We Can Choose What We Remember:

Religion and Radical Movements in the South

Allyn Maxfield-Steele

November 12, 2020

Calls by 2020 presidential campaigns to “Make America Great Again” and “Restore the Soul of America” are powerful historical and spiritual assertions. Both imply that the other side is the enemy bent on erasing the other’s “back then.” As sound bites of two contending national mythologies, the slogans also challenge progressives and radicals to grapple with what they inspire people to remember about who we are and where we’re trying to go.

Don’t be confused: the slogans are not moral equivalents. An executive regime change and, quite possibly, a congressional power shift will take place in the US in January 2021, and I write without hesitation that it’s a good thing. My family, colleagues, and I have felt the terror of the last four years. Highlander’s place and people survived a 2019 white supremacist attack, the most recent in a series of attacks over the decades that we’ve been doing our work. We have no doubt that the attack came, as I’ve written before, because of the pluralistic horror we represent to those who espouse any number of white supremacist tendencies. We are also clear that the attack happened in the context of numerous dog whistles from the White House and other right-wing officials since 2017. Plus, as often as Southerners are blamed (erroneously, in my opinion) for the country’s woes, 2020 alone has shown that our communities—especially those that are Black, brown, and indigenous—have taken some of the hardest hits in the country from the pandemic alone. Regime change is critical to survival.

Still, among the many tasks of progressives and radicals will be preventing an incoming regime from entrenching a centrist status quo or, perhaps worse, popularizing a bizarro, politically flat, spiritualized version of a red MAGA hat. On one hand, regardless of what happens between now and January 2021, white supremacist violence and organizing—whether embodied in a political party or in non-state actors—remain threats to assess, to protect our people from, and to out-organize. On another hand, white liberal elitism from local communities to the national level will do nothing to substantively transform the material conditions of our communities or to strengthen grassroots relationships that will foster any semblance of democracy. Those of us pushing for fundamental transformations away from white supremacy culture, capitalism, and cis-hetero-patriarchy have to go further than turning states blue.

As much as elections are core to efforts to govern the present and future, they are also massive projects in (re)organizing our collective memories. We can choose what we remember. Being mindful of that is part of what makes radical and progressive religious analysis so important, particularly in the South. For my part, as a Christian clergyperson who carries a lot of memory about what the South has been, can be, and ought to be, I understand remembrance as both a sacramental act and political act, where what’s broken apart can be, even if for a moment, brought closer to something that feels whole.

I believe we are witnessing the result of this kind of remembrance in this very moment of history in the Movement 4 Black Lives. Calls to #defundpolice and #defendBlacklife have fundamentally shifted the way that families and church study groups are talking to one another. A mostly Southern and Midwestern Black women-led electoral justice movement mobilized millions to usher in critical victories that will benefit all of us. An ambitious piece of proposed national legislation to create alternatives to policing and community safety, the Breathe Act, promises significant divestments from militarization and police-enforced economic apartheid.

Where the 21st century Black Freedom Movement has carried all of us since the summer of 2020 (and before) moves in the legacy of what happened during the mid-20th century Black Freedom Movement. It’s a reminder that time and time again, Black women, especially those from the South, have helped us all that imagine that survival—wholeness—is possible.

Looking at just one example, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) Digital Gateway Project gathers the stories of Fannie Lou Hamer, Victoria Gray (Adams), Annie Devine, and Hazel Palmer and their work with the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). Organized and mentored by unsung Black women like Ella Baker, whose words, “we who believe in freedom cannot rest until it comes,” were penned into song by SNCC veteran Dr. Bernice Johnson Reagon, the story of the MFDP helps us remember that the steady and faithful work of community organizing with working people can build the kind of independent political power that will crack open, and hopefully dismantle, white-dominated political elitism.

