civil rights movement

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.

In 1965, MLK asked religious leaders to come to Selma and march. Decades later, plans are taking shape in Montgomery to honor those who came.

About 15 years
ago I was a guest at the annual meeting of the Association of Christians Teaching Sociology. In one session a professor reported on a
student's project. Taking the Century as a barometer of mainline Protestantism and Christianity Today as a barometer of evangelicalism, his student
compared the respective responses to the civil rights movement. The student
found that the Century was very hospitable toward the movement and that CT was critical of
it. (Full disclosure: At the time of this ACTS meeting, I was working for
CT.)

Since ACTS is comprised
largely of evangelical scholars, there was some hanging of heads in the room.
Evangelicals, they agreed, had been on the wrong side of history, not to speak
of the wrong side of justice.

It was the spring of 1963 in Birmingham, and it looked as if the civil rights movement would suffer yet another defeat. The powers that be had more jail space than the civil rights workers had people. But then one Sunday, reports historian Taylor Branch, 2,000 young people came out of worship at the New Pilgrim Baptist Church and prepared to march.

Our armor always loses because our weapons are consistently one step ahead of our protection.

Two Century editors report from the second march in Selma, Alabama, on March 9, 1965