scholars should not speak about the violence of Black men against Black women because it causes harm to the Black community. West emphatically opposed “maintaining silence about black male violence.” She did not say that womanists definitely hold a different view from her own. She knew where she stood, as a Black Christian feminist, whereas it was harder to be clear on womanist grounds.61 West told a story about a public lecture where a womanist speaker asked all the feminists to stand: “I proudly popped up, as did one other black woman and scores of white women.” A friend tugged at her to sit down: “We aren’t feminists, we’re womanists.” West refused to wait to stand with the womanists. Who was authorized to say that she was not a feminist? “When was this decision made and why?” If womanists were determined to enforce a consensus, she wrote, “how can they avoid the contradiction of circumscribing conformity and policing black womanhood while claiming to free it from the bondage of too few acceptable forms?” West rejected the “narrowing” tendency of womanist thought, pointing to its repeated conflation of feminism with whiteness. Perhaps the guardians of womanism were fine with “erasing the contributions of a generation of black feminist foremothers,” but she was not.62 G RO T E S QUE A ESTH ETIC S OF CREATIVE EXCHANGE: V ICTOR A N DERSO N

Victor Anderson, a figure too important to our story not to be mentioned several times already, shares Traci West’s concern about church conformity, except more intensely, having been saved by the church, abused by it, committed to it, and then, for much of his career, deeply estranged from it. He grew up traumatized in a patched-together family, getting a second chance through education and the church. He took a winding path to a career as a prominent social ethicist at Vanderbilt, developing an allergic reaction, by virtue of being traumatized and gay, to heroic renderings of Black church salvation, including womanist versions. Anderson was born in New York City in 1955, the youngest

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male among ten siblings. His mother, Evelyn Anderson, died of cancer when he was three years old, and his father, Frederick Anderson, died of a heart attack the following year. Anderson’s family was a mosaic of skin colors and languages; his mother had children with two partners before marrying Frederick Anderson. Anderson and his siblings became wards of New York State until Frederick Anderson’s parents adopted the five younger children, fathered by their only son. The older siblings remained in the Bronx, a bad deal they resented.63 Anderson’s grandfather was a light-colored native of Thomaston, Georgia, who was badly treated by the White and Black communities of Thomaston. Upon marrying a young Black woman from nearby Barnesville, he fled Georgia at the threat of being lynched. As Anderson put it, the whiteness of his grandfather’s blackness was offensive to White Georgians determined to keep their daughters “uncontaminated by that mulatto vermin.” Anderson’s grandfather joined the army, had his best years in it, and sent for his long-ago wife, Flora Anderson, after World War II ended; they resided in Englewood, South Side Chicago. They had settled into their empty-nest years, save for a grandson they adopted, when Anderson’s father died and the grandparents took on five more children. Anderson grew up lonely, sad, and fearful in Chicago, dreading his grandfather’s severity and the physical abuse he took from an older brother. Canaan Baptist Church was his refuge, where he thrived in the youth choir and discovered he was gay: “For many of us, the black churches of our youth were a grotesque surrogate world of anxiety and pleasure, love and loathing.” It was a place of furtive sexual trysts, severe preaching against gay sexuality, and older men who preyed on boys. Anderson had gay friends who did not survive the predatory behavior of Canaan’s organist. Much as Anderson loved the church— enough to become a minister—he also hated it.64 Theology fascinated him. Anderson peppered his pastor with theological questions: Would he see his parents in heaven? Would they remember him? Why did God create the devil? If God is love, why does he threaten people with hell? Anderson loved the buoyant singing and exuberant praying of Black worship. He devoured high school library books on the Renaissance, developing an aesthetic vocabulary. For college he went to Trinity Christian College in Chicago, graduating in 1982, and served as an associate pastor of a Baptist church before and during his college years. His next stop was Calvin Theological Seminary in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he earned two master’s degrees and won the Calvin College Minority Faculty Recruitment Fellowship for Graduate Studies. For two years he taught at Calvin College while ministering at a local Christian Reformed church. Anderson stewed over the secrets of his home, church, sexual life, and what he really believed. In 1988, a year before he

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resigned his ordination, he took the Calvin College fellowship to Princeton University, where he studied under Jeffrey Stout, Cornel West, Malcolm Diamond, and Victor Preller. A succession of fellowships helped him decide what he really believed. Anderson won an Andrew Mellon scholarship and took a one-year exchange fellowship to Yale University, where he studied American religious philosophy under John E. Smith, found a formative intellectual influence in Josiah Royce, and decided that Stout and West were right about pragmatism. Anderson refined his own pragmatism in a dissertation on the pragmatism of D. C. Macintosh, H. Richard Niebuhr, and James M. Gustafson, completing his doctorate at Princeton in 1992. Meanwhile, he stewed over Black theology, fixing on Cone’s contention in Black Theology and Black Power that the reality of Black people is “their life of suffering and humiliation,” which “must be the point of departure for all Godtalk which seeks to be black-talk.” Anderson bristled at “suffering,” “humiliation,” “must,” and “all.” Black experience is fundamentally suffering and humiliation? There is no other point of departure for true theology? Cone interpreted experience as a cultural signifier in which culture achieves a totalizing effect. Anderson’s training at Princeton gave him language for his refutation.65 At Princeton he caught the high tide of the postmodern renewal of American pragmatism. Richard Rorty, who taught philosophy at Princeton for twenty-one years before moving in 1982 to a humanities chair at the University of Virginia, was the prophet of the new pragmatism. In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) and Consequences of Pragmatism (1982), Rorty rejected the entire Western philosophical quest of secure foundations, advocating a revision of Deweyan pragmatism that drops Dewey’s optimism about human progress. Theology, Rorty argued, is too enmeshed in Western “Philosophy” (his term for foundationalism generally) to have a viable future. The great traditions of philosophy, including the Platonist wellspring of theology, are no longer useful. Therefore, theology is finished, too. Rorty, Stout, West, and Harvard philosopher Hilary Putnam fashioned “neo-pragmatism” as a postanalytic rejection of the positivist dichotomy between facts and values. Stout and West developed it into a social philosophy, and Anderson followed their lead with a constructive twist, contending that theology needs a strong dose of neo-pragmatism to regain its academic identity and public relevance.66 If the neo-pragmatists were right that Western onto-theology is bankrupt, the racial essentialism of Black theology and Black identity politics fares no better. That was Anderson’s thesis as he began his academic career at Vanderbilt, teaching religious ethics at the divinity school and African American Studies at the college of arts and sciences. His first book, Beyond Ontological Blackness

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(1995), employed a Foucauldian genealogy of Western racial discourse that turned the dismantling tools of poststructuralist theory on modern representations of blackness. Anderson argued that the essentialized blackness of Black theology and identity politics is a mirror image of the colonialist othering that gave birth to modern racism in the eighteenth century. Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment colonizers mythologized their world-conquering genius, inventing whiteness as a superior category, which gave birth to a reactive defense called blackness.67 Anderson called for a pragmatic, postmodern, culturally fluid alternative to Black essentialism. Instead of reifying race as though it actually exists independent of historical particularities and subjective intentions, Black intellectuals should break free of the totalizing, unresolved, binary dialectics of slavery and freedom, Black and White, insider and outsider, and struggle and survival. He charged that Black theology held back the flourishing of African Americans, very much like identity politics generally. It cannot be liberating to treat race as something real, central, defining, and consuming. Cone described a simple, fixed, singular, unchanging Black experience. Anderson countered that an aesthetic category, the grotesque, better conveys the ambiguity of Black experience. The grotesque is two contrasting sensibilities clashing, and more—something akin to Nietzsche’s description of the Dionysian personality, a continually selftransforming self, characterized fundamentally by disharmony. Anderson was describing his own experience without saying so; his first book avoided any autobiographical allusion. He made his early mark as an exponent of the grotesque subversion of the conformist Black cult of the heroic: “When black identities are justified primarily in terms of ontological blackness, too many of the differences that genuinely signify black life and culture recede into the background. Too often the heroically representational qualities of racial genius, the cult of black masculinity, and its often brutal forms of conformity gain ascendancy.”68 Anderson delineated three phases of Black theology, all of which ontologized blackness, attributing qualities of being to race. All three forms, he protested, featured “racial apologetics” fostering a conformist cult of heroism. Cone essentialized the Black revolutionary consciousness of the 1960s, claiming that only Black people share in the Black experience. Anderson said this claim is plainly absurd. It masked the fact that Cone was alienated from the evangelical faith of the Black churches and that Cone’s early work depended on White theologians he otherwise condemned. More important, Cone’s conception of blackness as the unitary experience of suffering and rebellion against whiteness made White racism the ground and necessary condition of blackness. Blackness was created and defined by its enemy, whiteness; there is no Black

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theology or “new black being” without it. Anderson declared: “In this way, black theology renders whiteness identifiable with what is of ultimate concern. . . . When race is made total, then ontological blackness is idolatrous.”69 Hopkins and Peter Paris, the leading advocates of phase two, took an Afrocentric narrative turn. Anderson described it as another consuming reification of blackness, albeit in a milder voice. Phase three, the womanism of Grant, Cannon, and Williams, did the same thing in a different way, heralding a tradition of surviving, sassy female figures—“the mirror image of black masculinity.” Anderson rated womanists higher on two counts—for emphasizing the complexity of Black women’s experience and commendably supporting gays and lesbians. He judged, however, that being faithful to the Black church and supporting gay sexuality do not go together. Anderson had already been harmed by this impossibility, which put him on the side of Cheryl Sanders, albeit from the opposite standpoint. He urged womanists to decide between being loyal to the church and holding an enlightened view of sexuality, and to stop ontologizing blackness. Womanists, he lamented, held fast to the “aporias of ontological blackness,” upholding “the black faith” as an ideological totality and identity claim, which contradicted their “transcending openings” regarding sexuality. He implored them to break free from the victimized consciousness of identity politics: “If suffering and resistance continue to have a totalizing function in womanist theological discourse as they do in classical black theology and Afrocentric theologies, on what does transcendence depend? At what point do thriving and flourishing enter the equation of suffering and resistance? An existence that is bound existentially only by the dimensions of struggle and resistance or survival, it seems to me, constitutes a less than fulfilling human existence.”70 He was a Thurman-Murray progressive who cared about the flourishing of all people. Anderson said the oppression that many Black people suffer is trivialized by “the absurdity that anyone who is black is also oppressed.” He built on Cornel West’s threefold typology of Black political leaders—race-effacing managers, race-identifying protest leaders, and race-transcending prophets. The prophets advocate racial justice, while transcending race as a category of personal identity and collective loyalty. Chicago Mayor Harold Washington exemplified category three, and Jackson never quite climbed into it. West similarly sorted Black intellectuals into race-distancing elitists, race-embracing rebels, and race-transcending prophets, contending that the prophets fuse the life of the mind with struggles for justice with no regard for intellectual fashions or their own careers. Baldwin was the model race-transcending prophet, and West said Toni Morrison was the only contemporary example.71

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Anderson agreed about Morrison, but named a few more—Dyson, hooks, Gates, Reed, Houston Baker Jr., historian Darlene Clark Hine, social critic Joe Wood, and West. hooks qualified for declaring that she opposed “essentialist notions, epistemologies, habits of being, concrete class locations, and radical political commitments.” Anderson liked Wood for declaring: “I am a multitude of names, masks, community memberships. Denying this is tyranny—‘race’ is not my only state. . . . I make new communities all the time.” Anderson said he refused to be bound by a binary racial dialectic, a form of tyranny that closes off any possibility of cultural transcendence: “Talk about liberation becomes hard to justify where freedom appears as nothing more than defiant self-assertion of a revolutionary racial consciousness that requires for its legitimacy the opposition of white racism. . . . The identification of ontological blackness with ultimate concern leaves black theology without the hope of cultural transcendence from the blackness that whiteness created.”72 He did not blame the founders of Black theology for adopting an essentialist ideology, but he contended it was no longer effective toward its best ends. The defining dialectic of race must be transcended in the direction of the good that is common to all people, the flourishing of every person. Thurman and King called it the beloved community; West called it radical democracy; Anderson called it cultural fulfillment, stressing the subverting power of the grotesque. The aesthetic critique of culture displaces the heroic by the grotesque, breaking the grip of ontological blackness and the heterosexist moralism of the Black church. Anderson was repulsed by the Million Man March, the epitome of moralistic heroism and heterosexist antifeminist chauvinism. He described it as “abominations of a million men.” To lionize Black manliness, strength, self-determination, and racial loyalty while ignoring the sins of homophobia, he argued, is repugnant: “No gay or lesbian representative addressed the crowds, no public affirmation of black homosexual love was commended, and no overt sign of acceptance was shown, except the silence of a million men. That is an abomination.” Anderson did not ask Black religious leaders to justify gay and lesbian sexuality with theological arguments; he said it is enough to stand for civil rights, human rights, justice, and peace. The church must speak against “the plight of black gays and lesbians who suffer abuse, murder, and alienation within the community that gave them life and regards them as abominations.” To do that, the church needs a new cultural politics of difference that shows “how African Americans can take each other in public life with aesthetic sensibilities that resist eclipsing individuality under collectivity.”73 Cone’s ontologizing of race demanded closer readings than Anderson offered, since Cone was nearly always careful to ontologize blackness only in a cultural

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sense of the term reflecting qualities of Black being-in-the-world. He believed that his twofold concept of “Black” as a cultural group and a symbol of oppression obtained just enough leeway to be able to say that he ontologized blackness only in a good way. Anderson entered the field by insisting that there is no good way to ontologize blackness. Beyond Ontological Blackness was the herald of a coming profusion of postmodern, ethical, and queer critiques wielding poststructuralist tools. Willie James Jennings, then teaching at Duke Divinity School, called the book a “groundbreaking” analysis that represented “a moment of clarity and adjustment in Afro-American philosophical and religious thought.” J. Deotis Roberts protested that Cone was not the sole founder of Black theology—“it was more of a movement than a project”—and that Anderson wrongly portrayed it as a monolith. Still, Roberts was deeply impressed: “Anderson has dealt a devastating blow against classical African-American life and thought. But will he be able to build on the ruins he has heaped on us?” Others suggested that Anderson-style cultural criticism might take Black theology in a new direction; Hopkins, despite being criticized by Anderson as a captive of ontological blackness, noted that his own work increasingly drew on postmodern cultural criticism.74 To most readers the book came from nowhere. Anderson was unknown, and he didn’t tell readers who he was, aside from his graduating from Princeton and teaching at Vanderbilt. It took him many years to accept that declaring his subject position is not optional in the postmodern academy. Beyond Ontological Blackness featured his regulative ideals of cultural fulfillment and transcendence with little hint of his theological position. Anderson reasoned that the goods and ends that contribute to human flourishing are relevant in every field of cultural studies, not merely religion. Thus, his critique of Black essentialism was not the place for his theology. His next book, Pragmatic Theology (1998), put forward his position, followed his teachers, and defied them. The teacher of Anderson’s teachers, Rorty, contended that theology is no longer a relevant form of academic or public discourse because it accounts for human actions in trans-historical terms. Theology is as dead as metaphysics, and for the same reasons. Theologians use a priori logic and believe in an order “beyond time and chance.” Modern consciousness disarmed theology of its selfjustifying pretensions, stripping the world of its transhistorical meanings, which left theologians with no real work. Modern theology does not exist, notwithstanding that theologians still exist; Rorty didn’t have to read any of them to know they were kidding themselves. The secular, historical, practical outlook of pragmatism, he argued, is the best replacement for discourses presuming to answer ultimate questions. By this standard, Rorty sadly judged that James was not a good pragmatist, since he defended the religious hypothesis that the best

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things are eternal. James got stuck in the second of Dewey’s three stages of religious consciousness, retaining the idea of something nonhuman that is on the side of human beings, a betrayal of pragmatism.75 In theory, Stout was a more promising conversation partner than Rorty for theologians because Stout argued that theology is still the “other” that secular moral philosophy must replace. All claims about transhistorical moral truths are fictional reifications of subjective states, just as the old humanist and positivist debunkers of theology contended. But Stout recognized that the old debunkers were often reactionary, not to mention ill-mannered. The new pragmatism had to transcend its oppositional relationship to theology.76 On this basis, Stout sought dialogues with theological and religious ethicists, but said he could not find any worth debating. According to Stout, theological liberals appropriated the themes, catchphrases, and methods of other disciplines and intellectual trends, but they lacked a distinctively theological message. Other theologians spoke with greater religious authority on the basis of a common religious identity, but they failed the tests of public warrant and relevance, repeating the dogmas of their groups. On Stout’s telling, no contemporary theologian offered distinctively religious thought that was intellectually warranted and publicly relevant.77 Anderson replied that his teacher was more polemical than he presumed. By Stout’s rules, theologians were not allowed to play if they did not leave their dogmas behind, but as soon as they took the field they were dismissed for abandoning theology. If they opted for a universal foundation, they were hopelessly backward; if they played without foundations, they had nothing to say that is not better said by others. Academic theology could not win if disciplinary distinctiveness is the fundamental rule of the game. Stout identified real theology, normatively, with classical theism, and functionally, with the communication of sacred doctrine. Anderson said Stout was welcome to his prejudices, but not to dictate what theology is. Theology functions variably as the doctrine of God, the matrix of historical processes directed toward a consummate telos, or the cultural identity of a community. On either of the latter two approaches it is perfectly plausible for theologians to have fruitful conversations with pragmatists. Instead of prizing the distinctiveness of a past orthodoxy, theologians should pragmatically reconstruct theology.78 His model was the early Chicago school of Shailer Mathews, Gerald Birney Smith, and Edward Scribner Ames. The Chicago founders understood that theological languages are social constructions, and they conceived their ideas as constructions of a reality present in experience that facilitates personal and social transformation. As such, Anderson argued, the reality that theology stud-

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ies is sacred: “The Chicago theologians did not see it as their task to duplicate and transmit the inherited materials of doctrine and theology that once shaped American higher learning. They saw an opportunity for a pragmatic theology among the human studies. They saw their task as discovering the vital significance of religious life and disclosing the ways that theological ideas contribute to the advancement of human fulfillment.”79 No less stringently than James and Dewey, the Chicago theologians described reality as the totality of undifferentiated matrices of experience. Human selfconsciousness occurs in a socializing process and is based on the awareness of others in experience. Rorty and Stout claimed that the framing issue between pragmatism and theology is incommensurability; Anderson stressed that the Chicago theologians were like James and Dewey, and unlike Rorty and Stout, on this point. Theology is a distinct interpretation of a shared human reality; the pragmatic test is whether it advances human understanding and flourishing. Naturalism and supernaturalism are incompatible, but pragmatism and good theology are very compatible. To Anderson, the Chicago school up through Henry Nelson Wieman got this right, before it lapsed into Whiteheadian metaphysics. Modern theology must be a form of pragmatic secularization. The key to modern theology is its naturalism, not its incommensurable relation to pragmatism.80 Naturalism, too, is compatible with theology. Anderson cautioned against equating pragmatism with naturalism, because pragmatism is only one of the critical discourses that are compatible with naturalism. Materialistic naturalists deny that the physical evolutionary processes and necessities of life exhibit any unitary intentions or end. Philosophical naturalists ascribe to the evolutionary processes and necessities a formal unity construed as fortune or fate. Pragmatic naturalists view reality as thoroughly processive and open to novelty. Anderson’s pragmatic naturalism pictured a radically interdependent and changing web of concrete entities, featuring the concepts of process, openness, and relation. He viewed the processes, necessities, values, and meanings of the world as circumscribed by the dynamic interrelation of all things to each other—a worldview compatible with belief in religious meaning. Pragmatic religious naturalism interprets religious symbols primarily in moral and expressive terms, leaving a role for theology as the interpretation of religious experience.81 That reduced theology and social ethics to value studies, an old complaint against the Chicago school that Anderson heard from students for whom theological ideas must be more than aesthetic or moral; otherwise, they were done with divinity school. Pragmatic naturalism left them feeling empty. But Anderson could be religious only on these terms, embracing the critical ethos of the academy,

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minimizing conflicts between theology and other disciplines, and making room for the explanation—not merely description—of religious experience. Anderson’s pragmatic naturalism orients theology and social ethics toward the flourishing of life, underwriting a metaphysic of finitude and transcendence conceived as limits to action and the experience of transformation. Put differently, on his terms, pragmatic naturalism is the metaphysical aspect of pragmatism. Anderson’s concept of God is an echo of the Chicago school: “God is conceptually disclosed as that structure of experience that gives meaning and value to the whole of experience, because it transcends every particular experience in a unity of experience.” Just as reality is the undifferentiated totality of experience, the divine symbolizes the unity of reality. Pragmatically, “God” is a symbol for the totality of meaning and value.82 To say that the early Chicago school theologians developed the best public theology is not to claim that they were the best public theologians. Anderson concurred with Cornel West that King and Reinhold Niebuhr were America’s foremost public theologians. Both used theological categories in their critiques of American society, recognized the moral limits of human beings, and struggled to advance the common good. Anderson signed on for all three, not being the kind of poststructuralist who dismisses the idea of the common good. Admittedly, he allowed, the common good smacks of ideological totalitarianism, Eurocentric domination, and God, but struggling for the best idea of it is indispensable to social ethics and the moral good itself. The conflicted, diverse moral culture of contemporary North American life ought to be common to all: “This is the only moral culture that we have in North America. It is our moral habitat both for philosophical and for theological reflection.”83 He said it as an advocate of denigrated peoples: “I admit that conflicts between gays and lesbians with the dominant heterosexual mainstream, bilingual advocates versus English only, family values versus homosexual unions, blacks versus white separatists and their paramilitary ideologies all seem to render our democratic form of life fragile, perhaps even fragmented.” The Deweyan task of attending to the common good is especially difficult if one is a member of an excluded group. Anderson, however, refused to resign himself to radical incommensurability or cynicism. The search for the common good is never settled and always ethically imperative.84 He could not be a Black theologian “if it meant bracketing the grotesqueries, the unresolved ambiguities, of black life for a picture of black experience defined by the blackness that whiteness created.” Anderson refused to suppress the worlds of difference that make Black experience more than a life of struggle, suffering, humiliation, resistance, and survival. Neither did he accept the claim

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that he could not be a liberationist if he espoused pragmatism and liberal theology. Some students found it confusing that he called himself a Black theologian; didn’t he erase blackness as a category? Anderson reasoned that race is a deep symbol in the sense of the term described by his Vanderbilt theological colleague Edward Farley. Beauty, reality, rights, nature, freedom, community, and justice are deep symbols—words of power that guide and constrain human beings in negotiating with life. A deep symbol is so basic to living that one feels it to be a priori, or is tempted to regard it as such. But all deep symbols are historical constructs that express the historical determinacy of given communities. Farley doubted that race and nation should be counted as deep symbols because both divide human beings from each other and have a history of genocidal violence. Anderson sympathized with this verdict, but countered that for African Americans, “any suggestion of bracketing these symbols is a cognitive feat near unimaginable.” Race is “a grotesquely ambiguous symbol”—powerful, relative, protean, and deep.85 For ten years Anderson pondered his theology of African American religious experience, prodded by his friend Pinn to write it out. In Creative Exchange (2008), Anderson framed his argument by explicating his affinities (substantial) and disagreements (few but crucial) with Pinn and Thurman. Pinn lamented that William Jones and Delores Williams made late moves that got God off the hook. Jones limited what God could do and Williams limited God’s responsibility to the sphere of survival. Pinn argued that to be rid of the baleful idea of redemptive suffering, we must get rid of God. Black liberation theology is not liberating if it leaves in place a divine ruler who oppresses Black people by requiring their redemptive suffering as a condition of liberating them from oppression. Being liberated and finding something of value in Black suffering are diametrically opposed ideas. The early Cone, Pinn contended, was more right than he realized when he declared that if God is not for Black people and against White racists, “then God is a murderer, and we had better kill God.”86 Anderson replied that redemptive suffering is not necessarily a theological symbol, and its substantive elements are not derived benefits of suffering. Pinn and Williams treated redemptive suffering as a causal claim: If one experiences unmerited suffering, some good is likely or certain to follow from it. The idea of redemptive suffering adds to the oppression of Black people by valorizing suffering itself. Anderson agreed only to a point, faulting Pinn for sweeping too categorically. Basic capacities for faith, courage, love, endurance, forgiveness, and other virtues are unleashed by suffering. These virtues are not direct causal effects of suffering. They are emergent potentialities in the creative exchanges that human subjects experience with suffering and evil. Redemption is an economic sign

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about acts of buying back that can be rendered theologically; it is not inherently theological. If one recognizes, Anderson argued, that redemptive suffering occurs in all manner of creative exchanges and contexts, Pinn’s either-or about killing off God to remove the theological sanction for redemptive suffering loses much of its ethical force.87 He also said yes and no to Thurman. Anderson prized Thurman’s ethical personalism, crediting Thurman with helping him clarify what he most cares about, but he rejected the idealistic epistemology underlying Thurman’s thought, which reflected Thurman’s yearning to be lifted about the natural plane. Thurman wrote about a creative encounter between a personal-subjectself and the divine personality in whom all personal subjects have their being. He drew on personalist philosopher Edgar Brightman and mystical theologian Rufus Jones in reasoning that personality is the key to all knowing and reality itself. Anderson cited Brightman and theologian Albert C. Knudson on personal idealism, not quite catching the differences between Brightman and Knudson that Thurman incorporated.88 The Brightman stream of personal idealism was neo-Hegelian, expounding a process metaphysics of radical temporality. The Knudson stream was neoKantian, expounding a doctrine of the religious a priori and retaining a nontemporal idea of God. Brightman fashioned a dynamic interreligious panentheism, describing the self as a complex personal unity within which sensing, willing, feeling, desiring, remembering, and reasoning take place. He pushed temporality as far as possible without losing the self; Thurman, putting it stronger than Brightman, said, “There remains a private, personal world which I claim as uniquely my own.” Anderson rightly observed that to Brightman, the self was the condition of the possibility of mind itself, including all its powers and activities such as thinking, reasoning, judging, and valuing. Thurman invoked this idea throughout his career. Anderson moved straight from this point to Knudson, stressing that Thurman embraced Knudson’s idea of the religious a priori—that religion is woven into the structure of the human mind. Knudson and Thurman invoked the religious a priori as a religious analogue to the Kantian categories of understanding. Just as Kant’s transcendental categories explained the possibility of experience, the religious a priori explained the possibility of religious experience.89 The Chicago school sought to sweep away the entire Kantian and postKantian theological tradition of appealing to transcendental categories. Anderson negotiates his deepest disagreement with Thurman on this point. Thurman was a mystical idealist who believed in the a priority of intuited religious experience. He leaned on James’s distinction between acquaintance knowledge and knowledge

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about, arguing that acquaintance knowledge is immediate, but not purely immediate, since pure immediacy is impossible. There is no personal self that is not substantiated by mediating structures of the individual’s lifeworld in society. Anderson, noting that Thurman ruled out pure immediacy, contended that Thurman must have known better than to believe in immediate intuitions and a personal self, despite what he said. Thus, Thurman developed the idea of a total self, arguing that in religious experience, “the individual is himself totally involved. This involvement includes the context of meanings, experiences, and values by which the persona is defined. He does not come into the experience de novo, but rather does the individual come into the Presence of God with the smell of life upon him.” Thurman’s idea of the total self is a phenomenological reduction, and the religious a priori, apperceived as the not-self, is grasped as a synoptic intuition. Thurman said the mind apprehends the whole such that the experience is beyond or inclusive of the discursive: “It is not other than the discursive, but somehow it is inclusive of the discursive.”90 Anderson appreciates why Thurman strained to establish a critical epistemology of subjectivity based on speculative categories. Thurman was deeply attached to the post-Kantian project of Schleiermacher, Jones, and the personal idealists. No other intellectual tradition made sense of his mystical-Christianinterreligious experience, which claimed him long before he had intellectual language for it. But Anderson is not for shoring it up. For postmodern religious thinkers like himself, he explains, steeped in Heidegger and Wittgenstein, affirmative claims about speculative reason, spiritual intuitions, and a priori conditions of the mind or consciousness are out of bounds: “For such religious thinkers, our biosocial, historical, and linguistic existence is the only condition we have for assessing meaning and value at all levels, but especially the meaning and value of individuals as persons. Thurman’s epistemic foundations are simply out of sync with those of us who embrace the saturated and situated self as the given of meaning and value without the postulation of an unencumbered self or a ‘My-self’ that is preliminary to the disclosures of the world.” The world is disenchanted, as the Chicago theologians recognized. Credible theologizing begins with this recognition. To save the social, ethical, and interreligious parts of Thurman that still matter, theologians should study religious experience in the pragmatic, empiricist, naturalistic fashion that the Chicago school pioneered before it lost its nerve and opted for Whiteheadian metaphysics.91 Anderson’s legacy in Black theology is distinctly de-essentializing, beginning with his critiques of heteronormative masculinity and reactive blackness, which made him a distinctly important conversation partner to theologians and social ethicists of wave-two and wave-three womanism. He shares the methodological

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concerns of wave two and the postmodern individuality of wave three. Three ways of framing the womanist tradition emerged in the twenty-first century that register different ideas about where womanism is going, or should go. All are variations on the feminist practice of distinguishing the wave-one feminism of the suffrage movement from the wave-two rebirth of feminism in the 1960s and 1970s from the wave-three feminism that stopped appealing to the universality of an oppressed female subject and experience. In womanism, the frames are much tighter, starting with Walker.92 M I NI NG TH E M OTH ERL ODE: STACEY FLOY D-THOMAS A N D WAV E- TWO WOMANIS M

The simplest womanist frame is chronological, assigning Grant, Cannon, and Williams to the first generation; Douglas, Cheryl A. Kirk-Duggan, and Karen Baker-Fletcher to the second generation; and those who entered the field after the turn of the century to the third generation. Two other frames make claims about a different kind of womanism emerging at the turn of the century. One describes the entire womanist tradition of the 1980s and 1990s as a firstgeneration enterprise founded on the telling of a womanist story, and the second generation, sometimes called the second wave, as an enterprise that developed a womanist method and grounded the womanist tradition in academic disciplines. In some versions of this rendering, there is no third wave; there is only the variable playing out of the open-ended second wave in the second, third, and fourth generations. Advocates of third-wave womanism, however, contend that wave three is very real and important: the second wave builds on an assumed womanist structure, while the third wave emphasizes its postmodern multiplicity, hybridity, and individualism. If one adopts a three-wave frame, as I do, one cannot employ the terms “generation” and “wave” interchangeably, since proponents of the third wave touted its existence shortly after the second-wave argument was introduced. Stacey Floyd-Thomas was, and is, the major proponent of the defining second-wave argument: womanism needs a method that nonwomanists can employ. At first, in 2006, she placed herself in the second generation of the womanist community, categorizing the entire womanist tradition preceding her work as a first-generation enterprise operating on the basis of confessional criticism. In this telling, womanism named the refusal by Black women to transcend their social location, claiming their blackness and femaleness by telling their stories, an approach characterizing the womanist movement as a whole until Floyd-Thomas wrote the inaugural work of the second generation, Mining

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the Motherlode: Methods in Womanist Ethics (2006). Later the same year, Floyd-Thomas revised how she framed the genealogy, placing herself in the third generation, but making the same argument about confessional criticism.93 Born in 1969 in Corpus Christi, Texas, to Charles and Lillian Floyd, she was raised, as she says, “as a Navy brat in Barbara Jordan’s Texas, not Barbara Bush’s Texas.” In her middle-class Black Baptist youth, Stacey Floyd was puzzled by the contempt of White Christians for Black Christians and by her congregation’s spurning of poor Blacks and the unchurched. Racism explained a great deal, but not everything. She asked why Christians behaved as though God doesn’t exist. This question yielded a career in social ethics. In 1991 she earned her undergraduate degree at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, and two years later earned a master’s degree in theology at Emory. Floyd enrolled in the doctoral program at Temple University, where she studied social ethics under Cannon and married Juan M. Thomas, a fellow Temple University graduate student. Juan Floyd-Thomas subsequently earned a doctorate in history at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1997 he and Stacey Floyd-Thomas founded the Black Religious Studies Scholars Group, soon an important venue of Black religious scholarship. Floyd-Thomas earned her doctorate at Temple in 1998 and began her teaching career at Texas Christian University. A member of the American Baptist Church and Progressive National Baptist Convention, she radiated from the beginning a passion for teaching, winning several awards, and undertook administrative tasks in academic and interchurch organizations.94 The question that haunted her childhood translated into a social ethical project about the complex relationships between norms and actions. Why do people act as they do, even in violation of their expressed norms and beliefs? FloydThomas built on Cannon’s account of the situation faced by Black women. White Christian ethics wrongly presumes that all people are moral agents possessing the power and autonomy to exercise freedom in relating to God and others. Embodied Black women are denied their humanity precisely in their embodiment. Floyd-Thomas noted that White Christian ethicists are not alone in failing to see the problem. The leading theory of justice of the modern age, formulated by John Rawls, purports to conceive what justice is for human beings by setting aside everything human that is particular, contextual, and embodied— “an absurdity.” Floyd-Thomas pointed to everyday Black women who share the confusion of Rawls, constantly mystified by White Christians who claim to see the humanity in everyone while ignoring the ravages of gender, race, and class privilege all around them. Floyd-Thomas recognized, however, that her thirdgeneration situation differed significantly from the one that Cannon faced when she made this argument at Union. The reference to “everyday black women”

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cued a subtle shift in her argument, shaping her reframing of the womanist question: “How can we de-center ourselves from our privileged positions of comfort while simultaneously placing at the center of our thoughts and actions the constructive envisioning offered to us by the most marginalized amongst us?”95 Her privileged standing as a tenured professor mattered. Moreover, FloydThomas did not believe that replacing a White patriarchal divinity with a Black, female, queer divinity is the solution. What matters is to see “in every being’s race, gender, sex, and class a voice and presence of God that needs to be heard and seen.” The moral crisis of identity wracking the church and American society, she warned, is the prospect and fear “that we may worship a strange god who is blind to gender, class, and color and neither shares nor sees our interests, concerns, and thoughts.” The mission of womanist ethics is to decolonize the spirit of Christian moral agency. Negatively, it is to repudiate bankrupt racist theologies. Positively, it is to overcome the various social, cultural, physical, and geographical forms of alienation “that have invariably kept black women from realizing a positive sense of religious awareness within themselves as well as in the company of others.” There must be a way to redeem normative theological ethics. Floyd-Thomas proposed to do it by developing interdisciplinary methods that depict, analyze, and solve crises in ethical formation. The original problem of womanist ethics remained to be solved, developing a method that harvests the “motherlodes of moral wisdom spoken by black women.” Cannon was right to make a claim of epistemological privilege for Black women’s wisdom, and to claim that such wisdom is relevant to all oppressed people. What remained is to assemble the tenets, methods, and resources of womanist Christian ethics.96 Mining the Motherlode reformulated Walker’s four tenets as radical subjectivity, traditional communalism, redemptive self-love, and critical engagement. Womanist radical subjectivity features the recurring intergenerational interaction between maturing girls and adult women. Traditional communalism teaches an ethic of accountability to the Black community and privileges the culture of Black women. Redemptive self-love is the imperative of loving one’s self regardless. Critical engagement is the obligation of Black women to interrogate their world at the intersection of their oppressions. Floyd-Thomas employed the methods of literary analysis, sociological analysis, and historiography, as well as practical engagement strategies for each method, to elucidate the three virtues described by Cannon and attack sites of oppression. Each of the methods correlates with a specific constellation of resources and a specific tenet. Literary analysis of Black women’s literature draws on autobiography and fiction (radical subjectivity), informs womanist virtue ethics (redemptive self-

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love), and funds diasporic analyses of Black women fostering inclusivity and freedom (traditional communalism). The sociology of Black liberation employs case studies (traditional communalism), tracks the “dance of redemption” in which patterns shape values that inform contexts (redemptive self-love), and employs an emancipatory meta-ethnography that gleans the ethical insights in Black women’s testimonies (radical subjectivity). Historiography mines the slave narratives, biographies, and autobiographies and merges history with ethics. Womanist wisdom, Floyd-Thomas argued, is not just a muse for Black people. It “fills in the gaps” left by White feminist ethics and androcentric forms of Black theology.97 But that put it in utilitarian fashion—womanist ethics is valuable for being useful. Floyd-Thomas cautioned that however useful it might prove to be for others, womanist ethics must hold fast to Walker’s admonition—the souls that Black women save may be their own. Womanism is an essential ethic of right relationships, not an oppositional discourse. It builds on repressed resources to survey the range of human agency, studies the various contexts of human relationship, and analyzes the effects of human actions. It rejects the fixation of conventional normative ethics with right and wrong in order to ascertain “the just and the unjust in personal, social, and divine wills.” By mining the moral resources of radical subjectivity, traditional communalism, redemptive selflove, and critical engagement, womanists not only excavate the moral wisdom of Black women “but also may change ourselves in the process.”98 This ambitious argument made a landmark interpretation of how womanist ethical thinking operates and a major contribution to holding together the womanist community. Floyd-Thomas was simultaneously conservative and innovative, mining the traditions and resources of all that preceded her, while contending that womanist theory needed to enter a new phase, and was doing so; the era of confession had passed. Womanism began as a definition, it developed as a movement, and now it was an epistemology that broadened the scope of religious discourse in the academy. Floyd-Thomas described the womanist revolution in Religious Studies as a “touchstone for liberation studies in religion” and for the interdisciplinary discourses in the academy that study liberation. For many, she observed, it is something more, rising to the level of a normative ethical standard, “the measure by which justice is critiqued.”99 On this account, Walker’s spiritual humanism greatly helped the womanist tradition move beyond the Protestant and Catholic voices that dominated womanism for twenty years, enabling womanists to pursue interfaith dialogues with African American Muslims, scholars and adherents of African-derived religions, and humanists, and to embrace African and Afro-Caribbean influences. Floyd-Thomas

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stressed that she carefully retained Walker’s humanism in reformulating the womanist tenets. In 2006, when she published Mining the Motherlode and her reader on womanism, Deeper Shades of Purple, Floyd-Thomas stressed that reaching beyond inherited Protestant and Catholic traditions was not merely an aspiration. It was a womanist reality radiating “deeper shades of purple.” Her reader employed the four tenets as organizing headings, validating her claim that interfaith dialogues had begun. Religious historian Debra Mubashshir Majeed, under the category of radical subjectivity, wrote about womanists encountering Islam. Religious historian Dianne M. Stewart, under traditional communalism, reflected on Caribbean immigrants of African descent negotiating the boundaries of place, race, class, and religion in the United States. Women’s Studies scholar Shani Settles, under redemptive self-love, wrote that the womanist encounter with African-derived religions, especially Osun, was just beginning. Social ethicist Melanie L. Harris, under critical engagement, observed that Walker defined her spirituality quite precisely in the late 1990s, coming out as a pagan who worships the earth as God. If the founder of womanism was a pagan, womanism should welcome Harris’s humanism and be less reflexively Christian.100 Cannon argued that womanism has always been affirming, generous, relational, and open-ended—go ahead and revise it, but please don’t exaggerate its deficiencies. Deeper Shades of Purple opened with her cry of the heart about the rude treatment of womanists in the academy. Douglas said the most important thing about womanism is the epistemological privilege it grants to everyday Black women, which yields an affirming and defining commitment to dialogue. She urged womanists to resist the agendas of the academy: “The primary focus of our work is black church women. The integrity of womanist work depends on such a focus.” Straying too far into interdisciplinary discussions that occur only in the academy would be ruinous to womanism: “We must continue to remain involved in the lives of ordinary black women in the church and in community organizations and groups.” Theologian Karen Baker-Fletcher described herself as an “Alice Walker womanist” with an affinity for Thurmanstyle ecumenism. Walker’s definition, “never intended to be confining,” still worked perfectly well for Baker-Fletcher, elucidating cosmological and social principles with a compelling lyricism, much like Thurman.101 Theologian Diana L. Hayes eliminated Walker’s first tenet about a womanist being a Black feminist or feminist of color. Hayes had never been a feminist, she resisted Whites who tried to appropriate womanism, and she believed that womanism works better by cutting the cord with feminism, dissociating it from the White feminist story and White appropriators. A womanist, she argued, “is a female African American Christian theologian.” To Hayes, this specifically

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Christian and African American definition was suitably large and definite. It acknowledged that the religious basis of the existing womanist community is overwhelmingly Christian, and it affirmed that womanists stand on their own as Black Christians, with no dependence on feminism: “I believe that it is long past time that we of African ancestry in these United States and elsewhere in the African Diaspora, name and claim ourselves as the unique individuals we are without having to resort to placing color before a term that has already been defined and overdefined.”102 Deeper Shades of Purple luminously made an argument and portrayed the field. The entire history, scope, and regnant debates of the womanist tradition were represented, especially current debates about its horizon and trajectory. Floyd-Thomas astutely organized the discussion under her reformulation of the Walker tenets without repeating her Motherlode prescriptive argument. Mining the Motherlode was the normative argument that womanism works best as an essential discourse about being in right relationship. Deeper Shades depicted the state of the field from a wave-two standpoint, interpreting womanism broadly as a new way of knowing. In both works she stressed that womanism is not an oppositional discourse that competes for victories: “I am convinced of the need to avoid the field being marginalized as viable for exploration only by black women. In light of the groundbreaking work done by first-generation womanists, it is now important to unearth these epistemological treasures so that students and scholars of all backgrounds can do womanism even if they cannot be womanists.” Floyd-Thomas epitomizes the wave-two agenda of establishing a normative womanist discourse and developing a method for interdisciplinary discourse. She did it so well that very few people told her she got it wrong. If developing a method for an established discourse is the project, she made a superb contribution. Some womanists, however, did not share her sense of what was needed. Floyd-Thomas had barely outlined her project when others began to say that wave three had come.103 P O S T M O D E RN IN DIV IDU A L ITY: M O NICA A. COLEMAN A N D WAV E- TH REE WOMANIS M

Monica A. Coleman was, and is, the tribune of wave three. As a graduate student she was ineffably grateful, steeped in Black feminism and womanism, to not know what it feels like to lack role models. The founding womanists were her godmothers: “They mothered me into the academic study of God.” But in 2006, entering the academic job market, she protested that she had to be a womanist to be hired. It wasn’t enough to assure search committees that she could

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teach womanist theology. Coleman felt caught between Black feminism and womanism. Being more individualistic, postmodern, and political than the womanist founders, she could be a womanist only on wave-three terms: “When I read Walker’s definition, I feel at home, but the trajectory of womanist religious scholarship has left me in a house without enough furniture.”104 Coleman had a womanist grandmother story centered on her maternal grandmother, a Baptist deacon in Washington, DC. She grew up believing that Washington and DC were different cities. Black people lived in DC, where Coleman spent summers with her nurturing grandmother, and White people lived in Washington. In the summers she felt happy, supported, smart, and blessed with playmate cousins. The rest of the year she lived fearfully in a tense home in Jackson, Michigan, the only child of a barely hanging-on mother and an angry, volatile, alcoholic father. Her mother, Pauline A. Bigby, sadly coped with a bad marriage; her father, Allen M. Coleman, was a graduate of Howard University who believed he was a good father. Coleman was raised to be a dutiful AME Church girl, but she stopped believing in God at age thirteen, when her grandmother died of cancer. What sort of God would take away the sunny part of her life, leaving her alone with her parents? Falling into her first bout with depression, Coleman found a boyfriend-confidant, telling him what her desperate sadness felt like until her father prohibited any further contact. Allen Coleman regarded his daughter as inexplicably ungrateful and sullen. Her depression grew worse, and she took refuge in piano playing, an isolated activity in which the depression worsened in secret from the world.105 Coleman won a scholarship to a prep school in Brighton, Michigan, and pretended to be happy. Her personality was naturally ebullient, so the mask didn’t show. Meanwhile she pondered whether not wanting to live is the same thing as being suicidal, since she definitely didn’t want to live. Coleman blamed her father for it, her mother for capitulating to him, and God for taking her grandmother, until her mother ended the marriage during Coleman’s junior year. Coleman reconciled with her mother and God, brushing off her therapist’s caution that she was still depressed. Depression followed her in 1991 to Harvard, which Coleman chose for admitting type A overachievers like herself. She joined the Harvard chapter of Campus Crusade for Christ, where Coleman liked the White evangelical songs about loving Jesus and being asked about her relationship with God. She worshipped at the local AME church as an ordained elder. Majoring in Afro-American Studies, she thrilled at studying under Henry Louis Gates. Coleman’s father had loved Black history as a student, while spurning literature. He and Coleman’s mother pleaded that Afro-American Studies has no career track; couldn’t she major in economics? Coleman

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immersed herself in Hurston, Morrison, Walker, Octavia Butler, and Toni Cade Bambara. She loved the work and seemed to be doing fine, aside from a nagging inability to sleep and a tendency to keep to herself. From Harvard she proceeded to Vanderbilt Divinity School, which Coleman chose for being Methodist and because Renita Weems taught homiletics there. She commenced a relationship with a sensitive, musical, former Vanderbilt student who was on his way to graduate study at Harvard. This boyfriend, the best one she thought she had ever had, surreptitiously read her journal, learned her secrets, and raped her. She struggled not to crash or flunk out. Coleman lingered over the words of Yahweh through Jeremiah: “For the hurt of the daughter of my people I am hurt. I am mourning; astonishment has taken hold of me.” She found a bit of comfort in the thought that God cried at her pain. God was with her, hurting, in her pain. This was not the God to whom she had prayed in the AME church and Campus Crusade: “This was some new God,” her first glimpse of “the only God I could believe in.” Coleman joined a group of rape survivors in Nashville, told Weems what had happened to her, and gradually told all her professors, finding compassionate care at each stop. She read books about surviving rape and learned she was doing no worse than normal. After six months she reported the rape to the police, and her parents exploded at her: Everyone will know! Why did you do that? Going to the police will make it worse! Coleman shuddered to imagine how it could get worse, since all her days were bad. Even her parents worried only about themselves; Coleman regretted telling them. She took a ministerial internship at the local Metropolitan church, fitting in with variously hurting people, many of them gay or lesbian. There she launched the Dinah Project in 1997, initially for her own healing. Coleman named it after the woman raped in Genesis 34, reaching out to survivors of sexual abuse: “Dinah was the only ministry I could do because rape was the only thing happening in my life.”106 The Dinah Project mushroomed into a full-time ministry of conferences, networking, and public speaking. As the project grew, Coleman talked constantly about rape. She fell in love with a young minister, grateful it was still possible, and finished her program at Vanderbilt, taking a preaching course on suffering and evil that assigned a book on process theology. She had barely heard of Alfred North Whitehead or the school of process theology based on his thought. Coleman felt drawn to its vision of God as an ordering structure in the process of creativity, feeling this was a God she could still profess: “I knew this was my calling. I wasn’t called to pastor or visit the sick or preach every Sunday. I wasn’t called to help the homeless or feed the hungry. Dinah was my calling.”

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Her ministry was based on her struggle to reclaim a believable faith. Coleman realized that her new romantic partner, an evangelical, would not be able to share it with her; the only divinity that was real to her was not his evangelical God. She ended the relationship and expanded the Dinah Project.107 She joined a West African dance ensemble and began to feel God again. Coleman danced to Sweet Honey in the Rock, wrapped her head in white cloth in Yoruba style, and swathed her entire body in white cloth as a symbol of walking death. She taught classes at Tennessee State University wrapped entirely in white, explaining that she was being initiated into something new. Three years after her rape, Coleman organized a public ritual to memorialize the person who had died when she was raped. She delivered a eulogy, declaring that she could not be that person again and was bidding farewell. Five months later a former classmate at Vanderbilt invited Coleman to a lecture by process theologian Marjorie Suchocki, who taught at Claremont School of Theology in Claremont, California. Suchocki expounded the Whiteheadian vision that everything is constantly changing. In each moment we become something new, constantly reborn in a life of perpetual perishing. God interacts with us as we change, calling us to new ways of being, luring us toward the flourishing of life. Coleman was transfixed, enthralled that Suchocki was describing her experience of dying, being reborn, feeling God in it, and finding a call through the Dinah Project: “I liked this theology that says that change is normal and that God is with me in it. This theology made sense for my life and the lives of the other survivors I knew.”108 Suchocki urged Coleman to Claremont, the epicenter of process theology. Enrolling in the doctoral program at Claremont, Coleman tried to work with the rape crisis center in nearby Los Angeles, but it required volunteers to work the crisis hotline, a nonstarter for her. She found a West African dance studio, but collapsed from severe anemia. At Harvard she had taken the required philosophy course, which centered on Plato and Kant, which “kicked my ass.” At Vanderbilt she had read interesting books authored by her teachers—Weems, Anderson, Peter C. Hodgson, and Sallie McFague. At Claremont she was supposed to read Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Kant, Schleiermacher, Hegel, Harnack, and Troeltsch, all to work up to Whitehead. Coleman had not considered that the process theology she liked was based on a metaphysical system grounded in the history of Western philosophy. There was no getting to Whitehead without learning Plato, Aristotle, and Kant. There was no getting to process theology without also learning Schleiermacher, Hegel, and Troeltsch. Coleman was stunned that trying to read such fare had become her life. At Harvard she had vowed, defeated by Plato and Kant, “never to read that crap

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again. Yet there I was. Two feet in. Just so I could learn more about process theology.”109 She hated her life at Claremont, a daily misery of philosophical reading, writing, and classes: “If I understood half of what I read at the end of each day, I considered it a victory.” Everything that had sustained her in Nashville was gone—dancing, Black friends, ministry, Dinah Project speaking, organizing: “I realized what happened to me in Nashville. I did not just teach and preach and organize. I had become a teacher, minister, and community advocate. That was who I was. But not anymore. In California, I was a student. A student who read all day. It made me sick, literally.” She grew violently ill, spent weeks shuffling in and out of health clinics, and called for her mother, “who stopped her life for six weeks to save mine.”110 Coleman had stitched her own safety net in Nashville, binding herself to people and practices that warded off the depression monster. In Claremont she was bereft of the safety net and reduced to Kant and Whitehead. She worked with a therapist, Lisa Phillips Schmid, who reconstructed her depression pattern: outbreaks at thirteen, fifteen, eighteen, twenty-one to twenty-three, and now, twenty-six. It helped to have a diagnosis: severe, recurrent, major depression with anxiety, “a name for my personal hell.” Coleman applied for an exemption from Claremont’s residency requirement; Suchocki helped her get one, telling her it was better to muddle through than to drop out. Coleman moved to Atlanta and consumed books on depression, which painted a bleak future for her, but she kept reading them anyway. She joined a weekly support group modeled on Alcoholics Anonymous, where people treated their diagnoses like addictions, naming them in clinical fashion.111 A book on bipolar depression, specifically the section on bipolar II, caught Coleman’s attention by describing her perfectly—hypomania, rapid speech, jumps from one idea to another, severe depressive lows, personable, high-functioning, professionally successful. She called Schmid, who confirmed that she had tagged Coleman as bipolar II. It was a revelation to her. The books on bipolar depression described bouts of superhuman mania that were foreign to Coleman. Bipolar II was her condition and fate. Coleman said she might not have survived her doctoral program had she not been driven by guilt and determination to reward the Fund for Theological Education and the Ford Foundation for investing in her education. Years later, upon achieving tenure at Claremont in 2011, she reported that she came closest to killing herself during her first year of doctoral study. Her mental and physical health “was severely compromised for most of my doctoral program and through the majority of my pre-tenure academic career.” Her vitae registered her success at writing the

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books and articles that are required for tenure: “But there is nowhere on the page to tell the story about the life of my mind.”112 In 2004 she completed a dissertation titled “Walking in the Whirlwind: A Whiteheadian-Womanist Soteriology.” It announced Coleman’s intention to relate Whiteheadian metaphysics and womanist theology to each other: “These two fields have several common strands that make them natural partners.” She said it was novel to bring these discourses together, but it shouldn’t be: “When they come together, they strengthen each other’s weaknesses and offer a theology that opens up a wider range of options than they have done independent of one another.” The book version, Making a Way Out of No Way: A Womanist Theology (2008), was much more personal, conveying Coleman’s struggle to find a relevant faith and theologize it without leaving behind “my grandmother’s tenacious black Baptist faith.”113 The book began with a story from Coleman’s Nashville years. She said she had needed a postmodern version of womanist theology during the time she worked on the Dinah Project. She found her way to a West African dance group and felt God in the dancing. A friend in the group told her, “I don’t know how this works, but it makes me feel whole.” That rang true to Coleman, and was not enough. Most people, she reflected, default to a functional theology that works for them when it really matters. A functional theology is not driven by logical consistency: “It’s the rock-bottom faith we cling to at two o’clock in the morning when we can’t sleep.” But what was the theology she really believed? What theology should she preach next Sunday? Coleman wrote, “I needed a religious perspective that would hold the truths of women who variously prayed at Jummah on Fridays, preached on Sunday mornings, and danced in egbe on Saturdays. I wanted to find a way to talk about the one thing that some of us found in Jesus, others in submission to Allah, and still others in divination and órísá worship.” She needed a religious worldview that made sense of “the power of the cultural and personal past as instructive for living in the present and into the future.” Assembling the components of a postmodern womanist theology was her project.114 Coleman surveyed womanist theologies of salvation, describing Grant on salvation as emancipation for Black women, Douglas on the Black Christ, Williams on the ministerial mission of Jesus, Terrell on the sacramental witness of Jesus on the cross, and Baker-Fletcher on the ecological dimension of salvation as God’s care for the natural world. She delineated four components of her ruling theme, “making a way out of no way,” which includes God’s presentation of unforeseen possibilities; human agency; the goals of justice, survival, and flourishing; and a challenge to the existing order. Womanist salvation, Coleman

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argued, is always, and rightly, about making a way out of no way: “It weaves the past, future, and possibilities offered by God into decisions that lead to survival, quality of life, and liberation for black women.” But Coleman criticized womanist theologians for assuming a too-high Christology, failing to distinguish between Jesus, Christ, and God. The womanist practice of avoiding classic Christological distinctions has the conservative upshot of conflating God with Jesus, making womanist theology exclusively Christian, not open to interfaith theologizing. Coleman observed that Baker-Fletcher was the only womanist theologian to incorporate African religious elements into her theology of salvation, and even Baker-Fletcher did not explain how womanists should learn from the ancestors.115 This was the pivot of Coleman’s plunge into Whiteheadian process metaphysics. Process thought is defined by its metaphysical claim that becoming is more elemental than being because reality is fundamentally temporal and creative. Broadly speaking, it includes all theologies and philosophies that conceptualize becoming, event, and relatedness as fundamental categories of understanding. Whitehead argued that the basic units of nature have experiential features. The irreducible constitution of the things that make up the universe is their experience; they are moments of feeling. Actual entities are experiencing subjects that realize some value and pass out of existence in the process of being succeeded by similar entities or occasions. Individuals do not have feelings; we become through feeling. The subject emerges by feeling its way into being; thus, in Whiteheadian theory, every self is a complex unity of feeling that emerges in response to one’s feelings of the world.116 Whitehead’s system offers a picture of a divinely influenced universe oriented toward beauty and the intensification of experience in which the universe demonstrates an inherent tendency toward increasing complexity, self-organization, and the production of emergent wholes that are more than the sum of their parts. From a commonsense standpoint, the world consists of material things that endure in space and time, while events are occurrences that happen to things or that things experience. In the Whiteheadian view, events are the fundamental things, the immanent movement of creativity itself. God constantly absorbs the passing world and retains its variety in the immediacy and final unity of God’s everlasting present. God is in process with creation as the lure for feeling and creative transformation, the eternal urge of desire that lures us to make creative, life-enhancing choices. Coleman argued that this scheme is surprisingly congenial to womanist sensibilities. It provides a philosophical undergirding for womanist religious affirmations and is open to multiple religious worldviews, not just Christianity: “I offer

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process metaphysics as a postmodern theological framework that addresses the challenges that today’s context poses to a constructive womanist theology. As a philosophical metaphysics, process thought offers a religious perspective that describes how the world works with specific views of God and human agency.” Coleman adopted David Ray Griffin’s claim that Whiteheadian organicism should be designated as a type of postmodernism, not a foundationalist discourse. Whitehead, like Hegel, expounded a theodicy of God salvaging what can be salvaged from history. Coleman loved process theodicy before she understood how it fit into Whitehead’s system. Her dissertation was the fruit of her graduate school determination to apply Whitehead’s system to womanist theology.117 Whitehead’s primer on religion, Religion in the Making (1926), described evil as suffering, loss, and the feeling that accompanies loss: “The common character of all evil is that its realization in fact involves that there is some concurrent realization of a purpose toward elimination.” His metaphysical system, Process and Reality (1929), put it vividly: “The ultimate evil in the temporal world is deeper than any specific evil. It lies in the fact that the past fades, that time is a perpetual perishing. Objectification involves elimination.” Evil is something built into the world, the losses that come from the process of becoming and the feelings caused by loss. Black feminist theologian Thandeka, though trained in process theology at Claremont, judged that Whitehead’s rendering of evil is too weak and neutral to register the unjust distribution of oppression: “Process thought does not make a distinction between suffering endemic to the entire human race and suffering which is meted out by one ethnic group to another.” On this account, she argued, it is not amenable to liberationist appropriation, for Whitehead’s God has “the manners of an English gentleman,” whereas the God of the oppressed has “the hard-edged rage of random injustice, awesome power, inexplicable suffering and steadfast love.”118 Thandeka, caught between her Unitarian Universalist disbelief in a powerful God and her liberationist sensibility, concluded that Whiteheadian theism is not the answer because its fixation on beauty and reason is not liberating for oppressed people. Coleman pressed for a different verdict while conceding that Whiteheadian thought must be supplemented with other ideas and commitments. Since Whitehead did not address systemic oppression or the politics of justice, she argued, process theologians must employ other sources on these subjects, for “one of God’s ideals for the world is justice.” But two Whiteheadian ideas promote the transformation of social structures: God shares in human suffering, and God and the world are interdependent. The first idea brought Coleman into process theology. The second idea is a bulwark against racist dualism and otherworldliness. Coleman cautioned that binary models of liberation

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mirror the same pattern of dualistic ordering as the racism they oppose. Whitehead’s process ontology accounts for the multivalent reality of oppression.119 If God is only for the oppressed, God must puzzle over persons who are oppressed and oppressors simultaneously. Coleman argued that a God who resists oppression does not “accept or despise” one person more than another or switch sides depending on the momentary situation: “God resists the oppressive activity and calls each party to justice in their future actions. God calls the world around these people to enact justice in their lives.” Coleman’s use of “call” language was another revising strategy, personalizing the lure of becoming, but not because she needed to Christianize Whitehead. She loved Whiteheadian thought because it underwrites most of what she liked in Christianity without necessarily being Christian.120 “Wrestling with evil, loss, and violence is not simple,” she cautioned. The quest for health and wholeness is often difficult and is not a belief. Neither can salvation be found in following one particular person. To be saved is to participate in a community that makes a way out of no way: “Postmodern womanist theology takes salvation away from the exclusive domain of Jesus, Christianity, and institutions. There is no one-time salvation once and for all. Salvation is the cooperative working together of the divine and creation.” We do justice to ourselves by acknowledging who and where we are, mourning our losses, celebrating our victories, and honoring our heritage.121 Theology and religion departments sought to hire womanists, and Coleman had scruples about calling herself a womanist. Approaching the job market in 2005, she wrote a sensational self-introduction that the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion published the following year. “I’m not sure I’m a womanist,” she said. Womanism and Black feminism are different things, and perhaps she was closer to hooks, Lorde, and Barbara Smith. Coleman argued that the womanist enterprise founded by Grant, Cannon, and Williams was insufficiently hospitable to many Black women she knew and loved. Most of it radiated heteronormativity, and its opposition to heterosexism usually felt gestural. The chief exception, Douglas, tied the church’s need to address gay sexuality to the HIV/AIDS crisis, a “disappointing” motive to Coleman. Overall, she argued, “womanist religious scholarship is typified by a silence about homosexuality. At times the silence is obvious and deafening.” The womanist devotion to writing for the church, combined with high Christology, “created a Christian hegemonic discourse within the field,” leaving womanist scholarship with no language for interpreting the religious experiences of many Black women.122 Moreover, Coleman lamented, womanists rarely took strong positions on political issues, settling for self-referential descriptions that curtailed the movement’s

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relevance to political struggles for justice. Here they paled in comparison to Black feminists, exactly as Black feminist historian Patricia Hill Collins judged. Coleman said she leaned toward Black feminism, but ambivalently: “Womanist religious scholarship makes me feel that I am grounded in my own history. But black feminism makes me feel global and political. They both have shortcomings.” In the job market, she reported, womanism was obligatory for Black women; position descriptions specified that schools sought to teach womanism and hire womanists: “I cannot imagine that the first womanists ever dreamed that this would happen.” If womanism had become this important, Coleman said, there was all the more reason to demand a third wave of it that wrote about “bisexuality, colorism and standards of beauty, eating disorders and obesity, class realities (after all, if we’re writing books, we can’t be too far down on the class scale), mental health, progressive Christianity, paganism, indigenous spirituality, and participation in other world religions—like Baha’i and Buddhism. These are the issues I want to read about.”123 This article and the book that followed it won ample notice, clearing the way for others to say they were third-wavers, too. Generally speaking, the womanist community was as faithful to the Black church as Coleman said; some who did not move in Coleman’s direction lamented that she introduced a spirit of competitive individualism into womanism that grew with the third wave. But most womanists who tried to be clerical leaders got beaten up or marginalized for trying, which pushed many toward the academy and, often, wave three. Coleman named a compelling option with a future. She evinced the Generation X experience of taking for granted that womanism is part of the established order; her study of liberal theology and related topics occurred only after she was steeped in womanism and Black feminism. More important, her perspective was keenly attuned to the sensibilities of early Generation Y millennials just reaching their graduate school years during the period that Coleman emerged. It puzzled them that established theologians dismissed New Age spirituality, which was prevalent, in favor of church religion, which was fading. Coleman met many of them on her road lectures. She stressed the affinities between third-wave feminism and third-wave womanism, especially postmodern hybridity, individualism, multiplicity, and anti-essentialism. Much as Coleman respected that womanism began as an essentialist self-naming enterprise, she said the first- and second-wave womanists were wrong to claim that only a Black woman can be a womanist. She could be a womanist only on different terms from the usual racial essentialism. Coleman found third-wave allies and collaborators in Monica R. Miller, a Religious and Africana Studies scholar at Lehigh University, and Layli Maparyan, executive director of the Wellesley Centers for Women at Wellesley College.124

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In her early career, Coleman taught at Bennett College and at Lutheran School of Theology (Chicago) before being called home in 2008 to Claremont, where she taught constructive theology and codirected the Center for Process Studies. John B. Cobb Jr. and David Ray Griffin had built the process school of theology at Claremont and the Center for Process Studies. Suchocki had succeeded her doctoral mentor, Cobb, when he retired in 1990. Claremont process theology was a school in every sense of the term. It was a big deal in progressive theology when Coleman joined the Claremont faculty, demonstrating that the major school of thought in American liberal theology had much at stake in wave-three womanism. She stayed for ten years, while the School of Theology weathered a prolonged financial crisis; then Coleman moved in 2018 to the University of Delaware. The Obama years were already beckoning when Coleman survived her doctoral program and began her teaching career. The womanist tendency to avoid political engagement that Coleman lamented became impossible when Obama emerged. The coming of Obama threw into question every certainty about the trajectory of the racist United States. If Obama could soar so high, what did it mean? What kind of Black theology and Black social gospel made sense in an era named for Barack Hussein Obama? Everyone with a stake in Black social Christianity was affected by this question as Obama attracted massive crowds of followers and won the presidency. RE CKON IN G WITH TH E OBAMA ERA

Obama grew up without a religious faith, which made his debt to the Black church all the more significant. His Kenyan father, Barack Obama Sr., was an atheist from a Muslim background. His Kansas-born mother, Ann Dunham, viewed religion through an anthropological lens. His Indonesian stepfather, Lolo Soetoro, was a hard-bitten realist. His maternal grandparents, Stanley and Madelyn Dunham, dropped evangelical Protestantism much as they dropped Kansas for Hawaii. Obama lived with his mother and stepfather in Indonesia for four years, moved to Hawaii at the age of ten to live with his grandparents, and had only sporadic contact with his anthropologist mother afterward. He was grateful to grow up in the cultural diversity of Hawaii, albeit with untethered confusion about who he was. In 1985, two years after he graduated from Columbia University, Obama moved to Chicago to work as an organizer for the Developing Communities Project, a branch of the Calumet Community Religious Conference representing a coalition of South Side churches. Working with churches raised the question whether he should join one, which he put off

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until the end of his three years of organizing. Obama took seriously the prospect of becoming a Christian. He told himself, and Jeremiah Wright, he would not join a church if he had to suspend his critical reasoning. Wright assured him that would be no issue at Trinity Church. Obama heard the gospel at Trinity Church and was claimed by it. Wright preached that God is a liberating power taking the side of the oppressed in their struggle for freedom and dignity. In “The Audacity of Hope,” a sermon laced with jeremiads about White greed running a world in need, Wright described cruise ships throwing away more food in a day than Haitians in Port-au-Prince see in a year. But he also spoke of his grandmother singing, “There’s a bright side somewhere . . . don’t rest till you find it,” and of God’s abiding love. Obama, listening to this sermon, awaited the altar call that would mark his conversion to Christianity. He felt his three years in Chicago—all the people and stories in it—swirling together. Becoming a Christian connected him more profoundly to the people he served and the story of the Bible: “I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion’s den, Ezekiel’s field of dry bones. Those stories—of survival, and freedom, and hope—became our story, my story; the blood that had spilled was our blood, the tears our tears; until this black church, on this bright day, seemed once more a vessel carrying the story of a people into future generations and into a larger world.”125 In Chicago, Obama found himself, something to write about, and a world of faith in the preaching, singing, and practices of African American Christianity. His mother, he believed, had been spiritually musical, exuding a naturemystical streak and an open delight in the profuse polymorphic strangeness of existence. Ann Dunham was happy to be a citizen of the world, drinking from many cultures and stitching together communities of friends wherever her sojourning spirit took her, taking pride in raising her children to be citizens of the world. Obama surmised that without the witness of the Black church, he would have followed his mother’s example, straddling cultures and keeping a critical distance from belief systems. Her cosmopolitanism would have been enough for him, “had it not been for the particular attributes of the historically black church, attributes that helped me shed some of my skepticism and embrace the Christian faith.”126 Obama treasured the refusal of the Black church to divorce personal salvation from social salvation. He embraced its historic tendency to blur the line between the sinners and the saved, a recognition that the sins of those who come to church are much like the sins of those who spurn the church. One comes to church precisely because one is of the world, not because one is sepa-

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rate from it: “In the day-to-day work of the men and women I met in church each day, in their ability to ‘make a way out of no way’ and maintain hope and dignity in the direst of circumstances, I could see the Word made manifest.” He recalled that on the day he converted to Christianity at Trinity Church, “I felt God’s spirit beckoning me. I submitted myself to His will, and dedicated myself to discovering His truth.”127 Then he went off to Harvard Law School, returned to Chicago as a lawyer and part-time law professor, married Michelle Robinson, worshipped at Trinity Church, and got into politics, enduring four years of drudgery in the state senate. State politics frustrated Obama, being small-bore, obscure, and low-paying, besides requiring constant back-and-forth travel to Springfield. In 2000 he challenged incumbent Bobby Rush for his First District seat in the U.S. Congress and made a poor impression. Rush’s 70 percent African American constituency did not care for Obama’s smooth-talking rhetoric about “turning the page,” which smacked of “smarter than him,” or his habit of reciting his Columbia and Harvard résumé, which smacked of “smarter than you,” or his frequent reminder that he could have made more money as a lawyer, which smacked of more selfcongratulation. Repeatedly he was called dull, effete, arrogant, condescending, conceited, professorial, and, worst of all, not Black enough. Rush chided Obama that his claim to the legacy of the civil rights movement was that he read a few books about it. He crushed Obama, winning by 61 percent to 30 percent.128 In 2002 Obama reentered the state senate while Michelle Obama implored him to get a real job. He promised to take only one more shot at his political dream. A golden opportunity arose in 2004, a wide-open race for the U.S. Senate. Running statewide, Obama discovered two things about himself: He was electric on television, and he had an Oprah-scale capacity to make White people feel good about themselves by winning their support. He won the Democratic nomination, catching the attention of the Democratic presidential nominee, John Kerry, who tapped him for a keynote address at the Democratic convention in Boston. Obama shot to national stardom in one night. Using a teleprompter for the first time, he gave a sensational talk about blue-state people who worship an awesome God, red-state people who don’t like federal agents poking through their libraries, blue-state folks who coach Little League, and red-state folks who happen to be gay. America is not divided between blue and red states, he intoned, nor is it divided between racial groups. America is one nation and people, the United States of America. He entered the U.S. Senate and tried to fend off questions about when he planned to run for president. Obama pleaded for time to accomplish something, to no avail. His rally crowds were enormous, mostly White, and plaintive—Run,

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Obama, run. They insisted his time had already come. He said that to think clearly about race, Americans should view their nation on something like a split screen, holding in view the just, multiracial society they want and the reality of an America that is not yet a just society. On the second screen, race remains a major marker of inequality and social privilege. As long as the two screens are so glaringly different, you cannot have a postracial politics, but America had moved considerably in that direction: “I have witnessed a profound shift in race relations in my lifetime. I have felt it as surely as one feels a change in the temperature. When I hear some in the black community deny those changes, I think it not only dishonors those who struggled on our behalf but also robs us of our agency to complete the work they began. But as much as I insist that things have gotten better, I am mindful of this truth as well: Better isn’t good enough.”129 That had perfect pitch for the massive crowds of White liberals and moderates who begged him to run for president. In January 2007 Obama decided to go for it. He asked Wright to deliver the invocation at his campaign launch the following month, but just before it occurred, Obama’s staff learned of a forthcoming article on Wright by Benjamin Wallace-Wells in Rolling Stone magazine. Wallace-Wells admired Wright, noting that he was very important to Obama and that Wright was amazingly radical—the most radical mentor any major American politician had ever had. He quoted some zingers from a Wright sermon: “Racism is how this country was founded and how this country is still run! . . . We are deeply involved in the importing of drugs, the exporting of guns and the training of professional KILLERS. . . . We believe in white supremacy and black inferiority and believe it more than we believe in God. . . . We care nothing about human life if the ends justify the means! . . . And. And. And! GAWD! Has GOT! To be SICK! OF THIS SHIT!”130 Obama’s aides David Axelrod, David Plouffe, and Robert Gibbs, reading these quotes, pictured a nightmare campaign launch in which Wright became the story and Obama became an asterisk. They pleaded with Obama to disinvite Wright from the program; if Wright went onstage, the campaign might explode before it began. Obama was reluctant to humiliate his friend and spiritual mentor. He treasured Wright and was averse to hurting his moral pride. If Obama had to hold a seminar on the role of jeremiads in Black church preaching, he was willing to do it. His aides prevailed, however, and Obama told Wright apologetically they needed to cancel his participation. Wright agreed to stay off the stage, feeling wounded.131 The following month Obama inserted himself for the first time into the ongoing story and legacy of the civil rights movement. On March 4, 2007, he spoke at a Brown Chapel gathering in Selma that commemorated the Selma

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demonstration. He paid tribute to “the Moses generation” of King, Young, Lewis, Lowery, and Anna Cooper, who marched and suffered. Many leaders of the Moses generation, Obama observed, did not cross the river to see the Promised Land. He thanked and praised them for their courage, turning to his own generation, “the Joshua generation.” Life is better for Black Americans, he said, but merely better is not good enough. Obama cautioned that history was being forgotten, racial discrimination persisted, schools were underfunded, and many had no health insurance, especially people of color. Too many people were looking for “that Oprah money” instead of giving themselves to disciplined service and exerting their political will.132 Everything was at stake in the Iowa caucuses. Obama figured that if he won in Iowa, he could win the nomination. His numbers would pop everywhere, and African Americans would stop hedging against disappointment and move to his camp. Black Americans were done with symbolic presidential campaigns, having spurned Sharpton and former Illinois senator Carol Mosely Braun when they ran for president in 2004. To beat Hillary Clinton, Obama had to end her front-runner status before her superior organization built up momentum. If he lost in Iowa, the whole thing was just a dream. A tidal wave of young White progressives rushed to his campaign, and Obama won a spectacular victory in Iowa. His victory speech was carefully written, delivered flawlessly despite not having been practiced, and singularly unleashed in feeling: “You know, they said this day would never come. They said our sights were set too high. They said this country was too divided, too disillusioned to ever come together around a common purpose. But on this January night, at this defining moment in history, you have done what the cynics said we couldn’t do. . . . We are one nation. We are one people. And our time for change has come!”133 The opening riff was an echo of King. The appeal to “our time” was an echo of Jackson’s presidential campaigns. Both were fashioned into a story about America realizing itself. To claim a “defining moment in history” for the outcome of a caucus vote would have been ludicrous for any other candidate, evoking ridicule for its grandiosity. On this night, Obama took the risk of appearing grandiose to those who did not share the exultant feeling that history had changed. He claimed a promise-and-fulfillment relation to the civil rights movement, inviting all to help him redeem King’s dream for America. Reaching this far, rhetorically, was for special occasions only; Obama wanted the votes of people who had limited tolerance for such talk. But this was a special night not to be wasted. Thus, he called Americans to a freedom movement for all people in the cadences of the civil rights movement. The Obama campaign, like King’s dream, was an extension of America’s struggle for freedom from tyranny, British

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imperialism, Axis fascism, and America’s history of bondage and exclusion, resuming the struggle of those who braved vicious beatings on the Selma bridge. This idea that the bridge in Selma led to Obama’s campaign was always there, though he played it down most of the time, respecting the difference. It was no easy thing, even for Obama’s disciplined temperament, to find the balance that worked best. He wanted to give a big speech on race, but he kept judging that the moment had not arrived, and perhaps never would. The issue was there all the time anyway. Conservative Black essayist Shelby Steele published a best seller titled A Bound Man, claiming Obama could not win because he tried to have it both ways on race and had no idea who he was; moreover, winning was impossible anyway. Obama, Steele contended, was caught in the double bind between Black bargainers and challengers. Bargainers ply for acceptance in White America by not presuming that White Americans are racist; challengers force White Americans to prove themselves innocent of racism. Bill Cosby, Oprah, and Colin Powell, on this telling, were the leading bargainers, and Jackson and Sharpton the leading challengers—just before Wright trumped the field.134 Steele said the bargainer-versus-challenger debate takes place among Blacks, among Whites, and between Blacks and Whites, setting guilt-as-impotence against innocence-as-power. Obama became a phenomenon by promising to deliver America from this sorry either-or, but he was too much bound by it to find a voice of his own. He was a racial cipher, Steele judged, not an actualized individual. His talent for inauthenticity made him good at fashioning a racial persona, which is not the same thing as achieving selfhood. Obama simultaneously granted racial innocence to White Americans and withheld it from them. Like the fictional Tod Clifton in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, he had no real self and probably lacked any real beliefs. According to Steele, this was why Obama could not win. If he bargained zealously, he could not win Black majorities. If he opted for challenge, making himself Black enough, he could not win a majority of any other group. Since winning was impossible anyway, Steele advised Obama to give up trying—it was better to find out who he was. Meanwhile, ABC News mortally threatened Obama’s campaign on March 13, 2008, by broadcasting select video clips of Wright’s sermons. The producers of ABC’s Good Morning America asked Brian Ross, a journalist, to look into Wright. Ross watched sermons for days without finding anything newsworthy, until he came to Wright’s sermon of September 16, 2001, the Sunday following 9/11. Wright had delivered a jeremiad on anti-imperial blowback. Americans, he said, dished out far more terrorism than they experienced as victims: “We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the

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thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye.” America sponsored state terrorism against Palestinians and Black South Africans, “and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards.” Things that Americans thought nothing of doing to others were now blowing back, just as Malcolm famously said: “America’s chickens! Are coming home! To roost!” Another clip showed Wright calling out, “The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing, ‘God Bless America.’ No, no, no, God damn America, that’s in the Bible for killing innocent people! God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human.” Cable outlets played the clips repeatedly and Fox News played them constantly. A shaken Obama declared that he “vehemently” disputed and “strongly condemn[ed]” the “inflammatory and appalling remarks” that his pastor apparently uttered from the pulpit. The moment for the race speech had come, albeit not as Obama had wanted. Four days later he gave a dramatic address at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia.135 The American experiment in democracy, he said, was launched across the street by a group of farmers, scholars, and statesmen who insisted on being free. They produced a remarkable document that founded a nation, which was stained “by this nation’s original sin of slavery.” Words on a parchment were not enough to deliver African Americans from slavery or a subsequent century of segregation, even though the Constitution held the answer to America’s terrible problem—the ideal of equal citizenship before the law. Obama appealed to the American constitutional order of liberty and justice, and his own experience. The ideal was in the Constitution, but it took a succession of freedom movements to narrow the gap between the ideal and America’s reality, and there was still a gap: “I chose to run for the presidency at this moment in history because I believe that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together—unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes.” He believed in this struggle because he was an American and he had an unusual American story. Obama said his family included people “of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents.” For as long as he lived, “I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.”136 He noted pointedly that his story would not have been possible for anyone of Wright’s generation, which helped explain Wright’s fixation with the sins of White America. Obama said he had never thought he had to agree with his pastor about politics. Wright was wrong, and something worse, divisive, but disowning him was out of the question. It was on a par with disowning the Black

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community or Obama’s beloved White grandmother, a woman who loved him dearly, sacrificed for him, and made casual slurs against Blacks. Black Americans, Obama observed, have favorite places for airing grievances, notably barbershops and churches. Their anger is real, powerful, and historically founded, if not always constructive. Moreover, anger in the White community is similarly intense and problematic. Most White Americans have little or no tolerance for any talk about White supremacy. They deny that being White gives them any privileges in society, they resent having to deny it, and they resent any insinuation that their fear about crime smacks of racism. White Americans, he reflected, see their jobs being shipped overseas and their pensions dumped after decades of labor. They hear of minorities getting preferential treatment through affirmative action, and they feel pushed aside by immigrants for jobs they might have gotten. All of that makes White Americans ripe for the politics of the Republican right: “Like the anger within the black community, these resentments aren’t always expressed in polite company. But they have helped shape the political landscape for at least a generation. Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan Coalition.” Obama understood the resentments and respected the humanity of angry souls on both sides, as well as the resentments and humanity of groups left out of this conversation: “This is where we are right now. It’s a racial stalemate we’ve been stuck in for years.”137 He did not believe that America’s racial division could be healed by his success, but he did believe that America was much less racist than it used to be, even if Wright did not believe it. Obama asked Americans to consider the wonder of his campaign, a coalition as diverse as America itself. He knew he could not win an election that turned ugly. To succeed, he had to be the candidate of hope who did not scare away independent voters. He implored Americans not to fall for bread-and-circus distractions. If the nominating process came down to Wright’s eruptions, or ridiculous speculation that Obama secretly agreed with Wright’s opinions, or allegations that a Clinton staffer played the race card, what mattered would be squandered. Nothing would change; wedge issues would drive the election. Obama urged Americans to refuse that outcome. This election had to be about crumbling schools that stole the future of America’s children, emergency rooms filled with people lacking health insurance, and the ravages of escalating inequality. America was overdue for a political leader who dared to treat Americans as adults in talking about race. Obama presumed to speak for all sides, capitalizing on his capacity to understand and represent different perspectives. The “race speech” was amply rewarded for doing so. Liberals and moderates over-

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whelmingly praised it as historic and a breakthrough. Center-right Republicans cautiously commended it and hard-right Republicans vehemently condemned it. Republican columnist Peggy Noonan called it a speech “to think to, not clap to,” judging that it would be remembered “as the speech that saved a candidacy.” Hillary Clinton tartly said that Wright would never have been her pastor—“hate speech” is always wrong, and “I just think you have to speak out against that.” Right-wing media superstars Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Sean Hannity, along with neocon columnist Charles Krauthammer, excoriated Obama for having a radical pastor. Krauthammer described Obama’s speech as “a brilliant fraud” that distracted attention from what it was supposed to be about, namely, Obama’s reprehensible devotion to Wright.138 On the political left, especially the academic left, and in Black church communities where Wright was revered, there were deeply felt opposite reactions, most of which stayed unpublished. Houston A. Baker Jr., a scholar of African American literature, broke the publication taboo, protesting that Obama staged a flag-draped embarrassment reminiscent of the Parthenon scene in Robert Altman’s movie Nashville: “A bizarre moment of mimicry, aping Martin Luther King Jr., while even further distancing himself from the real, economic, religious and political issues so courageously articulated by King from a Birmingham jail. In brief, Obama’s speech was a pandering disaster that threw, once again, his pastor under the bus.” Cornel West, who shared the left’s critique of Obama, yet also campaigned for his nomination and election, told friends like me that it felt like he was walking a tightrope every day with perils on every side.139 I walked that tightrope for weeks along with West, Cone, Dyson, Hendricks, Forbes, and Melissa Harris-Perry. We were pro-Wright and pro-Obama, anxious to refute attacks on the Black church, and fearful that the journalists who called us would miss the nuance of a quote, misrepresenting what we said. Then Wright gave a speech on April 28, 2008, at the National Press Club that blew up our tightrope dance and Obama’s relationship with his pastor. Wright started very well, teasing reporters that religious scholars had come to a two-day conference to explore “this unknown phenomenon of the black church.” He gave a concise rendering of Black church history, built up to the recent attack on the Black church, declared that it was precisely an attack on the Black church, not on him personally, and tweaked the reporters again when applause broke out: “That applause comes not from the working press.” The reporters were in the gallery, something hard to discern on C-SPAN. Wright repeatedly marked the contrast between the low-information reporters in the gallery and the scholars gathered below. He ran through the history of liberation theology, affirming that he liked and admired Cone, though his version of liberation theology differed

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from Cone’s for being Afrocentric, extending “back past the problem of Western ideology and notions of white supremacy.” Wright made a plug for Trinity Church and its prophetic ministries, ending with a luminous peroration on his Afrocentric, multicultural, liberationist idea of reconciliation.140 Except that was just the end of the lecture. The press had questions and Wright recoiled at being misrepresented with out-of-context quotes and cornered with do-you-repudiate questions: “Everybody wants to paint me as if I’m antiSemitic because of what Louis Farrakhan said twenty years ago.” Wright refused to be trapped into saying something bad about Farrakhan, the only African American who could draw a million people to the Washington mall. The National Press Club had no standing to tell him who his enemies and friends should be. There were questions about Obama; Wright showed zero interest in helping Obama. He said Obama did what politicians do, and Wright did what pastors do; he was answerable to God, not the electorate. A reporter pressed for an apology concerning God damning America; Wright conceded nothing, standing on the Bible, not Obama’s platform. Another reporter wondered if Obama actually went to church; maybe he didn’t know what Wright preached? Wright tartly replied, “He goes to church about as much as you do.” Wright deflected a question about Israel; it was Jimmy Carter, not he, who called Israel an apartheid state. There were total-ignorance questions that heightened Wright’s annoyance, and he repeated that this entire Wright controversy was really an attack by the media on the Black church. One last question about Obama gave Wright an opportunity to say something nice about him, and he passed.141 Obama was devastated by Wright’s tone of derision and contempt, which felt like a deliberate attempt to sabotage his candidacy. The next day, campaigning in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, he said he had always sought to bridge the gap “between different kinds of people,” working to build a more inclusive and generous America. But Wright had gone beyond the pale: “Yesterday, we saw a very different vision of America. I am outraged by the comments that were made and saddened over the spectacle that we saw yesterday.” The person at the Press Club, Obama declared, was not the person he had met twenty years before: “His comments were not only divisive and destructive, but I believe that they end up giving comfort to those who prey on hate.” Obama denied that Wright accurately represented the Black church. He and Wright did not hold the same values and beliefs, and saying so was not “political posturing,” contrary to Wright. Obama said he would never praise Farrakhan or describe U.S. wartime fighting as terrorism. He was finished with Wright, whom he had apparently misjudged. For the next week Obama fretted that Wright had destroyed his candidacy. He took solace in gallows humor, joking to aides that he could

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always fall back on making speeches for a living. Then he won North Carolina by fourteen points, which put him on a straight path to the nomination.142 On June 16, 2008, with the nomination clearly in sight, Obama gave a calculated speech sharply attacking absent Black fathers, noting that he had been victimized by one: “Too many fathers are MIA, too many fathers are AWOL, missing from too many lives and too many homes. They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men. And the foundations of our families are weaker because of it.” He chose the 20,000-member Apostolic Church of God as the venue, a cavernous structure on the South Side of Chicago near Lake Michigan, where the church’s pastor, Byron Brazier, was an Obama supporter. Obama rang the chimes on a venerable Black church trope, respectability, evoking cheers at Apostolic Church. He admonished Black men to get off the couch, stop watching SportsCenter, and stop praising themselves for mediocre accomplishments: “Don’t get carried away with that eighth-grade graduation. You’re supposed to graduate from eighth grade.” This riposte brought much of the congregation to its feet, roaring in assent. It triggered a new round of an old debate over the churchy politics of respectability, exactly what Obama sought. His nearly flawless run for the White House needed some version of a Sister Souljah episode, so Obama picked on Black men who lacked his charmed story.143 The last night of the Democratic convention was on August 28, 2008, the forty-fifth anniversary of the March on Washington. That day, rehearsing at a Denver hotel, Obama tried to say that forty-five years ago, Americans from every corner of the land were drawn by the promise of freedom to go to the Washington Mall “to hear a young preacher from Georgia speak of his dream.” But Obama could not get through the words, “forty-five years ago,” which caught in his throat. He fought back tears: “I gotta take a minute.” He walked around the room, calming himself: “This is really hitting me. I haven’t really thought about this before really deeply. It just hit me. I guess this is a pretty big deal.” His aides had seen him get this emotional only once before, on Iowa caucus night.144 Shortly afterward the reckoning came for ten years of unhinged greed in the mortgage market and derivatives industry, and the financial system crashed. Obama, now as the Democratic presidential candidate, helped the Bush administration obtain its bailouts of September and October 2008. Had Obama not been a key political player in the bailout, he might have been less obsequious to Wall Street after he became president. Had the financial system crashed in December instead of September, Obama might have demanded tougher treatment of firms that caused the crash, which might have led to stronger policies of his own—assuming his election. As it was, Obama was coopted before he began, and he stayed on that path.145

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He inherited a global deflationary spiral that exacted portfolio contractions of 30 to 40 percent. He put his economic policy in the hands of Timothy Geithner, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, who cut the bailout deals, and Lawrence Summers, who helped Clinton tear down the Glass-Steagall wall separating commercial from investment banking. Geithner became Treasury secretary and Summers chaired the National Economic Council. That was a sickening omen to many left-liberal activists who had worked hard to elect Obama. Something precious was already slipping away before Obama was inaugurated in January 2009—the hope that he might change the system. Meanwhile, Obama’s election flooded Black communities with elation. There was a sizable gap already between politically left progressives who reeled at Obama’s appointments and the Black churches and radio stations that countenanced no criticism of Obama. Black communities granted Obama a pass for appointing only one Black member to his senior cabinet, Eric H. Holder Jr. as attorney general, and appointing three others to subsenior posts. The progressive left gasped with revulsion when Obama stocked his cabinet and staff with Wall Street insiders, Republican defense officials, and retreads from the Democratic establishment, appointing only one progressive, Labor Secretary Hilda Solis. On March 27, 2009, Obama met with the CEOs of the nation’s thirteen biggest banks, famously telling them: “My administration is the only thing standing between you and the pitchforks.” He said they needed to pull together, work together, and show some respect for the public’s rage about excessive executive compensation. The bankers nodded in fake agreement, winning a reprieve they didn’t deserve. They created a joint lobbying powerhouse, the CDS Dealers Consortium, to oppose every financial reform that Obama and the Democrats proposed. Citigroup alone hired forty-six lobbyists to fight off the government that had just bailed out Citigroup.146 Obama escalated the war in Afghanistan and expanded America’s military empire. He watered down the financial reform bill as it moved through Congress, accepting carve-outs for corporate users of derivatives and opposing proposals to force banks to spin off their trading operations in derivatives. He killed a crucial amendment to the financial reform bill that would have imposed sensible limits on the size of megabanks. He took a passive approach to healthcare reform legislation, letting a Democratic Congress write the bill, and refused to press for a public option. He put off immigration reform for a later time that did not come and broke a campaign promise by extending Bush’s tax cut for the rich. Conciliation was not merely Obama’s default mode, as progressives had worried in 2008; it was his chief operating mode.

