Introduction

This chapter introduces the African American intellectual and theologian Howard Thurman and the physical embodiment of his thought: the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples. The Fellowship Church, which Thurman cofounded in San Francisco in 1944, was the nation’s first interracial, intercultural, and interfaith church. Amid the growing nationalism of the World War II era and the heightened suspicion of racial and cultural “others,” it successfully established a pluralistic community based on the idea “that if people can come together in worship, over time would emerge a unity that would be stronger than socially imposed barriers.” Rooted in the belief that social change was inextricably connected to internal, psychological transformation and the personal realization of the human community, it was an early expression of Christian nonviolent activism within the long civil rights movement. The Introduction locates the Fellowship Church within its historical context and argues that, rather than being “56 years ahead of his time” as the SF Gate reported in 2010, the Fellowship Church was actually right on time—a distinct product of its historical moment and a provocative expression of midcentury liberal American thought.

Introduction

The introductory chapter situates the civil rights movement within the political theory literatures on civil disobedience—old and new—and traces the way that the debate has shifted since the mid-century (from a decidedly liberal framework to various democratic ones) as well as broadened (bringing attention to new movements and forms of action). Despite the important insights generated out of these shifts, the civil rights example remains at once central and marginal—operating as a key proving ground for the political purchase of liberal and deliberative theories but also attesting to their limits, without making the movement itself the subject of sustained analysis or theoretical interest. In contrast, drawing on—but also departing from—the insights of the critical historiography of the “long civil rights movement,” the introduction presents the case for returning to the civil rights movement as a site of (and source for) political theorizing about civil disobedience.

“Hell Is Popping Here in South Carolina”: Orangeburg County Black Teachers and Their Community in the Immediate Post-Brown Era

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.