Poetry of the American Civil Rights Movement and Era

There are many ways to address and record the flood of emotions that come during revolutionary times. One of the best of those ways is poetry, which can express fear, sorrow, and triumph all at once. Words of Protest, Words of Freedom is the first comprehensive collection of poems written during and in response to the American civil rights struggle, collected and edited by Jeffrey Lamar Coleman. This book features both famous and non-famous poets alike, mixing in works by Maya Angelou and Allen Ginsberg with those by activists and ordinary citizens.

Some of the poems are direct responses to events that happened during the civil rights movement, while others encapsulate the general feeling of anticipation and turmoil that gripped the nation at the time. No subject is too big or too small to be included, and poets highlighted events such as the integration of the Little Rock schools, as well as people like Malcolm X. Including more than 150 poems, this anthology highlights the tremendous symbolic reach of the civil rights movement within and beyond the United States.

Reviews and endorsements of the publication include:

“America’s ongoing civil rights movement reflects the triumphs and travails of struggles for citizenship, equality, and social justice. Jeffrey Lamar Coleman’s insightful and illuminating work redirects our gaze toward the power of poetry in transforming the nation’s postwar civil rights landscape. An essential book for students and scholars of the civil rights struggle.” — Peniel E. Joseph, author of Dark Days, Bright Nights: From Black Power to Barack Obama

“Editor Jeffrey Lamar Coleman has combined scholarship with art. There are 14 sections to the book and each is preceded by an essay as educational scaffolding for the poems. Each essay, a small exegesis of history, describes how the poems relate. It’s a masterwork of organization and strategy. Not only African American poets are represented here, the editor points out, and the 82 poets make up a roster that could fill any poetry hall of fame. Some are dead, some venerable, some unknown, but the poems are each honored with context and framework.” — Grace Cavalieri, Washington Independent Review of Books

“This marvelous collection of poems written from 1955 to 1975 brings back the emotions and memories of those times as only poetry can.” — Karlan Sick, School Library Journal

For more information on the publication, click here.

Fellow travelers are scholars, activists, and practitioners that embody the ideals and commitments of the Project on Lived Theology. We admire their work and are grateful to be walking alongside them in the development and dissemination of Lived Theology.

For more of “On the Lived Theology Reading List,” click here. To engage in the conversation on Facebook and Twitter, @LivedTheology, please use #LivedTheologyReads. For more recommended resources from our fellow travelers, click here, #PLTfellowtravelers. To sign up for the Lived Theology monthly newsletter, click here.

Civil War Heroine and Champion of the Mentally Ill, Dorothea Lynde Dix

Dorothea Dix was born in 1802, and managed to fight through illness and a traumatic childhood in order to become one of the most well-respected nurses of the civil war and an early proponent of social reform. In Heart’s Work, authors Charles Schlaifer and Lucy Freeman track Dorothea’s remarkable journey from her birthplace in Maine to her eventual death in New Jersey where she finally succumbed to the illnesses that had plagued her throughout life.

At a time when the mentally ill were cast aside and forgotten, Dorothea Dix made it her mission to visit mental hospitals across the US and report her findings to the government, pushing for more care and humane treatment. She took this caring but intelligent attitude with her when the Civil War started and she was named the Superintendent of Army Nurses for the Union Army, enforcing strict standards of care for her patients and pushing for nurses to have more opportunities. Although she has received little notice today for her groundbreaking work, Schlaifer and Freeman are able to rectify that in this long overdue work.

Reviews and endorsements of the publication include:

“In an era when woman’s work centered primarily on hearth and home. Dorothea Lynde Dix won the respect of men and women alike through her quiet determination and selfless dedication to help those imprisoned in troubled minds. Freud was just a boy during the years Dix traveled across the United States, later to Europe and Japan, to found scores of hospitals for the indigent insane. Weakened by chronic tuberculosis, Dix doggedly pursued her cause. During the Civil War, she put her work for the mentally ill on hold to supervise nurses who treated wounded soldiers. Despite her ill health, Dix lived to be 85, dying in 1887 in the first hospital she had founded, in Trenton, N.J. Schlaifer (coauthor of Action for Mental Health ) and Freeman ( Fight Against Fears ) tell Dix’s story in a matter-of-fact… manner, using letters to illustrate the profound effect she had on her friends and fellow citizens.” — Publisher’s Weekly

For more information on the publication, click here.

