A More Durable Weapon: Religion and Nonviolence in the Black Freedom Movement, 1918 - 1960

Abstract

Beginning with the rise of a white pacifist movement in the United States during the First World War, this dissertation tracks how Howard Thurman, Bayard Rustin, and James M. Lawson, Jr. envisaged pacifism and navigated its inadequacies between 1918 and 1960. The way these influential black intellectuals linked personal religiosity and social politics is perhaps best captured by what I call a ‘politics of being,’ a conceptual framework that explores the relationship between religious being and nonviolent direct action in modern America. Defining the politics of being as embodied acts of mercy, kindness, and forgiveness in the face of violent white hostility, this dissertation argues that an influential lineage of thinkers and activists came to believe that such practices could transform social relations between white and black Americans in the United States. At once a political methodology and a religious commitment to take action against Jim Crow, this dissertation documents how Howard Thurman derived these politics of being from pacifism, and charts the way Bayard Rustin and Jim Lawson showed forth how this nonviolent religious framework could be used tactically to challenge Jim Crow in modern America. In exploring the space between religious ideas about nonviolence and nonviolent tactics, this dissertation challenges the conceptual approach that characterizes scholarly discussions of nonviolence – a typical bifurcation of nonviolence as either tactic or a way of life. This study locates a vibrant lineage of people for whom ethical being was also a tactically effective method of politics. Finally, by centering religious being in the history of resistance to racism, the politics of being opens up space for querying the political meaning of religious being in Modern America - both for individual practitioners and for the racist American society to which these practitioners belonged.