Or take the story of Septima Poinsette Clark, Highlander’s Director of Workshops in the 1950s, whose leadership in developing and expanding the Citizenship School program laid the foundation for a massive expansion of Black political enfranchisement across the mostly rural South. Although effectively a literacy campaign with an explicit goal of beating the Jim Crow era literacy tests aimed specifically at preventing Black people from being able to vote, the Citizenship School programs used education to form organization, often functioning as the groundwork for local economic democracy projects. Recognizing that community power and self-determination come from both economic and political democracy, the Citizenship School program helped build alternative worlds of freedom while also disrupting the suppression of the vote, one of the key trophies of white supremacy culture (still).

Less well known than their male, mostly Christian (and often clergy) counterparts, these were Black women whose work in their communities was very much grounded in their communities of faith regardless of tradition. Today, movements continue to carry Spirit inside them, even if religious institutions and organizations are less prominently connected. My dear friend, comrade, Co-Executive Director, and sister in faith, Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson, an Affrilachian daughter of a Missionary Baptist preacher, often reminds us that belief is very much a part of today’s movements for liberation in the South. “Every time you chant, ‘I believe that we will win,’” Ash-Lee will say, “you are making a statement of faith.” Driven as much by the conviction that people deserve their full dignity as they are inspired by any particular faith or spiritual tradition, contemporary Black Freedom movements, with all of their roots in the Black Freedom movements of the South, represent an enduring belief in the possibility of wholeness and a vision for a liberated life.

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Raised in Texas, Germany and North Carolina, Rev. Allyn Maxfield-Steele’s movement work has included solidarity struggles with Thai people’s movements, work as an educator and organizer in Spartanburg, South Carolina, and a range of support for front-line struggles in Nashville, Tennessee, and throughout the South and Appalachia. As a member of the Educational Network for Global and Grassroots Exchange (ENGAGE), Allyn was a member of Highlander’s 2010 Threads cohort and served as an adult ally for the 2010 Seeds of Fire youth program. He joined Highlander’s Board of Directors in 2011, where most recently he has served as chair of the board.

An ordained minister in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), Allyn has served congregations in Juneau, Alaska, Nashville, and Springfield, TN. Allyn’s focus and interests lie at the intersection of radical pastoral care, institutional transformation, dismantling toxic white masculinities, and liberation-driven ministry and movement building, especially in rural and small town communities. Allyn holds a B.A. in History from Wofford College (SC) and a Masters of Divinity from Vanderbilt Divinity School.

Love and Solidarity: James Lawson and Nonviolence in the Search for Workers' Rights

Michael K. Honey

November 12, 2020

Please join us for a short film on the theory and practice of nonviolence as explained by the legendary Rev. James Lawson, who led John Lewis, C.T. Vivian, Bernard Lafayette, Diane Nash, and others in preparing and carrying out the Nashville student lunch counter sit-ins, and later played key roles in the freedom rides in 1960.

As you watch the film, think about how this strategy and philosophy worked then and continues to work today in labor organizing and communities of color.

Of note, nonviolence is not something that worked for Martin Luther King and others in the 1960s, it continues to work for us today. We need to think and talk about this philosophy and method, which is needed more than ever today to fight racism, war, and economic injustice.

Michael K. Honey is the Haley Professor of Humanities at the University of Washington Tacoma and a Radcliffe/Harvard Institute fellow. See his Recent writings on ML King and Economic Justice.

A Matthew 25 Christian

Alison Collis Greene

December 10, 2020

If you want to know who informs me and my sense of how we engage as people in the economic system you need look no further than Matthew 25, I’m a Matthew 25 Christian, that’s what I am. I was hungry and you fed me, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink. I was sick and you visited me.

-Raphael Warnock, Georgia U.S. Senatorial runoff debate, December 6, 2020 (transcript)

Senator Kelly Loeffler dubbed her challenger “Radical Liberal Raphael Warnock” nine times up to this point in their debate, characterized him as a socialist five times, twice questioned his interpretation of scripture, and falsely accused him of inviting Fidel Castro to his church when Warnock finally responded with his striking clarification, “I’m a Matthew 25 Christian.” As senior pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, the position most famously held by Martin Luther King, Jr., Warnock anticipated Loeffler’s attacks. He surely recognized the mocking similarities in cadence between his proper title, Reverend Doctor Raphael Warnock and Loeffler’s snide, racist substitute. Yet his Matthew 25 response seemed more the result of exasperation with his opponent’s clumsy attacks than of preparation, a moment both pastoral and political—but not radical.

