This is an extended review of this important contribution to the scholarship of the Civil Rights movement in the United States.



David Chappell’s book A Stone of Hope examines the philosophy of the civil rights movement from its foundation of prophetic religion. One of the core issues it considers is the liberal belief in social progress over time. Chappell begins his narrative by describing how the New Deal, at its height in the 1930s, achieved very little in terms of civil rights. The New Dealer

This is an extended review of this important contribution to the scholarship of the Civil Rights movement in the United States.



David Chappell’s book A Stone of Hope examines the philosophy of the civil rights movement from its foundation of prophetic religion. One of the core issues it considers is the liberal belief in social progress over time. Chappell begins his narrative by describing how the New Deal, at its height in the 1930s, achieved very little in terms of civil rights. The New Dealers recognized that even in democratic America they were constantly at a disadvantage against irrational conservative appeals to tradition, authority, and religious sanction, especially when the New Dealers needed the votes of conservative Southern Democrats to carry out the New Deal programs they cared about most.



The inability of New Deal leaders to make much progress against racism and Jim Crow was one reason why many of the major figures in the civil rights movement, such as Martin Luther King, Bayard Rustin, and James Lawson, embraced a different conception, based on morality and prophetic religion, of how to change society. These leaders looked to the essentially pessimistic view of human nature as corrupt and sinful, originally preached by the Old Testament prophets and more recently articulated by Reinhold Niebuhr, for the intellectual foundation of their movement: “They were conspicuous for their unwillingness to let social processes work themselves out and for their lack of faith in the power of education and economic development to cure society of oppressive evils.” (45)



Their approach is interesting if for no other reason than the fact it contrasted with the legal strategy pursued by the premier civil rights organization of the first half of the 20th century, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). In its gradual efforts to reverse the “separate but equal” doctrine codified by the 1896 Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, the NAACP put its faith in the belief that direct action was secondary in importance when legal redress was available. The Montgomery bus boycott of 1955-56 seemed to provide ample justification for its stance. While King helped organize the boycott, the NAACP took the matter to court. After the Supreme Court’s decision in Gayle v. Browder (1956) put an end to segregation in public transportation, NAACP lawyer Thurgood Marshall remarked, “All that walking for nothing. They might as well have waited for the court decision.”



The Warren Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka placed ultimate faith in progress through education. Warren’s written decision was a brief eleven pages because he wanted newspapers to reprint it for all to read. Part of his reasoning was that education was an imperative part of training citizens to participate in a democracy; therefore, it must be equal to all. The opinion attempted to convince southern “moderates” who were open to persuasion of the righteousness of integrating public education. Warren allowed a delay in implementation to give these “moderates” a reasonable time to come to terms with the decision and then put it into effect, avoiding more forceful remedies in the process. Interestingly, Warren cited Gunnar Myrdal’s 1944 study on race in America, An American Dilemma, as support for this tactic. Myrdal claimed American institutions, such as the government, were growing more sympathetic towards blacks over time. Chappell contrasts all of this with the writings of Niebuhr and the civil rights leaders who put his views into action. Niebuhr claimed that institutions were by nature immoral, acting only in their own self-interest.



The southern reaction to Brown demonstrated that the liberal faith in the power of law and education to produce eventual progress was at least partially mistaken. While a few southern school districts complied with Brown in short order, most dug in their heels, with Mississippi and South Carolina going so far as to eliminate public schools to evade desegregation. Southern politicians and newspapers made the by-now familiar denunciations of outside agitators and communists, some even claiming the NAACP was a Jewish- or Communist-led organization. Meanwhile, Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi conjured up the ghost of John C. Calhoun with their stated intentions to interpose themselves between their citizens and the national government, thereby nullifying the Brown decision. Only the force of the federal government integrated many educational institutions in the South, including Little Rock’s Central High School in Arkansas and the universities of Mississippi and Alabama. Brown and subsequent civil rights legislation such as the 1964 Civil Rights Act may have ended legal segregation, but no court decision or legislation could end prejudice.



Why did the liberal faith in progress fail to convert southerners to a belief in equality? Chappell attempts to provide answers when discussing the fundamental influence of religion in the South and how many southerners believed in a Biblical sanction for segregation: “The South was the Bible Belt: inerrantist and literalist views ran high. . . . It was not simply propaganda.” (115) Nor was this faith in segregation “the cause of semiliterate rednecks and demagogues.” (155) Instead, “the educated class of the white South was, with rare exceptions, united with the trash on the goal of preserving white supremacy.” (155) Yet, he notes that during the critical years of the 1950s and 1960s, southern church leaders largely failed to back the segregationists with the moral authority of their churches. Lawyers’ efforts to find legal justification were similarly wanting in enthusiasm. This leads to one of his key insights into the success of the civil rights movement: “Perhaps the most important reason for their confidence that they could win—not in Heaven or in the eternal sight of God, but here and now, on this earth—was their recognition that their enemies were weak.” (154)



Not that the fight against segregation was easy. Many of the prophetic leaders realized that they faced not just the intransigence of racist southerners, but also the moral apathy of their erstwhile supporters, black and white, whose faith in gradual progress lulled them into complacency. Fanny Lou Hamer claimed that 10 o’clock Sunday morning was the most segregated hour in America. On the other hand, the young idealists who traveled to Mississippi to work for civil rights there showed Hamer “more Christianity there than I’ve ever seen in the church.” (72) Bob Moses said the same thing at a training session for Freedom Summer in 1964: “The country isn’t willing yet to admit it has the plague, but it pervades the whole society.” (82)



The value of the book is that Chappell does not claim to have the whole story, only that he adds a new perspective to the traditional political and legal story. Another of his key contributions is that direct action is most effective when combined with behind-the-scenes legal work like of the NAACP, but direct action is the more difficult of the two approaches because of the moral courage it requires. That is what black leaders like King brought to the movement in the 1950s and 1960s—moral courage based on prophetic religion. It took the 1965 Voting Rights Act to create significant progress in voter registration from the perspective of sheer numbers, yet who knows how much longer African Americans would have had to wait for a Voting Rights Act if not for the individual courage and rejection of gradualism of the leaders and their followers described by Chappell?

This is a quality book that will help educate anyone who wants to understand the full range of attitudes and beliefs informing the Civil Rights Movement. Those interested in religion especially will probably enjoy Chappell’s book.

