Religion and Nonviolence in the Black Freedom Movement, 1918 - 1960

A More Durable Weapon: Religion and Nonviolence in the Black Freedom Movement, 1918 - 1960 By Anthony C. Siracusa Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Vanderbilt University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in History August 31, 2017 Nashville, Tennessee Approved: Dennis. C. Dickerson, Ph.D Sarah E. Igo, Ph.D Paul A. Kramer, Ph.D Larry W. Isaac, Ph.D TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Introduction............................................................................................................................................................1 Chapter 1 Race and the Problem of Pacifism in the United States............................................................................20 Origins of the US Fellowship....................................................................................................................23 The Primacy of Personality and The Search for Methods........................................................................35 “Techniques which are in themselves immediate ends”...........................................................................42 The Color of Pacifism...............................................................................................................................59 2 From "Mere Quietus" to “Prophetic Religion”: Howard Thurman and the Politics of Being..................64 The Howard University School of Religion..............................................................................................66 Howard Thurman and the Politics of Being..............................................................................................74 Howard Thurman and the Politics of Nonviolence...................................................................................82 Dialectics in Black Religious Education...................................................................................................92 The Christian Antithesis – American Christianity..................................................................................105 3 From Pacifism to Resistance: The Evolution of Nonviolence in Wartime America..............................109 Streams of Intermovement Influence......................................................................................................113 Forward from Pacifism............................................................................................................................130 4 Disrupting the Calculation of Violence: James M. Lawson Jr. and the Politics of Nonviolence...........146 White Violence and Nonviolence in the US South.................................................................................151 James M. Lawson, Jr. and The Remaking of Racial Politics in the US South........................................158 Nonviolence and Being...........................................................................................................................171 Building a Nonviolent Army...................................................................................................................176 Conclusion “Agnostic Nonviolent Technicians”......................................................................................................................180 ii Introduction “By a positive program I am here referring to a flesh and blood program which deals with physical realities of social relationships. I am not here concerned with that perverted pietism which ignores the facts of life and preaches disembodied spiritualism.”1 Bayard Rustin, 1943 In his March 1955 report to the national office of the pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), Fellowship Field Secretary Glen Smiley told his bosses in New York that Martin Luther King, Jr. wanted to “do it right,” but King was “too young” and “some of his close help is violent.” Smiley reported that King’s entourage of bodyguards had recently sought a “permit...to carry guns,” and he described King’s home as “an arsenal.” Smiley told his New York bosses that “King sees the inconsistency” between his nonviolent ideals and the armed reality of the situation, “but not enough. He believes and yet he doesn't believe. The whole movement is armed in a sense, and this is what I must convince him to see as the greatest evil.” Concluding his report without acknowledging the irony in his final statement, Smiley wrote “this stuff on arms is deadly. Treat it in the strictest confidence.”2 Glenn Smiley’s effort to convert Martin King to nonviolence is, by now, a well known episode in scholarly literature on the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Black Freedom Struggle. But Smiley’s role in Montgomery was as much an ending as a beginning - a turning point in a decades long effort by white pacifists to apply their politics to the problem of racial violence and discrimination in the US South. Smiley and his late 1950s counterpart, FOR Southern Secretary James M. Lawson, Jr., were part of a third generation of Fellowship staff 1 Bayard Rustin, “Forward from Pacifism, Part I, Session #3 “Our Need to Shift Our Emphasis from Pacifism to a Program of Positive Social Goals,” April 2 1944,” John H. Bracey, Jr. and August Meier, eds., Bayard Rustin Papers, (Microfilm, 23 reels, University Publications of America, 1988) [hereafter ‘BRP’], Reel I. 2 Glenn Smiley, Letter to John and Al, 29 February 1956, Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) Papers [hereafter FOR], Series E, Box 17, Folder Correspondence Martin King 1954 - 1967; see also, Christopher Strain, Purefire: Self Defense as Activism in the Civil Rights Era, (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005), 40. 1 concerned with Jim Crow and white violence in the United States. Since the First World War, American pacifists had decried lynching and racial discrimination, citing it alongside the violence of the labor struggle as a domestic problem of critical importance. But until Montgomery, this group of largely white pacifists failed to demonstrate how the politics of pacifism – predicated on a commitment to doing no violence – might actively undermine and ultimately end Jim Crow violence and racial discrimination. This dissertation charts how and why the pacifist movement influenced the Black Freedom Struggle between the First World War and the sit-downs of 1960. It locates the intellectual roots of nonviolent US politics in religious ideas about ethical being, religious ideas to which both white pacifists and black religious intellectuals found themselves committed. It chronicles the history of failures that preceded the successful effort by Smiley and his black pacifist colleague Bayard Rustin to convince King to use the weapon of nonviolence in Montgomery. And it shows how religious ideas were successfully grafted onto direct action tactics deployed by US labor activists, a process of “movement spillover” and tactical “borrowing” that led to the widespread deployment of the sit down in the black freedom struggle by 1960.3 In exploring the space between religious ideas about nonviolence and nonviolent tactics, this dissertation challenges the conceptual approach that characterizes scholarly discussions of nonviolence – a typical bifurcation of nonviolence as either tactic or a way of life. This study locates a vibrant lineage of people for whom ethical being was also a tactically effective method of politics. 3 David S. Meyer and Nancy Whittier, “Social Movement Spillover,” Social Problems 41, no. 2 (1994): 277–98; Larry Isaac and Lars Christiansen, “How the Civil Rights Movement Revitalized Labor Militancy,” American Sociological Review 67, no. 5 (2002); Larry Isaac, Steve McDonald, and Greg Lukasik, “Takin’ It from the Streets: How the Sixties Mass Movement Revitalized Unionization,” American Journal of Sociology 112, no. 1 (2006): 46–96. 2 Beginning with the rise of a white pacifist movement in the United States during the First World War, this dissertation tracks how Howard Thurman, Bayard Rustin, and James M. Lawson, Jr. envisaged pacifism and navigated its inadequacies between 1918 and 1960. The way these influential black intellectuals linked personal religiosity and social politics is perhaps best captured by what I call a ‘politics of being,’ a conceptual framework that explores the relationship between religious being and nonviolent direct action in modern America. Defining the politics of being as embodied acts of mercy, kindness, and forgiveness in the face of violent white hostility, this dissertation argues that an influential lineage of thinkers and activists came to believe that such practices could transform social relations between white and black Americans in the United States. These ideas and practices – the politics of nonviolence - flowed out of a domestic pacifist movement. But neither pacifism nor nonviolence fully capture the praxis of resistance devised and diffused by Thurman, Rustin, and Lawson for challenging Jim Crow. These men rejected the idea of pacifism as a methodology of resistance for white supremacy, opting for the ‘force’ of nonviolence just as Gandhi did. But the politics of being became a way of doing nonviolence in modern America for these religious activists and the students they inspired. The politics of being were at once a political methodology and a religious commitment to take action against Jim Crow. This dissertation documents how Howard Thurman derived these politics of being from pacifism, and how Bayard Rustin and Jim Lawson showed forth how this nonviolent religious framework could be used

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