A Stone of Hope

by Chappell, David L.

• ISBN13: 9780807856604
• ISBN10: 0807856606
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2005-08-29
• Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Pr

Summary

In a provocative assessment of the success of the civil rights movement, David L. Chappell reconsiders the intellectual roots of civil rights reform, showing how the prophetic tradition of the Old Testament-sometimes translated into secular language-drove African American activists to unprecedented solidarity and self-sacrifice. Martin Luther King Jr., Fannie Lou Hamer, James Lawson, Modjeska Simkins, and other black leaders believed, as the Hebrew prophets believed, that they had to stand apart from society and instigate dramatic changes to force an unwilling world to abandon its sinful ways. Although segregationists outvoted and outgunned black integrationists, the segregationists lost, Chappell concludes, largely because they did not have a religious commitment to their cause.

Table of Contents

Introduction	1	(8)
1 Hungry Liberals: Their Sense That Something Was Missing	9	(17)
2 Recovering Optimists	26	(18)
3 The Prophetic Ideas That Made Civil Rights Move	44	(23)
4 Prophetic Christian Realism and the 1960's Generation	67	(20)
5 The Civil Rights Movement as a Religious Revival	87	(18)
6 Broken Churches, Broken Race: White Southern Religious Leadership and the Decline of White Supremacy	105	(26)
7 Pulpit versus Pew	131	(22)
8 Segregationist Thought in Crisis: What the Movement Was Up Against	153	(26)
Conclusions: Gamaliel, Caesar, and Us	179	(12)
Appendix: A Philosophical Note on Historical Explanation	191	(4)
Notes	195	(98)
Archival and Manuscript Sources	293	(4)
Bibliographical Essay	297	(30)
Acknowledgments	327	(4)
Index	331