Popular and academic narratives of the American Black Power movement's rise and the liberal-integrationist Civil Rights movement's decline at the end of the 1960s generally frame the Black Power movement as anti-Christian. Kerry Pimblott's Faith in Black Power, however, uses a long-term community study of Cairo, Illinois, a hub for Black Power organizing, to explain how Christianity influenced the Black Power movement. She convincingly demonstrates that “black religious discourses and institutions continued to provide the basis for a coherent movement culture, unifying ideology, and renewed access to the black church's tremendous organizational resources” (6).
Faith in Black Power’s grounding in a particular place allows Pimblott to unravel the institutional and personal connections in Cairo while demonstrating the contingency of Christianity's major role in the city's Black Power movement. She opens with an overview of Cairo's history that explains why the city's black churches became the central civil rights institutions during World War II. Cairo's position in a borderland between the North and the South contributed to the city's white leaders’ adoption of a political structure during the Jim Crow era that excluded black citizens from participation, preventing the development of black political institutions. Black workers’ marginality on the job market, compounded by Cairo's weak relationship to industry, meant that no viable separate middle-class institutions developed that could compete with churches for loyalty. The churches, furthermore, shared similar cultures because Cairo did not experience massive waves of African American migration, which diversified religious cultures in other areas (although, like in other borderland cities, white people responded to periods of increased black migration with racial violence).
Skilled activists were able to draw on this common religious culture to foster a cross-class and intergenerational alliance during World War II to work to desegregate public facilities. Church leaders like Hattie Kendrick worked with the NAACP to end school segregation. But white resistance, the violence of which prohibited a moderate white stance, drove activists underground and fractured church support for widespread civil rights efforts. In the early 1960s, as direct-action protests became a hallmark of civil rights activism nationally, Reverend Blaine Ramsey, Jr. of the African Methodist Episcopal Church was assigned to a Cairo parish. He mentored the black teenager, Charles Koen, naming Koen's feelings of shame for his racial position as legitimate and offering the youth an organizational outlet for his anger. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) also worked in Cairo, framing segregation as a symptom of a deeper moral illness that could be healed only by redemptive love. SNCC motivated younger activists, whose arrests promoted older black Cairoites to join the movement. This cross-class, intergenerational alliance ruptured, however, in 1967 as working-class young people rebelled violently in the face of alleged police brutality and a lack of economic opportunity.
The youth's rebellion shifted the center of Cairo's movement to outside the churches. But these Black Power leaders, including Koen, whose faith remained foundational to his work and life, knew they needed churches to sustain them. Koen and other leaders rebuilt the alliances through formal black theology and grassroots religious traditions, such as call and response, testifying, and honoring elders. The religious culture of Cairo's United Front organization, which Koen led, united a variety of activists. Unlike most Black Power advocates nationally, Koen argued that Christian traditions were relevant to Black Power. Keon and his partners in Cairo called the Bible the “handbook for the revolution,” emphasizing Biblical narratives of nation-building like the story of Nehemiah and the Israelites rebuilding the wall around Jerusalem. For them, building the wall meant building parallel economic institutions in the context of white people's resistance to integration; it meant using guns for self-defense; it meant working together, not following a single leader (in contrast to Exodus narratives with a Moses as the leader).
Maintaining connections to the churches also meant that white and black denominations funneled money into Black Power organizations. At the same time that the FBI's Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) aimed to dismantle the United Front and white Cairo residents created new ways to limit black advancement, Ramsey funneled from churches of both white and black denominations funds to Black Power groups as a leader of the Illinois Council of Churches. White and black ministers served as advocates for poor black citizens, working for government legislation, and also as enablers, passing along funds so they could develop their own autonomous institutions. But after 1974, as white Christians, especially, protested their denominations’ giving priorities, the church funds dwindled. In the face of shrinking financial resources, increased state repression and narrowing opportunities, United Front leaders shifted their tactics away from boycotts and developing separate institutions toward more traditional political engagement.
Pimblott makes important contributions to multiple historiographies. She not only complicates narratives of Black Power's anti-Christian stance by demonstrating how churches both sustained and contributed to the decline of Black Power, but she shows how black theology was intimately connected to the grassroots in Cairo as activists there read the latest theological literature, went to seminaries, and welcomed theologians to Cairo to speak. Her focus in Cairo also complicates the history of race in America, revealing the complexity of racial geographies, black churches, and white conservatism.
While excellent overall, the book could be strengthened by more attention to the personalities of the different leaders. Pimblott mined many archives and conducted oral history interviews with several activists, and I wanted the book's actors to come alive more as people. Also, while Pimblott discussed white religious support for Black Power, the book had no exploration of white religious support for segregation and racial hierarchies. While perhaps outside the book's scope, attending more to white people's faith would complicate and contextualize the narratives more.
Nonetheless, Faith in Black Power bridges Christianity and Black Power; local, state, and national networks; and the seminary and the streets in ways that will convince the reader of Christianity's vitality in the Black Power movement.
