Review of David L. Chappell, A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow

Ernest Balajthy, State University of New York at Geneseo

Published December 2004 in the SUNY-Geneseo Lamron Newspaper

I was interested to read the debate in the last issue of The Lamron about the role of religion in politics. It brought to mind some recent historical research I’ve been studying, and some memories of my childhood.

Back in the 1960s, both my mother and father were deeply disturbed about Martin Luther King’s provocative efforts to do away with legalized segregation. Not that they weren’t sympathetic to the plight of African-Americans. Both had traveled to the South in the early 1940s, my father for training as a mechanic in the Army Air Force and my mother to visit a friend who had moved to Texas. Both had been alarmed at the treatment of African-Americans, but both were convinced that nothing King and his followers could do would change anything. “We’ll have a war, another Civil War, before the South agrees to accept blacks as equals,” my dad told me. In fact, his warnings were very plausible in light of the violence we were seeing on the nightly newscasts.

Today of course, we know that King was remarkably successful in bringing about a relatively peaceful transformation in a culture that was profoundly racist. The media and our educational system usually offer a dubious explanation of the changes: The almost magical power of nonviolent protest methods. But a recent book by University of Arkansas historian David L. Chappell, A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow (University of North Carolina Press, 2004), gives convincing evidence that it was the impact of King’s powerful and prophetic religious message—not his nonviolent protest methodology—that helped carry the day for peace and justice in the South.

Chappell argues that the impact of faith-based values operated in two directions. First and most obvious, King’s movement saw itself as having God on its side. Many Americans today, accustomed to the secularized Martin Luther King, Jr. of public school January celebrations, may not realize this, but a quick look at any (unexpurgated) speech or letter demonstrates the religious foundation of King’s quest for justice. He didn’t invent WWJD (What Would Jesus Do?), but that question was at the heart of his social ideas.

Chappell’s research, however, shows a second and more surprising side to the impact of religion on the civil rights movement, one that came from the foundational values of the pro-segregation whites themselves. He gives case after case of white, Southern Christian leaders who were culturally in favor of segregation, but whose high view of the Bible as God’s Word forced them to admit the fundamental conflict between Christian morals and oppression of fellow human beings. Their commitment to traditional Southern bigotry was undercut by a contradictory commitment to living a life of faith in Jesus.

Chappell, then, offers us the fascinating picture of the destruction of legalized segregation as the result of, on the one hand, African-Americans taking on the cloaks of Biblical prophets crying out for justice, and on the other hand, white Southern segregationists weighing their own cultural values against Biblical norms and finding them wanting.

Today, in a day when the phrase “religion and politics” conjures up images of zealots flying airplanes into skyscrapers, I find it refreshing to study an instance where principles of faith found a powerfully positive application.

The introductory chapter to Chappell’s book is online at the publisher’s website, http://uncpress.unc.edu/chapters/chappell_stone.html. Extensive examples of King’s speeches and writings are available at http://www.stanford.edu/group/King/popular_requests.