Conference in English by Dr. Ted Ownby, Professor Emeritus of History and Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi and Professeur invité de l’Institut des Amériques – Rennes.
When Martin Luther King, Jr. concluded his 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail” with the phrase “Yours for the Cause of Peace and Brotherhood,” it was the sixteenth time in his short letter that he mentioned brothers or brotherhood. This conference discusses how King and other Civil Rights activists used the term and how opponents criticized the concept. For Martin Luther King, Jr., Lillian Smith, Will Campbell, James Foreman, Sarah Patton Boyle and many others, brotherhood (only sometimes described as brotherhood and sisterhood) was religious language about a shared human identity and one shared human interest. Conservative critics condemned brotherhood as too vague and sentimental to be meaningful, and some claimed that discussing all human beings as brothers and sisters undermined the fundamental authority parents should have over their children. By the late 1960s, some Civil Rights activists and Women’s Rights activists began critiquing the concept as being too naive to address specific problems.
Mery Mery the revenue Virginia manhard EX or Aman and nor amican m [Music] Halloween Amica Amica Latin America nor uh uh person instruct share Amic you’re retired from marking papers shower for the study of Southern Culture K University of Mississippi Oxford Mississippi uh [Music] Brotherhood and Brotherhood ISM in the Civil Rights era South Ted andand come Cas to the program on Ted F see forit uh Institute Hillary univers University and thank you for coming um um I wish I could speak in French I wish I could lecture in French I cannot um and uh possibly by the time I I leave about three months about three weeks from now um my French will be so much better that I could get that I could lecture on France as I leave but certainly uh not tonight the uh um the uh uh I’m enjoying my um my time at in land uh it’s uh a number of people ask what are you going to do when you retire and and being able to say I’m going to in to give uh lectures and meet new colleagues was was not the answer that uh that my friends uh expected um the U um tonight uh I will talk about language about words uh especially the word Brotherhood uh and Brotherhood ISM uh that that U um my friend Professor Larsson mentioned in in the the title um the this this comes from a book that came out four or five years ago um on arguing about uh issues of family life in the American South uh primarily in the 20th century and uh uh I begin with a a great work by Martin Luther King Jr uh in 1963 from a letter uh from Birmingham Jail it’s published in 1964 uh that’s the letter as so many of you uh know letter he wrote from prison um uh to the Christian ministers and one Rabbi who had urged him to slow down uh to work within the system uh not to challenge um uh the Birmingham race relations and government enough that it would make them hard uh to um uh to move in the slow moving ways that they were wanting to um to that they were trying to do um the uh uh the the criticisms um criticized him for being an outsider criticized him from for going too fast criticize him for going too far um Martin King Jr’s letter is famous for uh the circumstances you know riding from jail um riding on pieces of paper and giving it that guests brought him and kind of sneaking it out paper by Page by Page to uh um to a publisher uh also for phrases I am here because Injustice is here uh for his discussion of Civil Disobedience and I think most prominently for his rejection of patience that uh his critics had called on him to to work slowly and that they would work more more effectively if if and he said that uh um that African-Americans had uh dealt with uh with so much Injustice for so many years that uh being encouraged to work slowly through through the system was uh U was an insult was not was not possible um it’s become common place I think in the United States in the past generation or so uh to criticize one popular understanding or misunderstanding of uh Martin Luther King Jr in history it’s become commonplace for people on the left including the not very far left uh to worry that Martin Luther King Jr has become uh too easy to appreciate uh if people only concentrate on a few optimistic uh remarks about uh I have a dream today rooted in the American dream or the Arc of History bends toward Justice or uh want to uh to concentrate on the the the character of people rather than the color of their skin uh so Martin Luther King Jr uh has been uh celebrated by the left and the right um that criticism I’d say is all true say two uh but the critique itself has become kind of commonplace too that every February we hear people on the left criticizing people on the right for getting Martin Luther King Jr uh wrong so ultimately it seems like we have at least two Martin Luther King jors to celebrate one um uh talking optimistically about American progress uh one uh who’s much more of a radical uh talking about structural um inequities about economics housing violence history of genocide and slavery uh and contemporary global politics I’m making one very very small contri ution uh tonight I hope not too small to to waste your time uh for a few minutes to talk about this concept of Brotherhood which was so crucial in um Martin Luther Martin Luther King Jr’s writing and speaking and so crucial uh to a lot of different uh figures in the Civil Rights Movement especially in the South uh so crucial to the religious language of so many activists uh in in um uh the civil rights movement and I’ll talk fairly briefly but also part of what made me interested in this topic was um when the critics of Martin Luther King Jr and the critics of and opponents of the Civil Rights