...rummaging through the debris in "post-racial" America...
My Book:
(click photo above)
"The Selma of the North": Civil Rights Insurgency in Milwaukee
Between 1958 and 1970, a distinctive movement for racial justice emerged from unique circumstances in Milwaukee. A series of local leaders inspired growing numbers of people to participate in campaigns against employment and housing discrimination, segregated public schools, the membership of public officials in discriminatory organizations, welfare cuts, and police brutality.
The Milwaukee movement culminated in the dramatic—and sometimes violent—1967 open housing campaign. A white Catholic priest, James Groppi, led the NAACP Youth Council and Commandos in a militant struggle that lasted for 200 consecutive nights and provoked the ire of thousands of white residents. After working-class mobs attacked demonstrators, some called Milwaukee “the Selma of the North.” Others believed the housing campaign represented the last stand for a nonviolent, interracial, church-based movement.
Patrick Jones tells a powerful and dramatic story that is important for its insights into civil rights history: the debate over nonviolence and armed self-defense, the meaning of Black Power, the relationship between local and national movements, and the dynamic between southern and northern activism. Jones offers a valuable contribution to movement history in the urban North that also adds a vital piece to the national story.
Think you know the full story of the civil rights era? Patrick Jones's masterful study of the movement in Milwaukee will make you think again. Meticulously researched and elegantly written, The Selma of the North provides a devastating rebuttal of many of the conventional narratives of the civil rights movement. Here a vibrant nonviolent movement in the de-industrializing Midwest grows into a Black Power movement led by urban youth and a white Catholic priest who use confrontational direct action to lay bare the fissures of racial inequality in the 'liberal' North. --Jeanne Theoharis, Brooklyn College, editor of Freedom North and Groundwork
A well-researched, well-written, and important history. Based on a rich array of sources, this book enhances our understanding of civil rights activism in the postwar urban North and establishes a useful foundation for the comparison of similar developments elsewhere in the country. --Joe William Trotter, Jr., Carnegie Mellon University, author of Black Milwaukee
This book fills a serious gap in the literature of the civil rights revolution, joining studies on other cities in laying the groundwork on race and civil rights in the postwar urban North. Jones tells a good story, capturing events that might otherwise be lost to history. --Arnold R. Hirsch, University of New Orleans, author of Making the Second Ghetto
The Selma of the North is an insightful and invigorating addition to the growing literature on black freedom struggles outside of the South. Jones's important and informative account writes Milwaukee back into the narrative of the civil rights-Black Power era and in the process expands our understanding of postwar America. --Peniel E. Joseph, Brandeis University, author of Waiting Till the Midnight Hour
The Selma of the North is a riveting new story of the civil rights movement in America, a tale on par with Selma, Birmingham, and Montgomery in its power and importance. Jones's magisterial research and magnetic prose illuminate the untold story of the battle for the urban north in the 1960s, a battle that shows how race has always been the Achilles heel of white progressives. This story transcends easy dichotomies of black and white, North and South, radical and reformist. How did a group called 'the Commandos' define nonviolence? How did a white Catholic priest become a 'Black Power' leader? If this is not a saga for the age of Obama, I don't know what is. --Timothy B. Tyson, Duke University, author of Radio Free Dixie and Blood Done Sign My Name
Speaking of Faith is one of my favorite NPR programs... always probing interesting dynamics of spiritual life. The following episode, from July 2008, focuses on Joe Carter and the African American spiritual:
The spiritual is celebrated in American culture and beyond. It is the source from which gospel, jazz, blues, and hip-hop evolved. It was born in the American South, created by slaves, bards whose names history never recorded. The organizing concept of this music is not the melody of Europe, but the rhythm of Africa. And the theology conveyed in these songs is a potent mix of African spirituality, Hebrew narrative, Christian doctrine, and an extreme experience of human suffering.
We celebrate the life of Joe Carter, who explored the meaning of the Negro spiritual in word and song — through its hidden meanings, as well as its beauty, lament, and hope.
