|
Product Description
The civil rights movement was arguably the most successful social movement in American history. In a provocative new assessment of its success, David Chappell argues that the story of civil rights is not a story of the ultimate triumph of liberal ideas after decades of gradual progress. Rather, it is a story of the power of religious tradition.Chappell reconsiders the intellectual roots of civil rights reform, showing how northern liberals' faith in the power of human reason to overcome prejudice was at odds with the movement's goal of immediate change. Even when liberals sincerely wanted change, they recognized that they could not necessarily inspire others to unite and fight for it. But the prophetic tradition of the Old Testament--sometimes translated into secular language--drove African American activists to unprecedented solidarity and self-sacrifice. Martin Luther King Jr., Fannie Lou Hamer, James Lawson, Modjeska Simkins, and other black leaders believed, as the Hebrew prophets believed, that they had to stand apart from society and instigate dramatic changes to force an unwilling world to abandon its sinful ways. Their impassioned campaign to stamp out "the sin of segregation" brought the vitality of a religious revival to their cause. Meanwhile, segregationists found little support within their white southern religious denominations. Although segregationists outvoted and outgunned black integrationists, the segregationists lost, Chappell concludes, largely because they did not have a religious commitment to their cause.
Features
- Used Book in Good Condition
Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought
- Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era
- Coming of Age in Mississippi: The Classic Autobiography of Growing Up Poor and Black in the Rural South
- The Vietnam War: A Concise International History (Very Short Introductions)
- The Politics of Authenticity: Liberalism, Christianity, and the New Left in America
- From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism
- Like a Hurricane: The Indian Movement from Alcatraz to Wounded Knee
- The Fire Next Time
- Debating the Civil Rights Movement, 1945-1968 (Debating Twentieth-Century America)
- White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Politics and Society in Modern America)
- God's Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights
*If this is not the "A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow" product you were looking for, you can check the other results by clicking this link. Details were last updated on Dec 16, 2024 03:21 +08.