Date of Award
Spring 2024
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
African American Studies
First Advisor
Jaynes, Gerald
Abstract
This dissertation investigates how Black political theology constructed the philosophical, ethical, and political architecture of the long civil rights movement. By recovering the radicalism of Black political theology in the Black Freedom Struggle, I seek to assess how religion animates the normative theorizing and political mobilization of liberation movements. I closely examine the political theories of its preeminent organizations, including the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the Nation of Islam (NOI). I offer a theory of Black political theology in defining civil rights praxis by tapping into the cultural synergy of theism with the Black experience to make politically legible the Black Spirit as an ontological, normative, and epistemological framework from which African Americans could use to combat racial injustice. The chapters locate Black political theology as central to the ideological and institutional development of the long civil rights movement in crucial respects by examining its influence on theories of political action, forms of political organization, and organizing praxis. Chapter I examines the palpable influence of Black political theology on the racial politics of the New Deal activism in two ways: (1) the radical expanse of the social gospel tradition in the life of the Black religious institutions and ministers and (2) the communitarianism of organized religion in providing welfare in response to democratic state failure. Chapter II reconstructs and critiques secular accounts of nonviolence by offering an alternative theoretical account of nonviolent praxis as a form of prophetic lamentation, where African American protesters actively sought the intervention of God to legitimate their “grammar of suffering” through deliverance, wherein they also experienced a spiritual revival. Chapter III advances a theory of Black charismatic leadership as a sacred regime attuned to its social epistemological and political theological essence in political mobilization. Chapter IV recovers the religious radicalism of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s organizing praxis by emphasizing the influence of Black political theology on SNCC’s political and ideological architecture and reinterpreting SNCC’s organizing tradition as apostolic. The dissertation’s epilogue concatenates the various strands of the dissertation to theorize what Black political theology might offer contemporary modes of political organizing and enunciates some of theoretical cues gained from my critical analysis of Black political theology in the civil rights movement.
Recommended Citation
Boyd, Da'Von Anthony, "The Black Spirit: Theorizing Black Political Theology in the Long Civil Rights Movement" (2024). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 1312.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/1312