It is Sunday, here is Howard Thurman, who was one of the important influences on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., discussing the ever-evolving and dynamic experience of spirituality (2 minutes in length):
As we wait to hear Senator Obama's remarks today on the issue of race in the presidential campaign, I'd like to share with you an interesting article. Edward J. Blum, who is a professor of history at San Diego State University and the author of W. E. B. Du Bois, American Prophet (2007) and Reforging the White Republic: Race, Religion, and American Nationalism, 1865-1898 (2005), has penned a useful essay for the History News Network that places the Jeremiah Wright controversy in a broader historical context. In part, he writes (emphasis added),
What is striking, historically, is that there is nothing new in Wright’s sermon and how often African American perspectives on so-called American Christian nationalism are ignored. It seems that each year, at least a handful of books come out trying to discern whether the United States was founded as a “Christian nation.” Most recently, this can be seen in Steven Waldman’s Liberating the Founders. But so often historians have approached the topic from the perspective of elite whites, and not the people who were building the nation from its foundation, hoeing the fields and raising the cotton, washing the clothes and preparing the meals. (One exception to this is David Howard-Pitney’s wonderful The African-American Jeremiad.) If we look closely at African American perspectives of Christian nationalism, we find Reverend Wright firmly in a long oppositional and rhetorical tradition.
I hope you will take the time to give the full article some consideration and share the link with others. If we are interested, we have an opportunity to have a deeper, more substantive discussion of race and faith... but only if we are willing to hear each other out and be compassionate about the different experiences of America that different groups have. This means, particularly, that white people need to be willing to listen to black people discuss their experiences and perspectives on America and that whites need to accept those experiences and perspectives as legitimate, even if they don't quite understand them, or share the sentiments themselves. To be sure, this will probably be a somewhat uncomfortable discussion, particularly for those whites that are largely ignorant of black experience, but it is essential if we are to find some higher (and common) ground...
This is a really interesting and insightful Bill Moyers interview with Christian theologian and philosopher, James Cone. During the Black Power era, Cone articulated what he called a "black liberation theology" and has since continued to put forth a radical and prophetic vision of Christ. "Any message that is not related to the liberation of the poor in a society is not Christ's message," Cone argues. "Any theology that is indifferent to the theme of liberation is not Christian theology."
The interview posted here is based on a lecture Cone gives, titled, "Strange Fruit: The Cross and the Lynching Tree." Here is what Cone has to say by way of introducing the topic:
I know that the cross and the lynching tree are not comfortable subjects to talk about together. Who wants to think about lynched black bodies in church worship? Or when doing a theological reflection on Bonhoeffer's question "Who is Jesus Christ for us today?" This is exactly what I contend the Gospel requires Christians to do-especially preachers and theologians. I claim that no American Christian- white, black, or any other color-can understand correctly the full theological meaning of the American Christ, without identifying his image with a recrucified black body hanging from a lynching tree.
Black poets and other artists like Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, and W.E.B. Du Bois realized the religious meaning and symbolic connection of the cross and the lynching tree. But this connection failed to ring a theological bell in the imagination of white theologians and their churches. Not many black theologians and preachers have made an explicit connection between the cross and the lynching tree either. So I want to start a conversation about the cross and the lynching tree, and thereby break our silence on race and Christianity in American history. I began this reflection in the only place I feel confident to speak as a theologian: the black religious experience. I was born into this reality, and have wrestled with these paradoxes and incongruities since childhood. If I have anything to say to the Christian community in America and around the world, it will happen as I stand as a theologian on the reality that sustains and empowers black people to resist the forces designed to destroy every ounce of dignity in their souls and bodies.
Cone is deep, a man of fierce intelligence. The Moyers interview (below) is worth some serious consideration... and is perhaps not a bad meditation for the new year:
part 1: (9:33)
part 2: (9:08)
part 3: (9:42)
part 4: (6:04)
Here is a well-known quote by Cone: "Anger and humour are like the left and right arm. They complement each other. Anger empowers the poor to declare their uncompromising opposition to opression, and humor prevents them from being consumed by their fury."
If you'd like to watch a video of Cone delivering the full "cross & lynching tree" lecture/sermon at Harvard, click here:
Speaking of Faith is one of my favorite NPR programs... always probing interesting dynamics of spiritual life. The following episode, from July 2008, focuses on Joe Carter and the African American spiritual:
