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Grassroots Impacts on the Civil Rights Movement Claremont Colleges Scholarship @ Claremont CGU Theses & Dissertations CGU Student Scholarship Summer 2018 Grassroots Impacts on the Civil Rights Movement: Christian Women Leaders’ Contributions to the Paradigm Shift in the Tactics of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Its Affiliates Wook Jong Lee Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cgu_etd Part of the History of Christianity Commons Recommended Citation Lee, Wook Jong. (2018). Grassroots Impacts on the Civil Rights Movement: Christian Women Leaders’ Contributions to the Paradigm Shift in the Tactics of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Its Affiliates. CGU Theses & Dissertations, 149. https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cgu_etd/149. doi: 10.5642/cguetd/149 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the CGU Student Scholarship at Scholarship @ Claremont. It has been accepted for inclusion in CGU Theses & Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Scholarship @ Claremont. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Grassroots Impacts on the Civil Rights Movement: Christian Women Leaders’ Contributions to the Paradigm Shift in the Tactics of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Its Affiliates By Wook Jong Lee Claremont Graduate University 2018 © Copyright Wook Jong Lee, 2018 All Rights Reserved ProQuest Number:10844448 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. ProQuest 10844448 Published by ProQuest LLC ( 2018). Copyright of the Dissertation is held by the Author. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. ProQuest LLC. 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, MI 48106 - 1346 APPROVAL OF THE DISSERTATION COMMITTEE This dissertation has been duly read, reviewed, and critiqued by the Committee listed below, which hereby approves the manuscript of Wook Jong Lee as fulfilling the scope and quality requirements for meriting the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Religion. Patrick Q. Mason, Chair Claremont Graduate University Professor of Religion Linda M. Perkins Claremont Graduate University Professor of Women’s Studies Monica A. Coleman Claremont School of Theology Professor of Theology Abstract Grassroots Impacts on the Civil Rights Movement: Christian Women Leaders’ Contributions to the Paradigm Shift in the Tactics of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Its Affiliates By Wook Jong Lee Claremont Graduate University: 2018 This dissertation examines the historical factors that built grassroots movements during the civil rights era of the United States. These movements were produced by Christian women leaders, and they influenced a crucial transition in the leadership of the civil rights movement. Through their training and mobilizing tactics, women civil rights leaders utilized grassroots leadership to help major civil rights organizations, such as SCLC, SNCC, CORE, COFO, and the NAACP, work closely with local black people in the South who struggled with their underprivileged circumstances. This project investigates the key role of the grassroots leadership of Christian women leaders, which led civil rights leaders to learn how to train and work together with local black people to desegregate voter registration and which drove their voting rights movement to succeed in achieving the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The nationwide successes of the Birmingham Campaign, the Freedom Summer Project, the St. Augustine Movement, and the Selma to Montgomery marches were essentially based on the Citizenship School, and Christian women leaders trained the major civil rights activists of these movements. This dissertation identifies the contributions of the women leaders’ Citizenship School as key to these successes during the civil rights movement. The grassroots leadership of the Christian women leaders was developed on the basis of their religious convictions for pursuing the beloved community. The concept of the beloved community, an integrated community, is founded in the black church tradition of freedom movements, which began during the slavery era. Using the Christian value of humanity as the children of God, women civil rights leaders developed the self-awareness of grassroots people in the local South and encouraged them to fight against social injustice with determined spirits for freedom. The Citizenship School of the women leaders transitioned the main stream of the civil rights movement from a focus on mass movements to the training and mobilizing of grassroots people in the South. By developing the individuality of grassroots people’s efforts for civil rights, women civil rights leaders produced the multiple grassroots leaders who led the voting rights movement from 1960 to 1965. The grassroots tactics of the Citizenship School provided the paradigm shift of the civil rights movement by transferring leadership from top, elite leaders to grassroots leaders during the voting rights movement. The grassroots tactics also played an essential role in breaking through the stagnation of the civil rights movement and mobilizing underprivileged local people in the South who could not pass the literacy exam for voter registration; the direct orders of the hierarchical leaders had not been able to motivate them to dedicate their lives to the voting rights movement. This dissertation provides historical evidence of this leadership transition and of women leaders’ contributions to the transition, which led the civil rights movement to achieve success in desegregating voting rights. Moreover, this historical research demonstrates that the Christian faith of the grassroots women leaders, based in the tradition of the black church, contributed to the unification of diverse civil rights organizations in the pursuit of common goals for the voting rights of grassroots people and for building the beloved community during the civil rights movement era. In dedication to my beloved daughter, Theophilia Sinae Lee 12.04.2008-12.19.2008 When the white snow is falling down, I am roaming around the field, Going for a visit to the path with memory of my old love. On one spring day when the snow is melting down, On the green leaf, my old love, your image remains for all eternity. Young Hoon Lee, Old Love Acknowledgements Three years have passed since I reached PhD candidacy, and I have worked hard collecting original sources and finishing this dissertation. Despite this heavy work, I could not miss engaging in the candlelight vigils of over ten million people who gathered in Gwangwhamun Plaza in Seoul, South Korea. During the one hundred thirty days of demonstrations on the street, President Park Geun-hye finally was impeached, and the farmer Pak Nam Gi and the diver Kim Gwan Hong were murdered by social evil as martyrs in the circumstances of the demonstration. I was in the middle of the people’s movement in Seoul while I was writing about the civil rights movement and the martyrs of the movement. I realized that the more people’s demanding is sublime, the more people’s lives are inevitably sacrificed. This is the lamentable truth of our human society, which suffers from the illnesses of social evil. The grassroots movements during the civil rights movement in American history were victorious and also regrettable. First, I am thankful to the African American civil rights activists who inspired me to write and to practice this victorious and regrettable journey for human rights. I am especially thankful to Dorothy Cotton, who recently passed away but who encouraged my dissertation writing and allowed me to have an interview with her for this research a few months ago. I thank my wonderful dissertation committee members: Dr. Patrick Q. Mason, who has advised and taught me to be a professional historian in American religions since 2011; Dr. Linda M. Perkins, who inspired me to research the women civil rights leaders and who introduced me to the broader field of the African American history of women; and Dr. Monica A. Coleman, who taught me about the African American womanist movement and black theology. Due to their great teachings, I have been able to write a better quality dissertation. vi I give thanks to Dr. Sydney J. Lemelle at Pomona College, who introduced me to diverse perspectives on radical African American movements. I want to thank to Dr. M. Shawn Copeland at Boston College, who taught me about African religions; I will never forget her teachings. I am grateful to Dean Imani-Sheila Newsome-Camara, who advised me to write about the African American history of the Great Migration era while I studied at Boston University. I am grateful to the archivists of the King Center, Cynthia P. Lewis and Elaine Hall, the best archivists I ever met; with their help, I could wrestle with the original writings of Septima Clark, Ella Baker, and Dorothy Cotton. I also want to thank Ryan Hendrickson of the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University and the archivists of the Highlander Research and Education Center in Tennessee. I give my love to Rev. Dr. Wesley A. Roberts and the congregation of the People’s Baptist Church in Boston, the oldest African American church in New England, for their fellowship and hospitality while my family was members of that church. I am grateful to the bereaved families of the Sewol ferry disaster, who led me to realize the responsibility to fight against social evil as a disciple of Jesus. I specially thank the members of the Church of Peace in Los Angeles, particularly Rev. Dr. Keedae Kim, Linda Lee, Yeni Han, Ki Byung Jang, Myung Gi Jung and Ho Hwang who have fought for human rights in Korea along with me. I thank my present church, Hyanglin Church in Seoul, Korea, which is a representative church of minjung and has pursued the path of Jesus with me.
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