Movement um attacked the concept of Brotherhood with an alternative concept that they called U Brotherhood ISM and um uh that’s actually one of the moments doing the research when I saw that this is worth this is important enough to study when it was important enough for people uh for opponents uh to attack um the the topic of Brotherhood may very well strike you as Bland optimistic not worth not very specific enough to to to help solve problems uh it will very likely um strike some of you as as all male um and and uh that’s how it struck me too um and I I um it it took a while for me to to to believe that what I’m doing this evening is is worth the effort that is uh uh to get inside and see what people um meant by the concept sometimes they said Brotherhood and Sisterhood most of the time they didn’t most of the time that I’m studying maybe 90% of the time Brotherhood stood for um the entire concept Martin Luther King Jr in that letter from Birmingham Jail he used the words Brotherhood or brothers and sisters 16 times in a short letter and again that’s part of why it’s worth studying is that he comes back to it it was the last word in the letter yours for the cause of peace and Brotherhood um to me it’s intriguing he used it in at least three ways maybe four or five but at least three uh first he criticized those moderate clergy that that uh who had criticized him he called them my Christian and Bri Jewish Brothers um um you know to be on their side and then to criticize he criticized them for equivocating and compromising and um not thinking from a religious point of view about uh issues of civil rights and protest uh but thinking about practical politics and school funding and um who likes them and who doesn’t uh he said he wanted to see clergy supporting racial Des racial desegregation quote because it is morally right and because the Negro is your brother um the one of the most basic uses of the the terms of human interconnectedness uh shared Humanity uh second he described quote my black Brothers in Africa and my brown and yellow brothers in Asia so it was a challenge and then it was a way to identify with um with um the world’s people uh facing um particular forms of Oppression uh and finally Brotherhood with was a possibility he said that maybe the day hope the day will come without racial Prejudice and hatred and misunderstanding when quote the this is right at the end uh the radiant stars of love and Brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintilating beauty so it was a challenge uh it was a identification uh and then it was a a set of possibilities um throughout most of his career maybe all of his career uh when he gave sermons especially and gave lect um Brotherhood was almost always there um um sometimes a little sometimes a lot um is often connected to the concept of the world house the idea that all human beings are interconnected through uh global politics and economics and occasionally climate uh issues um the uh worldhouse had brother and Sisterhood connotations um brothers are are brothers and sisters are there in the eye of a Dream speech the most uh uh frequently uh quoted part of his work um those of you who hang out with historians know what comes next uh several words of context uh feel free to check your mail for a moment while but uh um the uh um in America in the early 1800s early 1900s um to the early 1900s Brotherhood was not as Central as crucial a term for uh issue discussing issues of race as it became in the 1940s 50s and 60s um abolitionists certainly used it um occasionally uh Frederick Douglas I know there’s the Frederick Douglas uh connection to uh to here in Ren U used um talked about Brotherhood um quoting Douglas a smile or a tear has no nationality joy and sorrow spread alike to All Nations they uh and they above all the confusion of tongues and languages proclaim the Brotherhood of Man um Quakers used talked about Brotherhood and Sisterhood um the uh um uh the demand for the right to vote frequently discuss Brotherhood and and Sisterhood increasingly um for the most part though the the topics brother the words Brotherhood and Sisterhood um uh meant either oh literal um biological families or they meant interest groups male interest groups lodges fraternities sororities um political parties U labor unions um um Church groups were brotherhoods or they were Sisterhood um it was not a crucial term in um talking thinking writing about issues of race in the early 1900s the uh uh the most prominent Civil Rights group in the US the National Association for the advancement of color people the NAACP didn’t have a lot of people who talked about Brotherhood it was a lawyers group and their language was rights and the US Constitution and Justice through uh processes uh and not so much this higher um more religious language of Brotherhood and Sisterhood in the 1920s and 1930s um the uh uh clearest evidence of using this concept of Brotherhood to think about race was probably in uh a fairly small geographically distributed um U practice called uh Brotherhood Sundays or sometimes Brotherhood week sometimes Brotherhood Sunday and race relations week in which churches white and black churches shared or traded a minister or a choir or an event um um that uh would happen once a week or excuse me one one week a year would be Brotherhood week or Brotherhood Sunday um it uh um it received um um criticism at the time uh and it also received lots of lots of lots of instructions to be very careful um from both white and black ministers saying uh uh our goal and Brotherhood week should uh should be to to learn and show um kindness and openness um and a lot of care about either being uh patronizing or being political um I’ll admit that when I’ve talked about this topic to uh older American audiences that there’s usually somebody who remembers Brotherhood