Why the modern civil rights movement keeps religious leaders at arm’s length

[rug]

By Rahiel Tesfamariam
Rahiel Tesfamariam is a social activist and former columnist for The Washington Post.
September 18 at 3:08 PM

On Aug. 10, the day after the one-year anniversary of Mike Brown’s killing in Ferguson, Mo., I was arrested with nearly 60 other faith leaders for blocking the entrance of a St. Louis federal courthouse in an act of civil disobedience. On my shirt was a quote from Hands Up United co-founder Tef Poe: “This Ain’t Yo Mama’s Civil Rights Movement.” The phrase has resonated with many young activists who reject the identity politics, conservative rules and traditional tactics of the church-led movement of the 1960s.

In the streets of Ferguson and Baltimore, the new movement for black lives was radicalized by legions of poor and working-class youth who forced the nation to grapple with black rage. They fearlessly confronted a militarized police force, tear gas, snipers and tanks designed for warfare while Americans watched on their television screens. These young people, including countless women and LGBTQ people who have organized many of the movement’s most powerful acts of resistance, have changed the predominant image of black activism in America.

The front lines of the fight for civil rights are no longer “manned” by the traditional leaders of the black community: well-dressed, respectable clergymen. From Emanuel AME Church’s historical fight against slavery in Charleston, S.C., to the Rev. Martin Luther King’s leadership in the 1960s, the church was the control center in black America’s struggle for civil rights for generations. Its authority infused the civil rights movement with traditional values — hierarchical leadership, respectability politics and the guiding principles of reconciliation and nonviolence.

Today’s movement has dismissed these criteria, operating without centralized leadership and accepting as many straight women and LGBTQ people on the front lines as straight men. Last winter, young activists rejected the leadership of the Rev. Al Sharpton when they stormed the stage of his “Justice for All” march in Washington and demanded an equal voice. Instead, the movement chants a phrase coined by three women, two of them queer: “Black lives matter.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/how-black-activism-lost-its-religion/2015/09/18/2f56fc00-5d6b-11e5-8e9e-dce8a2a2a679_story.html

[struggle4progress]

1. The history seems to me inaccurate, and it also seems inappropriately dismissive

of aspirations to traditional respectability -- which was, after all, often denied simply on the basis of skin color in much of the US for quite a long time: acting "biggety" could be a fatal offense, and the crime often consisted of ordinary self-respect and hard work

... Anthony Crawford was lynched in 1916 in Abbeville ... His crime you might ask? Cursing a white man for offering him a low price for the cotton seed he was trying to sell and being too rich for a Negro ...

... When Wilbur Little, an African American soldier, returned to Blakely, Georgia from service in World War I, a group of white men met him at the train station and forced him to strip off his uniform. A few days later he defied their warning not to wear the uniform again in public, and a mob lynched him...

... Marshall was consistently in danger as he traveled through the South in the 1930s through the 50s. It was in Columbia Tennessee in 1946 that he ... narrowly escaped a lynching. Marshall had come to Columbia to defend several men who were accused of instigating a race riot ... Marshall and his colleagues from the NAACP ... were able to get acquittals for nearly two dozen black defendants ... Marshall, his colleagues .. and a reporter .. immediately made a bee line out of the courthouse when the final verdicts were read. They wanted to get out of town as soon as possible ... They were being followed by three police cars. Marshall pulled over ... Police officers .... approached Marshall and told him to put his hands up... With guns drawn, they forced Marshall into the backseat of a “nonofficial sedan” and placed him under arrest. They told the other men to head out of town ... Thurgood Marshall escaped .... due to the courage of his NAACP associates who refused to obey the orders of Columbia police ...

The tactics that finally worked in the 1950s and 1960s were the product of decades of hard work. Rosa Parks was by no means the first woman arrested for refusing honor segregated transport; here's Ida Bell Wells-Barnett discussing her own experience:

... When the train started and the conductor came along to collect tickets, he took my ticket, then handed it back to me and told me that he couldn't take my ticket there. I thought that if he didn't want the ticket I wouldn't bother about it so went on reading. In a little while when he finished taking tickets, he came back and told me I would have to go in the other car. I refused, saying that the forward car was a smoker, and as I was in the ladies car I proposed to stay. He tried to drag me out of the seat, but the moment he caught hold of my arm I fastened my teeth in the back of his hand ...

She sued the railroad for tossing her off, won in lower court, but lost on appeal. Pauli Murray experimented some with refusal to honor restaurant and transport segregation in the 1940s. Here's Bayard Rustin on the 1947 Journey of Reconciliation:

... In 1946 the Supreme Court of the United States delivered what became known as the Irene Morgan Decision. Irene Morgan was a black woman who had an interstate ticket on a bus. The Supreme Court ruled that she had been incorrectly arrested and punished, because if a person was moving between the states on a bus or train it was a burden on interstate commerce to stop the bus or train and waste time and energy separating people. You will also remember that 1946 is a crucial period, because many blacks who had been in the army were returning home from Europe. There were many incidents in which these black soldiers — having been abroad and exposed to fighting for freedom — were not going to come back to the United States on their way home and be segregated in transportation. Therefore the combination of these blacks who were already resisting, and the Irene Morgan Decision, which gave blacks the right to resist segregation, particularly in interstate travel, we in CORE decided immediately following the Morgan decision that the next year, 1947, we were going to create a nationwide protest with nine blacks and nine whites who would go into buses all over the upper south with blacks sitting in the front and the whites sitting in the back to challenge this. This was known generally as the first Freedom Ride. It was called “The Journey of Reconciliation.” As a result of the Journey of Reconciliation a number of black and whites were jailed. That was my first experience on a chain gang ...

Rustin later helped organize the 1964 March on Washington but was regarded as too radical to deserve public recognition

The March itself was really the brainchild of A. Philip Randolph, who had earlier organized the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and used it to god advantage: Randolph had seen WWII as an opportunity to press for civil rights gains, and had helped force black employment in the defense industry then by threatening a black march into segregated DC. The importance of the BSCP may be indicated by the fact that, when Rosa Parks was arrested,

... Meeting her at the jail with bail money was E.D. Nixon, president of both the city’s NAACP chapter and the Montgomery local of the .. BSCP ...

Political activism involves organizing, strategy, and theater: the successes of the 1950s and 1960s did not spring full-born from the churches but resulted from hard work over several generations, as activists with widely varying philosophies thrashed through the cultural climate and studied what worked