Straight from the Offering Plate

Chapter Four tracks Black Power activists’ mobilization of these new discourses to secure important organizational resources and coalitional support from local, state, and national Black church organizations. Between 1969 and 1974, the United Front secured more than half a million dollars in grants from church-based organizations as well as extensive lobbying, consultancy, and staff support for their political programming. As financial support for traditional civil rights organizations waned during the 1960s and local civic elites obstructed governmental funds, these new organizational resources proved invaluable and ensured that churches would become a significant, albeit overlooked, source of coalitional support for the Black Power Movement in Cairo and beyond.

Conclusion

This conclusion serves to show that despite the severity of the city’s economic problems, the impact of the Cairo Black Power Movement has continued to resonate across the nation, giving rise to new political alliances such as the National Black United Front and theologies that offer an important alternative to prevailing conservative doctrines such as the Prosperity Gospel and Word of Faith movement.

On Jordan’s Banks

Chapter One provides a broad historical overview of African American community formation in Cairo, illuminating how the region’s economic instability and distinct blend of northern and southern racial practices combined to solidify the Black church’s emergence as the leading institution in local community-building and protest traditions. This chapter argues that the Black church’s preeminence was not inevitable. It was instead a creative and necessary response to broader patterns of Black political marginalization and an absence of alternative institutions due to the precarious economic position of Cairo’s Black working-class. The chapter also contends that the ability of Cairo’s Black churches to fill this organizational vacuum was made possible by the distinctive religious tradition harbored by African American communities across the borderland.

Redemptive Love, Vigilante Terror, and Rebellion

Chapter Two chronicles the key battles in Cairo’s Civil Rights Movement with a particular focus on how activists working with the local branch of the NAACP and SNCC mobilized Black congregations behind a powerful local movement aimed at upending the edifice of Jim Crow. By adopting a religious conception of civil rights liberalism rooted in Black Christian discourses of racial reconciliation and nonviolence, local activists were able to recruit intergenerational and cross-class support. However, this religiously based alliance ultimately fractured under the weight of white resistance and the growing disillusionment of Cairo’s Black working-class youth whose frustrations culminated in the urban rebellion of 1967.

Introduction

This introduction provides an outline of the book by discussing topics such as Black power and the Black church. Black freedom struggles in the borderland and the Black Power Movement in Cairo, Illinois. A large emphasis is placed on the exploration of the changing relationship of the Black church and African American Christianity to Cairo Black freedom struggles. The story of Karen Rice, a Black Power activist, is also provided in order to show how stories of this kind during the Black Power Movement raised important questions about Black Power’s de-Christianization and bolstered recent calls from scholars in the emergent subfield of “Black Power Studies” to probe more deeply the relationship between the Black church, African American Christianity, and the Black Power Movement.

The Recession of National Spirit

Chapter Five examines the closing stages of the Cairo Black Power struggle, situating state repression of activist church agencies and the revival of conservative political agendas within white congregations as fundamental but overlooked causes of the movement’s demise. In contrast to many other grassroots Black Power organizations, the United Front had survived the narrowing structure of political opportunities as well as the initial wave of state repression that characterized the late 1960s. As this chapter will show, United Front leaders – like other Black Power activists across the country – were subject to a systematic campaign of repression at the hands of federal agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

From the Seminary to the Streets

Chapter Three explores how Black Power activists rebuilt the pre-rebellion coalition under the banner of a reconstructed and relevant Christianity that drew upon both formal Black Theology and grassroots religious traditions. This chapter chronicles the formation of the Cairo United Front, an organization that brought together Black Cairoites from across organizational, class, generational, and ideological lines in support of a broad-based and inclusive movement for racial change and social justice.