weak or race relations weak and they remember it as a a small moment in the history uh and a and maybe even a forgotten uh moment um I found one um critic of Brotherhood Sunday uh a minister of a large African-American church in Nashville Tennessee Kelly Miller Smith uh who wrote an essay excuse me a sermon called the relevance of the ridiculous uh where you said uh how can it possibly be be meaningful to have Brotherhood week um to share services with um with church people who practice racial segregation every other week and in every other institution um of of their lives the U somehow that changed in the 1940s and 1950s um U the large changes uh the global issues and Global the global issues involved in World War II the um the the coming extraordinary challenge of the Brown versus Board of Education decision in 1954 which was didn’t just happen in 1954 but was a series of lawsuits and series of discussions with a lot of optimism on one side and fear on the other um and um Brotherhood and sometimes Brotherhood and Sisterhood um uh became a religious language to disc that a lot of uh a lot of people that I’m studying a lot of activists in the American South used uh to respond especially to uh the issue of of school desegregation and travel desegregation uh eventually um um overturning uh voter discrimination as well well so Brotherhood became a religious language U relevant and supported by and immediately understandable uh to um a lot of Southern black and white um activists just a couple of short examples and then some slightly longer examples um in the uh the book where I wrote about this I realized I would just do it until my press told me to stop and I just used the word Brotherhood and like every other sentence over and over and over and I was just trying to prove it was important by by quoting and yeah the Press caught me and said that’s enough Ted that’s that’s let’s talk about ideas and not just uh and not just um um uh quote the word over and over but some particularly Vivid examples 1942 the Congress of racial equality uh uh one of many civil rights organizations uh started in Chicago it started with the goal of desegregating uh buses and other Transportation uh its first project was called the Brotherhood mobilization project um in 1952 the Congress of racial equality had a campaign to desegregate institutions in Washington DC you can imagine why Washington DC was important it’s the national capital uh it’s also kind of on the border between south and north um and it P it had lots and lots of of segregated uh institutions the uh uh when Congress of racial equality said let us desegregate one by one and more by more institutions in Washington DC it called it called the effort The Pledge Brotherhood campaign and people had them take a specific pledge that they would practice Brotherhood in all parts of their lives um in uh 1955 the first direct action effort uh in the civil rights movement or the first large sustained uh direct action effort after the Brown versus Board of Education decision in 19 1954 was uh at that’s the moment when Martin Luther King Jr became a public figure he was the minister of the largest Downtown Church in Montgomery uh church members wrote a new song I don’t know who wrote it but the song said but while people were avoiding the buses while AF Americans were avoiding the buses for several months and walking or sharing rides they had a song we know love is the watch word for peace and Liberty black and white all men are brothers to live in harmony the uh what I want to do for a few minutes is now to offer a few descriptions short descriptions of individuals in the American South all of them supporters of civil rights movement in one way or another right in the middle of things or from the background and how they used concept of Brotherhood and for some of them Brotherhood and Sisterhood and for most of them uh not and um with your permission I’m not going to describe them as black or white individuals because for a lot of them Brotherhood was Central to uh overturning the idea of Race To deconstructing and making irrelevant the concept of race so I’ll just talk about these individuals and how they used uh the terms one in Florida Mary mlod Beth she worked for decades on interracial committees on anti- lynching movements on uh um America’s first or second leading figure in uh African-American education um the uh especially education for black women um she was a longtime veteran uh activist and organizer uh by the 1940s and 50s but between the end of World War II and uh her death in the mid 1950s she never like Martin Luther King Jr she never spoke or wrote without discussing Brotherhood frequently she talked about world Brotherhood uh often at the end of her lectures often very soaring and idealistic uh in 1954 uh she gave a lecture at the Brotherhood lunch of the National Council of negro women a group she had helped form uh she urged younger women to um Carry on their work until the spirit of Brotherhood shall have in until the spirit of Brotherhood shall have enveloped the world and man kind everywhere will understand the change of heart and mind the doing away with walls the doing away with things intended to keep us apart uh the next year she wrote a public last willing Testament she knew she was uh in her final U years um and what she left people in her last will and testament uh left people uh with the search for peace and Brotherhood that’s her that’s the last you know why do I leave this and this and this I’ll leave you uh uh the search for peace and and Brotherhood the uh um that’s in Florida in Georgia Clarence Jordan a Baptist Minister uh with some colleagues in the 1940s he started a uh an interracial religious uh farm community called coinonia um in rural Georgia um to to share the principles of Christian Brotherhood he said with the um