McClay – The Uniqueness of the Civil Rights Movement

The
Uniqueness of the Civil Rights Movement

A Luncheon Address
to the Philadelphia Society
October 2, 2004
Philadelphia, PA

Wilfred M. McClay
University of Tennessee at Chattanooga

On the principle that it’s always good to provide some
local flavor when addressing an audience, I thought I would begin my remarks
today with the case of Gov. James McGreevey of New Jersey. You remember him.
He’s the fellow who, in one of the most curious multiple non-sequiturs of
recent American political history, chose to fend off charges of incompetence and
pervasive corruption by hauling his wife in front of a national television
audience, and declaring his homosexuality—then going on to assert that,
because rumors and suspicions had made it impossible for him to govern
effectively, he would resign his office—although not until some three months
hence. (Amid all the ensuing waves of congratulation and self-congratulation,
there was no indication about when or whether he would also resign from his
marriage. Evidently that was too private a matter to get into.)

We should not be detained by trying to disentangle this
absurd mess. But I want to read you part of the
New York Times‘s account of it. Not only because it surely tells
us The Truth—it’s the New York Times, after
all—but also because provides us with an important insight into at least part
of what was really going on. You’ll recall the situation. With McGreevey’s
standing as governor already in deep legal and political trouble, he feared that
a looming sexual-harassment lawsuit, filed by an (otherwise unqualified) male
lover whom he’d installed in a high state office, would destroy him. Let me
read this passage, taken from the August 15, 2004 edition of the Times:

Through much of Wednesday night
and early Thursday morning, the governor and his advisers debated how to handle
what they expected to be the coming lawsuit. No option was pleasant.”The
political people all said that the public might accept that he was gay and
overlook the fact that he had an affair,” said one person involved in the
debate. “But having a lover on the payroll, in a job where they weren’t
really qualified, whatever their sexual preference, would be devastating.”

Mr. McGreevey
soon began preparing a speech to make to the public about his life and current
circumstances. In doing so, he began conferring with directors at the Human
Rights Campaign, a prominent gay advocacy group in WashingtonThe most
dramatic line the governor eventually utter—“I am a gay American”—was
developed by the group and was a
poll-tested phrase used to reframe the debate about gay causes from one about
sexual liberation to one about civil rights. (my emphasis)

So, if you were wondering where that strangely gratuitous
term, “gay American,” came from—the phrase that Governor McGreevey
described as “his truth”—now you know. It was but the latest, and far from
being the most shameless, attempt—though it may well be the clumsiest—to
borrow the moral mantle of the Civil Rights Movement to ennoble other purposes,
and conceal other “truths.”

Whatever else this tawdry episode tells us, it shows the
enduring power of that mantle. The Civil Rights Movement has lost none of its
moral prestige. Those of us who teach American history see its enduring power
nearly every day. If my own experience is any guide, a sizable percentage of
applicants for graduate study in U.S. history at any given time are likely to
cite the Civil Rights Movement as one of their chief inspirations for taking up
the study of history.

Their affinity goes far deeper than mere intellectual
curiosity or political calculation, let alone professional ambition. The moral
urgency of the subject for them is an indication that they are, in some sense,
working out their own salvation with fear and trembling. Shelby Steele nailed a
big part of this in his remarks about “white guilt” and the need for
disassociation last night. And I think there is often something even deeper,
something that I see at work in students of all races. We have been so trained
to see the world in strictly material terms that we miss the obvious fact that
people are often motivated, and profoundly so, by their moral needs. These
students find themselves in a morally complicated world full of imperfect heroes
and compromised ideals, in which their own wealth and ease fill them with
ambivalence. They feel a powerful need to redeem and ennoble their own lives
through association with a cause they can regard as incontrovertibly pure,
simple, and noble. Hence their readiness to find their destiny, and their moral
release, in this, one of the greatest of American stories.

Thus, for better or worse, the Civil Rights Movement has
become a moral icon to the United States and much of the rest of the world. For
better, because it was an admirable movement, both in its means and its ends,
and one that clearly has had the effect of improving the American nation and
recalling it to its own professed ideals. But, one must reluctantly admit, the
influence has in some ways been for worse too. To the extent that the
Movement’s example has come to be used mindlessly and mechanically as a
template for all social and political struggles, its exaltation has also tended
to elevate social movements over institutional politics, demonstrations over
deliberations, righteous theatrics over reasoned compromise, and social history
over political history. This is not meant as a criticism of the Movement itself,
either tactically or substantively. But we need to guard against the tendency to
reduce all of history to variations upon a few easily grasped themes—a habit
as wrongheaded as it is tempting. Not every tyrant is a Hitler, not every
intervention is a Vietnam, not every massacre is a Holocaust—and not every
aspirant social cause is analogous to the Civil Rights Movement.