Or was it? Matthew 25 opens with two parables before closing with the least-of-these passage to which Warnock referred, a passage in which Jesus describes service to the lowliest as service to him and rejection of the lowliest as rejection of him. More a standard for Christian charities than Christian socialists in past decades, that passage now stands in stark contrast to a substantial proportion of American citizens who gleefully demean the hungry, refuse clean water to the thirsty, and—in the midst of a national pandemic—mock the sick. For those same Americans, the liberalism of the American century (at its most basic, a commitment to the public good and the social welfare state) melts into radicalism (not a political position in itself but a determination to challenge the fundamental structures of existing system). Never mind the protests of liberals and radicals—particularly actual socialists—themselves or the routine animosity between them. We live in a moment when claiming to be “a Matthew 25 Christian” confirms the Radical Liberal moniker, that to commit to the public good is to challenge the fundamental structures of our society.

Yet, as readers of this forum know, there is a genuine and longstanding tradition not just of liberal Christianity but of radical Christianity in the South. It is a tradition that crosses—but does not transcend—lines of race, class, and gender that politicians like Loeffler simultaneously reinforce and pretend to ignore. It is a tradition well-documented in the historical record, both in the archive and in careful histories painstakingly collected.

Warnock’s reference to Matthew 25 echoes a long legacy within Black southern churches of mutual aid and community support. Within churches like Ebenezer, that legacy also includes committed social action, explicit rejection of white supremacy, and a clear sense of both a biblical and a moral mandate for that work. This is radicalism to white Americans like Loeffler, raised at best on stories that deradicalized Martin Luther King, Jr. in public, demeaned him in private, and disregarded the host of Black activists like Septima Clark or Vera Pigee, whose work undergirded and exceeded his. Unfamiliar with the context or theologies of Black churches but aware that they do not feel like white churches, Loeffler and others committed to the preservation of white supremacy equate Black Christianity with radical Christianity. For white Americans unreflective about our own complicity in racist systems—like the Southern Baptist seminary presidents who just declared critical race theory and acknowledgement of structural injustices incompatible with Christian teaching—Black Christianity’s very existence outside white control stands as challenge to fundamental structures of American life. Even when it is conservative, it is radical.

While Black traditions of radical Christianity—and broader mischaracterizations of Black Christianity as radical—have a place in the white American consciousness, white southern radical Christianity does not. From the North Carolina populists whose theologies proved the bridge from conservativism to radicalism to the coterie of Vanderbilt and Yale divinity students who helped workers organize across the South to Highlander’s longstanding work at the nexus of racial and economic justice, and far beyond, every state in the South has a history of radical white Christianity. Those white radical Christian traditions lived with and often carried on a legacy of white supremacy. But many—like the men and women of the Fellowship of Southern Churchmen and Claude Williams’s People’s Institute of Applied Religion—came to see racial justice and economic justice as inextricable and worked toward both. Conservative evangelicalism is not the white South’s only, or even most significant, form of white Christianity.

Yet the long history of Southern Christian radicalism is not a tradition that has reached what historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot called “the moment of retrospective significance”—a place in the public consciousness, in the narratives Americans across lines of difference learn at the dinner table and in grade school. I taught Ivy League students as a graduate student, public university students in the deep South as a junior professor, and now theology students in Atlanta as a midcareer scholar, and across those contexts, my students almost universally express astonishment when they learn of Alabama communists or Appalachian socialists and utter disbelief when they learn that those same Alabama communists and Appalachian socialists were also devout and committed Christians, that their theologies and politics flowed together in the same riverbed.

