Breaking White Supremacy: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Black Social Gospel

629 Pages·2018·6.77 MB·English

by  Gary Dorrien

Breaking White Supremacy
BOOkS By gary DOrrien
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The Democratic Socialist Vision
Reconstructing the Common Good
The Neoconservative Mind: Politics, Culture, and the War of Ideology
Soul in Society: The Making and Renewal of Social Christianity
The Word as True Myth: Interpreting Modern Theology
The Remaking of Evangelical Theology
The Barthian Revolt in Modern Theology
The Making of American Liberal Theology:
Imagining Progressive Religion, 1805–1900
The Making of American Liberal Theology:
Idealism, Realism, and Modernity, 1900–1950
Imperial Designs: Neoconservatism and the New Pax Americana
The Making of American Liberal Theology:
Crisis, Irony, and Postmodernity, 1950–2005
Social Ethics in the Making: Interpreting an American Tradition
Economy, Difference, Empire: Social Ethics for Social Justice
The Obama Question: A Progressive Perspective
Kantian Reason and Hegelian Spirit: The Idealistic Logic of Modern Theology
The New Abolition: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Black Social Gospel
B
reaking
W
hite
S
upremacy
Martin Luther King Jr. and the Black Social Gospel
Gary Dorrien
New Haven & London
Published with assistance from the Louis Stern Memorial Fund.
Copyright © 2018 by Yale University. All rights reserved. This book may not be
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2016963360
ISBN 978-0-300-20561-9 (hardcover : alk. paper)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Sara and Will,
With joy and thanksgiving
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cOntentS
Preface ix
Illustrations xiii
one Achieving the Black Social Gospel 1
two Prophetic Suffering and Black Internationalism 24
three Moral Politics and the Soul of the World 96
four Protest Politics and Power Politics 172
five Redeeming the Soul of America 255
six Nightmare Fury and Public Sacrifice 355
seven Theologies of Liberation 442
Notes 505
Index 575
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preface
This book stands on its own, resumes the story told in my previous book, and
fulfills my longtime desire to see someone—eventually, me—give the black
social gospel tradition its due recognition. The founding of the black social
gospel in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a prolonged
affair of forerunners and founders comprising four different ideological perspec-
tives. This book is about something later and more specific—the mid-twentieth-
century black church leaders who embraced the full-orbed, modern, progressive,
justice-oriented, internationalist social gospel from the beginning of their
careers and fulfilled it. They did not break their nation of white supremacy or
other forms of oppression connected to it. But they inspired and led America’s
greatest liberation movement.
This book is distinctly personal for me because it converges on the figure that
propelled me into social justice activism and Christian ministry and then into
an academic career. I came of age during the climactic years of the civil rights
movement. Martin Luther King Jr. seized my attention before I understood
much of anything about politics or religion, and his contributions to the black
freedom and anti–Vietnam War movements anchored my worldview when I
entered college. In my twenties and early thirties I worked as a solidarity activist
and Episcopal pastor; in my mid-thirties I became an academic; today I have
the same touchstone with which I began: the peacemaking and justice-making
way of Jesus, as exemplified by King.
In my early career I wrote books on post-Kantian idealism, Social Democratic
politics, and Christian Socialism, and I puzzled over why early black Christian
Socialists such as Reverdy C. Ransom and George W. Woodbey were completely
forgotten. Why were there no books on the convictions that linked Ransom,
iixx