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Meanwhile, Obama triggered a ferocious, titanic, vindictive backlash merely by living in the White House and doing his job. Every day that he served he made the nation look better than it was, which Donald Trump keenly grasped while putting it differently. Fox television and an unhinged right blogosphere stoked the backlash, expanding the market for a best-selling conspiracy literature. A skyrocketing Tea Party movement claimed that Obama’s stimulus bill was a socialist takeover of America; somehow it was outrageous to prevent the nation from reliving 1932. Impassioned rallies demanding, “I want my country back,” began shortly after Obama was inaugurated. More than one-fourth of the U.S. population claimed to believe that Obama was not born in the United States, was not a legitimate president, was a Muslim, and a Socialist, and either definitely or probably sympathized with the goals of Islamic fundamentalists wanting to impose Sharia law throughout the world. In some polling up to onethird of U.S. Americans tagged Obama as sympathetic with Islamic radicalism, and over one-half tagged him as a Socialist. The books and right blogosphere had random lists of bad things that Obama supposedly believed, plus competing narratives about how he and his White lefty allies defrauded the nation. His entire presidency was a conspiracy to destroy America.147 The birther movement rang this alarm for two years before Trump joined it in 2011. It had no basis whatsoever besides racism and backlash hysteria, being too blatant to be called a dog whistle. Trump became a major political player by lauding the birther movement and stumping for it. He flirted with the idea of running for president, shooting to the top of the prospective Republican field, but he wasn’t ready to mount a campaign. He was impressed at how quickly he ascended and how easy it was. All he had to do was play to the rage and not get outflanked in doing so. The Christian left that had worked to elect Obama was caught between its disappointment in his tepid politics and its revulsion at what he was up against. Some fell out dramatically. To friends, West had worried all along that Obama was the Johnny Mathis of American politics, gliding to success in the smoothly tame manner of the crooner’s early career. Then Obama appointed Geithner and Summers, and West began to feel betrayed. He had similar feelings when Obama retained Bush’s defense secretary, Robert Gates, and appointed a McCain Republican, retired Marine General James L. Jones, as national security advisor, and recycled Middle East advisor Dennis Ross. West recalled: “I said, ‘Oh my God, I have really been misled at a very deep level. . . . I have been thoroughly misled, all this populist language is just a facade.” He had figured that Columbia University economist Joseph Stiglitz and Princeton University economist Paul Krugman, or at least progressive Keynesians of lesser stature, would run Obama’s economic policy.148

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West had spoken for Obama sixty-five times during the campaign, sometimes appearing with him. Shortly after Obama was elected, he brushed off West, who resented getting the Jeremiah Wright treatment. As late as April 2009, West was still hoping that Obama would tack back to treating him respectfully. West noted pointedly on Bill Moyers Journal that Lincoln didn’t have to agree with Frederick Douglass to solicit his opinion with sincerity and respect. By the time the Moyers show aired, on July 3, 2009, however, West was seething against Obama, feeling personally and politically betrayed. Two years into Obama’s presidency, West described him scathingly as “a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats. And now he has become head of the American killing machine and is proud of it.” Friendships were frayed and broken over this reaction.149 Black churches and radio stations bristled at any criticism of Obama, especially since the political right viciously attacked him. Sharpton gained stature by strongly supporting Obama, later declaring on 60 Minutes that he had resolved never to criticize Obama “for not having a black agenda.” It was the job of civil rights leaders, Sharpton reasoned, to have a Black agenda; Obama’s job was to be everyone’s president and respond generously to the agenda pressed by Black leaders. West accused Sharpton of “prostituting” himself, charging that Sharpton betrayed his record as a civil rights leader to become “the bonafide House Negro of the Obama Plantation.” Sharpton replied that he supported Obama precisely because he, Sharpton, was a leader accountable to Black churches and a civil rights organization—the National Action Network.150 Dyson adhered to the path of somewhat critical support while urging his audiences to support Obama. He had known Obama since they appeared together in the early 1990s on a Black history panel in suburban Chicago. He had given a passionate-booster introduction for Obama in 2003 at a Chicago Black radio expo when Obama ran for the Senate. When Obama ran for president, Dyson served as an informal advisor and official surrogate for him, speaking at countless campaign stops. The surrogate role ended when Obama was elected, and Dyson tweaked him selectively. In 2009 Dyson protested that Black Americans were so grateful to have a Black president that they failed to demand anything of him. The following year he lamented on MSNBC that Obama ran from the issue of race “like a black man runs from a cop.” Dyson said it should be possible for Obama to occasionally say something from a Black perspective. In 2012 he replaced Tavis Smiley as a King holiday speaker in Peoria, Illinois, after Smiley was disinvited for pillorying Obama. Dyson said Smiley was his dear friend, King got disinvitations too, and nobody is exempt from criticism, even Obama. These occasional tweaks fell under the rubric that America’s

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wonderful president could do better, while Dyson stoutly defended Obama on television, which provoked West to label Dyson as one of Obama’s chief “bootlickers.” A bitter clash ensued between West and Dyson that singed both of them and their mutual friends.151 Every crisis of the Obama presidency provoked self-conscious debates about Obama’s performance. On February 26, 2012, seventeen-year-old Trayvon Benjamin Martin visited his father on a rainy Sunday evening in Sanford, Florida. He lived with his mother in Miami Gardens, Florida, and was walking back to his father’s residence from a store, where he had purchased a can of iced tea and a pack of Skittles. A neighborhood watch captain, George Zimmerman, judged that Trayvon looked suspicious, apparently for being Black and walking in a gated neighborhood. Zimmerman called 911, reported the suspicious person, was told to wait in his car, and did not. Armed with a gun, he tracked down Trayvon and shot him, leaving him dead on the sidewalk. Sixteen months later a six-woman jury acquitted Zimmerman of second-degree murder and seconddegree manslaughter. This extended rolling nightmare ripped through Black communities like nothing since the vicious beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles police in March 1991. It convulsed a generation and their parents. It was too shocking and terrible for words, but words had to be found. Obama spoke to the moment with a simple sincerity that was spot-on. On March 23, 2012, he said from the Rose Garden: “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon. When I think about this boy, I think about my own kids.” Right-wing critics howled that Obama had no business injecting himself into the case, he politicized it by doing so, and he descended to race-baiting. All the usual right-wing Obama-haters lined up to say it—Newt Gingrich, Sean Hannity, Michelle Malkin, and others, thrilled that Obama violated his usual dictate on decorous speaking about race. Was Obama really saying that skin color erased all other relevant differences between his hypothetical son and Trayvon Martin? Yes, when it came to the danger of being targeted on the street merely on account of skin color, Obama said that was precisely what traumatized Black parents, especially the parents of Black sons. After the unbelievable Trayvon verdict was delivered on July 13, 2013, protests erupted through the nation. Obama waited until July 19 to fully address the issue, doubling down on “if I had a son,” now putting it differently: “Trayvon Martin could have been me thirty-five years ago.”152 Nearly all Black Americans, he said, have to deal with being followed in a department store, hearing the click of car-door locks when they walk by, and seeing White people frightened when they share an elevator ride. These things happened routinely to him until he became a U.S. senator. Black Americans

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saw the Trayvon case through constellations of experiences that were foreign to most White Americans. Obama explained the upshot for the Trayvon case as mildly as possible: “All that contributes I think to a sense that if a white male teen was involved in the same kind of scenario, that, from top to bottom, both the outcome and the aftermath might have been different.” So where did that leave America, more than halfway through the Obama presidency? He remarked, “I think it’s understandable that there have been demonstrations and vigils and protests, and some of that stuff is just going to have to work its way through, as long as it remains nonviolent.”153 Obama defenders, especially Sharpton and Dyson, who had waited for years for Obama to talk like this, cheered that he had crossed a line. On television they repelled a second wave of anger against Obama that was not confined to the hard-line political right. Abigail Thernstrom, vice chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, chastised Obama for breaking the racial contract that got him elected and reelected. Obama broke the contract, in her telling, when he uttered, “If I had a son.” If Obama had a son, she declared, he would attend tony private schools and inherit a life trajectory totally unlike the one mapped out for Trayvon Martin. According to Thernstrom, there were only two explanations for Obama’s decision to betray the careful speaking about race that got him elected. One, he was so narcissistic that to him, every issue was only about him. Or two, he wanted “disadvantaged Americans to believe that he and his family are one of them— despite their life of unparalleled privilege,” so he pretended to believe the Trayvon case was about race, “where justice demanded a guilty verdict.” In the latter case, “Obama should be ashamed of his effort to stir America’s turbulent, dangerous racial waters.” Thernstrom argued that Jackson and Sharpton made their careers off race baiting—viewing racism as systemic and elevating “what’s wrong with America over all that is remarkably right.” Obama surpassed them by respecting “the sensibilities of the American people,” until he was past the prospect of running again for office.154 Thernstrom tried to shame Obama back to assuaging White voters. Meanwhile, Philadelphia pastor Kevin Johnson blasted Obama for sticking to postracial pretend, two press conferences notwithstanding. Johnson was a prominent social gospel figure in Philadelphia and the senior pastor of Bright Hope Baptist Church. He had worked hard for Obama in 2008, hosting the first clergy breakfast in Philadelphia, which recruited religious leaders to the campaign, and in 2012, expecting a better Obama to emerge from the 2012 election. Instead, he looked at Obama’s second-term cabinet in April 2013 and despaired. Obama still had only one Black American in his senior cabinet, Holder. Johnson recounted that Clinton had five—Ron Brown at Commerce, Mike Espy at

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Agriculture, Hazel O’Leary at Energy, Alexis Herman at Labor, and Jesse Brown at Veterans Affairs, plus two others in subsenior posts. Even George W. Bush had prominent Black American cabinet leaders in Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Rod Paige, and Alphonso Jackson. The Obama team was pitiful by comparison, and Black Americans also fared worse under Obama in the economy. Johnson observed that unemployment for Black Americans in January 2009, the nadir of the financial crash, was 12.7 percent; four years later the figure was 13.8 percent.155 He told an inside-baseball story about a 2012 campaign meeting in the White House. Obama’s senior advisor Valerie Jarrett convened Black leaders from Philadelphia to discuss the campaign. The meeting proceeded cordially until Johnson said he “mustered the courage” to ask the question he heard constantly from African Americans—what had Obama done in four years to help Black people? The meeting froze in silence. Jarrett fired off the usual talking points that Black Americans benefited from Obamacare and the increase in Pell Grants. She concluded that they needed to support Obama because “we are family.” Johnson persisted that Black Americans cared very much about unemployment and the fact that Obama had not put an African American on the Supreme Court. Jarrett replied that Obama was the president of all Americans, “not just Black people.” Johnson said that was surely true, except Black people apparently didn’t count to Obama as part of the “all.” Since Obama had such a “poor record,” Black Americans needed to ask why they were so loyal to a president who was not loyal to them. What was it about African Americans that made them eager to support almost any candidate who happened to be Black? And why was Democratic Party affiliation the only qualifier? Johnson warned that Obama was on a path that would make him a historical leader, the first Black president, but not a transformational leader, the president who lifted Black people “from cycles of poverty, unemployment, illiteracy, and despair.”156 In February 2014 Obama launched the My Brother’s Keeper initiative to address the persistent opportunity gaps facing boys and young men of color. One year later a scaled-up version called My Brother’s Keeper Alliance was launched, and in 2017 it became a project of the Obama Foundation. It features mentorship programs and support networks aimed at giving boys of color a healthy start in life, achieving grade-level reading by third grade, graduating from high school, completing postsecondary education or training, successfully entering the workforce, and keeping young men on track. Columbia University law professor Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, a scholar of critical race theory who developed the theory of intersectionality, objected that reserving exclusive solicitude for Black males is unfair and shortsighted. Black and Hispanic girls,

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too, need help in education and vocational training. Crenshaw stressed that girls and young women deal with gender-specific risks as victims of domestic violence and sex trafficking. They are more deeply affected by the child welfare and juvenile justice systems, “and more likely to die violently.” High rates of Black male incarceration do not justify focusing exclusively on males. Otherwise, must Black females “pull even with males” in criminal convictions to earn interventions in their behalf? Crenshaw argued that as long as projects like My Brother’s Keeper do not collect data on the challenges faced by girls and young women of color, they perpetuate a self-fulfilling cycle “proving” that Black females don’t need Keeper-style interventions: “What needs to be fixed are not boys per se, but the conditions in which marginalized communities of color must live.”157 This was the state of play concerning Obama and his second term when Michael Brown was gunned down on August 9, 2014, in Ferguson, Missouri. An unarmed eighteen-year-old Black man, Brown had a tense altercation with White police officer Darren Wilson, who fired twelve bullets at Brown, and Brown was struck six times, dying on the street. His body lay on the street while a crowd gathered to witness a prolonged forensic investigation. The city erupted in passionate protests against the killing of another unarmed Black man. West put himself in the line of fire by joining the protesters in Ferguson and being arrested. Obama made a tepid response to the killing and demonstrations, offering his condolences to the Brown family and the Ferguson community: “We should comfort each other and talk with one another in a way that heals, not in a way that wounds.” Dyson broke form, imploring Obama “to use his bully pulpit.” Dyson said on Face the Nation that Obama had to stop pretending to believe in the moral equivalency between armed police and unarmed Black people: “He needs to step up to the plate and be responsible.” Washington Post reporter Nia-Malika Henderson, noting that Dyson usually defended Obama, described him as the highest-profile African American critic of Obama’s weak response to Ferguson. Four days later Dyson put it more sharply, protesting that Obama was tone-deaf toward the fire-alarm crisis occurring in Ferguson.158 A year later, Obama allowed that he was two years into his second term before he felt sufficiently confident in his decisions to loosen up and say what he really thought. GQ’s interviewer Bill Simmons judged that the gap between Obama the president and Obama the person narrowed considerably in 2015. Obama confirmed it, but he stressed that the events of 2015 were not fraught with the uncertainties of Ferguson. It wasn’t clear what happened in Ferguson, and “to actually get something done, you have to build consensus.” Merely expressing outrage would have been counterproductive. As the attorney general’s boss, he

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could not have weighed in with a strong opinion about what happened without damaging the case, after which the blowback and backlash would have been colossal. In other cases, he noted, it was far clearer what had happened.159 Eric Garner, a forty-four-year-old, heavyset, genial, peaceable Black man arrested multiple times for selling unlicensed cigarettes, was choked to death in Staten Island on July 17, 2014. Garner pleaded eleven times, “I can’t breathe,” while several New York City police officers held him down. Officer Daniel Pantaleo killed Garner with a prohibited chokehold, which the medical examiner ruled a homicide. The Garner case did not explode until December, when a Richmond County grand jury decided not to indict Pantaleo. For weeks there were demonstrations every night in New York City, shouting, “I can’t breathe,” condemning the murder and the grand jury verdict, insisting defiantly that Eric Garner’s life mattered. On June 17, 2015, a twenty-one-year-old white supremacist named Dylann Roof murdered nine African Americans at a Bible study at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. Mother Emanuel, founded in 1818 by Morris Brown, has a venerated history that includes cofounder Denmark Vesey’s execution in 1822 for plotting a slave revolt. Its iconic standing caused Roof to select it as the ideal place to massacre Black people. One of his nine victims was the church’s revered pastor, Clementa C. Pinckney, a state senator. Obama eulogized Pinckney with heartrending beauty, noting that he was a preacher at thirteen, a pastor by eighteen, and a public servant by twenty-three. Pinckney was always wise beyond his years, Obama recalled, unfailingly loving, faithful, gentle, and pure. He poured himself out for the poor of his sprawling Lowcountry district, spending full days at the capitol before heading to his church. He cast lonely votes in the legislature and scraped for resources for people left behind: “Reverend Pinckney embodied a politics that was neither mean nor small. He conducted himself quietly and kindly and diligently. He encouraged progress not by pushing his ideas alone, but by seeking out your ideas, partnering with you to make things happen. He was full of empathy and fellow feeling, able to walk in somebody else’s shoes and see through their eyes.”160 Obama was always superb at eulogies, but this one was different, and not only because Pinckney was saintly good. His eulogy for Pinckney moved into the most deeply Black-church oration of his presidency. The voice was Blackchurch, the delivery was the syncopated speak-and-pause of Black preaching, and it built to a close featuring the hymn of a converted slave trader. Obama grieved at losing Pinckney at forty-one, “slain in his sanctuary with eight wonderful members of his flock, each at different stages in life but bound together by a common commitment to God.” He named them individually: “Cynthia

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Hurd, Suzie Jackson, Ethel Lance, DePayne Middleton Doctor, Tywanza Sanders, Daniel L. Simmons, Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, Myra Thompson.” He grieved at losing people “so full of life and so full of kindness,” and in a sacred place. Obama said the Black church has always been, and still is, the center of African American life and a sanctuary from a “too-often hostile world.” Black churches were “hush harbors” where slaves could worship in safety, “praise houses” where free descendants shouted hallelujah, “bunkers” for the freedom fighters of the civil rights movement, and “community centers” for justice organizing. They were, and are, places where children are loved, cared for, protected, and taught that they matter: “That’s what happens in church.” The Black church is “our beating heart,” Obama declared, “the place where our dignity as a people is inviolate.” Mother Emanuel epitomized it, “a church built by blacks seeking liberty, burned to the ground because its founder sought to end slavery only to rise up again, a phoenix from these ashes.”161 Perhaps something could be done, he said, about the “unique mayhem that gun violence inflicts upon this nation.” Americans somehow accepted that thirty Americans are killed by gun violence every day. Perhaps something could be done about race relations in America. Obama moved to the close: “Clem understood that justice grows out of recognition of ourselves in each other; that my liberty depends on you being free, too. That history can’t be a sword to justify injustice or a shield against progress. It must be a manual for how to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past, how to break the cycle, a roadway to a better world. He knew that the path of grace involves an open mind. But, more importantly, an open heart.” Obama was unsure whether he could sing “Amazing Grace,” or should end by reciting it. Unsteadily he sang it, unforgettably, while others joined in, trying to be grateful for grace amazing while mourning the vicious murder of nine more innocents.162 Charleston triggered a cultural chain reaction, unshackling Obama. Suddenly numerous symbols of the Confederacy were banished. South Carolina removed the Confederate flag from the State House grounds. White politicians in Maryland, Mississippi, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia pledged to strip Confederate symbols from their license plates, public parks and buildings, retail stores, and internet sites. In July 2015 the NAACP held its annual convention in Philadelphia. Obama started with prefatory banter, apologized for not sending Michelle, and announced that he was going to talk about the criminal justice system. He allowed that a lot of folks belong in prison—“murderers, predators, rapists, gang leaders, drug kingpins.” But many of the 2.2 million souls in prison should not be there, and far more of the Justice Department budget should be

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spent on busting people who belong there. Locking up nonviolent drug offenders for twenty years or a life sentence has always been wrong, and it costs way too much. Obama observed that America spent $80 billion per year to keep folks incarcerated. For $80 billion, the nation could finance universal preschool for every three- and four-year-old. Or it could double the salary of every high school teacher. Or eliminate tuition at every public college and university. Or finance all the new roads, bridges, airports, job training programs, and research and development that Washington talks about perpetually. He stressed that the incarceration issue disproportionally affects communities of color. African Americans and Latinos make up 30 percent of the general population and 60 percent of the prison population. One in every thirty-five African American men is imprisoned. One in every eighty-eight Hispanic men is imprisoned. “Among white men, that number is one in 214.” Obama pledged to spend the rest of his presidency changing this picture, finding allies wherever he could, even in the Republican Party. His speech to the NAACP was more telling for how he gave it than what he said. It conveyed that he was finally unleashed.163 He was a good president who could have been better. Obama presided over eight years of slow, steady economic growth, his administration had no scandals, and he represented the nation with consummate dignity and intelligence. He changed the nation and the presidency by inhabiting the presidency, representing the nation itself and the nation’s racial progress and the people victimized by historic American anti-blackness. The legislative part of his presidency lasted only two years, after which he coped with a nakedly obstructionist Republican Congress. He never lost his fervent and appreciative following in Black churches. In the academy, where Black social Christianity grew and diversified, and in the Black Lives Matter movement, born in the Trayvon eruption of July 2013, he was less frequently celebrated, to put it mildly. Obama got too much campaign mileage out of respectability politics to be endearing to many people who were alienated, shamed, or offended by respectability admonitions. He did nothing whatsoever to dismantle or scale back America’s global military empire. He made a calculated, selective pitch to Black church social conservatism that was often remembered afterward, especially by young people in Black Lives Matter. In his first two years, Obama took whatever he could get from the sixtieth vote in the Senate without twisting a single arm or planting a flag. The political skills and temperament that carried him to the White House serviced an accommodating approach to the presidency, not a fighting-for-justice approach. Meanwhile, Obama’s eight years of presidential success heightened the dangers to Black Americans in American streets and set off the backlash tornado that carried Trump to the presidency.

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FRAMES OF IDENTITY AND WORLD HOUSE STRUGGLE

The ground shifted just as our story took a contemporary turn—halfway through the Obama years. Obama perfectly symbolized the hope of a cosmopolitan, multicultural, postracial solution to America’s congenital antiblackness and racism. He said it plainly in his first inaugural address as president on January 20, 2009: “What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them, that the stale political arguments that have consumed them for so long no longer apply.” His election supposedly proved that established traditions of antiracist politics are obsolete. Those who still talked about America’s congenital anti-blackness and racism needed to get their clocks fixed; their arguments were stale and no longer applied. To be sure, Obama employed the same post- trope to other topics, such as government big or small, markets good or bad, safety versus ideals, and so on. Still, his presidency was historic from its opening moment on account of race, the meaning of which he addressed with a strong assertion. If he could be elected president, postracial deliverance was not far off; perhaps it had already come. This argument, a powerful half-truth, carried Obama to the White House, where he said as little as possible about Black anything until the ground shifted again, yielding a movement proclaiming defiantly that Black Lives Matter.1 The reproach in this three-word message was ingeniously understated. Alicia Garza, a Black organizer based in the San Francisco Bay area, coined the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter in July 2013 along with her friends Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi after George Zimmerman was acquitted of murdering Trayvon Martin. Garza said it continued to surprise her how little Black lives matter. Her statement, as the name of a movement, perfectly registered that 418

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Black lives never mattered to most White Americans and that Garza was surprised it was still true and that the confident postracialism expressed in Obama’s first inaugural address was wildly exaggerated. Garza, Cullors, and Tometi built a platform and an organizing tool that grew into a global network, focusing especially on police violence against transgender and gender-nonconforming people of color. Many who flocked to BLM had heard enough about King’s dream. They grew up in Black communities scarred by hostile treatment from police and racked by unemployment rates that were triple or quadruple the national average. Many were raised on the bromide that they had to become respectable to avert a bad future. BLM leaders were sharply critical of the Black church’s legacy on this subject, contending that the church discredited itself by preaching a religion and politics of respectability, which put church leaders on the defensive.2 Church leaders had been there before. Until lightning struck in Montgomery in December 1955, precious few people believed that churches were indispensable to the Black freedom movement. The usual view among movement activists was that church communities were too conservative, insular, and respectable to challenge Jim Crow. Black social gospel leaders of the early twentieth century had to overcome conservative majorities in their own churches and among movement leaders who looked down on church people. The same thing was true for every Black social gospel leader of the second and third generations, the role models and mentors for King. The ministers and church-based activists who later became synonymous with the civil rights movement had to battle their way into it and prove their relevance. The generation that came of age during the Black Power movement had a similar challenge. Then it happened again on the watch of America’s first Black president. Obama was not wrong that the ground had shifted—before it shifted again. He had felt it the same way that one feels a change in the weather. But even Obama said America was far from being racially just or postracial, a consequence of America’s long history of racial discrimination. White Americans did not include African Americans in the American creed that all human beings are created equal and endowed with unalienable rights. The American Idea was an abstract claim that whitewashed the congenital reality of racial oppression and exclusion in American democracy. The simple creed of nonracism that bound Black churches to each other was a reaction to being stigmatized, denigrated, and excluded. How to hold off the racism of the dominant society was always the common task of Black churches otherwise divided by ecclesiology, class, location, theology, politics, and culture. It reverberated in the incredulous preaching of Black ministers about the racism

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of White Christians: Don’t they believe in their own religion? How did they justify slavery for centuries? The creed of nonracism was shared across the spectrum of Black churches from nationalists fixed on returning to Africa to cultural nationalists demanding to be left alone, to protest movements demanding equal rights and cultural self-determination, to evangelicals fixed on heaven, to accommodationists fixed on assimilating to White society. The foremost Black Christian nationalist of the nineteenth century, Henry McNeal Turner, despite rejecting the politics of racial integration, spoke passionately about the egalitarian ideal denied to Black Americans, very much in the American idiom, and promoted assimilationist ideals through his cultural conservatism, like other nationalists. Countless Black church sermons pointed to the tragic fate of Native Americans as proof that outright opposition to White American civilization could yield only conquered genocidal ruination. Black social gospel leaders said it was not too late for White America to stop betraying its American and Christian ideals. When the ground shifted for the second time in the Obama era, BLM activists judged that the entire Black church tradition of nonracism was too American for them, undercutting their agency by leaving them no real choice. Nonracism was at least something reasonably definite—the repudiation of the bigotry engrafted in U.S. culture marking Whites as more valuable than others. It presented a straightforward demand to Whites, no matter how complex race might be said to be: Figure out how to stop being racist. When the relationship between nonracism and postracialism became a relevant question, it registered that the ground was shifting, perhaps for the better. Social critic Touré, in a book epitomizing its moment, Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness? (2011), said blackness is totally liquid, shape-shifting into any conceivable form. It is limited only by one’s incapacity or unwillingness to imagine it differently. He argued that three types of blackness coexist in American life—introverted, ambiverted, and extroverted.3 Introverts hold a private relationship with blackness, saying they happen to be Black, something less important than being a human being or an American; former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice is an ideal type. Ambiverts affirm that being Black is important to them but does not identify them; they love being Black as long as it does not define them. Touré put Obama, actor Will Smith, and former secretary of state Colin Powell in this group. Extroverts earnestly identify with being Black, making it the story of their lives; Touré pointed to King, Malcolm, and rapper Jay Z. Black theologian Walter Earl Fluker, feeling the pull of post-blackness, but stopping short of Touré’s hyperfluidity, reflected that post-blackness is ghostly and shape-shifting. It is ghostly as a spectral, evasive, eliding, compelling something that coerces a mode of allegiance

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to itself, and shape-shifting as a critique of any sign claiming to be an absolute or essential something—such as blackness—that does not change. Fluker felt the ghost of American racism throughout Obama’s drive to the White House in 2008. It showed up in the “Kill Obama!” shouts at Republican rallies and the anti-Obama protesters declaring they were fed up. On the day after Obama was elected, Fluker described the ghost to readers of U.S. News and World Report. He said America’s ghost is not the kind that spooked Sleepy Hollow in Washington Irving’s headless horseman tale of early America, or that stares out of staircase portraits in Harry Potter chronicles. America’s ghost is a cultural haunting more like the country churchyard ghosts of Black folk culture, or Toni Morrison’s ghostly central character in Beloved, conveying repressed aspects of a communal or national character. Morrison reasoned that race has become metaphorical—designating and disguising symptoms of cultural decay, hostility, economic injustice, and toxic politics.4 When Obama announced at his inauguration that America’s long-running debates about racism were obsolete, Fluker rejoiced and trembled at the specter of postracial deliverance. This jubilant moment in American life, he wrote, was for him “a surreal, fantastical, disembodied experience.” Many of his friends who lived and breathed the Black church had a similar experience. Fluker was thrilled at the rise of Obama; he did not have to imagine that Obama was some kind of lefty, or the next MLK, for the elation to be warranted. But the ghost spooked and scared him. What was being lost? What would happen to the Black church? If a broadly cultural, postmodern postracialism is the future, how would the Black church retool its moral language and describe itself to itself? If postracism is a good thing, as he believed, why was he so anxious? Was it merely a distrust of feelings “that were too joyful, too hopeful, and perhaps deceptive”?5 As the Obama presidency unfolded, Fluker ruminated that the best example of America’s racial ghost is the High John the Conqueror tale of a house ghost who didn’t die right. In the folk tale, the ghost would wait until new tenants began to feel comfortable and then terrify them by chanting constantly that he hadn’t died right. Finally, the ghost met up with High John the Conqueror, who was not afraid of ghosts and declared that if the ghost stayed in the house, he would die right that very night. Fluker judged that a ghost that hadn’t died right haunted Obama’s White House, evading capture and confrontation. Its spectral reality was, and is, something that is not a thing. Its haunting is accompanied by plural temporalities and meanings. Under postmodern postracialism, even justice is pluralized in languages of diversity, multiculturalism, and difference that conceal Black materiality and specifically anti-Black forms of racism.

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Fluker and his former colleague Lawrence Edward Carter Sr. fix on King’s call to move into the “world house.” Carter, spending his entire career at Morehouse College, built the Martin Luther King Jr. International Chapel into an ecumenical bastion of world-house education, activism, worship, and social gospel theology dedicated to King’s memory and witness. Fluker’s career is an arc of prestigious appointments at liberal institutions—assistant professor of Christian ethics at Vanderbilt Divinity School; dean of Black Church Studies and Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Theology and Black Church Studies at Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School; director of the Andrew Young Center for Global Leadership and Coca-Cola Professor of Leadership Studies at Morehouse College; Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Ethical Leadership and editor of the Howard Thurman Papers Project at Boston University School of Theology; and Dean’s Professor of Spirituality, Ethics, and Leadership at Candler School of Theology, Emory University. Fluker and Carter became pillars of the Black social gospel establishment through their guardianship roles at these institutions, extending its legacy into and beyond the Obama era. S HIF TIN G GROU N D A N D DIAS P ORIC FIRE: WA LTER EA RL F LUKER

Fluker was born in 1951 in Vaiden, Mississippi, locally called “Frogbottom,” a place of desperately poor Black people who rarely found an exit. His father, Clinton Fluker, made it to South Side Chicago in 1956, working as a car wash attendant and dishwasher, eventually sending for his wife, Zettie Fluker, and their three surviving children. Zettie Fluker was fiery and fearless, protecting her children except during her bouts of epilepsy, when they took care of her. One of Fluker’s Chicago uncles said that Clinton and Zettie Fluker “seen a hard, hard time” in Frogbottom. Yet during their lonely, alien, violent Chicago exile, Frogbottom morphed into a nostalgic family memory of home and innocence.6 Zettie Fluker found a refuge in a storefront church in the “Bucket of Blood” district on Forty-third Street, Centennial Missionary Baptist Church. The church saved her, and Walter. He grew up on her Tuesday-night prayer-meeting testimony, a memorized litany of hard times, trials endured, joy in Jesus, and hope of heaven. Zettie Fluker said she never gave up because she had a joy that the world does not give and cannot take away. Jesus walked beside them as they traversed the poverty, gangs, razor fights, murders, and drug trade of the Bucket of Blood. Fluker reflected that his father, however, struggled with devils: “Devils from Mississippi, devils in Chicago, devils of fear, devils of hopelessness, and devils he could not name. The greatest of these devils was hopeless-

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ness.” Clinton Fluker never really made the transition to Chicago. To him it was a place of humiliation, dislocation, drunkenness, violence, and blight. In Frogbottom he had been a churchgoer. In Chicago he could not pretend to have any hope. He disdained churchgoing, though Fluker noticed that his father still sang the old hymns at home: “Do you know him? Do you know him? Jesus Christ, God’s Son?” Clinton Fluker didn’t return to church until he fell ill with cancer near the end of his life; he died in 1984. He was too unskilled and out of place in Chicago, “a veritable hell with many fiendish imps mocking his every effort to remain sane and whole.”7 Centennial Church, though a place of saving refuge for Fluker, was also a place of theological terror. He dreaded the prospect of burning eternally in the lake of fire. On two occasions in his preadolescence, Fluker tried to join the church to change his fate, but the congregation said he was too young to be saved. His only comfort on this issue came from a succession of Jehovah’s Witnesses whom Clinton Fluker welcomed into the living room. The Witnesses said there is no eternal damnation of the lost. If one’s consciousness dies, one simply ceases to exist. Consciousness is not a system independent of one’s body that survives the death of one’s body. God created us to have bodies formed from the dust; we are dust breathing. Fluker loved the Witness doctrine that death and the loss of consciousness are synonymous. Had his mother joined the Witnesses, he would have eagerly tagged along, very much attracted to the crisply ironed suits and dresses, shined shoes, White bourgeois manners, and saved-for-heaven confidence of the Witnesses. The Witness magazine, Watchtower, featured pictures of paradise— neatly dressed people walking in lush gardens of beautiful trees and low-hanging fruit in their resurrected White bodies. That set up Fluker to become a born-again evangelical. In high school he served an internship at a downtown advertising agency, his first exposure to the world of White professionalism. Fluker learned how to act White, graduated in 1969 near the bottom of his class at Dunbar Vocational High School, which put a college deferment out of play, and joined the U.S. Army, serving as a chaplain’s assistant. There he entered the world of White evangelicalism through Navigators Ministries. Completing his army tour in 1973, Fluker shocked his old Chicago friends by trying to evangelize them—you’re now a White evangelical? Enrolling at Trinity College in Deerfield, Illinois, an evangelical school, Fluker studied philosophy and the Bible, served for two years as a Minority Student Affairs coordinator, and realized he was not at home in this body, either. He cast around for a Christianity that fit him, finding his way to the Black social gospel. Fluker was ordained to the Baptist ministry in 1979 and earned a master of divinity degree from Garrett-Evangelical the following year. In 1980

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he enrolled in the Ph.D. program in social ethics at Boston University School of Theology, working under John H. Cartwright, the first holder of the Martin Luther King Jr. Chair. Fluker pastored a historic UCC congregation, St. John’s Congregational Church, in Springfield, Massachusetts, during the first five years of his doctoral program, completing his doctorate in 1988. For most of his career he sustained this practice of serving a congregation while teaching successively at Vanderbilt, Colgate Rochester, Morehouse, and Boston University. In all these places he fixed on a threefold subject—the transcendent importance of ethical leadership, its role in the Black church, and the ruinous lack of it in most of U.S. American life. Fluker put it categorically in 1998, while running the Leadership Center at Morehouse College: “There is a crisis that reaches across the social, religious, economic, and political spectrum and touches every facet of our lives.” The economy kept growing while poor and working-class people fell further behind, moral appeals to the common good got nowhere in American politics, and morality was reduced to market rationality—grab what you can. America is spiritually sick, Fluker argued, and the cure will not come from New Age spirituality, clinical therapy, managerial liberalism, quick-fix religious revivalism, working out, or prosperity religion: “The problem of ethical leadership is the failure of public leaders to resolve America’s long history of shame and to address what constitutes the human need for love, hope, and sense of community.” He fashioned a variation of communitarian criticism; American liberal democracy and capitalism created a narcissistic culture of greed, self-preoccupation, “this inordinate need for recognition,” and predatory competition: “This sickness of the soul is wrought by a sensate culture that has inverted on itself—it is madness, the insatiable passion for domination of the other.”8 Cultural historian Christopher Lasch described modernity as the credo that what matters is the forward movement of Western individualism, progress, which erases all connections to the past. Fluker, appropriating Lasch, stressed that Europeans would not have colonized most of the planet lacking the idea of progress that undergirded their superficial optimism. Lasch contended that modernity owed its peculiar optimism to Europe’s nostalgic memory of collective innocence, a self-serving historical amnesia that erased the boundaries of history. Hope, by contrast, is the product of hard-won faith in the potential goodness of life. Unlike modern optimism, hope is not sentimental, does not feed on bogus innocence, and is not cut off from historical reality. It demands a belief in justice, not a belief in progress. It derives more confidence from the past than from any notion of ostensible progress or a future trajectory. Lasch cited King and Niebuhr as exemplars of ethical-historical hope. Fluker agreed

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with him up to the part about King and Niebuhr, since both were mere liberals in the 1950s who did not grasp the vicious social evil masquerading under the American dream of progress.9 All U.S. Americans are schooled in the myth of America as the exceptional beacon of progress. Fluker, borrowing a phrase of biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann, countered that the true makers of American history are the marginalized who stand “outside the time line and every headline.” The White founders and heroes of the America-the-Great story never envisioned a society that cares about everyone. Fluker commended neoconservative theologian Richard John Neuhaus for asking the right question: “Who, Now, Will Shape the Meaning of America?” Neuhaus in the 1980s perceived that secular forms of liberalism and conservatism were declining in the United States; a postsecular culture was emerging, led by evangelicals. He argued that Catholics, Lutherans, and evangelicals should join together to reshape American culture—a cause he championed with singular proficiency in his magazine, First Things.10 Neuhaus was a withering critic of liberal Protestantism. Year after year he hammered on the shrinking, shrinking, shrinking trajectory of what he called the old-line churches. He loved to tease that the Christian right’s vision of a Christian America was rooted in mainline Protestantism and lifted from the social gospel. But liberal Protestantism, he said, worked itself out of a job. It pledged itself to the enlightened leadership of the nation, a mission too large and too small at the same time. Moreover, the pledge was not reciprocated. Mainline Protestantism was barely thanked for helping to bring society to the point of secular, pluralistic self-sufficiency. It succeeded in making itself dispensable. Then it capitulated to liberation theology because, having lost confidence in its own tradition, the terms of its remaining prestige were unacceptably demeaning. So the mainline churches trashed what remained of their tradition. At least the pathetic social gospel trinity of Christianity, America, and civilization spoke to middle-class Americans where they lived. The liberationist trinity of Christianity, developing nations, and revolutionary justice spoke to a tiny audience of religious professionals and academics, who produced memos for radical change, the noise of prophetic assemblies, and what Neuhaus persistently called “pervasive feelings of failure and guilt.”11 America needed a confident, serious, and religiously uncompromised Christianity that dared to make unlikely alliances. In the late 1970s Neuhaus began to say that mainline Protestantism was too mired in guilt and relativism to be capable of it. Moreover, liberal Protestant leaders could never imagine joining forces on anything with the resurgent evangelical right, which they perceived as hopelessly reactionary. In the mid-1980s Neuhaus began to say that

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American Catholicism might seize the moment and renew the vision of a Christian America in new forms. He published the book version of this argument in 1987, The Catholic Moment. Three years later he was received into the Catholic Church.12 Neuhaus became the Christian right’s most sophisticated defender by straddling it carefully, contending that it rightly rejected the rules that marginalized liberal Protestantism. The Christian right did not view itself as having entered into a social contract for the adjudication of interests. It took no interest in a politics of disinterested individuals, stripped of faith and community, making bargains for justice. Justice is not the end of a bargain or a work of human imagination, but participation in a transcendent good. The Christian right was determined to talk about God in the public square, challenging a state that permitted abortion and pornography on liberal grounds. It rejected the liberal doctrine that the public arena must adjudicate interests but not morality. Even when the Christian right had the wrong answers, Neuhaus said, or espoused them badly, it raised momentous questions about the problems of a socialcontract liberalism dominated by secular elites. This was the central argument of his two major works, The Naked Public Square and The Catholic Moment. One reason that Neuhaus was so effective as a defender of the Christian right was that he perceived the limitations and distortions of its fundamentalism. To him, the politicized fundamentalist right was crucial to building a movement that overturned Roe v. Wade and kept alive the idea of the United States as a Judeo-Christian nation, but wrong to treat its fundamental beliefs as immune to public criticism. Fundamentalists wanted to change society on the basis of their religious beliefs without allowing these beliefs to be publicly questioned. Neuhaus said this approach is indefensible, imposing religious teachings on a bare authority claim. It proceeds on the basis of coercion, not persuasion. Even when it prevails politically, it wins only a political victory, the triumph of one interest group over another, which does nothing to create or strengthen a moral consensus. It weakens the basis of any conceivable consensus by politicizing private beliefs. Christian right politics-as-usual is alien to democracy and hostile to it. Neuhaus called for a social Christianity that enlisted Niebuhr and Catholic theologian John Courtney Murray to its cause, plus, very selectively, John Dewey and King. It advanced a religiously grounded public philosophy for the American experiment in freedom, democracy, and virtue. The remedy for the naked public square, he argued, is not naked public religion or moralizing the public sphere with naked appeals to religious authority. It is to develop a Christian social philosophy employing the mediating concepts of natural law,

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common grace, general revelation, and the order of creation to sustain the American experiment. Neuhaus never tired of warning: If we cannot agree that there is an authority higher than the community, the state will assume evergreater control over all authorities. The very existence of a healthy pluralism of social authorities and mediating institutions is safeguarded only by a publicly sanctioned religious faith, preferably biblical religion. Only religion can invoke against the state a transcendent authority and inject a strong notion of virtue into the public square.13 Fluker respected Neuhaus’s acumen, recognizing that the Christian right succeeded as a counterversion of the social gospel, forging alliances between conservative Catholics and conservative evangelicals. The Christian left was weak and a failure by comparison, except for the progressive leaders that came out of Black churches. Fluker stressed that Black churches excel at producing leaders: “Because of the black church’s distinctive sociocultural location and long history of producing ethical leaders despite inadequate material and social resources, it is a prime candidate for offering direction for the ongoing debate over religion and public life.” He mined the careers of King and Thurman for examples of the best ethical leadership practices, noting that King and Thurman straddled the borderlands between American liberal theology and the Black protest tradition, uniting leaders “at the intersection where worlds collided.” Thurman was a combination priest, shaman, and prophet who opened the way for others by listening, being present, healing, teaching, and offering a vision of reconciled wholeness. King drew on his deep spirituality to forge a movement calling for a revolution of values and the abolition of racism. The task of the ethical leader, Fluker argued, as exemplified by King and Thurman, is to inspire and guide others “in the process of transformation through courageous acts of defiance and resistance against systems of injustice.”14 Fluker loved the historic identification of the Black church with Psalm 118:22: “The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.” Black churches, the rejected cornerstone, understand White America better than it understands itself, so they are distinctly qualified to speak about the soul of America and uniquely proficient at producing moral leaders. Only the Black tradition of social Christianity offers a serious counterword, based on gospel values, against a Christian right that toadies to the powerful, capitulates to capitalist materialism, and, for many years, made empty-gesture appeals to King. Fluker stuck to these points until the Christian right got serious about hijacking King, fortified by a best-selling book by Clarence Jones, What Would Martin Say? (2008).15 King’s former lawyer was politically conservative and proudly upper class. He claimed to know—“I was privy to his innermost thoughts”—that King was not

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the lefty progressive that people said. Far from it, King was remarkably like Jones. Had King lived into the present time, Jones said, he would have sought to abolish affirmative action, been appalled by Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, implored the United States to crack down on undocumented immigrants, and supported America’s invasion of Iraq. King believed in self-reliant individualism, just like Jones. He would have commended Black Republicans, also like Jones, because he truly believed that one should be judged only by the content of one’s character. To be sure, Jones allowed, King advocated reparations for Black Americans, but affirmative action would have repelled him. Jones explained that King was the opposite of Black leaders who “pimp the best interests of black people,” telling Blacks they are disadvantaged. According to Jones, King shared his derision of lazy, spoiled welfare recipients, a drag on society. Moreover, King believed that people who violate America’s immigration laws “deserve no more consideration from the authorities than does a thief.” In 2008 King would have added: “I find it offensive and insulting when you wave Mexican and Salvadoran flags and compare yourself to civil rights demonstrators.” Jones even channeled a King who cheered the invasion of Iraq—surely King would have said that Iraq got what it deserved for failing to comply with UN resolutions.16 Conservatives quoted Jones gleefully, happy to pit King against liberal Democrats. Historian Lewis V. Baldwin and social ethicist Rufus Burrow Jr. countered that Jones grasped nothing of King’s seminary-educated theological worldview, which made his projections about King shallow and secular, wholly unlike King. Womanist theologian Rosetta E. Ross and political scientist Shirley T. Geiger said it was “unbelievable” that King would close the nation’s borders to poor Brown people “so that poor black people can have exclusive rights to perform the low wage, backbreaking, dehumanizing tasks for those reserved for those lowest on the economic ladder.” Womanist theologian Cheryl A. KirkDuggan was puzzled that Jones said nothing about King’s promiscuity and sexism—subjects on which Jones held inside knowledge. Fluker left the arguments about politics and policies to others, focusing on the leadership issue. On one level, he said, Jones employed the usual formula, only with conservative politics: Start with King, then bash everyone who tried to follow him as a leader. Fluker ran through a long list of recent books bearing titles such as Enough, Scam, We Have No Leaders, and Losing the Race. The literature about Black leaders, he observed, “tends to be extraordinarily harsh.” The Jones episode was another iteration of a tired trope about a heroic-sacrificial MLK being succeeded by scam artists, race hustlers, career opportunists, and political failures.17 Fluker moved to a postmodern point. Looking for King in an age of postracism and post-blackness, he said, “is akin to scavenging through a huge heap of

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postmodern, used, and reusable linguistic and cultural fragments and piecing together a quilted image of the man who has been lost in consumerism, conservatism, and conspiracy.” He didn’t mean to disparage King’s legacy for the age of Obama. Surely, Jones needed to be corrected. But Fluker stressed that all historic figures, especially King, get recycled for cultural consumption and the service of self-interested agendas. Finding the “real” King among the ruins and debris of twenty-first-century politics, marketing, and religion is an unpromising enterprise, especially since it is nearly always delivered as a litany of complaints, laments, and accusations against Black leaders. Fluker rethought his usual tack in this debate and what he took from King. In 2013 he took his first pass at a reframing argument. Black Americans, Fluker argued, have moved since the King era, or are in the process of moving, or at least, should move, from dilemma to diaspora, exodus to exile, and the frying pan to the fire. Later there was a book version, The Ground Has Shifted: The Future of the Black Church in Post-Racial America (2016).18 The King generation was steeped in the dilemma consciousness classically described by Du Bois and Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal. Du Bois began Souls of Black Folk with a stunning description of his split consciousness as a Black man and an American. Myrdal, in 1944, fixed on one dilemma: How should Black Americans relate to American democracy? Fluker did not say the dilemma had been solved. He said it “still exists at the heart of African American life” and that focusing on it is self-defeating. The ethical dilemma of how Black communities should relate to the United States’ national and civic interests cannot be solved.19 If one retains the dilemma framework of the King era, Fluker reasoned, one might end up with Jones, accepting moral responsibility for America’s interests and urging African American youths to fight America’s wars. Fluker countered with King’s call in 1967 for a world house consciousness in which Blacks and Whites, easterners and westerners, Gentiles and Jews, Catholics and Protestants, and Muslims and Hindus learn how to live together in peace. To Fluker, this was the way for Black Americans to move beyond the dilemma problem, embracing the homeless diasporic reality of Black American existence. Jones tied Black Americans so tightly to U.S. American democracy that he truly believed King would have agreed with him about invading Iraq and cracking down on Central American migrants. For Jones and his version of King, there is no basis for global citizenship, but King was a global citizen.20 The first transnational modern community was the Black culture that emerged from the ships carrying enslaved Africans to their fateful destinations. Sociologist Paul Gilroy in 1993 called it the “Black Atlantic,” preferring the

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specificity of this metaphor to “diaspora.” In 2005 cultural anthropologist J. Lorand Matory called it the “African diaspora.” Fluker leaned on Gilroy and Matory to describe the Black Atlantic refutation of Western civilization, although Gilroy did not project an ontological-racial identity on disparate peoples of African descent, and the later Gilroy denounced all forms of racial thinking, including attempts to underwrite new or old forms of it by drawing on his scholarship. Race, Gilroy contends, is an inherently toxic and reactionary concept that degraded modern thought, yielding cheap solidarities and dehumanizing everyone it touches: “Black and white are bound together by the mechanisms of ‘race’ that estrange them from each other and amputate their common humanity.”21 Fluker pondered Black essentialism, anti-essentialism, and the indeterminacy of diasporic identities, agreeing with Dianne Stewart that it should be possible to suspend anti-essentialist criticism of diasporic ethnocultural and racial identifications with Africa. Whether or not, Fluker argues, there is a viable third way between essentialism and anti-essentialism, it should be permissible to press the pause button on deconstructions of race, even if one assumes, as he does, that blackness is fluid and unfixed. Scholarship on diasporic identity and unity-in-diversity is just beginning. Diasporas are thoroughly shape-shifting, “yet necessary for navigating the world.” Black American religious communities are connected to diasporic roots and shoots across the planet, “but are not ultimately determined by them.”22 Moving from exodus to exile is a complementary frame, this time in biblical categories. Fluker appropriates two generations of womanist criticism and the Black humanism of William R. Jones on this theme, adding that if one reads the later King from a world house perspective, King’s Mountaintop Sermon in Memphis opens out to a diasporic-exile horizon, not the Promised Land of the Exodus story. The Promised Land metaphor conjures up images of Joshua conquering Canaan and slaughtering Canaanites. In the past it worked only when applied selectively to the African American situation. Today its relevance in Black churches is rapidly diminishing, except in Pentecostal-prosperity versions that turn prophetic religion on its head, converting the promise into a private spiritual deliverance or worldly wealth. Fluker warns that the spiritualization of the Exodus story by a growing surge of Afro-Pentecostal, charismatic, and prosperity gospel churches has “all but erased” the social gospel in large sectors of Black Christianity. Pentecostal religion emphasizes ecstatic spiritual experience, spiritualizing the biblical emphasis on justice. Prosperity religion preaches that God wants born-again people to be materially wealthy and free of disease. Fusions of charismatic and prosperity

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religion have made deep inroads into Black, White, and Brown evangelical and nondenominational churches. Megachurch superstar Creflo A. Dollar Jr., the televangelist founder of the World Changers Church International based in College Park, Georgia, tells his followers that God wants them to have a private jet, two Rolls-Royces, and high-end real estate—just like him. Fluker stresses that the social gospel and liberationist versions of exodus theology are being routed in Black churches where the operative theology is that God wants the faithful to be rich, and being rich is a sign of faithfulness.23 The exodus motif, he contends, is like the U.S. American dilemma framework in perpetuating more problems than it solves for contemporary Black churches. It evokes something real but does not fit the contemporary situation, except when twisted into something that militates against social justice and a healthy community life. Fluker says the exile frame speaks far more personally and relevantly to Black Americans today. King offered an inspiring version of it in the Mountaintop Sermon, taking the crowd at Mason Temple on a panoramic tour of Western history that folded the exodus event into a story about the long march of humanity toward freedom, inviting the crowd to place itself in the worldwide struggle.24 Fluker names Delores Williams, Kelly Brown Douglas, and Cheryl Sanders as womanist allies on moving from exodus to exile. Williams pointed to the intraoppressive dynamics of the exodus frame. Douglas challenged Black theologians to stop treating male heteronormativity as the norm of Black leadership. Sanders commended the Sanctified churches for rebuffing the oppressor-versusoppressed dialectic of the social gospel and liberationist traditions, which attribute too much importance to White racism. The Sanctified Church has always had an exile consciousness, deriving Black identity from the spiritual experiences and traditions of Afro-Pentecostal and Holiness churches. Fluker emphasizes that a broad form of exile consciousness has long vied with the exodus motif for primacy in Black Christianity. Peter Paris observed that whenever a group of persons is rejected by society, it is cast into “a veritable permanent state of Exile, wherein they have no sense of belonging, neither to the community nor to the territory.” Black Americans, Fluker reflects, have never belonged to the United States, but perhaps they can find a home in global struggles waged by people of color.25 The wilderness, to be sure, is dangerous and lonely. It is hard to find a home in the wilderness, and hard to be heard there. Fluker occasionally catches himself when expounding on the freedom of exiled wilderness, remembering his own considerable “privileges of academic and ecclesiastical authority.” But he gives the upper hand of moral authority to those who cry in the wilderness.

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Those who are driven to the wilderness do not seek to make straight that which is crooked. They do not assume responsibility for the right ordering of the world. They dare to speak for themselves, “the voices of the muted, missed, and dismissed, the wretchedly fated who have no recourse but to cry out.” Fluker observed in 2016 that wilderness voices cried out recently in Sanford, Florida; Ferguson, Missouri; Staten Island, New York; and Waller County, Texas, setting off explosive reactions of anguish and violence in megalopolises the world over. In both contexts the crowds of marchers and demonstrators caught a glimpse of their own wildness, loneliness, and alienation.26 To feel one’s wild, lonely, broken, embodied, alienated, not-belonginganywhere homelessness is to be cast from the frying pan into the fire. Fluker acknowledges that King roared against homeless alienation, preaching that he was somebody and so is every child of God. King said what mattered about him was not the color of his skin but his fundamentum, his sacred dignity and eternal worth as a child of God. Fluker sets up his rejection of King’s personalism by misrepresenting it, claiming it was a static philosophy based on Enlightenment dualisms of mind-body and permanence-change. To the contrary, King was steeped in the neo-Hegelian personalism of Edgar Brightman and Walter Muelder, which was not static, or dualistic, or based on a substantive self. King, however, did recycle the classic idealist emphasis on mind, and among King’s personalist teachers, only Harold DeWolf stressed that human embodiment is sacred. Fluker claims that King had to overcome his idealism to struggle for justice, notwithstanding that King and Muelder said the opposite. King reflected that his personal trials taught him the value of unmerited suffering. Fluker retains from King’s fundamentum theme only the sense of embodiment enfolded in it: somebodyness implies a crucial source for ethical living in the middle, the body. There is no ethical life or aesthetic life without a body. Ethics responds to beauty, balance, and symmetry in life, not only to questions of right and wrong. The body is an aesthetic site for pondering what it means to privilege the frames of diaspora and exile.27 What it means is that Black bodies are thrown into the fire. Fluker reflects that fire is purgative and universal: “Fire demands that our commitments to the nation be judged by a more inclusive and prophetic norm, not unlike the tongues of fire at Pentecost.” Whatever commitments that African Americans make to the nation must cohere with their commitments to people of African descent “and other oppressed peoples” in Haiti, Darfur, Tibet, Zimbabwe, Colombia, Ecuador, Palestine, and elsewhere. Willie James Jennings, in The Christian Imagination (2010), describes modern Christianity as a theological error tracing to the European colonization of non-White peoples in the fifteenth

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century. The church sought to discern who was elect—a doctrine first applying to peoples, not individuals—and who possessed salvific viability. Alessandro Valignano, a sixteenth-century Jesuit theologian, declared that salvation in Black bodies was doubtful, just as the church had judged concerning Jews and Moors. The church began to say, Jennings recounts, that White embodiment indicates “high salvific probability, rooted in the signs of movement toward God.” Claims about cleanliness, intelligence, obedience, social hierarchy, and advancement in civilization underwrote a vast scheme in which White European Christians were deemed as the elect at the top of the scale, ten other groups sorted out below, and Blacks at the bottom. Building on Jennings, Fluker says the next stage of Black religious reflection must be aesthetically attuned, risking sustained reflection on “the many colored, crip, queered, and estranged bodies that are heirs to somebodyness.”28 The fire, as Fluker construes it, is a critical tool of the spirit that allows us to interrogate how Black bodies are held in bondage to the political-cultural, theological-ethical, and existential-aesthetic gazes of the ghost of racism. The frying pan is an existential-aesthetic moment epitomized in Black bodies gunned down by police, prisons crammed with Black bodies, and cities teeming with unemployed Black bodies lacking health care. The dilemma framework tells the Black body to stand still, to look for God while being assaulted. The exodus framework references a liberation that has already occurred and points to a redemption beyond the world. The fire of Pentecost, Fluker observes, is spreading through the world in churches bearing the name Pentecostal—and not. It is a corrective to forms of religious expression emphasizing facility of language and domination, teaching religious communities to look for signs of blessing in plurality, novelty, diversity, and openness, and conversely, to look for signs of judgment “on structures that oppose plurality, novelty, and openness.”29 The future is Pentecostal, or at least, broadly Sanctificationist. The question for the Black church is whether the fire will yield religious communities turned on themselves or struggling for the flourishing of endangered bodies throughout the world. In 2010 Fluker left Morehouse to teach at Boston University, moving from one iconic bastion of the King-and-Thurman social gospel to the other one, declaring that the ghosts of King and Thurman at Boston were too strong for him not to come. For the next decade he taught moral leadership at his alma mater and stressed that it became harder to be a Black leader after the civil rights era. King, Fluker explained, spoke to Black audiences that absorbed the social-ethical narratives of self-understanding taught by the church. His successors have much less working for them, dealing with greatly diminished “understandings of character, civility, and a sense of community.”30

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Three generations of African Americans have come of age lacking a moral script. Fluker acknowledges that some of the old scripts are best forgotten, “but when you appear on the stage of history without your lines, in most cases you appear either as an anxious stutterer or as a highly improvisational actor. What we are witnessing today among many of our youth, especially among young black males, is the absence of well-articulated scripts and the lack of clear definitions on what role they should play in a larger historical narrative—and the consequences have been danger, death, destructiveness, and madness in the streets of our inner cities.” The calling of church leaders in King’s time was to stir the churches to struggle for freedom and equality. Fluker says the calling of church leaders today is to wake the dead. The accumulated ravages of poverty, unemployment, bad schools, crime, incarceration, and family dissolution are devastating, “a new form of the ghostly appearance of race in a post-racial society.” The neoliberal economy teaches disadvantaged Blacks that they don’t matter and aren’t needed. Fluker warns that the problem only starts there: “Black churches in the United States have much to confess regarding their complicity with the ghosts of utilitarian individualism masquerading as prosperity gospels and the social-political narcolepsy that perpetuates forgetfulness and narcissism.”31 The same social and economic forces that create walled-off enclaves in the larger society have driven middle-class Black churches further from the world of the Black poor. To wake the dead, Fluker argues, Black Christians must congregate, rallying their diminished communities, conjure a better future than the one mapped out by neoliberalism and the prosperity gospel, and conspire to make a difference. The Black social gospel of the future will be more Pentecostal than the Baptist-Methodist-dominated movement of the past, but it cannot capitulate to the predatory, selfish, commercial individualism of the prosperity gospel. Mainline middle-class Black churches have their own version of capitalist accommodation and capitulation to resist. To wake the dead, they must acknowledge their complicity in pushing aside the poor and neglected “in our pursuit of recognition, prestige, and power.” It cannot happen, Fluker cautions, without building on the historic capacity of the Black churches to produce justice-oriented religious leaders.32 Fluker taught for twelve years at Morehouse, while his spouse, Sharon Watson Fluker, made an immense contribution to theological education as vice president of Administration and Doctoral Programs at the Fund for Theological Education in Atlanta. Sharon Watson Fluker, a political scientist, created a doctoral fellowship program that assisted over four hundred students of color. Meanwhile, at Morehouse, Fluker, Carter, and Morehouse’s President Robert M. Franklin exemplified the college’s commitment to training moral

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leaders in the social ethical values of Mays, Thurman, and King. Mays ran Morehouse from 1940 to 1967, giving way to Hugh Morris Gloster, who elevated the chapel program by building King Chapel in 1978. The following year he hired Carter, who built the Martin Luther King Jr. International Chapel into a beacon of world-house ecumenism. G LO BA L N ON V IOL EN CE AT MOREHOUS E: L AWREN CE EDWA RD CARTER S R.

Born in Dawson, Georgia, in 1941, Carter grew up in Columbus, Ohio, where his mother, Bernice Childs Johnson, cleaned hospital floors to make a living. His father, John Carter, was a World War II veteran who experienced severe traumatic shock during the war and never recovered. John Carter drifted in and out of Chillicothe (Ohio) Veterans Hospital for the rest of his life, too shell-shocked and alcoholic to manage on his own or be seen by his son. Bernice Johnson was deeply faithful, ethical, kind, and extremely hardworking. A pillar of Oakley Full Gospel Baptist Church in Columbus, she never said a bad word about anyone, and she was a fount of proud announcements about the achievements of her son. Carter sat in the car and cried when his mother visited John Carter at the hospital. It tore at him not to know his father, and to wonder about the horrors that shattered him. Carter saw him only twice, once on a one-month discharge, and the second time just before he went to college, when John Carter incongruously called him “the baby.”33 As a tenth grader, Carter was taken one Sunday to Union Grove Baptist Church in Columbus to hear King speak. Carter was bookish and considering the ministry, so afterward he asked the Union Grove pastor, Phale D. Hale, if he could look at his library. Hale waved him in, Carter looked up and down at the books, marveled at Hale’s massive collection, turned around, and met King himself. King asked Carter where he was planning to attend college. Carter said he was aiming for Virginia Seminary and College (later renamed Virginia University) in Lynchburg. King said that was a mistake; he should go to Morehouse, just as King and Hale had done; Morehouse was a great school. Carter’s neighbor warned him, however, that Morehouse would be too hard for him. Bernice Johnson wanted him to enroll at nearby Ohio State University, and his church family held Virginia Seminary in nostalgic, outdated, exalted regard as the best college and seminary for pastors. So Carter chose Virginia and later told this story with wonder. Virginia Seminary disappointed him almost immediately, but in March 1961 Carter heard King speak again, this time at E. C. Glass High School in Lynchburg.

