Civil Rights in America: A Secular Cause by J.W. Cohen

Flying in the face of rather knowable and easily verifiable history, it seems that the Civil Rights movement as a whole has been hijacked by theists as a whole cloth Christian cause.In a public debate I had last year with a Methodist Pastor named Tyler Sit (who, by the way runs a church with a very serious and noble dedication to the promulgation of environmental justice, the “New City Church”) on Religion (guess which side I took), it was stated by the good Pastor that slavery and indeed Jim Crow wouldn’t have been abolished were it not for the mysterious and shady permission of the so-called lord (note the small L).And indeed, there were a number of Christians involved in the movement because of fealty to theism.The first all-too obvious name is Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, jr and second, the much less well-known but equally influential Ralph Abernathy.Dr. King famously invoked the preachments of Genesis and Exodus by proclaiming that his people be let go. It is, however, very worth noting that this proclamation is in fact the title of a speech given by MLK in 1965 at Hunter college as a response to Apartheid in Africa. The phrase appears nowhere in said speech.Minister Abernathy (who co-founded, with Dr. King, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957), led a similarly religious life and once stated that “I am not going to say I have been a saint. I have not been a perfect man. No one is perfect but the Father, which is in Heaven (1).As a secularist, I would regard this as what you may call religious progress. After all, it is indeed to their credit that in the waning decades of epochs of biblically-mandated injunctions for slavery and general subjugation that a few theists belatedly joined the wider secular cause that initially advanced the ideal that we are all equal and as Joe Louis put it, “credit[s] to [our] race…the human race”.Why do I say belated? Well, we know that great prevailing humanists and proponents of the Enlightenment such as Thomas Paine and Benjamin Franklin were starch advocates for the abolition of Slavery. They did, after all, join the Anti-Slavery Society. And yes, of course, Bishop William Wilberforce was a co-founder of this cause but will any serious person truly stand up and publicly state that slavery isn’t biblically permitted and in many cases outright mandated? I would invite them to do so.No, instead the great secularist Thomas Paine stated in his 1774 essay “African Slavery in America” … “that many civilized, nay, Christianized people should approve, and be concerned in the savage practice, is surprising; and still persist, though it has been so often proved contrary to the light of nature, to every principle of Justice and Humanity, and even good policy, by a succession of eminent men, and several late publications.”. Now, turning back to the Civil Rights movement, why don’t we-at long last- deconstruct to my best (and I admit potentially pithy) effort, the secular roots of the March on Washington, for instance?The most salient example that immediately races to the front of my mind must be that of the great secular socialists  A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, who built an alliance with various civil rights, labor, and religious organizations[4] including the trade unions. It was, in fact, these efforts that were the true building blocks for the all-important March on Washington; fighting under the collective banner of “jobs and freedoms”. Phillip Randolph was a trade union leader himself, having founded the noteworthy “Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters”. For the reader of above-average curiosity, the reason the BSCP is noteworthy is because it was the first labor organization led by African Americans to receive a charter in the American Federation of Labor (AFL). Bayerd Rustin, meanwhile, was a rather more complicated figure and so, by definition, my favorite. He was an open and notorious homosexual and when I say notorious I mean to say that he had accumulated multiple charges for public engagement (in the biblical sense, ironically) with male prostitutes (if it matters, they were all white so he could be guilty of showing racial favoritism of a kind). He was also a serious labor union activist, having become head of a major AFL–CIO organization (oddly enough , it was the A. Philip Randolph Institute ). He became involved in the great cause for the advancement of civil rights by claiming fealty to the ideal of “strategic nonviolence”. In the months leading up to the March on Washington, Rustin stated quite emphatically, "As we follow this form of mass action and strategic nonviolence," he said, "we will not only put pressure on the government, but we will put pressure on other groups which ought by their nature to be allied with us."
This is of course an abbreviated treatise on the matter of the secular influence. Personally, I felt it was important to call out as I notice that all too often religion manages the dialectical dilemma of hijacking the accomplishments of the secular while also usurping its insidious responsibilities in events such as the wide-spread mutilation of the genitals of children as well as suicide bombing among others.
I hope it was informative and please feel free to leave any comments or feedback.
Thank you!




APA Style CitationRalph Abernathy. (n.d.). AZQuotes.com. Retrieved December 22, 2017, from AZQuotes.com Web site: http://www.azquotes.com/quote/953593(1)