civil rights movement

The young people leading this movement have heard enough about Martin Luther King's dream. It is not enough for church leaders to reply that they don't know much history.

Most white Christians, and many middle class racial minority communities, have cut themselves off from any intimate life together with poor black communities that struggle every day with a multiplicity of oppressive obstacles. But a movement is happening all around us.

Fifty-two years ago, eight white clergy penned their version of “all lives matter.” These white men of God questioned the efficacy of the civil rights movement in their hometown of Birmingham, Alabama. They wrote that "honest convictions in racial matters could properly be pursued in the courts.”

I recently had the honor of sitting down with a fourth-generation Mississippian who knows a thing or two about racial injustice because he’s spent his life fighting it: Duncan M. Gray Jr., bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Mississippi from 1974 to 1993.

“Tell me what a feminist looks like,” the woman at the microphone chanted. Obediently and enthusiastically, we responded, “This is what a feminist looks like.” It was a beautiful, if chilly, April afternoon, and several hundred students, faculty members, and administrators had gathered in front of the University of Mary Washington’s administration building to mourn the murder of Grace Rebecca Mann and celebrate her life.

In 1960, when Vincent Harding moved to Atlanta, he began trying to weld together the ongoing nonviolent activism being lived out by some in the Black Church with the peace witness of the Mennonite Church. This effort became less than a decade long experiment, because Harding would eventually break formal ties with the Mennonite Church. Though his time and effort keeping a foot simultaneously in both the Black community and Mennonite community was fixed should not suggest to us that he no longer had an important role to play in for Mennonite lived faith or that he did not continue to influence the Mennonite Church deeply. In fact, his ongoing legacy for the Mennonite Church lives on today.

The third Selma-to-Montgomery march was a civil rights watershed. It also focused the lives of many who gave it its spiritual hue.

Seven of this year's eight best picture nominees are stories of lone, white heroes—stories that seem out of touch with the times. The exception is Selma.

President Barack Obama’s State of the Union proposed to enlarge the American promise of prosperity by introducing a new tax structure for the very wealthy, tax credits for families outside of the wealthy stratum, increased access to retirement plans for more American workers, and a plan to subsidize community college tuition. While there will be resistance to the president’s proposals, the impulse behind them is an appeal to an idealized form of decency that Lyndon B. Johnson believed would make his idea of a Great Society an American reality.

Fifty years ago this month, Johnson introduced his vision to Congress.

This is a book for those that are seeking to embody the radical witness of Jesus for their own time, recalibrating their own lives in light of the Sermon on the Mount and Jesus’ example of solidarity with the oppressed. If you, or anyone you know, is looking to be inspired by both the past and present witness of Jesus in the world, and if you would appreciate it communicated through creative and beautiful artwork testifying to God’s Church making visible the Kingdom of God, then Radical Jesus is for you!

Through analysis of denominational statements about what is arguably the most debated military conflict in recent U.S. history, George Bogaski produces an illuminating, if also unvarnished, story.

What happened to the civil rights movement? David Chappell offers a carefully wrought study of a nation's fitful waking from a beautiful dream.

The Harlem Ashram (1940-1948) was a grand experiment that didn't go very far. The interracial Christian commune at Fifth Avenue and 125th Street was modeled after ashrams, or Hindu religious centers, that Gandhi had established in India. Its founders were two white men, Ralph Templin and Jay Holmes Smith, who had been Methodist missionaries in India in the 1930s. There they became interested in Gandhi's synthesis of religion, politics, and nonviolent protest. 

Templin and Smith were part of a cohort of American pacifists who saw Gandhi’s work as a potential model for political and religious activism in the United States.

Vincent Harding died yesterday. If all the civil rights leader had done was draft King's "Beyond Vietnam" speech, that would have been quite a contribution. ("I watched this [antipoverty] program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything on a society gone mad on war.") But in the 60s Harding founded Atlanta's Mennonite House (with his wife Rosemarie Freeney Harding), traveled around the South with the movement, and got his doctorate in history (here in Chicago, with Century contributing editor Martin Marty). Since then he led a career of teaching (mostly at Iliff), writing, and activism.

Vincent Harding combined his sensibilities as a historian and as a pastor. He called us, as individuals and as a nation, to face our weaknesses and learn from them.

When President Obama argued for U.S. strikes on Syria, he used a familiar trope:

When, with modest effort and risk, we can stop children from being gassed to death and thereby make our own children safer over the long run, I believe we should act. That’s what makes America different. That’s what makes us exceptional.

Yet his proposed Syria policy put him in new political territory: against the views of a majority of African Americans.

I wanted to join a group of pastors going to the March on Washington. But I had young children—and no money for bus fare and meals—so I didn’t. I've rued it ever since.

Campbell got into trouble in lots of different ways. As a seminarian, I was particularly impressed that he dared to drink whiskey with the Klan.

When I left North Carolina at age 22, I never planned to be back in a Baptist church. Years later, here I am.