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King gave a stemwinder titled “The American Dream.” It made four rhetorical runs eliciting four standing ovations, and Carter was enthralled, vowing to follow in King’s footsteps. He wanted to transfer to Morehouse, but his mother feared it would be more expensive than Virginia Seminary, which she was straining to finance already. Carter resolved that if he couldn’t transfer to Morehouse, he would follow King instead to Boston University School of Theology. Carter journeyed to Boston to make his case personally to Muelder, the dean of the School of Theology, who told him the school had a place for him; just go back and finish college. At Boston, Carter absorbed Muelder’s pacifist-socialist idealism and his devotion to King. On April 4, 1968, Carter and his future wife, Marva Lois Griffin, attended a play at the university about the assassination of Lincoln. Suddenly Muelder appeared in the auditorium, grief-stricken, pulling homiletics professor Robert Luccock out the door. Carter caught up with Muelder, who told him the tragic news. Carter staggered to Marsh Chapel: “From somewhere deep within, the words welled up. I prayed aloud, ‘Lord, help me to do something significant for Martin Luther King Jr. before I close my eyes.’ Then and there I decided that I would spend the rest of my life furthering the work of King. Before I had felt the inspiration of mentorship, now I felt the responsibility and the obligation of the mentee.”34 That spring he graduated from the master of divinity program and was admitted to the School of Theology’s doctoral program in pastoral counseling. Intellectually, Carter absorbed the King-Muelder synthesis of social ethical idealism, liberal theology, neo-Hegelian personalist philosophy, and Gandhian pacifism. But Carter earned his degree in practical theology, focusing on psychology of religion. He served on the staff of Marsh Chapel, ran its Martin Luther King Jr. Center, and wrote a dissertation comparing the sermons of Otis Aubrey Maxfield and William Augustus Jones Jr., employing Abraham Maslow’s theory of needs and values. Gloster’s search for the Morehouse chapel dean was a big deal in Black theological education. He interviewed nearly five hundred candidates over a three-year period, including Carter in 1977. In 1979, when Carter graduated, Gloster settled on him. Carter did not have to be told that Gloster and Mays held very high expectations for the first dean of King Chapel, but they told him anyway. Gloster made Carter responsible for fund-raising in addition to running the chapel and teaching. Mays said the benchmark of success would be an average Sunday attendance of five hundred.35 From the beginning Carter conceived the chapel program as a world house model of interfaith peacemaking, worship, and dialogue undergirded by the Morehouse tradition of social gospel theology. He hosted a train of scholars, politicians, dignitaries, international leaders, clergy, and civic leaders at Morehouse,

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heightening the Morehouse tradition of serving the civic community of Atlanta. He welcomed Catholic, Islamic, Sikh, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, and Protestant speakers to chapel services, practicing the wider ecumenism he preached. He ran an annual Assistant Chaplains Program that trained seminarians and upcoming clerics, nurturing the next generation of social gospel leaders. He was eloquent and commanding in the pulpit, sprinkling sermons with his vast base of theological knowledge. In the classroom Carter instilled King-Thurman-Muelder personalism in Morehouse students and taught them to revere King and Gandhi as he did. Modeling his faith and career on King and Gandhi set up Carter to feel like a failure. He was too driven to feel that he had built a program worthy of King’s memory, never mind that he built a stellar program. It didn’t matter that Gloster lauded his work and that trustee chair Thomas Kilgore Jr. asked him in 1987 to succeed the retiring Gloster as president. Carter couldn’t take a new job because he hadn’t succeeded in this one. It gnawed at him that his many forums mostly yielded only more forums. Ceremonial and academic words chased more ceremonial and academic words; meanwhile, perpetual wars multiplied, American cities were ravaged by “assault-weapon wielding sociopaths and street gangs,” and the planet teetered on the edge of eco-apocalypse. It seemed to Carter that violence was winning, exactly as King had cried to Abernathy after the Memphis march. As Carter put it: “We behave as if violence is the primary purpose of humankind on earth.”36 Carter told himself it was a privilege to run King Chapel. His friends pressed the point—you have the greatest job in the world! Morehouse pays you to hold forth on everything you care about! What’s not to love? It never felt like enough to Carter. If King would have done something different, Carter was willing to try it, whatever it was. In the summer of 1999 his clerical friend Amos C. Brown, a Morehouse alum, called him out of the blue with a question: What was Carter going to do about the massacre at Columbine High School? The question startled Carter, realizing that King would not have needed to be asked. King was the apostle of human tied-togetherness in a network of mutuality. The choice is not between violence and nonviolence; it’s either nonviolence or nonexistence for all of us. This saying of King’s had mantra status for Carter, but he didn’t know what to do with it. No matter how strenuously he tried to follow King and Gandhi, “I still felt I had made little or no progress in creating real momentum around peace as a living, breathing way of being in the world, a real and living possibility in the minds of my students and my small, ever-changing Sunday congregation at the chapel, my Morehouse colleagues and fellow clergy. In truth, I felt I had done nothing toward creating a sustainable culture of peace.”37

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Interfaith religiosity was built into the world house idea from the beginning. Gandhi was crucially important to Carter for this reason, being a Hindu who contended that Hinduism, Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam share the same roots of nonviolence. Carter knew he had to find a new way to express the faith of nonviolence. Another course or forum on King and Gandhi would not cut it. He was mulling a service called Millennium Sunday, scheduled for April 2, 2000, when a social work professor from across the street at Clark Atlanta University, Anne Fields-Ford, called to ask if Carter knew about Daisaku Ikeda. Carter had never heard of Ikeda. Fifteen minutes later, Fields-Ford was in Carter’s office, introducing herself as a member of the Soka Gakkai InternationalUSA (SGI), a lay Nichiren Buddhist organization boasting 12 million members in 192 nations. The original organization was founded in Japan as a response to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In 1960 Ikeda became its president and turned it into an international organization devoted to creating a commonwealth of global citizens. Carter struggled to fathom the information that a Japanese lay Buddhist he had never heard of had built a vast organization dedicated to a global beloved community. It felt like an answer to Amos Brown. To Carter it was also the answer to his quandary about making the faith of King and Gandhi come alive to others, and freshly to him.38 Ikeda, Carter learned, had a Buddhist version of the concept of the interconnectedness of all things, which he called codependent origination. It was an echo of South African ubuntu—I am because we are. The Nichiren chant Nam-myoho-renge-kyo (“devotion to the Lotus Sutra of the Wonderful Law”) expresses the weaving of the human in all that is, analogously to King’s personalist concept of the sacredness of personality. We come from life and return to life. Carter loved the nontheistic Nichiren idea that an omnipresent life force analogous to the Christian God underlies the so-called birth and death of all living things. We have always been here and will always be here because energy cannot be destroyed. Life energy merely changes forms. Since Carter adhered to Muelder’s neo-Hegelian concept of personality, he did not have to overthrow dualistic personalism to feel an affinity with Ikeda. Theistic and Buddhist interconnectedness are complementary perspectives. As Carter studied Ikeda’s thought and movement, and subsequently befriended Ikeda, he relinquished much of the achievement anxiety that had eaten at him. No amount of deepening his commitment to King and Gandhi would have done it, since their impossible standards of accomplishment were the problem: “I began feeling more confident of my own path as a follower of Jesus than ever before. My theological and liturgical vocabulary expanded, and my comfort level in the interfaith community grew exponentially.”39

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Carter had long felt drawn to the fusion of Emersonian and New Thought philosophy expounded by spiritual philosopher Ernest Holmes in The Science of Mind (1926). He felt an affinity with the United Church of Religious Science, which is based on Holmes’s teaching. Saying so from the pulpit of the King Chapel felt problematic until Ikeda’s Buddhism freed him to say what he loved in Holmes and the New Thought tradition. Thurman was enabling on both sides of this back-and-forth. His mysticism opened a door for many, but Carter was first and foremost a guardian of the King tradition, and Thurman held back from civil rights activism. Adding Ikeda to Carter’s King-and-Gandhi concept of interfaith peacemaking helped him let go: “I experienced my despair evaporating like the dew in a bright sun and felt, as Psalm 30 puts it, the joy that ‘cometh in the morning’ with the start of a bright, new day.”40 Black antiracism was not, and is not, the story of his life, despite the racist battering he endured while growing up in Columbus. To Carter, nonviolence trumps everything because war robbed him of knowing his father and robbed his father of the life he should have had. Carter does not begin from an absolute pacifist position of claiming to know or believe that no war can be necessary or ethically justified. He is like King in committing himself to nonviolence and seeing how far it takes him. In 2001 he coauthored a book titled Global Ethical Options that interpreted Gandhi, King, and Ikeda as prophets of a global ethic of nonviolence. Carter argued that nonviolence fosters self-realization and cooperation, as Gandhi, King, and Ikeda contended; moreover, in our time it must emphasize ecological wholeness. Like King, only more so, Carter is trueblue for Morehouse, dispensing its lore and touting its virtues. Carter tells students that King became himself only because he went to college at the House. It doesn’t matter that he earned Bs and Cs. It was the House—especially Mays’s sermons at Sale Hall Chapel—that turned King into a highly confident, eloquent, ambitious, justice-oriented church leader. To become a Morehouse student, Carter is fond of saying, is to enter a consciousness: “The very name suggests a bigger, more expansive, more liberated state of mind.”41 Morehouse men are committed to serve others and to make the world a better place. John Hope passed this faith to Johnson and Mays, who passed it to King and Thurman. For forty years and counting, Carter has made Mays, King, and Thurman present to Morehouse students. He stresses that being a steward of the Morehouse tradition and being a harbinger of change are interlocking commitments for him. Carter is patient with the many who want nothing to change at Morehouse, or in their wing of the Black church, or in the social gospel. He gently replies that everything they love will be lost if they aren’t open to change. Anything that helps Black Americans become global citizens is a

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change in the right direction: “As African Americans, embracing our particular history, we should nobly take an equal place in the commonwealth of world citizens and friends. And because our race looks like the rainbow, we should not limit our loyalties and identities to one ethnic group.”42 King said nonviolence was a fire in his bones that he would never relinquish. Carter challenges students to think like King: “A beloved world community is a moral cosmopolitan commonwealth formed through nonviolent social change. It is formed by people engaged in the earnest struggle to get to know one another. In a beloved community, we understand that we are still progressing toward our highest ideals. We are still growing into a greater understanding of what it is to be human.” We cannot make progress by peering through the distancing lens of the nation-state. We cannot recognize our common humanity if the state is our highest authority. Carter implores, citing King more than Thurman but with echoes of Thurman: “We must take the risk of sounding foolish, uninformed, and unpopular to speak to others whose perspectives are different from ours. We cannot risk failing to take actions that we know to be right simply because we fear our motives will be misunderstood.” King gave his life to the struggle against racism, but for King, “this was merely the starting point, the necessary beginning of the work to create this ideal community. He wanted us to transcend that which separates us, that which reinforces our differences and causes us to seek domination over others, and instead to realize that we are living in a great world house.”43 Fluker and Carter are more alike than not in conceptualizing the world house mission of the social gospel. Both are restless types not prone to fossilize a received tradition. Both identify with King and Thurman while fixing on different aspects of their legacies. For Carter, nonviolence is paramount, naming the spirituality and politics by which the beloved global community grows, claims connections to multiple religious communities and peoples, and ties together the means and ends of faithful living. For Fluker, there is no golden key to the beloved community; postmodernity has seeped too deeply to make any one thing the key to everything else. The ghostly presence of race pervades society and culture; the study of diasporic ethnocultural and racial identities has only begun; and there are worse things to deconstruct than essentialized blackness. For Robert Franklin, even more than for Fluker and Carter, moral leadership is a career-defining and absorbing subject. He studied and wrote about the role of the public moral leader before he became one. Born in Chicago in 1954 and raised in the Church of God in Christ (COGIC)—St. Paul Church in Chicago—Franklin earned his college degree at Morehouse in 1975 and his doctorate in ethics and society at the University of

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Chicago in 1985. In his early career he taught ministry studies at Harvard and served as dean of Black Church Studies at Colgate Rochester before moving in 1989 to Candler. His first book, Liberating Visions (1990), compared Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, Malcolm, and King, describing all four as public moralists who exemplified “the public and quasi-religious cast of national black leadership.” Black religious leaders, Franklin observed, are expected to combine the prophetic, priestly, messianic, and pastoral roles. In 1995 he took a leave from Emory-Candler to run the Rights and Social Justice Program of the Ford Foundation, which put Franklin on an upward-climbing administrative track; meanwhile he wrote a book on how Black churches engaged the social crises of the 1990s, Another Day’s Journey (1997). It was analytical, practical, and mainstream, offering detailed descriptions of church programs aimed at directly helping children, the elderly, and the poor. That year Franklin took over the presidency of Interdenominational Theological Center (ITC), a position he held for five years. Then he served for five years as president of Morehouse, for three years as director of religion at the Chautauqua Institution, and for three years as a program officer of the Ford Foundation.44 In 2014 he cycled back to Candler, eventually wearing a title that matched him with Fluker at the same school, James T. and Berta R. Laney Professor in Moral Leadership. Franklin’s vocation is developing moral leaders for multiple cultural contexts. All moral leaders, he argues, are moral agents first, acting on deeply held convictions and principles about what is right, true, good, and beautiful. You cannot be a moral leader while lacking the requisite foundation for moral agency. Moreover, moral leadership requires something beyond a moral basis and moral agency—the capacity and willingness to lead others with integrity, courage, and imagination in the service of the common good in a way that invites them to join the struggle for it. Leaders who inspire others to become moral agents enhance the common good by increasing the forces of righteousness, truth, goodness, and beauty, very much as King said.45 The return of Franklin and Fluker to Atlanta illustrated the central role of Atlanta in the Black social gospel. During the last years of the Obama era and the early years of the Trump presidency, a new generation of Atlanta social Christian leaders fought for the rights of Medicaid recipients, incarcerated prisoners, and disenfranchised voters, preparing for the dramas of the 2018 and 2020 elections. Elsewhere, established social justice ministries were sustained and new ministries were created. In Boston, COGIC minister Eugene F. Rivers III continued his longtime work as a crusader against gang violence, served as pastor of the Azusa Christian Community in Dorchester, and founded the National Ten Point Leadership Foundation. Rivers is an exemplar of the truism that the best street

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ministers tend to have a lot of the street in them. In Florissant, Missouri, three miles from Ferguson, United Church of Christ (UCC) minister Traci D. Blackmon led the Justice and Local Church Ministries program of the UCC denomination and served as head pastor of Christ the King UCC. Blackmon modeled for many clerics how to play a constructive role in the era of Black Lives Matter without being defensive about the church. In Durham, North Carolina, Disciples of Christ minister William J. Barber II launched the Forward Together Moral Movement and served as pastor of Greenleaf Christian Church in Goldsboro, North Carolina. Barber calls for a new Awakening movement and a Third Reconstruction, combining evangelical Black faith and social justice fusion politics, most recently as the leader of a new Poor People’s Campaign. G ANG - B U S T IN G PEN TECOSTA L F IR E: EUGENE RIVERS III

Eugene Rivers is an apostle of the claim that the next Black social gospel must be primarily Pentecostal and neo-Pentecostal. Born in Boston in 1950, he grew up in Chicago and Philadelphia, coping with the divorce of his parents, which fell hard on Rivers. His mother, Mildred Bell Rivers, and father, Eugene Rivers Jr., met at South Carolina State University and never had much in common except neo-Garvey nationalism. Mildred Rivers was a deeply serious, hardworking, disciplined, morally intense, devout Christian who made her living as a registered hospital nurse. She taught her son that life is a holy war, a struggle to be morally good. Eugene Rivers Jr. was a gifted painter who loved to party and did not strive earnestly to be morally good. In Boston he studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts; in Chicago he worked in the art department of the Chicago Defender. One night in 1953 he came home drunk and insulted his wife’s sister. Mildred Rivers ordered him out of the house; she was done with him. Five years later, Eugene Rivers Jr. joined the Nation of Islam, signing on as art director for its flagship journal, Muhammad Speaks. He joined the Black Muslims for nationalist solidarity reasons and to acquire some discipline in his life, at first as Eugene3X. Later he designed the masthead of Muhammad Speaks and acquired a Nation name, Eugene Majied.46 Eugene Rivers III traced his moral conservatism first to his mother and second to his searing experience of needing a father during his adolescence. When he was nine years old, he and his two younger sisters moved with Mildred Rivers to Philadelphia. Rivers boxed at the Police Athletic League to fit into a tough north Philadelphia neighborhood. At the age of twelve he was drafted into the Summersville gang, fearing he had no choice, just as his father stuck with the Nation in Chicago instead of defecting to Malcolm, also fearing he had no

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choice. By day, Rivers studied commercial art at a vocational high school; at night he ran with the gang, barely averting murderous consequences. A Billy Graham broadcast got his attention, and at sixteen Rivers got pulled off the street by a Pentecostal pastor, Benjamin Smith Sr., which saved his life. Smith was far more effective than the local Nation at evangelizing young Black men, partly because in Philadelphia, the Nation was a criminal gang that controlled the heroin traffic. Smith was pastor at Deliverance Evangelistic Church, an independent congregation founded by ten people in 1961 that soared to a thousand members, necessitating a move to a vacant former theater in the city’s Tioga section. It teemed with young Black men like Rivers, something he had never seen at church. The difference was not nationalism; as far as Rivers knew, the entire Black church was nationalist. He had never known a Black minister who wanted to integrate with Whites. Smith had a program and the right kind of religion for breaking through to kids like Rivers. Deliverance Church was Biblecentered and evangelistic, expecting its members to study the entire Bible and witness to unbelievers. Rivers had coasted through school, except in art classes. The church made him intellectually serious while getting him off the street.47 He graduated from high school in 1968, went on to Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and mulled what to do with his life. In 1969 the police-raid killings of Black Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark shook Rivers deeply. He was angry, confused, and plagued with survivor guilt. Where did he belong? To the Black nationalist left, which condemned the church, or to the church? Rivers cut his activist teeth on the reparation movement of James Forman, the Black Economic Development Conference of Muhammad Kenyatta, and the National Conference of Black Churchmen. The fate of the Panthers traumatized him. He asked God to spare him from being killed, felt guilty at being spared, and vowed to be like Smith, saving young men. He told young Black men the Panthers were not like the Vietnamese, who had fought for a thousand years; the Panthers had no idea what they were doing. Rivers butted heads with the Nation, putting his life at risk. He had no future in Philadelphia; plus, he had gotten a woman pregnant. He drifted to Yale University, where for three years—1973 to 1976—he surreptitiously audited courses, favoring left-wing historians. Rivers made ends meet by hustling welfare checks in three states, writing papers for well-off students, and selling reefer. He styled himself a street version of Cornel West, closest to Albert Cleage ideologically, but with a Pan-Africanist global perspective. It seemed to him that the Black community had no political leaders. There was only an insular nationalist community; the Black politicians and middle-class pastors who came out of the civil rights movement were pimps of the system. Meanwhile, the church with a future, he believed, was Pentecostal.

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He reasoned that no group achieves significant power without numbers, or money, or elite influence. At least one of these factors is a necessity. By that metric, antireligious nationalists had no chance of changing the world, much as he loved them. In 1976 Rivers got serious about his educational standing. Yale told him to enroll or get out, and Harvard political scientist Martin Kilson brokered his admission to Harvard. Rivers took Harvard undergraduate classes with classmates who were ten years younger than he. Their conformism repulsed him; he raged at privileged Blacks aiming for careers in elite society. One of them was Jacqueline Olga Cooke, a Jamaican who went on to earn a Ph.D. in African American Studies and sociology at Harvard. Rivers was too bustling, angry, alienated, and autodidactic to make it through Harvard, though he befriended Cooke. He knocked around as a Pentecostal preacher, hustled for seed money, dropped out of Harvard in 1983, and in 1984 founded his own congregation, Azusa Christian Community, in Dorchester, one of Boston’s poorest neighborhoods. Two years later he married Cooke.48 A local drug dealer and gangbanger named Selvin Brown told Rivers the church had no chance against the gangs because they were ever-present. Being there is most of the battle. Rivers knew that was right. He bought a grand, bowfront, Victorian parish house called the Ella J. Baker House to give vulnerable kids a place to come. From the beginning he was controversial. A sensational speaker with a big personality, Rivers preached that political liberals and conservatives were locked in a stupid debate that worked for them and hurt the kids growing up in places like Dorchester. Liberals talked about government intervention and the rights of the poor. Conservatives talked about crime, homes without fathers, and taking responsibility for your own problems. Rivers said the only way to rescue kids from the drug and gang cultures is to offer a substitute family undergirded by strong moral values. Only the church can do it, something he knew personally, since only the church could have saved him. He was accustomed to battle, beginning with himself. Rivers was still the person who had run with a gang and studied art simultaneously. Pentecostal Christianity helped him hold together his two selves, but he combined it with Pan-African radicalism, another unusual pairing. In Boston he spoke at mainline church forums at which liberal Democratic politics was the norm. Rivers offered counterpoint, blistering church leaders for their middle-class conformism, stressing that mainline churches did nothing for urban youths. Moreover, many mainline church leaders still treated racial integration as an article of faith. Rivers was controversial on these grounds and for securing money from conservative foundations. On May 14, 1992, a funeral crowd gathered at Morning Star Baptist Church in Dorchester to mourn the death of twenty-year-old Robert Odom, who was

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murdered at a party. Young Jerome Brunson burst into the church, chased by a gang that beat and stabbed him in front of the crowd. That lit a fire. Three hundred church leaders signed an outraged petition. Rivers, AME pastor Ray Hammond, and Baptist pastor Jeffrey Brown organized a coalition of ministers, founding the Boston TenPoint Coalition, which melted to a core of Pentecostal and Baptist ministers. The group walked the ’hoods, engaged the gangs, pulled kids out, established church sanctuaries, launched a mentoring program, built a congregational program called “Adopt a Gang,” and waged a street evangelism campaign. They also collaborated with the Boston Police Department, brokering decades of hostility between the police and the city’s Black communities and locking up gang leaders.49 Rivers wrote an open letter to the Boston-Cambridge intellectual community poignantly titled “On the Responsibility of Intellectuals in the Age of Crack.” This title had a backstory. Politics writer Dwight Macdonald, after World War II, had asked to what extent American and British intellectuals were responsible for the terror bombing of civilians that culminated in the incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In 1967 anarchist doyen Noam Chomsky updated Macdonald, describing intellectuals as a mandarin class that should interrogate its role in terrorizing Vietnam. Rivers recalled that Chomsky got to him during his coming of age. Twenty years later, the Vietnam of its time was the catastrophe facing ten million Black and Hispanic urban poor. Rivers observed that Republican and Democratic elites correctly judged “that poor blacks are a politically disposable population.” Both elites exploited the tragedy to ensure their dominance, especially the Republican right. In previous generations, Rivers said, Black Americans were known for their religious faith, thirst for literacy, and capacity for hope. That was gone, yielding “a ‘new jack’ generation” that “knows not the Lord” and was “ill-equipped to secure gainful employment.” Rivers commended West for contending that the number-one crisis in Black American life is the plague of nihilism. Imploring Black intellectuals to take a break from “lecture circuit radicalism,” Rivers said they should set aside Gramsci, Foucault, and Derrida in order to focus on social death in the cities. He called out West, Kilson, Henry Louis Gates, bell hooks, and Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson by name, challenging them to join the TenPoint ministers in something real.50 hooks protested that she did not deserve to be lumped with “a select group of black men” and called out: “I think that a lot of the kinds of bridges that have been built between various black communities have been formed by black women thinkers. But our work does not receive attention. So when people say there is a lack of intellectual leadership, part of that lack is the refusal of

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masses of people to take on the work that many black women have already done, and raise us to the level of leaders.” Harvard political scientist Randall Kennedy said Rivers wrongly claimed that a crisis had befallen Black Americans: “I think that we are actually in a renaissance. In many respects this is a wonderful moment for lots of black intellectuals.” Kennedy agreed that intellectuals should behave responsibly, denied that Black intellectuals had any special responsibility, and judged that, overall, Black Americans were advancing; he worried mostly about a shortage of Black doctors, engineers, biologists, physicists, and economists. Near the end of a lengthy forum, Rivers observed that no one had talked about helping people on crack; if you care to help, he implored, please come join us.51 People did come—clergy, civic leaders, former military officers, financial professionals, and academics with and without tenure. They welcomed kids needing a place of refuge from the gangs, the drug culture, and parents who kicked them out. At first Rivers pushed religion hard, but that didn’t work. He pulled back on religion, except at the worship services and prayer meetings, which were full-Pentecostal—spontaneous, hand-clapping, and ecstatic, long on testimonies and calling on the Holy Spirit. Over the next five years, Boston’s homicide rate fell by 39 percent, and Rivers reaped a windfall of glowing media coverage. In 1997 he expanded the program on a national scale, the National Ten Point Coalition. The following year he made the cover of Newsweek and struggled to meet the demand for media appearances. Rivers was good copy, being highly quotable. Some church leaders denounced him as a Rasputin who duped White elites into believing he was a Black leader; Rivers gave it right back, describing the mainline Black denominations as “the major crime families.” Clerics scoffed that Azusa Christian was a tiny congregation; Rivers replied that Baker House was always full, rescuing Boston’s most troubled Black men. His intellectual critics scoffed that Rivers lacked a college degree; Rivers said he should have been much tougher on the intellectuals, especially Gates, “the emcee at the Cotton Club on the Charles.” He warned that if the Black church did not step into the breach, American cities would become apartheid zones. The 1996 welfare reform bill granted to states the option to fund church groups instead of welfare agencies. Rivers became the public face of the faith-based option. His church-based Black nationalism was the kind of radicalism the evangelical right could applaud. He preached against abortion, family breakdown, and gay sexuality, forging a close friendship with criminologist John DiIulio Jr., a policy guru of the Republican right. Jacqueline Rivers told Newsweek that her husband and DiIulio “are very odd soulmates. One is so far left he’s right, the other is so far right he’s left. They really think

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alike.” Meanwhile she trained inner-city teachers in the Boston Algebra Project and made tag-team presentations with Rivers at conferences, pairing her polished eloquence with his whirling, slang-sprinkled, staccato improvisations.52 The election of George W. Bush in 2000 put DiIulio in charge of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. That cast a brighter spotlight on Rivers, who told reporters he was renowned only by default, having stepped into a leadership vacuum. He disputed that he was the Republican answer to Jesse Jackson, since he was not a Republican, didn’t compare himself to Jackson, and had voted for Al Gore. Rivers offended his conservative political allies every time he expounded on America’s demonic evil of White supremacy. He called out his White evangelical allies, chiding them for expecting the faith-based program to be a cash cow, “their private property politically.” A new generation of Black religious leaders, he argued, was emerging. COGIC Bishop Charles E. Blake of Los Angeles and Greater Allen AME Cathedral pastor Floyd Flake of Queens were leading examples. As for himself, he aspired to be the movement’s strategist, not its public leader. Rivers said he was “outraged” that Bush had climbed into power by disenfranchising Black voters in Florida, and he was skeptical about how Bush used his power. But he had worked with Clinton and was equally willing to work with Bush, unlike the Congressional Black Caucus, which walked out of the congressional vote that confirmed Bush’s election. Rivers said the Black Caucus reduced Black politics to theatrical gestures: “To be effective again, black politics must move from protest to program, from assertions of identity to demands for action, and from politically correct preening to simple, shared, concrete, and confidently applied measures aimed at advancing those demands.”53 Rivers shuttled between Boston and DC during the Bush years, repeatedly disputing a chronic media trope that he wanted to be the next Jackson. Jackson was fading and Rivers was ascending; the story wrote itself, over and over. Rivers did not leak the story of Jackson’s love child to the National Enquirer, but he was forced to deny that he had done so. Boston Globe reporter Adrian Walker accused Rivers of dancing on Jackson’s political grave; Rivers replied that Walker felt obligated to take him down twice per year. He respected Jackson, he said, for championing “good and progressive politics,” but Jackson was a microphone performer who flitted from issue to issue, and his era was over: “We simply have a new epoch.” As for dealing with Bush, Rivers reasoned that if Ho Chi Minh could negotiate with war criminal Henry Kissinger, he could bargain with Bush, who presided over a party with two factions. One faction simply despised Black people and the other made a cost-benefit calculation, expecting a return on appointing Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice to high positions. Rivers reflected:

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This can be a complete failure, in which case we then become adversaries. No problem. We’ll extend the olive branch. If you spit on it, then we’re your adversaries, okay? And we will have credibility as adversaries, if we go there. Because if the liberals hear that the guys who tried to make peace got pissed on, then we all close ranks. So the beauty of it, in a perverse way, is, “President Bush, we’re making a peace offering, an overture. If you reject us, we win. Because then you’ve got no more political credibility. And then we just fight for the next four years.”54

To Rivers, the Bush presidency was a precious opportunity akin to the one that arose in 1957, when King and the SCLC wrested Black political leadership from Roy Wilkins, Thurgood Marshall, and other secular leaders of the NAACP. It didn’t matter that Jackson was a minister. Rivers regarded Jackson as essentially a secular leader with a secular agenda. Jackson once opposed abortion and gay sexuality for Christian reasons, but he changed his positions for political reasons. He belonged to a party that tolerated the religiosity only of Black Democrats, while the Republicans teemed with evangelicals. Now that Republicans had an evangelical president, maybe there was an opportunity to break the half-century impasse in which Whites had two parties and Blacks had one. Rivers was the symbol of that wager during Bush’s presidency. He told numerous conferences, both friendly and hostile, that Black politics needed to pull back on affirmative action and welfare and support a church-based ethic of self-help, self-reliance, mutual aid, and moral leadership. The liberal Democrats, he said, made a terrible mistake when they ceded the faith issue to the Republican right, and the mainline Black churches erred by capitulating to Democratic secularism: “For the poor, the language of faith is the only language and vocabulary that has the capacity to resurrect faith and hope for a generation of young people for whom faith and hope has died.”55 Rivers and Bush used each other before and after Bush invaded Iraq, sustaining an awkward political dance. In 2006 a teen mentor at Baker House was accused of rape, which triggered the city to audit Baker House and Governor Mitt Romney to eliminate its state funding. Rivers reaped a windfall of bad publicity, which he weathered quietly. The rape charge was dropped, the audit came up clean, and Rivers pulled away from Baker House, while remaining on its board. It was time, he judged, for Baker House to operate on its own. The Bush years passed and Black Americans still had only one party. Journalists who wrote about Rivers usually began with his latest controversy before moving to his contradictions. The Boston Globe rued that he got admiring coverage at the national level despite being “often reviled locally”—for example, by the Boston Globe. “Reviled locally” did not describe how Rivers is regarded in Dorchester.

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His interventions to save kids and fight for them are palpable realities there. Meanwhile he branched out, serving as a consultant to the governments of Chile, Brazil, Canada, Ireland, and England on how to combat violent crime with faith community/law enforcement partnerships. Rivers founded a think tank, the Seymour Institute for Black Church and Policy Studies, which sponsors conferences featuring Black pastors and conservative social policy experts.56 In 2014 his preaching on heterosexual marital monogamy caught the attention of the Vatican, which invited Rivers and Jacqueline Rivers to speak at its conference on traditional marriage. Rivers told the Vatican audience that traditional marriage is incomparably beautiful, binding human beings across the ages in the flesh, “across families in the flesh, and across the fearful and wonderful divide of man and woman, in the flesh.” Jacqueline Rivers declared: “Something precious was stolen from blacks in the United States during slavery. It was a blessing from the hand of the Creator Himself: the right of a man and a woman to be joined in holy matrimony.” She described marriage as a “divinely established order” that “creates unity at every level of husband and wife: physical, emotional, volitional and spiritual.” By contrast, she argued, same-sex unions abolish in law the principle of marriage as a conjugal union, “reducing it to nothing other than sexual or romantic companionship.” She and Rivers protested that marriage equality proponents in the United States appropriate the rhetoric of the civil rights movement for their cause. Jacqueline Rivers said this appropriation and the “message” of marriage equality are “profoundly false and damaging,” conveying “that children do not need a mother and father in a permanent complementary bond.”57 Rivers is reflective and regretful about the theological liberalism he does not share with King. He muses that King’s liberal theology prevented outsiders from recognizing that the civil rights crusade was a movement of the Holy Spirit. Secular renderings of King don’t come close to getting him, or to recognizing that the forces of White supremacy, economic oppression, and militarism that King opposed are demonic powers “that must be combatted with spiritual weapons.” The problem of interpreting King, Rivers says, begins with King himself and his liberal training. Since King was theologically liberal, he was “only dimly aware of the invisible principalities and powers that lay behind the violence of white supremacy.” Morehouse, Crozer, and Boston University steeped him in naturalism and rationalism, impairing his spiritual understanding. To put it bluntly, the education of King and other Black church intellectual leaders “inhibited them from fully tapping into the Pentecostal movement’s radically biblical vision of the power of the Holy Spirit.” The White South got what it deserved by driving Black social gospel students to northern seminaries. They

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returned to the South imbued with self-confidence, degrees, and just enough of the Holy Spirit to destroy Jim Crow. Liberal theology had enough of the gospel for that, but not enough to carry the movement after King was gone.58 Rivers says the catastrophe that befell Black Americans after King was lost was primarily spiritual and moral, and only secondarily economic and political. Social gospel liberalism and Black liberation theology lacked the answer, being too political, as well as grievously lacking in Holy Spirit power. The shadow years came, and the churches that mobilized for racial justice were too spiritually anemic to throw off the onslaught of nihilism, depravity, and backlash racism. Entire generations of inner-city Black Americans were lost. Pentecostalism soared, though much of it ran to the prosperity gospel. Today the churches need the Pentecostal eruption that began with the founding of modern Pentecostalism in 1906 on Azusa Street in Los Angeles. King preaching the Mountaintop Sermon at Mason Temple, the mother church of COGIC, is a symbol of it. The Pentecostal churches have the Spirit power the churches need, notwithstanding that they have not yet stirred to social justice and many are awash in wealth-and-health religion. Rivers preaches that Pentecostalism needs the social gospel, much as the social gospel needs Pentecostalism. The invisible powers that destroy human life must be named, unmasked, and confronted. The church must accept its call to be a liberationist force, reclaiming the power of Spirit-filled intercessory prayer to do it. The only weapon we have to combat the demonic is to call on the Holy Spirit in intercessory prayer. Otherwise, we get sucked into the spirit of the demonic and fall into anger, violence, and hate. In May 2018 Rivers warned that BLM desperately needs the Holy Spirit, being much too proud of rejecting God: “This philosophical rejection is an act of spiritual and cultural suicide.”59 On May 25, 2020, George Floyd was murdered by a group of Minneapolis police officers with an icy indifference that triggered massive protests across the world. Floyd was a genial forty-six-year-old Black man who had worked as a security bouncer. He died while police officer Derek Chauvin coldly pressed his knee on Floyd’s neck, impervious to Floyd’s cries that he couldn’t breathe. The protests against Floyd’s killing carried on for weeks. It felt like the beginning of the first global-scale movement to abolish racism ever mounted. Nowhere near this many White people had ever shown up, day after day, to demand the abolition of racism. The protests against Floyd’s murder were a moment like no other in the United States. BLM skyrocketed to a far higher level of public recognition and support, as it split into a global umbrella foundation, a political action committee, and a grassroots organizing vehicle. On BLM, Rivers is admiring and distressed. He deeply respects, he says, that BLM

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has organized more protests for interracial solidarity than anyone since King. But the anti-Christian rhetoric of BLM repels him, especially the BLM emphasis on queer politics and the pro-queer positions that progressive Christians take in solidarity with BLM. To Rivers, the queer ideology of BLM is straightforwardly anti-Christian, not something debatable from a Christian perspective: “They’re fomenting civil war in the black community with their rejection of the very idea of male and female.” He goes to BLM rallies, but with a sign making a Christian statement. Rivers stresses that BLM needs Christians to show up to talk about the “real roots of white supremacy,” demonic evil itself: “White supremacy is a supernatural evil that has wrought havoc in this world. We in the churches have backed away from engaging this. Do I expect young people at Black Lives Matter protests to engage properly with something I’m not prepared to engage myself? This is a sin, a failure by the church.” We have to pray, he urges, to abolish the racist demon, turn from evil ways, and pray some more.60 On September 18, 2020, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg died with only six weeks remaining until the November election, and Trump nominated Seventh Circuit Judge Amy Coney Barrett for her seat. Many objected that this nomination was extremely rushed and that Barrett would be one of the most extreme conservatives on the bench. Rivers and Jacqueline Rivers rallied vehemently to her defense. Rivers said on Fox television that this was a showdown against the antireligious bigots on the two coasts; as a Black man and a Pentecostal Christian, he was offended in every way by the protests against Barrett, a conservative charismatic Catholic. In a public letter he and Jacqueline Rivers declared: “As black Christians we will not stand by in silence as our sister in the faith is persecuted for the ‘political crime’ of her beliefs.” They charged that aspersions cast on Barrett’s membership in a charismatic Catholic community “reflect rank religious bigotry that has no legitimate place in our political debates or public life. We condemn these vile attacks—which began three years ago during the process of her confirmation for the judicial post she currently holds.” Pentecostal and Charismatic Christians, they observed, number 600 million people in the world—8.5 percent of the world’s population, nearly twice the U.S. population. If Barrett’s belief in the baptism of the Holy Spirit disqualified her for the Supreme Court, “then our American values of individual freedom and the right to follow one’s conscience are simply hypocrisy.”61 Rivers rejoiced that Bishop Blake similarly rallied to Barrett’s defense and that she was elected to the Supreme Court. In response, forty-two distinguished conservative Catholic scholars led by Princeton legal scholar Robert George warmly commended Rivers and Blake in a public letter for standing up for

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righteousness. Ecumenical, to Rivers, radiates in many directions, but not in unity. He has one foot in numerous communities, waiting on Holy Spirit power to ignite a new Pentecost. Meanwhile his primary ecumenical community revolves around claims about divinely established heteronormativity, repelling many who agree with him about racism, economic equality, American militarism, and the postcolonial world house.62 T HE T H IRD REC ON STRUC TION: TRACI BLACKMON A N D WIL L IA M J. BARBER II

Traci Blackmon and William Barber II are routinely tagged, by contrast, as progressive Christians, a label they reject. The name is an inference from the fact that they construe the teaching of Jesus in social ethical terms, emphasize economic justice in social gospel fashion, advocate progressive-coalition politics, and affirm the rights of LGBTQ+ persons and communities. But to Blackmon and Barber it is misguided, even offensive, to qualify the term “gospel” with any descriptive or ideological term. Some of their work has occurred together, sometimes alongside James Forbes. Blackmon’s life changed the night that Michael Brown was gunned down in Ferguson. Barber is the founder of a moral revival movement that arose spectacularly in North Carolina and subsequently evolved into a new Poor People’s Campaign. Both are as full-believing as Rivers concerning the truth of the gospel and the witness of the Holy Spirit. But they contend that the next Awakening movement must welcome queer individuals and communities to the world house of faith, being evangelical, social gospel, and liberationist in the best traditions of the Black church. Blackmon grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, in the 1960s, integrating an exclusive private high school with her presence. From fourth grade to college she was the only Black student in the room; from fourth grade to seminary she had zero Black teachers. In her sophomore year of high school, she toured Ivy League schools; in her junior year the tour consisted of elite southern schools. She applied to Princeton, Yale, Swarthmore, Duke, Emory, Vanderbilt, and Birmingham-Southern and was admitted to all. A Harvard recruiter came to her school; Blackmon, feeling good about her record, thought, What the hell? Harvard had not appealed to her during her sophomore tour, but why pass up the pitch? Blackmon went to hear the recruiter, who told the crowd that Harvard was extremely selective, the odds against admission were terrible, but good luck. Blackmon felt nauseated, not planning to meet with the recruiter. But at the reception he headed straight for her. She listened with all the politeness she

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could muster as he told her not to worry about her grades. If she maintained a C average at this high school, she was sure to be admitted to Harvard. Blackmon was devastated. This jerk knew nothing about her—nothing of her skills, achievements, awards, grades, or SAT scores. All he knew was that she was Black at an elite school, so she should ignore the admission speech. Blackman absorbed, with a sickening feeling, that nothing she could ever achieve at Harvard would make this recruiter see her. Her race alone disqualified her from being a real Harvard student, only a pretend one. She knew that Harvard didn’t deserve her, yet the episode stung her. Many years later she recalled: “The words of that arrogant, presumptuous recruiter wounded my heart but he did not shape my identity. Nothing about me is defined by that moment.” She passed up the other elite schools too, enrolling at nearby Birmingham-Southern College.63 There she earned a bachelor of science degree in nursing in 1985 and embarked on a twenty-five-year career as a registered nurse. Early in her career, Blackmon focused on cardiac care; later she focused on mobile health care to underserved communities. She developed a mobile faith-based outreach program called “Healthy Mind, Body, and Spirit” that changed health outcomes in impoverished areas. To Blackmon, health care was very much a ministry, but it also drew her into AME church ministry, which impelled her to seminary. For nine years she served in a variety of ministerial assignments in the AME Church, eventually studying at Eden Theological Seminary in St. Louis, from which she graduated in 2009 with a master of divinity degree. That year she transferred to the UCC to facilitate her call as the first female pastor in the 153-year history of Christ the King United Church of Christ. Christ the King was a large building with a proud history and very few members; the congregation struggled to keep the lights on and pay the pastor. It managed to pay the required income of a UCC pastor only because it had some longtime members living in wealthier neighborhoods who still made the drive to Florissant. Blackmon said this was not a sustainable model, or anything with which she could identify. If the congregation was going to survive, it had to become a church of its poor Black community, not a relic of its White past propped up by suburbanites. Blackmon developed service programs for neighbors not requiring church membership. The congregation offered GED classes, founded a robotics team, and established a mentoring program for girls. It built a computer lab used mostly by senior citizens and conducted funerals for people lacking a church home. The church grew modestly and Blackmon was feeling encouraged. Then on August 9, 2014, she got the call that changed her life. In Ferguson, three miles away, an unarmed eighteen-year-old Black man had been gunned down in the street by police and was lying prone on the pavement.64

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Michael Brown lay uncovered on the street for four hours while a crowd gathered nearby. Blackmon spent that night quietly pastoring to Brown’s shaken, grieving, traumatized parents. She rose to the moment, offering a witness and a clerical-collared presence as Ferguson rocked from protests, fire, and looting. Blackmon stressed that many had been killed like Brown. Two more—Ezell Ford and Kajieme Powell—were killed shortly afterward only a few miles from the site of Brown’s death. Why did Ferguson spark a historic eruption? Blackmon believed it was Brown’s blood oozing for hours on the street, saturating the pavement, making a statement about the value that America places on Black life. She said Brown’s blood exposed the eagerness of White Americans to regard a teenaged Black man as the other to be feared. His blood displayed “the pervasive assumption of guilt that is the black man’s burden in America.” It cried out against the insidious racism that criminalizes and dehumanizes Black bodies. It “unveiled the chasm that exists between a disenfranchised young generation and a disconnected church.” It showed how race and poverty and hopelessness intersect on American streets. It provided “needed commentary on the self-mutilating, self-annihilating behaviors that have infected our communities of color.” Above all, Blackmon said, the blood of Michael Brown exposed the “insidious effects of racism that are intrinsic to the very fiber of our nation’s being.”65 Blackmon was a beacon to many during the period that clergy fretted about the hard things that BLM said about church leaders. To her there was no question about showing up and being a witness. She was going to do it, and who she was had been settled long ago. She said she had never known the gospel outside of justice work. Justice work is essential to the gospel, so showing up at Ferguson was part of her ministry, not something extra. She found that being a UCC pastor was a huge advantage in the Ferguson moment. Blackmon called on pastors across the gamut of local Christian and religious communities. It occurred to her that two hundred pastors from many different denominations would make a greater impact than two hundred members of a big downtown congregation. At the initial gathering at Christ the King Church, the first thing she did was ask the clergy to stand. The sanctuary was packed with them. Blackmon reflected that only her scrappy, small, liberal congregation and denomination could have convened this diverse crowd of White mainline Protestants, Black mainline Protestants, Black and Hispanic Pentecostals and evangelicals, gay and gendernonconforming individuals and communities, Catholics, White Pentecostals and evangelicals, Unitarian Universalists, and others. It was the small, open, and affirming UCC that made these disparate groups feel welcome and safe.66 Her speaking calendar exploded. Blackmon spoke across the nation about Ferguson and served on the Ferguson Commission appointed in November 2014

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by Missouri’s Governor Jay Nixon. The group convened nineteen commission meetings in local neighborhoods, working until December 2015 to gather feedback from communities and make recommendations for investments, infrastructure, and policy changes. The UCC was thrilled to be associated with Blackmon, and Obama appointed her to the President’s Advisory Council on Faith-Based Neighborhood Partnerships. In 2015 Blackmon took over as interim executive of the UCC Justice and Local Ministries Division. Two years later she was elected to her first four-year term as associate general minister of Justice and Local Ministries, the second-highest-ranking position in the denomination. Her congregation tripled to 160 members after Ferguson erupted and she hit the road for the denomination. Blackman said the UCC is made for fights—fighting for justice, for love, for compassion, and for equality. Her high position in the quintessentially liberal denomination and her support of its liberal views on sexuality earned her a tag she hated—“progressive Christian.” Sometimes she ripped it off just after being introduced: “One of my pet peeves is when people describe me or others I work with as being left, or progressive, or liberal. I don’t preach a progressive gospel. I preach the gospel. The gospel is a social gospel, a liberating gospel. And if, when you preach it, it does not do those things, it is not the gospel. We will not be defined by other people’s labels. We are disciples of Jesus Christ.”67 The Trump years came and Blackmon grieved at having to speak constantly about Trump’s racism, sexism, selfishness, narcissism, and White nationalism. Trump won the Republican nomination for president in 2016 by appealing directly to the wing of the party that revered Rush Limbaugh, who built a massive radio following by ridiculing feminists as “feminazis,” antipoverty activists as “compassion fascists,” and environmentalists as “tree-hugging wackos.” Limbaugh mocked the deaths of gay men from AIDS and claimed that Obama’s 2009 health-care bill would empower “death panels” to “euthanize” elderly Americans. He almost never apologized to those he slandered and skewered. Trump perfected Limbaugh’s blend of mockery, grievance, accusation, shamelessness, entertainment brilliance, and conspiracy, routing the Republican field of contenders with it. He launched his campaign by viciously attacking undocumented Mexican immigrants. He escalated by calling for a ban on all Muslim immigrants. He played constantly to the rage he knew was out there, which was enough to beat Hillary Clinton in the general election.68 As president, he never tried to unite the country or carry out normal tasks of the job. Trump stayed on the attack, stoking the culture war ceaselessly, winning nearly every news cycle. His base adored him and regular Republican politicians feared his power over their voters. He lied constantly about matters

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big and small. For a while in 2020 he sprayed his news conferences on the COVID crisis with a firehose of falsehoods until the pandemic bored him too much to bother with it. Then he mocked people who wore masks. Every week he violated decency, democracy, or the rule of law in some way that demanded a response. In the end, Trump lied incessantly that the 2020 election was stolen from him. He incited a violent mob that attacked the U.S. Capitol and prowled for politicians it didn’t like. That got him impeached for the second time by the House of Representatives, but U.S. Republican senators, still terrified of his following, gave him another pass just after he departed the White House. Audiences demanded commentary on Trump throughout his presidency. Blackmon was obliging to a point, but always cautioned that Trump was not really the problem. Trump was like Goliath, she said, who came out from the Philistines. Goliath didn’t come from nowhere, and neither did Trump. Everything that Trump represented has a long history in the United States. Upward of 40 percent of the country revered him for championing its fears and hatreds. On August 11–12, 2017, neo-Nazis and White nationalists staged a Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, beginning with a march through the University of Virginia campus. Local and incoming clergy held a counterprotest worship service at St. Paul’s Memorial Church, across the street from the university rotunda. Blackmon preached a barnburner sermon to an overflow, high-spirited gathering. Three hundred White supremacists marching two by two approached the church with torches, chanting, “Jews will not replace us! Blood and soil! You will not replace us! White lives matter!” There were flyers calling for a race war and declaring that the White nationalists had come to take back their country. No one knew if the mob would invade the sanctuary, where the crowd sheltered in place, fearing the worst, until the mob returned to Nameless Field. Blackmon, on MSNBC, replied to the chants: “Are you kidding me? And this president wants to talk about revising history? Read some history. Black people built this country.” She proceeded to a small evangelical college in Nebraska, not realizing that she was traumatized. Blackmon realized it only when she demanded to be moved to a hotel containing at least one or two Black people. She couldn’t stay in her room or go to sleep surrounded only by White people.69 She toured with Barber and Forbes and coauthored a curriculum for the UCC on interrogating White privilege. In 2018 Blackmon gave high priority to voter registration work, and in 2020 she retired from Christ the King Church, announcing that she had reached an age when her work for the denomination needed to be enough. Every week on the road, someone chastised Blackmon for the church’s involvement in politics. Sometimes they opined that her

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approach to her job crossed the line. She replied that the line was real to her; she didn’t want the church to take positions on how people should vote. But the teaching of Jesus is quite specifically political, she argued. A nonpolitical Jesus is a fantasy or some kind of cover-up. When faced with a choice between Jesus and any American convention, she took Jesus every time. On the road, when teamed with Barber, she had to say it differently if Barber got the question first, because Barber had the same answer. For eight years of Obama and four years of Trump, Barber stood out among all descendants of the Black social gospel as the symbol of its ongoing, deeply political, progressive, coalitional, gospel-based, social justice activism. He was a throwback, but forward-looking. He saw no reason why the churches could not mobilize as they did between 1955 and 1965, if only they fixed on Jesus and built some good organizations. Barber was, and is, earnest, eloquent, relentless, burly, eager to preach, and didactic, often riffing long excurses of political history. He wears black suits with a white clerical stole reading, “Jesus Was a Poor Man,” or full-robed sanctuary regalia, in both cases with a magenta shirt marking his episcopal status. He speaks in carefully parsed sentences, always leaning forward, a visible sign even to those unaware of his story that he suffered much along the way. He was born to the struggle, in Indianapolis, Indiana, two days after “I Have a Dream.” Barber’s father, William Barber Sr., was a physics teacher who settled in Indianapolis after graduating from Butler University and marrying a local government clerk, Eleanor Barber. Just before Barber started kindergarten in an integrated Indianapolis public school, his father got a call from an old friend in Plymouth, North Carolina, E. V. Wilkins, an educator and civil rights activist. Wilkins asked Barber Senior to move back to North Carolina to help in the struggle. The NAACP needed Black teachers and their children to integrate the schools. Would Barber Senior come home to Roper, North Carolina, bringing his wife and son? A year later the Barber family moved into Barber Senior’s boyhood home in Roper, where his mother still lived. Barber Senior taught science at the local high school; Eleanor Barber took a job in the school office; Barber went to first grade at a segregated school and to second grade at a previously all-White public school; and he cherished his paternal grandmother, whom he called Grandmamma. His grandmother was an elder—a wisdom-keeper and the spiritual anchor of the family. Every Sunday she visited shut-ins after church. For years Barber thought she mistook the word “hope” for “help,” as in “We’ll be back shortly. We’ve got to go and hope somebody.” Later he realized that “hoping” others in Christ was precisely how his grandmother survived, contradicting a White society that despised her. Barber’s

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early impression was that his grandmother was singularly extraordinary. As he grew older, he grasped that his father was much like Grandmamma, except with two master’s degrees.70 William Barber Sr. was the real thing, like his mother and son. He could have taught at a northern university, but he answered the call to integrate public schools in the South. He could have been a big-steeple preacher, but he preached on the side in tiny rural churches of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). Coming home to Roper meant that Barber Senior chose a life of poverty, humility, and service. He rode around in a beat-up pickup truck, carried his son from community meeting to meeting, and everyone called him Doc. When people asked why he brought his kid, Barber Senior said leave the kid alone; he’s learning. A conversation at the house about an injustice done to someone would lead to a meeting in a church basement or barbershop. Barber grew up watching his father look out for people, gathering little groups to address their problems, “hoping” them any way he could. His father preached revivals in small churches across eastern North Carolina, a twofer by his lights: Wherever he went, he spread the gospel and expanded his organizing network. Barber Senior loved to tell the story of the Disciples of Christ, which fused two early nineteenth-century movements that sought to reform the church by restoring it to the model of the New Testament church. The Barton W. Stone strand derived from a 1901 revival in Cane Ridge, Kentucky. The Thomas and Alexander Campbell strand came from Scotland. Barber Senior stressed that Black and White Disciples worked and worshipped together, cofounding the Fusion Party after Reconstruction, which united freed slaves and poor Whites across North Carolina. There were episodes of heroic moral faith to recount, but this was a sad story, even in Barber Senior’s revival version, because integrated religion and Fusion politics were crushed in the Jim Crow South.71 Barber Senior exhorted Disciples to live up to their early history, without much success. People looked away or tuned him out, especially in White congregations, objecting that he asked too much. His son recoiled at watching the same reaction over and over. He never doubted that God exists or that his father embodied the ideal, but he didn’t want to be his father, a minister who wasted too much of his spirit on the church. Barber majored in political science at North Carolina Central University (NCCU), aiming for a law career. He aspired to serve the public as a credentialed big-city professional, scaling up from his father’s world. In his senior year he organized a group that marched to Raleigh to demand more funding for historically Black colleges. The march won ample attention, which revealed to Barber that he had the family gift for

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organizing. Boston University School of Theology offered him a scholarship, and Barber nearly accepted it. He still didn’t want to be a minister, but the opportunity to follow King to Boston University was hard to turn down. His grandmother prayed about it, returning with a verdict—Barber didn’t need to go to Boston. A few weeks later he reluctantly consented. Years later, when Barber told this story, he analogized that Paul had wanted to go to Spain, but the Spirit prevented him. This was like that. Going to Boston would have taken him away from his North Carolina family, lifeworld, and story. In 1984 Barber had met an NCCU classmate, Rebecca McLean, at a Jesse Jackson campaign event. The following year they graduated from NCCU, and she told him she didn’t want a long-distance relationship. Barber enrolled instead at nearby Duke Divinity School. If he couldn’t follow King to Boston, at least he could study theology like King. His father and grandmother died during his seminary studies, and he married McLean in 1987. Barber surmised in later years that Boston University probably would have changed him. As it was, he was grateful that the Spirit kept him in North Carolina.72 At Boston University he would have studied its traditions of liberal theology, religious philosophy, and social ethics. At Duke he was spared all of that. Duke is the lodestar of its own tradition of southern, Methodist, White, mainline Protestantism. Its faculty boasted two renowned figures who defined the school within theological education, theological ethicist Stanley Hauerwas and chapel dean William Willimon. Each had a high-profile career on his own, and Hauerwas became famous for his scathing, salty, polemical attacks on political and theological liberalism. Together they pressed an influential argument about the recent collapse of the Protestant main line. Hauerwas and Willimon said mainline clergy were “agents of modernity” who helped congregations adapt to the cultural status quo. By contrast, the church should understand itself as a colony—an island of true-believing Christians stubbornly persisting amid the secular culture partly brought about by liberal Protestantism. The coauthored book version of this diagnosis, Resident Aliens (1989), asked how Christians should relate to politics and society. It said that activist churches, which aim at social reform, and conversion churches, which focus on individual souls, are both wrong. The answer is to form confessional communities of the cross that suffer for the sake of righteousness, worship Christ in all things, and embrace the colony status of the postliberal Christian church.73 Resident Aliens quotably told church leaders to shed their Christendom consciousness and nostalgia. It knowingly said that seminaries produce young pastors lacking any idea that their job is to help congregations be the church. It quoted pastors who felt besieged by a culture that had turned against them. The book

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provided help by reviving social gospel arguments about the evisceration of kingdom Christianity in Constantinian Christianity and the importance of nurturing spiritually formative communities. The authors, however, did not put it that way, because denigrating “social activist churches” was central to their agenda. Resident Aliens won attention by censuring modern churches that ventured into social activism, a critique that implicitly skewered the entire tradition of modern Christian social ethics, which Hauerwas confirmed in subsequent books.74 Hauerwas-style postliberalism dichotomized between the faithful church and the pagan everything else, disparaged Christian struggles for a just order, and specialized in broadsides against liberalism. It reduced the theology of the kingdom or commonwealth of God to a my-group binary, misrepresenting the gospel-centered faith of Rauschenbusch and King. It evaded the critical force of every liberation theology, claiming “nonviolent us” status on a unitary basis that masked the oppressions condemned by liberation theologies. Hauerwas and Willimon helped many pastors scale back to something they could preach and manage in a time of cultural fragmentation and upheaval. But Christian social ethics is supposed to propel you into that world, not rationalize your insularity. Barber was conflicted about the postliberal prescription. He welcomed the emphasis of Hauerwas and Willimon on being the church, forming confessional communities, and dissenting from the dominant culture. He didn’t mind the antiliberal polemics of Hauerwas because Barber had a southern church aversion to liberalism, too. Barber defined himself as a religious conservative or, sometimes, as an evangelical or theological conservative, though not a conservative evangelical. In his lexicon, the distinction between religious conservatism and religious liberalism cuts to one thing. Religious conservatives accept and follow the commands of God revealed in the Bible. Religious liberals ignore, relativize, or oppose these commands. By this logic, the Christian slaveholders and segregationists were religious liberals, as were the mainline pastors who implored King to slow down and be patient. To Barber, as for Blackmon, what matters terminologically is to uphold the gospel testimony about a God of love and justice who hates oppression. Belief in the true faith is conservative; all forms of disbelief in it are liberal. Barber reflected: “God was calling me as a theological conservative to reclaim language that had been hijacked by those who liberally resist and ignore so much of God’s character.”75 But obeying God’s commands pushed him into the coalitional activist work that Hauerwas and Willimon decried. At Duke, Barber majored in William C. Turner Jr., a legend at Duke and the pastor of Durham’s Mount Level Missionary Baptist Church. Turner integrated Duke’s football team in 1967, graduated from the college in 1971, and earned master’s and doctoral degrees at Duke in

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1974 and 1984. In his long career at Duke, he served as assistant provost and dean of Black Affairs, director of Black Church Affairs, associate professor of theology, and at the end, James T. and Alice Mead Cleland Professor of the Practice of Preaching. Turner specialized in pneumatology in Black church preaching. To Barber, he was a godsend—a friend, mentor, and spiritual father who helped him remember why he was at seminary. Upon graduating in 1989, Barber accepted a call to pastor Fayette Street Christian Church in Martinsville, Virginia, just across North Carolina’s northern border. His first plunge into social activism as a pastor was chastening. A group of workers at a local textile factory asked him to support their efforts to start a union. Shortly afterward the president of the company hosted a breakfast meeting for Black clergy at his corporate office. All it took was an hour of schmoozing and a few reminders of the company’s token philanthropy to get the ministers to oppose the union. A stunned Barber asked himself a seminary question: What would Niebuhr say we did wrong? He knew the Niebuhrian answer: Working for justice in the real world requires real political power. If you don’t have any power, you can’t achieve gains for justice.76 Barber vowed never to enter another fight for justice without knowing who had his back. But learning a Niebuhrian lesson and being a Niebuhrian were different things. Barber had not accepted, when he read Niebuhr in seminary, Niebuhr’s claim that the test of faithful action is political effectiveness. If Christian social ethics reduces to Niebuhrian realism, why become a minister? Barber thought of Psalm 94, God asking who will rise up before the wicked. That was biblical faith to him—“leading people who had lost a fight but still knew that the Lord was on their side.” He thought about William Lloyd Garrison, nearly lynched by a respectable mob in 1835. Garrison had no plan or power; all he could do was rail against slavery, hoping to find some allies. Barber thought about Justice John Marshall Harlan of Kentucky, casting the only vote in the U.S. Supreme Court against Plessy v. Ferguson. Harlan was routed in 1896, but the NAACP cited his words for decades, all the way to the Brown decision.77 It occurred to Barber that Niebuhr might have developed a better Christian realism had he remained a pastor in Detroit instead of moving to Union Theological Seminary. In Detroit he allied with working-class Whites and Blacks. In New York, he consorted with academics and leftist professionals, so his blind spot about his White privilege grew worse. Barber questioned whether he had a similar blind spot. His negative feelings about Whites were justified, weren’t they? Naturally, he trusted Black pastors and workers, and he didn’t trust White pastors and workers. How could it be otherwise? Barber had an inkling of the answer, which worked on him: If he had some White allies, his

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feelings might be otherwise. Moreover, the Black pastors of Martinsville had folded over one breakfast meeting. If Barber’s mission was to work for justice, he needed all the friends he could get. He stayed for three years in Martinsville, forming an interracial group against toxic chemical dumping in a Black neighborhood, which won a small victory, “the crash course in moral leadership that I didn’t know I needed.” Barber returned to North Carolina knowing something about environmental racism and interracial organizing. E. V. Wilkins, still a force in his life, recommended Barber to chair Governor Jim Hunt’s Human Relations Commission. Barber took the job and enjoyed the work, much of it dealing with employment discrimination and fair housing. He preached on the side while Rebecca Barber worked as a nurse in Durham. In June 1993 Barber preached at Greenleaf Christian Church in Goldsboro, seventy-eight miles west of Durham. He was not seeking a pastoral call, and definitely not one this far from Durham. Greenleaf members told him he was wrong; God had led him to them.78 Barber tried to resist until mid-July, when he relented. Two weeks after he accepted the call, he woke up at home and could not move. Barber’s legs and back were paralyzed. He cried out incredulously to Rebecca, who called an ambulance. The diagnosis was ankylosing spondylitis, an extreme form of arthritis that fuses one’s bones in place. Barber’s neck, hips, and the base of his spine had locked simultaneously. There was no cure; there was only the hope that intense physical therapy might regain some mobility. The pain was excruciating. Barber recoiled at needing constant doses of pain medication to get through a day. His daily trips to the gym were torture, and seemingly futile; when therapists bent his knees, it felt like he was being stabbed with a knife. He fell into depression, spending many nights “just crying in my bed.” Barber could barely speak to his congregants when they visited, and he could not imagine being their pastor. They urged him to hold on; he was their pastor and they would wait for him. For weeks it was unimaginable to him that he might resume his ministry. The doctors told him he would never walk again, the pain and depression were overwhelming, and he lost the will to get out of bed. One night a woman in a wheelchair visited him in his hospital room. A double amputee, she rebuffed his plea that he couldn’t talk to anyone. She had come to tell him that God was not done with him; God still had work for Barber to do. The woman prayed for Barber and wheeled herself out. The next morning Barber asked if his mother might be allowed to play hymns in the hospital lobby; maybe he could sing with her. Also, could they tell him the room number of the double amputee? Barber wanted to thank her. The nurses knew of no such patient, and did not find one after checking. Barber called her “my amputee angel.”79

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He learned how to use a walker, and his growing family and congregation rallied around him. Barber left the hospital after three months, commencing his ministry at Greenleaf with a tag-team of drivers. His family had already weathered one health crisis, his daughter’s brain surgery for hydrocephalus. This time his wife and five children forged a new life revolving around Greenleaf Church and Barber’s resolve to bring people together for the work of justice. The pain stabbed him constantly, except in the pulpit. For twelve years he got to the pulpit on his walker, swung it behind him, and leaned on the lectern to preach. Barber savored the irony that Greenleaf was the kind of community he had tried to flee—a small congregation in a small military town consisting of tight-knit families and groups with long local histories. Now the communal closeness worked for him, enabling him to restart his ministry. Barber often thought of Hauerwas, appreciating more than ever the Hauerwas maxim that the vocation of the church is to be the church. What matters is to be faithful to God’s peculiar politics. The only way for people to see that another way is possible is for the church to be the strange, nonviolent, nonconforming community of Christ followers it is called to be.80 But that was only the base point of Barber’s ministry in Goldsboro. The church does not exist only for itself, and it cannot do the work of justice by itself. Barber led Greenleaf to consider what the good news of the gospel would look like to the poor of Goldsboro, both churched and not. The answer included a community development corporation called Rebuilding Broken Places that Greenleaf cofounded in collaboration with other community groups. They enlisted local businesses and secured grant money to build senior housing units, single-family houses, and a freedom school academy. Barber preached that the Spirit blows where it will, through and beyond the church. God inspires ministries serving the entire community. In 2005, twelve years into his ministry at Greenleaf, Barber awoke one night and walked to the bathroom. He was standing there before it occurred to him that he hadn’t used his walker. Walking back to the bedroom, he asked Rebecca to pinch him; was he dreaming? They laughed out loud at discovering that his body had been healing without their noticing. It happened while Barber was absorbed in nursing their little community from sickness to health. That morning he bought a wooden cane, and he never relinquished it afterward, politely declining nicer ones that people bought for him. The cane was his testimony, like the man told by Jesus to take up his mat and walk. Barber scaled up. What if they built a statewide coalition on the Goldsboro model? Somehow, he was ready to travel constantly, climbing into and out of multiple vehicles per day, every time an ordeal of dragging his back and legs to work for him.81

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First he ran for president of the North Carolina NAACP, in the summer of 2005. Barber argued that the NAACP no longer advanced people of color; it was the National Association for Colored People, specializing in nice banquets. North Carolina schools had resegregated, and 12 percent of North Carolina’s total youth population had no health insurance. Why did the NAACP respond with self-congratulatory nostalgia? Barber offended the banquet luminaries and won the election; he appointed a longtime White civil rights activist, Al McSurely, to be his legal redress chair. He confirmed that it meant something to pick a White lieutenant; the NAACP had to go back to being seriously activist and interracial, as in its glory days. Barber enlisted Greenleaf in his NAACP work. He had to be driven everywhere, and his brand of ministry did not work if he did it by himself. He never believed, however, that reenergizing the NAACP would be enough to change North Carolina. The NAACP presidency put him in a position to create what was needed, an organization uniting all the social justice organizations, a new iteration of fusion politics. The perennial dream of the American left is to unite all the groups that struggle for social justice. It never was, or is, hard to imagine. What if we all banded together? Every Farmer-Labor-Progressive-Socialist coalition tried to pull it off. Barber thought of Ezekiel, not the Farmer-Labor saga, when he described fusion politics. Ezekiel dreamed of Israel’s divided tribes uniting in Jerusalem; thenceforth, the Lord would be there. Barber listed fourteen justice tribes of North Carolina, calling them in December 2006 to a meeting in the state capitol. Representatives of sixteen organizations told each other what such conventions always do: There are more of us than of them. Let’s change the narrative by working together. The group formulated a fourteen-point agenda, organized a People’s Assembly in February 2007 at the state capitol, and adopted McSurely’s name suggestion, the Historic Thousands on Jones Street (HKonJ). Barber fretted that the name might be exaggerated, until five thousand people turned out, an echo of the Fusion Party. Barber stressed that HKonJ was not liberal, conservative, Democratic, or Republican. It was for all that is good and right, such as voting rights, criminal justice, labor rights, health care, and immigrants’ rights. In 2007 it went all-out on one issue that affected all the others: voting rights. For a while the new coalition was quietly effective. The North Carolina NAACP and HKonJ worked closely together, being led by the same two people, Barber and McSurely. They won a crucial victory when the state legislature expanded early voting and allowed same-day registration, just in time for a thing of beauty in the 2008 election: “Souls to the Polls.” Black churchgoers were driven to early voting sites after worship services ended. Souls to the Polls rode

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on the excitement generated by Obama’s candidacy, playing a key role in turning North Carolina barely blue in the presidential election. The expansion of voting rights in 2007 added 185,000 new voters to the electorate in a state that Obama won by just over 100,000 votes. That ended Barber’s quiet days of power building. The backlash against Obama and Barber was furious, incredulous, and determined. How the hell had North Carolina gone for Obama? Why had they treated this Barber character as a buffoon?82 Barber went swiftly from being derided as “Reverend Bar-B-Q” to receiving death threats. He told friends it was a measure of how strong they had become. He added that he worried more about the moneyed kingmakers than about the loudmouths. In January 2010 the political right won a colossal victory in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5–4 that corporations and special interests have a “free speech” right to pump as much money as they want into elections in complete secrecy. The fallout in North Carolina was devastating. Art Pope, a right-wing kingmaker who inherited a retail chain from his father, played the leading role in turning North Carolina’s state legislature flaming red in the 2010 midterm elections. “Big government” was vilified for coddling the “undeserving poor,” always code for Black and Brown. Barber noticed that much of the right-wing money went into culture wars funneled through foundations. Whipping up resentment against the poor was a twofer—poisoning the culture and enhancing the Republican vote. HKonJ won a few victories during the early Obama years, most notably a Racial Justice Act guaranteeing an appeal to every death row inmate victimized by racial bias in the sentencing process. But there was no denying that the Republican right was winning. In 2012 the right got politically creative, aiming to split the growing Black vote in North Carolina by pushing a so-called defense of marriage measure called North Carolina Amendment One. Barber thought of the Pharisees setting a trap for Jesus. His broad coalition, he reasoned, could not define what marriage is, or endorse marriage equality, but it had to uphold the principle of equal protection under the law, defending the civil rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer-identified persons. HKonJ fought against Amendment One on that basis, framing the issue in a way that won the support of Black communities in the precincts it reached. Barber was repulsed that the right tried to pit African Americans against LGBTQ persons and communities. It was offensive and dishonest to claim “that black folk don’t support gay folk.” No group in America, he argued, grasps better than the Black community the importance of civil rights. But reaching North Carolina’s rural communities would have required time and resources that HKonJ lacked. On May 8, 2012,

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Amendment One passed. It had nothing to do with defending marriage and everything to do with divide-and-conquer politics. Barber exhorted his allies not to endorse the pernicious interpretation that they were divided. To blame any single group for the Amendment One assault on LGBTQ persons “is a waste of time and creates unnecessary divisions.”83 The winter of 2012–2013 was the nadir of the Obama years in North Carolina, where Obama lost the state despite winning reelection. HKonJ convened its seventh coalition People’s Assembly in February 2013 with a battered but defiant spirit. It confronted a right-wing onslaught to block the expansion of Medicaid to half a million poor North Carolinians, to overturn the Racial Justice Act, to require photo ID for voting, and to eliminate same-day voter registration. The group responded by forming the Forward Together Moral Movement in North Carolina, advocating a fivefold platform of economic justice, educational equality, universal health care, criminal justice reform, and voting rights. At five o’clock on a Monday evening, April 29, 2013, it staged a protest outside the doors of the North Carolina state legislature on Jones Street. Barber said they opposed the “avalanche of extremist policies” being debated by the legislature, and they had written numerous letters demanding to be heard. The time had come to put their bodies on the line. Seventeen protesters were promptly arrested for annoying the legislators, and the Moral Monday campaign was launched.84 The following Monday, several hundred people showed up to demonstrate, and thirty entered the People’s House to get arrested. Barber said the Forward Together Moral Movement already had a legal strategy, challenging the new policies in court, and an organizing strategy, working across the entire state. The Moral Monday witness had its own work and purpose—to respond to the crisis of American democracy with acts of nonviolent civil disobedience. Moral Mondays struck a cultural nerve. The crowds grew, and the media showed up to cover the ritual of protests and arrests. The fourth Moral Monday, on May 20, drew a thousand protesters, and fifty-seven were arrested. The following month, in Shelby County v. Holder, the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Section 5 requires select states and local governments to obtain federal preclearance before changing their voting laws or practices. Section 4(b) had specified the coverage formula under which jurisdictions were subject to preclearance based on their histories of discrimination. The court ruled by a 5–4 vote that 4(b) was unconstitutional because the coverage formula was based on outdated data. Section 5 was left standing, but lacking a coverage formula to implement it, no jurisdiction is subject to Section 5 preclearance.85 Shredding the greatest legislative achievement of the civil rights movement evoked contrary reactions. Obama said he was deeply disappointed, and Congress

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should enact a new formula. That was a pure fantasy for this Congress. U.S. Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the leading Republican on the Judiciary Committee, said the court’s decision proved that the Voting Rights Act worked during its time and was no longer needed. John Lewis, stunned and grieving, bluntly declared: “The Supreme Court has stuck a dagger into the heart of the Voting Rights Act.” This law, he said, was “the most powerful tool this nation has ever had” to combat voter discrimination. Now it was eviscerated. Lewis drew the contrast between those who fought for the law and those who dismantled it: “Those justices were never beaten or jailed for trying to register to vote. They have no friends who gave their lives for the right to vote. I want to say to them, Come and walk in my shoes.” He recalled that the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments were vitiated in a few years, after which it took nearly a century to pass the Voting Rights Act. A few hours after the Shelby announcement, Texas moved to implement a voter ID law that the Justice Department had declared illegal. Lewis shuddered at watching America hurtle backward.86 A flurry of retrogression ensued. In North Carolina, Republican legislators threw all their voter suppression ideas into one bill, no longer restrained by the Voting Rights Act. The Moral Monday crowds swelled to five thousand people per week, the legislature passed a monster voter suppression bill and went home, and the demonstrations kept going through July. Barber declared on the twelfth Moral Monday, July 22: “The whole world can see through your lies, legislature. The whole world can see through your lies about voter fraud and voter integrity.” He noted that at least segregationist icon Jesse Helms was honest about being anti-Black. Helms didn’t hide behind ridiculous lies about voter fraud: “We know what you are up to. Maybe you are stuck in the 19th century, but we’re not. Maybe you are stuck in Jim Crow and the Old South, but we’re not.” This fight, he declared, was on.87 Sometimes he had to police the “moral” in Moral Monday. Just after the Trayvon Martin verdict, Barber censured some of the sign wavers: “This is Moral Monday. We don’t have to curse people to be right.” In a moral movement, he said, you aim to make friends of your enemies. All great movements arise from a deep moral wellspring, not from attacking people. Barber knew why his listeners were angry, depressed, and hurting, because so was he. Trayvon’s mere appearance evoked Zimmerman’s hostility; Barber recoiled at knowing how his three sons looked to the Zimmermans of the world. He said he wanted his sons to realize why he was constantly on the road, trying to change the world. Barber told the crowd what happened to him the night before, watching Fox television in a hotel room. A pundit declared that Trayvon was dead because he chose to confront a man he believed had disrespected

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him. Barber’s son fought back enraged tears: “Dad, they want to emasculate us all. They want to take our voting rights. They want to hurt the poor. They want to take away education. Then they want to even take away the ability for us to defend ourselves.”88 Moral Mondays was a spectacular success. It grew week by week, operating in revival style, replete with evangelistic sermons and an altar call. The revival format did not stop it from feeling interreligious; there were sermons by Christian, Jewish, and Muslim clerics who took turns inspiring the crowd. Barber had to bring his A-game every week just to compare favorably with a slew of very able preacher-orators. Reporters asked where this movement was heading, and Barber explained that Moral Mondays was a revival witness and civil disobedience campaign, not a movement. Forward Together was the movement. They kept Moral Mondays going for thirteen weeks, culminating with rallies across North Carolina on July 29, 2013, that served as a kind of dress rehearsal for a mass march in Raleigh the following February. Barber said they were trying to birth a Third Reconstruction. The First Reconstruction led to interracial fusion alliances that were viciously attacked by White backlash movements. The Second Reconstruction was the civil rights movement. The Third Reconstruction must aim higher than the expansion of voting rights achieved by the Voting Rights Act, winning a constitutional amendment that guarantees the same voting rights in every state. In 2014 Barber established an educational center called Repairers of the Breach to equip leaders for state-based coalitions. It teaches organizers to conduct grassroots statewide campaigns and to employ moral language to frame policy issues, advocating nonviolent civil disobedience, enabling ordinary people to be heard, and treating antiracism and anticlassism as equally fundamental. In 2016 Barber lit up the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia by calling on Americans to stand up and vote together for their deepest moral values. After Trump was elected in 2016, Barber advised that no single defeat changes everything. He said it in January 2017, speaking at Washington Hebrew Congregation: “We will never, never, never turn back. One election can’t turn us back. A loudmouth can’t turn us back.” He said it with a historical slant in July 2017, addressing the NAACP National Convention, observing that Trump was not the first “racist narcissist” to occupy the White House; Woodrow Wilson lauded the Klan and reinstated segregationist policies in the federal government. “Trump is a symptom of a deeper moral malady,” Barber warned. “And Trump is not new. He’s as American as apple pie.” Twenty-two states had new racial voter suppression laws and eleven states were pressing to join them. In 2016 alone, Black American communities lost nine hundred polling sites. Barber

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concluded: “Tell Trump, tell Paul Ryan, tell Mitch McConnell, tell the extremists, tell the courts, tell the racists: We shall not be moved! We’re not moving from the streets! From the courts! We’re not moving from the ballot box!”89 The following year he launched the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival (PPC). It took up the unfinished business of its namesake, fifty years later, building toward “Forty Days of Action” in May–June 2018. Barber teamed as codirector with White Presbyterian minister Liz Theoharis, a New Testament scholar who earned her Ph.D. from Union Theological Seminary in 2014 and directed Union’s Kairos Center for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice. Barber and Theoharis had a grassroots integrity that Ella Baker would have appreciated, vowing to build a network of locally focused chapters led by poor people themselves, ruling out partnerships with national progressive organizations. They reasoned that they couldn’t call it a grassroots movement if they linked up with national labor unions, think tanks, and advocacy groups. The new PPC kicked off a national tour in Marks, Mississippi, and proceeded to Detroit, Selma, Harlan County (Kentucky), Central Valley (California), and Grays Harbor (Washington), building up to forty consecutive days of action in twenty-five state capitals and other sites. Sometimes they drew encouraging crowds; sometimes they were brutally disappointed. In December 2017 Trump’s massive tax cut for the donor class sailed through the U.S. Senate. PPC staged a civil disobedience action in the atrium of the Hart Senate Office Building that yielded only twelve arrests.90 At Union there was constant anxiety about the size of the crowds and whether PPC was taking off. These were our friends trying to kindle something big. Barber’s core sermon paired Psalm 118 and Luke 4—the rejected cornerstone and the anointing of Jesus to preach good news to the poor. He said that 140 million Americans lived in poverty and low wealth, 43 percent of the nation. They were the key, moved by God’s Spirit, to the salvation of the nation: I believe right now that the soul of America is at stake. The soul of the nation cannot be saved, cannot be sturdy, cannot be properly put together unless the rejected lead the revival and become the chief cornerstones. This has always been true at the heart of our story. . . . There is no way to mend the flaws of the nation and be one nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all unless the rejected are at the center. We can’t find our way out of the mess we’re in with a left focus or a right focus. We’ve got to refocus on those who have been rejected.91

The Forty Days were up and down, like the buildup tour, while the culminating demonstration on June 21, 2018, in Washington, DC, drew a strong crowd

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to hear speeches by Barber, Theoharis, Jesse Jackson, and Randi Weingarten, leader of the American Federation of Teachers. One hundred people were arrested at the U.S. Capitol. One month later there was a heartwarming moment in New Orleans: Bishop Yvette Flunder, the presiding bishop of the Fellowship of Affirming Ministries, a trans-denominational coalition of Christian churches, consecrated Barber as a bishop in the College of Affirming Bishops and Faith Leaders, lauding his prophetic ministry. Afterward, Barber and Theoharis aimed for a March on Washington in June 2020. Now they sought partnerships with the same national progressive organizations they had previously avoided, switching gears with humility, pluck, and, eventually, a very rushed pivot to an online event.92 The organizers geared up for a big march in DC at the same time as the Democratic candidates for president vied with each other in preprimary debates. Barber engaged the leading contenders, encouraging them to speak about their faith and its relationship to their policy positions. All the leading Democratic candidates respected his integrity and goals, even as Barber and Theoharis stressed that PPC is politically nonpartisan. Cosponsors came aboard, including major unions such as the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, the American Postal Workers Union, and the Association of Flight Attendants. PPC assembled a movement songbook called We Rise and organized an artists’ cooperative called Justseeds. On February 29, 2020, Joe Biden won the South Carolina primary, and the waters parted spectacularly for him. All his primary rivals except Bernie Sanders dropped out, and Super Tuesday— March 3, 2020—settled who the Democratic candidate would be, eight days before the World Health Organization declared that COVID-19 had reached global pandemic status. Barber and Theoharis revamped the march for a nation reeling from the COVID crisis, convening a virtual rally on June 20, 2020.93 Driven online, the PPC rally boasted 248 cosponsors, including fourteen major trade unions headed by the American Federation of Government Employees and the United Auto Workers; nine Christian denominations, including the Episcopal Church and the AME Zion Church; three Muslim organizations headed by the Muslim Public Affairs Council; and many activist organizations, including March for Our Lives, 350.org, Greenpeace USA, Faith in Public Life, Interfaith Worker Justice, and Fight for $15. It attracted over 2 million viewers and called for racial justice, single-payer health care, worker rights, free tuition at public colleges, an assault weapons ban, and criminal justice reforms. Speakers blistered the federal government for failing to battle the pandemic, but made few direct references to Trump. There were brief talks by Muslim activist Linda Sarsour, Jewish activist Rabbi Sharon Brous, Catholic

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activist Sister Simone Campbell, and San Carlos Apache Tribe representative Wendsler Nosie. There were stump sermons by Barber and Theoharis, and a featured talk by Al Gore, who stressed that poverty, systemic racism, and the climate crisis are tightly linked.94 That was the movement highlight of an exceedingly miserable year, except for the explosion of protests against the killing of George Floyd, a global eruption surpassing all precedents, and the November election of Biden, a comeback by the nation that twice elected Obama. The PPC rally provided the strongest evidence in years that the religious left was still out there to be gathered and mobilized, even as Barber and Theoharis refused to put it that way. They stuck to a Christian gospel message fixed on the poor and a national stage. Everything that Barber dealt with in North Carolina got harder when he scaled up. The revival model that felt open and hospitable in Durham often felt aggressively evangelical in other contexts. But PPC was built for the long haul, being led by two veteran organizers whose strength is a faith message that does not change. AT LA N TA POL ITIC S A N D THE DIVIDED B L A CK C H U RC H : RA PH A EL WARNOCK

Meanwhile the epicenter reasserted itself in the elections of 2018 and 2020. Two Atlanta figures straight out of the Black social gospel tradition, Stacey Abrams and Raphael Warnock, soared into national prominence. Abrams, the daughter of two Methodist ministers, went to college at Spelman and to law school at Yale, won her first electoral office in 2006 in the Georgia state House of Representatives, and became a leader in the state Democratic Party, serving as House minority leader of the state legislature. In 2017 she founded a voter registration campaign called the New Georgia Project, enlisting the activist pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church, Warnock, to serve as its chair. The following year Abrams ran a spectacular campaign for governor and nearly overcame an onslaught of voter suppression by the governing Republicans. She founded a new organization, Fair Fight Action, to fight off voter suppression, and got Warnock to run in 2020 for the U.S. Senate. Abrams and Warnock based their political careers on the constituencies that had built the SCLC legacy in Atlanta, elected Maynard Jackson, Andrew Young, and John Lewis, and represented in the national imagination the ongoing legacy of the civil rights movement. On July 17, 2020, the nation lost its icon of the civil rights movement. Lewis had fought stage-four pancreatic cancer for eight months. His death set off a flood of tributes memorializing his moral heroism and that of C. T. Vivian, who died the same day. The later Lewis wore his eminence with the same humility

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and ethical integrity that marked him in SNCC and SCLC, a point made profusely as he lay in state in the U.S. Capitol. To many, for many years, he had been the answer to the King question: What would Martin do in our time? Four months before Lewis passed, he addressed his last gathering at Selma, a threeday commemoration marking the fifty-fifth anniversary of Bloody Sunday. Democratic presidential candidates Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Mike Bloomberg, Amy Klobuchar, and Elizabeth Warren showed up, two days before Super Tuesday and shortly before Buttigieg and Klobuchar dropped out of the race. Lewis said it was good to be in Selma one more time. He had come in 1965 on a journey with some children of God, called by King, James Lawson, and Diane Nash. Lawson, ninety-one years old, stood nearby as Lewis spoke. Lewis said they had come because of the saints of old—children of God through the ages who sought to fulfill the love ethic of the gospel. He implored the massive crowd, “Speak up, speak out, get in the way, never give in.” Historian Jon Meacham, summarizing the moment, aptly remarked that Lewis was as important to the founding of a modern multiethnic America as Jefferson and Madison were to the founding of the American republic.95 The Democratic Party of Georgia selected party chair Nikema Williams to run for Lewis’s seat for a new two-year term in November. Williams came up through Young Democrats of Georgia and worked for Planned Parenthood. She ascended in professional party circles in 2012 by becoming a top bundler for the Obama campaign, and won her first elected office in 2017 to the Georgia State Senate. Her husband, Leslie Small, had been an aide to Lewis; then her election as party chair in 2019 put her in a position to succeed Lewis. Robert Franklin’s friends in the clergy and educator community rallied behind him, running a symbolismheavy campaign to fill the brief remainder of Lewis’s congressional term. A special election in September winnowed a seven-person field to two, consisting of Franklin and former Atlanta city council official Kwanza Hall. Franklin touted his longtime friendship with Lewis, his fund-raising prowess as president of Morehouse and ITC, and his claim that he distinctly possessed the moral leadership qualities of Lewis. He lost the December runoff to Hall, which suggested that the clergyeducator community might have overestimated its electoral clout. Instead, the following month the social gospel won its greatest electoral victory ever.96 Abrams dramatically influenced Georgia politics by building organizations that expanded the Democratic vote and nearly winning the governor’s seat. A special election loomed for November 2020 to fill out the last two years of the U.S. Senate seat opened by the retirement of Republican Senator Johnny Isakson. Abrams prevailed on Warnock to run for it. He was a leader in the

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statewide fight for access to affordable health care and the chair of the New Georgia Project. He was the pastor of a church so prestigious that many considered the U.S. Senate to be a step down from it. He was also a leading framer of where the Black church has been, where it is heading, and where it should go. Raphael Gamaliel Warnock, born in 1969 in Savannah, Georgia, was the eleventh of twelve children blended by his parents and the first child born to them. His father, Jonathan Warnock, grew up in Savannah, served in the army during World War II, learned auto mechanics, made his living by restoring junked cars, and entered parish ministry on the side in his forties, preaching at a Pentecostal Holiness Church. Jonathan Warnock was divorced with four children when a younger divorced woman with six children, Verlene Brooks, joined his congregation. Their marriage fused the two families and soon produced two more children, Raphael and his younger sister Valencia, who grew up in the Kayton Homes public housing project of Savannah. Jonathan Warnock was reflective, kindly, deeply serious, and hardworking, requiring all his children to be dressed and ready for the day every day by dawn. On Sundays the service began with a pledge of allegiance to the U.S. flag hung behind the pulpit. Warnock’s parents were fervently evangelical but respected the right of their children to make up their own minds. Warnock took to all of it, quoting the Bible so earnestly the family nicknamed him “the Rev.” He idolized King and was determined to win admission to Morehouse, which Upward Bound and a Pell Grant helped make possible. At Morehouse he found the mentor of a lifetime, Lawrence Carter. Religion and philosophy professor Aaron Parker and psychology professor Duane Jackson also helped Warnock find his way. Majoring in psychology, Warnock became a Baptist, graduated in 1991, and enrolled in the master of divinity program at Union, from which he graduated in 1994.97 At Union he found another mentor, Cone, though it would be equally accurate to say that Cone found him. Cone cared very much about the future of Black theology. He surveyed his classes in search of the next important Black theologian, and he picked out Warnock as the best candidate. Warnock was already distinctly important to Cone when he entered the doctoral program in 1994. He had everything that Cone looked for in a theologian—a strong identification with blackness, humble beginnings, intellectual and religious passion, intellectual acumen, teachability, and courage. Cone pinned his hopes for Black theology on Warnock, which became a heavy burden to bear while Warnock ascended at Abyssinian Church from intern minister to youth pastor to assistant pastor.

