Daniel Harrison
ENGL 4450
Dr. Susana Morris
April 29, 2014
Opening Précis – Why I Focus on Religious Motivations Inspiring Political Stances in both
Individuals and Groups in the Civil Rights Movement
I specifically chose to focus on the books and materials I did to focus on how religious
motivations affected political philosophies within the specific confines of the Civil Rights
Movement (CRM) and the Black Power Movement (BPM). I have already stated my personal
interest on my “About” page, but I wish to speak here to the specific materials I have chosen for
my project. My choice for a topic has left me at an interesting cross-disciplinary study evaluating
the subjects of religion, philosophy, politics, and literature. In studying this topic, I have decided
to focus on a college level syllabus for my study of these varying elements by analyzing
documents from the Civil Rights Era. In addition, I have chosen to evaluate a book that analyzes
different religious approaches to the CRM in early 1960s Mississippi called God’s Long Summer
by Charles Hudson in order to give specific voice to the varying approaches, both white and
black, to the civil rights struggles from religious individuals. In my papers, I have sought to bring
together parts of three response papers that I felt added something to my topic by seeing how
collective elements of the Civil Rights Movement often conflicted with personal responses that
were often of a religious nature. In creating this portfolio under this topic, I seek to provide
varying religious voices from the era, and not just the Christian approach. My topic is to
understand how different religious perspectives approached civil rights or black empowerment
and to see why religious doctrine and personal moral philosophies affected political stands.
My use of different natured responses to the questions this semester left me wondering
where I could connect my various research and papers to this idea of a religious-political
response. But then I realized that some common themes emerge from my reflection papers: the
importance of interpersonal and communal relationships in the civil rights era, the religious
motivations of important individuals, and the development of a moral response to particular
social issues within real-life or fictional frameworks. My edited papers reflect together the
unified goal of presenting a reflection on the polito-religious framework of civil rights through
the interplay of the individual-communal divide in relation to viewing religious matters. The
edits I have made intend to combine the three papers in a seamless fashion in order to reveal the
interconnectedness of diverse events (from the Little Rock school incidents to MLK’s personal
stances) and even the fictional account of civil rights fights in Meridian. I have attempted to
connect these events in a manner that shows that while they are of different events and topics,
they speak towards a consistent struggle between personal viewpoints on matters of a religious
nature and often reflect how personal beliefs of what is “good” and what morally is justifiable
shape events for that individual as well as the communities around them.
My choice for a book review is similarly designed to analyze carefully the religious
situation within the South during the 1960s. I chose the book God’s Long Summer by Charles
Marsh because it reveals the important matter of how different views of the nature of “God”
affected individual response to the politics of the CRM and later the BPM. Marsh depicts
individuals with widely varying political responses yet most of whom claimed a form of
Christian spirituality. I found his book an interesting way of looking at the interrelation of
religion and politics, as Marsh singles out a single summer in Mississippi in 1963 for analysis
and finds interesting narratives that go along with history to create a personal feel to the era
missing in most historical texts. God’s Long Summer added to my project by providing a
historical text that reveals the doctrinal beliefs of specific individuals and how those individuals
used such beliefs as motivation to create political responses to their situations.
Finally, my syllabus was chosen to represent a college syllabus for an English class
studying civil rights works from an interdisciplinary perspective. I sought to base this course off
of the questions and information provided by various historical and religious analyses of the
effects of the “black church” and the Nation of Islam doctrines in the lives of individuals in the
civil rights era, as well as those of other philosophical origins who had major impacts on the
CRM and BPM. I sought to list works within the syllabus for reading and study that would
reflect these various doctrines in different units of study. I tried to treat this as much as possible
as a real syllabus, containing the list of works and dates read as well as some assignments for
class to make it feel as realistic as possible, although I tried to work in the sources accordingly. I
didn’t try to require the syllabus to make a statement regarding the validity or superiority of any
of the doctrine or philosophy but merely to provide a class that would serve as framework for a
topical study of the era.
As you can see, while I covered a topic from a variety of ways throughout my papers in
this portfolio, they all basically center around the idea that within the civil rights era, individuals
formed political responses to their injustices based on religious motivations. I wanted to make
clear that while the project was inspired by my own beliefs, the research and framing of the
project materials centered on giving a fair cultural assessment of the era as well as a framework
for studying this in a possible future class. While not perfect, I hope that the research in this
project will be useful to any individuals seeking to gain a new and often unheard perspective
regarding the motivation behind events of a historic period.