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DAVID L. CHAPPELL teaches history at the University of Arkansas. He is author of Inside Agitators: White Southerners in the Civil Rights Movement.

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In a new assessment of the Civil Rights Movement, Chappell argues that its success was not due to the triumph of liberal ideas after decades of gradual progress, but to the tradition of prophetic religion that brought the vitality of a religious revival to the integrationist cause. Segregationists lost, he says, because they did not have support in their white southern religious denominations.

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In a new assessment of the Civil Rights Movement, Chappell argues that its success was not due to the triumph of liberal ideas after decades of gradual progress, but to the tradition of prophetic religion that brought the vitality of a religious revival to the integrationist cause. Segregationists lost, he says, because they did not have support in their white southern religious denominations.

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A Stone of Hope

University of North Carolina Press

Introduction

King's public career had begun in 1955, in a period defined by Joseph McCarthy and Joseph Stalin; by the homogeneity of Levittown and the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit; by a popular president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, who opposed federal action to promote equality; and by equally popular racial demagogues in the southern states. The Democratic Party, in its 1948 platform, and the U.S. Supreme Court, in its 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, appeared to repudiate their long-standing support of white supremacy. But neither could do much to change the discriminatory laws and customs in the South. The Democrats retreated from their bold statement, and the Court seemed to consign victims of discrimination to an endless, costly series of individual lawsuits. Many black southerners-including King, for a time-concluded that the rosy promises of change were as false as innumerable promises in the past. Hopes of racial justice seemed as distant as ever.

Yet over the twelve-odd years of King's career, a mass movement rose up in the South and brought city governments, bus companies, and chambers of commerce to their knees. The movement created disorder so severe as to force a reluctant federal government to intervene-on the side of black southerners, which was more surprising than it seems in hindsight today. The civil rights movement-aided by Democratic-Republican competition for the votes of recent black migrants to the North and by U.S.-Soviet competition for allies among newly independent African and Asian nations-destroyed Jim Crow, the vast system of legal segregation and disfranchisement named after a nineteenth-century minstrel character. In addition to provoking Congress to turn against its powerful southern bloc in the sweeping Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965, the movement forced a change in the Constitution. The Twenty-fourth Amendment and new interpretations of the Fifteenth guaranteed black Americans the vote. The movement shut down a political culture of racist demagoguery and one-party rule in the southern states, a culture long underwritten by the threat of mob violence.

The movement did all this with remarkably few casualties. Ugly as white southern resistance was, Maya Lin's memorial to martyrs of the civil rights movement has only 40 names engraved on it. The apartheid regime in South Africa beat that figure in a single day, at Sharpeville in 1960, when it killed 67 people and wounded 200 more. In a freedom struggle closer to our own time, Chinese authorities killed some 2,600 in the immediate aftermath of Tiananmen Square. America's own war to destroy slavery, with 600,000 deaths, makes the destruction of segregation a century later appear astonishingly nonviolent. Its eradication appears a feat of moral and political alchemy, well represented by King's stone of hope from a mountain of despair.

How did it happen? The civil rights struggle did not consist entirely of politics and grassroots organizing, as books and documentaries on the subject have so far implied. It also involved a change in American culture, a change in what Americans thought and felt when they talked about things like freedom, equality, race, and rights. It involved a change in Americans' expectations about these things, what they considered realistic as opposed to idealistic.

This book tries to account-and claims only to begin the accounting-for the cultural changes behind the civil rights movement by answering four questions: Why did the dominant voice in American political culture, liberalism, fail to achieve anything substantial for black rights at the height of liberal power in the 1930s? Where did black southerners find a philosophical inspiration to rebel, given the failure of liberalism as they knew it? How did black southerners sustain the confidence, solidarity, and discipline of their rebellion through years of drudgery, setbacks, and risk? Finally, why were the enemies of the civil rights movement, for one fleeting but decisive moment, so weak?

Chapters 1 through 4 reconsider the intellectual roots of the civil rights movement. The black southern movement's political successes depended on an alliance with northern liberals. Yet the liberals' animating faith was radically different from that of the southern movement. Liberals believed in the power of human reason to overcome "prejudice" and other vestiges of a superstitious, unenlightened past. Liberals believed, with Gunnar Myrdal, the Swedish social scientist whose famous 1944 report on American racism they embraced, that "progress" was under way: further, education, along with economic development, would lead white southerners to abandon their irrational traditions. Therefore liberals, though sincere in their devotion to black rights, did not see any reason to do anything drastic to promote them. Indeed, they thought that pushing too hard for black rights would provoke a violent reaction in the backward white South.

Liberals' most sensitive and articulate spokesmen, such as John Dewey and Lionel Trilling, were acutely aware of the cultural weakness of their faith in reason. Especially after seeing how difficult it was for the West's liberal democracies to fight the Nazis, liberals envied and feared conservatives' power to draw on irrational wellsprings of myth and tradition. Yet in the South of the 1950s, it was liberals' new black allies, rather than their white supremacist enemies, who drew most effectively on such irrational wellsprings.

The black movement's nonviolent soldiers were driven not by modern liberal faith in human reason, but by older, seemingly more durable prejudices and superstitions that were rooted in Christian and Jewish myth. Specifically, they drew from a prophetic tradition that runs from David and Isaiah in the Old Testament through Augustine and Martin Luther to Reinhold Niebuhr in the twentieth century. (That tradition also traveled down a different path, via the seventh-century prophet Muhammad, to the mind of the mature Malcolm X and some of his followers, though that path is not examined in this book. The prophetic tradition was not confined to Christianity or even to religion: strictly Christian thinkers like Karl Barth and Reinhold Niebuhr were quick to admit that an atheist might take a prophetic stance more readily and faithfully than a typical twentieth-century Christian.) The thinkers who were active in the black movement-at least the ones for whom I was able to track down an extensive intellectual record-believed that the natural tendency of this world and of human...