“You can see what’s at stake,” Kelly Loeffler said in her closing statement. “There are two visions for our country, mine, the American dream, my opponent, socialism.” One the mythic hero of unrestrained capitalism; one its bogeyman. Yet for generations of southern radicals, the two were not at odds. Unlike Loeffler and the capitalist oligarchy she represents, Southern Christian radicals imagined an American dream accessible to all—especially the least of these.

Dr. Alison Collis Greene is Associate Professor of American Religious History at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology and teaches United States religious history, with interests in American religions as they relate to politics, wealth and poverty, race and ethnicity, the environment, and the modern rural South.In addition to her role as Director of the Master of Theological Studies program, Greene is an affiliated faculty member in the Department of History at Emory College of Arts and Sciences. She is author of No Depression in Heaven: The Great Depression, the New Deal, and the Transformation of Religion in the Delta (Oxford, 2016), as well as a number of essays and articles on modern United States religious history in both scholarly and popular outlets. Greene is a 1996 alumna of YTI at Candler and serves on the YTI Advisory Board. She is also on the editorial board of the Journal of Southern Religion.

“God and a Union”:

Tobacco Workers Organizing in Winston-Salem, NC, 1943

Robert Korstad

December 10, 2020

“Working Conditions were so bad you needed God and a Union.” Geneva McClendon, a stemming machine operator at R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, offered this assessment of the dual strategies that were necessary to better the lives of black tobacco workers. And it was just such a blending of religion and civil rights unionism that led to the organization of Local 22 of the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America-Congress of Industrial Organizations (UCAPAWA-CIO) in 1943. The story of Local 22 is chronicled in my book Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-Twentieth-Century South. What follows is a look at how black religious traditions aided the initial organizing campaign.

UCAPAWA had targeted Reynolds, one of the country’s largest and fiercest anti-union tobacco firms in early 1942. One of the first organizers on the scene was William DeBerry, a native of Memphis, Tennessee, who had helped UCAPAWA build a successful local in his hometown. Soon after he arrived, DeBerry began making contact with black ministers. Embedded in this approach was a strategic understanding of the centrality of the church and the importance of its leaders within the black community.

DeBerry made the rounds in Winston-Salem, contacting ministers at several of the larger churches as well as a number of the worker/preachers who pastored the dozens of smaller congregations. He described his method: “Many times I walked into churches all over the South and put down five or ten dollars in the plate, or maybe go and talk with the minister. We didn't talk too much about labor business, but he knew who I was. We'd feel one another out. He'd say, ‘Brother DeBerry, come down to service Sunday and worship with us.' After the service he'd say, ‘I've got somebody I want you to meet.’ I could reach all of those people, otherwise I wouldn't have a chance.”

As DeBerry gained the confidence of some of the preachers, he and his fellow organizer Harry Koger began to introduce some of the messaging that had served them well in Memphis. Both DeBerry and Koger belonged to the People's Institute of Applied Religion, and they drew extensively on its blend of prophetic religion and trade unionism. The institute's founder, the Reverend Claude Williams, was one of a coterie of white radicals who surfaced in the South between the world wars, burning with a fierce determination to fight the social and economic injustices they saw around them. “Claude reread the Bible with new eyes,” according to the historian Mark Naison. “He saw the Son of Man as a revolutionary who was continually identified with the [most extreme] victims of society–the poor, the suffering, the exploited. The same was true of virtually all the Old Testament figures who represented the prophetic impulse, from Moses through Amos and Isaiah. Looked at from this perspective, the Bible read as ‘the longest continuous record of struggle against oppression that mankind possessed.’”

Asked by unionists to help train black and white labor leaders, Claude Williams developed an approach to labor education that grew directly out of his religious convictions. That approach “was necessitated by the strong religious background of virtually all the participants,” Naison observed, “and the fact that the Bible represented virtually the only framework within which they could make sense of their struggles, their setbacks and their aspirations.”

