Theologies of Liberation

King’s radicalism was hard to see or remember after he was assassinated and a campaign for a King Holiday transpired. It became hard to remember that he was the most hated person in America during his lifetime. The black social gospel became more institutional and conventionally political after the King era; liberation theology grew out of the Black Power movement; and womanist theology grew out of black theology.

Prophetic Suffering and Black Internationalism

The generation of black social gospel leaders who began their careers in the 1920s assumed the social justice politics and liberal theology of the social gospel from the beginning of their careers. Mordecai Johnson became the leading example by espousing racial justice militancy, Christian socialism, Gandhian revolutionary internationalism, and anti-anti-Communism as the long-time (and long embattled) president of Howard University

Redeeming the Soul of America

Martin Luther King Jr. grew up in a black southern clerical family, earned graduate degrees at Crozer Seminary and Boston University School of Theology, and electrified the Montgomery boycott on its first night, becoming a movement leader. His training, temperament, and brilliance enabled him to catalyze and hold together the historic, institutional, mostly secular civil rights movement in the North and the fledgling, dramatic, mostly church-based movement in the South.

Moral Politics and the Soul of the World

Benjamin E. Mays and Howard Thurman differently exemplified the black social gospel as theologians, lecture circuit speakers, and academics. In their early careers they formed a social gospel trio with Mordecai Johnson at Howard University. Later they influenced Martin Luther King Jr. and other leaders of the Civil Rights Movement. Mays was an educator, theologian, and activist in the Johnson mode, while the later Thurman gave himself to mystical theology and ecumenical ministry.

Achieving the Black Social Gospel

The black social gospel advocated protest activism within religious communities to resist America’s system of racial caste. Dorrien’s previous book, The New Abolition: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Black Social Gospel, described the 19th century founding of this tradition as a successor to the abolitionist movement. The New Abolition ended just as King’s models of social justice ministry entered the story. Breaking White Supremacy describes the black social gospel luminaries who influenced King and the figures of King’s generation who led the civil rights movement.

Nightmare Fury and Public Sacrifice

Martin Luther King Jr. was more radical and angry in 1960 than in 1955, more of both in 1965 than in 1960, and more of both in 1968 than ever. The great demonstrations in Birmingham, St. Augustine, and Selma yielded the civil rights bills, but King struggled to adjust to the rise of Black Power and dared to oppose the Vietnam War, burning his alliance with President Johnson. King provided the theology of social justice that the civil rights movement spoke and sang.

Protest Politics and Power Politics

Adam Clayton Powell Jr. was pastor of the historic Abyssinian Church in Harlem for many years and America’s only nationally prominent black politician. Many Americans knew of the kind of Christianity represented by Powell only because they knew something about him. An historic and contradictory figure, Powell steered much of the Great Society legislation through Congress, but his career ended badly.