Religion 50, Liberation and 20th Century Christian Thought
Spring 2011

Reading question for the Civil Rights movement

For Monday, March 28:  David Chapell, A Stone of Hope, chs. 3-5; Martin Luther King, Jr., “An Autobiography of Religious Development”, “Reinhold Niebuhr’s Ethical Dualism”, and “MIA Mass Meeting at Holt St. Baptist Church”

1)		What was ‘prophetic’ about the ideas that motivated the Civil Rights movement, according to Chapell?  How do these ideas relate to the themes we’ve read about earlier in this course?

2)		Where in these readings do you see a distinction between individual moral failures and collective or structural moral failures acknowledged?  Do these texts suggest a relationship between these two?

3)		Where in these texts do you see the influence of, or similarities to, the work of Reinhold Niebuhr?  Which of Niebuhr’s themes seem to be at work in these texts?

For Wednesday, March 30:  David Lewis, “Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Promise of Nonviolent Populism”;  King, “A Time to Break Silence” and “Where Do We Go From Here?”; and Malcolm X, “God’s Judgment on White America”

1)		In what ways does King broaden the focus of his efforts beyond civil rights in these late essays?  What connections does he draw between the civil rights struggle and his broader goals?

2)		What is at stake, for King, in the question of whether the United States should be involved in military conflict in Vietnam? 

3)		What role does the notion of a distinctive ‘black identity’ play in the texts from King and from Malcolm X?