Williams envisioned the institute as a nonsectarian organization that would train religious leaders to organize unions and lead campaigns against racial discrimination. To communicate with people who could barely read and write, Williams had an artist design illustrations depicting Bible stories that seemed to contain revolutionary messages or showing scenes of contemporary struggles accompanied by appropriate Biblical passages. The preachers Williams trained made these illustrations a centerpiece of their organizing campaigns. Williams, accompanied by the Reverend Owen Whitfield, a leader of the famous 1939 roadside protest by Missouri sharecroppers, brought his charts to Winston-Salem in the winter of 1943 for a week-long applied institute.

In the aftermath, Whitfield presented a well-publicized series of talks before Baptist congregants that ended with an appearance before the Ministerial Alliance. Such gatherings highlighted the importance of the free public spaces created by the black churches. Here ministers, workers, and organizers talked openly and honestly about tactics for change. Here too was forged the relationship among trade unions, black freedom struggles, and prophetic Christianity that defined civil rights activism among working-class blacks in the 1940s.

Unions were strictly taboo in Winston-Salem, so organizers had to find ways to allay workers’ fears and to stamp the union drive as the workers' own. One tactic they used was to combine meetings where union leaders spoke with appearances by one of the city’s popular choral clubs or gospel quartets. Among the union’s early converts were members of the Smith Choral Club, one of the city's best known singing groups. Theodosia Simpson emerged as one of the early worker-organizers and her husband Buck was a long-time member of the club. He and three other members formed a quartet specifically to sing at union gatherings. The quartet performed gospel songs and CIO standards, but, like the choral clubs more generally, it also drew on popular musical traditions, including seemingly unpromising tunes such as Stephen Foster's nostalgic 'Old Black Joe.'

Gone are the days when the boss had all the say,

Gone are the days when we worked for meager pay.

How does it come? Do you really want to know?

We hear the workers' voices calling 'CIO.'

Such cultural improvisations, which combined sacred and secular traditions with popular music, simultaneously claimed the imprimatur of Christianity and softened the radical implications of the union's rhetoric for fearful listeners. It also subverted the racist overtones of popular music, giving a critical, antiracist edge to pro-union messages.

Finally, UCAPAWA drew on the organizational skills that workers had learned in their churches. Velma Hopkins exemplified the leadership roles played by both working- and middle-class women in the black community. Described by many people as a model club woman, Hopkins combined her roles as a mother, wife, worker, and community member. ”My training, I guess, came from being a mother and working in the [Shiloh Baptist] church and in the school,' she said. 'I'd always participated in PTAs. And I was head of an organization in the church [the Galaxy Club]. I got lots of my training from my pastor too.”

In the summer of 1943, in the wake of a week-long sitdown strike, UCAPAWA won collective bargaining rights for workers at Reynolds. Over the next six years, the union was a powerful presence in Winston-Salem. It fought for unemployment compensation and low-income housing and spearhead the election of the city’s first black alderman since the 1890s. By 1950, a combination of forces—automation, anti-labor legislation, and the Second Red Scare—undermined the union’s position and it lost bargaining rights for Reynolds workers.

But throughout Local 22’s existence, African American religiosity remained a mainstay of union culture. Assemblies of all kinds—from the mass membership meetings that brought together thousands of workers and their families to the small gatherings of the few workers who joined the Communist Party—began with prayer and song, often the spiritual “Do Lord Remember Me.” It is no exaggeration to say that the black church was an Important wellspring of labor activism in Winston-Salem as it was in so many of the South’s struggles for social justice.

Robert Korstad is Emeritus Professor of Public Policy and History at Duke University. He received his B.A. and PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His publications include: Fragile Democracy: The Struggle Over Race and Voting Rights in North Carolina (coauthor, University of North Carolina Press, 2020); To Right These Wrongs: The North Carolina Fund and the Battle to End Poverty and Inequality in 1960s America (coauthor, University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Civil Rights Unionism: Tobacco Workers and the Struggle for Democracy in the Mid-Twentieth-Century South (University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Remembering Jim Crow: African Americans Talk About Life in the Segregated South (coeditor, The New Press, 2001); Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World (coauthor, University of North Carolina Press, revised edition, 2000).