Breaking White Supremacy: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Black Social Gospel. By Gary Dorrien

Extract

Gary Dorrien, in over five hundred pages, shows how the black Social Gospel movement emerged from the Protestant Social Gospel, undergirded the most successful civil rights movement in US history, and cleared the ground for its successor, black liberation theology. Dorrien’s project is a daunting one, and his overall narrative provides many valuable insights. At the same time, his text is a mishmash of intellectual history, political struggles, and theology seen and articulated through the cultural hermeneutics of African-American history.

The book is comprised of seven chapters, but frankly has five sections. In chapter one, Dorrien does such a thorough overview of the text, that some readers could read just this chapter and get the essential themes of the book without ever reading it. Chapters two and three review how the lives and thoughts of the intellectual figures Mordecai Johnson, Benjamin Elijah Mays, and Howard Thurman articulate a black Social Gospel that challenges the emotional pietism of black congregations and then consequently provides a fertile field for Martin Luther King Jr. to cultivate this gospel of confrontational engagement. Chapter four provides a fascinating examination of Adam Clayton Powell as both preacher and politician and leaves no stone unturned both as to his successes and failures. Chapters four and five illustrate Martin Luther King’s educational formation and then his leadership of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) from the Montgomery bus boycott through the Selma campaign for voting rights. In turn, Dorrien shows how King was unable to sustain his vision of the beloved community due to both the rise of the Black Power movement and the growing white political backlash captured in figures such as Ronald Reagan. The final chapter then discusses how black liberation theologies challenge King’s integrationist stance, yet also reveals both how thinkers such as Pauli Murray and civic leaders such as Andrew Young, Jesse Jackson, and John Lewis remain true to King’s vision.