Rhetoric, Religion, and the Civil Rights Movement -- 2 volumes now!

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That rhetoric and religion “have conspired to cocreate reality” may be a truism, and that rhetoric and religion co-conspired memorably and effectively in the civil rights movement (a basic thesis underlying this book) is no great surprise. Yet to see these standard statements played out in hundreds of pages of rich primary source material is a treat and an invaluable service to scholarship. Scholars Houck and Dixon have compiled a massive compendium, an embarrassment of riches, that fleshes out that relationship. Starting with the Moses Moon collection, consisting of some eighty hours of audio tape collected in the early and mid-1960s, the editors then scoured numerous other libraries and archives for sermons, speeches, impromptu addresses, and exhortations. The editors lay out the material chronologically, and give each selection detailed and informative introductions. Readers then may peruse at leisure, picking and choosing among the selections. The paradox remains that these selections were originally oral performances, and the printed page cannot capture the essence of those moments – just as those oral moments would not allow for the extended contemplation that having the addresses in printed form allows. Indispensable.  

Since then, Houck and Dixon have put out volume two, a little shorter than but, if anything, even better than vol. I. Featured in this volume is an extended transcription of an off-the-cuff address by Dick Gregory; the speech by Ed King which followed the eulogy for murdered civil rights worker James Chaney by Dave Dennis, often seen as a key turning point for those who were coming to question non-violence as a philosophy; and a speech from the late 1950s by Martin Luther King, Jr., in which King pronounces his hope that white southern moderates will soon rise up, make their presence felt, and smooth the way to a more just South. Quite a contrast to his famous condemnation of those “moderates” in “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” 

Besides tapping the Moses Moon collection, Houck and Dixon really combed archives through the country, and anyone who does a lot of archival travel and research knows how much time, energy, organization, and just plain persistence that takes. 

As it happened, I was fortunate enough this summer to have a short email correspondence with one of the editors, and in the dialogue he happened to mention this particular resource, which has just became available online: Guide to the KZSU Project South Interviews. Click on the link and you’ll find an astonishing resource for research: not just interviews with civil rights volunteers, although there are plenty of those, but also transcribed recordings of mass meetings and other impromptu speeches. Do you want to hear/read Fannie Lou Hamer upbraid southern preachers and talk about the religion she had found among the (often ostensibly irreligious or atheist) northern volunteers? Want to hear/read an impromptu debate at a mass meeting on whether blacks worshipped a God envisioned as white? And on and on. Here’s a brief description of the types of material here:

Because the transcripts are PDF’ed and therefore keyword searchable, the researcher can zero in on topics that are of most interest (for me, it was discussions of religion, but many interviews range all over the place and researchers of virtually any topic related to the civil rights movement will find rich fodder here). Oh, also, right at the end there’s a transcribed speech by Robert Shelton of the Klan. 

Here’s a brief description from the site and how it came to be in the first place: