A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow [Hardcover]

David L. Chappell (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 26, 2004

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. famously said that the South could hew "a stone of hope" from segregation's "mountain of despair." This book explores the role that religion played in shaping that hope. In a brilliant chapter on the grassroots character of the civil rights cause, Chappell argues that the movement could be considered less a political protest with religious dimensions than a religious revival with political and social dimensions. The civil rights struggle had many of the elements of revival-miracle stories, mass religious enthusiasm, music, "conversion" experiences, even messianic expectations. Chappell writes engagingly, drawing an important revisionist portrait of the crucial role of religion in defeating Jim Crow.
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Review

"[A] pathbreaking study of prophetic Protestantism and the camapaign against Jim Crow."
— Commonwealth

"Intricate, dazzling in its reach into so many corners of black and white Southern life and fascinating at every turn. . . . In its mix of rigor, daring and perceptiveness, A Stone of Hope is a spectacular work. New York Times Book Review"

"[Chappell's] new interpretation of the civil rights movement is a first-rate work of history. . . . The book is a major contribution to civil-rights history: clearly written, prodigiously researched and forcefully argued. . . . A Stone of Hope respects the public power of religion, but it also brings Dr. King and his co-workers down from the mountaintop, transfiguring them into human beings. Wall Street Journal "

It's impossible to read the book without doing some fundamental rethinking about the role religion can play in . . . public life. New York Times

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 360 pages
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press; First Edition edition (January 26, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 080782819X
• ISBN-13: 978-0807828199
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.5 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #748,780 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars No Sones Unturned, May 2, 2004

By 

Clyde E Wooten (Stone Mountain, GA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow (Hardcover)

The Civil Rights Movement has been well covered by previous writers and I have enjoyed most writings on the subject. In A Stone of Hope I see a fresh perspective, a stone that has not been turned before. The role of religion,especially the "old time religion " of southern Black people has now been elevated to its proper height in the analysis of the success of the movement for equality and freedom. God's voice was echoed by the leaders of the movement and an evil system was dismantled. Faith gave them the fire that moved a race of people to stand up for what was theirs and the world is better for their having believed that God would not allow the Oppressors to continue in their sins. It was truly a prophetic movement. I think that all who are interested in the history of the struggle for justice in America should read this book

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars the third awakening and the second reconstruction, July 26, 2011

By 

David M. Pence (Mankato, MN United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow (Paperback)

"Approaching this story as an atheist, I was surprised and skeptical to hear so many of my subjects-- whom I admired from afar--expressing what Bayard Rustin called "fundamentalist" views. Even had I been a believer in the sense that most educated folk use the term I doubt that any isolated testimony of miracles could have struck me as worth copying down in my notes. But it was repeated so much and perhaps because it was so foreign to me ..I kept copying it down and ultimately it appeared a key to the beliefs... and strategic choices of my sources"
David Chappell, author of Stone of Hope