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Cone chafed at losing many of the best Black theologian prospects to church ministry. Whenever he told me how much it bothered him, which was often, Warnock was Example A. Cone had shaken his head in the 1990s as Warnock became a fixture at Abyssinian, serving under Calvin O. Butts III, a major figure in New York City politics. In 1993, Butts launched a public crusade against gangster rap that Warnock joined, decrying violent and misogynistic lyrics; Warnock mediated a generational divide in Harlem over this issue. He also blasted Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s work requirements for welfare recipients, calling the program a cruel hoax, and spoke against police violence targeting Black men. In 1997, Warnock’s brother Keith, a Savannah police officer, was caught in an FBI drug sting and sentenced to life in prison. Warnock grieved for his brother, supported him, protested against the racist incarceration system, and began to yearn for a congregation of his own.98 In 2000 he had his heart set on the pastorate of Sixth Avenue Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, but didn’t get the job. The following year Warnock landed at Douglas Memorial Community Church in Baltimore, where he flourished, speaking out on the AIDS crisis. In 2004, Joseph Roberts Jr. retired as pastor of Ebenezer and Warnock was exactly what the congregation wanted: young, accomplished, charismatic, and fully in the social gospel mode of MLK. He later reflected that all his ministerial training and leadership took place “at churches that, like Ebenezer, had served as social gospel stations led by social gospel ministers.” Winning the pastorate of Ebenezer in 2005 gave Warnock immediate entry into the upper echelon of Atlanta society. He declared that he belonged to the King tradition, something very different from the prosperity gospel of Creflo Dollar and Bishop Eddie L. Long. Warnock said King did not tell the Memphis garbage collectors “they should ‘name it and claim it.’” King criticized the system that exploited the garbage collectors: “And for that he gave his life. To me, that’s what Christian ministry is all about.” Meanwhile Cone was angry with Warnock for taking the ministry path, not finishing the dissertation, and not writing a dissertation that Cone liked.99 The dissertation hung like a stone cloud over his head, twelve years into his doctoral program. Warnock was eager to devote himself to Ebenezer, meeting its swirl of ministerial and civic demands, but he ran out of extensions at Union and pressed hard to meet a March 2006 deadline. Cone disliked Warnock’s argument that Black theology fell short of what it should be because it is too deeply embedded in the academy. It took Cone many years to accept criticism from Warnock that he routinely took from Wilmore, notwithstanding that Warnock never criticized Cone specifically, unlike Wilmore. Eventually there was a book version of the dissertation, The Divided Mind of the Black Church

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(2014). It ranks with Paris’s Social Teaching of the Black Churches as a judicious analysis. By the time it came out, Warnock was a leader of the fight to expand Medicaid under Obamacare in Republican-run Georgia.100 The Divided Mind of the Black Church conveyed its argument in the title. To Warnock, double consciousness was not only a Du Boisian argument about being Black and American. The religious identity of the Black church is a form of double consciousness. Two powerful identity-forming forces—White evangelicalism and the history of Black struggle—created the Black church, shaped what it became, and never quite fit together. The contradictions between the evangelical and liberationist strands of Black Christianity have never been resolved. Warnock argued that four overlapping “moments” or steps have failed to solve the problem, passing a divided mind from generation to generation. Black Christianity came late to thinking critically about theology, even theology about itself. Black Christians readily conflated their passion for freedom with Christian doctrine, so they didn’t question the doctrinal integrity of an inherited orthodoxy. They simply puzzled that White Christians failed to live up to the ethical demands of Christian faith. Warnock appropriated Paris’s observation that the Black church failed to consider that White Christians did not worry about the chasm between their faith and practice. They didn’t even see it; racism was barely mentioned in White theology. Had Black ministers reflected on the White Christian betrayal of Christianity, Black theology might have emerged sooner.101 The first moment was the formation of a liberationist faith, “the invisible institution” named by Albert Raboteau. Black Christians worked out an antiracist and holistically saving version of Christian faith, which they fused with an inherited evangelicalism. The second moment was the founding of a liberationist church—the independent Black church movement of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It was the chief expression of Black resistance to slavery, containing a political message by virtue of rebelling against racist White society, not merely the church. The deeper Black church critique, however, was theological. Black Christians broke away from the White churches, condemned American racism, espoused an egalitarian understanding of what the church is supposed to be, and showed that the White churches were as racist as the general society. Warnock stressed that Black churches were born in the fires of the First and Second Awakenings. They were creative agents in the Second Awakening, deeply absorbing its evangelical consciousness and revival sensibility. The evangelical emphasis on personal spirituality worked in the Black church, but it stifled the liberationist impulse of Black faith, preaching that individual conversion is what matters and spirituality is primarily interior.102

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The third moment was the civil rights movement, a church-led liberationist movement. Warnock did not track the debate over social justice theology that occurred between the second and third moments. He made a cursory reference to decades of Black social struggle before asserting that the SCLC was something new and revolutionary. The Black church had never previously set out to redeem the soul of America, as the SCLC slogan put it. Only with the founding of the SCLC did the Black church become an instrument of social transformation. Warnock put it strongly to mark off the King era. The civil rights movement was a revolution of consciousness in the Black church, but it was truncated theologically. It was a form of revivalism that traded on the evangelical faith of the Black church and relied on the charisma of spellbinding preachers. It created a liberationist movement fired by the Black Christian ethic of equality, but it stopped short of developing a Black liberation theology. Instead, it employed the revival language that worked in Black churches. The fourth moment was the Cone project of liberation theology, declaring that Black and White Christianity hold nothing in common because White Christianity is anti-Christian. Cone theologized a systematic understanding of the Black church as an instrument of liberation. Formally, Warnock made an audacious claim for liberation theology, treating it as comparable to the formation of Black faith, the founding of the Black church, and the creation of a civil rights movement. But the asymmetry in this comparison set up his critical argument.103 Early Black theology soared by stepping into the putative void that Cone, Roberts, Joseph Washington, and C. Eric Lincoln described vividly. Warnock followed this line of argument, to a point. He did not ask if perhaps there was something off about denigrating the theological imagination of Ransom, Johnson, Mays, Thurman, and King. Warnock recycled the Washington argument and the subsequent coup de grâce of Lincoln that the Negro church had died in the 1960s. Lincoln, however, wrote his requiem for the church of Mays and Thurman in 1974. He said it died willingly in order to be reborn: “Out of the ashes of its funeral pyre there sprang the bold, strident, self-conscious phoenix that is the contemporary Black Church.” Warnock, a product of the ostensible phoenix, observed that Lincoln was a superb sociologist of religion; he just didn’t write like one in this case. Lincoln wrote as an all-out partisan of Black liberation theology, which yielded some wishful thinking. To put it bluntly, Warnock said, “The death certificate is actually a death wish.”104 It struck him that Lincoln’s hermeneutical logic was much like the “God is dead” argument in White theology. Postmodern White theologians said God needed to die so that religion might grow up. Warnock stressed that only in White theology was such a thing as atheist theology imaginable; Black Christians

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did not talk about the death of God or fathom how atheist theology could exist. What struck him was that Lincoln had reached for a trope so alien to the culture of Black Christianity. If Lincoln could appropriate death-of-God theology for the Black church situation, his alienation from the existing church must have cut very deep. Asking what the Black church should be after the rise of Black Power was no less radical than asking what White Christianity should be if God is a fairy tale. If that was the question in 1974, what was the inheritance in 2014? Warnock didn’t have to speculate about that. He was an expert on the Black church, its recent history, and its still-divided mind.105 This was an updated dissertation, so first there was a tour of the first two generations of Black theology: Cone, Roberts, Wilmore, and Cecil Cone, followed by Hopkins, Pinn, J. Carter, and two theologians closer to Warnock’s point, James H. Harris and Dennis Wiley. Warnock set Carter and Pinn against each other. Carter made an argument about Christian heresy, contending that Western Christianity wrongly dissociated itself from the Jewish body of Jesus by crafting a rational discourse that construed the embodied Jewish particularity of Jesus as a problem. Christianity superseded Judaism, and Christian rationality transcended embodied difference. Carter said this anti-Jewish heresy, replete with a Gnostic doctrine of creation, gave rise to White supremacy. Pinn countered that the last thing Black theology needs is to sign up for another story about true Christianity being betrayed by heresies. Cone launched this mistaken enterprise, deploying the language of true-versus-heretical forms of Christianity. Pinn argued that Cone’s hermeneutical move fatally relegated Black theology to the normative gaze and doctrinal categories of Christianity, doubling down on a baleful historical inheritance. African American religion could have turned out differently if not for the overwhelming force of the two Awakenings, which aggressively introduced Blacks to Christianity, an outcome not challenged by Black theology. Pinn implored Black theologians to end the reign of Christian privilege by engaging Yoruba, Vodou, Santería, Islam, Black humanism, and other traditions.106 Warnock moved past the impasse between Carter and Pinn by making a diversity argument and pressing a counterfactual. Whatever Carter got right or wrong about the relationships between Gnosticism and racism, he clearly operated in the Black theology tradition. As for Pinn, Carter said Black theologians might very well expand their dialogues to include other traditions. Pinn was wrong, however, to claim that Black theology operates mostly in the Black church. Warnock said that did not remotely describe his experience of Black theology in the church or the academy. The primary conversation partner of Black theology is the White academy.107

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He cited Harris, a Black theologian mentored by Roberts at Virginia Union, and Wiley, a Black theologian mentored by Cone at Union, for support. Harris taught pastoral theology at Virginia Union and pastored a Baptist church in Richmond, Virginia. He said liberation theology is foreign to most Black churches, whereas evangelical theology is not. Evangelical arguments, literature, and theologians are well known in Black church communities, while liberationist arguments, literature, and theologians are known only in the academy. If Black theology is not primarily academic, why do only academics write it and discuss it? Harris warned that if Black theologians do not build a bridge between the books that win them tenure and the people to whom pastors minister, the churches will become poor imitations of White evangelicalism. Wiley put it more personally. He copastored Covenant Baptist Church in Washington, DC, and worried greatly about the erosion of the Black church. Citing Cone’s claim that Black theology rerooted itself in the 1970s in the church, Wiley said he saw no evidence of it. Had Black theologians knocked somewhere on the door, without his notice? If so, were they still standing there, or had they left? Wiley was not being playful; he was deadly earnest. He wanted Black theology to revive the church, and he recognized that Black theology, womanism, and Black Religious Studies were flourishing in the academy. But out here in the church, he warned, it’s really tough.108 That came through in The Divided Mind of the Black Church. Warnock said he, Wiley, and Harris “agonized” over the situation in the Black church. They agreed that the Black church needs a critical theological principle that judges the church’s faithfulness to its best understanding of the biblical witness as viewed through the prism of Black church history. This principle would carry out the critique of White Christianity that Black liberation theology commenced before it became essentially an academic enterprise. The church needs theology that helps the church become what liberation theology says it is. Black theologian James H. Evans, in We Have Been Believers (1992), lamented that Black churches have a pronounced tendency to reduce their religion to “cultural performance” while Black theology traffics entirely in “abstract concepts.” Wilmore was a quotable fount on this subject, always warning against making a home in the academy. Warnock cited a 1982 Wilmore quote: “It was both unnecessary and contrary to the best interests of black theology to turn the movement over to professional theologians who had one eye on their latest books and the other on the tenure track. We were back into the academic gamesmanship of the Joseph Washington days when it was deemed important that white colleagues understood that we were sufficiently knowledgeable of Western philosophy and theology for our black God-talk to be taken seriously.”109

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Black Christianity, Warnock argued, needs to enter an integral fifth stage that cannot be conceived by academics geared to the lifeworld of the White academy. The next phase of Black theology must be led by pastors who labor in the trenches, exude the best aspects of Black personal spirituality, love the Black church, and demand more of it. In the trenches, one cannot dismiss the many who hold fundamentalist views of the Bible and conservative views on politics and social issues. Warnock lingered over Joseph H. Jackson, an anachronism to academics, but a towering figure in the NCBC. Closer to the center, many Black Christians idolize King and have never heard of Cone. Warnock said Cone’s doctrine of ontological blackness is one “creative theological option” in the Black church, but many Black Christians remain integrationists in King’s sense, Anderson’s critique of ontological blackness is creative too, and the Afrocentric approach of Roberts is another credible option. Warnock did not expand on these points in the book or at his dissertation defense. It was enough to establish that ontologizing blackness is just one option, and perhaps not the best one.110 The book built up to a late-chapter discussion of the womanist tradition. Warnock commended womanists for criticizing the patriarchal structure of the Black church, challenging the androcentric assumptions of Black liberation theology, and stressing the importance of personal piety. Black churches, he noted, have generally rebuffed womanist criticism, while womanists fare much better in the academy. Warnock ventured an explanation. Notwithstanding that womanist theology gives voice to ordinary women, “it was born in the academy.” Moreover, the class tensions and institutional barriers that hamper Black theology are worse for womanists. To put it bluntly, Warnock said: “Womanist God-talk is even more unfamiliar to pastors and ordinary black women in the churches than is black theology.”111 He lauded Douglas for urging womanists to write and speak primarily for the church, not the academy. Warnock stressed that the academy is always far removed from the poor and has no particular reason to care about the poor. The issue of deciding to whom theology should speak is theological. He sympathized with womanist objections to cross-and-sacrifice language, but Warnock argued that atonement theology underwrote surrogacy servitude only after Christian doctrine was privatized by the Constantinian church. The deeper theological problem is the privatizing hermeneutic that stripped the cross, salvation, the church, and even the kingdom of God of political meaning. PreConstantinian Christians construed the cross as an instrument of imperial evil and as God’s judgment against the empire. Rome viewed the cross from the top down. Christianity viewed the cross from below, as the means by which God

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overthrows domination, violence, and death. When the church joined the empire, it lost the radical political meaning of the cross, which gave rise to a spiritualizing hermeneutic in which the cross became an instrument of Christian oppression, not the solidarity of Jesus with the suffering. Black Christianity, Warnock argued, a product of four liberation movements and an evangelical hermeneutic, can move forward only by integrating its four liberationist moments, reclaiming the unabashedly political character of the gospel.112 He did not claim to see it happening. In 2014 Warnock observed that the relationship between the Black church and Black theology had not improved since 1970. If anything, it had worsened with the rise of the Christian right and an explosion of prosperity religion in the churches. Warnock put it dolefully, noting that most Black church laity and even many clergy had never heard of Black theology until the Jeremiah Wright episode of 2008 introduced it to them. But an integrative Black Christianity is conceivable and achievable, he said. It must be achievable because there is no “authentic black piety that is not connected to liberation.” The Black church is always liberationist except when it accommodates White supremacy: “Specifically, white supremacy has to be fought in varying ways, and the liberationist agenda of the church, as it aims toward the fulfillment of God’s salvific purposes for humanity, must extend outward and inward in a truly multidimensional and radically improvisational approach that addresses the basic human need for personal fulfillment and existential meaning, even while challenging systemic structures of oppression in political economy, religious discourse (confessional and academic), and church polity.”113 What is needed is to integrate the liberationist faith, founding, movement, and theology of the Black church. Warnock stressed that it cannot happen without organic leaders who build organic institutional infrastructure. Theological professors must be rooted in the church. Church pastors must ground their congregations in good theology. Movement activists must build new organizations that bridge the divide between “Sanctified Churches and human rights marches,” and between “ivory towers and ebony trenches.” The Black church, he argued, has never bloomed into a self-critical liberationist community. It takes pride in King, but does not follow him in conceiving the church as a vehicle of social revolution. King regarded the redemption of Black bodies and the transformation of society as central to the mission of the church. He took for granted that the mission of the church must be founded on a strong doctrine of social salvation. Warnock judged that Black churches are reasonably good at reacting to “glaring episodes of insult,” and not so good at being the oppositional body of Christ in the world. Constantly opposing the dominant culture is exhausting. Black churches prefer to find terms of conciliation and reward.

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Warnock said the church must learn to cultivate a fundamentally oppositional spirituality, which requires taking seriously “the pietistic dimensions of black faith.”114 Liberation theology is strong on oppositional rhetoric and weak on nurturing spirituality. Here lies the crucial challenge, Warnock argued. The Black church can be renewed as an integral liberationist community only by learning how to be spiritual and militant simultaneously. Pentecostalism is soaring because it is unabashedly spiritual. Warnock did not say that the future of Black social Christianity must be Pentecostal. He said it is a tragedy that the gospel is not being heard in much of the Black community: “It is not being heard because the church born fighting for freedom needs to be clearer about what the gospel is and who it is as an instrument of its living manifestation in the world.”115 Cone disliked Warnock’s claim that a better Black theology must be developed. First, Warnock had spurned Cone’s plan for him to become an academic and perhaps succeed him at Union. Then Warnock put this decision at the center of his dissertation, contending that liberation theology is too confined to the academy and is not very spiritual. Cone was justly proud of founding Black theology and of placing numerous theologians in colleges, universities, and seminaries across the nation. He felt that Warnock downgraded what he had accomplished in the academy. Three weeks before Warnock defended his dissertation in 2006, and the day before Warnock defended it, Cone scalded me with his intense feelings on this subject. Afterward, I didn’t realize how angry he remained about it. In 2012 one of my doctoral advisees asked if Warnock could be one of her readers on a comprehensive exam; I cluelessly took this proposal to the theology field, where Cone excoriated me again. My colleagues, including Cornel West, sat ashenfaced and silent. Nothing that they or I could have said would have assuaged Cone. Warnock had offended him—how could I have forgotten it so soon? But Warnock persisted in inviting Cone to Ebenezer, Cone relented, and Cone was love-bombed by the entire community. There he realized that Warnock had taken the right path. When Cone returned home he called me to his apartment. It was the happiest I ever saw him; he was glowing. “Raphael is doing something great at that place,” he said. In that feeling he asked Warnock to preach the eulogy at his funeral. In his last years, Cone taught a course on Baldwin that rekindled his love of teaching. Soon he regretted having waited so long to teach Baldwin. He loved Baldwin for saying that “every artist is fundamentally religious,” and that the church “is the worst place to learn about Christianity.” He fashioned a lecture on Baldwin’s statement that White Americans “are probably the sickest and

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certainly the most dangerous people, of any color, to be found in the world today.” Cone dutifully assigned a few writings by Baldwin scholars, but told students he hated that scholars snuffed out the fire in Baldwin’s work—the thing he loved most in Baldwin. He took two passes at writing a book about Baldwin, couldn’t decide how to organize it, and found himself writing another memoir, Said I Wasn’t Gonna Tell Nobody (2018). It had a closing chapter on Baldwin, but the key Baldwin theme came early—Baldwin’s statement in “Autobiographical Notes” that a writer writes “out of one thing only—one’s own experience.” Cone wrote that he heard the cry of Black blood in 1967 and never stopped hearing it: “White people didn’t hear it then, and they still don’t hear it now. They are deaf to the cry of black blood. Yet black people will not be silent as our children are thrown in rivers, blown into eternity, and shot dead in the streets. Black Lives Matter! God hears that cry, and black liberation theology bears witness to it.”116 He finished the manuscript on December 1, 2017, just before he learned that he had little time left. Cone was grateful to have had his say. He welcomed a carefully spread-out succession of friends to his apartment, reminiscing about his life. On one occasion he asked me about Vincent Lloyd, a prolific Black theologian at Villanova University. I told him about Lloyd’s new book, Religion of the Field Negro (2018), which made a framing argument about the history of Black theology. Lloyd said Black theology in its original phase was theological and social critical, making strong claims about God, Christ, the judgments of God, and the idolatry of White theology. The second phase began when secularism and its conjoined twin, multiculturalism, crept into Black theology, reducing it to one of many ways to pluralize theology. Black theology lost its nerve. It was not very theological any more, being more concerned to pass secular and multicultural tests of civility and diversity. Historicists, feminists, womanists, postmodernists, and secular Religious Studies scholars played the leading roles in taming Black theology, but even Cone went along with relativizing critiques that stripped his work of its early power. The third phase, Lloyd argued, commenced with the rise of Black Lives Matter. It has no theological exemplars as yet, but they are surely coming, because Black Lives Matter is closer to the Black Power moment than anything that existed between 1975 and 2010.117 “Hmmm,” Cone said. “There’s something to it, isn’t there? What do you think?” I said this frame certainly describes something familiar, but it doesn’t do enough sorting to accomplish what frames are supposed to do. Phase one is terribly brief, phase two is almost the entire history of Black theology lumped together in all its variations, and phase three is a blank space. But I added that Cone’s forthcoming memoir was more like his first two books than any of the

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others. “Yes,” he said, “that’s what I mean. There is something to it.” On April 28, 2018, we lost him. I eulogized him at Union’s memorial service on April 30, stressing his moral passion and radiant humanity. Warnock eulogized him on May 7 at the funeral service at Riverside Church, declaring that to measure Cone’s significance in modern theology, we must distinguish between “BC and AC.” Theology was one thing Before Cone, and something very different After Cone. Eden Theological Seminary theologian Ben Sanders III, defending his doctoral dissertation at the University of Denver/Iliff School of Theology two days after Cone’s funeral, astutely argued that the entire history of Black theology is an ongoing series of responses to Cone—a “traditioning” process of evaluating, contesting, and reshaping what Black identity is and should be in theological discourse.118 Two years later Warnock ran for the U.S. Senate with the eyes of the nation and the hopes of Democrats upon him. He spoke powerfully to the moment after George Floyd was murdered, and the protests drew attention to Warnock’s candidacy: “We have built this massive infrastructure over the last 40 years, and the infrastructure has created its own distinct ideology. It is the mutation of an old virus, COVID 1619, and in this land we have been trying to beat back this virus since 1619.” His election opponent, Republican U.S. Senator Kelly Loeffler, brought up Fidel Castro every day, never mind that Warnock had nothing to do with Castro. Abyssinian had hosted Castro for an event in 1995, when Warnock was a low-ranking assistant pastor. Jeremiah Wright rivaled Castro for scare-mentions, the “God Damn America” tape was resurrected, and Loeffler boasted in one of her campaign ads that she was “more conservative than Attila the Hun.” Fox News host Tucker Carlson declared that nothing could be more racist than asking America to repent of its whiteness. Florida Senator Marco Rubio charged that Warnock was shockingly biased against America’s military. Willie Jennings aptly replied that White religious figures can be sharply critical of various aspects of American life without being accused of anti-Americanism, a privilege not granted to Black religious figures: “If you’re Black, especially a Black Baptist, and you speak in the prophetic tradition, it’s always interpreted as against the very fabric of America.” Prophetic criticism, Jennings observed, is central to the Black Baptist tradition: “Nothing is off-limits to criticism, nothing is off-limits to challenge because one understands oneself inside of a more decisive story, that’s the Christian story.”119 Warnock and his fellow Democrat Jon Ossoff, an investigative journalist and former intern to Lewis, won the runoff elections of January 5, 2021, that delivered control of the U.S. Senate to the Democrats. Normally these stunning victories would have been an earthquake, but the Georgia moment was drowned

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out by a violent right-wing mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6. For weeks Trump incited his followers by contending that the presidency had been stolen from him. Somehow, on his telling, the same ballots of November 2020 that elected scores of Republicans in multiple states defrauded him. Trump behaved so atrociously after the November 2020 election that he undercut the Republican senators in the Georgia runoff, helping Warnock and Ossoff reclaim the Senate for the Democrats. Trump’s enormous following was eager to believe his lies. He topped off all the others by telling the mob he incited on January 6 that he would be marching to the Capitol with them. Now there was a U.S. senator who preached on Sundays from King’s pulpit in a robe trimmed with kente cloth. Bernice A. King, the CEO of the MLK Center and a guardian of her father’s legacy, said it was no coincidence that Warnock ascended in the year Lewis, Vivian, and Joseph Lowery died: “Warnock is the answer to the prayers of our ancestors and the fruit of their labor. His election represents the dawn of a new South.” Warnock kept his pulpit, like many minister-politicians and minister-activists before him, hustling home on Sundays. He was the symbol of Georgia turning purple, a 50–50 Senate, and Democrats trying to figure out how to govern in the midst of a global pandemic, a cratered economy, an eco-crisis verging on apocalypse, and a White nationalist backlash insisting that Black lives get too much consideration. In 2022, Warnock called the roll of his role models: King, Lowery, Otis Moss Jr., Prathia Hall, Marian Wright Edelman, Butts, Proctor, and Jesse Jackson. All had shown him, he said, to put his body on the line, so there he was.120 D O U B LE C ON SCIOU SN ESS A S TRAGIC S OUL-LIFE A N D REA C TIV E OB STACLE

Fluker’s call to cast aside dilemma consciousness is a plea for relief from a core assumption shared by Du Bois and King. Du Bois did not want to be a Black leader, but was repulsed by White America’s contempt for Black people —enough to assume the burdens of leadership. If he was going to be a leader, he had to do it better than those who claimed the title. It started with owning up to his split consciousness as a Black man and an American—a Black man birthed, nurtured, schooled, demeaned, enabled, edified, abused, and rewarded in the United States, a nation that had scarred him and filled his head with ideals. He was as American as the tropes he imbibed from Emerson, Lincoln, and Douglass. If Du Bois was going to be a Black leader, he had to aim higher than the usual small-minded leaders fixed on insular survival or assimilated mediocrity. He dragged his family to New York with no guarantee of a job, willing to

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cut a deal with White NAACP liberals in order to be a self-sacrificing Black American leader. King expected all along to be a leader, while taking for granted that Du Boisian double consciousness defines all Black leaders of the best kind. But King struggled like Du Bois not to be alienated from the United States and his U.S. American identity. He went from being a 1950s integrationist who called on the United States to fulfill the idealism in its liberal creed to being the King of September 1963 who began to say that the country was deeply sick and perhaps hopelessly sick. In his last years King got pelted with rocks in Chicago and turned a supportive U.S. president against him by condemning the Vietnam War. King emphasized what was true in Black Power, felt betrayed by his lieutenants, and agonized over American cities on fire. He bore his cross to the end, brutally exhausted and depressed, verging on despair. Succeeding him was impossible. Those who tried to do it took for granted that “Black American” is a hybrid identity yielding built-in dilemmas for Black leaders. Double consciousness is profuse and various, not just a trope about Black American hybridity. Critiques of it tend to generate new forms of it, as in the case of Fluker, who framed his case for dropping the dilemma-conscious form of double consciousness by describing the hopes and anxieties that coursed through him on the day that Obama became president. He was simultaneously thrilled and fretful, trying to imagine what the Black church would become, now that the United States had a Black president. Fluker acknowledged that dilemma consciousness remains at the heart of African American life, culture, and politics. He didn’t like it because the Black America problem is a true dilemma, being unsolvable. The only home that works for Black Americans, he says, or rather, the only home that might work, is the world house. But the surge of conflicted emotion that Fluker felt at the rise of Obama registered his longtime commitment to gird upcoming generations for the dilemmas of Black moral leadership in U.S. American life. The New Abolition analyzed a forest of theories about the meaning of Du Boisian double consciousness. Most of them wrestled with the profuse legacy of this idea, usually contending that there must be something profound and relevant in it, because look at the gusher of commentary! But I also included scholars who call for no more books on double consciousness. Political philosopher Robert Gooding-Williams stresses that Du Bois employed it to criticize the failings of Black leaders. Sociologist Lawrence Bobo says that double consciousness never explained anything, so stop writing about it. Political theorist Adolph Reed says it smacked of nineteenth-century Lamarckism until Du Bois dropped it, as should we. Afro-American Studies scholar Ernest Allen says it was merely

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a tactic to ease the fears of Talented Tenth achievers that their success in the White world would be discredited. The early Paul Gilroy said it was the key to everything—the dialectic of fulfillment and transfiguration—but the later Gilroy says it is too nineteenth century to matter anymore. Double consciousness cannot handle the postmodern experience of cultural multiplicity and multiple identities.121 These arguments make plausible claims about how Du Bois negotiated the shifting cultural politics of his time. Du Bois, however, was determined to fashion and exemplify a better model of Black leadership. He struck gold by projecting his tortured double consciousness on all Black Americans in his first publication for a national audience, and later again in Souls of Black Folk. Moreover, he did not care only about strategies to move the political needle or to change Black politics. Du Bois had a religious philosophy of subjectivity, freedom, sacrifice, and moral action. He worked it out while cutting his intellectual teeth on Hegel and Emerson, studying under Royce, James, and George Herbert Palmer. Hegel broke open the Western tradition of metaphysics by conceiving being as becoming and consciousness as the social-subjective relation of spirit to itself. Self-consciousness exists only in being acknowledged, coming out of itself when encountering another self-consciousness, finding itself in the other. Du Bois reflected the influence of Hegel on him in claiming that he was a doubly conscious striver for freedom both enabled and thwarted by a racist veil imposed on him. World history, to Hegel and Du Bois, was a struggle of the spirit of freedom to recognize itself through the struggles of historical peoples. Du Bois flipped Emerson’s concept of double consciousness to register what mattered about it. Every self, Emerson taught, has a doorway to the sacred realm through its own spiritual nature. Double consciousness is the dichotomy between a grubby, calculating, sensate lower self and the higher self of a reflective soul. For Emerson, the idea of double consciousness was transhistorical, generically human, and potentially redemptive, underwriting Emersonian spirituality. For Du Bois, double consciousness was gritty, social, historical, and problematic, with spiritual potential.122 Du Bois had a restless religious spirit driven by ethical idealism and undergirded by Hegelian and Emersonian concepts. Hegel conceived God as inexhaustible creativity that saves what can be saved; Christianity is a religion of love divine poured out in differentiation, suffering, sacrifice, death, and reconciliation. Du Bois said Christianity inspires an ethical religion of sacrifice or it is worthless. Emerson conceived culture as a commonwealth of value and aspiration, protesting that U.S. Americans lived parasitically off European culture. Du Bois agreed on both counts—U.S. Americans needed to unleash their

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inward spiritual capacities to create a radiant culture based on genuine selfknowledge, fulfilling the ideals of self-creation and individuality. He put it in Emerson’s idiom—the very end of human striving is to be a coworker in the kingdom of culture.123 Terrence L. Johnson, a religion and politics scholar at Georgetown, demonstrates the ongoing relevance of Du Boisian double consciousness. In Tragic Soul-Life: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Moral Crisis Facing American Democracy (2011), Johnson explores the repressed realities of race and religion in U.S. American democracy, contending that American political liberalism helped win select social and political gains for African Americans by excluding religious arguments from consideration, including the role of religion in constructing the nation’s racist idea of race. Political liberalism is a form of strategic forgetting that secures select rights by limiting politics to matters of individual right. A distinct kind of liberal democracy comes from refusing to interrogate racist ordering, the role of religion in fostering racial bigotry, and the moral poverty of liberalism—the U.S. American kind. Johnson describes Du Bois as a moral theorist of Black sorrow and hope whose doubly conscious ethic of sacrificial hope should be as deeply inscribed in liberal thought as the principles of liberty and opportunity. Du Bois was deeply religious in the sense of religiousness as tragic soul-life, developing an integral idea of a true self through his ethic of hope amid suffering and despair.124 The idea of double consciousness marked Du Bois’s experience as a symbol of achievement in America and as a member of an oppressed caste. His metaphor of the veil expressed this plight of duality. The African American, born with a veil, acquired a second sight in the world of White America. Cheryl KirkDuggan makes a quintessentially womanist point about this idea, observing that Du Bois captured the sense of bombardment that descendants of African holistic harmony experienced in confronting U.S. American oppression. The harmony pervades the folklore and praise singing that became the spirituals. People nurtured in harmony coped with its vicious destruction by slavery, a shock to their core being. Kirk-Duggan says the double-consciousness trope persists through the generations because it continues to convey, for many African Americans, an experience of feeling torn by contradictory thoughts and strivings. Hesitation and striving go together as the upshot of double aims: How to escape White contempt while surviving in White society? The racism of the dominant White society, she observes, “forces the African-American experience to remain veiled.” Kirk-Duggan, teaching at Shaw University Divinity School, retrieves from the spirituals the harmonious Black values that an assaulted, traumatized,

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bombarded diasporic people poured into them. She interprets the spirituals as songs of expectation, justice, and exorcism, “chants of collective exorcism” that introspectively expose and call out the evils of oppression. The spirituals healed wounded spirits and scarred bodies, celebrating “the retention of transplanted African sociocultural richness in the lives of Black men and women in their preservation of life within the narrative Black aesthetic.”125 The dialectic of recognition is a reality, whether for good or not. The idea of double consciousness thus persists despite repeated attempts to bury it. It persists even under postmodernity because it mirrors how the postmodern academy talks about race—a social invention, yet terribly real and embedded in psyches, social structures, and communal legacies. Double consciousness was a truth of Du Bois’s experience and a source of creativity in him. He railed against the evils of White civilization while affirming the intellectualism and progressive social ideals he internalized at Harvard and Berlin. He fashioned an alternative to the draining debate between nationalists and integrationists by affirming his own fraught double consciousness. African Americans had to stop arguing about which of their selves to give up, opting for a robust, full-bodied struggle for—what? I agree with Johnson that the tragic soul-life of Du Bois is the key to the normative moral meaning of his thought, though I place greater weight than Johnson on Du Bois’s radical democratic Socialism. Du Bois, however, was Emersonian in privileging powers of mind over embodiment as a mechanism of resistance, a problematic idealistic trope for embodied Black and denigrated non-Black selves who struggle with the problems of identity and communal belonging. Any argument that diminishes Black bodies is not liberating. Eboni Marshall Turman, a womanist ethicist at Yale, puts the issue sharply. Du Bois left a problematic legacy for Black moral agency by pathologizing Black embodiment. The furious attempts of White supremacy to maintain its dominance mortally threaten any Black self that only “is” insofar as it is established by a toxic other. Turman observes, “While Du Boisian double-consciousness seemingly empowers black Americans with a natural capacity for twoness that may assuage intercommunal negotiations, the internal consequences of the invisibilization of black bodies that occurs by way of the slick maneuverings of the gaze of white supremacy is hardly ever escaped.”126 Du Bois said that when he first realized he was like his White classmates in heart and life and longing, but different from them in being shut out from their world, cast behind a veil, it excited him. He had no desire to tear down the veil or creep through it: “I held all beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows.” The sky was bluest for

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him when he beat his classmates on exams, “or even beat their stringy heads.” The veil worked for him, even as he loathed it. It was the partition through which he could see into the White world more perceptively than Whites, albeit with few chances to pass through. But over time, Du Bois enjoyed his contempt less, wanting the prizes of the White world. He sought to get them by studying law, becoming a physician, telling the stories that swam in his head, or, as it turned out, studying social science at Harvard. In his case, the strife was “fiercely sunny.” For other Black acquaintances, he recalled, the veil was a prison-house shade: “Their youth shrunk into tasteless sycophancy, or into silent hatred of the pale world about them and mocking distrust of everything white; or wasted itself in a bitter cry, ‘Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in my own house?’ ”127 Turman gives this searing reflection its due. The veil as color line operated subversively for Du Bois, disrupting the White gaze; as countermemory it cleared room for second sight, gazing outwardly at the White world. Second sight sustained his Black consciousness outside the White imagination, at least for a while. But even Du Bois the genius stressed that the prizes remained mostly outside his reach; meanwhile, Turman reflects, the veil metaphor was interpreted “as depicting black existence as always situated on the negative pole of life’s spectrum, that is, as always beholden to the acrimonious whims of white supremacy and Jim Crow.” Du Bois contributed to the baleful literature that characterized Black people as degenerate. Moreover, even if one puts aside Du Bois-at-his-worst passages, his description of the veil and its recycling through decades of repetition harmfully normalized it as a constitutive feature of Black American existence and empowerment. Du Bois’s Black body, caught between being American and Black, became a twoness boundary that thwarted Black people from self-actualization. When twoness is internalized, Turman warns, it leads straight to a psychic break “that is precipitated by the very identity that it is, and yet that it simultaneously seeks to claim.” Double consciousness subjugates Black selves to White supremacy by “inscribing unjust limitations” on Black bodies.128 Du Bois fixed too much on the machinations of the color line and oversold his idea of the soul as a counterforce against attacks on Black bodies. Turman allows that the soul can be a bulwark against racism, but not as Du Bois construed it, describing the Black soul as emerging from and reacting against the gaze of White supremacy. Blackness emerged as opposition to whiteness and White violence. Black identity, on this account, is a reactive event depending on kata sarka constructions—what happened or happens to. Turman objects that if one’s soul is a product of what happens to bodies, any claim that one makes about personality must be fleeting because priority has been granted to that which happens to the body.

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She employs Anglican theologian Sarah Coakley’s apophatic interpretation of Chalcedonian Christology, construing the Chalcedon Definition as a transitional boundary functioning as both end and beginning. On this account, the Council of Chalcedon refused to be cornered by Apollinarian, Eutychian, or Nestorian arguments that threw into question the identity of Jesus as described in the creeds of Nicaea and Constantinople. Chalcedon resolved the Christology controversy by treating the identity of Jesus as something already settled. Turman brushes aside the difficulty that the Chalcedon formula merely redescribed the Christological problem without solving it. To say that Christ was one person in two natures was to summarize the problem that post-Nicene theologians sought to solve, while fatefully committing the church to the doctrine of substance assumed in Greek theology. However, Chalcedon did accomplish what it most needed to do by heading off various threats to the divine affirmation of humanity in Christ. Turman applies its logic to Black identity. If the White world and the White gaze determine Black selfhood, Black people are condemned to “a sort of existential death.” Embodied Black identity is something given, not invented by others, let alone by malevolent others.129 Sociohistoricism, Turman allows, wielded as a tool, is an aid to the struggle for justice and the interpretation of the Bible. Wielded as an authority or taken too far, it is spiritually devitalizing and ethically perilous: “A womanist ethic of incarnation contends that sociohistorical realities must be negotiated with a primary in-itself that is prompted by divine activity ‘in the flesh.’ ” Nothing that human beings do, she argues, supersedes the affirmation of humanity that God delivered in Christ. The Black church must prove willing to destroy the veil that harms Black people: “The black church must embrace and act in accordance with an ‘in the flesh’ body ethic that engenders justice for every body, and not just some of them.”130 As an ordained minister in the National Baptist Convention USA, Turman is committed to the womanist future of the Black church, but she stresses that the Black church is “overwhelmingly led by black men,” its sexism has “induced violence against women, often with appeals to the name of God,” and Black women are fleeing from it. Women are excluded from pastoral leadership positions, tokenized in ministerial staff and lay leadership positions, and often subjected to “misogynist and homophobic preaching that belittles and demonizes women and LGBTQ persons.” Moreover, Turman observes, Black churches have mostly refused to provide room for spiritual experiences outside their own traditional frameworks. The womanist tradition, open from the beginning to spiritual beliefs and practices outside Christianity, has become more so, partly out of opposition to the sexism of the Black church. More than ever, womanism

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affirms whatever enables Black women to flourish and live fully: “This flourishing includes black women’s celebration, black women’s joy, black women’s selfcare and ‘squad care,’ and black girl magic, all of which are proactive mechanisms of resistance in a world that continues to despise black women.”131 In short, Turman argues, womanist theology “has moved the theological conversation beyond the demonic navel-gazing of whiteness and masculinity, always aiming for a more inclusive vision.” Womanism is about Black women doing the work their souls require and making a way out of no way, living by womanist wisdom, virtues, and faith, and expanding its orbit.132 Today, womanist scholars are major contributors to the reinvention of theological education as an eco-global and interfaith enterprise, while operating in ecumenical institutions and religious denominations that often lack even half the social policy infrastructure of previous generations. No Christian tradition compares to the record of the Black social gospel and the White social gospel in committing religious communities to social justice concerns, creating peace and justice ministries, building ecumenical institutions, and stubbornly persisting. There is no alternative to waging constant, specific, concrete, and strategic opposition to White supremacy as a structure of power and to forging broadbased social justice ministries. Yet religious communities take up this work with depleted social justice programs in shrinking denominations. Always there are tensions to negotiate between building independent organizations tied to specific ecclesiastical and cultural identities and aiming to influence local and national politics. Every page of the Black social gospel story features church leaders and intellectuals negotiating the dilemma tension between home and society. Nearly always they have said they must build strong Black organizations to make an impact on society. RE LI G IOU S PH IL OSOPH Y IN A BLACK LIBERALL IBERATION IST K EY

My interpretation of the Black social gospel is shot through with the bias of a longtime solidarity organizer who came to politics and religion through King. The idea that a social justice movement necessarily draws on multiple traditions and identities is deeply ingrained in me, as is the assumption that such movements must not rest content with having a tradition or a personal identity. The New Abolition and Breaking White Supremacy were geared to get to MLK, who stated emphatically that social gospel Christianity and a personalist version of post-Kantian idealism were foundationally important to him. Ebenezer Church, Morehouse College, Crozer Seminary, and Boston University taught King a

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language of sacred human dignity and social justice struggle. He said his Christian personal idealism was his philosophical mainstay, enabling him to speak with a confident theological voice to secular and religious audiences alike. Theology was never just church talk to King. He spoke in public theologically in an interreligious fashion, drawing on his metaphysical foundation for everything he said about freedom, liberalism, equality, antiracism, and justice. Yet no aspect of King’s legacy is trivialized more than his post-Kantian religious philosophy. Many scholars cannot handle philosophical arguments, some respect only their own philosophy, and metaphysics is out of play in the Anglophone academy, where everything religious is customarily regarded as an out-of-bounds conversation stopper. Thus, scholars routinely brush aside King’s philosophy in three moves. The first posits a cartoon version of personal idealism. The second describes King’s position as unintelligible scholasticism. The third declares that his doctoral dissertation had nothing to do with racial justice. These conventions, besides being wrong, reinforce the fateful assumption that King’s thought is too outdated to matter; all that matters is his movement leadership. Since theology and metaphysics are out of bounds, so are his writings in these areas, which must be mined for usable nuggets suited to disciplinary translation. Vanderbilt political philosopher Paul C. Taylor, though a superb exception to three-moves dismissal, takes for granted that King can be taught in political philosophy courses only with very selective mining and translation. Taylor extracts three usable political philosophy positions from King’s unusable religious metaphysic: (1) individuals have dignity, (2) individuals are at the center of sociopolitical life, (3) individuals are distinct personalities—not merely abstract centers of value—needing self-directed actualization.133 This troika effectively describes the individualistic version of post-Kantian personal idealism propounded at Boston University by philosopher Borden Parker Bowne and theologian Albert C. Knudson. King was steeped in it, drawing deeply on Bowne and Knudson. But King was equally steeped in the social, temporal, relational neo-Hegelian personalism of Brightman and Muelder, which was committed to nonviolence and social justice. King appropriated both streams of the personalist school, fully aware that there were choices to be made between them, and that DeWolf straddled them. King took for granted that being a Black Christian and thinking through his Black consciousness should drive the choices he made. He made judgments about which parts and types of modern theology and philosophy aided, illuminated, or were harmful to Black faith. He embraced Kant’s emphasis on ethical individuality and favored Hegel above all other philosophers, espousing Hegelian dialectic and Hegel’s concept of God’s revelatory cunning in history. But Hegel conceived

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love divine as forsaking its absolute being to enter the world, differentiate, edify, suffer, die, and return to itself. The eternal God of Black church faith was a brake on what King took from Hegel theologically. King offered a model of Christian metaphysical theology in a Black key, expounding a post-Kantian ontology of freedom that grounded freedom-seeking Black being in the eternal I AM of Exodus 3:14.134 Kant contended that reason and will are inseparable, reason is essentially an activity, free activity is reasonable, and freedom is the unfathomable groundless ground of something we fathom, the moral law within us. King absorbed these arguments while assuming Kant’s single certainty: We ought to do right. If we ought to do right, there is one speculative idea that we know on an a priori basis: the idea of freedom. We do not understand this idea, yet we know it as the condition of the moral law, something we know. The actuality of the moral law makes room for the actuality of freedom that is necessary to grasp the moral law within us. Kant deepened the contradictions of subjectivity by placing the conflicts between autonomy and heteronomy, freedom and determinism, reason and sensibility, a priori and a posteriori, universality and particularity, objectivity and subjectivity, obligation and inclination, and form and matter within individual human subjects. His Critique of Judgement mediated these binary oppositions by developing the idea of intellectual intuition, a form of inner teleology in which means and ends are internally and reciprocally related. Each means and end become itself in and through the other; neither can be itself apart from the other. Every work of art features an interplay between the whole and the parts—a type of unity that creates differences. The inner reciprocity of parts and wholes is a kind of teleology, a form of internal purposiveness.135 Every form of post-Kantian idealism seized on Kant’s idea of intellectual intuition and amplified it. Kant teetered on the edge of the limit of reason as he construed it, believing that he ascertained where the boundary existed, but reason drove him over the edge, at least on “regulatory” terms—the ground of his postulated moral deism and his idea of inner teleology. He was wary of intellectual intuition because it threatened to veer out of rational control. Post-Kantians, casting off Kant’s wariness and the unknowable thing-in-itself, caught the radical upshot of inner teleology: There is a Kantian basis for the principle of constitutive relation. Identity is differential, not oppositional. Mechanistic philosophy does not account for the inwardly reciprocal purposiveness in aesthetic judgments. Bowne and Knudson conceived purpose as constitutive of thought and rejected Kant’s thing-in-itself. Brightman took post-Kantian logic a step further, stripping the Kantian self of its last vestiges of metaphysical glue. Muelder went further than Brightman, conceiving the social mind as energy fields interacting

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with each other and within which persons interact. Social interaction takes place below consciousness and on the level of shared meanings. Individual minds participate in spirit and achieve awareness of each other through it, achieving consciousness of objective spirit.136 King and Thurman drew on Bowne, Knudson, Brightman, and Muelder, especially Brightman, who moved as far as he could from a substantive self without relinquishing the personal self—the complex personal unity within which sensing, willing, feeling, desiring, remembering, and reasoning take place. He called it the “shining present,” a figurative abstraction, since it does not shine or hold a single literal meaning. Brightman stressed the Hegelian point that every now is a was that can never be again. Shining presents are interactions registered partly as sensations and partly as other feelings of the effect of events on us. Innumerably various and lacking any continuous substance, they contain messages from the past and traces of unremembered events. They look to the future with yearnings and plans, marked by inner experiences of confusion and clarity, disorder and order, aimlessness and purpose, and hate and love. A shining present is whatever a person is at the present moment—a far cry from the cartoon personalism that prevails in dismissive literature about the personal idealism of King and Thurman.137 The soul is essentially active, not a substance. King and Thurman conceived personality in classic personalist terms as the bearer of common spirit and the principle of individuality, human community, and the divine. God is the Spirit of the world that lights our souls. To King, personality meant only two things necessarily—self-consciousness and self-direction. Applied to God, the idea of personality implies no limitation. God is the personal ground of the infinite value of human personality. This two-sided credo was King’s mainstay. If the worth of personality is the ultimate value in life, racism is distinctly and abhorrently evil. Evil is precisely that which degrades personality, the sacred dignity of every human life.138 King and Thurman were habituated to sifting the creative parts of White intellectualism and religion from the racist, colonial, and nationalist underpinnings of White civilization. Both emphasized individual subjectivity and the ethical doctrine of individual human dignity. Thurman refashioned arguments that he and Quaker mystic Rufus Jones shared with King and Brightman, describing a creative encounter between a personal-subject-self and the divine personality in whom all personal subjects have their being. Thurman told lecture audiences that he was surely a child of nature, his parents, his nation, and a civilization and culture rooted in multiple long-past civilizations and cultures, but he was also a self with a personality distinctly his own who related directly

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to the divine. His self was the condition of the possibility of his mind, as Brightman put it, including its powers and activities of thinking, reasoning, judging, and valuing. From his childhood onward, Thurman said, “I have been on the scent of the tie that binds life at a level so deep that the final privacy of the individual would be reinforced rather than threatened. I have always wanted to be me without making it difficult for you to be you.” Thurman adopted the Troeltsch-Knudson idea that religion is woven into the structure of the human mind. Just as Kant’s transcendental categories explained the possibility of experience, the religious a priori explained the possibility of religious experience.139 Thurman’s personal world was uniquely his own, his a priori capacity for religious experience was crucial to his being, and clarifying what both things didn’t mean was crucial to him. Pure immediacy is impossible, he stressed, and what matters in religious experience is to actually experience God. He invoked the Jamesian distinction between acquaintance knowledge and knowledge about, reasoning that acquaintance knowledge is immediate, but not purely immediate, which is impossible. Every self, Thurman said, is “an experiencer” saturated by mediating structures of one’s world. All the elemental materials of one’s experience “are in some very crucial manner worked over by him, assimilated by him, and thus they become parts of what he defines as his own person, his own personality, or his own self.” But no person is ever completely one with one’s experiences. Every self is always also an observer and participant; moreover, every self brings to whatever religious experiences it experiences certain given tools: “This equipment is apt to be very determinative in how he interprets the significance not only of his religious experience but also the significance of experience itself.”140 Thurman felt his connection to all things long before he acquired language for it, so it was no stretch for him to believe in the a priority of religious experience. He did not, however, make a mystical germ argument, since he believed that in religious experience “the individual is himself totally involved.” All the meanings, experiences, and values that define a persona go into it. Persons come into the presence of God with the “smell of life” on them. Thurman told readers that the supremely important thing is to encounter God, not merely to have a capacity for it. In religious experience, “the individual is seen as being exposed to direct knowledge of ultimate meaning, ne plus ultra being, in which all that the individual is, becomes clear as immediate and often distinct revelation.” One encounters something far more encompassing than the sum total of one’s self-awareness. In that moment, “there are no questions. Without asking, somehow he knows.”141 The mind encounters the subject of all predicates. Thurman conceived the total self as a phenomenological reduction and the religious a priori— apperceived as the not-self—as a synoptic intuition. The mind apprehends the

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whole such that the experience is beyond or inclusive of the discursive: “It is not other than the discursive, but somehow it is inclusive of the discursive.” He was fond of saying that realization, when added, makes all the difference in the world. The person is inclusive of one’s totality, including what the person means by God, and God is the creator of life itself, “holding within His context all that there is.”142 Giving up God’s eternal perfections was not an option for Thurman and King even as they conceived God’s purposive Mind as the immanent principle of the world process. The world process is the medium of God’s personal action, and God’s active purpose is the determinant element in every actual cause. One might say that God’s saving purpose is unchanging because it is perfectly good and persists through time. But on the theistic terms that Thurman and King shared with Bowne and Knudson, God is neither changing nor unchanging, for God does not persist through time; God eternally is. King’s religious philosophy was Kantian in being driven by an ethical purpose and Hegelian in believing that love divine saves the world through sacrifice, struggle, and reconciliation. He chose the philosophy that surpassed all others in affirming human dignity and freedom, notwithstanding that precious few White American personalists had ever stressed the antiracist upshot of personalism, and no German idealist had ever done so. Black Americans improved personalism in the same way they improved Christianity, by hearing something different in it from what was given. Post-Kantian idealism was never refuted or surpassed as a philosophical discourse; it merely fell out of fashion after it failed to solve the puzzles of subjectivity. King shared the classic personalist fault of being too mind-centered to valorize embodiment and nonhuman nature. He was fond of teasing audiences that they did not see him; all they saw was his body. But he and Thurman were right to emphasize personality. The conventional claim that they were dualists for doing so is wrong. Moreover, personal idealism is no less amenable than Buddhism or humanism to eco-holist correction.143 Personality, to King, was the opposite of being a selfless and homeless body thrown into the fire. The nihilistic anti-philosophies that enthrall the academy today would have puzzled and repelled him. Puzzled, because King would have perceived that deconstructionist criticism is often animated by an unnamed moral passion against authority and various forms of domination. Repelled, because he would have loathed the deconstructionist denigration of personhood, subjectivity, humanism, and truth, just as Nietzsche repelled him on these subjects. I refuse to doubt that I think my thoughts and will my purposes, a belief not requiring a substantive self that possesses thoughts and purposes. Persons feel

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and think; there is no thought without attention, an act of will. Thought is an act performed with a motive, which implies feeling. Every act of willing has an object and is essentially connected with feeling, thought, and a self’s capacity to distinguish itself from its successive experiences and share its experiences with others. The contentious, energetic, and visionary language of religious idealism, identifying spirit and reason with will, is distinctly suited to theologize struggles for human and eco-flourishing, very much as King and Thurman contended. They did not espouse metaphysical dualism—the view that matter and spirit are irreducibly different. King and Thurman believed that matter and spirit are aspects of one unitary process of personal will. Everything in life is a function or activity of divine willing. Many religious people only half-believe in God, hoping that God exists in some fashion beyond or alongside impersonal things and processes. King and Thurman pressed the questions of God and personality to the end, spurning halfway houses, urging listeners to live as if God is real. If God is real, nothing is impersonal. Everything that exists comes about through the energizing of the divine will—love divine, or, divine nonviolence, ahimsa. To King and Thurman, the ultimate test of a worthwhile philosophy was whether it helps advance the beloved community, a goal embracing all nations, religions, and peoples. Religious philosophy, to do its job, must be big-scale, expansive, and interreligious, imagining what global recognition and reconciliation would look like, inventing new language to describe an active, ethical, relational self that is dedicated to intersectional movements for justice and peace. The differences between King the social justice movement leader and Thurman the mystic sage loom large in the story of the Black social gospel. King exemplified his twofold theme that freedom has no reality apart from power and power is integral to hope and liberation. He epitomized the radicalism in the Black social gospel, which made him the first liberation theologian. His religious philosophy remains the most luminous example of taking Black American faith and experience as a privileged point of departure, making a liberal-liberationist argument steeped in the Black freedom tradition that draws on the entire history of Christian and modern thought. But a Thurman renaissance is closing the gap. All Thurman’s books are back in print and in classrooms. His interfaith mysticism speaks to “spiritual with religion” and “spiritual but not religious” seekers, both activist and not. His emphasis on spirituality is for many a lifeline against anomie, consumerism, nihilism, dogmatism, and, especially, everyday meaninglessness. His counsel that people should ask themselves what makes them come alive, not what the world needs, because what the world needs is fully alive people, inspires countless readers within and outside religious communities. So also does his plain

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rejection of all forms of authoritarian religion. His emphasis on the “religion of Jesus” renewed a venerable trope of liberal theology and improved on it, placing Jesus among the world’s disinherited. Thurman looked for life, love, and truth wherever he went, seeking the larger ecumenism through Black faith and an expansive mystic and philosophical bent.144 In his last years he lamented the seemingly hopeless condition of Native Americans and prophesied that African Americans would soar past the despair of the 1970s. To Thurman, the fate of Native Americans was “a unique form of torture, a long, slow, anguished dying” lacking any discernible basis for hope. He said he could barely look on or write about the ravaged descendants of the original Americans, conquered and devastated by genocidal violence and displacement, homeless and rootless in their own land: “There are some things in life that are worse than death—surely this must be judged as such.” He fumbled for words, finding he could muster only a paragraph: “An unconscious guilt has entered into the very fiber of the American character and there is no catharsis to be found. . . . Our words falter and our claim to challenge lies limp at our feet.” African Americans, by contrast, were essential to the United States long before it was a nation. They built up the nation in every generation, demanded their due in it, and pushed America to become a democratic community, not yet successfully. The shadow years grieved Thurman; they felt like a stopgap to him, “a halt in the line of march toward full community.”145 He insisted that no barrier to human community stands forever—not even White racism or self-protective Black separatism. He could imagine young Thurmans of the future who walked out under the stars thinking lonely thoughts about where they came from and the meaning of their lives. Thurman said they will prophesy against the illness afflicting the children “who in their delirium cry for their brothers whom they have never known and from whom they have been cut off behind the self-imposed barriers of their fathers.” Communities flourish only when their boundaries give way to “the coming of others from beyond them.” Someday the realization that no community can feed for long on itself will spread like a contagion. Then the colossal harm of centuries of racism will give way to a new heart, new nervous system, and new identity yielding a feeling of belonging in which “our spirits are no longer isolated and afraid.” Thurman called his Black U.S. American readers to save the land of their birth from the plague that drove them into exile and self-segregation. All human beings belong to each other. Whoever shuts oneself away diminishes oneself. Whoever destroys another destroys oneself.146 One reads Thurman for this sermon, to experience his radiant spirituality, and to grapple with how he thought about both. King preached a similar sermon, in

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his case with the inflection of a movement leader identified with world house liberation movements: “However deeply American Negroes are caught in the struggle to be at last home in our homeland of the United States, we cannot ignore the larger world house in which we are also dwellers.” He described African Americans as a creative minority perched between their marginal status in the traditions of U.S. American democracy and their fragile solidarity with non-White peoples around the world. I have seen classes burst alive when surprised students learn that King talked this way. It isn’t the King they thought they knew. But King had social gospel forerunners on this theme, especially Ransom, Johnson, Mays, and Thurman, and successors both departed and living who challenged White Americans to interrogate the racist ravages of their civilization. Vincent Harding was one of them, a beacon of the shadow years. He said if White Americans were to face the truth about their racist history and their complicity in it, it might be possible to join him in envisioning a darkly radiant future: “You are surrounded by life, my friends, and you are challenged by the children of these life-givers, children who now invite you out of your racial individualism into the darkly radiant, expanding community of all those Americans who are changing, recreating this world, our world, for the common good. To receive such a word is to be given some guidance for our largely uncharted journey together toward the meaning and mystery of this chaotic and magnificent nation we share.”147

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NOTES

c hapter 1 .   sh ape s of l ib e r at ion a n d w h o l e n e s s 1. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Gift of Black Folk: The Negroes in the Making of America (1924; repr., Garden City Park, NY: Square One, 2009); Martin Luther King Jr., interview by Alex Haley, Playboy, January 1965, in King Jr., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King Jr., ed. James M. Washington (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 340–377, “the true,” 345; Vincent Harding, “Toward a Darkly Radiant Vision of America’s Truth,” Cross Currents 37 (Spring 1987): 1–16, “the most,” 4 (reprinted in Charles H. Reynolds and Ralph V. Norman, eds., Community in America: The Challenge of Habits of the Heart [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988], 67–83). 2. Gary Dorrien, The New Abolition: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Black Social Gospel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015); Dorrien, Breaking White Supremacy: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Black Social Gospel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018). 3. Vincent Harding, “Black Power and the American Christ” (1967), in Black Theology: A Documentary History, 1966–1979, ed. Gayraud S. Wilmore and James H. Cone (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1979), 35–42; E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Church in America, and C. Eric Lincoln, The Black Church Since Frazier, in one vol. (New York: Schocken, 1974), 106–108; C. T. Vivian, Black Power and the American Myth (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1970). 4. Vivian, Black Power and the American Myth, quote, 6. 5. Ibid., quote, 61. 6. Andrew Young, An Easy Burden: The Civil Rights Movement and the Transformation of America (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2008). 7. Barbara A. Reynolds, Jesse Jackson: The Man, the Movement, the Myth (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1975); Reynolds, Jesse Jackson: America’s David (Washington, DC: JFJ Associates, 1985), quote, i. 8. Marshall Frady, Jesse: The Life and Pilgrimage of Jesse Jackson (New York: Random House, 1996); Frady, Wallace (New York: Random House, 1968); Frady, Billy Graham: A Parable of American Righteousness (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979).

501

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Notes to Pages 13–19

9. Cornel West, “The Making of an American Radical Democrat of African Descent,” introduction to West, The Ethical Dimensions of Marxist Thought (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1991), reprinted in West, The Cornel West Reader (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 1999), “a grand” and “King was,” 7; West, “Martin Luther King Jr.: Prophetic Christian as Organic Intellectual,” address at King symposium at the U.S. Capitol, October 1986, reprinted in West, Prophetic Fragments: Illuminations of the Crisis in American Religion and Culture (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1988), “King’s thought,” 11. 10. James H. Cone, Black Theology and Black Power (New York: Harper & Row, 1969); Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1970); Cone, God of the Oppressed (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1975); Cone, Martin & Malcolm & America: A Dream or a Nightmare (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1991). 11. Joseph R. Washington, Black Religion: The Negro and Christianity in the United States (Boston: Beacon, 1964); Washington, The Politics of God (Boston: Beacon, 1967); Doctrines and Discipline of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (Philadelphia: R. Allen and J. Tapisco for the African Methodist Connection, 1817), 16, 32; Andrew Fuller, The Gospel Worthy of All Acceptation (1786), in Fuller, The Complete Works of Andrew Fuller (Boston: Lincoln, Edmands, 1833); Johannes Steenbach, “Always Already Loved,” Journal of European Baptist Studies 18 (September 2018): 31–44; J. Deotis Roberts, “The Black Caucus and the Failure of Christian Theology,” Journal of Religious Thought 26 (1969): 15–25, reprinted in Roberts, Black Theology Today: Liberation and Contextualization, ed. Frank Flinn (New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 1983), 140–150. 12. Gayraud S. Wilmore, Black Religion and Black Radicalism: An Interpretation of the Religious History of African Americans (1973; 3rd ed., Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1998). 13. For works that explicate my post-Hegelian religious philosophy and democratic Socialist politics, see Gary Dorrien, In a Post-Hegelian Spirit: Philosophical Theology as Idealistic Discontent (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2020); Dorrien, Kantian Reason and Hegelian Spirit: The Idealistic Logic of Modern Theology (Chichester, UK: WileyBlackwell, 2012); Dorrien, Economy, Difference, Empire: Social Ethics for Social Justice (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010); Dorrien, Social Democracy in the Making (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019); Dorrien, American Democratic Socialism: History, Politics, Religion, and Theory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021). 14. Dorrien, The New Abolition, 85–123, 409–425. 15. Dorrien, Breaking White Supremacy, 22–23, 470–500; “Prathia Hall,” This Far by Faith, PBS, https://www.pbs.org/thisfarbyfaith/people/prathia_hall.html; Courtney Pace, Freedom Faith: The Womanist Vision of Prathia Hall (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2019); Alice Walker, “Coming Apart” (1979), in Take Back the Night, ed. Laura Lederer (1st ed., New York: Bantam, 1979), 84–93, reprinted in Layli Phillips, ed., The Womanist Reader (New York: Routledge, 2006), 3–11; Walker, review of Gifts of Power: The Writings of Rebecca Jackson (1795–1871), Black Visionary, Shaker Eldress, ed. Jean McMahon Humez, in Black Scholar (November–December 1981): 64–67; Walker, The Color Purple (New York: Pocket Books, 1982); Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1983), xi–xii.

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16. Eddie S. Glaude Jr., “The Black Church Is Dead,” Huffington Post, April 26, 2010, updated August 23, 2012, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-black-church-is-dead_b _473815, quotes. 17. Cheryl J. Sanders, Saints in Exile: The Holiness-Pentecostal Experience in African American Religion and Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Milmon F. Harrison, Righteous Riches: The Word of Faith Movement in Contemporary African American Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Stephanie Mitchem, Name It and Claim It? Prosperity Preaching in the Black Church (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2007). 18. Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 177–202; King, “A Time to Break Silence” (1967), in A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King Jr., ed. James M. Washington (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), quotes, 242. 19. Raphael G. Warnock, The Divided Mind of the Black Church: Theology, Piety, and Public Witness (New York: New York University Press, 2014). 20. J. Kameron Carter, “Contemporary Black Theology: A Review Essay,” Modern Theology 19 (January 2003): 117–137; Carter, Race: A Theological Account (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010); Anthony B. Pinn, African American Humanist Principles: Living and Thinking Like the Children of Nimrod (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); Pinn, Varieties of African American Religious Experience (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1998); Pinn, Writing God’s Obituary: How a Good Methodist Became a Better Atheist (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2014); Eboni Marshall Turman, “Black Women’s Faith, Black Women’s Flourishing,” Christian Century, February 28, 2019, https://www.christiancentury.org/article/critical -essay/black-women-s-faith-black-women-s-flourishing. 21. Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). 22. Michael Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984); Amitai Etzioni, The Spirit of Community: Rights, Responsibilities, and the Communitarian Agenda (New York: Crown, 1993); Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (New York: Basic Books, 1983); Gary Dorrien, Soul in Society: The Making and Renewal of Social Christianity (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995), 336–376. 23. Vincent Harding, “An Open Letter of Concern to the SCLC Convention in Birmingham,” August 8, 1965, reprinted in Harding, Martin Luther King: The Inconvenient Hero (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2008), 135–139; Vincent Harding Papers, 1952– 2014, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University, Atlanta; Rosemarie Freeney Harding, Remnants: A Memoir of Spirit, Activism, and Mothering (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). King’s Riverside Address can be found at https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksilence .htm.

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2 4. Harding, “Toward a Darkly Radiant Vision of America’s Truth.” 25. Ibid., 3; Harding, There Is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1981). 26. Harding, “Toward a Darkly Radiant Vision of America’s Truth,” 15–16.

c hapter 2.   ant ir ac ist pol it ic s in a n e o l i b e r a l w o r l d 1. Andrew Young, A Way Out of No Way: The Spiritual Memoirs of Andrew Young (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1994), 20–21; Young, An Easy Burden: The Civil Rights Movement and the Transformation of America (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2008), 7–23; Andrew J. DeRoche, “A Cosmopolitan Christian: Andrew Young and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, 1964–68,” Journal of Religious Thought 51 (1994): 67–80. 2. Young, A Way Out of No Way, quote, 9; Young, An Easy Burden, 45. 3. Young, A Way Out of No Way, 32–33, 51–52; Young, An Easy Burden, 48–97, 129–133; Andrew Young, Harvey Newman, and Andrea Young, Andrew Young and the Making of Modern Atlanta (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2017), 31; Hartford Seminary, “Our History,” http://www.hartsem.edu/about/our-history; Robert W. Spike, “Address to the National Council of Churches of Christ in the USA,” Philadelphia, December 2, 1963, in Rhetoric, Religion, and the Civil Rights Movement, 1954–1965, ed. Davis W. Houck and David E. Dixon (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2006), 670–676, 769–773; James F. Findlay Jr., Church People in the Struggle: The National Council of Churches and the Black Freedom Movement, 1950–1970 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 113. 4. Andrew J. DeRoche, Andrew Young: Civil Rights Ambassador (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2003), 15–20; Lydia Walker, Challenge and Change: The Story of Civil Rights Activist C. T. Vivian (Alpharetta, GA: Dreamkeeper, 1993); Daniel Lewis, “Hosea Williams, 74, Rights Crusader, Dies,” New York Times, November 17, 2000; Young, An Easy Burden, 281, 299. 5. Young, An Easy Burden, “you had,” 287, “he kept,” 490; Young, A Way Out of No Way, 90–95, “All of my,” 102. 6. Young, A Way Out of No Way, 109; Adam Fairclough, To Redeem the Soul of America: The Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Martin Luther King Jr. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987), 395–396; John Lewis, with Michael D’Orso, Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998), 428–429; David Halberstam, The Children (New York: Random House, 1998), 680–681; Young, An Easy Burden, 503; Ralph David Abernathy, And the Walls Came Tumbling Down: An Autobiography (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), 540–577. 7. Hamilton Burns, “A Southern Activist Goes to the House,” Ebony, February 1973, quote, 84; Bruce Galphin, “Former King Aide Wins Runoff in Georgia,” Washington Post, September 24, 1970; Earl Caldwell, “Negro’s Aides Optimistic on House Race in White-Dominated District in Atlanta,” New York Times, August 9, 1970. 8. Henry Grady, “A Message from the South,” New York Times, December 23, 1886; Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction (New York:

Notes to Pages 41–46

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Oxford University Press, 1992), 50–55; William A. Link, Atlanta: Cradle of the New South: Race and Remembering in the Civil War’s Aftermath (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 151–154; Booker T. Washington, “The Atlanta Exposition Address, 1895,” in Negro Protest Thought in the Twentieth Century, ed. Francis L. Broderick and August Meier (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), 3–8. 9. Ralph McGill, Best of McGill: Selected Columns (Atlanta: Cherokee, 1980); Clarence N. Stone, Regime Politics: Governing Atlanta, 1946–1988 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1989). 10. Gary M. Pomerantz, Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn: The Saga of Two Families and the Making of Atlanta (New York: Penguin, 1996), 145–149; Young, Newman, and Young, Andrew Young and the Making of Modern Atlanta, 57. 11. Irene Dobbs Jackson to Martin Luther King Jr., May 21, 1957, in The Papers of Martin Luther King Jr., vol. 4, Symbol of the Movement, January 1957–December 1958, ed. Clayborne Carson, Susan Carson, Adrienne Clay, Virginia Shadron, and Kiernan Taylor (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 215–216; Lauren Keating, “Irene ‘Renie’ Dobbs Jackson: 1908–1999,” http://sweetauburn.us/rendobbs.htm. 12. “From Texas to Georgia, Maynard Jackson, Jr.,” African American Registry (2005), http://www.aaregistry.com/african_american_history/2239/From_Texas_to_Georgia_ Maynard_Jackson_Jr; Bradley R. Rice, “Maynard Jackson, 1938–2003,” New Georgia Encyclopedia (August 12, 2020), https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/government-politics/maynard-jackson-1938-2003; Maurice J. Hobson, The Legend of the Black Mecca: Politics and Class in the Making of Modern Atlanta (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 41–46; Pomerantz, Where Peachtree Meets Sweet Auburn, 387–389. 13. V. O. Key, Southern Politics in State and Nation (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984), 378–384; Burns, “A Southern Activist Goes to the House,” quote, 84; Kenneth Reich, “Black Vote Disappoints Georgia Candidate,” Washington Post, November 19, 1970; Young, Newman, and Young, Andrew Young and the Making of Modern Atlanta, 59; DeRoche, Andrew Young, 42–44. 14. Ronald H. Bayor, Race and the Shaping of Twentieth-Century Atlanta (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Alton Hornsby Jr., “The Negro in Atlanta Politics, 1961–1973,” Atlanta Historical Bulletin 21 (Spring 1977): 7–33; Young, Newman, and Young, Andrew Young and the Making of Modern Atlanta, 56; Clarence A. Bacote, “The Negro in Atlanta Politics,” Phylon 16 (1955): 329–332. 15. William L. Chaze, “Atlanta Black Wooing Votes,” Washington Post, October 1, 1972; “At the Hungry Club, Young Talks of Education Plans for the ’70s,” Atlanta Daily World, May 12, 1972; Burns, “A Southern Activist Goes to the House,” 90; “Young, Andrew Jackson, Jr.,” United States House of Representatives: History, Art & Archives, https://history.house.gov/People/Detail/21064; “The South’s Black Congressman Reflects on His Stunning Victory,” New Amsterdam News, November 18, 1972; Young, An Easy Burden, 501–520. 16. Young, An Easy Burden, 520; Lewis with D’Orso, Walking with the Wind, 415. 17. “Young Urges Pay Hike for Maids, Youths,” Atlanta Daily World, June 17, 1973; William L. Clay, Just Permanent Interests: Black Americans in Congress, 1870–1991

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(New York: Amistad Press, 1992), 11–12, 165, 172–174; DeRoche, Andrew Young, 43–45; The Almanac of American Politics, 1974 (Boston: Gambit, 1975), 232; “Young, Andrew Jackson, Jr.”; Young, An Easy Burden, 525; Young, A Way Out of No Way, 119; Congressional Black Caucus, https://cbc.house.gov/history/; Carl Gardner, Andrew Young: A Biography (New York: Drake, 1978), 181–185, quote, 184. 18. Young, Newman, and Young, Andrew Young and the Making of Modern Atlanta, 62; Young, A Way Out of No Way, quote, 110. 19. Colleen Teasley, “Mayor, Currey Deny Rift, Seek Business in Chicago,” Atlanta Constitution, November 21, 1974, quote; John Huey, “Jackson, Brockey Sending Corrections,” Atlanta Constitution, November 15, 1974; Claudia Townsend, “CAP Warns of Crime Fears,” Atlanta Constitution, September 21, 1974; Young, Newman, and Young, Andrew Young and the Making of Modern Atlanta, 66. 20. Ivan Allen Jr. and Paul Hemphill, Mayor: Notes on the Sixties (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1971); Frederick Allen, Atlanta Rising: The Invention of an International City, 1946–1996 (Atlanta: Longstreet), 212–224; “Moderate Beats Segregationist in Race for Mayor of Atlanta; Allen a Business Leader, Is Easy Victor in Run-Off—Heavy Vote Is Cast,” New York Times, September 23, 1961; Bill Shipp, Lewis Grizzard, Sharon Bailey, Frederick Allen, and Sam Hopkins, “City in Crisis,” Atlanta Constitution, March 23, 1975; Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Harvey Newman, “Hospitality and Violence: Contradictions in a Southern City,” Urban Affairs Review 35 (March 2000): 551–556. 21. Congressional Record, 93rd Cong., 1st sess. (July 26, 1973), quote, 26192; “Young Seeks Biased Firms Funds Halt,” Atlanta Daily World, February 16, 1973; DeRoche, Andrew Young, 52–59; Murray Marcer, “Role in Chile Haunts Pick for State Job,” Washington Post, February 20, 1975. 22. Gardner, Andrew Young, 182; Congressional Quarterly Almanac, 1973 (Washington, DC: Congressional Quarterly, 1974), 826. 23. Congressional Record, 93rd Cong., 2nd sess. (June 5, 1974), 17856; James Haskins, Andrew Young: Man with a Mission (New York: Lothrop, Lee, and Shepard, 1979), quote, 118; DeRoche, Andrew Young, 51; Robert Schulzinger, A Time for War: The United States and Vietnam, 1941–1975 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 316–318. 24. Benjamin Pogrund, Sobukwe and Apartheid (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991), 325–326; DeRoche, Andrew Young, 54. 25. John Lewis Jr., “3 Blacks Named to Powerful Congressional Committees,” New Pittsburgh Courier, December 21, 1974; “Young Defends U.S. Food Stamp Program,” Atlanta Daily World, October 17, 1975; Marcer, “Role in Chile Haunts Pick for State Job”; Congressional Record, U.S. House of Representatives, 94th Cong., 1st sess. (February 19, 1975), 3626; “Young Introduces Bill for Health Care for All People,” Atlanta Daily World, May 2, 1975; Andrew Young, “The Promise of U.S. Africa Policy,” Washington Post, May 17, 1976. 26. Congressional Record, 94th Cong., 1st sess. (June 3, 1975), quote, 16774; Lewis, “Black Congressmen Wage Fight for Extension of Voting Rights Act,” New Pittsburgh Courier, June 14, 1975.

