Reviews in American History

"Black Power," the black liberation theologian James Cone wrote in his classic Black Theology and Black Power (1969), "even in its most radical expression, is not the antithesis of Christianity, nor is it a heretical idea to be tolerated with painful forbearance. It is, rather, Christ's central message to twentieth-century America."¹ Like Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton's Black Power: The Politics of Liberation (1967), Black Theology and Black Power sought to explain Black Power's origins, meaning, and content. Unlike his contemporaries, however, Cone's intellectual context and approach were deeply molded by theological questions, as well. For him, Black Power was not just an urgent political and social necessity. It was also opportunity and obligation for Christian churches to recapture their moral compass.

Written at a time when Black Power in America was simultaneously at its zenith and facing unremitting backlash from both the United States government and a wide majority of American citizens, Cone argued that it was inexcusable for Christians to sit on sidelines or, worse yet, ally themselves poorly. Responding to accusations from conservative and moderate coreligionists alike that Black Power was extremist, racist, counterproductive, and "the work of the Antichrist," Cone countered that Black Power was not, in fact, any of those things. Instead, it was a logical manifestation of Christian ethics and justice—very much Christ's teachings in action. Dismissing or deriding Black Power put the soul of the church at risk. "Unless," he argued, "the empirical denominational church makes a determined effort to recapture the man Jesus through a total identification with the suffering poor as expressed in Black Power, that church will become exactly what Christ is not."² [End Page 111]

Although Black Power and Black Theology was a revelation at the time of publication and remains important today, the actual, historically realized relationships between Cone's two conceits—Black Power and Black Theology—remain mystified. The religious foundations of the 1950s and 1960s southern civil rights movement and the centrality of Christian discourses within it are everywhere in evidence, and are well-documented in the historiography. By contrast, the relationships between Black Power, the Christian church, and religious discourses are not. While studies such as Angela Dillard's Faith in the City: Preaching Radical Social Change in Detroit (2007) and Patrick Jones's The Selma of the North: Civil Rights Insurgency in Milwaukee (2010) center churches that served as sites of Black Power organizing and clergypersons who were allies of the movement, the ways that Christian ethics and ideas aided and influenced Black Power remain unclear.

This is, in part, a simple product of history. Many people who embraced Black Power's ethics and aesthetics did so having either never taken to the civil rights movement's religiosity, or having become disillusioned with what it could do to mitigate entrenched socioeconomic inequality, sprawling urban slums, and police and other forms of social violence. And many of those Black Power activists who did think religiously identified Malcolm X—who, despite his own close proximity to Christianity as a minister's son, publicly and repeatedly assailed Christianity as a counterrevolutionary force—as an intellectual forbear. Indeed, major figureheads in the Black Power movement themselves explicitly rejected the Christian church as irrelevant or worse. As Black Panther Party cofounder Huey Newton put it in a 1971 apologia for the Party's longstanding dismissal of the church, "As far as the church was concerned, the Black Panther Party and other community groups emphasized the political and criticized the spiritual. We said the church is only a ritual, it is irrelevant, and therefore we will have nothing to do with it."³

And yet it would be wrong to think that the Christian church...