Faith in God allows a man to see more clearly into the reality of things but apparently it has taken Atheist Chappell to write this penetrating book defining the civil rights movement as a religious revival. He plays the righteous pagan Virgil in guiding Christian Dantes through the biblical prophetic theology and working of the Spirit which signaled the civil rights movement as the third American Awakening.
While Chappell is obviously more comfortable with the reasoning and rationales of the Bayard Rustins of the movement, he is also an honest man. All those miracles and fundamentalists kept intruding in his story. He takes religion seriously enough not to study only the protesters but to analyze the inability of the segregationists to mount a serious religious argument against integration. His look behind the "southern white mob" reveals 1) a divided white church, 2) respectable opponents of integration trying to distance themselves from the rabble, and 3) politically potent segregationists unmatched by a similar certitude among religious authorities.
American churches are bellwethers for the nation. In the 1840's the Baptists and Methodists split into northern and southern churches. In 1861 the Presbyterians did the same. When the Civil War came, a white man could go to a southern church and hear why a Christian had a duty to fight northern tyranny. When a soldier was buried, his death was seen as part of the Christian tradition of male sacrifice for the community. This kind of religious sanction never became such a force in the South during the sixties. Before the Supreme Court Brown decision on school desegregation (1954), the PCUS (Southern Presbyterians) had passed resolutions supporting desegregation. Just after Brown, the Southern Baptists overwhelmingly did the same. Since 1954 Billy Graham never allowed segregated sitting at his rallies. All of his rallies throughout the South were integrated and he once complained that national news stations chose to never report that fact. The chapters in Chappell's book that look seriously at the intellectual and religious movements supporting segregation support his thesis that the "The historically significant thing about white religion in the 1950's and 1960's is that it failed in any meaningful way to join the anti civil rights movement. The white southern churches never lived up to the militant image that southern politicians had shown."
There was in the post WWII era a more pressing evangelical development being led by such men as L Nelson Bell intellectual leader of the Southern Presbyterians. "Bell was part of a conservative insurgency within southern Protestantism known as Evangelicalism. The evangelical movement emerged during WWII as an aggressive effort to reestablish the popularity, legitimacy, authority and institutional strength of conservative doctrine." Educated Protestant conservatives felt neither the Bryan fundamentalism at the Scopes trial nor the theological liberalism of the Social Gospel adequately proclaimed the Gospel in America or in the foreign missions. That Chappell can see all of this as well as understand that Martin Luther King was not a product of the Social Gospel nor Tillichian Ground of our Being theology shows a remarkable clarity for any reporter. It is downright miraculous from an atheist. There is an especially insightful notation that Rev King rejected the flattening of religion into "ethical religion". The whole anthropology of religion as ethics led to an unwarranted optimism about the nature of man and the struggle needed to confront evil with a more powerful force. Education was NOT the key to prophetic religion. God, judgment, conversion, sin, demons and miracles constitute the vocabulary of the prophets. King's God was a highly personal God--the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob not the god of the philosophers. He could be trusted in times of travail and prayed to in times of danger. Andrew Young was quoted, "the civil rights movement brought a resurgence of religious feeling in the South. When folks start shooting at you--- you do a lot more praying." When Bayard Rustin was asked if King believed in the fundamentalist active personal God, he answered "Oh yes profoundly, it always amazed me how he could combine this intensely philosophical analytical mind with this more or less fundamental-well I don't like to say fundamentalist --but abiding faith." As Thomas Gilmore another civil rights veteran said--"the Holy Spirit guided us. I got strength facing the sheriff he was the biggest man in the county but I felt we were walking next to someone bigger. God is real, man. Years later Gilmore became the first black sheriff of his county.
Chappell has little time for the flatteners of history who in the name of "people's history" try to paint the civil rights struggle as the ever present but under reported fight of the common man against oppression. Chappell argues that something happened here that was extraordinary indeed and the people who stepped out of the routines of their everyday lives to enter the political arena and national historical narrative were extraordinary people. He found the source of their courage and hope (that "stone of hope" they somehow chipped from the mountain of despair). What is unique about his study is that he does not stress the easy lesson that the biblical prophetic tradition was a foe to racism. He instead contrasts prophetic religion as a more effective and truthful actor for justice than position paper rationalistic liberalism. What did those Baptist preachers; Ralph Abernathy, Martin Luther King and Fred Shuttlesworth know and do that eluded Gunnar Myrdal, John Dewey, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Lionel Trilling. Chappell's answer is that the civil rights movement was not the inevitable maturation and triumph of philosophical liberalism. It was not education for progress. Rather it was a Spirit driven melding of characters and events living out the biblical narrative by confronting the soul of a nation. This prophetic witness employed a "coercive non-violence" necessary to confront evil and men wedded to evil. Such nonviolence is much more like war than pacifism and is grounded in a realistic Christian anthropology which saw both struggle and an embrace of "unrequited suffering" as the redemptive route to justice. It was a stunning paradox of this fitting time that there was no group more convicted by this witness--not into joining the cause but chastened to inaction--than Southern evangelicals who were also seeking a renewal of lived out religion in the daily life of the nation.
Returning military veterans of WWII and Korea as well as preachers infused the civil rights movement with the intersecting language and claims of religion, patriotism and righteous warfare. The charismatic soldier-preacher Fred Shuttlesworth of Birmingham said in 1958, "this is a religious crusade, a fight between light and darkness, right and wrong, fair play and tyranny. We are assured of victory because we are using weapons of spiritual warfare." In 1964 the fire still burned in the man whose eloquence was only surpassed by his courage. "We have faith in America and still believe that Birmingham and Alabama will rise to their heights of glory in race relations. And we shall be true to our ideals as a Christian nation."
The civil rights movement "carried the Constitution in one hand and the Bible in the other." This crucial book by an atheist historian should challenge American Christians to distinguish the great religious awakening of the civil rights movement from the contrary spirits of black power and the sexual revolution. These profane pretenders have hobbled our national gait. Black and white evangelicals are now religious brethren separated into the voting army "bases" of two opposing parties. How long asked Elijah can Israel hobble on divided between Baal and Yahweh. Can the third great awakening stir American Christians to be one again promising a second reconstruction more just than the first? Chappell's book gives no answer but he has led us to the question.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating, April 10, 2009

By 

Don Incognito - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow (Hardcover)

This book is notable for discussing how secular liberals--led by John Dewey--noticed the transforming power of religion, and sought to duplicate that power and harness it for secular liberalism. Their inability to do so affected their presence in the civil rights movement, and affected their relationship with its religious leaders (Dr. King and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference). The author is definitely not Christian, if you don't like reading books with a Christian worldview; near the end of the book, he reveals himself to be an atheist.

This was one of the five or six assigned readings in my fall 2005 Post-WWII America course, and I found it arguably the most interesting of them.