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27. Congressional Record, 94th Cong., 1st sess. (September 25, 1975), quote, 30196; Piero Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959–1976 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 250–272; Congressional Record, 94th Cong., 1st sess. (December 16, 1975), 41096–41097; DeRoche, Andrew Young, 59. 28. Young, A Way Out of No Way, 115–121; Young, Newman, and Young, Andrew Young and the Making of Modern Atlanta, 70–71. 29. Christopher Lydon, “Carter Arouses Hostility Among McGovern’s Aides,” New York Times, March 1, 1976; John Dumbrell, The Carter Presidency: A Re-evaluation (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 1995), quote, 88–89; James Reston, “The Fable of Jimmy Carter,” New York Times, July 14, 1976; Hal Gulliver, “Big Day for National Political Figure,” Atlanta Constitution, July 19, 1976; Patrick Anderson, “On Working Closely with Jimmy Carter,” New York Times, July 19, 1976. 30. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Power and Principle: Memoirs of the National Security Adviser, 1977–1981, rev. ed. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1985), 5–14; Brzezinski, The Soviet Bloc: Unity and Conflict (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967); Brzezinski, Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era (New York: Viking, 1970); Brzezinski, “Meeting Moscow’s Limited Coexistence,” New Leader 51 (December 16, 1968): 11–13; Cyrus Vance, Hard Choices: Four Critical Years in America’s Foreign Policy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983), 34–41. 31. Jimmy Carter, Keeping Faith: Memoirs of a President (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1995), 51–55; Young, A Way Out of No Way, 122–125; DeRoche, Andrew Young, 74; Young, Newman, and Young, Andrew Young and the Making of Modern Atlanta, 71. 32. Brzezinski, Power and Principle, 18–31; Vance, Hard Choices, 36–44. 33. Andrew Young, interview by Dan Rather, Who’s Who, CBS Television, January 25, 1977. 34. Jimmy Carter, Why Not the Best? The First Fifty Years (Nashville: Broadman, 1975); “Andrew Young Sworn in as U.N. Delegate,” New York Times, January 31, 1977. 35. Andrew DeRoche, “Standing Firm for Principles: Jimmy Carter and Zimbabwe,” Diplomatic History 23 (Fall 1999): 657–685, Young and Carter quotes, 667; DeRoche, Andrew Young, 78; Seymour Finger, American Ambassadors at the U.N.: People, Politics, and Bureaucracy in Making Foreign Policy (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1988), 270; Cyrus Vance, “The Human Rights Imperative,” Foreign Policy 63 (1986): 3–19. 36. Brzezinski, Power and Principle, 37, 43–44, 140–141; Vance, Hard Choices, 257–261, 284–288. 37. Robert Massie, Loosing the Bonds: The United States and South Africa in the Apartheid Years (New York: Doubleday, 1997), quote, 421; Bartlett C. Jones, Flawed Triumphs: Andy Young at the United Nations (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1996), 81–83. 38. Senate Subcommittee for African Affairs, “To Receive a Report from Ambassador Young,” 95th Cong., 1st sess. (June 6, 1977); Jones, Flawed Triumphs, quotes, 110; Thomas A. Johnson, “Young Eulogizes Fannie L. Hamer, Mississippi Civil Rights Champion,” New York Times, March 21, 1977. 39. Graham Hovey, “Young Ends His Trip on a Dissonant Note,” New York Times, May 27, 1977, quotes.

508

Notes to Pages 59–65

40. Peter R. Range, “Interview with Andrew Young,” Playboy, July 1977, 61–83; “The Push for Human Rights,” U.S. News & World Report, June 20, 1977, 29, 46; “Moral Policeman to the World? Six Senators Back Up Carter’s Stand,” U.S. News & World Report, March 14, 1977; Hedrick Smith, “Aid Cut to Rights-Violating Nations Is Break with U.S. Pragmatism,” New York Times, February 25, 1977. 41. James Reston, “The Case of Andy Young,” New York Times, May 27, 1977; Letters to the Editor, “Of Andrew Young and His Statements,” New York Times, June 14, 1977. 42. Range, “Interview with Andrew Young,” 69–73; David S. Broder, “Pushing Human Rights: To What Consequence?” Washington Post, June 15, 1977. 43. Andrew Young, “A New Unity and a New Hope: Economic Growth with Social Justice,” speech to the Seventeenth Session of the UN Economic Commission for Latin America, Guatemala City, Guatemala, May 3, 1977, in Andrew Young at the United Nations, ed. Lee Clement (Salisbury, NC: Documentary Publications, 1978), 21–46, “I have” and “that democracy,” 25; “just happened,” “I know,” and “freed,” 45. 44. Ibid., quotes, 34. 45. Ibid., quotes, 28, 30. 46. Andrew Young, “Action Against Apartheid,” speech to the World Conference on Action Against Apartheid,” Lagos, Nigeria, August 25, 1977, in Clement, Andrew Young at the United Nations, 53–60, quotes, 56, 57. 47. Ibid., quotes, 58. 48. Meldrim Thomson to the Conservative Caucus, July 27, 1977, in DeRoche, Andrew Young, 84. 49. Kathleen Teltsch, “Andrew Young Opens Jaunty Jamaica Visit,” New York Times, August 6, 1977; John M. Goshko, “Young Warns Haiti on Human Rights,” Washington Post, August 16, 1977; Jones, Flawed Triumphs, 95–96. 50. Andrew Young, “International Economic Cooperation,” speech at the Resumed 31st Session of the UN General Assembly, September 13, 1977, in Clement, Andrew Young at the United Nations, 61–68; Young, “Close of the General Assembly,” September 19, 1977, in Clement, Andrew Young at the United Nations, 69–72. 51. Andrew Young, “Admission of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam and Djibouti to the United Nations,” speech to the UN General Assembly, September 20, 1977, in Clement, Andrew Young at the United Nations, 75–77, quotes, 76. 52. Andrew Young, “South Africa’s Racial Policies,” speech to the UN Security Council, October 31, 1977, in Clement, Andrew Young at the United Nations, 89–96, quotes, 93, 96. 53. Mary Ann Glendon, A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (New York: Random House, 2002); Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: Norton, 2007); John XXIII, Pacem in Terris: Peace on Earth (1963), in Catholic Social Thought: A Documentary History, ed. David J. O’Brien and Thomas A. Shannon (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1992), 129–162. 54. Charles E. Curran, Catholic Moral Theology in Dialogue (Notre Dame: Fides, 1972); Curran, Toward an American Catholic Moral Theology (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1987); Max Stackhouse, Creeds, Society, and Human Rights: A Study in Three Societies (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1984); David Hollenbach, Justice, Peace, and Human Rights: American Catholic Social Ethics in a Pluralistic

Notes to Pages 66–74

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World (New York: Crossroad, 1988); Hollenbach, The Global Face of Public Faith: Politics, Human Rights, and Christian Ethics (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2003). 55. Andrew Young, “Improvement of Human Rights,” statement to the Third Committee of the UN General Assembly, on “Alternative Approaches and Ways and Means with the United Nations System for Improving the Effective Enjoyment of Human Rights,” December 5, 1977, in Clement, Andrew Young at the United Nations, 123–125, “Under no,” 125; Young, “Human Rights High Commissioner,” statement to the Third Committee, December 5, 1977, in Clement, Andrew Young at the United Nations, 129–133, “For people,” 130. 56. Young, “Human Rights High Commissioner,” 130. 57. M. Tamarkin, The Making of Zimbabwe: Decolonization in Regional and International Politics (Savage, MD: Frank Cass, 1990), 208–209; DeRoche, Andrew Young, 92–93; Jones, Flawed Triumphs, 64–67; Vance, Hard Choices, 290–301. 58. Tamarkin, The Making of Zimbabwe, 233–235; Ian Smith, The Great Betrayal: The Memoirs of Africa’s Most Controversial Leader (London: Blake, 1997), 249–256; DeRoche, Andrew Young, 99; Jones, Flawed Triumphs, 67. 59. Andrew Young, testimony, “U.S. Policy Toward Africa,” hearing before the Subcommittee on African Affairs of the Committee on Foreign Relations, U.S. Senate, 95th Cong., 2d sess. (May 12, 1978); Carter, Keeping Faith, 154; Smith, The Great Betrayal, quote, 252. 60. “Political Prisoners in U.S., Young Says,” New York Times, July 13, 1978, quotes; “Carter Tells Young of Unhappiness at Comment on Political Prisoners,” New York Times, July 16, 1978. 61. Jones, Flawed Triumphs, 103–105. 62. Brzezinski, Power and Principle, 141–144, quote, 143; Andrew DeRoche, Black, White, and Chrome: The United States and Zimbabwe, 1953–1998 (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2001), 271–274; Alex Thomson, “The Diplomacy of Impasse: The Carter Administration and Apartheid South Africa,” Diplomacy & Statecraft 21 (2010): 107–124. 63. Young, A Way Out of No Way, 135–137; Carter, Keeping Faith, 326–412. 64. Young, A Way Out of No Way, quote, 138. 65. Jones, Flawed Triumphs, 130–131; Young, A Way Out of No Way, 139; DeRoche, Andrew Young, 111; Andrew Young to President Jimmy Carter, August 14, 1979, Andrew Young Folder, box 109, Jimmy Carter Library, Atlanta. 66. Jimmy Carter to Andrew Young, August 15, 1979, Andrew Young File, Jimmy Carter Library, “with deep”; Carter, Keeping Faith, “A mountain,” 501–502. 67. “Statement of Black Leadership Forum,” August 16, 1979, White House Central File, box IT10, Jimmy Carter Library; American Jewish Congress, “The American Jewish Congress Responds to SCLC in Its Call for New Black-Jewish Dialogue Following Resignation of Ambassador Young,” August 16, 1979, White House Central File, box IT10, Jimmy Carter Library. 68. Joseph Kraft, “Andrew Young’s Transgression,” Washington Post, August 16, 1979. 69. John Herbers, “Aftermath of the Andrew Young Affair: Blacks, Jews, and Carter All Could Suffer Greatly,” New York Times, September 6, 1979; Warren Brown and T. R. Reid, “Blacks vs. Jews?” Washington Post, October 21, 1979; Robert G. Weisbord and

510

Notes to Pages 74–84

Richard Kazarian, Israel in the Black American Perspective (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1985), 121–138; Jonathan Kaufman, Broken Alliance: The Turbulent Times Between Blacks and Jews in America, rev. ed. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), 232, 245; Dumbrell, The Carter Presidency, 102–104; Robert G. Weisbord and Arthur Stein, Bittersweet Encounter: The Afro-American and the American Jew (Westport, CT: Negro Universities Press, 1970). 70. Herbers, “Aftermath of the Andrew Young Affair,” Schindler quote; Carl Gershman, “The Andrew Young Affair,” Commentary, November 1979, https://www. commentarymagazine.com/articles/carl-gershman-2/the-andrew-young-affair/; Thomas Landess and Richard Quinn, Jesse Jackson and the Politics of Race (Ottawa, IL: Jameson, 1985), 136–137. 71. Gary Dorrien, The Neoconservative Mind: Politics, Culture, and the War of Ideology (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992); Nathan Glazer, Affirmative Discrimination (New York: Basic Books, 1975); Kaufman, Broken Alliance, 227–231. 72. Kaufman, Broken Alliance, 232; Gershman, “The Andrew Young Affair”; Weisbord and Kazarian, Israel in the Black American Perspective, 130–138; Landess and Quinn, Jesse Jackson and the Politics of Race, 142–145. 73. Brown and Reid, “Blacks vs. Jews?” 74. Gershman, “The Andrew Young Affair.” 75. Coretta Scott King, My Life, My Love, My Legacy (New York: Henry Holt, 2017), 172–194, quote, 189; Edythe Scott Bagley, Desert Rose: The Life and Legacy of Coretta Scott King (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012), 246–262. 76. Abernathy, And the Walls Came Tumbling Down, 579–585. 77. Ibid., quotes, 588, 589, 593. 78. Andrew Young, “Chilling Words in Nashoba County,” Washington Post, August 11, 1980; Young, A Way Out of No Way, partial Labond quote, 141; Young, Newman, and Young, Andrew Young and the Making of Modern Atlanta, partial Labond quote, 71–72. 79. Tamar Jacoby, Someone Else’s House: America’s Unfinished Struggle for Integration (New York: Basic Books, 1998), quote, 407; Young, Newman, and Young, Andrew Young and the Making of Modern Atlanta, 74–75. 80. Leon Dash, “African Respect for Young Aids Trade Mission,” Washington Post, September 11, 1979; Robert E. Johnson, “Ambassador Young’s Last Official Visit to Africa,” Ebony, December 1979, 31–42; Clarence N. Stone, Regime Politics: Governing Atlanta, 1946–1988 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1989), 133–138; Young, Newman, and Young, Andrew Young and the Making of Modern Atlanta, 75–76. 81. Nehl Horton, The Young Years: A Report on the Administration of the Honorable Andrew Young, Mayor of the City of Atlanta, 1982–1989 (Atlanta: n.p., 1989), 111–112; Young, Newman, and Young, Andrew Young and the Making of Modern Atlanta, 174–175. 82. George Gilder, Wealth and Poverty (New York: Basic Books, 1980), “the enriching” and “the multiplying,” 119–120; David Stockman, The Triumph of Politics (New York: Harper & Row, 1986), “besides,” 305; Michael Harrington, The New American Poverty (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1984). 83. Charles Murray, Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950–1980 (New York: Basic Books, 1984), 227–234; Stockman, The Triumph of Politics, “weak,” 305; Gary Dorrien,

Notes to Pages 84–88

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“Blaming the Poor for Poverty,” Sojourners, January 1986; Michael Katz, The Undeserving Poor: From the War on Poverty to the War on Welfare (New York: Pantheon, 1989), 143– 156; Robert S. McElvaine, The End of the Conservative Era: Liberalism After Reagan (New York: Arbor House, 1987), 48–49. 84. Jude Wanniski, The Way the World Works: How Economies Fail—and Succeed (New York: Basic Books, 1978). 85. “Historical Debt Outstanding: Annual 1950–1999; Annual 2000–2010,” TreasuryDirect, www.treasurydirect.gov/govt/reports (accessed August 2011). 86. Michael Harrington, “Don’t Bank on a Recession,” Democratic Left 10 (November 1982): 8. 87. Martin Schram and Dan Balz, “Jackson’s Run Poses Dilemma for Black Voters,” Washington Post, November 27, 1983; Howell Raines, “Pressure on Jesse Jackson,” New York Times, June 22, 1983; William Safire, “Mindreading Jackson,” New York Times, June 23, 1983; Jacoby, Someone Else’s House, 428; Fay Joyce, “Fiery Jesse Jackson Attracting Politicians’ Praise and Criticism,” New York Times, June 27, 1983. 88. Marshall Frady, Jesse: The Life and Pilgrimage of Jesse Jackson (New York: Random House, 1996), 371; Jacoby, Someone Else’s House, 428–429; DeRoche, Andrew Young, 129. 89. Testimony of Andrew Young, Hearings before the Committee on Foreign Relations, U.S. Senate, 99th Cong., 1st sess. (May 22, 1985), in U.S. Policy Toward South Africa (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1985), 283; Robert Fatton, “The Reagan Foreign Policy Toward South Africa: The Ideology of the New Cold War,” African Studies Review 27 (March 1984): 57–82. 90. “Young and Atlanta Are Synonymous in Much of Africa,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, July 21, 1985; President Ronald Reagan, “Letter to the Speaker of the House of Representatives and the President of the Senate Reporting on the National Emergency with Respect to South Africa,” September 9, 1987, https://www.reaganlibrary.gov /research/speeches/090987e; Fatton, “The Reagan Foreign Policy Toward South Africa,” 62–70; Lauren E. Moran, “South to Freedom? Anti-Apartheid Activism and Politics in Atlanta, 1976–1990” (Ph.D. diss., Georgia State University, 2014); Dudley Clendinen, “South Africa’s Violence and Memories of Selma,” New York Times, October 25, 1985. 91. Andrew Young, “Only Multinational Effort Can Control Terrorism,” Atlanta JournalConstitution, June 1, 1986; Marc Rice, “Atlanta’s Mayor Young Faces Comic, Salesman, and Private Eye in Election,” Associated Press, October 7, 1985, https://apnews.com/ e59b8a5928828a4eb5c0e2ee9681f5bd; “Young Easily Wins Again in Atlanta,” Chicago Tribune, October 10, 1985. 92. John Lancaster, “ ‘Roast’ Quickly Becomes a Toast to Andy Young,” Atlanta JournalConstitution, June 27, 1986. 93. Andrew Young, “A Sanction That Would Affect the ‘Passive Majority,’ ” Washington Post, August 10, 1986; John E. Jacob, “South African Strategies,” Atlanta Inquirer, October 4, 1986; Connie Green, “Coke to Sell Its Assets in South Africa,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, September 18, 1986; “Coca-Cola to Sell Off South Africa Holdings,” Atlanta Daily World, September 19, 1986; Cynthia Tucker, “Coke Divestment Shrewd, Farsighted,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, September 19, 1986.

512

Notes to Pages 89–95

94. “Nakasone Meets Young, Apologizes for Remarks on Minority Intelligence,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, September 30, 1986. 95. Young, Newman, and Young, Andrew Young and the Making of Modern Atlanta, 174. 96. Young, Newman, and Young, Andrew Young and the Making of Modern Atlanta, “This savvy,” 173; John Portman, interview by Young, Newman, and Young, September 15, 2011, in Andrew Young and the Making of Modern Atlanta, “Andy got” and “always one,” 174. 97. Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games, Welcome to a Brave and Beautiful City, vol. 1, and Atlanta: City of Dreams, vol. 2, Atlanta’s official bid for the 1996 Olympic Games (Atlanta: Peachtree Publishers, 1990). 98. Ronald Smothers, “Andrew Young Going Afield to Run for Governor,” New York Times, November 26, 1989; Kristine F. Anderson, “Georgia Governor’s Race Reveals Old South’s Shifting Tide,” Christian Science Monitor, May 18, 1989; Peter Applebome, “Drama Is Past Tense in Georgia Race,” New York Times, July 16, 1990; Smothers, “Young Gains Berth in a Playoff to Run for Governor of Georgia,” New York Times, July 18, 1990. 99. Ronald Smothers, “Georgia Democrats Pick Miller in Runoff for Governor,” New York Times, August 8, 1990; Mary T. Schmich, “Young Loses Governor Runoff,” Chicago Tribune, August 8, 1990; Jacoby, Someone Else’s House, quote, 520; DeRoche, Andrew Young, 153. 100. Bert Roughton Jr. and Karen Rosen, “City Explodes in Thrill of Victory as Athens Is Defeated on 5th Vote,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, September 18, 1990; Maria Saporta, “The Atlanta Olympics ’96: What It Means to Business,” Atlanta JournalConstitution, September 18, 1990; Joel Provano and Mike Morris, “Remembering the 20th Anniversary of Atlanta’s Olympic Moment,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, September 17, 2010. 101. Young, A Way Out of No Way, 163, 164. 102. Ibid., 162. 103. John Blake, “Remembering Jean Young: Family, Friends Bid an Eloquent and Teary Farewell,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, September 20, 1994; Young, A Way Out of No Way, 165–167; “Jean Young Dies,” Washington Post, September 17, 1994. 104. William Claiborne, “Clinton Announces $100 Million Fund for Southern Africa,” Washington Post, October 6, 1994; White House, Office of the Press Secretary, “President Clinton Announces Southern Africa Development Fund,” October 6, 1994, https://clintonwhitehouse6.archives.gov/1994/10/1994-10-06-president-announcessouthern-africa-development-fund.html. 105. Harvey K. Newman, Southern Hospitality: Tourism and the Growth of Atlanta (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999), 259–264; Young, Newman, and Young, Andrew Young and the Making of Modern Atlanta, 239–243; Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games, Welcome to a Brave and Beautiful City and Atlanta: City of Dreams. 106. Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games, “Atlanta Centennial Olympic Fact Book” (Atlanta: Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games, 1996); Young, Newman, and Young, Andrew Young and the Making of Modern Atlanta, 246–248. 107. Young, Newman, and Young, Andrew Young and the Making of Modern Atlanta, quotes, 250, 251.

Notes to Pages 95–99

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108. Ronald Smothers, “Atlanta’s Vending Contract Angers Olympics’ Sponsors,” New York Times, November 12, 1995; Peter Applebome, “So, You Want to Hold an Olympics,” New York Times, August 4, 1996; Atlanta Journal-Constitution, August 6, 1996, special edition; Young, Newman, and Young, Andrew Young and the Making of Modern Atlanta, 252–258; Atlanta Convention and Visitors Bureau, “Annual Report: Atlanta Convention and Visitors Bureau” (Atlanta: Atlanta Convention and Visitors Bureau, 1996). 109. GoodWorks International, http://GoodWorksIntl.com. 110. Associated Press, “Nike Employing Andrew Young,” New York Times, February 26, 1997; Dana Canedy, “Nike Appoints Andrew Young to Review Its Labor Practices,” New York Times, March 25, 1997; Dana Canedy, “Nike’s Asian Factories Pass Young’s Muster,” New York Times, June 25, 1997; DeRoche, Andrew Young, 159–160; “No Nike Sweatshops, Says Ex-Ambassador,” Spokane Review, June 25, 1997. 111. Asia Monitor Resource Centre and Hong Kong Christian Industrial Committee, “Working Conditions in Sports Shoe Factories in China: Andrew Young’s Assessment of Nike: A Response,” September 1, 1997), http://www.corpwatch.org/print_article. php?$id=3031; Bob Herbert, “Mr. Young Gets It Wrong,” New York Times, June 27, 1997; Campaign for Labor Rights, “Labor Alerts: The Andrew Young/GoodWorks International Report on Nike,” June 28, 1997; Stephen Glass, “The Young and the Feckless: Andrew Young, Nike, and the Reputation Racket,” New Republic, September 8 and September 15, 1997, 24, 26; Thuyen Nguyen, “Letter to the Editor: Response to Andrew Young,” Business Journal, July 9, 1997; “Nike Supervisor Gets Six Months for Abusing Workers,” Chicago Tribune, June 29, 1997; “Nike Fights Full-Court Press on Labor Issue,” Christian Science Monitor, September 23, 1997; “Nike Gives Four Factories the Boot,” Los Angeles Times, September 23, 1997. 112. Andrew Young to the Editor, New York Times, July 6, 1997, quote; Walter LaFeber, Michael Jordan and the New Global Capitalism (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 149– 150; “Leaked Audit: Nike Factory Violated Labor Laws,” Mother Jones, November 7, 1997. 113. “Africa and America: Partners in the New Millennium,” February 16–20, 2000, in National Summit on Africa Commemorative Book (Washington, DC: National Summit on Africa, 2000), quote, 8. 114. Maxwell A. Cameron and Brian W. Tomlin, The Making of NAFTA: How the Deal Was Done (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002); Robert E. Scott, “The Effects of NAFTA on US Trade, Jobs, and Investment, 1993–2013,” Review of Keynesian Economics 2 (July 2014): 429–441; Gary Clyde Hufbauer and Jeffrey J. Schott, NAFTA Revisited: Achievements and Challenges (Washington, DC: Institute for International Economics, 2005); Kim Moody, An Injury to All: The Decline of American Unionism (New York: Verso, 1988). 115. Office of the United States Trade Representative, “African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA),” https://ustr.gov/issue-areas/trade-development/preference-programs/ african-growth-and-opportunity-act-agoa; DeRoche, Andrew Young, 164–166. 116. Skip Smith Jr., “Interview with Ambassador Andrew Young, Chairman, Goodworks International; Former US Ambassador to the United Nations and Mayor of Atlanta,” Journal of African Business 2 (2001): 123–127.

514

Notes to Pages 100–109

117. Associated Press, “National News Briefs: Council of Churches Installs Andrew Young,” New York Times, November 12, 1999; Jeffrey Sheler, “Christians, Unite!” U.S. News & World Report, November 15, 1999, 100; “National Council of Churches: Facing the Future,” Religion & Ethics Newsweekly, November 12, 1999, https://www .pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/1999/11/12/november-12-1999-national-council-ofchurches-facing-the-future/22370/. 118. “Andrew Young, Politician, Activist, and Pastor, Poised to Take NCC Helm,” Religion News blog, January 1, 1999, https://religionnews.com/1999/01/01/news-profile-andrewyoung-politician-activist-and-pastor-poised-to-take-ncc/, “I viewed” and “It’s only”; “Interview with Andrew Young,” Worldwide Faith News, November 11, 1999, “Because the NCC” and “because my.” 119. “Interview with Andrew Young,” Worldwide Faith News, quote. 120. Barry Meier, “For U.S.-Nigeria Go-Between, Ties Yield Profits,” New York Times, April 18, 2007; Kevin Bogardus, “Washington Lobbyists Develop Strategy for Nigerian Politicians,” Hill, May 30, 2007. 121. Michael Barbaro, “Wal-Mart Tries to Enlist Image Help,” New York Times, May 12, 2006; “Young Faces Criticism in Position on Wal-Mart,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, April 25, 2006; Bruce Dixon, “Andrew Young: Shameless Son,” Black Commentator, March 7, 2006; Marcus Kabel, Associated Press, “Andrew Young to Speak for ProWal-Mart Group,” Lincoln Journal Star, February 26, 2006. 122. Abigail Goldman, “Young to Quit Wal-Mart Group After Racial Remarks,” Los Angeles Times, August 18, 2006, quotes; Michael Barbaro and Steven Greenhouse, “Wal-Mart Image-Builder Resigns,” New York Times, August 18, 2006. 123. Andrew Young, “80th Commencement Address,” Connecticut College, May 1998, https://digitalcommons.conncoll.edu/commence/2/; Andrew Young, keynote address to UN 75: 2020 and Beyond, June 11, 2020, www.globalatlanta.com/event/un-virtualglobal-conversation-what-a-wonderful-world/.

chapter 3.   t h e b l ac k so c ial g o sp e l a s r a i n b ow p o l i t i cs 1. Barbara A. Reynolds, Jesse Jackson: The Man, the Movement, the Myth, 1st ed. (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1975), 20–22; reprinted as Jesse Jackson: America’s David (Washington, DC: JFJ Associates, 1985), 20–22; Marshall Frady, Jesse: The Life and Pilgrimage of Jesse Jackson (New York: Random House, 1996), 76–78; Roger Bruns, Jesse Jackson: A Biography (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2005), 5–6. 2. Ronald Smothers, “Noah L. Robinson, 88, Father of Jesse Jackson,” New York Times, January 31, 1997; Blue Clark, Indian Tribes of Oklahoma: A Guide (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2012), 75; Reynolds, Jesse Jackson, quote, 22; Bruns, Jesse Jackson, 6; Frady, Jesse, 79. 3. Reynolds, Jesse Jackson, quote, 18; Frady, Jesse, 86, 97; Bruns, Jesse Jackson, 7. 4. Frady, Jesse, 113–122; Reynolds, Jesse Jackson, 27–36; Bruns, Jesse Jackson, 10–12; Jesse Jackson, “Faith Without Works Is Dead,” sermon delivered in November 2008, occasion unknown, in Keeping Hope Alive: Sermons and Speeches of Reverend Jesse L. Jackson Sr., ed. Grace Ji-Sun Kim (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2020), 31–32.

Notes to Pages 110–117

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5. David O’Brien, “Jesse Jackson Emblematic of NC A&T; Ideals,” South Florida SunSentinel, December 16, 1991; Fighting Illini Football Record Book (Urbana: University of Illinois, 2015), 155; Harry Edwards, “The Man Who Would Be King in the Sports Arena,” ESPNgo.com, February 28, 2002; Kenneth R. Timmerman, Shakedown: Exposing the Real Jesse Jackson (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2002), quote, 13; Gaylord Shaw, “A Clash Within: The Mixed Blessings of Rev. Jackson,” Los Angeles Times, December 16, 1987; “University Says Jackson Records Show No Blemish,” Lawrence (KS) Journal-World, December 31, 1987. 6. Frady, Jesse, quote, 141; North Carolina A&T, “About NC A&T: History and Traditions,” https://www.ncat.edu/about/index.php. 7. Frady, Jesse, 142–152; Reynolds, Jesse Jackson, 38–39. 8. “200 Negroes Seized in Greensboro Rally,” New York Times, May 19, 1963; Jack Langguth, “Negroes Pressing Greensboro Pact; 3,000 March as Biracial Committee Seeks Accord,” New York Times, May 23, 1963; Robert Watson, “A Game of Nonviolence in Greensboro, N.C.,” 1963, Robert W. Watson Papers, 1948–1980, University of North Carolina Greensboro, https://gateway.uncg.edu/islandora/object/mss%3A76751, 1–15; Beth Taylor, “Account of Participation in the Sit-ins,” May 1963, Robert W. Watson Papers, 1948–1980; Frady, Jesse, 171–173. 9. Jack Langguth, “Greensboro Negroes Approve Boycott of White Merchants; 420 Are Arrested in Sixth Day of Protests; 1,000 Seized in Durham,” New York Times, May 21, 1963; “Greensboro Protests Go On; Mass Arrests Are Resumed,” New York Times, June 7, 1963; Knighton Stanley, interview by Frontline, “Jesse the Orator,” Public Broadcasting Service, n.d., https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/jesse/impressions/orator.html; Frady, Jesse, 175–178; Reynolds, Jesse Jackson, 37. 10. Reynolds, Jesse Jackson, 40; Frady, Jesse, 181; Bruns, Jesse Jackson, 24; Samuel DeWitt Proctor, The Substance of Things Hoped For: A Memoir of African-American Faith (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1995), 108. 11. Alan B. Anderson, “The Issue of the Color Line: Some Methodological Considerations” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1975), 305–335; Biographical Note and Series One: Civil Rights Movement, W. Alvin Pitcher Papers, 1928–1993, University of Chicago Library, Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center. This section registers memories gleaned from my conversations with Pitcher in the late 1980s. 12. Andrew Young, An Easy Burden: The Civil Rights Movement and the Transformation of America (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2008), quote, 386; Reynolds, Jesse Jackson, 54; Howard Schomer, “Faculty Members Describe Selma Situation,” Maroon, April 2, 1965; George W. Pickering, “The Issue of the Color Line: Some Interpretive Considerations” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1975); Anderson and Pickering, “The Issue of the Color Line: A View from Chicago” (joint appendix to Ph.D. dissertations, 1975), 329–335. 13. Gary Dorrien, Breaking White Supremacy: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Black Social Gospel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 386–387; Adam Fairclough, Redeeming the Soul of America: The Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Martin Luther King Jr. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987), 279–286; David Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian

516

Notes to Pages 117–123

Leadership Conference (New York: Quill, 1986), 455; Taylor Branch, At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965–68 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006), 320–321; Young, An Easy Burden, 382–385. 14. David Maraniss, “Jackson Playing to the Camera,” Washington Post, December 27, 1987; Maraniss, “Batter Takes a Swing at Strikeout Story,” Washington Post, December 27, 1987; Maraniss, “Mind over Matter at Jackson’s Alma Mater,” Washington Post, May 9, 1988; Frady, Jesse, 206. 15. Martin Luther King Jr., “Next Stop: The North,” Saturday Review, November 13, 1965, “crystallized,” “a system,” 33; Garrow, Bearing the Cross, “war,” 456; Anderson, “The Issue of the Color Line: Some Methodological Considerations,” 345–347; Anderson and Pickering, “The Issue of the Color Line: A View from Chicago,” 329–335; King, “Address to the Chicago Freedom Movement Rally,” Soldier Field, Chicago, July 10, 1966, King Center, www.thekingcenter.org/archive/document/transcript; W. Alvin Pitcher, “The Chicago Freedom Movement—What Is It,” November 1966, unpublished paper, W. Alvin Pitcher Papers; Frady, Jesse, 198; Alan J. Matusow, The Unraveling of America (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), 205. 16. “Still King Jr.,” Christian Century, September 7, 1966, 1071–1072; editorial, Chicago Daily News, September 6, 1966; editorial, New Republic, September 17, 1966, 9–10; Nicholas von Hoffman, “King Hails Accord but Problem Still Terrifies Chicago,” Washington Post, August 29, 1966; Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, “King’s Chicago Pillow,” Washington Post, August 29, 1966; “Cicero March Called Off,” Chicago Defender, August 27–September 2, 1966. 17. “King Comes to Chicago,” Christian Century, August 11, 1965, 979–980; Leon Sullivan, Moving Mountains: The Principles and Purposes of Leon Sullivan (Valley Forge, PA: Judson, 1998); Young, An Easy Burden, 388; David T. Beito and Linda Royster Beito, Black Maverick: T. R. M. Howard’s Fight for Civil Rights and Economic Power (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), 205–210. 18. Reynolds, Jesse Jackson, 105–130; Biographical Note and Series One: Civil Rights Movement, W. Alvin Pitcher Papers, 1928–1993. 19. Frady, Jesse, 209, 222, 225. 20. Ralph David Abernathy, And the Walls Came Tumbling Down: An Autobiography (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), 431–433; Reynolds, Jesse Jackson, 110–118; Frady, Jesse, 226; Jesse Jackson, panel presentation at American Academy of Religion, November 19, 2016, San Antonio, TX. 21. Earl Caldwell, “Guard Called Out: Curfew Is Ordered in Memphis, but Fires and Looting Erupt,” New York Times, April 5, 1968; Young, An Easy Burden, 466; Branch, At Canaan’s Edge, 767; Reynolds, Jesse Jackson, 82–83; Frady, Jesse, 229; Abernathy, And the Walls Came Tumbling Down, 446; Gail Sheehy, “Jesse Jackson: The Power or the Glory?” Vanity Fair, January 1988, https://archive.vanityfair.com/article/1988/1/ jesse-jack-the-power-or-the-glory, quote. 22. Garry Wills, Under God: Religion and American Politics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), 227–228; Frady, Jesse, quote, 232. 23. Calvin Morris, interview by Larry Crowe, HistoryMakers, March 23, 2003, https:// da.thehistorymakers.org/story/78813; Frady, Jesse, quote, 250.

Notes to Pages 123–131

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24. Michael Friendly and David Gallen, Martin Luther King Jr.: The FBI File (New York: Carroll and Graf, 1993), 586–587; Tom Brune and James Ylisela Jr., “The Making of Jeff Fort,” Chicago, November 1988, 205; Leanita McClain, “Jeff Fort Can’t Be ‘Rewritten,’ ” Chicago Tribune Sunday, April 24, 1984; Paul Delaney, “Operation PUSH Opens a Black Expo in Chicago,” New York Times, September 28, 1972; Timmerman, Shakedown, 29; Reynolds, Jesse Jackson, 164–172. 25. Angela Parker, “SCLC Sets Chicago Unit Probe,” Chicago Tribune, November 28, 1971; Parker, “Learn Black Expo Skipped Legal Finding,” Chicago Tribune, December 2, 1971; Parker, “Rev. Jackson Suspended from Breadbasket Duties,” Chicago Tribune, December 4, 1971. 26. Angela Parker, “Jackson Defends Goals; Rips Reporter in Breadbasket Talk,” Chicago Tribune, December 5, 1971, quotes; Parker, “Rev. Jackson Suspended from Breadbasket Duties”; Reynolds, Jesse Jackson, 348, 406; Timmerman, Shakedown, 42; Thomas Landess and Richard Quinn, Jesse Jackson and the Politics of Race (Ottawa, IL: Jameson, 1985), 62. 27. Seth S. King, “Jackson Quits Post at SCLC in Policy Split with Abernathy,” New York Times, December 12, 1971; “A Black for President Among Jesse’s Goals,” Chicago SunTimes, March 28, 1971; “Jesse Jackson Refuses to Return to SCLC,” New York Times, December 18, 1971; Thomas A. Johnson, “Jesse Jackson Forms New Black Group for Economic and Political Action,” New York Times, December 19, 1971; Frank Lynn, “New Hat in Ring: Mrs. Chisholm’s,” New York Times, January 26, 1972; C. Gerald Fraser, “Mrs. Chisholm Starts Campaign in State,” New York Times, March 30, 1972; Reynolds, Jesse Jackson, quote, 262. 28. Vernon Jarrett, “PUSH Problems Need Deeper Look,” Chicago Tribune, November 18, 1973; Jarrett, “PUSH Faces Cash Crisis,” Chicago Tribune, November 10, 1973; Stanley Ziemba, “PUSH Suffering but Not Near Ruin, Board Says,” Chicago Tribune, November 14, 1973; Earnest E. Fair Sr. to Vernon Jarrett, November 26, 1973, in Reynolds, Jesse Jackson, 337; “PUSH Audit Finds Past Financial Problems,” Chicago Tribune, July 4, 1987. 29. Ernest R. House, Jesse Jackson and the Politics of Charisma: The Rise and Fall of the PUSH/Excel Program (Boulder: Westview Press, 1988); Barbara Sizemore, “PUSH Politics and the Education of America’s Youth,” Phi Beta Kappan 60 (January 1979): 364–370; Gary Massoni, The Challenge of Blackness (Chicago: Johnson, 1972). 30. Reynolds, Jesse Jackson, 289–308, quotes, 292; Morris interview by Larry Crowe. 31. Morris interview by Larry Crowe; Reynolds, Jesse Jackson, 302–303; Ray Gibson and Maurice Possley, “Jackson’s Half-Brother Probed in Killing of Former Employer,” Chicago Tribune, October 4, 1987; Matt O’Connor, “Robinson to Spend Life in Prison for Drug, Conspiracy Convictions,” Chicago Tribune, August 22, 1992. 32. Lolly Bowean, “Rev. Willie T. Barrow, Activist and Civil Rights Icon, Dies at 90,” Chicago Tribune, March 15, 2015; Jason Keyser, “The Rev. Willie Barrow Dies at 90; Longtime Civil Rights Activist,” Los Angeles Times, March 12, 2015; Frady, Jesse, quote, 275. 33. Jesse L. Jackson, PUSH for Excellence! 1978, https://www.discogs.com/Various-PushFor-Excellence/release/4517514; Robert W. Cole, “Black Moses: Jesse Jackson’s PUSH for Excellence,” Phi Delta Kappan 58 (January 1977): 378–382.

518

Notes to Pages 132–138

3 4. Jesse L. Jackson, “Give the People a Vision,” New York Times, April 18, 1976. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid. 40. Cole, “Black Moses,” 380–382. 41. Michael Coakley, “Jesse’s L.A. School Program Puts Him on California Map,” Chicago Tribune, September 18, 1977; S. R. Murray, C. A. Murray, F. E. Gragg, L. M. Kumi, and P. A. Parham, The National Evaluation of the PUSH for Excellence Project (Washington, DC: American Institutes for Research, 1982), 87; CBS News, 60 Minutes (December 4, 1977), text in Robert McClory, “Rev. Jesse Jackson’s ‘Push’ to ‘Excel,’ ” Illinois Issues, May 1978, https://www.lib.niu.edu/1978/ii780508.html. 42. Clarence Page, “The Mysterious PUSH-Excel,” Washington Monthly, cited in Landess and Quinn, Jesse Jackson and the Politics of Race, 78. 43. McClory, “Rev. Jackson’s ‘Push’ to ‘Excel.’ ” 44. Roger Wilkins, “Black Leaders and Needs,” New York Times, September 28, 1981, “what we”; Ronald Walters, “The Black Politician: Fulfilling the Legacy of Black Power,” Current History 67 (November 1974): 200–214; Robert Smith, “Black Power and the Transformation from Protest to Politics,” Political Science Quarterly 96 (Fall 1981): 431– 443; Sheila Rule, “Black Caucus in Capital Works to Develop Communal Leadership,” New York Times, September 30, 1981, “We do”; Martin Kilson, “The New Black Political Class,” in Dilemmas of the New Black Middle Class, ed. Joseph Washington (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, Afro-American Studies Program, 1980), 81–100; Adolph L. Reed Jr., The Jesse Jackson Phenomenon (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 2–7. 45. “Jesse Jackson Says 3 of 4 in Prisons Are Nonwhites,” New York Times, December 26, 1977. 46. William Claiborne, “Begin Reportedly Decides to Snub Jackson,” Washington Post, September 19, 1979; Claiborne, “Jesse Jackson Warns Israel of Black Influence,” Washington Post, September 25, 1979, quote; “Jesse Jackson Goes to Mideast Expecting Progress,” New York Times, September 24, 1979; “Jesse Jackson, Advocating Talks with P.L.O., Meets Critics in Israel,” New York Times, September 25, 1979; Manning Marable, “Jackson and the Rise of the Rainbow Coalition,” New Left Review, January–February 1985, 29. 47. Angus Deming, “Jackson! Arafat!” Newsweek, October 8, 1979, “I am sick,” “the persecution,” and “He was arrogant,” 50; David K. Shipler, “Jesse Jackson Visits a Palestinian Camp, Sees Jewish Memorial,” New York Times, September 26, 1979, “the persecution”; William Claiborne, “2 Jews Quit Jackson’s Group; Jews Accompanying Jackson Assail Black Leader’s Aims,” Washington Post, September 26, 1979; Landess and Quinn, Jesse Jackson and the Politics of Race, 146–147. 48. “Jesse Jackson, in Nablus, Exhorts the Arabs and Criticizes Terrorism,” New York Times, September 27, 1979, quote. 49. “Jackson and Arafat Confer in Lebanon,” New York Times, September 30, 1979, “my friend”; Landess and Quinn, Jesse Jackson and the Politics of Race, “American,” 148, “Obviously,” 149; Frady, Jesse, “He just,” 297.

Notes to Pages 139–146

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50. Monroe Anderson, “Jackson Attacks U.S. Media Jews,” Chicago Tribune, October 7, 1979; Bayard Rustin, “Do Blacks Have Anything to Gain from Ties to the PLO?” Chicago Tribune, October 14, 1979; Frady, Jesse, quote, 298. 51. Tom Morgenthau, “Jesse Jackson’s Troubles,” Newsweek, July 20, 1981, 29; Spencer Rich, “U.S. Cancels Grant to Jackson’s PUSH,” Washington Post, September 12, 1981; Kevin B. Blackstone, “Jesse Jackson Condemns ‘Right-Wing Revolution,’ ” Boston Globe, October 5, 1981; Richard A. Viguerie, “Defund the Left,” New York Times, August 11, 1982; Lois Romano, “Dept. of Education Audit Finds Missing Money,” Washington Post, July 31, 1983; “Two Jesse Jackson Groups Misused $1.7 Million, U.S. Auditors Say,” New York Times, August 20, 1983; Timmerman, Shakedown, 127; Murray et al., The National Evaluation of the PUSH for Excellence Project. 52. Howell Raines, “Pressure on Jesse Jackson,” New York Times, June 22, 1983; William Safire, “Mindreading Jackson,” New York Times, June 23, 1983; Fay Joyce, “Fiery Jesse Jackson Attracting Politicians’ Praise and Criticism,” New York Times, June 27, 1983, quote; Frady, Jesse, 310; Lois Romano, “Jesse Jackson,” Washington Post, July 31, 1983; “Jackson and the Family Feud,” Washington Post, November 18, 1983; Ronald Smothers, “Black Caucus Weighs Candidacy by Jesse Jackson,” New York Times, September 26, 1983. 53. Joyce, “Fiery Jesse Jackson Attracting Politicians’ Praise and Criticism”; “Jackson and the Family Feud”; Reynolds, Jesse Jackson, quotes, 418, 419; Frady, Jesse, 328; Barbara Reynolds, interview by Rob Redding, March 12, 2002, http://www.reddingnewsreview .com/transcripts/trans3.htm. 54. Milton Coleman, “Jackson Launches 1984 Candidacy,” Washington Post, November 4, 1983, quotes; “Jackson and the Family Feud”; Thomas L. Friedman, “U.S. Bombers Hit Lebanon, Syrians Down 2, Reagan Issues Warning, 8 Marines Killed,” New York Times, December 5, 1983; “Robert Goodman, the American Navigator Shot Down,” United Press International, December 8, 1983, https://www.upi.com/Archives/1983/12/08 /Navy-Lt-Robert-Goodman-the-American-navigator-shot-down/3494439707600/. 55. Ronald Smothers, “Syria Frees Flier, Attributing Step to Jackson’s Trip,” New York Times, January 4, 1984; Smothers, “Reagan Praises Navy Flier and Jackson,” New York Times, January 5, 1984; editorial, “Have Carpetbag, Will Travel,” New York Times, January 4, 1984; Howell Raines, “Jackson Coup and ’84 Race,” New York Times, January 4, 1984, quotes; George F. Will, “Jesse Jackson in Syria,” Washington Post, January 1, 1984; Rick Atkinson, “U.S. Navy Flier Goodman Is Freed,” Washington Post, January 4, 1984. 56. Rick Atkinson and Milton Coleman, “Peace with American Jews Eludes Jackson,” Washington Post, February 13, 1984; Coleman, “A Reporter’s Story,” Washington Post, April 8, 1984; Sam Zagoria, “What Jesse Jackson Said,” Washington Post, February 22, 1984; Howell Raines, “Democrats Vie for Position in Calm, Mannerly Debate,” New York Times, February 24, 1984; Frady, Jesse, 342; Bruns, Jesse Jackson, 78. 57. Rick Atkinson, “Jackson Denounces ‘Hounding’ from Jewish Community,” Washington Post, February 22, 1984; Atkinson, “Jackson Compiles Evidence of ‘Hounding,’ ” Washington Post, March 8, 1984; James R. Dickenson and Kathy Sawyer, “Jackson Admits to Ethnic Slur,” Washington Post, February 27, 1984; Fay S. Joyce,

520

Notes to Pages 146–153

“Jackson Admits Saying ‘Hymie’ and Apologizes at a Synagogue,” New York Times, February 27, 1984; Kathy Sawyer, “Buoyant Jackson Finds Forgiveness, Questions,” Washington Post, February 28, 1984. 58. Jonathan Kaufman, Broken Alliance: The Turbulent Times Between Blacks and Jews in America, rev. ed. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995), quote; Frady, Jesse, 348; Ronald Smothers, “The Impact of Jesse Jackson,” New York Times, March 4, 1984. 59. Clarence Page, “Farrakhan Hits a Sour Note,” Baltimore Sun, April 30, 1993; Michel Marriott, “Black Muslim Leader Endorses Jackson,” Washington Post, November 20, 1983; “Muslim Leader Has Threatened Others,” United Press International, May 23, 1984; “Punish the Traitor: Milton Coleman,” Time, April 16, 1984, quotes; “Muslim Accuses Press of Twisting His Comments,” New York Times, April 12, 1984; “Koch Asks Jackson to Reject Support from Black Muslim,” New York Times, April 16, 1984; Adam Wallinsky, “The Jackson Incident,” New York Times, April 17, 1984. 60. “Jackson, Invoking ‘Integrity,’ Repeats Farrakhan Defense,” New York Times, May 6, 1984; Nat Hentoff, “Farrakhan: What Must Be Said,” Washington Post, June 8, 1984; Martin Schram, “Party Urges Jackson to Cut Farrakhan Tie,” Washington Post, June 28, 1984, “gutter” and “criminals”; Fay S. Joyce, “Jackson Criticizes Remarks Made by Farrakhan as ‘Reprehensible,’ ” New York Times, June 29, 1984, “outlaw act,” “I find,” “took a very.” 61. Eric Pianin, “Jackson Declines to Denounce Farrakhan, Despite Statements,” Washington Post, July 2, 1984, quotes. 62. Gerald M. Boyd, “Jackson Back in U.S. from Cuba with Prisoners Set Free by Castro,” New York Times, June 29, 1984, Reagan quote; Juan Williams, “Jackson Arrives in U.S. with Freed Prisoners,” Washington Post, June 29, 1984; James Reston, “What’s Jesse Doing?” New York Times, June 27, 1984, Reston quote; Victoria Churchville, “Dazed Cubans Start New Lives,” Washington Post, July 2, 1984, “appeared” and “of men.” 63. Jesse Jackson, “Address to the 1984 Democratic Party National Convention; San Francisco, California, July 18, 1984,” reprinted in Jackson, Keeping Hope Alive, quotes, 53, 55. 64. Ibid., quote, 56. 65. Ibid., quotes, 56, 57. 66. Ibid., quotes, 59. 67. Ibid., quotes, 60; Howell Raines, “Delegates Reject 3 Bids to Change Party’s Platform,” New York Times, July 18, 1984. 68. Jackson, “Address to the 1984 Democratic Party National Convention,” quotes, 61, 62. 69. Ernest R. House, “Jesse in 1984: Whites Wept, Blacks Frowned,” Los Angeles Times, July 24, 1988; Bill Van Niekerken, “SF’s 1984 Democratic Convention: Historic, but Not Smooth,” San Francisco Chronicle, August 1, 1984; Gerald M. Boyd, “Jackson Charges Mondale Ignored Him on No. 2 Spot,” New York Times, July 11, 1984; Faye S. Joyce, “Mondale’s Campaign Is Working to Win Jackson and Black Voters,” New York Times, August 13, 1984; Joyce, “Mondale Voices Irritation with Jackson’s Criticisms,” New York Times, August 15, 1984; “Jackson Says Democrats Need the Black Vote,” New York Times, August 17, 1984; Ronald Smothers, “Jackson Pushing Democrats in South,” New York Times, September 17, 1984; Ellen Hume, “Jackson Flair Is Welcome Bonus,”

Notes to Pages 153–164

521

Wall Street Journal, October 10, 1984; James Reston, “Jackson’s Arrogant Pride,” New York Times, September 2, 1984, quotes. 70. Roger Wilkins, “The Natural,” Mother Jones, August–September 1984, quote, 40; Faye S. Joyce, “Leaders of Blacks Debate Conditions on Aid to Mondale,” New York Times, August 29, 1984; Frady, Jesse, 368; Ronald Smothers, “Jackson’s One Sure Legacy Is New Voters,” New York Times, October 21, 1984. 71. Adolph L. Reed Jr., The Jesse Jackson Phenomenon (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), “a media-conveyed,” 1; “between” and “A groundswell,” 12. 72. Ibid., quote, 44. 73. Ibid., “the cathartic,” “of the most,” and “only after,” 69; “proposed no,” 70; “idiosyncratic,” 73. 74. See Gary Dorrien, American Democratic Socialism: History, Politics, Religion, and Theory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021), 464–465. 75. Frady, Jesse, 394. 76. Dorrien, American Democratic Socialism, 444–445; “Ann Lewis,” Forward 50: Loud, Proud, and at the Heart of America, 2015, https://forward.com/series/forward-50/2015/ ann-lewis/; Stuart E. Weisberg, Barney Frank: The Story of America’s Only LeftHanded, Gay, Jewish Congressman (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2009), 297. 77. “The Rev. Jesse Jackson Met with Gov. George Wallace,” United Press International, May 23, 1983, https://www.upi.com/Archives/1983/05/23/The-Rev-Jesse-Jackson-metwith-Gov-George-Wallace/8119422510400/; Jon Margolis, “Jackson Courts Wallace for Support in South,” Chicago Tribune, July 21, 1987, quote. 78. E. J. Dionne Jr., “Democrats Hold Presidential Debate,” New York Times, July 2, 1987, “the Seven”; Fred Barnes, “Jesse Goes Country,” New Republic, August 3, 1987, https:// newrepublic.com/article/91583/jesse-jackson-economy-israel-1987, “I am.” 79. C-SPAN, Democratic Party Presidential Debate, University of New Hampshire, January 24, 1988, https://www.c-span.org/video/?27-1/democratic-candidates-debate. 80. Jesse Jackson, “The Basic Speech: From a Tradition of Marching for Jobs and Rights,” New York Times, January 19, 1988, quote. 81. Jon F. Hale, “The Making of the New Democrats,” Political Science Quarterly 110 (1995): 207–232; Kenneth S. Baer, Reinventing Democrats: The Politics of Liberalism from Reagan to Clinton (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000); Adam Nagourney, “Centrist Democrats Warn Party Not to Present Itself as ‘Far Left,’ ” New York Times, July 29, 2003. 82. R. W. Apple Jr., “Jackson Wins Easily in Michigan in Surprising Setback to Dukakis,” New York Times, March 27, 1988, “surprisingly”; Jon Margolis, “Jackson Wins in Michigan,” Chicago Tribune, March 27, 1988, “responding” and “deeply.” 83. “JESSE!?” Time, April 11, 1988; Michael Kruse, “What Jesse Taught Bernie About Running for President,” Politico, March 15, 2019; Frady, Jesse, 392; Paul Taylor, “Jackson Campaign Operation Matures,” Washington Post, April 1, 1988. 84. E. J. Dionne Jr., “Dukakis Defeats Jackson Handily in Wisconsin Vote,” New York Times, April 6, 1988; Dionne, “Black and White: How Jesse Jackson Made History While Losing in Wisconsin,” New York Times, April 10, 1988.

522

Notes to Pages 165–172

85. Andrew Silow Carroll, “Mayor Says Jews Would Be ‘Crazy’ to Vote for Jesse Jackson,” Daily News Bulletin, Jewish Telegraphic Agency, April 5, 1988. 86. Kaufman, Broken Alliance, 263–264. 87. E. J. Dionne, “Many Black New Yorkers Believe Campaign Is Tinged with Racism,” New York Times, April 18, 1988; Frady, Jesse, “Everyplace,” 398; Maureen Dowd, “The Air Is Bitter to Buoyant as Voting Nears: Jesse Jackson; The Candidate Talks About Death Threats and Politics of Hate,” New York Times, April 19, 1988, “a race”; Kaufman, Broken Alliance, 265. 88. Editorial, “The Primary, Both of Them,” New York Times, April 19, 1988, quotes; David E. Rosenbaum, “Dukakis and Jackson on Agreeable Terms in Debate,” New York Times, April 23, 1988; Maureen Dowd, “Jackson Campaign, Chastened by Recent Primary Defeats, Revises Its Goal,” New York Times, April 28, 1988; Frady, Jesse, 399; R. W. Apple Jr., “Jackson Is Seen as Winning a Solid Place in History,” New York Times, April 29, 1988. 89. Frady, Jesse, 407. 90. Jesse Jackson, “Common Ground: Address to the 1988 Democratic Party National Convention,” Omni Coliseum, Atlanta, Georgia, July 19, 1988, in Jackson, Keeping Hope Alive, quotes, 67, 69. 91. Ibid., “They catch,” 71–72; “You see,” 76; “So I” and “That’s why,” 77. 92. Ibid., quote, 77. 93. Bernard Weinraub, “Convict’s Victim Makes an Ad,” New York Times, October 10, 1988; Richard L. Berke and Michael Wines, “Bush, His Disavowed Backers and a Very Potent Attack Ad,” New York Times, November 3, 1988; Editorial, “George Bush and Willie Horton,” New York Times, November 4, 1988. 94. Gary Lee, “Jesse Jackson in Moscow to Press Armenian Aid,” Washington Post, January 30, 1989; Lee, “Jackson’s Soviet Visit a Mixed Success,” Washington Post, February 5, 1989; Frady, Jesse, 419. 95. Lee, “Jackson’s Soviet Visit a Mixed Success,” quotes. 96. Frady, Jesse, quotes, 424. 97. Lee May, “Jackson Refuses to Rule Out Run for D.C. Mayor,” Los Angeles Times, January 28, 1989; Tom Sherwood, “Jackson Discusses Running for Mayor in Capital,” Los Angeles Times, April 29, 1989; R. Bruce Dold, “Jackson Urged to Run in Washington,” Chicago Tribune, June 16, 1989; Jack W. Germond and Jules Witcover, “Jackson Has His Eye on Statehood for D.C.,” Daily Press, December 18, 1989; Michael Abramowitz, “Barry Rejects Prospect of Jackson Run,” Washington Post, January 7, 1990, quote. 98. Donald P. Baker and R. H. Melton, “Wilder Narrowly Defeats Coleman in Virginia to Become First Elected Black U.S. Governor,” Washington Post, November 8, 1989; Liz Sly, “Freed Hostages Relieved, Angry After Ordeal,” Chicago Tribune, September 3, 1990; Milton Viorst, “Report from Baghdad,” New Yorker, September 17, 1990, 89; Joseph Wilson, The Politics of Truth: Inside the Lies That Put the White House on Trial and Betrayed My Wife’s CIA Identity (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2004), 146–147; Frady, Jesse, quote, 482. 99. Peter Applebome, “Death Penalty; Arkansas Execution Raises Questions on Governor’s Politics,” New York Times, January 25, 1992.

Notes to Pages 173–177

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100. Thomas Edsall, “Clinton Stuns Rainbow Coalition,” Washington Post, June 14, 1992; Sheila Rule, “The 1992 Campaign: Racial Issues; Rapper, Chided by Clinton, Calls Him a Hypocrite,” New York Times, June 17, 1992; R. W. Apple, “Jackson Sees ‘Character Flaw’ in Clinton’s Remarks on Racism,” New York Times, June 19, 1992, quote; Clarence Page, “Bill Clinton’s Debt to Sister Souljah,” Chicago Tribune, October 28, 1992. 101. Rosalind Rossi, “Life Term, Huge Fine, for Noah Robinson,” Chicago Sun-Times, August 22, 1992; Rossi, “How the Law Was at War with El Rukns,” Chicago SunTimes, August 24, 1992; Michael Abramowitz, “Noah Robinson, in the Shadow of the Rainbow,” Washington Post, July 30, 1992; Doug Marlette, “Will the Real Bubba Please Stand Up?” Newsday, October 3, 1992; Paul Galloway, “Mr. Bubba Goes to Washington,” Chicago Tribune, November 9, 1992; Frady, Jesse, 502; “Clinton, Gore the New South’s Double Bubbas,” Orlando Sentinel, November 15, 1992; Peter Applebome, “From Carter to Clinton, a South in Transition,” New York Times, November 10, 1992. 102. Michael Kramer, “The Political Interest Rumblings on the Left,” Time, December 13, 1993, quote. 103. Operation PUSH Conference, November 27, 1993, quoted in Mary A. Johnson, “Crime: New Frontier—Jesse Jackson Calls It Top Civil-Rights Issue,” Chicago SunTimes, November 29, 1993. 104. Bob Herbert, “A Sea Change on Crime,” New York Times, December 12, 1993, quotes; Mike Royko, “Jesse Jackson’s Message Is Too Advanced for Most,” Baltimore Sun, December 3, 1993; Richard Cohen, “Common Ground on Crime,” Washington Post, December 21, 1993. 105. H.R.3355—Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, 103rd Cong., https://www.congress.gov/bill/103rd-congress/house-bill/3355/text; Steven A. Holmes, “Prominent Blacks Search for an Answer to Mounting Crime,” New York Times, January 8, 1994; Rashawn Ray and William Galston, “Did the 1994 Crime Bill Cause Mass Incarceration?” Brookings Institution, August 28, 2020, https://www.brookings .edu/blog/fixgov/2020/08/28/did-the-1994-crime-bill-cause-mass-incarceration/. 106. Steven Greenhouse, “Jesse Jackson Sets Up Office to Monitor Corporate Action,” New York Times, January 16, 1997, quote; Rainbow PUSH Wall Street Project, https:// rainbowpushwallstreetproject.org/about.html. 107. Charles Gasparino and Joseph N. Boyce, “Jackson Urges Wall Street to Promote Greater Diversity,” Wall Street Journal, December 23, 1997; “Jesse Jackson: The Mother Jones Interview: Populist on Wall Street?” Mother Jones, March–April 2000, http://www.motherjones.com/news/qa/2000/03/jackson.html, quote. 108. Richard L. Berke, “President Braces for Some Dissent at the Convention,” New York Times, August 25, 1996, “great consternation”; Jesse L. Jackson, “Speech to the 1996 Democratic National Convention,” https://inmotionmagazine.com/jjdem.html, “We can disagree.” 109. James Bennet, “Throngs Greet Call by Clinton for New Africa,” New York Times, March 24, 1998; Bennet, “Clinton Seeks a Partnership with Africans,” New York Times, March 27, 1998; Suzanne Daley, “Clinton in Africa: The Reaction; Jaded See

524

Notes to Pages 178–181

South Africa as ‘Flavor of the Month,’ ” New York Times, March 28, 1998; Editorial, “Bill Clinton’s African Odyssey,” New York Times, March 20, 1998; “Uganda Could Be Model for ‘New’ Africa’s Goals,” New York Times, March 26, 1998; U.S. Department of State, “Special Envoy Jesse Jackson’s Trip to West Africa,” November 6, 1998, https://1997 2001.state.gov/briefings/statements/1998/ps981106b.html; “Jesse Jackson Begins West Africa Mission,” BBC News, November 9, 1998, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/ hi/africa/210435.stm, quote; Nic Paget-Clarke, “Interview with Rev. Jesse Jackson: Affirmative Action, Wall Street, and the IMF,” February 23, 1998, http://www. inmotionmagazine.com/jjinter.html. 110. Stephen Ellis, The Mask of Anarchy: The Destruction of Liberia and the Religious Dimension of African Civil War (London: Hurst, 1999); Danny Hoffman, “The City as Barracks: Freetown, Monrovia, and the Organization of Violence in Postcolonial African Cities,” Cultural Anthropology 22 (August 2007): 400–428; Mary H. Moran, Liberia: The Violence of Democracy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). 111. Ryan Lizza, “Where Angels Fear to Tread: Sierra Leone, the Last Clinton Betrayal,” New Republic, July 24, 2000, https://newrepublic.com/article/64215/where-angelsfear-tread; Tarty Teh, “Liberia Is Being P.U.S.H.ed by Rev. Jesse Jackson,” Perspective, May 26, 2000; Tom Kamara, “Taylor’s Millions Target U.S. Politicians,” Perspective, September 19, 2000; Timmerman, Shakedown, 316–317; Bruns, Jesse Jackson, 121–122; Jon Lee Anderson, “The Devil They Know,” New Yorker, July 27, 1998; “Jesse Jackson Goes to Liberia,” BBC News, February 12, 1998, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/ africa/55831.stm. 112. Lizza, “Where Angels Fear to Tread,” quote; Ann M. Simmons, “Sierra Leone Guerrilla Chief Is Captured,” Los Angeles Times, May 18, 2000; Norimitsu Onishi with Jane Pertez, “How U.S. Left Sierra Leone Tangled in a Curious Web,” New York Times, June 4, 2000. 113. Douglas Farah, “Army Presses Sierra Leone Rebels: Troops Advance Despite U.N. Push for a Cease-Fire,” Washington Post, May 16, 2000; Lizza, “Where Angels Fear to Tread”; Onishi and Pertez, “How U.S. Left Sierra Leone Tangled in a Curious Web.” 114. Larry O’Dell, “Robb Stumps State’s Black Vote with Help from Jesse Jackson,” Washington Times, September 18, 2000, quotes. 115. David Gonzalez, “Jesse Jackson Demands Inquiry on Florida Vote,” New York Times, November 10, 2000; Julian Borger, “US Inquiry into Claims Black Voters Were Stripped of Rights,” Guardian, December 4, 2000; David Cox, “Jackson Vows Fight, Comparing Florida to Alabama in ’60s,” Orlando Sentinel, December 14, 2000, quote; “Jesse Jackson Files Suit in Florida,” ABC News, December 6, 2000, https:// abcnews.go.com/Politics/story?id=122301&page=1. 116. Pam Belluck, “Jackson Says He Fathered Child in Affair with Aide,” New York Times, January 19, 2001; ABC News, “Jesse Jackson Admits Affair, Illegitimate Child,” January 18, 2001, https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/story?id=122032&page=1, quote; “Jackson Quits After Aide Has His Child,” Guardian, January 18, 2001; Hector Tobar and Eric Slater, “Sadness, Cries of Hypocrisy Greet Jackson’s Disclosure About Child,” Los Angeles Times, January 19, 2001.

Notes to Pages 182–187

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117. Tracy Connor, “Jesse Admits He’s Love Child’s Dad: Puts Everything on Hold to Be with His Shattered Family,” New York Post, January 18, 2001; Connor, “Jesse’s Wife Makes Up with ‘Other Woman,’ ” New York Post, January 26, 2001; Jack E. White, “How Can Jesse Jackson Preach Morality After Fathering a Love Child?” CNN.com, January 22, 2001, https://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/time/2001/01/29/rainbow .html, “it’s time”; Susan Reimer, “What Adultery? Jesse Jackson’s First Sin Is Pride,” Baltimore Sun, January 22, 2001, “He knew” and “are self-important.” 118. “Jackson Says He Had Child Outside Marriage,” Christian Century, January 31, 2001, 7; ABC News, “Jesse Jackson Admits Affair, Illegitimate Child.” 119. Timmerman, Shakedown. 120. Michael Eric Dyson, I May Not Get There with You: The True Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Free Press, 2000), quotes, 99. 121. Lee Glendinning, “What Jesse Jackson Really Said About Barack Obama,” Guardian, July 17, 2008, quote; Shelby Steele, “Why Jesse Jackson Hates Obama,” Wall Street Journal, July 22, 2008. 122. “Jackson Apologizes for ‘Crude’ Obama Remarks,” CNN.com, July 9, 2008, https:// www.com/2008/POLITICS/07/09/jesse.jackson.comment, Jesse Jackson Jr. quotes and “most unfortunate”; Allison Samuels, “Awkward Past: Jesse Jackson and Barack Obama,” Newsweek, July 11, 2008, “It’s unfortunate.” 123. Michael Slackman, “Sharpton Runs for Presidency, and Influence,” New York Times, December 5, 2003, quote; Jacob Kornbluh, “Al Sharpton’s Mea Culpa: I Should Have ‘Done More to Heal Rather Than Harm,’ ” Jewish Insider, May 20, 2019, https:// jewishinsider.com/2019/05/al-sharptons-mea-culpa-i-should-have-done-more-to-healrather-than-harm/; Ron Kampeas, “Sharpton Admits to Using ‘Cheap’ Rhetoric About Jews,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, May 20, 2019, https://www.jta.org/2019/05/20 /united-states/al-sharpton-cops-to-cheap-rhetoric-in-the-past-in-a-controversial-talkto-reform-jews; Seth Gitell, “Al Sharpton for President?” Phoenix.com, February 28, 2002, https://wayback.archive-it.org/all/20151010210747/http://bostonphoenix.com/ boston/news_features/top/features/documents/02179033.htm. 124. D. Jason Berggren, “The Election of 2004: Al Sharpton,” Center for Presidential History, Southern Methodist University, http://cphcmp.smu.edu/2004election/alsharpton/; Al Sharpton, The Rejected Stone: Al Sharpton and the Path to American Leadership (New York: Cash Money Content, 2013), 124–127; Robert Novak and Paul Begala, “The Rev. Al Sharpton for President?” CNN, Crossfire, January 27, 2003, http://edition.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/01/27/cf.opinion.al.sharpton/. 125. Gary Dorrien, The Obama Question: A Progressive Perspective (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012). 126. Jesse Jackson, “The Moral Center,” sermon preached at Riverside Church, New York City, March 20, 2005, in Jackson, Keeping Hope Alive, 13–20, quote, 14. 127. Jesse Jackson, “Reflections on Fifty Years of Struggle,” address at the Lincoln Memorial, Washington, DC, April 24, 2013, in Jackson, Keeping Hope Alive, 155–162, quote, 158. 128. Jackson, “Reflections on Fifty Years of Struggle,” 159; Jesse Jackson, “The Important Word in ‘Democratic Socialism’ Is ‘Democratic,’ ” Chicago Sun-Times, February 24, 2020.

526

Notes to Pages 189–198

c hapt e r 4.   t h e o l o g ie s o f b l a ck n e s s w i t h a l ib e r at ionist b e n t 1. National Committee of Negro Churchmen, “Black Power,” New York Times, July 31, 1966, in Black Theology: A Documentary History, 1966–1979, ed. Gayraud S. Wilmore and James H. Cone (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1979), 23–30; and James H. Cone and Gayraud S. Wilmore, eds., Black Theology: A Documentary History, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1993), 1:19–26. 2. Samuel DeWitt Proctor, The Substance of Things Hoped For: A Memoir of AfricanAmerican Faith (Valley Forge, PA: Judson, 1995), 1–7, quote, 2. 3. Carter Woodson, The Mis-Education of the Negro (Washington, DC: Associated Publishers, 1933); Samuel DeWitt Proctor, My Moral Odyssey (Valley Forge, PA: Judson, 1989), quote, 17. 4. Proctor, The Substance of Things Hoped For, 38–42; Proctor, My Moral Odyssey, 55–60. 5. John M. Ellison, ed., “A Century of Service to Education and Religion,” Virginia Union Bulletin 65 (June 1965): 4–107; Miles Mark Fisher, ed., Virginia Union University and Some of Her Achievements: Twenty-fifth Anniversary, 1899–1924 (Richmond: Virginia Union University, 1924); Ralph Reavis Sr., “Black Higher Education Among American Baptists in Virginia: From the Slave Pen to the University,” American Baptist Quarterly 11 (1992): 357–374; Adam L. Bond, The Imposing Preacher: Samuel DeWitt Proctor and Black Public Faith (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2013), 54–56. 6. Patrick Parr, “ ‘We Were Madly, Madly in Love’: The Untold Story of MLK’s White Girlfriend,” Politico, April 1, 2018; Gary Dorrien, Breaking White Supremacy: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Black Social Gospel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 268–270. 7. Proctor, My Moral Odyssey, quotes, 64, 65. 8. Proctor, The Substance of Things Hoped For, quotes, 47, 48. 9. Ibid., 52. 10. “Pond Street Calls New Pastor,” Providence Chronicle, July 21, 1945; Samuel D. Proctor, “On Being Neutral,” Providence Chronicle, March 29, 1947; Proctor, “The Fellowship of Belief,” Providence Chronicle, June 21, 1947; Proctor, “Evangelism and Social Concern,” Providence Chronicle, August 9, 1947; Proctor, “Taking Religion Seriously,” Providence Chronicle, February 7, 1948; Proctor, “New Testament Interpretation Within the Northern Baptist Convention” (Th.D. diss., Boston University School of Theology, 1950), quote, 11. 11. Proctor, The Substance of Things Hoped For, quotes, 71. 12. Samuel D. Proctor, “Lengthening Our Cords and Strengthening Our Stakes,” inaugural presidential address, Virginia Union University, November 4, 1955, Archives and Special Collections, Virginia Union University, Richmond. 13. “Negro in Peace Corps Post,” New York Times, December 10, 1962; M. S. Handler, “Negroes Advised to Aid Their Poor,” New York Times, February 21, 1966; Proctor, My Moral Odyssey, quote, 140; “Report from Vice President Humphrey to President Johnson,” January 12, 1968, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964-68v24/d231.