How, then, to find our way back to a truer and more precise
understanding of the Civil Rights Movement and its proper place in American
history, one that resists this universalizing temptation? One helpful clue can
be found in historian David L. Chappell’s valuable recent book A
Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion, Liberalism, and the Death of Jim Crow,
which insists that we look carefully at the historical particulars of this great
undertaking, and understand more clearly the specific reasons why it succeeded.
And when we look at those specifics, what we see is the pervasive force of
religion. More specifically, Chappell argues that it is simply impossible to
understand the Movement’s success without taking into account the cultural
setting of pervasive Southern Protestantism within which it unfolded. He is not
merely claiming religion as “a neglected factor.” Instead, he is claiming it
as the absolutely crucial conditioning factor, without which nothing could have
occurred as it did. The Movement, in this view, should not be understood as a
fundamentally political mobilization with lots of swaying singing of gospel
songs and other colorful trappings of black American religious culture added in
on the side, a position that Chappell see for the condescension that it in fact
is. Instead, in his view, the Movement should be seen primarily as a high-octane
religious revival, full of prophetic utterances and messianic expectations,
which had the effect of leading to profound and lasting political and social
change, almost as much as a byproduct as a set of stated goals.

Now, this argument may well be somewhat overdrawn, and
leave other elements in the Movement out of account. But it has considerable
corrective merit. Not the least of its virtues is that in making it, Chappell
gives the back of his hand to smug white secular liberals, such as Arthur M.
Schlesinger, Jr. and Gunnar Myrdal, who envisioned the cause of racial justice
as but one element in the great unfolding of The Progressive Agenda—and
therefore saw no need to act decisively. Whatever the setbacks of the moment,
such liberals knew themselves to be anointed by history as the party of the
future, and so the cause of black civil rights in the South was deemed an
insufficiently pressing reason to put liberals’ electoral chances in jeopardy.
As Chappell puts it with acid concision: “opportunism on this issue dictated
the same gestures as idealism.”

But black Southern preachers and their followers approached
life with a different view of human progress. Martin Luther King’s
fundamentalist Baptist background and his liberal seminary education may have
been at odds in certain respects, but they meshed well in his view of human
nature and the prophetic calling of the Christian leader. The doctrine of
original sin, the tendency of all human endeavors to slide into corruption, the
inability of human institutions to reform themselves without divine favor, and
hence the need for the man of God to stand outside the comfort and security of
the status quo, and speak with the boldness of Jeremiah calling the people to
repentance, and the need for the faithful to experience suffering and submission
to God’s will as the price of their redemption—these were things that King,
and his followers, all instinctively grasped. The Biblical view of man and God
and sin and suffering and humility and redemption was their chief sustenance,
their spiritual meat and drink, their everyday solace and their end-times hope.
Without the primal force of their deep religious convictions driving and
directing the Movement, Chappell contends, it would never have begun to move.

Chappell also brings a more careful and imaginative
approach to the study of white Southern religious convictions, and the white
Christian response to the Movement. Such insight has been a long time in coming,
since “the standard image of the white South in the civil rights struggle,”
Chappell rightly observes, “is a mob.” In that respect, Chappell’s book,
although it could hardly been considered overly sympathetic to the white South,
is a real advance in understanding. Chappell points to the remarkable fact that,
although most white Southern Protestant churches were still aligned with the
same sectionalist denominations that had been created by the Civil War, these
churches were, by and large, unsupportive of the segregationist cause.

To be sure, unsupportiveness is not the same thing as
repudiation. But there were numerous cases in which it at least took the form of
outright and unambiguous opposition. The denominational assemblies of the
Southern Baptists and Southern Presbyterians, for example, went on the record
with resolutions strongly favoring desegregation, and the evangelist Rev. Billy
Graham was admirably consistent from the very beginning of his career, in both
his public utterances and his private and personal behavior, in his opposition
to racial segregation.

The more characteristic response from white churches was
one of evasive neutrality. Still, such a muted response by the white Southern
clergy left the segregationist opposition disabled in crucial ways. The white
Southern faith may not have been strong enough to overcome ingrained racial and
social barriers. But it was at least strong enough to withhold the full mantle
of legitimacy from those barriers. And that made all the difference.

Chappell is careful, then, not to claim anything
approaching moral heroism for the white Southern church. But the uneasy
conscience he depicts made it necessary for segregationist politicians in the
South to fight for their cause on strictly sociological and constitutional
grounds, or with undiluted demagoguery, without being able to count on the moral
support of the South’s most characteristic institution. And that, in a word,
is why they could not prevail. That is also why secular liberalism failed to
make the Movement move. And that is why the white Southern opponents of the
Movement, though mightier in some ways, were disarmed from the start by their
inability to draw on the same sources of strength that animated their foes. In
other words, the specific dynamics of the Civil Rights Movement were made
possible by the fact that both sides agreed on something—and that something
was the truth and legitimizing force of Christianity. The presence of this
shared cultural premise was just as fundamental as anything the opponents
disagreed about. It was the principal source of the Movement’s uniqueness.

There are some inferences to be drawn from this, inferences
that affect the way we assess the Movement’s significance in American and
world history. For one thing, it should help explain to provincial Americans why
Tiananmen Square is not Selma, and why the tactics of King and Gandhi do not
work against a Saddam Hussein or the Iranian theocrats. Such tactics seek to
prick consciences that are shaped like one’s own; but they fall pitiably short
when the “other” inhabits a genuinely different moral universe. For all its
shortcomings, the United States has always had a shared moral framework
grounded, not merely in abstract ideas of human rights and individual liberty,
but also in a longer and deeper heritage of Biblical narratives, tropes,
parables, and moral wisdom. This is one reason why our own struggles and
triumphs are so difficult to replicate in the rest of the world.

