The Spiritual Impulse of the Black, Mexican-American & Native American Civil Rights Movements
Gastón Espinosa
Arthur V. Stoughton Professor of Religious Studies
“In a real sense all life is inter-related. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly... I have tried to stand between these two forces, saying that we need emulate neither the “do nothingism” of the complacent nor the hatred and despair of the black nationalist. For there is the more excellent way of love and nonviolent protest. I am grateful to God that, through the influence of the Negro church, the way of nonviolence became an integral part of our struggle.”
“We also carry the Sacred Cross and the Star of David because are not sectarians, and because we ask the help and prayers of all religions. All men are brothers, sons of the same God; that is why we say to all men of good will, in the words of Pope Leo XIII, ‘Everyone’s first duty is to protect the workers from the greed of speculators who use human beings as instruments to provide themselves with money. It is neither just nor human to oppress men with excessive work to the point where their minds become enfeebled and their bodies worn out.’ God will not abandon us.”
This Gould Center lab built on my Religion, Race, and Civil Rights Movements class, books, articles, and research. After examining the history of slavery, racism, anti-Blackness, segregation, and white supremacy from the colonial era to the 1950s, we explored the spiritual impulse of the Black, Mexican American, and American Indian (AIM) civil rights movements side-by-side.
After laying out the historical context for the civil rights period, I started the main focus of the lab in 1954 because that’s the year of Brown v. Board of Education, which provided a legal impetus for Blacks and others to fight segregation and racism. I ended the lab in 1975 because by this time most of the main civil rights leaders had met their goals, were killed, retired, or in prison, and/or had moved on to other endeavors. I include a final unit that connected these three movements to recent racial-ethnic civil rights struggles from Ferguson to Immigration Reform on the U.S.-Mexico border to Standing Rock to Minneapolis.
Religion played a critical role in all three movements, especially indigenous expressions. We see the pivotal role that religion, faith, spirituality, and religious texts, symbols, and churches, traditions and leaders played in the lives, rhetoric, platforms, aspirations, and goals of the main leaders. Despite this fact, religion and spirituality has often been stripped from these movements and leaders by the larger outside white society, largely for positive reasons – believing that a secular framing would be more appealing to elites and the general public. For example, none of the first eleven biographies of César Chávez dedicate a single chapter to his faith, despite its critical role. However, this stripping of the spiritual impulse contributes to a kind of cultural cleansing, whitening, and violence that invariably denigrates popular racial-ethnic forms of spirituality in favor of more rational forms. This stripping of indigenous cultural expressions was carried out by public education and secular universities, in both cases for ostensibly positive reasons, but with damaging results.
Virtually any close reading of the writings of civil rights leaders (MLK, Strength to Love, Malcolm X, Autobiography, Ella Baker, Organizing, César Chávez, Mexican Americans & Church and Plan of Delano, Dennis Banks, Ojibwa Warrior, Leonard Crow Dog, Crow Dog, Mary Crow Dog, Lakota Woman) and viewing of their documentaries and interviews make it clear that spirituality (though often indigenous, popular, and non-institutional forms) played a decisive role in shaping their understanding and moral visions of racial equality and how to build a more just society.
Traditions explored would include Protestant—AME, Baptist, Methodist, Episcopalian (Martin Luther King, Jr., Fred Shuttlesworth, Jesse Jackson, Rosa Parks, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker), Muslim (Malcolm X), Catholic (César Chávez, Dolores Huerta, Diane Nash), Pentecostal (Reies López Tijerina, James Baldwin), Native American traditions (Dennis Banks, Russell Means, Mary Crow Dog, Vine Deloria), revolutionary humanism (Angela Davis, Huey Newton), and others. The Lab would focus on the movements, 6-10 leaders in each, and keep it broad and inclusive.
On this website, I include primary source readings, secondary source interpretations, photographs to illustrate the struggle, YouTube clips and links, documentary clips and links (perhaps just to the free trailers if there are copyright concerns), chronologies, and bibliographies on key movements and themes (e.g., slavery, segregation, racism, white supremacy, black liberation, Latin American liberation theology, women and the civil rights movements). I would also like to create short two-page bios that junior high, high school, college, and graduate school students and the general public could use for their research, writing, and other projects.
I operationalized this Lab by selecting CMC students from across racial-ethnic and other backgrounds, dividing up the work in light of their personal research interests, and then by sitting down with students for 1-2 hours individually and/or collectively every other week or as needed to go over their assignments for their respective assignments.