Notes to Pages 199–206

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14. Proctor, The Substance of Things Hoped For, quote, 134. 15. Proctor, My Moral Odyssey, 143; Proctor, The Substance of Things Hoped For, 135–141. 16. Samuel D. Proctor, “A Warrior for Justice,” African American Pulpit 4 (2000–2001): 69–74; George Dugan, “An Imposing Preacher: Samuel DeWitt Proctor,” New York Times, July 24, 1972; Bond, The Imposing Preacher, 63. 17. Samuel D. Proctor, “Education for the Humanization of Society,” Educational Record 57 (1977): “Genuine community,” 243; Proctor, My Moral Odyssey, “My moral,” 149. 18. Proctor, My Moral Odyssey, quotes, 158–159. 19. Proctor, The Substance of Things Hoped For, quotes, 166, 168. 20. Samuel D. Proctor, The Certain Sound of the Trumpet: Crafting a Sermon of Authority (Valley Forge, PA: Judson, 1994), quotes, 5, 70. 21. Ibid., quote, 85. 22. Ibid., quotes, 81; Ella Pearson Mitchell, Women: To Preach or Not to Preach (Valley Forge, PA: Judson, 1991); Henry H. Mitchell, Black Preaching: The Recovery of a Powerful Art (Nashville: Abingdon, 1990). 23. Cain Hope Felder, Troubling Biblical Waters: Race, Class, and Family (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1989); Felder, Stony the Road We Trod: African American Biblical Interpretation (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991); Bond, The Imposing Preacher, quote, 34. 24. Samuel D. Proctor, “The Metes and Bounds of Black Theology,” Journal of Theology 96 (1992): quotes, 39, 41. 25. Major J. Jones, Black Awareness: A Theology of Hope (Nashville: Abingdon, 1971); Jones, Christian Ethics for Black Theology (Nashville: Abingdon, 1974); Richard I. McKinney, “Reflections on the Concept of ‘Black Theology,’ ” Journal of Religious Thought 26 (Summer Supplement 1969): 10–14; Preston N. Williams, “James Cone and the Problem of a Black Ethic,” Harvard Theological Review 65 (1972): 483–494; Gardner C. Taylor, “A Mighty Oak Is Fallen,” eulogy preached at Abyssinian Baptist Church on May 29, 1997, in Taylor, The Words of Gardner C. Taylor, vol. 4, Special Occasions and Expository Sermons, ed. Edward L. Taylor (Valley Forge, PA: Judson, 2001), “vaccinated” and “a man,” 145; Bond, The Imposing Preacher, “the content” and “Proctor,” 216. 26. James Deotis Roberts, From Puritanism to Platonism in Seventeenth Century England (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1968); Roberts, “Afterword,” in Black Religion, Black Theology: The Collected Essays of J. Deotis Roberts, ed. David Emmanuel Goatley (Harrisburg, NJ: Trinity Press International, 2003), 200. This section contains highly condensed summaries of discussions in Dorrien, Breaking White Supremacy, 444–463; Gary Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Crisis, Irony, and Postmodernity (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2006), 161–163; and Dorrien, Social Ethics in the Making: Interpreting an American Tradition (Oxford: WileyBlackwell, 2009), 396–406. 27. James Deotis Roberts, Faith and Reason: A Comparative Study of Pascal, Bergson and James (Boston: Christopher Publishing House, 1962); Roberts, “Black Theology and the Theological Revolution,” Journal of Religious Thought 28 (Spring–Summer 1971): 5–20, reprinted in Roberts, Black Religion, Black Theology, 31–49; Roberts, “Christian Conscience and Legal Discrimination,” Journal of Religious Thought 19 (1962–1963):

528

Notes to Pages 206–214

157–161; Roberts, “Black Theology in the Making,” Review and Expositor 70 (Summer 1973): 321–330, in Cone and Wilmore, Black Theology: A Documentary History, 2nd ed., 1:114–124; see Roberts, “Kierkegaard on Truth and Subjectivity,” Journal of Religious Thought 28 (1961): 41–56; Roberts, “Bergson as a Metaphysical, Epistemological and Religious Thinker,” Journal of Religious Thought 20 (1963–1964): 105–114. 28. J. Deotis Roberts, “The Black Caucus and the Failure of Christian Theology,” Journal of Religious Thought 26 (1969): 15–25, reprinted in James Deotis Roberts, Black Theology Today: Liberation and Contextualization, ed. Frank Flinn (New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 1983), 140–150, quotes, 141, 144, 145; Joseph R. Washington Jr., Black Religion: The Negro and Christianity in the United States (Boston: Beacon, 1964). 29. Roberts, “The Black Caucus and the Failure of Christian Theology,” quotes, 148, 149. 30. James H. Cone, My Soul Looks Back (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1986), 22; Cone, “Martin & Malcolm & America: A Response by James Cone,” Union Seminary Quarterly Review 48 (1994): 52–57, quote, 53; Cone, Risks of Faith: The Emergence of a Black Theology of Liberation, 1968–1998 (Boston: Beacon, 1999), ix–xviii. 31. Cone, My Soul Looks Back, 44. 32. James H. Cone, Black Theology and Black Power, 2nd ed. (1st ed., 1969; 2nd ed., 1989; repr., Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2005), quotes, 6, 22, 23; Gayraud S. Wilmore, “Black Theology at the Turn of the Century: Some Unmet Needs and Challenges,” in Black Faith and Public Talk, ed. Dwight N. Hopkins (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1999), “gospel of blackness,” 234. 33. Cone, Black Theology and Black Power, quotes, 56. 34. Ibid., quotes 15–16. 35. Ibid., 113–114. 36. James H. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation (1st ed., 1970; 20th anniversary ed., Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1990), quotes, 5, 7, 8, 9. 37. Ibid., 10. 38. Ibid., quotes, 25. 39. Ibid., quotes, 30, 56, 57, 63. 40. Ibid., quotes, 64, 65. 41. Ibid., quotes, 65, 66; James H. Cone, “Black Theology on Revolution, Violence, and Reconciliation,” Union Seminary Quarterly Review 31 (Fall 1975): 5–14. 42. Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation (1973; repr., Boston: Beacon, 1985), 25. 43. Rosemary Radford Ruether, Liberation Theology: Human Hope Confronts Christian History and American Power (New York: Paulist Press, 1972), 134–137, quote, 137. 44. Ibid., quotes, 137, 138. 45. J. Deotis Roberts, Liberation and Reconciliation: A Black Theology, 2nd ed. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1994), quote, 75–76. 46. Ibid., quotes, 9, 21, 80. 47. James H. Cone, God of the Oppressed (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1975), quote, 239–240. 48. Roberts, “Black Theology in the Making,” 118–119; Roberts, Liberation and Reconciliation, quotes, 98–99, 102; J. Deotis Roberts, “Christian Liberation Ethics:

Notes to Pages 215–219

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The Black Experience,” Religion in Life 48 (Summer 1979): 227–235, reprinted in Roberts, Black Religion, Black Theology, 50–60. 49. James H. Cone, “Black Theology and Ideology: A Response to My Respondents,” Union Seminary Quarterly Review 31 (Fall 1975): 71–86; Jones, Christian Ethics for Black Theology, 72; Williams, “James Cone and the Problem of a Black Ethic,” 485– 488; Cone, God of the Oppressed, quote, 203. 50. Charles H. Long, “Perspectives for a Study of Afro-American Religion in the United States,” History of Religion 11 (August 1971): 54–66; Long, “Structural Similarities and Dissimilarities in Black and African Theologies,” Journal of Religious Thought 32 (Fall– Winter 1975): 9–24; Gayraud S. Wilmore, Black Religion and Black Radicalism (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1972); Cecil Cone, The Identity Crisis in Black Theology (Nashville: African Methodist Episcopal Church, 1975); Cecil W. Cone; “The Black Religious Experience,” Journal of the Interdenominational Theological Center 2 (Spring 1975): 137–139; Vincent Harding, “The Religion of Black Power,” in The Religious Situation, 1968, ed. D. R. Cutler (Boston: Beacon, 1969); James H. Cone, For My People: Black Theology and the Black Church (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1984), 78–98. 51. Cone, My Soul Looks Back, “To find,” 60–61; James H. Cone, The Spirituals and the Blues (1972; repr., Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1991); Cone, God of the Oppressed, 97, 124, 163–177, 183–194, “Christians,” and “When suffering,” 177. 52. James H. Cone, The Black Church and Marxism: What Do They Have to Say to Each Other? (pamphlet) (New York: Institute for Democratic Socialism, 1980), 9–10; Cone, “Black Theology and Third World Theologies,” Chicago Theological Seminary Register 73 (Winter 1983): 3–12; John Eagleson and Sergio Torres, eds., Theology in the Americas (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1976); Cone, “Fe Cristiana y praxis politica,” in Praxis Cristiana y producción teológica, ed. Jorge V. Pixley and Jean-Pierre Bastian (Salamanca: Sigueme, 1979). 53. James H. Cone, “A Black American Perspective on the Future of African Theology,” speech delivered at the Pan-African Conference of Third World Theologians, December 17–24, 1977, Accra, Ghana, reprinted in Cone and Wilmore, Black Theology: A Documentary History, 1:393–403; Cone, “Black Theology and Third World Theologies,” speech delivered at the Fifth International Conference of the Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians, August 17–29, 1981, New Delhi, India, reprinted in Cone and Wilmore, Black Theology: A Documentary History, 2:388–398; John Mbiti, “An African Views American Black Theology,” Worldview 17 (August 1974), in Cone and Wilmore, Black Theology: A Documentary History, 1:379– 384, quote, 380; see Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy, 2nd ed. (Gaborone, Botswana: Heinemann Educational Books, 1990). 54. Cone, My Soul Looks Back, quotes, 115–116. 55. Ibid., quote, 118; Cone, For My People, 134. 56. Jacquelyn Grant, “Black Theology and Black Women,” in Cone and Wilmore, Black Theology: A Documentary History, 1st ed., 418–433; Cornel West, “Black Theology and Marxist Thought,” in Cone and Wilmore, Black Theology: A Documentary History, 1st ed., 552–567; West, Prophesy Deliverance! An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1982), quote, 115.

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Notes to Pages 220–227

57. James H. Cone, Martin & Malcolm & America: A Dream or a Nightmare (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1991), 246–271, quotes, 316, 318. 58. Delores S. Williams, “James Cone’s Liberation: Twenty Years Later,” in Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, 189–195, quote, 191; Rosemary Radford Ruether, “Black Women and Feminism: The U.S. and South African Contexts,” in Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, 174–184. 59. “Gayraud S. Wilmore,” Presbyterian Historical Society: National Archives of the Presbyterian Church USA, https://www.history.pcusa.org/about/blog/gayraud-s.wilmore; Wilmore, Black Religion and Black Radicalism, “any more than,” 218; Wilmore, “A Revolution Unfulfilled, but Not Invalidated,” in Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, 145–163, “creeping,” 152. 60. Wilmore, “A Revolution Unfulfilled, but Not Invalidated,” quote, 155–156. 61. Ibid., quotes, 156, 160. 62. Cone, Black Theology and Black Power, “were completely,” 91; Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., “An Underground Theology,” in Black Faith and Public Talk: Critical Essays on James H. Cone’s “Black Theology and Black Power,” ed. Dwight N. Hopkins (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1999), ”When you,” “Merchant,” “let the,” 96, 97; Wright, “Black Sacred Music: Problems and Possibilities” (doctor of ministry thesis, United Theological Seminary, Dayton, Ohio, 1990); Wright, “Doing Black Theology in the Black Church,” in Living Stones in the Household of God: The Legacy and Future of Black Theology, ed. Linda E. Thomas (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2004), 13–23; Melville Herskovits, The Myth of the Negro Past (Boston: Beacon, 1958); John Lovell, Black Song: The Forge and the Flame (New York: Macmillan, 1972); Lorenzo Dow Turner, Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1974). 63. Wright, “An Underground Theology,” quotes, 99, 101. 64. Gayraud S. Wilmore, “Black Theology at the Turn of the Century: Some Unmet Needs and Challenges,” in Hopkins, Black Faith and Public Talk, 232–245, quotes, 235, 236, 237. 65. Ibid., quotes, 238, 239. 66. Ibid., quotes, 239, 243. 67. James H. Cone, “Looking Back, Looking Forward: Black Theology as Public Theology,” in Hopkins, Black Faith and Public Talk, 246–259, quotes, 252, 253–254. 68. Ibid., quotes, 255, 256–257. 69. J. Deotis Roberts, “Folklore and Religions: The Black Experience,” Journal of Religious Thought 27 (1970): 5–15; Roberts, “Afro-Arab Islam and the Black Revolution,” Journal of Religious Thought 28 (1972): 95–111; Roberts, “Religio-Ethical Reflections upon the Experiential Components of a Philosophy of Black Liberation,” Journal of the Interdenominational Theological Center 1 (Fall 1973): 80–94; Roberts, “Theology of Religions: The Black Religious Heritage,” Journal of the Interdenominational Theological Center 1 (Spring 1974): 54–68; Roberts, “Black Theologies and African Theologies,” Insight: A Journal of World Religions 3 (1978–1979): 14–27; Roberts, A Black Political Theology (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1974), 20–21; Roberts, “The Methodological Crisis in Black Theology: Major Jones, William Jones and James Cone,” in Roberts, Black Theology Today, quotes, 40, 43.

Notes to Pages 228–231

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70. J. Deotis Roberts, “Black Liberation Theism,” Journal of Religious Thought 33 (Spring– Summer 1976): 25–35, reprinted in Roberts, Black Theology Today, 48–57, “I am pleading,” 54; Roberts, “A Black Ecclesiology of Involvement,” Journal of Religious Thought 32 (Spring–Summer 1975): 36–46, reprinted in Roberts, Black Religion, Black Theology, 73–86, “We have been,” 74. 71. J. Deotis Roberts, “Traditional African Religions and Christian Theology,” Studia Africana 1 (Fall 1979): 206–218, reprinted in Roberts, Black Religion, Black Theology, 128–144, quote, 137; see Roberts, “Africanisms and Spiritual Strivings,” Journal of Religious Thought 30 (Spring–Summer 1973): 16–27; John S. Mbiti, New Testament Eschatology in an African Background (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971); Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970); E. Bolaji Idowu, African Traditional Religion: A Definition (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1973); Aylward Shorter, African Christian Theology (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1977). 72. Roberts, A Black Political Theology, quotes, 146–147. 73. Roberts, “The Methodological Crisis in Black Theology,” 39–43; J. Deotis Roberts, “An Afro-American/African Theological Dialogue,” Toronto Journal of Theology 2 (Fall 1986): 172–187, reprinted in Roberts, Black Religion, Black Theology, 145–165; and Roberts, Black Theology in Dialogue (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1987), 28–42. 74. Roberts, “An Afro-American/African Theological Dialogue,” quotes, 149. 75. Ibid., quote, 150. 76. J. Deotis Roberts, “The Future Is Now: Conservatism, Liberalism and Liberation,” in Roberts, Black Theology Today, quote, 97; Roberts, “And We Are Not Saved: A Black Theologian Looks at Theological Education,” Religious Education 87 (Summer 1992): 369. 77. Roberts, “And We Are Not Saved,” “but I am,” 184; J. Deotis Roberts, “The Roots of Black Theology: An Historic Perspective,” in Roberts, Black Theology Today, “black ethnicity” and “using,” 91; see Preston N. Williams, “The Ethics of Black Power,” in Quest for a Black Theology, ed. James A. Gardiner and J. Deotis Roberts (Philadelphia: Pilgrim Press, 1971), 82–96. 78. Roberts, “The Methodological Crisis in Black Theology,” quotes, 39. 79. Roberts, “An Afro-American/African Theological Dialogue,” quotes, 156, 160–161; Roberts, A Black Political Theology, 109–116; see Cone, God of the Oppressed, 136; Jacquelyn Grant, White Women’s Christ and Black Women’s Jesus: Feminist Christology and Womanist Response (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989); Kelly Brown Douglas, The Black Christ (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1994). 80. J. Deotis Roberts, The Prophethood of Black Believers: An African American Political Theology for Ministry (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1994), “It is,” 77; Roberts, Africentric Christianity: A Theological Appraisal for Ministry (Valley Forge, PA: Judson, 2000), “must be” and “it will be,” 38–39; Roberts, Roots of a Black Future: Family and Church (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1980). 81. Molefi Kete Asante, The Afrocentric Idea (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987); Asante, Afrocentricity (Trenton, NJ: Third World Press, 1988); W. E. B. Du Bois, The World and Africa (New York: International, 1992); Aimé Césaire, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1956).

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Notes to Pages 232–237

82. Roberts, Africentric Christianity, quote, 29; Mary R. Lefkowitz, Not Out of Africa: How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History (New York: Basic Books, 1996); Mary R. Lefkowitz and Guy MacLean Rogers, eds., Black Athena Revisited (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Felder, Stony the Road We Trod; Felder, Troubling Biblical Waters (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1989); James H. Cone and Gayraud S. Wilmore, eds., Black Theology: A Documentary History, vol. 2, 1980–1992. 83. Roberts, Africentric Christianity, quotes, 59, 122. 84. Roberts, “Afterword,” 200; Dwight N. Hopkins, Introducing Black Theology of Liberation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1999), quote, 62. 85. Hopkins, Introducing Black Theology of Liberation, ix. 86. Dwight N. Hopkins, Black Theology USA and South Africa: Politics, Culture, and Liberation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1989), quotes, 1. 87. Hopkins, Black Theology USA and South Africa, 35–62; Albert B. Cleage, The Black Messiah (Kansas City: Sheed, Andrews, and McMeel, 1968). 88. William R. Jones, Is God a White Racist? A Preamble to Black Theology (Garden City, NY: Anchor Doubleday, 1973); Hopkins, Black Theology USA and South Africa, quote, 57. 89. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1903), 1–7; Gary Dorrien, The New Abolition: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Black Social Gospel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 185–220. 90. Wilmore, Black Religion and Black Radicalism, 222–281; Gayraud Wilmore, “Black Theology: Its Significance for Christian Mission Today,” International Review of Mission 64 (April 1974): 214–215; Wilmore, “Spirituality and Social Transformation as the Vocation of the Black Church,” in Churches in Struggle: Liberation Theologies and Social Transformation in North America, ed. William Tabb (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1986), 240–241; Hopkins, Black Theology USA and South Africa, 64–70. 91. Charles H. Long, Significations (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986); Long, “Perspectives for a Study of Afro-American Religion in the United States,” History of Religions 11 (April 1971): 55–59; Long, “Structural Similarities and Dissimilarities in Black and African Theologies,” Journal of Religious Thought 32 (Fall–Winter 1975): 16–24; C. Cone, The Identity Crisis in Black Theology, 13–39, 70–79; Hopkins, Black Theology USA and South Africa, 63–90. 92. Manas Buthelezi, “Toward Indigenous Theology in South Africa,” in The Emergent Gospel: Theology from the Developing World, ed. Sergio Torres and Virginia Fabella (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 178), 56–75; Allan Boesak, “Coming In and Out of the Wilderness,” in Torres and Fabella, The Emergent Gospel, 76–98; Simon S. Maimela, Proclaim Freedom to My People (Johannesburg: Skotaville, 1978); Frank Chikane, “The Incarnation in the Life of the People in Southern Africa,” Journal of Theology for Southern Africa (June 1985): 44–47; Bonganjalo C. Goba, An Agenda for Black Theology: Hermeneutics for Social Change (Johannesburg: Skotaville, 1988); Itumeleng J. Mosala, “African Traditional Beliefs and Christianity,” Journal of Theology for Southern Africa (June 1983): 17–19; Takatso A. Mofokeng, “A Black Christology: A New Beginning,” Journal of Black Theology in South Africa (1987): 7–12; Desmond M.

Notes to Pages 237–245

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Tutu, Crying in the Wilderness: The Struggle for Justice in South Africa (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1985); Hopkins, Black Theology USA and South Africa, 121–144, quotes, 144. 93. Hopkins, Black Theology USA and South Africa, 167–180. 94. Dwight N. Hopkins and George C. L. Cummings, eds., Cut Loose Your Stammering Tongue: Black Theology in the Slave Narratives (1991; 2nd ed., Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2003); 95. Dwight N. Hopkins, “Slave Theology in the ‘Invisible Institution,’ ” in Hopkins and Cummings, Cut Loose Your Stammering Tongue, quotes, 1, 2; Albert J. Raboteau II, Slave Religion: The Invisible Institution in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978). 96. George C. L. Cummings, “The Slave Narratives as a Source of Black Theological Discourse: The Spirit and Eschatology,” in Hopkins and Cummings, Cut Loose Your Stammering Tongue, 33–46; Will Coleman, “ ‘Coming Through Ligion’: Metaphor in Non-Christian and Christian Experiences with the Spirit(s) in African American Slave Narratives,” in Hopkins and Cummings, Cut Loose Your Stammering Tongue, 47–72; Cheryl L. Sanders, “Liberation Ethics in the Ex-Slave Narratives,” in Hopkins and Cummings, Cut Loose Your Stammering Tongue, 73–96; Riggins R. Earl Jr., Dark Symbols, Obscure Signs: God, Self, and Community in the Slave Mind (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1993); Theophus H. Smith, Conjuring Culture: Biblical Formations of Black America (New York: Oxford, 1994); Coleman, Tribal Talk: Black Theology, Hermeneutics, and African/American Ways of “Telling the Story” (State College, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000). 97. Dwight N. Hopkins, Shoes That Fit Our Feet: Sources for a Constructive Black Theology (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1993), quotes, 4, 5. 98. Ibid., quotes, 19, 21, 27. 99. Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (New York: Washington Square Press, 1970); Morrison, Beloved (New York: Knopf, 1987); Morrison, Sula (New York: Knopf, 1973); Morrison, Tar Baby (New York: Knopf, 1981). 100. Hopkins, Shoes That Fit Our Feet, quotes, 66, 69. 101. Ibid., quotes, 84, 104. 102. Ibid., quotes, 117, 118, 119. 103. David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919 (New York: Henry Holt, 1993); Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919–1963 (New York: Henry Holt, 2000); Dorrien, The New Abolition. 104. W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Future of Wilberforce University,” Journal of Negro Education 9 (October 1940): 553–570, quotes, 564–565; Du Bois, “The Joy of Living,” in Writings in Periodicals Edited by Others, ed. Herbert Aptheker, 4 vols. (Millwood, NY: KrausThomson, 1982), 1:219. 105. Dorrien, The New Abolition, 158–248. 106. W. E. B. Du Bois, “My Character,” in The Seventh Son: The Thought and Writings of W. E. B. Du Bois, ed. Julius Lester, 2 vols. (New York: Random House, 1971), quote, 2:732. 107. Hopkins, Shoes That Fit Our Feet, quote, 137. 108. Ibid., quote, 144.

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Notes to Pages 245–253

109. W. E. B. Du Bois, An ABC of Color: Selections Chosen by the Author from Over a Half Century of His Writings (New York: International, 1969), “Love Is,” 185; Du Bois, Prayers for Dark People, ed. Herbert Aptheker (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), “There Is,” 60; Du Bois, “Democracy,” Crisis 12 (May 1916): 29; Du Bois, “A Litany at Atlanta” (September 1906), in Du Bois, Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1920), 14–17, “Surely,” 15; Du Bois, “The Song of the Smoke,” Horizon 1 (February 1907): 5. 110. Hopkins, Shoes That Fit Our Feet, “God is,” 150; W. E. B. Du Bois, The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois (New York: International, 1968), “moral,” 43. 111. W. E. B. Du Bois to Herbert Aptheker, January 10, 1956, in The Correspondence of W. E. B. Du Bois, ed. Herbert Aptheker, 3 vols. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1978), 3:394–396, Du Bois quotes, 395, 396; Hopkins, Shoes That Fit Our Feet, “an incomprehensible,” 152. 112. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Christmas,” Crisis 3 (December 1911), 65; Du Bois, “The Riddle of the Sphinx,” in Darkwater, quotes, 30, 31. 113. Hopkins, Shoes That Fit Our Feet, “painted,” 159; W. E. B. Du Bois, “Easter,” in The Seventh Son, “But suddenly,” 2: 19; Du Bois, “Jesus Christ in Georgia,” in The Seventh Son, “Why,” 2:28. 114. Hopkins, Shoes That Fit Our Feet, quote, 168–169. 115. Ibid., quotes, 170. 116. Malcolm X, “What’s Behind the ‘Hate-Gang’ Scare?” in Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements, ed. George Breitman (New York: Grove, 1966), 68–69; Hopkins, Shoes That Fit Our Feet, “spoke,” 172; “otherworldly,” 173; “a form,” 177; Malcolm X, “Not Just an American Problem, but a World Problem” (February 16, 1965), in Malcolm X: The Last Speeches, ed. Bruce Perry (New York: Pathfinder, 1989), “When you,” 166–167. 117. Hopkins, Shoes That Fit Our Feet, quote, 186. 118. Malcolm X, “What’s Behind the Harlem ‘Hate-Gang’ Scare?” quote, 69; Hopkins, Shoes That Fit Our Feet, 196–197. 119. Dwight N. Hopkins, introduction to Hopkins and Cummings, Cut Loose Your Stammering Tongue (1st ed., 1991), xvi. 120. Hopkins, Introducing Black Theology of Liberation; Gayraud S. Wilmore, “General Introduction,” in Cone and Wilmore, Black Theology (1993 ed.), 1:1–11, “will doubtless,” 10; James H. Cone, “General Introduction,” Black Theology (1993 ed.), 2:1–11, “It is” and “The more,” 10. 121. Hopkins, Introducing Black Theology of Liberation, quote, 6. 122. Ibid., quotes, 6. 123. Ibid., quotes, 182, 190. 124. Washington, Black Religion. 125. Dwight N. Hopkins, Down, Up, and Over: Slave Religion and Black Theology (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2000), quotes, 147. 126. Hopkins, Down, Up, and Over, “Our basic,” 155; Diana L. Hayes, review of Down, Up, and Over, by Dwight N. Hopkins, Theological Studies 62 (March 2001): quote,

Notes to Pages 253–264

535

167; Dan McKanan, review of Down, Up, and Over, by Dwight N. Hopkins, Church History 71 (September 2002): quote, 676. 127. Hopkins, Down, Up, and Over, “I kneeled,” 163. 128. Ibid., “It is,” 181; “A divine,” 185. 129. Ibid., “the poor,” 195; “Whoever works,” 198. 130. Ibid., “Against,” 205; “co-constitute,” 217; David Walker, David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in Particular and Very Expressly to Those of the United States of America, ed. Charles M. Wiltse (1829; repr., New York: Hill and Wang, 1965). 131. Hopkins, Down, Up, and Over, “God has,” 262; “overcome,” 275. 132. Arthur Fournier, “Black Theology of Liberation: Hopkins Educates Church Leaders, Expands Scope of Scholarship,” University of Chicago Chronicle 19 (March 16, 2000), http://chronicle.uchicago.edu/000316/hopkins.shtml. 133. Fournier, “Black Theology of Liberation,” quotes. 134. J. Kameron Carter, “Contemporary Black Theology: A Review Essay,” Modern Theology 19 (January 2003): 117–138, quote, 131. 135. Ibid., quote, 133. 136. Ibid., “He cannot” 133; “the proper,” 134. 137. Ibid., quote, 135. 138. J. Kameron Carter, Race: A Theological Account (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 3–9, 14–36, 158–159, quote, 159. 139. Carter, “Contemporary Black Theology,” “gendered,” 120.

c hapter 5.   w om anist in t e r v e n t ion s a n d i n t e r s e ct i o n s 1. Melbourne S. Cummings and Judi Moore Latta, “When They Honor the Voice: Centering African American Women’s Call Stories,” Journal of Black Studies 40 (March 2010): 666–682; Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, “ ‘Together and in Harness’: Women’s Traditions in the Sanctified Church,” Signs 10 (Summer 1985): 678–699; James H. Cone, “Black Ecumenism and the Liberation Struggle,” address delivered at Yale Divinity School, February 16, 1978, unpublished; Cone, “New Roles in the Ministry: A Theological Appraisal,” in Black Theology: A Documentary History, 1966–1979, ed. Gayraud S. Wilmore and James H. Cone (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1979), 389–397; Gary Dorrien, The New Abolition: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Black Social Gospel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 35–36, 68–74, 359–360; Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1983). 2. Jacquelyn Grant, HistoryMakers interview by Larry Crowe, August 12, 2003, Interdenominational Theological Center, Atlanta, https://da.thehistorymakers.org /story/188126;cID=A2003.183;type=1. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid. 5. Frances Beale, “Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female,” in The Black Woman: An Anthology, ed. Toni Cade (New York: New American Library, 1970), reprinted in Black Theology: A Documentary History, ed. James H. Cone and Gayraud S. Wilmore, 2 vols.

536

Notes to Pages 265–273

(Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1993), 1:284–292; Theressa Hoover, “Black Women and the Churches: Triple Jeopardy,” in Sexist Religion and Women in the Church, ed. Alice Hageman (New York: Association Press, 1974), 63–76, reprinted in Cone and Wilmore, Black Theology, 1:293–303; Pauli Murray, “Black Theology and Feminist Theology: A Comparative View,” Anglican Theological Review 60 (January 1978): 3–24, reprinted in Cone and Wilmore, Black Theology, 1:304–322; Alice Walker, “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens,” Ms., May 1974, reprinted in Cone and Wilmore, Black Theology, 1:339–348; Jacquelyn Grant, “Black Theology and the Black Woman,” reprinted in Cone and Wilmore, Black Theology, 1:323–338. 6. Grant, “Black Theology and the Black Woman,” “Black men” and “the stereotypes,” 1:325; “If the,” 1:328. 7. Grant, “Black Theology and the Black Woman,” “conspiracy,” 1:328; “looking into,” 1:334; Sojourner Truth, “Address to the First Annual Meeting of the American Equal Rights Association—May 9, 1867,” https://awpc.cattcenter.iastate.edu/2017/03/21/addressto-the-first-annual-meeting-of-the-american-equal-rights-association-may-9-1867, “I feel.” 8. Jacquelyn Grant, White Women’s Christ and Black Women’s Jesus: Feminist Christology and Womanist Response (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989), “Black women,” 209; “challenge,” 195. 9. Ibid., quotes, 195–196. 10. Ibid., “A womanist,” 205; “For Christian,” 213; “The condition,” 216. 11. Katie Geneva Cannon, “Exposing My Home Point of View,” in Hard Times Cotton Mill Girls: Personal Histories of Womanhood and Poverty in the South, ed. Victoria Byerly (Ithaca, NY: ILR Press, 1986), 26–39, reprinted in Cannon, Katie’s Canon: Womanism and the Soul of the Black Community (New York: Continuum, 1995), 162– 170, quote, 167. This section considerably expands on my discussion of Cannon in Gary Dorrien, Social Ethics in the Making: Interpreting an American Tradition (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008), 585–591. 12. Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, I’ve Known Rivers: Lives of Loss and Liberation (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1994), quotes, 18, 34, 54. 13. Ibid., quotes, 54, 59. 14. Ibid., quotes, 61, 62, 65. 15. “Dr. Cannon’s Biography,” Katie Geneva Cannon Research Collection, Union Presbyterian Seminary, Richmond, Virginia, https://upsem.libguides.com/cannon/ bio; Lightfoot, I’ve Known Rivers, quote, 90. 16. Lightfoot, I’ve Known Rivers, quotes, 102, 103, 104. 17. Ibid., quotes, 105, 106. 18. Ibid., “into this,” 106; “but nobody,” 107; Stina Busman Jost, Walking with the Mud Flower Collective: God’s Fierce Whimsy and Dialogic Theological Method (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2014), “Now as I,” 135. 19. Gary Dorrien, “Hanging in There for a Good Cause: Donald Shriver’s Presidency at Union Theological Seminary,” in Christian Ethics in Conversation, ed. Isaac B. Sharp and Christian T. Iosso (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2020), 34–37; Milton McCormick Gatch Jr., “Managing Union in the Shriver Era,” in Sharp and Iosso, Christian Ethics in Conversation, 44–45.

Notes to Pages 273–276

537

20. Zora Neale Hurston, Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934), Mules and Men (1935), Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), 1-vol. ed. (New York: Quality Paperback Books, 1990); Alice Walker, “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston,” Ms., March 1975; Valerie Boyd, Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston (New York: Scribner, 2003); Lucy Anne Hurston, Speak, So You Can Speak Again: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston (New York: Doubleday, 2004). 21. Evelyn C. White, Alice Walker: A Life (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005); Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth, PBS, American Masters (2014), https://www.pbs.org/video/americanmasters-alice-walker-beauty-truth/; Alice Walker, the Official Website, https:// alicewalkersgarden.com/; Alice Walker, Once (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968). 22. Alice Walker, The Third Life of Grange Copeland (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1970); Walker, Meridian (New York: Pocket Books, 1976); Harold Hellenbrand, “Speech, After Silence: Alice Walker’s The Third Life of Grange Copeland,” Black American Literature Forum 20 (Spring–Summer 1986): 113–128; Kate Cochran, “When the Lessons Hurt: The Third Life of Grange Copeland as Joban Allegory,” Southern Literary Journal 34 (Fall 2001): 79–100. 23. Alice Walker, “Coming Apart” (1979), in Take Back the Night: Women on Pornography, ed. Laura Lederer (New York: Morrow, 1980), 84–93, reprinted in The Womanist Reader, ed. Layli Phillips (New York: Routledge, 2006), 3–11, “though she,” 7; Walker, review of Gifts of Power: The Writings of Rebecca Jackson (1795–1871), Black Visionary, Shaker Eldress, ed. Jean McMahon Humez, in The Black Scholar (November– December 1981): 64–67. 24. Alice Walker, The Color Purple (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1982); Mel Watkins, “Some Letters Went to God,” New York Times, July 25, 1982; Ary S. Tahir, “Gender Violence in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple,” Journal of Language and Literature Education 2 (December 2020): 218–221; Richard Kreitner and the Almanac, “April 18, 1983: Alice Walker Becomes the First Woman of Color to Win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction,” Nation, April 18, 2015, https:// www.thenation.com/article/archive/april-18–1983-alice-walker-becomes-first-womancolor-win-pulitzer-prize-fiction/. 25. Alice Walker, “The Civil Rights Movement: What Good Was It?” in Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, 119–129; Walker, “Coretta King: Revisited,” in Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, 146–157, “I would,” 147; Walker, “Choice: A Tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.,” in Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, 142–145, “He was,” “who had,” and “For years,” 144; Walker, “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens,” in Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, 231–243, “they were,” 232; “I found,” 243; Walker, The Color Purple. 26. Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, xi–xii. 27. Katie G. Cannon to Carter Heyward, November 2, 1982, in Cannon and Heyward, “Can We Be Different but Not Alienated? An Exchange of Letters,” in Feminist Theological Ethics: A Reader, ed. Lois K. Daly (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1994), 59–76, quotes, 65; Cannon, Katie’s Canon, 23; Cannon, “Resources for a

538

Notes to Pages 277–282

Constructive Christian Ethic for Black Women with Special Attention to the Life and Work of Zora Neale Hurston” (Ph.D. diss., Union Theological Seminary, 1983). 28. Mud Flower Collective, God’s Fierce Whimsy: Christian Feminism and Theological Education (New York: Pilgrim Press, 1985), quote, 10; Carter Heyward, The Redemption of God: A Theology of Mutual Relation (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1982); Ada María Isasi-Díaz, Mujerista Theology (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1996); Mary D. Pellauer, Toward a Tradition of Feminist Theology: The Religious Social Thought of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Anna Howard Shaw (Brooklyn: Carlson, 1991). 29. Mud Flower Collective, God’s Fierce Whimsy, quotes, 14–15. 30. Ibid., 84–90, “I’ve always,” 84; “Somehow,” 85; Beverly W. Harrison, interview by Traci C. West, “Making Connections: Becoming a Feminist Ethicist,” in Harrison, Justice in the Making: Feminist Social Ethics (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2004), “Initially,” 8; Jost, Walking with the Mud Flower Collective, 101–102. 31. Mud Flower Collective, God’s Fierce Whimsy, 111–112. 32. Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite, “Together in Difference,” Christianity and Crisis 46 (August 11, 1986): 278–279; Lynn Rhodes, “Foundational Questions,” Christianity and Crisis (April 3, 1989): 121–127; Catherine T. McNamee, “Pray, What Is Religious Education?” America (October 5, 1985): 202–206; Elly Bulkin, “Secular Jew/Christian Feminist Theology,” Lesbian Contradictions 16 (November 1986): 5–8; Jost, Walking with the Mud Flower Collective, 46–52. 33. Cannon, “Resources for a Constructive Christian Ethic for Black Women”; Cannon, “The Emergence of Black Feminist Consciousness,” in Feminist Interpretation of the Bible, ed. Letty M. Russell (Louisville: Westminster, 1985), quote, 40. 34. Katie G. Cannon, Black Womanist Ethics (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1988), 2. 35. Ibid., 3–4. 36. Ibid., 6. 37. Zora Neale Hurston, “How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” World Tomorrow, May 1928, “I am not,” 216; Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1942), “It is simply,” 287; Cannon, Black Womanist Ethics, 11. 38. Mary Burgher, “Images of Self and Race in the Autobiographies of Black Women,” in Sturdy Black Bridges: Visions of Black Women in Literature, ed. Roseann Bell et al. (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1979), 113; Cannon, Black Womanist Ethics, 17; Zora Neale Hurston, Moses, Man of the Mountain (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1939); Hurston, Seraph on the Sewanee (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1948). 39. Alice Walker, foreword to Robert Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977), xvii; Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1938), “soaking,” 119; Cannon, Black Feminist Ethics, 103–105; Katie G. Cannon, “Unctuousness as Virtue: According to the Life of Zora Neale Hurston,” Zora Neale Hurston Forum (Fall 1987): 38–48, reprinted in Cannon, Katie’s Canon, 91–100. 40. Cannon, Black Womanist Ethics, 145. 41. Henry Louis Gates, “Soul of a Black Woman,” New York Times Book Review, February 19, 1978, 30–31; Katie G. Cannon, “Resources for a Constructive Ethic: The Life and

Notes to Pages 283–290

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Work of Zora Neale Hurston,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 1 (1984): 37–51, reprinted in Cannon, Katie’s Canon, 77–90, “Across,” 90. 42. Katie G. Cannon, “Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick: The Womanist Dilemma in the Development of a Black Liberation Ethic,” Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics (1987): 165–177, reprinted in Cannon, Katie’s Canon, 122–128, quotes, 122, 123. 43. Cannon, “Hitting a Straight Lick with a Crooked Stick,” quote, 123. 44. Ibid., quote, 126. 45. Katie G. Cannon, “Metalogues and Dialogues: Teaching the Womanist Idea,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 8 (Fall 1992): 125–130, reprinted in Cannon, Katie’s Canon, 136–143, quote, 137; see Emilie M. Townes, ed., A Troubling in My Soul: Womanist Perspectives on Evil and Suffering (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1993). 46. Cheryl J. Sanders, Katie G. Cannon, Emilie M. Townes, M. Shawn Copeland, bell hooks, and Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, “Roundtable Discussion: Christian Ethics and Theology in Womanist Perspective,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 5 (1989): 83–112; reprinted in Phillips, The Womanist Reader, 126–157, “The fact,” 129; “supplant,” 130; “the survival,” 132; “our audacious,” 133; “the term,” 131. 47. Ibid., “In preparing,” “Was I,” and “new questions,” 135; “A Black,” 136; Harrison, “The Power of Anger in the Work of Love,” in Harrison, Making the Connections: Essays in Feminist Social Ethics, ed. Carol S. Robb (Boston: Beacon, 1985), 3–21. 48. Sanders et al., “Roundtable Discussion,” “our commitment,” 156; “In a racist,” 157. 49. Katie G. Cannon, “Appropriation and Reciprocity in the Doing of Womanist Ethics,” Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics (1993): 189–196, reprinted in Cannon, Katie’s Canon, 129–135, quotes, 131. 50. Ibid., quote, 135. 51. Katie G. Cannon, “Response,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 22 (2006): quotes, 96–97; Cannon, “Sexing Black Women: Liberation from the Prisonhouse of Anatomical Authority,” in Loving the Body: Black Religious Studies and the Erotic, ed. Anthony B. Pinn and Dwight N. Hopkins (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 11–30. 52. Cannon, “Response,” 97–98. 53. Katie G. Cannon, “Structured Academic Amnesia: As If This True Womanist Story Never Happened,” in Deeper Shades of Purple: Womanism in Religion and Society, ed. Stacey M. Floyd-Thomas (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 19–27, “From 1983,” 22–23; “golden boy,” 22; “Our existential,” 19; Anika Gibbons, Journey to Liberation: The Legacy of Womanist Theology and Womanist Ethics at Union Theological Seminary, film, March 26, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= PjhtUGqFCWg. 54. Sanders et al., “Roundtable Discussion,” quotes, 139; Peter Paris, The Social Teaching of the Black Churches (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985). 55. Walker, The Color Purple, “God is,” 177; Sanders et al., “Roundtable Discussion,” “radically,” 139; Delores Williams, “Womanist Theology: Black Women’s Voices,” Christianity and Crisis (March 2, 1987): 70. 56. Emilie M. Townes Papers, Archives of Women in Theological Education, Burke Library, Columbia University; Emilie M. Townes, Womanist Justice, Womanist Hope

540

Notes to Pages 291–297

(Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1993), quote, ix; Gibbons, Journey to Liberation. This section considerably expands my capsule discussion of Townes in Dorrien, Social Ethics in the Making, 640–646. 57. Emilie Townes, discussion with the author, August 7, 2004; Townes to author, August 13, 2021. 58. Townes, Womanist Justice, Womanist Hope, quotes, 1; Ida B. Wells, Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells, ed. Alfreda M. Duster (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970); Paula J. Giddings, Ida: A Sword Among Lions (New York: HarperCollins, 2008); Linda O. McMurry, To Keep the Waters Troubled: The Life of Ida B. Wells (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). 59. Townes, Womanist Justice, Womanist Hope, “regal,” 7; “Wells-Barnett,” 173; “Time and,” 181. 60. James Cone, God of the Oppressed (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 177–181; Townes, Womanist Justice, Womanist Hope, quote, 195; Audre Lorde, “Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred, and Anger,” in Lorde, Sister Outsider (Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1984), 171–172. 61. Wells, Crusade for Justice, quote, 287; Townes, Womanist Justice, Womanist Hope, 197. 62. Townes, Womanist Justice, Womanist Hope, “She could,” 204; “One is able,” 205; “She did,” 212. 63. Jacquelyn Grant, “The Sin of Servanthood and the Deliverance of Discipleship,” in Townes, A Troubling in My Soul, 199–218; Katie G. Cannon, “ ‘The Wounds of Jesus’: Justification of Goodness in the Face of Manifold Evil,” in Townes, A Troubling in My Soul, 219–231; Delores S. Williams, “A Womanist Perspective on Sin,” in Townes, A Troubling in My Soul, 130–149; Cheryl A. Kirk-Duggan, “African American Spirituals: Confronting and Exorcising Evil Through Song,” in Townes, A Troubling in My Soul, 150–171; M. Shawn Copeland, “ ‘Wading Through Many Sorrows’: Toward a Theology of Suffering in Womanist Perspective,” in Townes, A Troubling in My Soul, 109–129, “in the dark” and “any ersatz,” 123; “They make,” 124; Emilie M. Townes, “Living in the New Jerusalem: The Rhetoric and Movement of Liberation in the House of Evil,” in Townes, A Troubling in My Soul, 78–91, “suffering is,” 90–91. 64. Emilie M. Townes, In a Blaze of Glory: Womanist Spirituality as Social Witness (Nashville: Abingdon, 1995), quote, 10. 65. Ibid., “It is,” 13; “This wisdom” and “In utter,” 11; “to be called,” 47. 66. Ibid., “black folk,” 50. 67. Ibid., quotes, 63. 68. Ibid., quote, 109. 69. Townes, In a Blaze of Glory, “The Black,” 118; Emilie M. Townes, “Introduction: On Creating Ruminations on the Spirit,” in Embracing the Spirit: Womanist Perspectives on Hope, Salvation, and Transformation, ed. Emilie M. Townes (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1997), remaining quotes, xii. 70. Townes, “Introduction: On Creating Ruminations on the Spirit,” “in absolutely,” “nothing healthy,” xii; Emilie M. Townes, “ ‘The Doctor Ain’t Taking No Sticks’: Race and Medicine in the African American Community,” in Townes, Embracing the Spirit, 179–193; “Too much,” 186; “we are called,” 193; Farai Chideya, Don’t Believe the

Notes to Pages 297–308

541

Hype: Fighting Cultural Misinformation about African-Americans (New York: Plume, 1995); Townes, Breaking the Fine Rain of Death: African American Health Issues and a Womanist Ethic of Care (New York: Continuum, 1998). 71. Emilie M. Townes Papers, Burke Library; Emilie Townes, conversations with the author, April 11, 2021, and August 23, 2021. 72. Emilie M. Townes, Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), quotes, 5. 73. Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 90–91; Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International, 1971), 57–58. 74. Townes, Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil, 29–55, quotes, 32, 36. 75. Ibid., quotes, 47, 52. 76. Ibid., quotes, 71, 74. 77. Ibid., quotes, 76–77. 78. Ibid., 79–110, quotes, 88. 79. Ibid., quote, 97. 80. Emilie M. Townes, “The Womanist Dancing Mind: Speaking to the Expansiveness of Womanist Discourse,” in Floyd-Thomas, Deeper Shades of Purple, 236–247, quotes, 240. 81. Emilie M. Townes, “Question of the Day,” Union Seminary Quarterly Review Festschrift for Delores S. Williams, 58 (2004): 157–162, quote, 160. 82. Townes, “Question of the Day,” 162. 83. Emilie Townes, “Gay Marriage and Religion: What Marriage Means to Me,” Huffington Post, January 22, 2012, updated August 21, 2012, https://www.huffpost.com /entry/gay-marriage-and-religion_b_1609491, quotes. 84. Gibbons, Journey to Liberation, quote. 85. Delores S. Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1993). 86. Rosemary Radford Ruether, “Feminist Theology in the Academy: How Not to Reinvent the Wheel,” Christianity and Crisis (March 4, 1985): 57–62, “must be,” “distinct,” “the legitimacy,” and “not at,” 57; “but we must,” 61. 87. Delores S. Williams, “The Color of Feminism,” Christianity and Crisis (April 29, 1985): 164–165, quotes, 164. 88. Delores S. Williams, “The Color of Feminism: On Speaking the Black Woman’s Tongue,” Journal of Religious Thought 43 (1986): 42–58, reprinted in Daly, Feminist Theological Ethics, 42–58, “but there,” 42; “The failure,” 49; Williams, “Womanist Theology: Black Women’s Voices,” Christianity and Crisis (March 2, 1987), reprinted in Cone and Wilmore, Black Theology, 2:265–272. 89. Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness, “the miracle” and “Holding,” x; “two-edged” and “as I see,” xiii. 90. Ibid., 1–6. 91. Ibid., “the survival,” 6; “There is” and “is a natural,” 146; “Have they,” 149. 92. Ibid., “identification,” 149; “the awful” and “has not,” 151. 93. Ibid., quote, 153.

542

Notes to Pages 308–317

9 4. Ibid., “between,” 157–158. 95. Ibid., quotes, 158. 96. Ibid., 161–164, quote, 161. 97. Ibid., “wanton,” 166; “historical” and “new vision,” 165. 98. James Deotis Roberts, Liberation and Reconciliation (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1971), 144–154; Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness, quote, 122. 99. Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness, 273; quotes, 237. 100. Ibid., 273. 101. Re-Imagining Conference (1993) audiotapes, Resource Express (Apple Valley, MN, 1993); Re-Imagining Collection, 1993–2016, Duke University, https://archives.lib. duke.edu/catalog/reimagining; Peter Steinfels, “Cries of Heresy After Feminists Meet,” New York Times, May 14, 1994. 102. Mary Farrell Bednarowsky, “The Spirit of Re-Imagining: Setting the Stage,” Church and Society 84 (May–June 1994): 12–13; Hyung Kyun Chung, “The Spirit of Re-Imagining” and “Re-Imagining God,” Re-Imagining Conference (1993) audiotapes, 1:2 and 2:2; Kwok Pui-lan, “Re-Imagining Jesus,” Re-Imagining Conference (1993) audiotapes, 3:2A; Joan M. Martin, “Re-Imagining the Church as Spiritual Institution,” Church and Society 84 (May–June 1994): 83–84. 103. Delores Williams, “Re-Imagining Jesus,” Re-Imagining Conference (1993) audiotapes, 3:1, 3:1A, quote, 3:2. 104. Steinfels, “Cries of Heresy After Feminists Meet”; Bill Broadway, “After Re-Imagining God, the Reality of Job Loss,” Washington Post, July 2, 1994; Williams, “Re-Imagining Jesus,” quote, 3:1A. 105. JoAnne Marie Terrell, “ ‘Something of God’ in Delores Williams: Poet, Prophet, Premier Womanist,” Union Seminary Quarterly Review 58 (2004): 1–6, “the premier” and “womanist’s,” 6; Marcia Riggs, “A Womanist’s Womanist,” ibid., 219–220; Linda E. Thomas, “Theology and Community: Lessons from South Africa,” ibid., 112–127; Lakisha NyHemia Williams, “The Bridge That Carried Us Over: Reflections on the Life and Legacy of Dr. Delores S. Williams,” ibid., 7–8, “the bridge” and “among,” 7. 106. Riggs, “A Womanist’s Womanist,” 219–220; Dianne M. Stewart, “Womanist God-Talk on the Cutting Edge of Theology and Black Religious Studies: Assessing the Contribution of Delores Williams,” Union Seminary Quarterly Review 58 (2004): 65–83. 107. Renee K. Harrison, “Hagar Ain’t Workin’, Gimme Me Celie: A Hermeneutic of Rejection and a Risk of Re-Appropriation,” Union Seminary Quarterly Review 58 (2004): 38–55, “an experience,” 41; “hermeneutic,” 39. 108. Kelly Brown Douglas, The Black Christ (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1994), quote, 2; Douglas, “Twenty Years a Womanist: An Affirming Challenge,” in Floyd-Thomas, Deeper Shades of Purple, 145–157. This section draws on numerous conversations between the author and Kelly Brown Douglas, especially on January 2, 2021. 109. Kelly Brown Douglas, “Struggling with Black Faith in America,” Christian Century, October 7, 2020: 28–31, quotes, 29. 110. Douglas, “Struggling with Black Faith in America,” 29; Kelly Brown Douglas, Black Bodies and the Black Church: A Blues Slant (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), quote, 84.

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111. Douglas, “Twenty Years a Womanist,” “but I did not,” 145; Douglas, Black Bodies and the Black Church, “My eyes,” 84. 112. Kelly Brown Douglas to the author, December 8, 2020, “until these guys”; Douglas, “Twenty Years a Womanist,” “I jumped” and “It affirmed,” 146. 113. Douglas, The Black Christ, “that go” and “Black churches,” 4; Kelly Brown Douglas to the author, April 23, 2021. 114. Ibid., “telling,” 8; “Attention,” 84. 115. Ibid., “most strident,” 95; “homophobic,” 101. 116. Kelly Brown Douglas, Sexuality and the Black Church: A Womanist Perspective (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1999), quotes, 87–88. 117. James Baldwin, “The Price of the Ticket” (1985); Baldwin, “The American Dream and the American Negro” (1965); and Baldwin, “White Man’s Guilt” (1965), in Baldwin, The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction, 1948–1985 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1985), ix–xx, 403–407, 409–414. 118. Douglas, Sexuality and the Black Church, “to promote,” 16; “social, political,” 17. 119. Ibid., “vile nature” and “White culture,” 17; “virtually synonymous,” 18. 120. Ibid., “shameless,” 18; Baldwin, “The Price of the Ticket,” “Go back,” ix; Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley, 3 vols. (1978–1986; repr., New York: Vintage, 1990), 1:95–96. 121. Douglas, Sexuality and the Black Church, “initiate,” 69; “hoes,” 78. 122. Ibid., “Clearly,” 80; “I empathized,” 2; Gibbons, Journey to Liberation, “He loved”; Kelly Brown Douglas to the author, January 2, 2021. 123. Douglas, Sexuality and the Black Church, quote, 91; Robin Scroggs, The New Testament and Homosexuality (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983); Vincent Wimbush, “The Bible and African Americans: An Outline of an Interpretive History,” in Stony the Road We Trod: African American Biblical Interpretation, ed. Cain Hope Felder (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991), 82–83. 124. Frances Cross Welsing, The Isis Papers: The Keys to the Colors (Chicago: Third World Press, 1991), “effeminate,” 81; Molefi Kete Asante, Afrocentricity (Trenton, NJ: African World Press, 1988), “We can,” 57; Nathan Hare and Julia Hare, The Endangered Black Family: Coping with the Unisexualization and Coming Extinction of the Black Race (San Francisco: Black Think Tank, 1984), “family,” “decaying,” and “coming,” 65; Audre Lorde, “Scratching the Surface: Some Notes on Barriers to Women and Loving,” in Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1984), “acute fright” and “This position,” 49; “The master’s,” 110; Douglas, Sexuality and the Black Church, “A discourse,” 107. 125. Douglas, Sexuality and the Black Church, quote, 128. 126. Kelly Brown Douglas, What’s Faith Got to Do with It? Black Bodies/Christian Souls (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2005), quotes, 5. 127. Ibid., 5–38. 128. Henry Chadwick, The Early Church (New York: Penguin Books, 1967); Elaine Pagels, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent: Sex and Politics in Early Christianity (1988; repr., New York: Vintage, 1989); Pagels, The Origin of Satan: How Christians Demonized Jews, Pagans, and Heretics (1995; repr., New York: Vintage, 1996); Douglas, The Black Christ, quote, 110.

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Notes to Pages 326–336

129. Douglas, What’s Faith Got to Do with It? 89–106, quote, 90; JoAnne Marie Terrell, Power in the Blood? The Cross in the African American Experience (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1998), 102–142. 130. Terrell, Power in the Blood? quotes, 120. 131. Douglas, What’s Faith Got to Do With It? quotes, 95. 132. Ibid., quote, 218. 133. Kelly Brown Douglas to the author, January 2, 2021; dialogue between Douglas and the author on James Cone, Union Theological Seminary Chapel service, April 28, 2020. 134. James H. Cone, For My People: Black Theology and the Black Church (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1984); Cone, My Soul Looks Back (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1986); Cone, Speaking the Truth: Ecumenism, Liberation, and Black Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986); Cone, Risks of Faith: The Emergence of Black Theology of Liberation, 1968–1998 (Boston: Beacon, 1999); Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2011). 135. Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, quote, 22. 136. Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, 37; Reinhold Niebuhr, “An American Approach to the Christian Message,” in A Traffic in Knowledge, ed. W. A. Visser ’t Hooft (London: Student Christian Movement Press, 1931), “supreme symbol,” 74; Niebuhr, “The Terrible Beauty of the Cross,” Christian Century, March 21, 1929: “terrible,” 386; Niebuhr, Christianity and Power Politics (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1940), “Christianity is,” 213. 137. Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, quote, 37; Quincy Ewing, “The Heart of the Race Problem,” Atlantic Monthly, March 1909, 389–397; Ewing, “The Beginning of the End,” Colored American Magazine, October 1901, 471–478; Edwin T. Wellford, The Lynching of Jesus: A Review of the Legal Aspects of the Trial of Christ (Newport News, VA: Franklin, 1905); David Margolick, Strange Fruit: Billie Holiday, Café Society, and an Early Cry for Civil Rights (Philadelphia: Running Press, 2000). 138. Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, 150. 139. Ibid., 150–151; Copeland, “Wading Through Many Sorrows,” quotes, 120, 124. 140. Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, quotes, 151.

chapter 6 .   pr o ph e t ic f ir e and c r e a t i v e f l o ur i s h i n g 1. Cornel West, “On My Intellectual Vocation,” interview by George Yancy, in West, The Cornel West Reader (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 1999), 19–20. For a detailed discussion of West’s socialism, see Gary Dorrien, American Democratic Socialism: History, Politics, Religion, and Theory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021). 2. Cornel West, “The Making of an American Radical Democrat of African Descent,” introduction to West, The Ethical Dimensions of Marxist Thought (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1991), reprinted in West, The Cornel West Reader, 3–18. 3. Cornel West, Prophesy Deliverance! An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1982); Stanley Aronowitz, The Crisis in Historical Materialism: Class, Politics, and Culture in Marxist Theory (New York: Praeger, 1981).

Notes to Pages 336–343

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4. West, Prophesy Deliverance! 134–137; West, “Black Theology and Marxist Thought,” in Black Theology: A Documentary History, 1966–1979, ed. Gayraud S. Wilmore and James H. Cone (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1979), 552–567; West, “Harrington’s Socialist Vision,” Christianity and Crisis (12 December 1983): 484. 5. West, Prophesy Deliverance! “Councilism is,” 137; Serge Bricianer, Pannekoek and the Workers’ Councils (St. Louis: Telos, 1978); Rosa Luxemburg, Selected Political Writings of Rosa Luxemburg, ed. Dick Howard (New York: Monthly Review, 1971). 6. Gary Dorrien, Reconstructing the Common Good: Theology and the Social Order (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1990), 162–164; Dorrien, The Democratic Socialist Vision (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1986), 129–132. 7. Cornel West, “Alasdair MacIntyre, Liberalism, and Socialism: A Christian Perspective,” in Christianity and Capitalism: Perspectives on Religion, Liberalism, and the Economy, ed. Bruce Grelle and David A. Krueger (Chicago: Center for the Scientific Study of Religion, 1985), reprinted in West, Prophetic Fragments: Illuminations of the Crisis in American Religion and Culture (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1988), “wholesome” and “a socio-economic,” 134; Alec Nove, The Economics of Feasible Socialism (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1983); Włodzimierz Brus, The Economics and Politics of Socialism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973); Branko Horvat, The Political Economy of Socialism: A Marxist Social Theory (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1982). 8. Cornel West, “Critical Theory and Christian Faith,” Witness (January 1986), reprinted in West, Prophetic Fragments, quote, 122; Michael Harrington, “Is Capitalism Still Viable?” Journal of Business Ethics 1 (1982): 283–284; Harrington, “Corporate Collectivism: A System of Social Injustice,” in Contemporary Readings in Social and Political Ethics, ed. Garry Brodsky, John Troyer, and David Vance (Buffalo: Prometheus, 1984), 245. 9. Cornel West, “Michael Harrington, Socialist,” Nation, January 8/15, 1990, reprinted in West, Beyond Eurocentrism and Multiculturalism, vol. 1, Prophetic Thought in Postmodern Times (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1993), 181–188, quotes, 183, 184. 10. Cornel West, Toward a Socialist Theory of Racism (New York: Institute for Democratic Socialism, 1985), reprinted in West, Prophetic Fragments, 97–108. 11. Ibid., 98–99, Stalin quote, 98; Marcus Garvey, “Address at Newport News, October 25, 1919,” Negro World, November 1, 1919, reprinted in The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, ed. Robert A. Hill (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 1:112–120; Harry Haywood, Negro Liberation (New York: International, 1948); James Forman, Self-Determination and the African-American People (Seattle: Open Hand, 1981). 12. West, Toward a Socialist Theory of Racism, 99–101; Oliver C. Cox, Caste, Class and Race (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1948). 13. West, Toward a Socialist Theory of Racism, quote, 107–108. 14. Ibid., quotes, 108; Cornel West, “Beyond Eurocentrism and Multiculturalism,” in West, Prophetic Thought in Postmodern Times, 3–30. 15. Michael Eric Dyson, I May Not Get There with You: The True Martin Luther King Jr. (2000; repr., New York: Touchstone, 2001), “humh,” 1; “King’s rhetoric,” 2.

546

Notes to Pages 343–356

16. Michael Eric Dyson, Reflecting Black: African American Cultural Criticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), quote, xxvi. 17. Ibid., quotes, 186–187. 18. Ibid., quote, 261. 19. Michael Eric Dyson, Making Malcolm: The Myth and Meaning of Malcolm X (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). 20. Michael Eric Dyson, Race Rules: Navigating the Color Line (1996; repr., New York: Vintage, 1997), 47–76, quote, 48. 21. Ibid., “a lot,” 50; “like a,” 52; “if there’s” and “Black bodies,” 53; “First Annual” and “middlebrow,” 67. 22. Ibid., 196–200. 23. Ibid., quotes, 201. 24. Ibid., “hardly,” 93; “We’ve got,” 101; “erotic,” 104; “his theological,” 105. 25. Ibid., quote, 106. 26. Dyson, I May Not Get There with You, “enlightened,” 100; “He was,” x; “would spare,” xii; “What struck,” xi. 27. Ibid., “Not only,” 195; “vigilant,” 159; “desperate” and “in the lowest,” 162; “Hard-core,” 184. 28. Sarah Watson, Caroline Hamilton, and Paul James, “Georgetown Investigated Professor Michael Eric Dyson for Student Harassment Before His Hire by Vanderbilt,” Georgetown Voice, June 1, 2021; Ann Brown, “Students at Vanderbilt University Try to Block Dr. Michael Eric Dyson Hire over Past #MeToo Allegations,” Moguldom Nation, March 5, 2021, https://moguldom.com/340799/students-at-vanderbilt-university-try-to-block-dr-michael-eric-dyson-hire-over-past-metoo-allegations/. 29. Virginia Heffernan, “A Politically Minded Minister Who Preaches Ecumenism,” New York Times, December 26, 2003; James A. Forbes Jr., Whose Gospel? A Concise Guide to Progressive Protestantism (New York: New Press, 2010). 30. Obery M. Hendricks Jr., The Politics of Jesus: Rediscovering the True Revolutionary Nature of the Teachings of Jesus and How They Have Been Corrupted (New York: Doubleday, 2006). 31. Ibid., quote, 3. 32. Obery Hendricks Jr. to the author, January 18, 2021, quotes; Richard A. Horsley, Jesus and the Spiral of Violence: Popular Jewish Resistance in Roman Palestine (1987; repr., Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993); Ched Meyers, Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1988); Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (New York: Random House, 1979); Norman K. Gottwald, The Tribes of Yahweh: A Sociology of the Religion of Liberated Israel, 1250–1050 BCE (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1979); Hendricks, “Guerrilla Exegesis: ‘Struggle’ as a Scholarly Vocation; A Postmodern Approach to African American Biblical Interpretation,” Semeia 72 (1995): 73–90. 33. John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus: Vicit Agnus Noster, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), 4–20. 34. Ibid., quote, 10. 35. Ibid., 99–188, “sweeping” and “to conduct,” 5; “Bush has,” 334.

Notes to Pages 356–366

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3 6. Ibid., quote, 313. 37. bell hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (Boston: South End Press, 1989), quotes, 155. This section on hooks adapts material from Dorrien, American Democratic Socialism, 480–488. 38. hooks, Talking Back, quote, 149; Tillie Olsen, Silences (1965; repr., New York: Feminist Press, 2003). 39. hooks, Talking Back, “Attending,” 150; “The book,” 151. 40. Ibid., quote, 152; Paulo Freire, Education, the Practice of Freedom (original, 1967); revised English edition published as Education for Critical Consciousness (New York: Seabury Press, 1973); Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos (original, 1968; 1st English ed., New York: Seabury Press, 1970). 41. hooks, Talking Back, quote, 57. 42. Ibid., “the proper,” 58; “despite,” 61; bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (1981; repr., New York: Routledge, 2015). 43. hooks, Ain’t I a Woman, “strong,” 125; “racist ideology,” 137; “That force,” 138; “By creating,” 150; “Many black,” 152. 44. Ibid., quote, 156; hooks, Talking Back, 154; Cheryl Clarke, “The Failure to Transform: Homophobia in the Black Community,” in Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, ed. Barbara Smith (New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1983), 197–208. 45. bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (Boston: South End Press, 1984), “Some of,” ix; “bored,” 1; “Racism,” 3. 46. Ibid., “Feminism,” 153; “As feminists,” 152–153. 47. Ibid., “Women must,” 44; Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, “Because love,” 77. 48. Min Jin Lee, “In Praise of bell hooks,” New York Times, February 28, 2019, “Because”; hooks, Talking Back, Schmidt and hooks quotes, 64. 49. Ibid., “We must,” 65; “Of course,” 67; “Feminist theory,” 36. 50. Ibid., quote, 106. 51. Ibid., “Obsessive,” 106; “To challenge,” 107. 52. Cornel West, Race Matters (1993; repr., New York: Vintage, 1994), 17–31, “major” and “and,” 23; bell hooks and Cornel West, Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life (1991; repr., New York: Routledge, 2017), “Nihilism” and “These feelings,” 14; “We must,” 16; “When I was,” 17–18. 53. hooks and West, Breaking Bread, “surreptitious,” 60; “without being” and “she feels,” 62; “hot,” 70; “Feminist,” 106. 54. bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions (New York: William Morrow, 2000), quote, 175–176. 55. Ibid., Peck quote, 10; M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978). 56. hooks, All About Love, “A culture,” 71; Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving (New York: Harper, 1956); Thomas Merton, The Hidden Ground of Love: Letters of Thomas Merton on Religious Experience and Social Concerns, ed. William H. Shannon (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1985). 57. Martin Luther King Jr., Strength to Love (1963; repr., Minneapolis: Fortress, 1981); King, “A Time to Break Silence” (1967), in A Testament of Hope: The Essential

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Notes to Pages 367–373

Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King Jr., ed. James M. Washington (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), “Hindu,” 242; hooks, All About Love, “The mystical,” 79; “striving,” 80; “To return,” 221. 58. hooks, All About Love, quote, 180; bell hooks, “Are You Still a Slave? Liberating the Black Female Body,” address given at Eugene Lang College at the New School, May 7, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=rJk0hNROvzs. 59. Traci C. West, “Is a Womanist a Black Feminist? Marking the Distinctions and Defying Them: A Black Feminist Response,” in Deeper Shades of Purple: Womanism in Religion and Society, ed. Stacey M. Floyd-Thomas (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 291–295, quotes, 291, 292; West, Disruptive Christian Ethics: When Racism and Women’s Lives Matter (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2006). 60. West, “Is a Womanist a Black Feminist?” “the womanist,” 292; “our own” and “cathartic,” 293. 61. Traci C. West, Wounds of the Spirit: Black Women, Violence, and Resistance Ethics (New York: New York University Press, 1999), “simply,” 121; “For them,” 120; West, “Is a Womanist a Black Feminist?” “maintaining,” 294. 62. West, “Is a Womanist a Black Feminist?” “I proudly,” “We aren’t,” and “When was,” 294; “how can,” “narrowing,” and “erasing,” 295. 63. Victor Anderson, Creative Exchange: A Constructive Theology of African American Religious Experience (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2008), 146. This section considerably expands on my discussion of Anderson in Gary Dorrien, Social Ethics in the Making: Interpreting an American Tradition (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 592–598. 64. Anderson, Creative Exchange, “uncontaminated,” 147; “For many,” 152. 65. James H. Cone, Black Theology and Black Power (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), quotes, 117; Victor Anderson, “The Legacy of Pragmatism in the Theologies of D. C. Macintosh, H. Richard Niebuhr, and James M. Gustafson,” Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1992. 66. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979); Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982); Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth, and History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Jeffrey L. Stout, The Flight from Authority: Religion, Morality, and the Quest for Autonomy (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981); Stout, Ethics After Babel: The Languages of Morals and Their Discontents (Boston: Beacon, 1988); Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989). 67. Victor Anderson, Beyond Ontological Blackness: An Essay on African American Religious and Cultural Criticism (New York: Continuum, 1995), 21–85. 68. Ibid., quote, 162. 69. Ibid., 86–94, “racial,” 16; “new black being,” 91; “In this way,” 91–92; “When race,” 15. 70. Ibid., 93–117, “the mirror,” 110; “aporias” and “transcending openings,” 116; “If suffering,” 112; Peter J. Paris, The Spirituality of African Peoples: The Search for a Common Moral Discourse (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995); Cheryl J. Sanders, “Roundtable Discussion: Christian Ethics and Theology in Womanist Perspective,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 5 (1989): 83–91.

Notes to Pages 373–379

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71. Anderson, Beyond Ontological Blackness, quote, 103; West, Race Matters, 57–66. 72. bell hooks, Yearnings: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (Boston: South End Press, 1990), “essentialist,” 19; Joe Wood, “The New Blackness” (1992), quoted in Anderson, Beyond Ontological Blackness, “I am,” 141; Anderson, Beyond Ontological Blackness, “Talk about,” 117; “The identification,” 161. 73. Victor Anderson, “Abominations of a Million Men,” in Black Religion after the Million Man March: Voices on the Future, ed. Garth Kasimu Baker-Fletcher (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1998), 19–26, “abominations” and “No gay,” 22; “the plight,” 24; Anderson, “Deadly Silence: Reflections on Homosexuality and Human Rights,” in Sexual Orientation and Human Rights in American Religious Discourse, ed. Saul Olyan and Martha Nussbaum (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 185–200; Anderson, Beyond Ontological Blackness, “how African,” 143. 74. Willie James Jennings, review of Beyond Ontological Blackness, by Victor Anderson, Theology Today 53 (January 1997): 527–528; J. Deotis Roberts, review of Beyond Ontological Blackness, Journal of Religion 78 (April 1998): 279–280; Dwight N. Hopkins, Introducing Black Theology of Liberation (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1999), 110–111; L. H. Mamiya, review of Beyond Ontological Blackness: An Essay on African American Religious and Cultural Criticism, by Victor Anderson, Choice 33 (April 1996): 1326; Mary Alice Mulligan, review of Beyond Ontological Blackness, Encounter 58 (Summer 1997): 331–333. 75. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, xv; Richard Rorty, “Religious Faith, Intellectual Responsibility, and Romance,” in Pragmatism, Neo-Pragmatism, and Religion: Conversations with Richard Rorty, ed. Charley D. Hardwick and Donald A. Crosby (New York: P. Lang, 1997), 3–21. 76. Victor Anderson, Pragmatic Theology: Negotiating the Intersections of an American Philosophy of Religion and Public Theology (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 13–28; Stout, Ethics After Babel, 109–123; Richard Rorty and Gianni Vattimo, The Future of Religion (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). 77. Stout, Ethics After Babel, 163–188; Anderson, Pragmatic Theology, 17–24. 78. Anderson, Pragmatic Theology, 22–28. 79. Ibid., quote, 67. 80. Ibid., 101–102; on the Chicago School, see Gary Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Idealism, Realism, and Modernity (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2003), 151–285. 81. Anderson, Pragmatic Theology, 100–104; Eugene Fontinell, Toward a Reconstruction of Religion: A Philosophical Probe (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970). 82. Anderson, Pragmatic Theology, quote, 106. 83. Ibid., quote, 129; Cornel West, Keeping Faith: Philosophy and Race in America (New York: Routledge, 1993), 91–139; Victor Anderson, “The Wrestle of Christ and Culture in Pragmatic Public Theology,” American Journal of Theology & Philosophy 19 (May 1998): 135–150. 84. Anderson, Pragmatic Theology, quote, 129. 85. Anderson, Creative Exchange, “if it,” 21; “any,” 31; “a grotesquely,” 32; Edward Farley, Deep Symbols: Their Postmodern Effacement and Reclamation (Valley Forge, PA: Trinity International, 1996).

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Notes to Pages 379–386

86. Anthony Pinn, Why Lord? Suffering and Evil in Black Theology (New York: Continuum, 1995), 10–18, 110–114; James H. Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, 2nd ed. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1986), quote, 27. 87. Anderson, Creative Exchange, 80–110. 88. Gary Dorrien, Breaking White Supremacy: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Black Social Gospel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 122–148; Anderson, Creative Exchange, 115–125. 89. Gary Dorrien, In a Post-Hegelian Spirit: Philosophical Theology as Idealistic Discontent (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2020), 237–257; Edgar S. Brightman, “Personality as a Metaphysical Principle,” in Personalism in Theology: Essays in Honor of Albert Cornelius Knudson, ed. Edgar S. Brightman (Boston: Boston University Press, 1943), 41–56; Brightman, Person and Reality: An Introduction to Metaphysics, ed. Peter A. Bertocci, Janette G. Newhall, and Robert S. Brightman (New York: Ronald Press, 1958), 44–54; Howard Thurman, The Creative Encounter: An Interpretation of Religion and the Social Witness (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1954), quote, 19; Anderson, Creative Exchange, 115–119. 90. Thurman, The Creative Encounter, “In authentic,” 22–23; “It is,” 28; Anderson, Creative Exchange, 118. 91. Anderson, The Creative Exchange, quote, 124. 92. Julia Kristeva, “Women’s Time,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 7 (1981): 13–35; Nancy Fraser, Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis (London: Verso, 2013), 1–16. 93. Stacey M. Floyd-Thomas, Mining the Motherlode: Methods in Womanist Ethics (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2006), 3–4; Floyd-Thomas, “Introduction: Writing for Our Lives—Womanism as an Epistemological Revolution,” in Floyd-Thomas, Deeper Shades of Purple, 4–5. 94. Stacey Floyd-Thomas, interview by Gabby Cudjoe Wilkes and Estee Nena Dillard, “Womanists Taught Us,” Black Theology Project, October 7, 2019, quote. 95. Floyd-Thomas, Mining the Motherlode, quotes, xii. 96. Ibid., quotes, xiii. 97. Ibid., “dance,” 69; “fills,” 169. 98. Ibid., quotes, 171. 99. Floyd-Thomas, “Introduction: Writing for Our Lives,” quotes, 5. 100. Debra Mubashshir Majeed, “Womanism Encounters Islam: A Muslim Scholar Considers the Efficacy of a Method Rooted in the Academy and the Church,” in Floyd-Thomas, Deeper Shades of Purple, 38–53; Dianne M. Stewart, “Dancing Limbo: Black Passages Through the Boundaries of Place, Race, Class, and Religion,” in Floyd-Thomas, Deeper Shades of Purple, 82–97; Shani Settles, “The Sweet Fire of Honey: Womanist Visions of Osun as a Methodology of Emancipation,” in FloydThomas, Deeper Shades of Purple, 191–208; Melanie L. Harris, “Womanist Humanism: A New Hermeneutic,” in Floyd-Thomas, Deeper Shades of Purple, 211–225; Harris, “Alice Walker’s Ethics: An Analysis of Alice Walker’s Non-Fiction Work as a Resource for Womanist Ethics” (Ph.D. diss., Union Theological Seminary, 2006); Harris, “Womanist Humanism: A Deeper Look,” Cross Currents 57 (Fall 2007): 396; Alice

Notes to Pages 386–393

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Walker, “The Only Reason You Want to Go to Heaven Is That You Have Been Driven Out of Your Mind (Off Your Land and Out of Your Lover’s Arms)—Clear Seeing, Inherited Religion, and Reclaiming the Pagan Self,” in Walker, Anything We Love Can Be Saved (New York: Random House, 1997), 9; Walker, “The River: Honoring the Difficult,” in Walker, The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult (New York: Scribner, 1996), 25. 101. Katie G. Cannon, “Structured Academic Amnesia: As If This True Womanist Story Never Happened,” in Floyd-Thomas, Deeper Shades of Purple, 19–28; Kelly Brown Douglas, “Twenty Years a Womanist: An Affirming Challenge,” in Floyd-Thomas, Deeper Shades of Purple, 145–157, “The primary” and “We must,” 149; Karen BakerFletcher, “A Womanist Journey,” in Floyd-Thomas, Deeper Shades of Purple, 158– 175, “Alice,” 166; “never intended,” 164. 102. Diana L. Hayes, “Standing in the Shoes My Mother Made: The Making of a Catholic Womanist Theologian,” in Floyd-Thomas, Deeper Shades of Purple, 54–76, quotes, 57. 103. Floyd-Thomas, Mining the Motherlode, quote, 3–4. 104. Monica Coleman, “Roundtable Discussion: Must I Be Womanist?” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 22 (Spring 2006): 85–96, “They mothered” and “When I read,” 86. 105. Monica Coleman, Bipolar Faith: A Black Woman’s Journey with Depression and Faith (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2016), 1–36. 106. Ibid., “This was” and “the only,” 142; “Dinah was,” 195. 107. Ibid., quote, 203; Monica Coleman, The Dinah Project: A Handbook for Congregational Response to Sexual Violence (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2004). 108. Coleman, Bipolar Faith, quote, 237; Monica Coleman, “Clergy Sexual Misconduct in the AME Church: An Open Letter to My Brothers and Sisters in the Clergy,” AME Church Review 114 (October–December 1998): 20–31. 109. Coleman, Bipolar Faith, quotes, 249. 110. Coleman, Bipolar Faith, “If I,” 248; “I realized,” 250; “who stopped,” 255; Monica Coleman, “Keeping Our Own Vineyards, or, Why Black Christians Should Celebrate Kwanzaa,” African American Pulpit 6 (Winter 2002): 39–41. 111. Coleman, Bipolar Faith, quote, 289. 112. Monica A. Coleman, “Life of the Mind,” Monica’s Blog: The Beautiful Mind Blog, December 11, 2011, https://monicaacoleman.com/life-of-the-mind/, quotes. 113. Monica A. Coleman, “Walking in the Whirlwind: A Whiteheadian-Womanist Soteriology” (Ph.D. diss., Claremont Graduate University, 2004), “These two” and “When they,” 1; Coleman, Making a Way Out of No Way: A Womanist Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2008), “my grandmother’s,” 4. 114. Coleman, Making a Way Out of No Way, “I don’t know,” 4; “It’s the,” 5; “I needed,” 5–6; “the power,” 6; Coleman, “The World at Its Best: A Process Construction of a Wesleyan Understanding of Entire Sanctification,” Wesleyan Theological Journal 37 (Fall 2002): 130–152. 115. Coleman, Making a Way Out of No Way, quote, 36. 116. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, corrected edition, ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York: Free Press, 1978);

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Notes to Pages 394–400

Gary Dorrien, In a Post-Hegelian Spirit: Philosophical Theology as Idealistic Discontent (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2020). 117. Coleman, Making a Way Out of No Way, quote, 43; David Ray Griffin, God and Religion in the Postmodern World (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989); Griffin, Whitehead’s Radically Different Postmodern Philosophy: An Argument for Its Contemporary Relevance (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007). 118. Alfred North Whitehead, Religion in the Making (New York: Macmillan, 1926), “The common,” 95; Whitehead, Process and Reality, “The ultimate,” 340; Thandeka, “I’ve Known Rivers: Black Theology’s Response to Process Theology,” Process Studies 18 (Winter 1989): 282–293, “Process,” “the manners,” and “the hard-edged,” 285. 119. Coleman, Making a Way Out of No Way, quote, 82. 120. Ibid., quotes, 82; Henry James Young, “Process Theology and Black Liberation: Testing the Whiteheadian Metaphysical Foundations,” Process Studies 18 (Winter 1989): 259–267; Young, Hope in Process: A Theology of Social Pluralism (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1990); Theodore Walker Jr., Mothership Connections: A Black Atlantic Synthesis of Neoclassical Metaphysics and Black Theology (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004). 121. Coleman, Making a Way Out of No Way, quotes, 170. 122. Coleman, “Roundtable Discussion: Must I Be Womanist?” “I’m not sure,” 86; “disappointing” and “womanist religious,” 87; “created,” 89. 123. Coleman, “Roundtable Discussion: Must I Be Womanist?” “Womanist religious,” 92; “I cannot,” 93; “bisexuality,” 95–96; Patricia Hill Collins, “What’s In a Name? Womanism, Black Feminism, and Beyond,” Black Scholar 26 (Winter–Spring 1996): 16. 124. Monica A. Coleman, “Introduction: Ain’t I a Womanist Too? Third Wave Womanist Religious Thought,” in Ain’t I a Womanist, Too? Third-Wave Womanist Religious Thought, ed. Monica A. Coleman (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2013), 1–31; Monica R. Miller, “I Am a Nappy-Headed Ho: (Re)Signifying ‘Deviance’ in the Haraam of Religious Respectability,” in Coleman, Ain’t I a Womanist, Too? 123–138; Layli Phillips, “Womanism: On Its Own,” in The Womanist Reader, ed. Layli Phillips (New York: Routledge, 2006), xix–lv. 125. Barack Obama, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance (1995; rev. ed., New York: Three Rivers Press, 2004), quotes, 294; Gary Dorrien, The Obama Question: A Progressive Perspective (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2012), 42–43. 126. Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2006), quote, 206. 127. Ibid., quotes, 207–208. 128. Dorrien, The Obama Question, 45–46. 129. Obama, The Audacity of Hope, quote, 233. 130. Ben Wallace-Wells, “Destiny’s Child,” Rolling Stone, February 22, 2007, quotes; David Plouffe, The Audacity to Win (2009; repr., New York: Penguin, 2010), 40. 131. Plouffe, The Audacity to Win, 40; David Remnick, The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama (2010; repr., New York: Vintage, 2011), 468–470.