In addition, A Stone
of Hope reminds us that the most successful and enduring movements for
change in American history are likely to have a respectful relationship to the
country’s religious heritage, or at least be broadly congruent with it. One
might cite not only the Civil Rights Movement but the movements for the
abolition of slavery, or women’s suffrage, or even the American Revolution
itself, as examples of this—issues in which one could find both religious and
secular rationales for change, and in which the two sets of justifications were
mutually supportive, and even mingled to an extent unthinkable in other
cultures. That congruency is a key element in the genius of American politics,
and of American religion. It is why Martin Luther King’s finest rhetoric
could, with equal plausibility, reverently invoke not only the prophetic
Scriptures, but also the Declaration and the Constitution and the Founders. We
enshrine the separation of church and state, but at the same time we practice
the mingling of religion and public life. It is not always logical, but it makes
good sense.

This is not to say that there weren’t also religiously
grounded arguments against such changes in each case (notably the cases of
slavery and women’s suffrage). But there are almost no examples to be found in
the American past of successful and widely accepted reforms that do not pay
their respects to both Americans’ religious and secular sensibilities. Our
best reform movements are required, so to speak, to pass muster with a bicameral
body politic.

This fact has profound implications for the larger meanings
we derive from the Civil Rights Movement, and for its use as a template for all
reforms. In the first place, one must view with the profoundest sense of regret
the transformation of the Civil Rights Movement by the late 1960s from an
instrument of national integration and reconciliation into an instrument of what
Christopher Lasch rightly called “the politics of resentment and
reparations.” That transformation corresponded exactly with the loss of the
Movement’s religious core, and its turn toward a paradoxical combination of
strident social militancy and court-imposed legalism. The balance between
strategies of coercion and appeals to conscience, a balance deftly and
conscientiously observed in the early years, had tipped decisively—toward the
former. With the consequence that as material conditions have steadily improved,
race relations remain mired in mutual suspicion, a state that has reach a kind
of culmination in an astoundingly pointless and divisive legal debate over
reparations for slavery. Whatever the outcome of that debate, it will never
further the cause of reconciliation—which is why it is impossible to imagine
the morally impressive black men and women of the early Movement ever embracing
such a cause, pursued in such a manner.

In addition, if it makes no sense to abstract the Movement
from its relationship to its larger religious context, then those who invoke it
as an analogy need to think harder about what they are doing. Two of the most
contentious issues of recent years are abortion and gay marriage. In both cases,
not only have policy changes been imposed by courts rather than through
representative institutions, but the changes involved have sought to challenge
and override the very core of the country’s prevailing religious convictions.
The results suggest that this tactic has been enormously costly. Even today,
over thirty years after Roe v. Wade, the cause of unrestricted abortion rights
stands largely on the acts of unelected judges, and on the morally unimpressive
principle of stare decisis. It has few if any full-throated defenders among the
religiously devout—and many fervent opponents, who increasingly look to the
abolitionists and the Civil Rights Movement for inspiration.

Similarly, proponents of gay marriage like to invoke the
Movement as precedent, comparing proscriptions against same-sex unions to
antimiscegenation laws and other forms of discrimination. Leave aside the fact
that, historically, one of the most successful legal strategies for overturning
antimiscegenation laws based itself on the claim that such laws violated
First Amendment guarantees of religious liberty. Instead, merely consider the
fact that no subgroup polls more negatively on this issue than black Americans.
Why is that? It is not only that they know when their movement is being
hijacked. It is that the religious sensibility that animated the Movement, and
that is still very much alive in the black community today, is bound up in a
Biblical worldview that would no more countenance the radical redefinition of
marriage than it would the reimposition of slavery. When King and his followers
joyfully invoked the word “freedom,” they didn’t mean the unlimited
expressive liberty of autonomous individuals. Their conception of freedom was
inseparable from their belief in “the beloved community,” from their
rootedness in their place and time, and from their obedience to the God of
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—an obedience that “overcame” because it was
profounder than that of their opposition.

None of which is meant to imply that the religious are
always right, or should have supervisory power over all social change—any more
than should the Federal and state judiciaries. It is merely to recognize the
longstanding and indispensable place of religion in the American experiment, and
the enormous price to be paid when it is sundered from the cause of social
change. Fortunately, we do not have to choose whether to call the story of the
Civil Rights Movement a Christian story, a black story, a Southern story, or an
American story, for it is all of these. What it is
not, however, is a license to make over endlessly all of our most
fundamental social conventions and social institutions, and do so in the name of
an increasingly narcissistic conception of “freedom.” That conception is
radically different from what the Movement, at its core, stood for. And by
adopting it, we would rob the Civil Rights Movement of its uniqueness, and turn
it into just another justification for the “me first” individualism that
already constitutes the path of least resistance in our culture. If that should
happen, what was once a mantle will have been refashioned into a shroud, to the
immense detriment of all Americans.