Not in Our Church

2021 ◽  
pp. 14-42
Author(s):  
J. Russell Hawkins

Chapter 1 explores the tensions that arose in southern evangelicalism between local church congregations and state- and nation-level bodies in the wake of the 1954 Brown decision. Such tensions reveal how Southern Baptists and Methodists negotiated the heightened antagonism emerging between denominational leaders and the people in the pews over civil rights in the mid-1950s. The chapter opens with South Carolina Southern Baptist churches rejecting broader Southern Baptist Convention efforts to advocate for civil rights in religious language and concludes with lay South Carolina Methodists defending the White Citizens’ Councils against criticism from a small number of Methodist clergy. Both these studies reveal the effective authority of local congregations in directing southern white churches’ responses to matters of race in the civil rights years. This chapter highlights that the congregational-level perspective gives the best vantage point for understanding white evangelicalism’s response to the civil rights movement, regardless of church polity.

Deferred Dreams, Defiant Struggles interrogates Blackness and illustrates how it has been used as a basis to oppress, dismiss and exclude Blacks from societies and institutions in Europe, North America and South America. Employing uncharted analytical categories that tackle intriguing themes about borderless non-racial African ancestry, “traveling” identities and post-blackness, the essays provide new lenses for viewing the “Black” struggle worldwide. This approach directs the contributors’ focus to understudied locations and protagonists. In the volume, Charleston, South Carolina is more prominent than Little Rock Arkansas in the struggle to desegregate schools; Chicago occupies the space usually reserved for Atlanta or other southern city “bulwarks” of the Civil Rights Movement; diverse Africans in France and Afro-descended Chileans illustrate the many facets of negotiating belonging, long articulated by examples from the Greensboro Woolworth counter sit-in or the Montgomery Bus Boycott; unknown men in the British empire, who inverted dying confessions meant to vilify their blackness, demonstrate new dimensions in the story about race and religion, often told by examples of fiery clergy of the Black Church; and the theatres and studios of dramatists and visual artists replace the Mall in Washington DC as the stage for the performance of identities and activism.


Author(s):  
Alexander Joel Eastman

Dozens of newspapers written and edited by people of color flourished in the last decades of the nineteenth century in Cuba. Through an analysis of black press periodicals representative of the main political tendencies between 1879 and 1886 this article examines the economic and socio-political contexts in which the black press operated and demonstrates how Cubans of color successfully carved out a space in the market of newspaper consumption. By examining the economic forces determining circulation and readership of these periodicals, it argues that black Cubans actively negotiated the public spheres of journalism and the marketplace, becoming empowered consumers and creators of information and economic value. This article foreground debates within the black press in order to analyze the history of the Cuban civil rights movement through the perspectives of people of color and to destabilize the notion of black political homogeneity. Black journalists and leaders with national and royalist affiliations vied for political positioning and debated over how to represent the people and the struggles of the raza de color.


2010 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 31-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacquelyn Dowd Hall ◽  
Eugene P. Walker ◽  
Katherine Mellen Charron ◽  
David P. Cline

2021 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-62
Author(s):  
Candace Cunningham

When the South Carolina legislature created the anti-NAACP oath in 1956, teachers across the state lost their positions. But it was the dismissal of twenty-one teachers at the Elloree Training School that captured the attention of the NAACP and Black media outlets. In the years following Brown v. Board of Education, South Carolina's Black and White communities went head-to-head in the battle over White supremacy versus expanded civil rights. The desegregation movement in 1955 and 1956 placed Black teachers’ activism in the spotlight—activism that mirrored what was happening in their community. This largely unknown episode of civil rights activism demonstrates that Black teachers were willing to serve not only as behind-the-scenes supporters in the equal education struggle but as frontline activists. Furthermore, it shows that South Carolina was an integral site of the long civil rights movement.


1963 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-67 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuan Chung Teng

Reverend Issachar Jacox Roberts was, as far as is known, the only Western teacher ever to instruct Hung Hsiu-ch'üan, the leader of the Taiping Rebellion. Aware of his special relationship with Hung, Roberts was for many years enthusiastic about Hung's undertakings. This article is concerned mainly with an account of the dealings between the two men.Born in Tennessee in 1802, Roberts studied at the Furman Theological Institution of South Carolina, and was ordained to the ministry in 1828. He preached for some time in Mississippi, where he owned property said to be worth $30,000. Using this property as a financial base, he organized the Roberts Fund and the China Mission Society. Upon arrival in China in 1837, Roberts took the Chinese name of Lo Hsiao-ch'üan (or Lo Heáou-tseuen). For his first five years in China, the missionary worked among the lepers at Macao. When his income became insufficient for his work there, he labored for a time as a saddler, joined the Baptist Mission in 1841, and in 1846 transferred to the Southern Baptist Convention. In 1844 Roberts, who was the first foreigner to live outside the restricted “factory” area, opened a mission in the city of Canton, which he used as a home base for the following twenty-two years of his missionary work. During this period, he returned to the United States only twice. His connection with the Southern Baptist Convention was dissolved in 1852, and thereafter he worked independently. He finally left China in 1866, and died of leprosy in 1871 at Upper Alton, Illinois.


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