Notes to Pages 401–407

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132. Patrick Healy and Jeff Zeleny, “Clinton and Obama Unite in Pleas to Blacks,” New York Times, March 5, 2007; David Remnick, “The Joshua Generation,” New Yorker, November 17, 2008, quotes, 69–70. 133. Barack Obama, Iowa victory speech, January 3, 2008, quote; Mary Frances Berry and Josh Gottheimer, Power in Words: The Stories Behind Barack Obama’s Speeches, From the State House to the White House (Boston: Beacon, 2010), 134. 134. Shelby Steele, A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can’t Win (New York: Free Press, 2008). 135. Brian Ross and Rehab El-Buri, “Obama’s Pastor: God Damn America, U.S. to Blame for 9/11,” ABC News.com, March 13, 2008, We bombed,” “and now,” “America’s,” and “The government”; Barack Obama, “On My Faith and My Church,” Huffington Post, March 14, 2008, huffingtonpost.com/entry/on-my-faith-and-my-church_b_91623, “vehemently,” “strongly,” and “inflammatory.” 136. “Transcript: Barack Obama’s Speech on Race,” NPR, March 18, 2008, https://www .npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=88478467, quotes. 137. Ibid. 138. Peggy Noonan, “A Thinking Man’s Speech,” Wall Street Journal, March 21, 2008, “to think” and “as the”; Charles Murray, “Have I Missed the Competition?” National Review Online, March 18, 2008, https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/160521/havei-missed-competition/charles-murray; Ed Koch, “Why Obama’s Speech Was Unconvincing,” Politico.com, March 25, 2008, https://www.realclearpolitics.com /articles/2008/03/obamas_unconvincing_speech.html; Mike Wereschagin, “Clinton: ‘Wright Would Not Have Been My Pastor,’ ” Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, March 25, 2008, Clinton quote; Charles Krauthammer, “The Speech: A Brilliant Fraud,” Washington Post, March 21, 2008, https://ontd-political.livejournal.com/248703.html; Howard Kurtz, “Media Notes: A Complex Speech, Boiled Down to Simple Politics,” Washington Post, March 20, 2008; Berry and Gottheimer, Power in Words, 180–181. 139. Houston A. Baker Jr., “What Should Obama Do About Rev. Jeremiah Wright?” Salon.com, April 29, 2008, https://www.salon.com/2008/04/29/obama_wright/. 140. CQ Transcriptions, “Reverend Wright at the National Press Club,” New York Times, April 28, 2008, quotes. 141. Ibid., quotes. 142. Federal News Service, “Obama’s Remarks on Wright,” New York Times, April 29, 2008, quotes. 143. Julie Bosman, “Obama Sharply Assails Absent Black Fathers,” New York Times, June 16, 2008, quotes. 144. Remnick, The Bridge, 538, quotes. 145. Alan Greenspan, The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World (New York: Penguin, 2007), 366–373; Ravi Batra, Greenspan’s Fraud: How Two Decades of His Policies Have Undermined the Global Economy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Henry M. Paulson Jr., On the Brink: Inside the Race to Stop the Collapse of the Global Financial System (New York: Business Plus, 2010); Andrew Ross Sorkin, Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System—and Themselves (2009; repr., New York: Penguin Books, 2010), 299–307.

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Notes to Pages 408–412

146. William D. Cohan, House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street (2009; repr., New York: Anchor Books, 2010), 56–154; Eric Dash, “Bankers Pledge Cooperation with Obama,” New York Times, March 27, 2009; Eamon Javers, “Inside Obama’s Bank CEOs Meeting,” Politico, April 3, 2009, https://www.politico .com/story/2009/04/inside-obamas-bank-ceos-meeting-020871; Rick Klein, “Obama to Bankers: I’m Standing ‘Between You and the Pitchforks,’ ” ABC News, Note Blog, http://blogs.abcnews.com/thenote/2009/04, quote. 147. Dorrien, The Obama Question, 207–216; Jerome R. Corsi, The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality (New York: Threshold, 2008); Corsi, Where’s the Birth Certificate? The Case That Barack Obama Is Not Eligible to Be President (Washington, DC: WND Books, 2011); Brad O’Leary, The Audacity of Deceit: Barack Obama’s War on American Values (Los Angeles: WND Books, 2008); Aaron Klein, The Manchurian President: Barack Obama’s Ties to Communists, Socialists, and Other Anti-American Extremists (Washington, DC: WND Books, 2010); Jack Cashill, Deconstructing Obama (New York: Threshold, 2011); Cashill, “Is Khalid al-Mansour the Man Behind Obama Myth?” WorldNetDaily, August 28, 2008, https://www.wnd .com/2008/08/73649/; Michelle Malkin, Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks, and Cronies (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2009); Pamela Geller, with Robert Spencer, The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America (New York: Threshold, 2010); Webster Griffon Tarpley, Obama: The Postmodern Coup (Joshua Tree, CA: Progressive, 2008); Dinesh D’Souza, “How Obama Thinks,” Forbes, September 27, 2010; D’Souza, The Roots of Obama’s Rage (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2010). 148. Chris Hedges, “The Obama Deception: Why Cornel West Went Ballistic,” truthdig, May 16, 2011, https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-obama-deception-why-cornelwest-went-ballistic/, quote. 149. Cornel West on Bill Moyers Journal, July 3, 2009, http://www.pbs.org/moyers /journal/07032009/profile.html; Hedges, “The Obama Deception,” quote. 150. Lesley Stahl, “Al Sharpton: The ‘Refined’ Agitator,” 60 Minutes, May 22, 2011, “for not having”; “Cornel West: Al Sharpton ‘the Bonafide House Negro of the Obama Plantation,” Real Clear Politics, August 31, 2013, https://www.realclearpolitics.com/ video/2013/08/31/cornel_west_al_sharpton_the_bonafide_house_negro_of_the_ obama_plantation.html, “prostituting” and “the bonafide.” 151. Michael Eric Dyson, The Black Presidency: Barack Obama and the Politics of Race in America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016), “like a black,” 295; “bootlickers,” 29; Dyson, “The Ghost of Cornel West,” New Republic, May 2015. 152. Krissah Thompson and Scott Wilson, “Obama on Trayvon Martin: ‘If I Had a Son He’d Look Like Trayvon,’ ” Washington Post, March 23, 2012, “If I had”; Jackie Calmes and Helene Cooper, “A Personal Note as Obama Speaks on Death of Boy,” New York Times, March 23, 2012; Aliyah Shahid, “Conservatives Blast President Obama’s Remarks on Trayvon Martin: He’s Race Baiting!” New York Daily News, March 24, 2012; White House, Office of the Press Secretary, “Remarks by the President on Trayvon Martin,” July 19, 2013, “Trayvon Martin.” 153. White House, “Remarks by the President on Trayvon Martin,” quotes.

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154. Abigail Thernstrom, “Obama’s Mistake on Trayvon Martin Case,” CNN Opinion, July 15, 2013, https://www.cnn.com/2013/07/15/opinion/thernstrom-trayvon-martinobama/index.html, quotes. 155. Kevin Johnson, “A President for Everyone, Except Black People,” Philadelphia Tribune, April 14, 2013. 156. Ibid., quotes. 157. Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, “The Girls Obama Forgot: My Brother’s Keeper Ignores Young Black Women,” New York Times, July 29, 2014, quotes. 158. Office of the White House, “President Obama Issues a Statement on the Death of Michael Brown,” August 12, 2014, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2014/08/12/ president-obama-issues-statement-death-michael-brown, “We should”; Nia-Malika Henderson, “Critics: Obama Should Step Up and Use His Bully Pulpit on Ferguson,” Washington Post, August 18, 2014, “to use” and “He needs”; Michael Eric Dyson, “Obama’s Remarks on Ferguson Are Tone Deaf and Disappointing,” Washington Post, August 22, 2014. 159. Bill Simmons, “President Obama and Bill Simmons: The GQ Interview,” GQ, November 17, 2015, https://www.gq.com/story/president-obama-bill-simmonsinterview-gq-men-of-the-year, quote. 160. “Transcript: Obama Delivers Eulogy for Charleston Pastor, the Reverend Clementa Pinckney,” Washington Post, June 26, 2015; “Full Text: Obama’s Remarks on Fatal Shooting in Charleston, SC,” Washington Post, June 18, 2015. 161. “Transcript: Obama Delivers Eulogy for Charleston Pastor.” 162. Ibid. 163. Office of the White House, “Remarks by the President at the NAACP Conference,” July 14, 2015, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2015/07/14/remarkspresident-naacp-conference, quotes.

chapter 7.   fr am e s o f ide nt it y and wo r l d h o us e s t r ug g l e 1. The White House, “President Barack Obama’s Inaugural Address,” January 21, 2009, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2009/01/21/president-barack-obamasinaugural-address, quote. 2. Gary Dorrien, “The Church’s Respectability Politics: Black Lives Matter Symposium,” Christian Century, March 8, 2016, https://www.christiancentury.org/article/2016-02 /churchs-respectability-politics; Brittney Cooper, “Jesus of the Resistance: Black Lives Matter Symposium,” Christian Century, March 8, 2016, https://www.christiancentury. org/article/2016-02/jesus-resistance; Anthea D. Butler, “The Challenge to Christians: Black Lives Matter Symposium,” Christian Century, March 1, 2016, https://www. christiancentury.org/article/2016-02/challenge-christians; Eboni Marshall Turman, “Black Lives Rising: Black Lives Matter Symposium,” March 7, 2016, https://www. christiancentury.org/article/2016-02/black-lives-rising. 3. Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, Achieving Our Humanity: The Idea of the Post-Racial Future (New York: Routledge, 2001); Touré, Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness? What It

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Means to Be Black Now (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011), 6–10; Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist (New York: One World, 2019). 4. Walter Earl Fluker, “President-Elect Barack Obama: Race Has Been Haunting This Election,” U.S. News and World Report, November 5, 2008, http://www.usnews.com/ articles/opinion/2008/11/05/president-elect-barack-obama-race-has-been-hauntingthis-election/comments/; Fluker, The Ground Has Shifted: The Future of the Black Church in Post-Racial America (New York: New York University Press, 2016), 16–42; Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987); Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992). 5. Fluker, The Ground Has Shifted, quotes, 44. 6. Ibid., quote, 4; “Interview with Walter Fluker, The Historymakers, November 12, 2018, https://www.thehistorymakers.org/biography/walter-fluker. 7. Fluker, The Ground Has Shifted, quotes, 10. 8. Walter Earl Fluker, “Introduction: The Failure of Ethical Leadership and the Challenge of Hope,” in The Stones That the Builders Rejected: The Development of Ethical Leadership from the Black Church Tradition, ed. Fluker (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 1998), “There is” and “The problem,” 1; “this inordinate” and “This sickness,” 2; Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978); Michael J. Sandel, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 133–174. 9. Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 80–82; Fluker, “Introduction: The Failure of Ethical Leadership and the Challenge of Hope,” 2–3. 10. Walter Brueggemann, “Blessed Are the History Makers,” in Brueggemann, Hope Within History (Atlanta: John Knox, 1987), “outside the time,” 498; Fluker, “Introduction: The Failure of Ethical Leadership and the Challenge of Hope,” 5; Richard John Neuhaus, “Who, Now, Will Shape the Meaning of America?” in Moral Issues and Christian Response, ed. Paul T. Jersild and Dale A. Johnson (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1988), 36–44; Gary Dorrien, Soul in Society: The Making and Renewal of Social Christianity (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995), 198–220. 11. Richard John Neuhaus, The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1984), quote, 237. 12. Richard John Neuhaus, The Catholic Moment: The Paradox of the Church in the Postmodern World (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987). 13. Neuhaus, The Naked Public Square, 121; Richard John Neuhaus, “Notes on the Culture Wars,” First Things 9 (January 1991): 61; Neuhaus, “The Feminist Faith,” First Things 2 (April 1990): 61; Neuhaus, “The Feminist Revelation,” First Things 18 (December 1991): 56–58; Gary Dorrien, “Interrogating Neoconservative Religion: Richard John Neuhaus, Reinhold Niebuhr, and the Politics of Moral Consensus,” Political Theology 14 (2013): 397–405. 14. Fluker, “Introduction: The Failure of Ethical Leadership and the Challenge of Hope,” “Because of,” 7; Walter Earl Fluker, Ethical Leadership: The Quest for Character,

Notes to Pages 427–431

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Civility, and Community (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2009), “at the intersection,” 16 and 23; “in the process,” 32. 15. Fluker, “Introduction: The Failure of Ethical Leadership and the Challenge of Hope,” 6–11; Fluker, Ethical Leadership, 175–189. 16. Clarence B. Jones and Joel Engel, What Would Martin Say? (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), “I was,” xvi; “pimp,” 33; “deserve no more,” 120–121; “I find it,” 121. 17. Lewis V. Baldwin, “Distorted Characterizations of Martin Luther King Jr. in the Conservative Mind,” in The Domestication of Martin Luther King Jr.: Clarence B. Jones, Right-Wing Conservatism, and the Manipulation of the King Legacy, ed. Lewis V. Baldwin and Rufus Burrow Jr. (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2013), 1–28; Rufus Burrow Jr., “Nonviolence and a Moral Universe: What Martin Might Say About War and Terrorism,” in Baldwin and Burrow, The Domestication of Martin Luther King Jr., 179– 201; Rosetta E. Ross and Shirley T. Geiger, “Leading in Challenging Times: Martin Luther King Jr., Ruby Hurley, and the Meaning of Black Leadership,” in Baldwin and Burrow, The Domestication of Martin Luther King Jr., 55–72, “unbelievable” and “so that,” 63; Cheryl Kirk-Duggan, “Drum Major for Justice or Dilettante of Dishonesty: Martin Luther King Jr., Moral Capital, and Hypocrisy of Messianic Myths,” in Baldwin and Burrow, The Domestication of Martin Luther King Jr., 100–109; Walter E. Fluker, “Looking for Martin: Black Leadership in an Era of Contested Postracism and Postblackness,” in Baldwin and Burrow, The Domestication of Martin Luther King Jr., 73–99, “tends to be,” 74. 18. Fluker, “Looking for Martin,” quote, 74. 19. Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and American Democracy (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1944); Fluker, “Looking for Martin,” quote, 85. 20. Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (Boston: Beacon, 1967), 167; Fluker, The Ground Has Shifted, 67–82. 21. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993); Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture Beyond the Color Line (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), quote, 15; Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005); J. Lorand Matory, Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationalism, and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 280–282. 22. Tracey E. Hucks, Yoruba Traditions and African American Religious Nationalism (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2012), Dianne Stewart-Diakite quoted, 47–48; Fluker, The Ground Has Shifted, “yet necessary” and “but are,” 85. 23. Fluker, The Ground Has Shifted, quote, 95; Milmon F. Harrison, Righteous Riches: The Word of Faith Movement in Contemporary African American Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Stephanie Mitchem, Name It and Claim It? Prosperity Preaching in the Black Church (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2007). 24. Fluker, “Looking for Martin,” 94. 25. Cheryl J. Sanders, Saints in Exile: The Holiness-Pentecostal Experience in African American Religion and Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Peter J. Paris, The Social Teaching of the Black Churches (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985), quote 59; Fluker, The Ground Has Shifted, 90–114.

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2 6. Fluker, The Ground Has Shifted, quotes, 107. 27. Martin Luther King Jr., Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story (1958; repr., Boston: Beacon, 1986), 88–95; King, The Measure of a Man (1959; repr., Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988), 54; Fluker, “Looking for Martin,” 96–97; L. Harold DeWolf, A Theology of the Living Church, rev. ed. (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1960), 155. 28. Fluker, “Looking for Martin,” “Fire demands” and “and other,” 98; Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), “high salvific,” 35; Fluker, The Ground Has Shifted, 119–120, “the many,” 121. 29. Fluker, The Ground Has Shifted, quote, 137–138. 30. Ibid., quote, 206. 31. Ibid., “but when,” 206–207; “a new,” 205; “Black churches,” 236. 32. Ibid., quote, 225. 33. “Interview with Lawrence Edward Carter Sr.,” The Historymakers, April 18, 2011, https://www.thehistorymakers.org/biography/lawrence-carter-41. 34. Lawrence Edward Carter Sr., A Baptist Preacher’s Buddhist Teacher: How My Interfaith Journey with Daisaku Ikeda Made Me a Better Christian (Santa Monica, CA: Middleway, 2018), quote, 60; Harold Dean Trulear, “It’s Not Easy Being Dean: From Kelsey to Carter and the Case for the Importance of Religion in the Historically Black College and University Context,” in In the Beginning: The Martin Luther King Jr. International Chapel at Morehouse College, ed. Echol Mix Jr. (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2015), 165–172; “Interview with Lawrence Edward Carter Sr.,” The Historymakers, April 18, 2011. 35. Lawrence Edward Carter, “Motivation and Preaching: Context and Analysis of Sermons by Two Preachers in Light of Abraham H. Maslow’s Theory of Need-Values” (Ph.D. diss., Boston University School of Theology, 1979); Carter, A Baptist Preacher’s Buddhist Teacher, 1–10; Trulear, “It’s Not Easy Being Dean,” 168–169. 36. Carter, A Baptist Preacher’s Buddhist Teacher, quotes, 4. 37. Ibid., quote, 6. 38. Ibid., 13–19; Richard Causton, The Buddha in Daily Life: An Introduction to the Buddhism of Nichiren Daishonin (Sutton, UK: Rider, 1995); Karel Dobbelaere, Soka Gakkai: From Lay Movement to Religion (Salt Lake City, UT: Signature, 2001). 39. Carter, A Baptist Preacher’s Buddhist Teacher, quotes, 18; Gary Dorrien, In a PostHegelian Spirit: Philosophical Theology as Idealistic Discontent (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2020), 113–164, 258–266. 40. Ernest Holmes, The Science of Mind (New York: R. M. McBride, 1926); Carter, A Baptist Preacher’s Buddhist Teacher, quote, 19. 41. Lawrence Edward Carter Sr., George David Miller, and Neelakanta Radhakrishnan, Global Ethical Options: In the Tradition of Gandhi, King, and Ikeda (New York: Weatherhill, 2001), 21–44; Carter, A Baptist Preacher’s Buddhist Teacher, quote, 72. 42. Lawrence Edward Carter Sr., “The Life of Benjamin Elijah Mays,” in Walking Integrity: Benjamin Elijah Mays, Mentor to Martin Luther King Jr., ed. Carter (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1998), 1–31; Carter, A Baptist Preacher’s Buddhist Teacher, quote, 76–77.

Notes to Pages 440–449

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43. Carter, A Baptist Preacher’s Buddhist Teacher, “A beloved” and “We must,” 86; “this was,” 93. 44. Robert M. Franklin, Liberating Visions: Human Fulfillment and Social Justice in African-American Thought (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1990), quote, 5; Franklin, Another Day’s Journey: Black Churches Confronting the American Crisis (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1997). 45. Robert M. Franklin, Moral Leadership: Integrity, Courage, Imagination (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2020). 46. Larry Crowe, “Interview with Reverend Eugene Rivers,” The Historymakers, February 12, 2007; Gary Dorrien, “Redeeming the Soul of America: Dialogue with Eugene Rivers,” October 11, 2018, John L. Loeb Jr. Institute for Religious Freedom, Institute on Religion and Democracy, National Churchill Library and Center, George Washington University, Washington, DC. 47. Sean P. Griffin, Black Brothers, Inc.: The Violent Rise and Fall of Philadelphia’s Black Mafia (Wrea Green, UK: Milo Books, 2005); Crowe, “Interview with Reverend Eugene Rivers”; Deliverance Evangelistic Church, “Get to Know Us: Our History,” https://decministry.org/. 48. Crowe, “Interview with Reverend Eugene Rivers.” 49. Sandy Maben and Aaron M. Gallegos, “National Ten Point Coalition,” Sojourners (July–August 1997), https://sojo.net/magazine/july-august-1997/national-ten-pointcoalition; John Leland, “Savior of the Streets: An Ex-Gang Member Who Went to Harvard, Gene Rivers Is an Impolitic Preacher on the Cutting Edge of a Hot Idea: Can Religion Fight Crime and Save Kids?” Newsweek, June 1, 1998, http://www. maryellenmark.com/bibliography/magazines/article/newsweek/savior-of-the-streets637520286288994843/N. 50. Eugene F. Rivers III, “On the Responsibility of Intellectuals in the Age of Crack,” Boston Review, October 1992, http://bostonreview.net/reverend-eugene-rivers-on-theresponsiblity-of-intellectuals-in-the-age-of-crack, quotes. 51. Boston Review forum at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, November 17, 1992, reprinted in Boston Review, December 1992, http://bostonreview.net/archives/BR19.1/ responsibility.html, quotes. 52. Leland, “Savior of the Streets,” quotes. 53. Gustav Niebuhr, “A Point Man for the Bush Church-State Collaboration,” New York Times, April 7, 2001, “their private”; Eva T. Thorne and Eugene F. Rivers III, “Faith in Politics?” Boston Review, April 1, 2001, http://bostonreview.net/forum/eva-t-thorneeugene-f-rivers-iii-faith-politics, “To be.” 54. Dan Kennedy, “Eugene Rivers’s Moment,” Boston Phoenix, November 10, 2006, quotes. 55. Ibid., quote. 56. Keith O’Brien, “Fiery Dorchester Pastor Undeterred by Controversy,” Boston.com, June 21, 2008, http://archive.boston.com/news/local/articles/2008/06/21/fiery_dorchester _pastor_undeterred_by_controversy/, quote. 57. Eugene F. Rivers III and Jacqueline Rivers, “A New Affirmation of Marriage,” Inside the Vatican, December 2014, excerpts in “Eugene and Jacqueline Rivers—Scholar

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Notes to Pages 450–456

and Protestant Minister,” Inside the Vatican.com, December 2014, https://insidethevatican.com/magazine/people/eugene-jacqueline-rivers-scholar-protestant-minister/? gclid=EAIaIQobChMIlOj488Dq7gIVmLWzCh3fNgWNEAMYASAAEgKUr, quotes. 58. Eugene F. Rivers III, “Principalities and Powers: King and the Holy Spirit,” Plough Quarterly 16 (May 2016): 44–49, “that must” and “only dimly,” 45; “inhibited,” 46. 59. Ibid., quote, 49. 60. Peter Mommsen, interview with Eugene F. Rivers III and Jacqueline C. Rivers, “Black Lives Matter and the Church,” Plough.com, June 29, 2020, https://www.plough.com /en/topics/justice/social-justice/racial-justice/black-lives-matter-and-the-church, quotes. 61. “ ‘I Anticipate Bigotry’ at Amy Coney Barrett’s Confirmation Hearing Tomorrow: Rev. Eugene Rivers III,” Fox News, October 11, 2020, https://video.foxnews.com/ v/6199601539001#sp=show-clips; Rivers and Jacqueline Rivers, “Defense of Conscience,” Voices: A Blog from the Bruderhof, September 24, 2020, https://www.bruderhof.com/en /voices-blog/justice/defense-of-conscience-reverend-eugene-rivers, quotes. 62. Robert George, “Letter of Gratitude to Most Rev. Charles E. Blake, Presiding Bishop, Church of God in Christ, Rev. Eugene F. Rivers, and Others,” Mirror of Justice: A Blog Dedicated to the Development of Catholic Legal Theory, October 5, 2020, https:// mirrorofjustice.blogs.com/mirrorofjustice/2020/10/letter-of-gratitude-to-most-revcharles-e-blake-presiding-bishop-church-of-god-in-christ-and-others.html. 63. Rev. Traci Blackmon, “Confession of a Woman Who Preaches,” New World Writing, September 25, 2020, https://newworldwriting.net/rev-traci-blackmon/, quote. 64. Rev. Traci Blackmon, “Marching with God: Missouri Reverend Putting Faith in Action,” Ebony, August 12, 2016, https://www.ebony.com/faith_spirituality/traciblackmon-activist-minister/; United Church of Christ, “Meet Our Officers,” 2020, https://www.ucc.org/ourfaithourvote/ourfaithourvote_about/about-us_meet-ourofficers/; Christ the King UCC, “Our Ministers,” 2020, http://ctk-ucc.org/about-us.html. 65. Traci D. Blackmon, “The Blood Did It: Why Michael Brown’s Death Was Different,” Sojourners, September 12, 2014, https://sojo.net/articles/faith-action/blood-did-it-whymichael-browns-death-was-different, quotes. 66. Traci Blackmon, interview by Bill Goettler, “Justice Work and the Gospel: A Conversation with Traci Blackmon,” Yale Divinity School Communications Office, January 29, 2018, https://divinity.yale.edu/news/justice-work-and-gospel-conversationtraci-blackmon. 67. Blackmon, “Justice Work and the Gospel,” quotes; Ferguson Commission, “STL: Positive Change,” https://stlpositivechange.org/commission-work/transition-period. 68. Robert D. McFadden and Michael M. Grynbaum, “Rush Limbaugh Dies at 70; Turned Talk Radio into a Right-Wing Attack Machine,” New York Times, February 17, 2021, quotes; Jeremy W. Peters, “Rush Limbaugh’s Legacy of Venom: As Trump Rose, ‘It All Sounded Familiar,’ ” New York Times, February 17, 2021. 69. Joe Helm, “A Stark Contrast Inside and Outside a Charlottesville Church During the Torch March,” Washington Post, August 19, 2017; Lilly Workneh, “Rev. Traci Blackmon Calls Out Trump’s Blatant Lies About Charlottesville,” Huffpost: Black Voices, August

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16, 2017, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/traci-blackmon-trump-lies-charlottesville_n_ 5994a805e4b06ef724d602de, quote; Blackmon, “Justice and the Gospel”; David F. Potter, “ ‘White Supremacy Will Not Win Here’: People of Faith to Counter-Protest Alt-Right Rally in Charlottesville,” Sojourners, August 8, 2017, https://sojo.net/articles/ white-supremacy-will-not-win-here-people-faith-counter-protest-alt-right-rally; Chris Suarez, “Faith Leaders Gather on the Eve of ‘Hate-Driven’ Unite the Right Rally,” Daily Progress, August 11, 2017, https://dailyprogress.com/news/local/faith-leadersgather-on-the-eve-of-hate-driven-unite/article_b1f33600-7f02-11e7-9b3c-7308e1924381. html. 70. William J. Barber II, with Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, The Third Reconstruction: Moral Mondays, Fusion Politics, and the Rise of a New Justice Movement (Boston: Beacon, 2016), quote, 3; Lisa Rab, “Meet the Preacher Behind Moral Mondays,” Mother Jones, April 14, 2014, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/04/williambarber-moral-monday-north-carolina/. 71. C. Leonard Allen and Richard T. Hughes, Discovering Our Roots: The Ancestry of Churches of Christ (Abilene, TX: ACU Press, 1988), 10–58; Lester G. McAllister and William E. Tucker, Journey in Faith: A History of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 1975); Barber, The Third Reconstruction, 6–8. 72. Jelani Cobb, “William Barber Takes on Poverty and Race in the Age of Trump,” New Yorker, May 7, 2008, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/05/14/william-barbertakes-on-poverty-and-race-in-the-age-of-trump; Barber, The Third Reconstruction, 10. 73. Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony (Nashville: Abingdon, 1989), quote, 116. 74. Stanley Hauerwas, After Christendom? How the Church Is to Behave If Freedom, Justice, and a Christian Nation Are Bad Ideas (Nashville: Abingdon, 1991). 75. Barber, The Third Reconstruction, quote, 12; William J. Barber II, with Barbara Zelter, Forward Together: A Moral Message for the Nation (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2014), 122. 76. William C. Turner Jr., “Black Evangelicalism: Theology, Politics, and Race,” Journal of Religious Thought 45 (Winter–Spring 1989): 40–56; Turner, “The Musicality of Black Preaching: A Phenomenology,” Journal of Black Sacred Music 2 (Spring 1988): 21–34. 77. Barber, The Third Reconstruction, 20–26, quote, 20. 78. Ibid., quote, 28. 79. Ibid., “just crying,” 32; “my amputee,” 33. 80. Hauerwas, After Christendom, 93–112; Stanley Hauerwas, In Good Company: The Church as Polis (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), 51–78. 81. Barber, The Third Reconstruction, 41; Cobb, “William Barber Takes on Poverty and Race in the Age of Trump.” 82. Katharine Q. Seelye, “Obama Backers Mobilize in Bid to Wrest State from Republican Grip,” New York Times, August 16, 2008; Tim Shipman, “Conservative Backlash Begins Against Barack Obama,” Telegraph, November 15, 2008; Patrik Jonsson, “After Obama’s Win, White Backlash Festers in U.S.,” Christian Science Monitor, November 17, 2008. 83. Barber, Forward Together, quotes, 121; Campbell Robertson, “North Carolina Voters Pass Same-Sex Marriage Ban,” New York Times, May 8, 2012; Rachel Weiner, “North Carolina Passes Gay Marriage Ban Amendment One,” Washington Post, May 8, 2012.

562

Notes to Pages 466–472

8 4. Barber, Forward Together, 11–25, quote, 23. 85. U.S. Supreme Court, Shelby County v. Holder, 570 U.S. 529 (2013), https://www.oyez .org/cases/2012/12-96; Barber, Forward Together, 28. 86. White House, “Statement by the President on the Supreme Court Ruling on Shelby County v. Holder,” June 25, 2013, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-pressoffice/2013/06/25/statement-president-supreme-court-ruling-shelby-county-v-holder; Jackie Calmes, Robbie Brown, and Campbell Robertson, “On Voting Case, Reaction from ‘Deeply Disappointed’ to ‘It’s About Time,’ ” New York Times, June 25, 2013; John Lewis, “John Lewis and Others React to the Supreme Court’s Voting Rights Act Ruling,” Washington Post, June 25, 2013, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions /john-lewis-and-others-react-to-the-supreme-courts-voting-rights-act-ruling/2013/06/25 /acb96650-ddda-11e2-b797-cbd4cb13f9c6_story.html?utm_term=.7foe408d9bdd, quotes. 87. Barber, Forward Together, quotes, 57. 88. Ibid., “This is,” 71; “Dad,” 75. 89. William J. Barber II, “The Need to Know Who We Are in Times Like These,” sermon delivered at Washington Hebrew Congregation, January 13, 2017, in Revive Us Again: Vision and Action in Moral Organizing, ed. Barber, with Liz Theoharis and Rick Lowery (Boston: Beacon, 2018), “We will,” 211; Barber, “We Shall Not Be Moved,” speech delivered to the 2017 National NAACP Convention, Baltimore Convention Center, July 25, 2017, in Revive Us Again, “racist,” 218; “Trump is,” 219; “Tell Trump,” 221. 90. Laurie Goodstein, “Ministers Look to Revive Martin Luther King’s 1968 Poverty Campaign,” New York Times, December 3, 2017; Frank Witsil, “Detroit Comeback Is Leaving Poor Behind, Activists Say,” Detroit Free Press, February 22, 2018; Heather Dockray, “50 Years Later, MLK’s Poor People’s Campaign Is Back—and More Needed Than Ever,” Mashable, April 4, 2018, https://mashable.com/2018/04/04/poor-peoplecampaign-mlk-revival/. 91. William J. Barber II, sermon delivered at National Cathedral in Washington, DC, June 3, 2018, in Barber, We Are Called to Be a Movement (New York: Workman, 2020), “I believe,” 61; “There is,” 63–64. 92. Jack Johnson, “ ‘Take Away Our Poverty Not Our Children?’: Poor People’s Campaign Caps Off 40 Days of Action,” Truthout, June 24, 2018, https://truthout.org/articles/poorpeoples-campaign-caps-off-40-days-of-action. 93. Poor People’s Campaign, We Rise: A Movement Songbook, https://www. poorpeoplescampaign.org/arts-culture/we-rise-a-movement-songbook/; Poor People’s Campaign, “Justseeds Artists’ Cooperative: Poor People’s Campaign Portfolio,” https:// www.poorpeoplescampaign.org/arts-culture/justseeds-portfolio/. 94. John Eligon, “From Policing to Climate Change, a Sweeping Call for a ‘Moral Revolution,’ ” New York Times, June 20, 2020; Karen Tumulty, “Trump Used His Rally to Air His Personal Grievances; He Could Learn from Another Event,” Washington Post, June 21, 2020; Jack Jenkins, “Poor People’s Campaign Stages Massive Online Demonstration,” Religion News Service, June 20, 2020, https://religionnews.com /2020/06/20/poor-peoples-campaign-stages-massive-online-demonstration/. 95. Associated Press, “Biden Warmly Welcomed in Selma as Dems Court Black Voters,”

Notes to Pages 472–476

563

U.S. News and World Report, March 1, 2020, https://www.usnews.com/news/politics /articles/2020-03-01/democrats-gather-for-bloody-sunday-commemoration-in-selma, quote; Jay Reeves, “Democrats Gather for ‘Bloody Sunday’ Commemoration in Selma,” March 1, 2020, https://abcnews4.com/news/connect-to-congress/democrats-gather-forbloody-sunday-commemoration-in-selma; Jon Meacham, His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the Power of Hope (New York: Random House, 2020), 4–5. 96. Greg Bluestein, “As They Mourn John Lewis, Georgia Democrats Must Quickly Choose a Successor,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, July 19, 2020; Bluestein, “Democrats Tap Nikema Williams to Replace John Lewis on November Ballot,” Atlanta JournalConstitution, July 20, 2020; Maya Prabhu, “Meet Nikema Williams, the Newly Elected Leader of Georgia’s Democrats,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, January 28, 2019; Lisa Rayam, “Candidate Robert Franklin Seeks to Represent 5th Congressional District,” WABE, August 13, 2020, https://www.wabe.org/5th-congressional-district-candidaterobert-franklin/; Rick Rojas, “Battle to Fill John Lewis’s Congressional Seat for 1 Month Moves to Runoff,” New York Times, September 29, 2020; Jeff Amy, “Hall Wins Runoff to Briefly Fill Seat of Late Rep. John Lewis,” Associated Press, December 2, 2020, https://apnews.com/article/election-2020-georgia-elections-house-elections-john-lewis6f16e63d6260a8d7f04d8f7b7572ab83. 97. Dana Clark Felty, “From Kayton Homes to King’s Pulpit,” Savannah Morning News, October 6, 2006; Astead Herndon, “Raphael Warnock’s Win Is One for the History Books,” New York Times, January 5, 2021; Eugene Scott, “What You Need to Know About Raphael Warnock,” Washington Post, January 6, 2021; Raphael G. Warnock, A Way Out of No Way: A Memoir of Truth, Transformation, and the New American Story (New York: Penguin Random House, 2022), 3–36. 98. Shaila Dewan and Mike Baker, “Raphael Warnock, from the Pulpit to Politics, Doesn’t Shy from ‘Uncomfortable’ Truths,” New York Times, January 2, 2021. 99. Warnock, A Way Out of No Way, 99–123, “at churches,” 122; Richard Fausset, “Can Raphael Warnock Go from the Pulpit to the Senate?” New York Times, November 1, 2020, quotes; Fausset, “Citing ‘Soul of Our Democracy,’ Pastor of Dr. King’s Church Enters Senate Race,” New York Times, January 30, 2020; Ricardo Lewis, “From Public Housing to the People’s Pastor: Savannah Native Uses Pulpit as Platform for Change,” WSAV-TV, February 15, 2016, https://www.wsav.com/news/from-public-housing-to-thepeoples-pastor-savannah-native-uses-pulpit-as-platform-for-change/. 100. Raphael G. Warnock, The Divided Mind of the Black Church: Theology, Piety, and Public Witness (New York: New York University Press, 2014). 101. Ibid., 16–17; Peter Paris, The Social Teaching of the Black Churches (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985), 76. 102. Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); Raboteau, A Fire in the Bones: Reflections on African-American Religious History (Boston: Beacon, 1995); Gayraud S. Wilmore, Black Religion and Black Radicalism: An Interpretation of the Religious History of African Americans, 3rd ed. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1998), 99–124; Warnock, The Divided Mind of the Black Church, 13–31. 103. Warnock, The Divided Mind of the Black Church, 31–48.

564

Notes to Pages 476–483

104. E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Church in America, and C. Eric Lincoln, The Black Church Since Frazier, in one vol. (New York: Schocken Books, 1974), “Out of,” 107; Warnock, The Divided Mind of the Black Church, “The death,” 86. 105. Thomas J. J. Altizer, The Gospel of Christian Atheism (London: Collins, 1967); Altizer, The Descent into Hell: A Study of the Radical Reversal of the Christian Consciousness (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1970). 106. J. Kameron Carter, Race: A Theological Account (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 14–35; Anthony Pinn, Varieties of African American Religious Experience (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1998); Pinn, Terror and Triumph: The Nature of Black Religion (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003). 107. Warnock, The Divided Mind of the Black Church, 111. 108. James H. Harris, Pastoral Theology: A Black Church Perspective (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991), 57–62; Dennis W. Wiley, “Black Theology, the Black Church, and the African American Community,” in Black Theology: A Documentary History, ed. James H. Cone and Gayraud S. Wilmore, 2 vols. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1993), 2:127– 138; Wiley, “The Concept of the Church in the Works of Howard Thurman” (Ph.D. diss., Union Theological Seminary, 1988). 109. Warnock, Divided Mind of the Black Church, “agonized,” 115; James H. Evans, We Have Been Believers: An African-American Systematic Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992), “cultural” and “abstract,” 1; Gayraud S. Wilmore, “Black Theology: Review and Assessment,” Voices from the Third World 5 (December 1982): 6–10, “It was,” 10. 110. Warnock, The Divided Mind of the Black Church, quote, 139. 111. Ibid., quotes, 158. 112. Ibid., 162–166. 113. Ibid., quotes, 174. 114. Ibid., “Sanctified” and “ivory,” 175; “glaring,” 182; “the pietistic,” 183. 115. Ibid., quote, 186. 116. M. S. Handler, “James Baldwin Rejects Despair Despite Race ‘Drift and Danger,’ ” New York Times, June 3, 1963, “every artist” and “is the worst”; James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (1963), in Collected Essays, ed. Toni Morrison (New York: Library of America, 1998), “are probably,” 326; Baldwin, “Autobiographical Notes,” in Collected Essays, “out of,” 8; James H. Cone, Said I Wasn’t Gonna Tell Nobody (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2018), “White people,” 171. 117. Vincent W. Lloyd, Religion of the Field Negro: On Black Secularism and Black Theology (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018), 5–38. 118. Ben Sanders III, “ ‘Traditioning’ Blackness: A Theo-Ethical Analysis of Black Identity in Black Theological Discourse” (Ph.D. diss., University of Denver/Iliff School of Theology, 2018). 119. Paul Kane, “A Confluence of Events Has Created a Moment for a Georgia Pastor to Take a Senate Seat Away from Warring Republicans,” Washington Post, August 8, 2020, “We have”; Kelly Loeffler, “Attila the Hun,” YouTube, September 21, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pfvEFPvVGA, “more conservative”; Mitchell Atencio, “What Warnock’s Critics Get Wrong About the Black Baptist Tradition,” Sojourners, November 24, 2020, https://sojo.net/articles/what-warnocks-critics-get-

Notes to Pages 484–489

565

wrong-about-black-baptist-tradition, “If you’re black” and “Nothing”; Ryan Mills, “Raphael Warnock’s Lifelong Education in Black Liberation Theology and Radical Politics,” National Review, December 11, 2020, https://www.nationalreview.com /news/raphael-warnocks-lifelong-education-in-black-liberation-theology-and-radicalpolitics/; Steven Harmon, “In Georgia, Demonizing Black Liberation Theology Yet Again,” Baptist News Global, November 17, 2020, https://baptistnews.com/article/ingeorgia-demonizing-black-liberation-theology-yet-again/#.YCHd8uBOlm8. 120. Bernice A. King, “Raphael Warnock,” Time.com, February 17, 2021, https://time.com/ collection/time100-next-2021/5937697/raphael-warnock/, quote; Aaron Morrison, “Senate Race Thrusts ‘Black America’s Church’ into Spotlight,” Christian Century, February 10, 2021, 17–18; Greg Bluestein, “Who Could Challenge Raphael Warnock in 2022,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, February 24, 2021. Warnock, A Way Out of No Way, 14–15. 121. Robert Gooding-Williams, In the Shadow of Du Bois: Afro-American Political Thought in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 66–129; Gooding-Williams, “Philosophy of History and Social Critique in The Souls of Black Folk,” Social Science Information 26 (1987): 106–108; Lawrence D. Bobo, “Reclaiming a Du Boisian Perspective on Racial Attitudes,” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 568 (March 2000): 186–202; Adolph L. Reed Jr., W. E. B. Du Bois and American Political Thought: Fabianism and the Color Line (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 107–125; Ernest Allen Jr., “Du Boisian Double Consciousness: The Unsustainable Argument,” Massachusetts Review 43 (2002): 215–217; Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 111–145; Gilroy, Against Race, 51–52. 122. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), #178–196, 111–119; Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Transcendentalist” (1842), in Emerson, Nature, Addresses, and Lectures, ed. Robert E. Spiller and Alfred R. Ferguson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), 201–216; W. E. B. Du Bois, “Strivings of the Negro People,” Atlantic Monthly, August 1897, 194–198; Dorrien, In a Post-Hegelian Spirit, 113–164, 443–503. 123. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1903), 3. 124. Terrence L. Johnson, Tragic Soul-Life: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Moral Crisis Facing American Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 125. Cheryl A. Kirk-Duggan, “African American Spirituals: Confronting and Exorcising Evil Through Song,” in A Troubling in My Soul: Womanist Perspectives on Evil and Suffering, ed. Emilie M. Townes (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1993), 152–156, “forces” and “the retention,” 155; Kirk-Duggan, Sacred and Secular in African American Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), “chants of,” 504; Kirk-Duggan, Baptized Rage, Transformed Grief (Eugene, OR: Resource Publications, 2017). 126. Eboni Marshall Turman, Toward a Womanist Ethic of Incarnation: Black Bodies, the Black Church, and the Council of Chalcedon (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), quote, 3. 127. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, quotes, 2. 128. Turman, Toward a Womanist Ethic of Incarnation, “as depicting,” 79; “that is” and “inscribing,” 80.

566

Notes to Pages 490–494

129. Ibid., quote, 83; Sarah Coakley, “What Does Chalcedon Solve and What Does It Not? Some Reflections on the Status and Meaning of the Chalcedonian ‘Definition,’ ” in The Incarnation, ed. Stephen T. Davis, Daniel Kendall, S.J., and Gerald O’Collins, S.J. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 161–162; Christopher Morse, Not Every Spirit: A Dogmatics of Christian Disbelief (New York: Continuum, 2009), 139–166. 130. Turman, Toward a Womanist Ethic of Incarnation, quotes, 160. 131. Eboni Marshall Turman, “Black Women’s Faith, Black Women’s Flourishing,” Christian Century, February 28, 2019, https://www.christiancentury.org/article/ critical-essay/black-women-s-faith-black-women-s-flourishing, quotes. 132. Ibid., quote. 133. Paul C. Taylor, “Moral Perfectionism,” in To Shape a New World: Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King Jr., ed. Tommie Shelby and Brandon M. Terry (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2018), 35–57. 134. Dorrien, In a Post-Hegelian Spirit, 205–266, 339–374; Borden Parker Bowne, Theory of Thought and Knowledge (New York: American Book Co., 1897); Bowne, Metaphysics (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1898); Albert C. Knudson, The Philosophy of Personalism (New York: Abingdon, 1927). 135. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (1934; repr., New York: Macmillan, 1973); Kant, Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith (1928; repr., Oxford: Clarendon, 1973), 3–39; Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), trans. Lewis White Beck, with critical essays edited by Robert Paul Wolff (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969); Kant, Critique of Practical Reason (1788), trans. Lewis White Beck (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949); Kant, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone (1793), trans. Theodore M. Greene and Hoyt H. Hudson (1793; Chicago: Open Court, 1934); Gary Dorrien, Kantian Reason and Hegelian Spirit: The Idealistic Logic of Modern Theology (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 23–83; Dorrien, In a Post-Hegelian Spirit, 29–72. 136. Walter G. Muelder, “Individual Totalities in Ernst Troeltsch’s Philosophy of History” (Ph.D. diss., Boston University, 1933); Muelder, Moral Law in Christian Social Ethics (Richmond, VA: John Knox, 1966), 61–119; Muelder, The Ethical Edge of Christian Theology: Forty Years of Communitarian Personalism (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1983), 6, 22; Muelder, “Communitarian Dimensions of the Moral Laws,” in The Boston Personalist Tradition in Philosophy, Social Ethics, and Theology, ed. Paul Deats and Carol Robb (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1986), 237–239. 137. Edgar S. Brightman, A Philosophy of Religion (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1940), 344– 358; Brightman, Person and Reality: An Introduction to Metaphysics, ed. Peter A. Bertocci (New York: Ronald Press, 1958), 34–74. 138. Martin Luther King Jr., “A Comparison of the Conceptions of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Nelson Wieman” (Ph.D. diss., Boston University, 1955), in The Papers of Martin Luther King Jr., ed. Clayborne Carson, 7 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992–2014), 2:339–544; King, Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1958), 88–89; Howard Thurman, The Creative Encounter: An Interpretation of Religion and the Social Witness (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1954), 19–55; Thurman, The Search for

Notes to Pages 495–499

567

Common Ground: An Inquiry into the Basis of Man’s Experience of Community (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), 1–7. 139. Thurman, The Creative Encounter, 19–55; Thurman, The Search for Common Ground, quote, xiii. 140. Thurman, The Creative Encounter, quotes, 20. 141. Ibid., “the individual,” 22; “smell,” 23; “the individual” and “there are,” 24. 142. Ibid., “It is,” 24; “holding,” 29. 143. Martin Luther King Jr., “The Dimensions of a Complete Life,” in King, The Measure of a Man (1959; repr., Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1988), 48. For relational-ecological versions of personal idealism, see Erazim Kohák, The Embers and the Stars: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Moral Sense of Nature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); Kohák, The Green Halo: A Bird’s-Eye View of Ecological Ethics (Chicago: Open Court, 2000); Frederick Ferré, “Personalism and the Dignity of Nature,” Philosophical Forum 2 (Spring 1986): 1–28; Harold H. Oliver, A Relational Metaphysic (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981); Oliver, “Relational Personalism,” Personalist Forum 5 (Spring 1989): 27–42; Kitaro Nishida, An Inquiry into the Good, trans. Masao Abe and Christopher Ives (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990); Mark Y. A. Davies, “Nature, Persons, and Value: Ecological Sentiments in Boston Personalism” (Ph.D. diss., Boston University, 2001). 144. Gregory C. Ellison II, ed., Anchored in the Current: Discovering Howard Thurman as Educator, Activist, Guide, and Prophet (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2020); Kipton E. Jensen, Howard Thurman: Philosophy, Civil Rights, and the Search for Common Ground (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2019); Amanda Brown, The Fellowship Church: Howard Thurman and the Twentieth-Century Religious Left (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021); Peter Eisenstadt, Against the Hounds of Hell: A Life of Howard Thurman (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2021). 145. Thurman, The Search for Common Ground, “a unique” and “There are,” 88; “An unconscious,” 89; “a halt,” 103. 146. Ibid., quotes, 104. 147. King, Where Do We Go, “however deeply,” 177; Vincent Harding, “Toward a Darkly Radiant Vision of America’s Truth,” Cross Currents 37 (Spring 1987): 1–16, quote, 15.

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INDEX

Page numbers in italics indicate photographs. Aaron, Billye, 93 Abernathy, Juanita, 78 Abernathy, Ralph David, 5, 34–35, 39, 78–80, 104, 116, 120–125 abolitionism, Black social gospel and, 2–3 Abrams, Stacey, 29, 471–73 Abyssinian Baptist Church (Harlem), 5, 200–204 Abzug, Bella, 125 academia: Black social gospel and, 6, 17; womanist theology and, 20 Adams, Theodore, 81–82 Adderley, Cannonball, 129 Adkins-Jones, Timothy, 24 Adrian College, 208 affirmative action, neoconservative critique of, 74–75 Affirmative Discrimination (Glazer), 75 AFL-CIO, 126 Africa: Black American cultural roots in, 223–24, 319–20; Communism in, 69–70; Cone’s interest in, 217–18; Jackson in, 170–71, 177–80; Proctor in, 198–99; Young’s work in, 56–72, 97–103 Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), 98–99

African diaspora theory, 430 African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME), 14, 190; Grant’s criticism of, 262–66; liberationism in, 17; women and LGBTQ community and, 17; women ministers in, 262. See also AME Zion Church African National Congress (ANC), 49, 62 African religions, Black theology and, 216, 227–29, 383, 386–87 African slave trade, 30 Afro-American Council, 3, 18 Afro-American League, 3 Afrocentrism: Anderson and, 373; Black theologians and, 12; Roberts’s Africentrism and, 16, 231–32, 479; sexuality and, 324–28; womanist theology and, 284 Afro-Christianity, Carter’s comments on, 257–60 Afro-Saxon Congregationalism, 35–36 Agnew, Spiro, 46 Ahlstrom, Sydney E., 252 Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), 83 Ain’t I a Woman (hooks), 358–67

569

570

Index

Albright, Madeleine, 98, 177 Ali, Muhammad, 94, 123 Allen, Ernest, 485–86 Allen, Ivan, Jr., 45, 47–48 Allen, Richard, 265 Allende, Salvador, 50 Alston, Lisa Young, 93 “Alternative Approaches and Ways and Means with the United Nations System for Improving the Effective Enjoyment of Human Rights” (UN Resolution), 65–66 AME Church. See African Methodist Episcopal Church America and Americans: democracy and inequality and, 30–33; terminology of, xi America magazine, 279 American Academy of Religion, 20, 220, 279, 302, 329 American Baptist Association, 19 American Baptist Church, 383 American Baptist Health and Pension Plan, 199 American Baptist Home Mission Society, 194 American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), 44, 139 American Communist Party, 340 American Equal Rights Association, 265 American exceptionalism, Fluker’s critique of, 425 American Federation of Government Employees, 470 American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, 470 American Jewish Congress (AJC), 73 American Missionary Association, 244 American Postal Workers Union, 470 Ames, Edward Scribner, 376–77 AME Zion Church, 252, 326–27, 470 Amos ’n’ Andy (television show), 300 “And All the Colored Folks Is Cursed: The Impact of HIV-AIDS on the African American Community” (Townes), 297

Anderson, Evelyn, 370 Anderson, Flora, 370 Anderson, Frederick, 370 Anderson, Victor, 16, 21–22, 251, 256, 259, 369–82, 390, 479 Anglo-American Plan for Zimbabwe, 57, 66–69 Angola: CIA and civil war in, 51, 55–56; Cuban support for, 51, 55–57, 62; Portuguese colonialism in, 48–49; Young’s diplomacy over, 67–72 Annan, Kofi, 179 Another Day’s Journey (Franklin), 441 anticolonialism: Black social gospel and, 4; Black theology and, 236–37; hooks and, 358; Jackson on, 133–35; Young and, 48, 53–72 anti-essentialism, Fluker on, 430 Anti-Lynching Bureau, 18 anti-lynching movement, 18 antiwar movement, 32, 116 apartheid: protests of, 86–87; Young’s activism against, 48–50, 57–58 Apostolic Church of God (Chicago), 407 Aptheker, Herbert, 246 Arab League, 141 Arafat, Yasser, 70–72, 76, 137–39, 145 Archer-Daniels-Midland, 81, 100 Argus, 100 Aristotle, 31, 390 Armenia, Soviet Union and, 170 Armstrong, Samuel, 192 Aronowitz, Stanley, 336–38 Arrington, Richard, 141 Art of Loving (Fromm), 366 Arutyunyan, Suren, 170 Asante, Molefi Kete, 324 Ashe, Arthur, 49 Asia Monitor Resource Centre, 96 Askew, Reuben, 144 Assad, Hafez, 142–43 assimilationist ideology, 2; Cone’s rejection of, 209; King and, 13 Association of Flight Attendants, 470

Index Athansius, 228 Atkinson, Rich, 145 Atlanta: Black church activism in, 471–84; Black colleges in, 42; Black political activism in, 29–30, 35, 40–44, 471–84; Black social gospel in, 26, 441–42; business community in, 40–41, 46, 50, 88–90, 99; civil rights movement in, 32, 35; Maynard as mayor of, 47–48; New South coalition and, 52; Olympic Games of 1996 bid by, 82, 90–95; white flight from, 47–48; white leadership of, 47–48; Young as mayor of, 81–84; Young’s career in, 8–9, 80–95 Atlanta Business League, 82 Atlanta Chamber of Commerce, 87–88, 94 Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games, 94 Atlanta Community Relations Commission, 44 Atlanta Compromise Speech of 1895 (Washington), 41 Atlanta Constitution, 41, 48 Atlanta Convention and Visitors Bureau, 82 Atlanta Exposition, 41 Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 92 Atlanta Life Insurance Company, 41, 43 Atlanta Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games, 82, 93–95 Atlanta Public Library, 42 Atlanta University, 42 Aubrey, Edwin E., 196 Aubrey, Gladys Topping, 196 “Audacity of Hope” (Wright sermon), 398 Augustine (Saint), 228 “Autobiographical Notes” (Baldwin), 482 Axelrod, David, 400 Azusa Christian Community, 26–27, 444, 446 back-to-Africa movement, 2 Bacote, Clarence, 44, 47

571

Bagnall, Robert, 3 Bailey, Randall, 232 Baker, Ella, 18, 332–33, 469 Baker, Houston A., Jr., 374, 405 Baker-Fletcher, Karen, 21–22, 283, 321, 382, 386, 393 Baldwin, James, 74, 130, 153, 298, 321–22, 333, 373, 481–82 Baldwin, Lewis V., 428 Baltimore Sun, 181 Bambara, Toni Cade, 389 Baptist theology, Black churches and, 188–89 Baraka, Amiri (LeRoi Jones), 353 Barber, Eleanor, 457 Barber, Rebecca (McLean), 459, 462 Barber, William, Sr., 457–58 Barber, William II, xxi, 25–26, 28–29, 452, 456–71 Barber-Scotia College, 269 Barbour, J. Pius, 3–4, 195 Barrett, Amy Coney, 451 Barrow, Clyde, 129 Barrow, Willie, 6, 12, 128–30 Barry, Marion, 141, 148, 171 Barth, Karl: Black theology and, 189, 229, 257; Cone and influence of, 207, 210–11, 213, 216, 220, 319; King and, 13 Barton, Josef, 291 Beale, Frances, 264 Beck, Glenn, 405 Beckel, Bob, 149, 156 Begin, Menachem, 137–38 Beker, Christiaan, 354 Belafonte, Harry, 40, 43, 56 Bellah, Robert, 30–31 Beloved (Morrison), 240–41, 295, 421 beloved community, 497 Bennett, Fred, 39, 43–44, 118 Bennett, John C., 75 Bennett, Lerone, Jr., 252 Bennett College, 262 Berg, Barbara, 360 Bethel, Lorraine, 360

572

Index

Bevel, James, 15, 38–39, 104, 116–18, 121 Beyers Naudé, C. F., 64 Beyond Ontological Blackness (Anderson), 371–72, 375 Bibb, Henry, 253 Biblical scholarship: of Cannon, 270–71; Douglas on, 324; Hendricks and, 351–57; Hopkins on, 253–55; society and, 31–33 Biden, Joe, 174, 470–72 Bigby, Pauline A., 388 Biko, Steve, 57, 63–64 Bill Moyers Journal (television show), 410 Binding the Strong Man (Meyers), 354 Birmingham bombing tragedy, 316–17 birther movement, 409 Bishara, Abdullah, 71 Black, Charles E., 447 Black Americans to Support Israel Committee, 75 Black Arts Movement, 353 Black Atlantic theory, 429–30 Black bodies: Douglas on, 323–28; Du Bois on, 487–89; Dyson on, 346–50; Fluker on, 432–35 Black business community: in Atlanta, 8, 37, 87–95; Jackson and, 123, 130, 134; Operation PUSH and, 126 Black capitalism, Jackson’s advocacy for, 130–35, 175–76 Black Christ (Douglas), 319, 326–27 Black Christ, theology of, 20, 246–48, 316–28 Black Christianity, criticism of, 14 Black Christian metaphysics, Carter’s concept of, 259–60 Black Christian Socialism, 335 Black church(es): African influences in, 224, 238; Anderson’s discussion of, 369–82; Atlanta politics and, 471–84; Black Lives Matter and, 23, 419–20; Black Nationalism and, 234; Black politicians and, 154–55; Black social gospel and, 4, 17; Carter and, 53; in Chicago, 117; civil rights and, 190–91;

Cone and, 209–10, 213; conservatism in, 79–80, 295–96; decline of, 23–24; definitions of, x–xi; Douglas’s criticism of, 317–20; Du Bois on, 242–46; Dyson on, 348–50; evangelicalism in, 222, 230, 232, 372, 423–24; Floyd-Thomas on, 383; Fluker on, 25, 422–23, 427, 485; fundamentalism in, 196; Grant and, 262–63; Jackson and, 108, 111–22, 139–42; liberationist theology in, 3; militancy in, 6; Nation of Islam and, 222; Obama and, 397–400, 403–7, 409–10, 415–17, 421, 485; Rivers’s critique of, 446–52; Roberts on, 230; sexuality in, 323–28, 348–49; slavery and, 238–39; social ethics in, 424; theological criticism of, 14, 251; Townes on, 294–303; voter drives and, 464–65; Warnock and, 471–84; Williams on, 323–28, 333; womanist theology and, 489–91; women’s repression in, 17–19, 263–66, 368–69, 479–80 Black colleges, 26, 42 Black Commentator, 102 Black culture: African mythology and, 241–42; Black theology and, 215–16, 228–32, 235, 248–56; colorism in, 296–303; Cone’s promotion of, 216–17, 226–27; Dyson on, 345–50; homosexuality and, 323–28; Hopkins on theology and, 236–56; misogyny in, 323–28; slavery and, 429–30 Black Economic Development Conference, 443 Black evangelicalism, 222, 230, 232, 372, 478 Black Expo (Black Minority Business and Cultural Exposition), 123–24, 126–27, 130 Black feminism: Black churches and, 17; Black theology and, 262–67; Cannon and, 271–72, 276–77; churchwomen and, 264; Coleman and, 395–97; Dyson and, 347–48; Grant and, 266–67; hooks

Index and, 357–67; Walker and, 274–75; West and, 367–69; womanism and, 387–97. See also feminist theory; womanist theology Black freedom movement, 5, 7, 102 Black intellectuals, Rivers’s critique of, 445–46 Black internationalism, 8 Black leadership: Fluker on, 426–29; in post–civil rights era, 34 Black Leadership Forum, 72–73 Black liberation theology: Black social gospel and, 6–8, 16; Cone and, 6–8, 12–14, 189–90, 208–21; evolution of, 205–15; Hopkins and, 233, 252–56; religious philosophy and, 491–99; developing nations criticism of, 217–18; Warnock on, 475–84; West and, 336–42; Wilmore and, 14–15; womanist critique of, 20; Wright’s discussion of, 405–6 Black Lives Matter (BLM), 22–23, 417–20, 442, 450–51, 454, 482 Black mayors, election of, 5, 47–48, 81–95, 131–32, 171. See also individual mayors Black men, Dyson on, 347–48 Black Messiah, Roberts’s concept of, 232 Blackmon, Traci D., xxi, 25–28, 442, 452–57 Black Muslim movement, 441; Jackson on, 134 Black nationalism, 2, 222; Rivers and, 443–44, 446 Black Nation thesis, 340 Blackness: identity politics and, 371–72; moral crisis of identity and, 383–84; as social category and collective identity, x; stereotypes of, 299–300 Black Panthers, 26, 335, 443 Black personal dignity, Black social gospel and, 3 Black politicians: in Atlanta, 29–30, 35, 40–44; Democratic Party and, 8, 11–12, 34, 130, 140–41, 146, 153–56

573

Black Power, 8–9, 11; Black liberation theology and, 189–91; Cannon’s embrace of, 269; Cone and, 12, 189–91, 205, 207–15, 220–21; Jackson on, 133–35; King and, 13; in post-King era, 419; Roberts on, 231; Warnock on, 477 Black Power and the American Myth (Vivian), 6 Black preachers: in Atlanta, 41–42; civil rights movement and role of, 35; Dyson on, 348; in post-King era, 5; Proctor on, 203–5; sexism and, 265; Warnock on, 479; women as, 261–62 Black Preaching: The Recovery of Powerful Art (Mitchell), 203 Black prosperity gospel, 23–25 Black radicalism, Wilmore on, 15, 225–26 Black Religion and Black Radicalism (Wilmore), 15 Black religious humanism, 30 Black Religious Studies Scholars Group, 383 Black social gospel: Barber and, 457; challenges to, 21–25; cultural and political importance of, 1; current activism in, 26–30, 334–35; definition of, 2–3; Du Bois and, 243; Fluker and, 423–24, 433–35; history of, 2, 189–90; Jackson and, 104–7; King’s analysis of, 1; liberation theology and, 16; Pentecostalism and, 18, 20, 441–52; in post-King era, 4–14, 104, 419; Proctor and, 205; recent history of, ix; Rivers on, 450–52; scope of, 14; social movements and, 6; vitality of, 30; Young and, 36–37. See also social gospel Black stereotypes, rejection of, 298–301 Blackstone Rangers gang, 123 Black theology: Africentrism and, 231–32; Anderson and, 370–82; Carter and, 256–60; Cone’s critique of, 226–27; Douglas’s critique of, 319–28; Hopkins and, 233–56; leading advocates of, 12–13, 189–90, 215–32; Proctor and, 204–5;

574

Index

Black theology (continued) significance of, 14; Warnock on, 474–84; women and, 19–20, 261–67 Black Theology (Cone and Wilmore), 219, 264, 329 Black Theology and Black Power (Cone), 7, 13, 208–10, 223–24, 330, 371 “Black Theology and Black Women” (Grant), 219 “Black Theology and Marxist Thought” (West), 219 Black Theology of Liberation (Cone), 13, 210, 221, 318 Black Theology Project, 219 Black United Front, 73–74, 75 Black Womanist Ethics (Cannon), 279–81, 367 Black women: Black churches and, 17–18; Black social gospel movement and, 6, 14, 18; as clerics and theologians, 262–67; discrimination against, 413–14; Hopkins on role of, 240–41; in Morrison’s fiction, 240–41; Proctor’s support for, 203–4; Roberts’s support for, 231 Blake, Charles E., 447, 451–52 Blassingame, John W., 252 Blazer, Philip, 137–39 Bloody Sunday (Selma, Alabama), 115–16, 472, 484 Bloomberg, Mike, 472 blues singers, Hopkins on, 242 Bluest Eye (Morrison), 240 Blum, Yehuda, 72, 74 Bobo, Lawrence, 485 Bockarie, Sam, 180 Boesak, Allan, 218, 236 Bond, Adam, 204–5 Bond, Julian, 35, 40, 43, 75, 125, 141 Borden Milk Company, 119 Borders, William H., Sr., 35, 41 Boston Algebra Project, 447 Boston Globe, 448 Boston TenPoint Coalition, 445–46

Boston Theological Institute, 282 Boston University School of Theology, 120, 197, 424, 436, 459 Bound Man (Steele), 402 Boutte, Alvin, 124 Bowman Dairy, 119 Bowne, Borden Parker, 492–94, 496 boycotts of White businesses, 37, 118–20 Bradlee, Ben, 171 Bradley, Bill, 341 Bradley, Tom, 141 Branch, Ben, 121 Braun, Carol Mosely, 401 Brazier, Byron, 407 Brazil, U.S. intervention in, 66 Brazile, Donna, 146, 153, 156 Breadbasket Commercial Association (BCA), 123–25 Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life (hooks and West), 364–65 Breaking White Supremacy: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Black Social Gospel (Dorrien), ix–x, 1, 4, 13, 18, 214–15, 491–92 Breaux, John, 156 Bright, John D., Jr., 6 Brightman, Edgar, 380, 492–94 Broughton, Virginia, 18 Brous, Sharon, 470 Brown, Amos C., 437 Brown, Ben, 52 Brown, Danielle L., 24 Brown, Harold, 57 Brown, James, 185 Brown, Jeffrey, 445 Brown, Jerry, 53, 172 Brown, Jesse, 413 Brown, John, 7 Brown, Mary, 316 Brown, Michael, 27–28, 414, 452–53 Brown, Morris, 415 Brown, Ron, 171–72, 412–13 Brown, Selvin, 444

Index Brown, William, 316 Brown, Willie, 153 Brown Douglas, Kelly, 262 Brueggemann, Walter, 425 Brunner, Emil, 229 Brunson, Jerome, 445 Brus, Włodzimierz, 338 Bryan, William Jennings, 152 Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 53–57, 69–70 Buddhism, 438–42 Burgess, John M., 6 Burgher, Mary, 281 Burns, Jesse. See Jackson, Jesse Burns, Matilda (Tibby), 105–8 Burroughs, Nannie, 3, 18 Burrow, Rufus, Jr., 428 Bush, George H. W., 90, 170 Bush, George W., 27, 180–81, 350–52, 413, 447–48 business community: in Atlanta, 40–41, 47–48, 50, 87–95; Black businesses and, 8, 37; Young’s ties to, 8, 37–38, 50, 81–103 Bustamante, John, 127 Buthelezi, Manas, 218, 236 Butler, Octavia, 389 Buttigieg, Pete, 472 Butts, Calvin O., III, 24, 200, 474, 484 Byrd, Harry, 48, 56, 69 Byrd, Robert, 72 Byrd Amendment to the Strategic and Critical Materials Stock Piling Act, 48–51, 56–57, 67 Calhoun, John C., 108 Califano, Joseph, 135 Callaghan, James, 51, 57 Calumet Community Religious Conference, 397 Calvin, John, 14 Calvin Theological Seminary, 370–71 Cambodia, Vietnamese invasion of, 68–69 Cameroon, 67 Campaign for Labor Rights, 97

575

Campbell, Alexander, 458 Campbell, Joan Brown, 100, 351 Campbell, Simone (Sister), 471 Campbell, Thomas, 458 Campus Crusade for Christ, 388 Candler School of Theology, 25–26, 229, 441 Cannon, Corine Lytle, 267–68, 271 Cannon, Esau, 267–68 Cannon, Katie Geneva, xviii; Black theology and, 223; on Black women, 279–81; Coleman on, 395; depression experience of, 271; Douglas and, 318; early life and career of, 267–70; Floyd-Thomas and, 383–84, 386; Grant and, 266; on Hurston, 280–82; Mud Flower Collective and, 277–79; on racism, 270; Sanders and, 285–87, 289–90; Townes and, 291, 292; womanist theology and, 19–20, 262, 267–90, 298, 373 capitalism: Black businesses and, 8; Black social gospel and, 35; Cone’s critique of, 217; Jackson’s Black capitalism, 130–35, 183–84; Reagan’s celebration of, 83; Young’s embrace of, 61, 81–103 Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism (Eisenstein), 360 Caribbean nations, Young’s diplomacy with, 62–63, 82 Carlson, Tucker, 483 Carmichael, Stokely (Kwame Ture), 189, 206, 208 Carrington, Peter, 69, 80 Carruthers, Iva E., 205 Carson-Newman College, 344 Carter, Jimmy, 97; Camp David accords and, 71; defeat of, 83; election of, 43, 52–53; foreign policy under, 53–72, 138; Jackson and, 131, 135–40; Middle East policies of, 74–78; Young and, 72–78, 102 Carter, J. Kameron: on Black social gospel, 25, 29–30; Black theology and, 12–13, 251, 256–60, 477

576 Carter, John, 435 Carter, Lawrence Edward, Sr., xx, 16, 25–26, 422, 435–42, 473 Cartwright, John H., 424 Carver, Richard, 67 Carville, James, 91 Castro, Fidel, 133, 149, 483 Catholic Moment (Neuhaus), 426 CDS Dealers Consortium, 408 Centenary Methodist Church (Memphis), 5 Center for Black Women in Church and Society (ITC), 266, 267 Center for Process Studies, 397 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 50–52 Certified Grocery stores boycott, 119 Césaire, Aimé, 231 Chadwick, Henry, 326 Chalcedon Definition, 490 Chalcedonian Christology, 490 Challenge of Blackness (Massoni), 127 Chaney, James, 80, 151, 167 Chapman, Mark, 233 Charlottesville, Virginia tragedy, 456 Chauvin, Derek, 450–51 Chavis, Benjamin F., Jr., 5, 321 Cheek, James, 126 Cheney, Dick, 353 Chevron, 99, 101 Chicago Defender, 135, 441 Chicago School of theology, 376–78, 382 Chicago School social theory, 115 Chicago Theological Seminary (CTS), 114–17, 123, 327 Chicago Tribune, 135 Chikane, Frank, 236 Child, Lydia Maria, 300–301 Childs, Jean. See Young, Jean Childs Chile, U.S. intervention in, 50, 66 China, Vietnam invasion by, 69 Chisholm, Shirley, 46, 125, 130 Chomsky, Noam, 445 Christian Century, 182

Index Christian Education, women’s predominance in, 262–63 Christian ethics. See social ethics Christian Gnosticism, 30 Christian Imagination (Jennings), 432–33 Christianity: Black experience and metaphysics of, 17; Douglas on, 325–28; Du Bois on, 246–48; postliberal critique of, 459–60; social gospel concept of, 3 Christianity and Crisis magazine, 279 Christian Methodist Episcopal Church (CME), 262 Christian right, Neuhaus on, 425–27 Christian socialism, Cone and, 217 Christology, womanist theology and, 393 Christ the King Church (United Church of Christ), 453–55 Church, Frank, 53 Church Dogmatics (Barth), 207 Church of God in Christ (COGIC), 440–41, 447, 450 Church of the Brethren, 36 Citigroup, 408 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 465 Civil Rights Act, 28, 190 civil rights movement: Black advancement and, 34; Black churches and, 190–91; Black social gospel and, 1, 4; Jackson and, 111–22; Obama and, 400–401; in post-King era, 4–5; Warnock on, 476; Young and, 56 Claremont School of Theology, 390–92, 397 Clark, Dick, 51 Clark, Kenneth B., 74 Clark, Mark, 443 Clark, Septima, 18 Clark College, 42 Clarke, Cheryl, 360–61 Clay, William, Sr., 46 Cleage, Albert, 234, 443 Clement (church father), 228

Index Clergy Leadership Network for National Leadership Change, 351 Clinton, Bill, 93, 98–99, 172–79, 181, 447 Clinton, Hillary, 184, 401, 405 CNN cable news channel, 169, 171–72, 181 Coakley, Sarah, 490 Cobb, John B., Jr., 230, 397 Coca-Cola Company: Black employees from, 119; Young and, 41, 88, 99, 102 Cochrane, M. Bartlett, 317–18 Coleman, Allan M., 388 Coleman, Milton, 145–47 Coleman, Monica A., xix, 16, 21–22, 387–97 Coleman, Will, 238 collectivism, West on, 339 College of Affirming Bishops and Faith Leaders, 470 Collins, Patricia Hill, 396 colorism, Townes’s discussion of, 296–303 Color Purple (Walker), 275, 289 Combahee River Collective, 360 Commentary magazine, 74–75 Commission on Racial Justice of United Church of Christ, 49 Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES), 144 Communism: Cone on, 217; SCLC and, 137; Young linked to, 62–72 communitarian theory, 31–33, 201–5; Fluker and, 424–25 “Comprehending Absurd Metaphors and Transforming Fragmented Communities” (Townes), 297 Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA), 139 Concord Baptist Church (Brooklyn), 5 Cone, Cecil, 191, 207, 214–16, 235–36, 263, 477 Cone, Charles, 207 Cone, James, xv; Anderson and, 371–75; on Baldwin, 481–82; on Barth, 190; on Black liberation theology, 6–8, 12–14, 16, 189–90, 207–21, 250, 476; Black Power

577

movement and, 12, 189–91, 205, 207–15; on Black Protestantism, 14; Black theology and, 328–33, 477; Carter’s comments on, 256–58; Christocentrism of, 210–11, 217, 227–28; death of, 482–83; Douglas and, 318–20, 325–28; Dyson and, 345–46; early life of, 207; feminist critique of, 212–13, 264; Grant’s critique of, 263, 265; Harding on, 32–33; Harris and, 478; Hopkins and, 223, 233–34, 249; on King, 13–14, 208–9, 216–17, 219–20, 226; Obama and, 405; Pinn on, 379; Proctor and, 204; Roberts’s critique of, 213–14, 227, 230; on slavery, 223–24; Terrell and, 327; Townes’s critique of, 292–93; Warnock and, 473–77, 479, 481–83; West and, 336; Wilmore and, 14–15, 225–26, 237; womanist criticism of, 19–20, 214–15, 218–19, 221, 263–64, 328–29, 332–33; Wright’s critique of, 223–26 Cone, Lucy, 207 Confederacy symbols, banishing of, 416–17 Congo, U.S. intervention in, 66 Congressional Black Caucus: antiapartheid movement and, 87; anticolonialism and, 69; crime legislation and, 175; founding of, 34; Jackson and, 125, 134; McGovern and, 125–26; Reagan and, 85; Rivers’s criticism of, 447; Young and, 46, 49–50, 52, 76–77 Congressional Health Clinic, 46 Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), 32, 112–15, 120 Conjuring Culture: Biblical Formations of Black America (Smith), 238 conscientization, 342 Consequences of Pragmatism (Rorty), 371 Conservative Caucus, 62 Conservative Party (Britain), 69 Constantinian church, 479–80 “Contemporary Black Theology” (Carter), 256 Conyers, John, 125

578

Index

Cook, Rodney, 45 Cooke, Jacqueline. See Rivers, Jacqueline Olga Cooke Cooks, Stoney, 44, 56, 70 Coordinating Council of Community Organizations (CCCO), 115–18 Copeland, M. Shawn, 19–20, 283, 293–94, 333 Corbett, Ellis, 110 Cosby, Bill, 123, 141, 402 Costen, James, 269 Cotton, Dorothy, 6, 18 Council Marxism, 337–39 Council of Chalcedon, 490 Country Delight Dairy, boycott of, 119, 176 COVID-19 pandemic, 470 Cox, Oliver, 340–41 Cox Communications, 100 Cranston, Alan, 144, 156 Crawford, Hiram, 119 Creative Exchange (Anderson), 379–80 Crenshaw, Kimberlé Williams, 413–14 crime: Jackson on, 132, 174; Reagan on, 83; Young on, 46–48, 90–91 critical consciousness, Black social gospel and, 3 Critique of Judgment (Kant), 493 Cross and the Lynching Tree (Cone), 329–33 cross theology, 326–28; Cone and, 329–33 Crozer Theological Seminary, 194–96, 221 crucifixion, Douglas on, 326–28 Crusade for Justice (Townes), 291 Cuba: Communism in, 62; Jackson’s prisoner negotiations with, 149; support for Angola from, 51, 55–57, 62, 67–68 Cullen, Countee, 231, 332 Cullors, Patrisse, 418–19 cultural criticism, Dyson and, 342–50 cultural nationalism, 2 cultural theology, Hopkins on, 236–37, 252 Cummings, George C. L., 237–39

Cut Loose Your Stammering Tongue (Hopkins and Cummings), 237–39 Cyprian (church father), 228 Daley, Richard, 114–15, 117–18, 125–26 Daly, Mary, 212, 264, 266 Dark Symbols, Obscure Signs: God, Self, and Community in the Slave Mind (Earl), 238 Darkwater (Du Bois), 247 Daschle, Tom, 156 Daughtry, Herbert, 73–74, 146, 152 Davis, Angela, 367 Davis, Arthur W., 194 Davis, Nathaniel, 50 Davis, Sammy, Jr., 123 Dayan, Moshe, 71 Dean, Howard, 185 Debs, Eugene, 340 debt and deficits, tax cuts and, 84–86 Deeper Shades of Purple (Floyd-Thomas), 288, 386–87 Deliverance Evangelistic Church, 443 Dellums, Ron, 87 Delta Airlines, 100 democracy: Du Bois on, 243–44; inequality and, 30–33; race and religion in, 487 Democratic Party: Abrams and, 471; Black church and, 448; Black politicians in, 8, 11–12, 140–41, 146; Black social gospel and, 27–29; business ties to, 98–100; Carter and, 76; Chisholm and, 125; Clinton and, 176–77; Daley’s machine in, 118; election of 1972 and, 125–26; in Georgia, 472; Jackson and, 104, 136–40, 148–56, 171–74, 176–77, 180–87; labor and, 98; Obama and, 400, 413–15; Proctor and, 198–99; Young and, 83–86 Democratic Select Committee, 46 Democratic Socialism: Black social gospel and, 4, 334–35; Du Bois and, 244; West and, 335–42 Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC), 217–18, 336