Fellow travelers are scholars, activists, and practitioners that embody the ideals and commitments of the Project on Lived Theology. We admire their work and are grateful to be walking alongside them in the development and dissemination of Lived Theology.

For more of “On the Lived Theology Reading List,” click here. To engage in the conversation on Facebook and Twitter, @LivedTheology, please use #LivedTheologyReads. For more recommended resources from our fellow travelers, click here, #PLTfellowtravelers. To sign up for the Lived Theology monthly newsletter, click here.

Essays of Southern Churchmen

During the 1960s, the Committee of Southern Churchmen began publishing a journal entitled Katallagete: Be Reconciled. Will Campbell and James Holloway, who helped edit the journal as well as publish this book, were convinced that the church and Christianity had failed to stay grounded in scripture and fight injustices through Christian means. Katallagete featured a number of essays from prominent people of the time, including some civil rights leaders, and ran for 8 years before this anthology of selected essays was published in 1972. Recently republished in 2004, The Failure and the Hope showcases some of the essays from Katallagete that Campbell and Holloway hope will be applicable to all people, whether they are southern or not.

In the foreword, Campbell and Holloway say that this is not “the best of Katallagete,” and in regards to the essays “there is no theological line common to them all.” They are all simply meditations on the failures and hopes of Christians at the end of the twentieth century, both personal and in regards to the church itself. Some of the essays include:

Events and pseudo-events : letter to a Southern churchman — Thomas Merton

An open letter to Billy Graham — Will D. Campbell and James Y. Holloway

Sick and tired of being sick and tired — Fannie Lou Hamer

The plutocrats and the po’ folks — William Paul Randall

Reviews and endorsements of the publication include:

“This volume brings the reader face to face with just where we are in the struggle for racial justice. It consists of penetrating and provocative essays by persons who write out of their own struggles with racism. These people not only ‘tell it like it is,’ but also ‘tell it like it ought to be.'” — Henlee Barnette, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary

For more information on the publication, click here.

Fellow travelers are scholars, activists, and practitioners that embody the ideals and commitments of the Project on Lived Theology. We admire their work and are grateful to be walking alongside them in the development and dissemination of Lived Theology.

For more of “On the Lived Theology Reading List,” click here. To engage in the conversation on Facebook and Twitter, @LivedTheology, please use #LivedTheologyReads. For more recommended resources from our fellow travelers, click here, #PLTfellowtravelers. To sign up for the Lived Theology monthly newsletter, click here.

Le Chambon, the Holocaust, and the Lives of André and Magda Trocmé

During World War II, the southern French town of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon and its surrounding villages became a haven for Jews and others in flight from Nazi roundups, where they could regroup before being hidden or led abroad. This was in no small part due to André and Magda Trocmé, two individuals who made nonviolence a way of life. In A Portrait of Pacifists, author Richard Unsworth uses the Trocmés’ unpublished memoirs, interviews, and original research in order to detail the couple’s role in the history of pacifism before, during, and after the war.

The Trocmés’ courage during World War II has been well documented in books and film, yet the full arc of their lives—the impulse that led them to devote themselves to nonviolence and their extensive work in the decades following the war—had yet to be examined. Unsworth rectifies this by tracing their mission of building peace by nonviolence throughout Europe to Morocco, Algeria, Japan, Vietnam, and the United States. Regardless of which nation was condoning violence, shaping international relations, or pressing for peace, both André and Magda remained driven by conscience to make nonviolence the hallmark of their life’s work.

Reviews and endorsements of the publication include:

“A compelling and engaging narrative that tasks any reader to think about the role and reality of violence within their world. More to the point, it tasks anyone interested in nonviolence to think about the Christian call to become peacemakers in the world as an uncompromising demand.”—Peace and Justice Studies Journal

“A beautifully written and long overdue biography of Magda and André Trocmé, two of the prime movers in a World War II rescue mission in south-central France that saved the lives of an estimated 3,500 refugees. Working with thousands of unpublished pages, Unsworth probes deeply into the psyche of these two very different internationalists from whose biographies emerge a history of nonviolence, conscientious objection and pacifism in the twentieth century.”—Patrick G. Henry, Whitman College

“An absolutely wonderful new biography of two seminal figures in the international history of nonviolence. Unsworth draws on rich archival research and personal interviews, skillfully weaving a narrative of these two exceptionally courageous and inspiring individuals. A comprehensive and engagingly written account, and a ‘must-read’ for anyone interested in nonviolence, the resistance to Nazism, and more broadly the meaning of a life uncompromisingly lived according to the highest ethical ideals.”—Micheal D. Bess, Vanderbilt University Religion, Theology, and the Holocaust

For more information on the publication, click here.

