Comments on: It’s time to build a mass movement http://www.feralscholar.org/blog/index.php/2005/06/30/its-time-to-build-a-mass-movement/ Making the Connections Wed, 08 Feb 2012 20:52:47 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 By: ray-davison http://www.feralscholar.org/blog/index.php/2005/06/30/its-time-to-build-a-mass-movement/#comment-1679 ray-davison Wed, 06 Jul 2005 16:12:25 +0000 /?p=147#comment-1679 brilliant post, thanks. Wanted to amplify a bit outside of dialectic discourse, reguarding the excerpt attached. Perhaps the stereotype Mr. Dixon explains the consequences of, arises out of the contribution to human civilization by those african americans, during slavery, formerly of intellectual/priestly families in africa, once they'd achieved freedom and made their way to cities like Philadelphia, working within the shelter of the Methodist Episcopal Church (work of James H. Cone & Gayraud S. Wilmore, Orbis Press). This contribution was acknowledged by Ghandi, the latin american liberation theologians and, of course Martin King incorporated the thought of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in one of our most vibrant intellectual traditions and gifts to the world. Witness Bishop Tutu's contribution to Africa's on going liberation struggle. It was in places where these networks were weakest, or where institutional gatekeepers like pastors could not be persuaded to take part that the mass movement was slowest to take hold, as this passage from the January 20, 2005 Cover Story of BC illustrates: “Contrary to current mythology, the Black church was never a great fountain of social activism. More often, suspicious and small-minded clergy shut their doors against the winds of change… In the years following the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott, church doors were slammed shut in King’s face throughout the South. As a preacher-led organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) required a local church base in order to set up operations. The same problems of Jim Crow and brutality existed in every southern city, yet in town after town, King could not find a single church that would open its doors to the SCLC. The ‘movement’ was sputtering. Rather than mounting a grand sweep through the region, King found himself hemmed in by the endemic fear and even hostility of Black clergymen.” Albert Camus' The Rebel is the best analysis I've encountered of the spirit in the secular struggle for liberation of the meaning of human life in modern societies. Mr. King's work as set forth in John J. Ansbro's Martin Luther King, Jr. the making of a mind, provides a uniquely american integration of such diverse traditions of liberation. brilliant post, thanks. Wanted to amplify a bit outside of dialectic discourse, reguarding the excerpt attached. Perhaps the stereotype Mr. Dixon explains the consequences of, arises out of the contribution to human civilization by those african americans, during slavery, formerly of intellectual/priestly families in africa, once they’d achieved freedom and made their way to cities like Philadelphia, working within the shelter of the Methodist Episcopal Church (work of James H. Cone & Gayraud S. Wilmore, Orbis Press). This contribution was acknowledged by Ghandi, the latin american liberation theologians and, of course Martin King incorporated the thought of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in one of our most vibrant intellectual traditions and gifts to the world. Witness Bishop Tutu’s contribution to Africa’s on going liberation struggle.

It was in places where these networks were weakest, or where institutional gatekeepers like pastors could not be persuaded to take part that the mass movement was slowest to take hold, as this passage from the January 20, 2005 Cover Story of BC illustrates:

“Contrary to current mythology, the Black church was never a great fountain of social activism. More often, suspicious and small-minded clergy shut their doors against the winds of change… In the years following the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott, church doors were slammed shut in King’s face throughout the South. As a preacher-led organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) required a local church base in order to set up operations. The same problems of Jim Crow and brutality existed in every southern city, yet in town after town, King could not find a single church that would open its doors to the SCLC. The ‘movement’ was sputtering. Rather than mounting a grand sweep through the region, King found himself hemmed in by the endemic fear and even hostility of Black clergymen.”

Albert Camus’ The Rebel is the best analysis I’ve encountered of the spirit in the secular struggle for liberation of the meaning of human life in modern societies. Mr. King’s work as set forth in John J. Ansbro’s Martin Luther King, Jr. the making of a mind, provides a uniquely american integration of such diverse traditions of liberation.

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