Index Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), 144, 155, 217–18, 336–42; Dyson and, 345 Denison University, 318 denominational alliances, Black social gospel and, 6 DeRoche, Andrew, 50 Derricotte, Juliette, 18 Developing Communities Project, 397 developing nations movements: Black liberation theology and, 222–23; Cone’s connections to, 217–18; Jackson’s involvement in, 133–35, 169–74 “Development and Limitations of Feminist Christology” (Grant), 266 Dewey, John, 31, 371, 376–78, 426 DeWolf, Harold, 492 Diamond, Malcolm, 371 Diggs, Charles, 46, 54 DiIulio, John, Jr., 446–47 Dinah Project, 389–91 Dinkins, David, 172 Disciples of Christ, 458 Divided Mind of the Black Church (Warnock), 29, 474–80 Dixon, Bruce, 102 Dixon, Emily, 239 Dobbs, John Wesley, 35, 37, 41–43 Dodd, Christopher J., 176–77 Doe, Samuel, 177–78 Dole, Robert, 67, 83–84 Dollar, Creflo A., Jr., 23, 431, 474 Dominican Republic, U.S. intervention in, 66 Donaldson, Ivanhoe, 43 Dorrien, Gary, Jackson and, 144 Dorsey, Helen Vivian (Mama Dorsey), 316 double consciousness: Du Bois’s theory of, 16–17, 25, 235, 429, 475; legacy of, 484–91 Douglas, Kelly Brown, xviii; Black social gospel and, 19–20; early life and career, 316–20; Fluker and, 431; on sexuality, 320–28; Terrell and, 326–28; Warnock on, 479–80; womanist theology and, 223, 266, 272, 282–83, 316–28, 386

579

Douglas, Lamont, 319 Douglas Memorial Community Church, 474 Douglass, Frederick, 2, 33, 410 Dowdy, L. C., 112 Down, Up and Over: Slave Religion and Black Theology (Hopkins), 251–56 Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Workshop, 126 drug addiction, Black church and, 319 Drummond, Kate, 253 Du Bois, W. E. B.: Black social gospel and, 2–3, 14, 334; cultural analysis by, 1; double consciousness theory of, 16–17, 25, 484–91; Fluker on, 429; on global justice, 48; Harding on, 32–33, 235; Hopkins on, 239, 242–49; Jackson and, 136; Niagara Movement and, 3; Pan-Africanism of, 231; political analysis by, 1; on racism, 340–41; on religion, 242–48; Talented Tenth concept and, 16–17, 36, 243–44; West on, 336; Young and influence of, 46 Dukakis, Michael, 90 Duke University Divinity School, 229–30, 459 Dulles, John Foster, 37–38 Dunham, Ann, 397–98 Dunham, Madelyn, 397 Dunham, Stanley, 397 Duthie, C. S., 206 Duvalier, Jean-Claude, 63 Dyson, Addie Mae Leonard, 342–43 Dyson, Everett, 342–43 Dyson, Michael, 345–46 Dyson, Michael Eric: Anderson and, 374; cultural criticism and, 342–50; early life and career, 344–45; Jackson and, 21, 155, 183, 344–45, 350; Obama and, 405, 410–12, 414 Earl, Riggins R,. Jr., 238 Early Church (Chadwick), 326 Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary, 229

580

Index

Ebenezer Baptist Church, 29, 41, 108, 471, 474, 481–82, 484 Ebony magazine, 40, 114 Economic Commission for Latin America (UN) (ECLA), 60 economic justice, 334–35 economic oppression, Back liberation theology and, 217 economic uplift ideology, 2 Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians (EATWOT), 218, 233 ecumenical theology and activism: Barber and, 469–71; Black social gospel and, 15; Christian left and, 351–53; FloydThomas and, 385–86; human rights and, 65; Jackson and, 115; National Council of Churches and, 37–38; Roberts and, 229; Wilmore on, 226; Young and, 37–38, 99–101 Edelman, Marian Wright, 5, 484 Edgewood Redevelopment Project, 50 education, Jackson’s focus on, 131–40 Edwards, John, 186, 352 Eisenstein, Zillah, 360 Eizenstat, Stuart, 45 electoral politics: Black involvement in, 2–3, 5, 34–35; Jackson and, 130–40; Young and, 40–53 Eliade, Mircea, 229 Eliot, Ray, 109 Ella J. Baker House, 26–27, 444, 446, 448 Ellison, John M., 194, 197–98 Ellison, Ralph, 402 El Rukn gang, 123, 173 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 235, 336, 439, 486–88 Encounter of Theologians conference, 217 Endangered Black Family (Hare and Hare), 324 England, Martin, 199 Episcopal Church, 317–18, 470 Episcopal Divinity School, 278–79, 282 Episcopal Peace Fellowship, 144 Ernst & Young, 97

Eskridge, Chauncey, 78, 121 Espy, Mike, 413 Ethiopia, 67–68 Etzioni, Amitai, 31 Eugene, Toinette, 223, 283, 321 Evans, James H., 478 Evers, Medgar, 317 Ewing, Quincy, 332 Executive Order 12532, 87 exodus theology, 430–32 Face the Nation (television show), 145 Fair, Earnest E., Sr., 126–27 Fair Fight Action, 471 Faith in Public Life, 470 family structure for Black Americans, 407; homosexuality as threat to, 324–28 Farley, Edward, 379 Farmer, James, 113 Farrakhan, Louis, 143, 146–48, 347, 406 Farris, Milton, 43 Fasholé-Luke, Edward W., 218 Fauntroy, Walter, 5, 46, 75–76, 88, 125, 136, 154 Federal Writers’ Project, 237, 253 Felder, Cain Hope, 232 Fellowship of Affirming Ministries, 470 Feminine Mystique (Friedan), 360 feminist theory: Cannon and, 271–72; Cone and, 212–13, 218–19; hooks on, 357–67. See also Black feminism Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (hooks), 361 Ferguson Commission, 454–55 Ferguson tragedy and protests: Blackmon and, 452–55; Obama and, 414–15 Ferraro, Geraldine, 153 Ferré, Nels, 230 Fields, James, 128 Fields-Ford, Anne, 438 Fifteenth Amendment, 2, 467 Fight for $15, 470 financial crisis of 2008, 407 Fiorenza, Elisabeth Schüssler, 286–87

Index First Things magazine, 425 Flack, Roberta, 123, 141–42 Flake, Floyd, 226, 447 Flowers, Gennifer, 172 Floyd, Charles, 383 Floyd, George, 450–51, 471, 483 Floyd, Lillian, 383 Floyd-Thomas, Stacey, xix, 21–22, 282, 288, 382–87 Fluker, Clinton, 422–23, 484–85 Fluker, Sharon Watson, 434–35 Fluker, Walter Earl, 16, 25–26, 420–35, 440 Fluker, Zettie, 422 Flunder, Yvette, 470 Folklore Division, Federal Writers’ Project, 237 Foner, Eric, 252 Foote, Julia, 262 Forbes, James, 351, 405, 452, 456 Ford, Ezell, 454 Ford, Gerald, 46, 49–51, 53, 59, 62–63 Ford Foundation, 97, 126, 134, 391, 441 foreign policy: Jackson’s critique of, 169–74; postcolonial antiracism and, 53–72; Young’s involvement in, 48–53 Foreman, James, 443 For My People (Cone), 329 Fort, Jeff, 123, 173 Forty Days of Action movement, 469–70 Forward Together Moral Movement, 28–29, 466 Fosdick, Harry Emerson, 195, 197 Foucault, Michel, 252–53, 298, 322 Fourteenth Amendment, 2, 265, 467 Fowler, Wyche, Jr., 78, 156 Frady, Marshall, 10–11, 113, 170–71 Francois, Willie Dwayne, III, 24 Franklin, Aretha, 123 Franklin, Jentezen, 23 Franklin, Robert M., Jr., xvi, 16, 25–26, 434–35, 440–42, 472 Fraser, Donald, 50 Frazier, E. Franklin, 223–24 Freedmen’s Bureau, 244

581

freedom songs, Hopkins on, 242 free trade, 98 Freire, Paolo, 358–59, 362 French deconstructionism: Hopkins and, 252–53; womanist theology and, 287 Friedan, Betty, 360–61 Fromm, Erich, 366 Fuller, Daisy, 35–36 Fund for Theological Education, 391, 434 Furman University, 109 Fusion Party, 458, 464 Gaddafi, Muammar, 76, 87–88 Gager, John, 354 Gandhi, Mohandas K.: Carter Sr. and, 437–38; King’s reliance on, 5, 26; Young and, 36–37 Gang of Five working group, 57 gangs: Jackson and, 123, 173; Rivers and, 27, 442–45 Garner, Eric, 415 Garrett Biblical Institute, 207 Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, 207, 291, 423–24 Garrison, William Lloyd, 461 Garvey, Marcus, 340 Garza, Alicia, 418–19 Gatch, Milton McCormick, Jr., 233 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 282, 346, 374, 388–89, 445–46 Gates, Robert, 409 Gaye, Marvin, 129 Geiger, Shirley T., 428 Geithner, Timothy, 408 General Electric, 101 General Motors, 120 Geneva Accords, 142 Geneva Prisoners of War Convention of 1949, 142 George, Robert, 451–52 Georgetown University, Dyson at, 350 Georgia Baptist College, 206 Georgia Negro Voters League, 41–42 Gephardt, Richard, 88

582

Index

German theology, 235 gerrymandering, 44 Gershman, Carl, 74, 77 Gibbs, Robert, 400 Gibson, Kenneth, 81 Giddings, Paula, 291, 347 Gilder, George, 83–84 Gilkes, Cheryl Townsend, 283 Gilroy, Paul, 429–30, 486 Gilyard, Otha, 24 Gingrich, Newt, 175–76, 411 Ginsburg, Ruth Bader, 451 Giuliani, Rudolph, 474 Glass, Stephen, 97 Glaude, Eddie, 23–24 Glazer, Nathan, 75 Glenn, John, 144–45 global anti-imperialism, Black social gospel and, 2 global economics, Young’s involvement in, 96–103 Global Ethical Options (Carter), 439 global justice: Rivers’s involvement in, 449; Young’s advocacy for, 48 global nonviolence movement, 435–42 Gloster, Hugh Morris, 435–36 Gnostic Gospels (Pagels), 353–54 Goba, Bonganjalo C., 236–37 God of the Oppressed (Cone), 215–17, 263, 328 God’s Fierce Whimsy: Christian Feminism and Theological Education (Mud Flower Collective), 277–78 Golden, Charles F., 6 Gooding-Williams, Robert, 485 Goodman, Andrew, 80, 151, 167 Goodman, Robert O., 142–44 Good Morning America (television show), 402–3 GoodWorks International, 95–103 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 169–70 Gordon, Cornell, 111 Gordy, Berry, 126, 141 Gore, Al, 27, 172–73, 180–86, 471

Gottwald, Norman, 354 Goucher College, 325 Graduate Theological Union (Berkeley), 223 Grady, Henry, 41 Graham, Billy, 10–11 Graham, Bob, 150, 156 Gramsci, Antonio, 298, 334, 336–37 Grant, Jacquelyn: Black social gospel and, 19–20; Coleman on, 395; Cone and, 333; Douglas and, 318; womanist theology and, 218–19, 223, 262–67, 272, 283, 293, 373, 382 Grant, Joseph, 262 Grant, Lillie Mae Ward, 262 Grassley, Charles E. (Chuck), 467 Grasso, Richard, 176 Gray, William, III, 5, 53, 154 Gray Panthers, 139 Great Awakening (1730–60), 188–89, 475 Green, T. H., 335 Greenleaf Christian Church, 462–64 Greenpeace USA, 470 Greensboro civil rights movement, 111–12, 198 Greenspan, Alan, 176 Griffin, David Ray, 394, 397 Griffin, Marva Lois, 436 Grisham, Daryl, 124 grotesque aesthetics, Anderson’s concept of, 372–82 Ground Has Shifted: The Future of the Black Church in Post-Racial America, 429 Guatemala: U.S. intervention in, 66; Young on, 60–61 “Guerrilla Exegesis” (Hendricks), 354–57 Gulf Oil, 126 Gullah dialect, 262 Gustafson, James M., 371 Guyana, Young in, 62–63 Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Bellah et al.), 30–33

Index Haiti, Young in, 63 Hale, Cynthia L., 24 Hale, Phale D., 435 Hall, Berkeley, 18 Hall, Kwanza, 472 Hamer, Fannie Lou, 130, 332–33 Hammond, Ray, 445 Hampton, Fred, 443 Hampton Institution, 192 Hannity, Sean, 405, 411 Harding, Rosemarie Freeney, 6, 15, 32, 191 Harding, Vincent, xiii; Black social gospel and, 6, 15, 30; Black theology and, 216, 235–36; Cone and, 32–33, 236; Institute of the Black World and, 263; on White supremacy, 1, 499 Hare, Julia, 324 Hare, Nathan, 324 Harkin, Tom, 172 Harlan, John Marshall, 461 Harlem Renaissance, 231 Harrington, Michael, 336, 339, 345 Harris, Barbara, 6 Harris, James H., 477–78 Harris, Melanie L., 386 Harrison, Beverly W., 271–73, 277–78, 285, 297, 367 Harris-Perry, Melissa, 405 Hart, Gary, 85, 140, 144–45, 147–49 Hartford Theological Seminary, 37 Hartsfield, William B., 41, 47–48 Hartsfield Airport (Atlanta), 50, 99 Harvard Divinity School, women at, 261, 264 Hatch, Orrin, 67 Hatcher, Richard, 81, 123, 141, 146, 148, 152 Hauerwas, Stanley, 459, 463 Hawthorne, Alice, 94–95 Hawthorn-Mellody, 119 Hayes, Diana L., 21–22, 251–52, 283, 386–87 Haynes, Frederick D., III, 24, 205 Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) grants, 135

583

health care in Black community, 453; inequalities in, 296–97 Hebrew Bible, Cannon’s study of, 270–71 Hebrew prophets, Proctor on, 200 Hedgeman, Anna Arnold, 6 Hefner, Hugh, 126, 141 Hegel, G. F. W., 32, 235, 335–36, 390, 394, 486, 492–93, 496 Heidegger, Martin, 381 Heiler, Friedrich, 229 Heilsgeschichte, Hopkins’s discussion of, 246 Helms, Jesse, 56, 67, 69 Henderson, Celious, 124 Henderson, Nia-Malika, 414 Hendricks, Obery, Jr., 21, 155, 351–57; Obama and, 405 Hendricks, Obery, Sr., 353 Hendricks, Willie Beatrice, 353 Herbert, Bob, 96–97, 174 Herman, Alexis, 413 Herskovits, Melville, 223–24 Heyward, Carter, 276–77 Hick, John, 230 High John the Conqueror folk tale, 421 Hill, Jesse, 35, 41, 43–44, 47, 81 Hine, Darlene Clark, 374 hip-hop culture, 345 historical-critical Scripture analysis, 195 historically Black colleges and universities (HBCU), 199 Historic Thousands on Jones Street (HKonJ), 29–30, 464–66 HIV-AIDS: Black church and crisis of, 319, 474; in Black community, 297; Douglas on, 323–24 Hocking, W. E., 229 Hodgson, Peter C., 390 Holder, Eric H., 408, 412 Holiday, Billie, 331–32 Holiness Church, 18; women clerics in, 262 Hollings, Ernest, 144

584

Index

Holman United Methodist Church (Los Angeles), 5 Holmes, Barbara, 283 Holmes, Ernest, 439 Holocaust, Jackson’s comments on, 137–38, 145–46 Holy Spirit, Carter’s discussion of, 258–60 homosexuality: Anderson on, 371–82; Douglas on, 320–28; Dyson on, 348–49; Rivers’s attacks on, 446–52 Hong Kong Christian Industrial Committee and, 96 Hooker, Johnny Lee, 211 hooks, bell, xvii, 21, 155, 346–47, 357–67; Anderson and, 374; Coleman and, 395; Rivers and, 445–46 Hooks, Benjamin, 5, 75, 141 Hoover, Theressa, 6, 264 Hope, John, 439 Hopkins, Dwight N.: on blackness and universality, 250; Black social gospel and, 12, 16; on Black theology, 191, 223–24, 233–56, 373, 477; Carter and, 256–60; Cone and, 233–34; criticism of works by, 252–53; on Du Bois, 243–48; early life and education, 233; on Morrison’s fiction, 240–41; on slavery and religious worship, 239–40; on South African theology, 236–37; on Wilmore, 235 Hopkins, Robert R., Sr., 233 Hordern, William, 207, 215 Horne, Lena, 40 Horsley, Richard, 354–55 Horton, Romeo, 178 Horton, Willie, 172–73 Horvat, Branko, 338 Hosmer, Frank, 244 Hough, Joe, 271 Howard, T. R. M., 118 Howard University, 36; Douglas at, 319–20, 325; Roberts at, 206, 213; School of Religion, 229; Wright at, 223 Hoyt, Thomas, Jr., 232, 263

Hughes, Langston, 231, 332 Human Relations Commission (North Carolina), 462 human rights: Jackson on, 136–37; Young’s advocacy for, 55–72 Humezk Jean McMahon, 274 Humphrey, Hubert, 85, 125, 135, 150, 198–99 Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Bill, 134 Hunt, Jim, 462 Hurston, Zora Neale, 273, 276, 280–82 Hussein, Saddam, 172 Idowu, E. Bolaji, 228 Ikeda, Daisaku, 26, 438–39 Iliff School of Theology, 33 I May Not Get There with You (Dyson), 349–50 Imposing Preacher (Bond), 204 In a Blaze of Glory: Womanist Spirituality as Social Witness (Townes), 294–95 inequality, Reagan economic policies and, 84–86 In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (Walker), 275 “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston” (Walker), 273–74 Institute of Religion (Howard University), 229 Institute of the Black World, 263 integration: Cone’s criticism of, 13, 209–15, 233; King’s focus on, 4, 7, 479; Vivian on limits of, 7 Interdenominational Theological Center (ITC): Black social gospel and, 26; Black theology and, 191; Cannon at, 270, 283–84; Franklin at, 441; Grant’s career at, 263, 266–67; womanist theologians and, 221, 229 Interfaith Worker Justice, 470 International Law Association, 96 International Olympic Committee (IOC), 90–92, 95

Index Introducing Black Theology of Liberation (Hopkins), 249–50, 255 Invisible Man (Ellison), 402 Iran, U.S. intervention in, 66 Iran hostage crisis, 76–77 Iraq War (2003), 351 Isakson, Johnny, 472 Isasi-Díaz, Ada María, 277–78 Isis Papers, 324 Israel: Black Americans and, 73–78, 319–20; Cannon’s experiences in, 270; Jackson’s visit to, 137–38; neoconservative commentary on, 75; Young’s Middle East diplomacy and, 70–72 Jackson, Alphonso, 413 Jackson, Ashley, 181 Jackson, Charles, Jr., 106 Jackson, Charles Henry, 106–8 Jackson, Duane, 473 Jackson, Helen Burns, 105–8 Jackson, Henry M., 53, 54 Jackson, Irene Wesley Dobbs, 42 Jackson, Jacqueline Lavinia, 129 Jackson, Jacqueline Lavinia Brown (Jackie), 111, 115, 117, 121–22, 129, 142–43, 146, 171–72, 181 Jackson, Jesse, xiv, 5; Abernathy and, 79–80; in Africa, 170–71, 177–80; anti-Semitism charges against, 144–48; Atlanta politics and, 484; Atlantic Olympic bombing and, 94–95; biographies of, 9–11; Black Expo and, 123–25; career of, 8–12; Carter and, 139–40; Clinton and, 172–77; Cuban prisoner negotiations and, 149–50; declining public image of, 180–87; Democratic party and, 136–40, 170–74, 176–77, 180–86; Douglas and, 321; Dyson and, 21, 155, 183, 342, 344, 350; early life of, 104–7; Farrakhan and, 143, 146–48; financial issues for, 127–35; foreign policy and, 136–39; Forty Days

585

of Action and, 470; global politics and, 169–74; Goodman rescue and, 142–44; Hendricks and, 356–57; King and, 8, 15–16, 104–7, 112–22, 186–87; as liberalliberationist, 16; McGovern and, 126; Middle East issues and, 76, 136–40; National Summit on Africa, 98; negotiating skills of, 119–20; Obama and, 184–86; Operation Breadbasket and, 104, 118–20, 122–25; Operation Push and, 126–35; presidential campaigns of, 139–68; Rainbow Coalition of, 11, 85–86; Rivers and, 27, 447–48; SCLC and, 78; Sharpton and, 185–86; social justice ministry of, 21; sports career of, 109–11; on voter suppression, 351–52; West and, 373; Young defended by, 73–74, 88 Jackson, Jesse, Jr., 129, 175, 185–86, 356 Jackson, Jonathan Luther, 129 Jackson, Joseph H., 11, 197, 479 Jackson, Maynard Holbrook, Jr., 35, 40, 42–43, 47, 50, 80, 91, 93–94, 471 Jackson, Maynard Holbrook, Sr., 42 Jackson, Michael, 345 Jackson, Oliver Wendell, 239–40 Jackson, Rebecca, 274 Jackson, Santita, 114, 129 Jackson, William, 113 Jackson, Yusef DuBois, 129 Jackson Five, 123 Jacoby, Tamar, 91 James, William, 32, 206, 235, 246, 336, 375–77, 486 January 6 insurrection, 484 Japan, Young’s visit to, 88–89 Jarrett, Valerie, 413 Jay Z, 420 Jefferson, Thomas, 316; as slaveowner, 33 Jehovah’s Witnesses, 423 Jemison, T. J., 142 Jennings, Willie James, 25, 29–30, 375, 432–33, 483

586

Index

“Jesse” (Flack ballad), 141–42 Jesse: The Life and Pilgrimage of Jesse Jackson (Frady), 10–11 Jesse Jackson: The Man, the Movement, the Myth (Reynolds), 10, 124 Jesse Jackson Show (television show), 171 Jesus: in Black theology, 210–11, 217, 227–28, 234; Cone’s discussion of, 329–33; Du Bois on, 246–48; Hendricks on, 352–57; Hopkins’s discussion of, 254–56; Proctor on, 200; Roberts on, 230–31; social gospel and teachings of, 188–89; womanist view of, 267. See also Black Christ, theology of Jesus and the Spiral of Violence (Horsley), 354 “Jesus Christ in Georgia” (Du Bois), 247 Jeter, Howard, 179 Jet magazine, 114 Jewish American community: Black Americans and, 73–78; Jackson and, 137–39, 145–48; neoconservatives and, 72 Jews Against Jackson, 145 Johns, Vernon, 197 Johnson, Barbara, 54–55 Johnson, Bernice Childs, 435 Johnson, George, 124 Johnson, John, 114 Johnson, Kevin, 412–13 Johnson, Leroy, 44 Johnson, Lyndon, 32, 48, 54, 58 Johnson, Mary E., 194 Johnson, Mordecai, 3–4, 14, 36, 189, 193, 228, 334, 476, 499 Johnson, Terence L., 487–88 Johnson C. Smith seminary, 269–70 John XXIII (Pope), 64–65 Jonah’s Gourd Vine (Hurston), 273 Jones, Clarence, 427–29 Jones, George, 124 Jones, James L., 409 Jones, Lawrence N., 6 Jones, Major J., 6, 205, 215, 264

Jones, Quincy, 126, 141, 171 Jones, Rufus, 380–81, 494 Jones, Solomon, 121 Jones, William Augustus, Jr., 436 Jones, William R., 231, 234, 255, 259–60, 379, 430 Jordan, Barbara, 45 Jordan, Hamilton, 54, 95 Jordan, Vernon, 5, 72–73 Jordan, Winthrop D., 252 Journal of African Business, 99 Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, 395 Journal of Religious Thought, 229 justice tribes, Barber’s organization of, 464 Kabbah, Ahmad, 179 Kairos Center for Religions, Rights and Social Justice, 469 Kalandia refugee camp, Jackson’s visit to, 137 Kant, Immanuel, 206, 257, 390–91, 493–94, 496 Karenga, Ron, 368 Keep Hope Alive political action committee, 180 Keller, Rosemary Skinner, 291 Kellogg’s, 81 Kelsey, George, 35, 195 Kemp, Jack, 84 Kennedy, John F., 58, 137, 198, 269 Kennedy, Randall, 446 Kennedy, Robert, 44 Kennedy, Ted, 76, 140 Kenya, 81 Kenyatta, Jomo, 133 Kenyatta, Muhammad, 443 Kerrey, Bob, 172 Kerry, John, 184, 186, 399 Keys, Martha J., 262–63 Khmer Rouge, 69 Kierkegaard, Søren, 272, 331, 335 Kilgore, Thomas, Jr., 437 Killing Me Softly (Flack album), 141 Kilson, Martin, 444

Index King, B. B., 211 King, Bernice A., 484 King, Bob, 109 King, Coretta Scott: Black Leadership Forum and, 72–73; Jackson and, 121, 141, 153; McGovern supported by, 125; SCLC and, 78–80; Sharpton and, 185–86; Young and, 9, 37, 86 King, Martin Luther, Jr.: Anderson and, 378; antiwar movement and, 32, 116–17; assassination of, 121–22, 269, 436; Black Lives Matter and, 419; Black social gospel and, 1, 4, 15, 334, 491–92; Black theology and, 7–8, 189–90, 374, 476; Carter on, 25–26; Carter Sr. and, 435–42; Chicago campaign of, 116–19; Christian metaphysics and, 17–18; church opposition to, 23; Cone’s analysis of, 13–14, 208–9, 216–17, 219–20, 227, 332; double consciousness and, 485; Dyson and, 343, 345–46, 349–50; financial problems of, 127; Fluker on, 25, 427–30, 432–33; on global justice, 48; Harding and, 32–33; Hendricks on, 355–57; hooks and, 366; Hopkins on, 239, 248–49; human rights advocacy and, 65; Jackson and, 11, 104–7, 112–22, 136–40, 186–87; Jones on, 427–28; Lasch on, 424–25; legacy of, ix–x; Lewis and, 472; as liberal-liberationist, 16; March to Montgomery and, 116–17; Neuhaus on, 426; Niebuhr and, 331; Obama on, 401–2; Proctor and, 194–95, 197–99; and Progressive National Baptist Convention, 5; religious philosophy of, 492–99; Rivers and, 449–52; Riverside address of, 32, 50; Roberts and, 206, 214, 230; role models for, 3; SCLC and, 18, 350, 448; Touré on, 420; Vivian’s criticism of, 6–7; Walker on, 275–76; Warnock and, 473–74, 476; West and, 335; White admirers of, 32; womanist theology and, 20; Young and, 8, 15–16, 37–39, 60–61, 63, 102; Zionism and, 75

587

King, Martin Luther, Sr., 35, 41, 43, 474 King, Rodney, 411 Kirk-Duggan, Cheryl A., 19–20, 283, 293, 382, 428, 487–88 Kissinger, Henry, 51–52, 54, 56, 59, 61 Kitchen Table Press, 368 Klobuchar, Amy, 472 Knight, Phil, 96 Knudson, Albert C., 380, 492–96 Koh, Harold H., 179 Korotich, Vitaly, 170 Korsch, Karl, 336–37 Kraft, Joseph, 73 Krame, Michael, 174 Krauthammer, Charles, 405 Krugman, Paul, 409 Ku Klux Klan (KKK), 37 Kyles, Billy, 122 Labond, Susie, 81 labor movement, Democratic Party and, 98, 126 Lafayette, Bernard, 6, 15–16, 137–38, 140 Laffer, Arthur, 84 Laffer Curve, 84 Lamar, William H., IV, 24 Lance, Bert, 54, 149 Landess, Thomas, 138 language, Black theology and role of, 236 Lasch, Christopher, 424–25 Latin America: liberation theology in, 217, 256, 342; Young and, 60–63 Law Companies Group, 92–93 Lawson, James, 5–6, 15–16, 38, 137, 472 “Leadership Family,” 140–41 Leak, A. R., 127 Lear, Norman, 141 Le Duc Tho, 51 Lee, Jarena, 265 Lee, Min Jin, 362 Lee, Spike, 323, 345 Lehmann, Paul, 215 Lenin, V. I., 337 Leninism, 336

588

Index

Lesbian Contradictions magazine, 279 lesbianism: Black feminism and, 357–67; Douglas on, 320–21, 324–28; Walker’s discussion of, 274–75. See also LGBTQ community; queer sexuality Lester, Julius, 74 “Letter from a Greensboro Jail” (Jackson), 113 Lewis, David Levering, 242–43 Lewis, Jacqui, 24 Lewis, John: Black social gospel and, 5, 12, 15–16, 29; civil rights movement and, 35; death of, 471–72; Obama and, 401; political career of, 45–46, 471; on racism, 332; voter registration and, 39–40; Voting Rights Act dismantling and, 467; Young and, 78 LGBTQ community: Black churches and, 17; Black communities and, 465–66 liberal communitarian theory, 31 liberalism: Cone’s critique of, 207–15; demonization of, 83; Douglas on, 322–28; Hendricks on, 356–57; Hopkins’s critique of, 234; Neuhaus on, 425; Proctor on, 199–200; race and, 487; Reagan and, 85; Rivers on, 449–50; theology and, 196 Liberalism and the Limits of Justice (Sandel), 31 Liberating Visions (Franklin), 441 Liberation and Reconciliation (Roberts), 213 Liberation Party, 124–25 Liberation theology: evolution of, 2–3, 7–8, 189–90; developing nations challenges to, 217; West on, 336–42. See also Black liberation theology Liberia, 81–82, 177–78 Libya: American air strikes against, 87–88; Black American views on, 75–76 Lilly Foundation, 134 Limbaugh, Rush, 181, 405, 455 Lincoln, Abraham, 58 Lincoln, C. Eric, 6, 209–10, 476–77

Lindsay, John, 125 Lizza, Ryan, 179 Lloyd, Vincent, 251, 482 Loeffler, Kelly, 483 Logos theology, Black experience and, 17 Loman, Lucille, 126, 129 Lomé accord, 178–80 Long, Charles H., 14, 191; on Black theology, 215–216; Cone and, 214, 263; Hopkins on, 235–36 Long, Eddie L. (Bishop), 23, 474 Long, Jefferson, 45 Lorde, Audre, 292, 324–25, 367, 395 Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, 103 Los Angeles Sentinel, 103 Losing Ground: American Social Policy (Murray), 83–84, 139 Lott, Eric, 347 Loudermilk, Charlie, 45, 81 Louis, Joe, 107, 123 Lovell, John, 223 Lowery, Joseph, 5, 15, 35, 74–76, 78–80, 137, 141, 484 Lucas, Robert, 154 Luccock, Robert, 436 lunch counter sit-ins, 110 Luther, Martin, 14 Lutheranism, 188 Luxemburg, Rosa, 336–37 lynching: Anderson on, 370; Cone’s discussion of, 329–33 Lynching of Jesus (Wellford), 332 Lynd, Staughton, 273 Macdonald, Dwight, 445 Machel, Samora, 133 Macintosh, D. C., 371 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 31 Maddox, Lester, 43, 91 Madsen, Richard, 30 Maimela, Simon S., 236 Majeed, Dabra Mubashshir, 386

Index Making a Way Out of No Way: A Womanist Theology (Coleman), 392 Making Malcolm (Dyson), 346 Malcolm X: Cone on, 219–20, 227, 239, 332; Douglas on, 319–20; Hopkins on, 248–49; Jackson and, 130; King and, 208–9; mind rape concept of, 272; Touré on, 420; West and, 335 Malkin, Michelle, 411 Mallel, Raymond, 137 Mammy figure, 298–300 Manatt, Charles T., 147 Mandela, Nelson, 49, 87, 93, 179–80 Mandela, Winnie, 66 Manhattan Institute, 84 Manley, Michael, 62 Maparyan, Layli, 396 Marable, Manning, 155 March for Our Lives, 470 March on Washington (1963), 407 March on Washington (2020), 470–71 March to Montgomery, 116 Marcus, Sidney, 81 market Socialism, 338 Marriott, 100 Marshall, Thurgood, 448 Martin, Clarice, 232, 283, 354 Martin, Joan, 283 Martin, Trayvon Benjamin, 23, 411–12, 418, 467–68 Martin & Malcolm & America (Cone), 13, 219–20, 233, 328 Martin Luther King Jr. International Chapel (Morehouse College), 26, 422, 435 Marubeni, 89 Marx, Karl, 32, 235, 244; West and, 335–42 Maslow, Abraham, 436 Massell, Sam, 43–44, 47 mass incarceration of Blacks and Latinos, 414–17 Massoni, Gary, 120, 127–28 mass transit legislation, Young’s advocacy for, 46–47

589

Masters, Carl, 95, 101 Mathews, Shailer, 376–77 Matory, J. Lorand, 430 Matrix (film series), 341 Maxfield, Otis Aubrey, 436 Maynes, Bill, 57, 71–72 Mays, Benjamin E.: Black social gospel and, 3–4, 14, 334, 499; Black theology and, 189–90, 193, 195, 228, 476; Morehouse and, 435–36, 439; political activism of, 35, 41, 43–44; Young and, 48 Mbiti, John, 218, 228–29 McClory, Robert, 135 McEwen, Homer, 71 McFague, Sallie, 390 McGill, Ralph, 41 McGovern, George, 52–53, 125–26, 144 McGuin, Henry J., 194 MC Hammer, 345 McHenry, Donald, 56, 75 McKanan, Dan, 252–53 McKinney, Richard I., 194, 197, 205 McKissick, Floyd, 113 McMickle, Marvin, 200 McMillan, Terry, 348 McMurry, Linda O., 291 McSurely, Al, 464–65 McSween, Cirilo, 127 Meacham, Jon, 472 Melton, Spars White, 193–94 Memphis, King’s campaign in, 120–22 Memphis-to-Jackson Meredith March Against Fear, 189–90 Mennonite Service Committee, 6, 32 Meridian (Walker), 274 Merton, Thomas, 366 Methodist theology, Black churches and, 188–89 Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce, 82 Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA), 47, 50 Mexico, Young in, 62 Meyers, Chad, 354–55 Meyers, Mel, 109

590

Index

middle class: in Atlanta, 83; Black expansion into, 41, 50; communitarian theory and, 31–33; critique of, 83 Middle East: Black Americans’ view of, 74–78; Jackson’s involvement with, 137–41; Young’s diplomacy in, 70–72, 87–88 Mikulski, Barbara, 156 Miller, Monica R., 396 Miller, Zell, 91 Miller Smith, Kelly, 5 Million Man March, 347, 374 Mining the Motherlode: Methods in Womanist Ethics (Floyd-Thomas), 383–87 minority businesses in Atlanta, 8, 37, 40–41, 47–48, 50, 87–95 Mississippi Freedom delegation, 130 Mitchell, Ella Pearson, 203 Mitchell, Henry, xvi, 203 Mitterrand, François, 89 MLK Center for Nonviolent Social Change, 78 Modern Use of the Bible (Fosdick), 197 Mofokeng, Takastso A., 236–37 Moitz, Betty, 195 Moitz, Hannah, 195 Moltmann, Jürgen, 206 Mondale, Walter, 85–86, 140–41, 144–45, 147–49, 152–53, 156 Moore, Minyon, 156 Moose, Richard, 57 Moral Man and Immoral Society (Niebuhr), 197 Moral Mondays, 28–29, 466–68 Morehouse College, 42, 195; Carter Sr. and, 435–42; Franklin at, 441–42; Martin Luther King Jr. International Chapel at, 26, 422 Morrill Act of 1890, 110 Morris, Calvin, 120, 122, 128–29 Morris Brown College, 42 Morrison, Toni, 239–42, 295, 298, 348, 358, 373–74, 421

Mosala, Itumelend J., 236–37 Moses, Man of the Mountain (Hurst), 273 Moss, Otis, III, 24 Moss, Otis, Jr., 351, 484 Mother Emanuel AME Church killings, 415–16 Motorola, 101 Mountain Top Sermon (King), 121, 343, 430, 431 Mozambique, 48–49, 66–68 Ms. Magazine, 273–74 Mud Flower Collective, 277–79 Muelder, Walter G., 436, 492–94 Mugabe, Robert, 38, 63, 66–67, 80, 170 Muhammad, Elijah, 222 Muhammad Speaks journal, 441 Mujerista theology, 277 Muldawer, Carol, 43 Muldawer, Paul, 43 Mules and Men (Hurston), 273 Murray, Charles, 83, 139 Murray, John Courtney, 426 Murray, Pauli, 6, 18, 264, 289, 334 Muslim Public Affairs Council, 470 Muzorewa, Abel, 57, 63, 67–69, 80 My Brother’s Keeper Alliance, 413–14 My Moral Odyssey (Proctor), 201 Myrdal, Gunnar, 429 My Soul Looks Back (Cone), 329 Nakasone, Yasuhiro, 88–89 Naked Public Square (Neuhaus), 426 Namibia, election reforms in, 57 Nash, Diane, 6, 333, 472 Nashville (film), 405 Nashville Movement, 38 National Action Network, 185–86 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP): American Jewish community and, 75; anti-Black violence and, 416–17; Barber and, 457, 464–65, 468; Black social gospel and, 2–3; Black theology and, 226; SCLC and, 78; Young and, 36

Index National Baptist Convention USA (NBCUSA), 5, 11, 18 National Black Political Convention, 130 National Committee of Negro Churchmen (NCNC), 189–90, 208, 221 National Conference of Black Churchmen, 443 National Council of Black Clergy (NCBC), 222, 479 National Council of Churches (NCC), 6, 37–38, 65, 100–101, 198, 222; antiwar activism and, 351 National Enquirer, 181, 447 National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNLA), 51 National Institute of Education, 135 National Summit on Africa, 97–99 National Ten Point Coalition, 446 National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA), 51 Nation of Islam, 441; Black churches and, 222; Jackson on, 134 Native Americans: Black social gospel and, 420; Thurman on, 499 naturalism, theology and, 377–78 Naval Apprentice School, 194 Navigators Ministries, 423 Négritude movement, 231 Negro Voters League, 37, 41–42 neo-abolitionism, 3–4 neoconservative movement, 54, 69; American Jewish community and, 72, 74–78; Fluker on, 425 neoliberalism: Black theology and, 16; Cone’s theology and, 221; Democratic Party and, 85; Young’s belief in, 96–103 neo-orthodoxy, 189, 229, 257 neo-pragmatism, 371–72 Neto, Agostinho, 51 Neuhaus, Richard John, 425–27 New Abolition: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Black Social Gospel (Dorrien), ix–x, 1, 13–15, 18, 485–86, 491–92 New Age spirituality, 396

591

New American Movement (NAM), 336 New Georgia Project, 471, 473 Newhall, Jeffrey, 100 New Republic magazine, 75, 97, 179 new separatism, 7–8 New South coalition, 43, 52 Newsweek, 137 New Testament church, 458 New Thought philosophy, 439 New York Conference of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, 262 New York Post, 181 New York Theological Seminary, 221 New York Times, 59, 96, 135, 137–38, 143, 174, 189 Niagara Movement, 3 Niebuhr, H. Richard, 371 Niebuhr, Reinhold: Barber and, 461; Black theology and, 189, 197, 226, 229; Cannon on, 272; Cone on, 331; Jackson and, 115; Lasch on, 424–25; legacy of, 378; Marxism and, 337; Protestantism and, 426; Young and, 61, 75 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 372, 496 Nigeria, 61, 67, 69, 81–82, 96, 98–99, 101–2 nihilism, hooks on, 364 Nike, 96 Nixon, Jay, 455 Nixon, Richard, 10, 40, 46, 48–49, 56, 59, 63, 199 Nkomo, Joshua, 38, 63, 66–68, 80 nonracism, Black church embrace of, 419–20 nonviolence: Black male rejection of, 38–39; Carter Sr. on, 437–40; civil rights movement commitment to, 113–14, 116–17; Cone’s criticism of, 217; King’s commitment to, 25–26, 70, 438–40; Roberts on, 214; Young’s belief in, 38–39, 70 Noonan, Peggy, 405 North African Christianity, 228 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 98

592

Index

North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College (A&T), 110–12, 198 North Carolina Amendment One, 465–66 North Carolina Central University (NCCU), 458–59 North Carolina Intercollegiate Council on Human Rights, 113 Northern Baptist Theological Seminary, 291 Nosie, Wendsler, 471 Nove, Alec, 338 Nunn, Sam, 172–73 Nyerere, Julius, 97 Obama, Barack: Barber and, 465; Black church and, 397–400, 403–7, 409–10, 415–17; Blackmon and, 455; Black political activism and, 28–29; Black social gospel and, 21–23, 334; Black theology and impact of, 397–417; electoral politics and, 399–400; as introvert, 420; Jackson and, 184, 186–87; on police violence, 414; presidency of, 408–28; presidential campaigns of, 400–413, 421; on race, 400, 402–5, 410–12, 418–21; voting rights and, 466–67; West and, 341; Williams and, 472 Obama, Barack, Sr., 397 Obama, Michelle Robinson, 399 Obama Foundation, 413 Obasanjo, Olusegun, 61, 98, 101 O’Dell, Jack, 137, 183 Odom, Robert, 444–45 Office of Economic Opportunity, 198 Ogonyok (Russian journal), 170 O’Leary, Hazel, 413 Olsen, Tillie, 358 Olympic Games of 1996, Atlanta bid for, 82, 90–95 Omega Psi Phi fraternity, Jackson and, 110, 120 Once (Walker), 274 “On the Responsibility of Intellectuals in the Age of Crack” (Rivers), 445

Operation Breadbasket, 104, 118–20, 122–25, 185 Operation Breadbasket Business Seminar and Exposition, 123 Operation PUSH (People United to Save Humanity), 6, 8, 10–11, 104, 125–35, 139–40, 171; Rainbow Coalition merger with, 175–76 Oprah (television show), 347–48 Orange, James, 39 Organization of African Unity, 178 Origen, 228 Orthodox Marxism, 337–38 Ossoff, Jon, 483–84 Osteen, Joel, 23 Osun (African religion), 386 Other America (Harrington), 339 Otto, Rudof, 229 Ovimbundu ethnic group, 51 Owen, David, 57, 63, 66–69 Pacem in Terris (Pope John XXIII), 64–65 Page, Clarence, 135, 182 Pagels, Elaine, 326, 353–54 Paige, Rod, 413 Palestine Human Rights Campaign, 137–38 Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), 70–76 Palmer, George Herbert, 486 Pan-African Conference of Third World Theologians, 218 Pan-Africanism, 231–32; Afrocentrism and, 231–32; Cone and, 218; Rivers and, 443–44 Panama Canal Treaty, 63 Pannekoek, Anton, 336–37 Pantaleo, Daniel, 415 Paris, Peter, 6, 373, 431, 474–75 Parker, Aaron, 473 Parker, Angela, 10, 123–25 Parker, John A., 474 Patriotic Front (PF), 66–69 Patterson, Orlando, 445

Index Patterson, Robert, 111 Pauline doctrine, 188–89; Douglas on, 326–28; Proctor on, 200 Payne, Billy, 90 Payne, Donald, 177–78 Payton, Benjamin F., 6 Peace Corps, 198 peace movement, Black social gospel and, 6 Peace Now, 137 “Peace with American Jews Eludes Jackson” (Atkinson and Coleman), 145 Peck, M. Scott, 365 Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Freire), 362 Pellauer, Mary D., 277–78 Pentecostal Church, x, 18, 20, 101; Fluker on, 430–31, 433–35; growth of, 24–25; Rivers and, 26–27, 441–52; women clerics in, 262 People’s Assembly (North Carolina), 464, 466 Pepsi-Cola boycott, 119 Peres, Shimon, 71 perestroika, Jackson and, 169–70 Peretz, Martin, 75 Perlmutter, Nathan, 145–47 Perry, Arthur, 128 personal idealism, 380–82 Petrella, Ivan, 256 Phelps, Jamie T., 283 Philander Smith College, 207–8 philosophical theology, 206, 331, 344–45, 371, 491–99 Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Rorty), 371 Pinckney, Clementa C., 415–16 Pinkney, Arnold, 142 Pinn, Anthony, 25, 29–30, 251, 259–60, 379–80, 477 Pitcher, W. Alvin, 114–15, 117, 120, 128 Planned Parenthood, 139 Platonism, 206, 326, 390 Playboy magazine, 58, 126 Plessy v. Ferguson, 41, 461

593

Plouffe, David, 400 pneumatology, 461 Poitier, Sidney, 40 political accommodation ideology, 2 “Political Economy of Misery” (Townes), 298 political hermeneutics, 354 politics: Black political leadership in, 34; Black social gospel involvement in, 2–3, 5; Jackson’s impact in, 131–35, 151–56 Politics of Jesus (Hendricks), 353, 355–57 Politics of Jesus (Yoder), 355 Pol Pot, 69 Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival (PPC), xxi, 452, 469–71 Poor People’s Campaign of Jesse Jackson, 29, 120–23 Pope, Art, 465 popular culture, West on, 339–42 Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), 51 Portman, John, 89 Portuguese colonialism, 48–51 Potter, David, 128 poverty, Proctor’s campaign against, 198 Powell, Adam Clayton, Jr., 197, 200–202, 289 Powell, Adam Clayton, Sr., 3, 15, 193, 197, 201–2 Powell, Colin, 98, 402, 413, 420 Powell, Jody, 52, 54 Powell, Kajieme, 454 Power in the Blood? (Terrell), 326 Pragmatic Theology (Anderson), 375 pragmatism, Black theology and, 371–82 preacher-mayors, post-King emergence of, 5 Preller, Victor, 344, 371 Presbyterian Commission on Religion and Race, 221 President’s Advisory Council on FaithBased Neighborhood Partnerships, 455

594

Index

primaries: in 1984, 85–86; electoral politics and role of, 52–53, 85–86; racial voting in, 91–92; White supremacy and, 41 Princeton Theological Seminary, 261; Hendricks at, 354 Pritchett, Laurie, 38 Process and Reality (Whitehead), 394 process theology, 231, 389–97, 431–32 Proctor, Barbara, 126 Proctor, Bessie Louise Tate, 196, 199 Proctor, George, 192 Proctor, Hattie Ann Virginia Fisher, 192 Proctor, Herbert, 192, 197, 199 Proctor, Samuel DeWitt, xv; at Abyssinian Baptist Church, 200–203; Black theology and, 5, 12, 190–205; career highlights of, 198–205; communitarian theory and, 201–5; early life of, 191–93; Jackson and, 110–16, 126, 145; King and, 15, 194–95, 197–99; as Virginia Union president, 197–98; Wright and, 223 Proctor, Steven, 199 Proctor, Timothy, 199 Proctor, Velma Hughes, 192 Programme to Combat Racism (World Council of Churches), 38 Progressive Baptist Convention, 75 Progressive movement: Black social gospel and, 3; rise of, 3–4 Progressive National Baptist Convention, 5, 383 Promised Land metaphor, King’s use of, 430 Prophesy Deliverance! An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity (West), 219, 336, 354 prophetic Black church, 23–24 Protestantism: Neuhaus’s critique of, 425–26; postliberal critique of, 459–60 public education, Jackson’s interest in, 131–35 Public Enemy, 345 public intellectualism: Dyson and, 346–50; West and, 339–42

Public Interest magazine, 75 PUSH (People United to Save Humanity). See Operation PUSH PUSH-Excel, 134–40 Putnam, Hilary, 371 Qoboza, 64 Quarles, Benjamin, 252 queer sexuality: Black church and, 316, 349, 452; Black identity and, 375; Black Lives Matter and, 23, 418–19, 451; Black social gospel and, 21; hooks and, 367; womanist theology and, 231, 314. See also lesbianism; LGBTQ community Quinn, Richard, 138 Rabbinical Council of America, 138 Raboteau, Albert J., II, 238, 344, 475 Raby, Al, 115, 118 Race: A Theological Account (Carter), 259 race and racism: American Christianity and, 207; Anderson on, 379–80; Black churches and, 419–20; communitarian theory and, 32; Cone on Black Power and, 209–15, 226–27; Cone’s condemnation of, 329–33; Dyson’s cultural criticism and, 342–50; Fluker’s ghost of racism and, 420–21; Gilroy on, 430; Jackson’s experience with, 107–8; Obama on, 400, 402–5, 410–12, 418–21; postcolonial antiracism and, 53–72; religion and, 487; West and Socialist theory of, 335–42; Young antiracist convictions and, 55–72, 77–78, 102 Race Rules (Dyson), 346–50 racial apologetics, Anderson’s concept of, 372–73 racial justice: Black social gospel advocacy for, 3, 7; West on, 341–42 Racial Justice Act, 465–66 Radhakrishnan, S., 229 Rainbow Coalition, 11, 85–86, 104, 140, 151–56, 173–76, 226 Rainbow-PUSH merger, 175–76, 183–84

Index Raines, Howell, 143 Rangel, Charles, 46, 52 Ransom, Reverdy, 3, 4, 14–15, 190, 334, 476, 499 rape survivors, 389 Rather, Dan, 55–56 Rauschenbusch, Walter, 197 Raven, Charles E., 206 Rawls, John, 383 Reagan, Ronald: Jackson and, 139, 142–44, 151, 169; Middle East policy under, 76, 88; Young and, 79–80, 82–95 Rebuilding Broken Places, 463 Reconstruction, Black social gospel during, 2 Recter, Ricky Ray, 172 Redding, Morris, 82 redemptive suffering: Black theology and, 332–33, 379–80; Dyson on, 350 Reeb, James, 116 Reed, Adolph L., Jr., 154–55, 347, 374, 485 Reeker, Philip, 179 Reflecting Black (Dyson), 345–46 Reformation theology, 251; Black churches and, 188–89 Re-Imagining conference, 326 Reimer, Susan, 181–82 Religion in the Making (Whitehead), 394 Religion of the Field Negro (Lloyd), 482 Religious Heritage of the African World project, 263 religious philosophy, 206, 331, 344–45, 371, 491–99 Remembered Gate (Berg), 360 Repairers of the Breach, 468 reparation movement, 443 Republican Party: attack politics and, 175–76; neoconservatives and, 77; Reagan and, 84–86; Rivers and, 447–48 republican theory, society and, 31–33 Resident Aliens (Hauerwas and Willimon), 459–60 “Resources for a Constructive Christian Ethic for Black Women with Special

595

Attention to the Life and Work of Zora Neale Hurston” (Cannon), 279 Reston, James, 59, 153 Resurrection City (Poor People’s Campaign), 121–23 Reverend Ike, 23 Revolutionary United Front of Sierra Leone (RUF), 178–80 Reynolds, Barbara A., 9–10, 125–26, 128, 135, 141–42, 182 Rhodes, Susan, 239 Rhodesian Front Party, 63 Rice, Condoleezza, 413, 420 Rice, D. C., 194 Rice, Susan, 179 Rich, Adrienne, 359–60 Richard, Ivor, 58 Richardson, Nancy D., 277 Richmond Theological Institute, 194 Riddick, George E., 128 Riggs, Marcia, 283, 313, 315 Rights and Social Justice Program (Ford Foundation), 441 Risks of Faith (Cone), 329 Rivers, Eugene F., III, xx, 24–27, 441–52; Jackson and, 27, 447–48 Rivers, Eugene F., Jr., 441 Rivers, Jacqueline Olga Cooke, 26, 444, 446–47, 449, 451 Rivers, Mildred Bell, 441 Riverside Address (King), 32, 50, 249, 366 Road Less Traveled (Peck), 365 Robb, Chuck, 161, 172–73 Roberto, Holden, 51 Roberts, J. Deotis, xvi; Black liberation theology and, 6, 8, 12, 14, 16, 189–90, 205–7, 213–15, 476; on Black theology, 227–32, 251, 375, 477, 479; Cone and, 213–14, 227, 230; Douglas’s critique of, 319; early life of, 206; ecumenical theology and, 229–30; Hopkins on, 234–35; King and, 206, 214, 230; Proctor and, 204–5; Wilmore and, 225–26; women’s perspectives on, 264

596

Index

Roberts, Joseph L., Jr., 474 Roberts, Samuel, 6 Robinson, Noah Louis, 105–7, 109, 114 Robinson, Noah Louis, Jr., 107, 109, 124, 128–29, 173, 183 Robinson, Randall, 54 Rockefeller Fund, 134 Roman Catholic Church: Hopkins on, 254; human rights and, 64–65; Neuhaus on, 426 Romney, Mitt, 448 Roof, Dylann, 415–16 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 99 Rorty, Richard, 335, 371, 375–77 Rose, Don, 122 Ross, Brian, 402–3 Ross, Dennis, 409 Ross, Rosetta E., 283, 428 Royce, Josiah, 246, 371, 486 Rozet, A. Bruce, 141 Rubin, Robert, 176 Rubio, Marco, 483 Rudolph, Eric, 95 Ruether, Rosemary Radford, 212–13, 221, 264, 266, 319 Rukeyser, Muriel, 273 Rush, Bobby, 184, 399 Russell, Letty, 264, 266, 279 Russia, anti-Semitism and racism in, 58, 60, 68 Rustin, Bayard, 75, 116 Rutgers University, 5, 199–200, 353 7 Up company, Black employees in, 119 60 Minutes (television show), 134–35, 410 Sadat, Anwar, 139 Said I Wasn’t Gonna Tell Nobody (Cone), 482 Saint Paul School of Theology, 293, 297 Salisbury Plan, 67 salvation: Black social gospel and, 2–4; in Black theology, 369–70; Coleman’s womanist theology and, 392–97; Cone on, 211–12, 330, 332–33; Hopkins on, 240,

254; Obama on, 398–99; Townes on, 296 Samaranch, Juan Antonio, 95 Sample, D. S., 108, 152 Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference, 205 San Carlos Apache Tribe, 471 Sanctified Church movement, 431, 433–35 Sandel, Michael, 31 Sanders, Ben, III, 483 Sanders, Bernie, 187, 341, 470 Sanders, Cheryl J., 19–20, 25, 238, 283–85, 289–90, 319, 373; Fluker and, 431 Sanford, Terry, 113–14, 156 Sankoh, Foday, 178–80 Sapphire figure, 298–300 Sarah Lawrence College, 273 Sarsour, Linda, 470 Sartawi, Isa, 73 Savimbi, Jonas, 51 Sawyerr, Harry, 218 Scheffer, David J., 179 Schindler, Alexander M., 74 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 381, 390 Schmid, Lisa Phillips, 391 Schmidt, Benno, 362 Schneider, Laurel, 301 Schomer, Howard, 116–17, 137 Schonfeld, Reese, 169 Schroeder, Patricia, 88 Schultz, George, 149 Schuyler, George, 345 Schwerner, Michael, 80, 151, 167 Science of Mind (Holmes), 439 Scroggs, Robin, 324 Second Great Awakening (1795–1830), 3, 188–89, 475 Security Council Resolution 282 (UN), 64 self-sufficiency ethic, Black conservatives and, 79 Selma, Alabama: Bloody Sunday in, 115–16, 472; March to Montgomery from, 116, 401–2 Senegal, 67 Senghor, Léopold, 231

Index separatist ideology, 2, 7–8. See also new separatism Settles, Shani, 386 sexuality, Douglas on, 320–28 Sexuality and the Black Church (Douglas), 323–25 Seymour Institute for Black Church and Policy Studies, 449 Shakedown: Exposing the Real Jesse Jackson (Timmerman), 182–83 Shange, Ntozake, 348 Sharpe, Reginald W., Jr., 24 Sharpton, Al, 12, 185–86, 401, 410, 412 Shaw, Herbert B., 6 Shaw University, 206 Shelby, Richard, 156 Shelby County v. Holder, 466 Shinn, Roger, 271–72 Shoes That Fit Our Feet: Sources for a Constructive Black Theology (Hopkins), 236–49 Shorter, Aylward, 228 Shriver, Sargent, 53, 54 Shuttlesworth, Fred, 332 Sierra Leone, 177–79 Simmons, Bill, 414 Simmons, William, 190 Simpson-Mazzoli bill, 151 Sims, Angela, 282 Sims, Harold, 128 Singer, William, 125 Singleton, John, 323, 345 Sirleaf, Ellen Johnson, 178, 180 Sithole, N’dabinge, 38 Six-Day War (1967), 74 Slave Religion: The Invisible Institution in the Antebellum South (Raboteau), 238 slavery: African cultural roots and, 223–24, 238; Black theology and, 231–32, 238–39, 251–56; Black women and, 265; Carter on religion and, 257–60; Douglas on, 322–23; Mammy figure and, 298–300; religious practices under, 239–40 Sloan, Maceo, 176

597

Small, Leslie, 472 Smiley, Tavis, 350, 410–11 Smith, Barbara, 360, 368, 395 Smith, Benjamin, Sr., 443 Smith, Gerald Birney, 376–77 Smith, Ian, 48, 51–52, 56–57, 59, 63, 66–69 Smith, John E., 371 Smith, Joseph (Mrs.), 239 Smith, Robert, 136 Smith, Theophus H., 238 Smith, W. Cantwell, 229 Smith, Will, 420 Snyder, Ross, 117 Sobukwe, Dinilesizwe, 49–50 Sobukwe, Miliswa, 49–50 Sobukwe, Robert, 49–50, 62, 66 social Christianity, Neuhaus’s concept of, 426–29 Social Darwinism, 30, 243–44 Social Democratic communitarian theory, 31 social ethics: Anderson on, 377–78; Cannon and, 271–72; Floyd-Thomas on, 383–87; Fluker on, 424; Pitcher and, 114–15; rise of, 3–4; Townes and, 290–303 social gospel: founding of, 3; legacy of, 188–89; post–World War I decline of, 189. See also Black social gospel Socialism: Black social gospel and, 2, 35; in Jamaica, 62; rise of, 3–4; Young and, 64 Socialist Party (U.S.), neoconservatives from, 75 Socialist theory of racism, 339–42 social justice: Barber’s campaigns for, 460–62; Black social gospel and, 1, 3–4; Floyd-Thomas on theories of, 383–84 social salvation ideology, 3–4 Social Teaching of the Black Churches (Paris), 475 Society for the Study of Black Religion, 221, 302 Society of Christian Ethics (SCE), 65, 282–83

598

Index

sociology, rise of, 3–4 Söderblom, Nathan, 229 Soetoro, Lolo, 397 Soka Gakkai International (SGI), 26, 438 Solarz, Stephen, 69 Solis, Hilda, 408 Somalia, 67–68, 178 Sommers, Christina Hoff, 31 Song of Solomon (Morrison), 240 “Song of the Smoke” (Du Bois), 245–46 Souljah, Sister, 173 Souls of Black Folk (Du Bois), 429, 486 Souls to the Polls voter drive, 464–65 South Africa: anti-apartheid movement and, 86–87; Black liberation theology in, 218; Hopkins on, 233, 236–37; sanctions against, 48–49, 51–52, 57–58, 63, 87–88; UN arms embargo in, 64; Young’s diplomacy in, 57–58, 61–63, 87–89 South Africa Development Fund, 93–94 South End Press, 359 Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC): American Jewish community and, 74, 75, 77–78; antiwar movement and, 32; Barrow in, 129–30; Black business support for, 41; Black Expo and, 124; Black political activism and, 471; Black social gospel and, 6, 9–10; Chicago Area Friends of, 115; Chicago campaign of, 116–18, 122; decline of, 78–80; electoral politics and role of, 34–35, 40; formation of, 1, 6, 18; Hardings and, 32; Jackson and, 108–9, 114–17, 124–25; King and, 18, 350, 448; Middle East policies and, 75–76, 137; Operation Breadbasket and, 118–20, 122–23; voter education programs and, 38–40; Warnock on, 476; Young and, 35–36, 38–39, 61, 101 Southern Rhodesia: elections in, 57, 59, 63, 66–69, 80; sanctions against, 48–52, 69 Southwide Voter Education Project, 39–40

Soviet Union: Jackson and, 169–70; U.S. foreign policy and, 51, 54 Sowell, Thomas, 295–96 Speaking the Truth (Cone), 329 Spelman College, 42, 273 spirituals, Cone’s analysis of, 216, 224, 330–31 Spirituals and the Blues (Cone), 216, 224 Stalinism, 336, 340 Stanford, Karin, 181, 183 Stanford University, hooks at, 357–58 Stanley, A. Knighton, 110–13 Steele, Shelby, 295–96, 402 Steinem, Gloria, 125, 274 Stewart, Dianne M., 386, 430 Stewart, Gina M., 24 Stiglitz, Joseph, 409 Stockman, David, 83–84 Stoicism, 326 Stokes, Carl, 40, 81, 123 Stokes, Louis, 46, 125 Stone, Barton W., 458 Stop McGovern movement, 125 Stout, Jeffrey, 344, 371, 376–77 “Strange Fruit” (song), 331–32 Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I), 51 Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT II), 54, 71 Strength to Love (King), 366 Strickland, Robert, 81 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), 1, 5–6, 18–19 student protests, Black preachers’ role in, 5 Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), 363 Suchocki, Marjorie, 390, 397 suffering, womanist theology of, 293–94 Sula (Morrison), 240–41 Sullivan, Leon, 118–19 Sullivan, William M., 30 Summers, Lawrence, 408 supply-side economics, 84 Sutton, Percy, 126, 141

Index Sweden, racism in, 58 Sweet Honey in the Rock (band), 390 Swidler, Ann, 30 systematic theology, 33; Hopkins’s discussion of, 238–39 2 Live Crew, 345 350.org, 470 Taft, Julia V., 179 Talented Tenth, Du Bois’s concept of, 16–17, 36, 243–44, 296, 486 Talmadge, Herman, 40, 42–43 Tanzania, 67, 81 Tar Baby (Morrison), 240 tax cuts, Republican embrace of, 84–86 Taylor, Charles, 177–80 Taylor, Gardner, 5, 205 Taylor, Jewel Howard, 178–179 Taylor, Paul C., 492 Tea Party movement, 409 Temple, William, 227, 229 Temple University, 282 Terrell, JoAnne M.: Black social gospel and, 19–20; Black theology and, 233; Douglas and, 326–27; womanist theology and, 262, 283 Terrell, Molly Church, 18 Terzi, Zehdi, 70–72, 74 Texaco Corporation, 177 Thandeka, 394–95 Thatcher, Margaret, 69 Their Eyes Were Watching God (Hurston), 273 theodicy: Black theology and, 234; Dyson on, 350 Theoharis, Liz, xxi, 469–71 Theology in the Americas program, 217 theology of hope, 206 theology of religions, 229–30 Thernstrom, Abigail, 412 Third Great Awakening, 3 Third Life of Grange Copeland (Walker), 274 third-wave womanism, 382, 387–97

599

Third World movements. See developing nations movements Thistlethwaite, Susan, 182 Thomas, George, 263 Thomas, Juan M., 383 Thomas, Linda E., 223–24, 262, 283 Thomas, Richard C., 126, 128 Thompson, Fletcher, 44–45 Thomson, Meldrim, 62 Thurman, Howard: Black social gospel and, 3–4, 14, 17–18; Black theology and, 190, 193, 228, 373–74, 379–81, 476; Carter Sr. and, 439; Fluker on, 25, 427, 433; on Jesus, 289; religious philosophy and, 494–99 Thurman, Sue Bailey, 18 Tillich, Paul, 13, 37, 216, 230, 272 Time Warner, 171 Timmerman, Kenneth R., 110, 182–83 Tipton, Steven M., 30 Todd, Thomas N., 126, 128 T’Ofori-Atta, Ndugu (George Thomas), 263 Tolbert, William, 177–78 Tometi, Opal, 418–19 Tongogara, Josiah, 66–67 Touré, 420 Toward a Socialist Theory of Racism (West), 339 Townes, Emilie M., xviii; Douglas and, 321, 326; early life and career of, 290–91; social ethics and, 290–303; womanist theology and, 19–20, 262, 283, 287–89, 290–303 Townes, Mary Doris McLean, 290 Townes, Ross Emile, 290 Tracy, David, 223 trade unions, rise of, 3–4 Tragic Mulatta figure, 300–301 Tragic Soul-Life: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Moral Crisis Facing American Democracy (Johnson), 487–88 TransAfrica, 86–87 Travis, Sivart, 126

600

Index

Tregay, Alyce, 126, 130 Tribal Talk: Black Theology, Hermeneutics, and African/American Ways of “Telling the Story” (Coleman), 238 trickle-down economics, 84–85 Trilateral Commission, 53 Triumph of Politics (Stockman), 83 Troeltsch, Ernst, 390, 495 Trotskyism, 336 Troubling in My Soul: Womanist Perspectives on Evil and Suffering (Townes), 293–94 Troy, Cecil, 124 Trump, Donald, 28, 176, 409, 455–56, 468–69, 484 Truth, Sojourner, 2, 265, 285 Tsongas, Paul, 172 Tubman, Harriet, 33 Turman, Eboni Marshall, xxii, 22, 25, 29–30, 488–91 Turner, Henry McNeal, 14, 190, 263, 420 Turner, Lorenzo Dow, 224 Turner, Ted, 169 Turner, William C., 460–61 Turner Theological Seminary, 262–63 Tutu, Desmond, 94, 218, 236–37 Udall, Mo, 53 UN Committee on Palestinian Rights, 70 Underground Atlanta project, 82 Unified Industries, 81–82 Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 74 Union Presbyterian Seminary, 271, 282 Union Theological Seminary: Black social gospel and, 6, 9; Cannon at, 270–71; Cone at, 191, 209–10; Douglas at, 318; Forbes and, 351; Grant at, 263–64; Proctor and, 204; Townes at, 297–303; Warnock at, 473–74; West at, 21, 335–36; womanist theology at, 218–20, 261–303; Women’s Caucus at, 272; women students at, 262 United Auto Workers, 470

United Church Board of the Congregational Church, 38 United Church of Christ (UCC), 27–28, 38, 100, 453–56; Commission on Racial Justice, 49; Justice and Local Ministries Division, 455 United Church of Religious Science, 439 United Daughters of the Confederacy, 299 United Kingdom: racism in, 58; Zimbabwe independence and, 67 United Nations (UN): Socialist Republic of Vietnam admission to, 63; Young as ambassador to, 54–72 United Negro College Fund (UNCF), 126–27 Unite the Right, 456 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 64 University of Chicago Divinity School (UCDS), 114–15, 291 University of Illinois, 109–10 University of Wisconsin, Proctor at, 199 Urban League, 38, 75, 78, 139, 226 Urban Mass Transit Administration, 47 Urban Mass Transportation Act, 46–47 U.S. News & World Report, 58 Uzunyol, Melih, 94–95 Valignano, Alessandro, 433 Vance, Cyrus, 53–57, 68, 71–72, 76 Vanderbilt University: Divinity School, 302, 389; Dyson at, 350 Van Peebles, Melvin, 323 Vietnam: Chinese invasion of, 69; Jackson on, 133; Nike factories in, 96; postwar government of, 63 Vietnam War: Black opposition to, 32; electoral politics and, 45–46; Kissinger and, 51; Young on, 66. See also antiwar movement violence, Dyson’s experience of, 342–44 Violence Against Women Act, 175 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act (1994), 174–75

Index Virginia Seminary and College, 435–36 Virginia Union University, 194–95, 197–99 Vivian, C. T., 5–7, 15, 471 Vorster, John, 51–52, 59, 61–62 voter education programs, 38–40 voter registration and voters’ rights: Barber’s campaign for protection of, 464–69; Black underrepresentation in, 139; Chicago campaign for, 118; Jackson’s involvement in, 148, 156, 180–81, 183, 351–52; New Georgia Project and, 471 Voting Rights Act, 28, 32, 44, 50, 116, 136, 190, 466–68 Waiting to Exhale (film), 348 Walker, Adrian, 447 Walker, Alice, 272–73; Cannon and, 276–77, 281; Douglas and, 318; Dyson on, 348; early life and career, 273–74; Floyd-Thomas and, 384–87; on Hurston, 273–74; Townes and, 294; Traci West and, 367–69; womanist theology and, 19, 22, 262, 264, 285, 289, 294 Walker, Corey D. B., 155 Walker, David, 2, 254 Walker, Mabel, 129 Walker, Minnie Tallulah Grant, 273, 276 Walker, Paul, 128 Walker, Willie Lee, 273, 275–76 Walker, Wyatt, 35, 73–74, 143 “Walking in the Whirlwind: A Whiteheadian-Womanist Soteriology” (Coleman), 392 Wallace, David, 119, 128–29, 142 Wallace, George, 10–11, 53 Wallace, Michelle, 348, 367 Wallace-Wells, Benjamin, 400 Wall Street Project, 175–77, 183 Wal-Mart, Young’s ties to, 102–3 Walters, Alexander, 3, 15 Walters, Ronald, 136, 155 Wanniski, Jude, 84

601

Wanzer Dairy, 119 WAOK-AM radio station, 102 Warnock, Jonathan, 473 Warnock, Keith, 474 Warnock, Raphael G., xxi, 25, 29, 471–84 Warnock, Verlene, 473 Warren, Elizabeth, 472 Warren, Rick, 23 Washington, Booker T., 2–3, 36, 41, 123, 131, 192–93, 273, 346 Washington, Harold, 373 Washington, James, 6 Washington, Joseph, 14, 206, 251, 476 Washington Post, 73, 145, 149–50, 171 Watchtower (magazine), 423 Watkins, Frank, 128–29, 139, 142 Watkins, Gloria Jean. See hooks, bell Watkins, Levi, 93 Watson, Carolyn, 94 Watson, Jack, 45 wave-three womanism, 382 wave-two womanism, 382–87 Wayland Seminary, 194 wealth, celebration of, 83 Wealth and Poverty (Gilder), 83–84 Weems, Renita J., 19–20, 232, 283, 389–90 We Have Been Believers (Evans), 478 Weingarten, Randi, 470 welfare: Black criticism of, 79; Clinton’s reform of, 176–77; conservative attack on, 83–84; Jackson on, 132–35 Wellford, Edwin T., 332 Wells-Barnett, Ida B., 3, 4, 18, 290–93 Welsiong, Frances Cress, 324 We Rise (songbook), 470 West, Cornel, xvii; Anderson and, 371, 373–74, 378; Black social gospel and, 21–24; Black theology and, 251; on capitalism and Black oppression, 219; Carter on, 259–60; Cone and, 214–15, 217, 481; Democratic Socialists of America and, 218; on Du Bois and Cox, 340–41; Dyson and, 344–47; early life and career, 335–36; Ferguson protests

602

Index

West, Cornel (continued) and, 414; hooks and, 364–65; Hopkins on, 249; on Israel and Black people, 319; James and, 335–36; on King, 13; Marxism and socialist antiracism and, 335–42; Obama and, 405, 409–10; Rivers and, 443, 445 West, Traci, 21, 367–69 Westinghouse, 81 Wettstein, Arnold, 326–27 What’s Faith Got to Do with It? (Douglas), 325 What Would Martin Say? (Jones), 427–28 White, Jack E., 181 White culture: Baldwin on, 321; Black stereotypes in, 298–301; Black women and, 265; Cannon’s discussion of, 270–72; communitarian theory and, 31–33; Douglas on, 321–28; Du Bois on, 488–89; Jackson’s criticism of, 107–8 White evangelicalism: Black evangelicalism and, 222; Bush and, 356; Coleman and, 388–90; individualism and, 29; racism and, 420; Rivers on, 447; salvation and, 355 White feminism: Cannon and, 286–87; Grant’s critique of, 266–67; racism and, 359–60; theology and, 262, 264 Whitehead, Alfred North, 389–95 White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, 447 White liberal theology: Black criticism of, 6–7; Cone’s critique of, 207–15, 226–27; decline of social gospel in, 189; Hopkins on, 235; Roberts’s critique of, 230 Whiteness, as social category and collective identity, x White prosperity preachers, 23 White social gospel, 3 White supremacy: in Atlanta, 41; Black militancy against, 7; Black radicalist view of, 15; Du Bois on, 247–48; Obama on, 404; political activism against, 1–2; Rivers on, 447; West on, 341–42

White Women’s Christ and Black Women’s Jesus: Feminist Christology and Womanist Response (Grant), 266 Whitman, Walt, 104 Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness (Touré), 420 Wieman, Henry Nelson, 377 Wiggins, Daphne, 283 Wilder, L. Douglas, 171–72 Wiley, Christian Y., 24 Wiley, Dennis W., 24, 477–78 Wilkes, Andrew, 24 Wilkins, E. V., 457, 462 Wilkins, Roger, 123, 136, 146, 153 Wilkins, Roy, 448 Williams, A. D., 474 Williams, Delores S., xviii; Black theology and, 223, 225–26, 251, 262; Cannon and, 277; Coleman on, 395; Cone and, 218–19, 221, 333; Douglas and, 318, 320, 326; Fluker and, 431; Pinn’s analysis of, 379; Terrell and, 327; Traci West and, 367; womanist theology and, 19–20, 266, 283, 303–16, 373 Williams, Hosea, 38, 79, 121 Williams, Nikema, 472 Williams, Preston N., 6, 205, 215 Willimon, William, 489 Willis, Benjamin, 115 Wilmore, Gayraud S., xvi; Black liberation theology and, 14–16, 189, 191, 208, 221–23, 225–26; on Black theology, 6, 8, 12, 215–16, 235, 249–50, 477–78; Cone and, 14, 214, 216, 221–22, 226, 237, 263, 474; Douglas on, 320; early career of, 221; Hopkins on, 234–36, 249; Proctor and, 204; Warnock on, 477–78; women theologians and, 264 Wilson, Darren, 414 Wilson, Flip, 123 Wilson, Nancy, 141 Wilson, Woodrow, 468 Wimbush, Vincent L., 232, 324 Winfrey, Oprah, 186, 402 Wink, Walter, 355

Index Wirth, Tim, 156 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 272, 381 WJPC radio station, 126 Wolf, Milton, 73–74 Wolin, Sheldon, 335 Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil (Townes), 298 womanist theology, xi; Anderson and, 373; Black churches rejection of, 17; Black-only sources in, 284; Cannon’s contributions to, 267–90; Carter on, 259–60; Chalcedonian Christology and, 489–91; Coleman and, 394–97; Cone and, 19–20, 214–15, 218–19, 221, 226–27, 332–33; Douglas and, 318–28; evolution of, 261–67; Fluker and, 430–31; founding of, 6, 19–20; Grant’s role in, 262–67; Hopkins on, 234; liberation theology and, 191; Proctor and, 203–5; Roberts’s support for, 231; Sanders and, 283–85; second-wave womanism, 382–87; social ethics and, 267–90; Terrell and, 326–28; third-wave womanism, 382, 387–97; Thurman and, 30; Townes and, 290–303; Traci West and, 367–69; Walker’s influence on, 274–76, 294; Warnock on, 479–80; Wells-Barnett and, 291–93; Wilmore on, 223 woman ministers, ordination of, 262 Women: To Preach or Not to Preach (Mitchell), 203 Women for Young, 44 Women’s Studies in Religion Program (Harvard Divinity School), 264 Women’s Theological Center, 277, 367 Wood, Forrest G., 252 Wood, Joe, 374 Woodbey, George W., 334 Woods, Donald, 64 Woodson, Carter, 193 Woodyard, David, 318 Working Families for Wal-Mart, 102–3 work songs, Hopkins on, 242

603

World Changers Church International, 431 World Conference on Action Against Apartheid (Lagos, Nigeria), 57, 61 World Council of Churches, 37–38 world house, King’s concept of, 422, 429–30, 435–38, 440–42 World Student Christian Federation, 18 Wounds of the Spirit (West), 368–69 Wright, Donald R., 252, 255–56 Wright, Jeremiah A., Jr., 12, 205, 223–26, 398, 400, 402–7, 480, 483 Wright, Nathan, 6 Wright, Richard R., Jr., 3, 237 Wurzburger, Walter S., 138 Wynn, Prathia Hall, 6, 18, 484 Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial, 137 Yakovlev, Alexander, 170 Yale Divinity School, 196–97, 298 Yale University, hooks at, 362–63 Yoder, John Howard, 355 Young, Andrea, 80 Young, Andrew, Jr., xiii, 5; Abernathy and, 79–80; African work of, 56–72, 97–103; anti-apartheid movement and, 87; assassination of King and, 121; business and corporate ties of, 8, 37–38, 50, 81–103, 176; career of, 8–9, 29, 36–38; Carter and, 52–72, 76–78; civil rights movement and, 38–39; Communism linked to, 62–72; Democratic Party and, 83–86; Dyson on, 350; early life of, 35–36; foreign policy and global justice advocacy of, 48–53; GoodWorks International and, 95–103; gubernatorial campaign of, 89–95; impeachment attempt against, 68; Jackson and, 85–86, 116, 136–37, 141; Japanese trade mission of, 88–89; King and, 8, 15–16, 37–39, 60–61, 63; as mayor of Atlanta, 81–95; Middle East diplomacy of, 70–78; as National Council of Churches president, 100–101; Nigerian ties with,

604

Index

Young, Andrew, Jr., (continued) 61, 67, 69, 81–82, 96, 98–99, 101–2; Nike factory inspections and, 96–97; Obama and, 401; Olympic Games bid and, 90–95; Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and, 70–72; political career of, 35, 38, 40, 43–53, 471; post-UN career in Atlanta of, 80–95; resignation as UN ambassador, 72–80; scapegoating of, 73–74; SCLC and, 35–36; South Africa Development Fund and, 93–94; as UN ambassador, 54–72; Vance and, 56–57; on Vietnam, 69 Young, Andrew, Sr., 35–36, 38

Young, Coleman, 86, 133, 141 Young, Jean Childs, 6, 35, 37–40, 43–44, 50, 55, 86, 92–93 Young, Paula Jean, 80 Young, Walter, 36 Young Democrats of Georgia, 472 Young Democrats of North Carolina, 113 Young Ideas, 88 Young Women’s Christian Association, 18 Zimbabwe, 63, 66–72, 80, 170 Zimmerman, George, 411–12, 418, 467–68 Zinn, Howard, 273 Zionism, Black Americans and, 73–78 Zucker, David, 137