Fellow travelers are scholars, activists, and practitioners that embody the ideals and commitments of the Project on Lived Theology. We admire their work and are grateful to be walking alongside them in the development and dissemination of Lived Theology.

For more of “On the Lived Theology Reading List,” click here. To engage in the conversation on Facebook and Twitter, @LivedTheology, please use #LivedTheologyReads. For more recommended resources from our fellow travelers, click here, #PLTfellowtravelers. To sign up for the Lived Theology monthly newsletter, click here.

The Clash over Civil Rights in South Carolina

Through extensive research and interviews with more than one hundred fifty civil rights activists, many of whom had never shared their stories with anyone, author Claudia Brinson chronicles twenty pivotal years of petitioning, preaching, picketing, boycotting, marching, and holding sit-ins in Stories of Struggle. These intimate stories of courage and conviction, both heartbreaking and inspiring, shine a light on the progress achieved by nonviolent civil rights activists while also revealing white South Carolinians’ often violent resistance to change.

Brinson highlights contributions made by remarkable but lesser-known activists, including James M. Hinton Sr., president of the South Carolina Conference of Branches of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and Mary Moultrie, grassroots leader of the 1969 hospital workers’ strike. She also includes firsthand accounts from petitioners who risked their lives by supporting Summerton’s Briggs v. Elliot ― a lawsuit that led to the historic Brown v. Board of Education decision ― the thousands of students who were arrested and jailed in 1960 for protests in Rock Hill, Orangeburg, Denmark, Columbia, and Sumter, and many more participants who have never had their stories told.

This pioneering study details the lynchings, beatings, bombings, cross burnings, death threats, arson, and venomous hatred that black South Carolinians endured―as well as the astonishing courage, devotion, dignity, and compassion of those who risked their lives for equality. Although significant racial disparities remain, the sacrifices of these brave men and women produced real progress―and hope for the future.

Reviews and endorsements of the publication include:

“Stories of Struggle is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the fight for racial justice in South Carolina. The riveting stories are horrifying in their depiction of what African American activists in the state endured, yet inspiring and uplifting in their description of what all these heroes accomplished. The book is a tremendous contribution to the history of South Carolina and the nation, and to the history of the civil rights movement.”―Marjorie J. Spruill, author of Divided We Stand: The Battle Over Women’s Rights and Family Values That Polarized American Politics

“In Stories of Struggle, Claudia Smith Brinson does an exceptional job in detailing in depth the full story of the significant role black South Carolinians played in the ultimate struggle that led to the U. S. Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education that brought an end to racial segregation in public schools and ultimately the passage of 1964 Civil Right Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act that followed.”―Jack Bass, author of The Palmetto State: The Making of Modern South Carolina

“If you think nothing of significance involving civil rights happened in South Carolina read Stories of Struggle. If you think South Carolina lacked drama, cruelty, violence, and above all courage during the civil rights era read this book. If you are not familiar with James M. Hinton, Cecil Ivory, Mae Frances Moultrie, Rosetta Simmons, and many others, read this book. There are no statues of these men and women, but they are some of the toughest, bravest, and most resourceful people that South Carolina has ever produced.”―William C. Hine, author of South Carolina State University: A Black Land-Grant College in Jim Crow America

For more information on the publication, click here.

Fellow travelers are scholars, activists, and practitioners that embody the ideals and commitments of the Project on Lived Theology. We admire their work and are grateful to be walking alongside them in the development and dissemination of Lived Theology.

For more of “On the Lived Theology Reading List,” click here. To engage in the conversation on Facebook and Twitter, @LivedTheology, please use #LivedTheologyReads. For more recommended resources from our fellow travelers, click here, #PLTfellowtravelers. To sign up for the Lived Theology monthly newsletter, click here.