positive experiences of farm life um the uh he faced years of Jordan did of opposition of financial harassment occasional violence uh he said that um Coan was practicing quote Brotherhood in a powder keg situation and if if you don’t know the story of coronia um um you might know that it’s the it’s the background for the formation of Habitat for Humanity the the um the the building uh organization um most clearly associated with Jimmy Carter and rosn Carter um also in Georgia a friend of Jordans uh Lillian Smith she ran a Girls Camp uh she wrote and edited in the mountains of Northeastern Georgia um um um she was uh clearly but not openly in a long-term samesex relationship she CH challenged issues of of of gender um um most of what she wrote she started by writing as lessons for teenage girls who came to the camp uh she had more of a psychological Focus on the issue of race and racism she grew grew up a Methodist said in her book killers of the dream that white Southern Christians quote learned our lessons of segregation along with their lessons of Brotherhood and democracy of the three we knew that segregation came first in church it came before brother in church it came before Brotherhood in schools it came before knowledge and lilan Smith is interesting in lots of ways uh um she fairly often reads like a 20th century race theorist uh talking about privilege and psychology and the the need for um people defined as white to recognize um um to to deconstruct them their own privileges their own identities um sometimes she sounds remarkably optimistic and kind of mid 19 mid uh 1900s uh optimism uh she said in her book 1955 book now is the time said she hoped the world would soon be a world without racial segregation or without uh the Iron Curtain uh she said that founded on brotherhood the world was moving toward a great family reunion um in South Carolina James McBride dabs a presbyterian Theologian a member of all sorts of activist organizations um speaker writer uh he wrote something like 25 essays and two books with the word South in the title um we study him in southern studies a lot because he he says too many things are southern but that’s that um but uh uh one time a group asked him uh um from Arkansas asked him to come to speak to them on uh Christian race relations and he said no um if you believe in Christian principles you don’t believe in the idea of race so without the idea of race there’s no idea of race relations he said he would come to Arkansas and lecture on brotherhood and and that’s that’s what he did um J MC BR Deb says the clearest meanings of Brotherhood to him are theological um uh he grew up in a time when uh the clear the the specific activity for uh churches was were to try to uh uh save individ save the souls of individuals um uh Revival meetings uh hymns sermons lessons were designed to uh address the individual James McBride Deb said uh the best thing that we can do is recognize salvation as a uh a project that involves our brothers and our sisters he said that uh we need to recognize the the the failures and the sinfulness of human beings as a as a uh group project said this is what I know about Brotherhood of uh Brotherhood of mankind is the Brotherhood of those who fail um so who’s trying to work out a theological meaning of of uh of of Brotherhood that was both social and um and individual James Lawson Methodist Minister I think of my group he’s the only one still with us still alive he’s deep into his 80s still a minister he’s most famous as an activist writer um uh protesting uh from the perspective of Christian nonviolence and it was very important to James Lawson to uh uh to emphasize that non-violence was not just a strategy long nonviolence is a is a way of living and a way of communicating um and for him a way of of addressing people as brothers and sisters um he said quote we black and white Christians and I hate saying that that is once more somebody who hated identifying people through categories of race I hate saying that have much to give each other God is throwing us together for he knows racism will be doing man will be excuse me racism will be destroying mankind unless we live together as as brothers and sisters and like a lot of people I’m studying James Lawson had the job of a Preacher so every fall he preached Revival Services um we’re at the end of Revival Services you’re hoping that people will have life-changing experiences and announce themselves as Christian individuals and join churches and he said that’s it is extraordinary and wonderful that people are filled up with beauty and inspiration and he would tell them Beauty and fullness and inspiration uh are exactly what you should have right right now now go serve your brothers now go serve your sisters um the uhu Will Campbell how many ministers can I talk about not too many more uh Will Campbell is the only person here that I that I’ve met he’s from Mississippi uh he’s uh from Southern Mississippi had a pretty fascinating life um uh he uh was briefly a Baptist Minister he trained to started in in age 17 he became a Baptist Minister uh uh he was fired for um activism um and uh remained a Baptist Minister without a church for the rest of his life um he uh is interesting in part because he hated institutions um hated churches he said churches exist for themselves and they become bureaucracies um he uh he he he disliked um activist institutions although he kept joining them uh he he was there when Martin Luther King Jr helped form Southern Christian leadership conference in Atlanta um and he criticized that institution as you know another that a you know a bureaucracy that has its own that starts to live for itself um he was a leading minister in the National churches National Council of churches the group that among other things uh helped train activists in the Mississippi Freedom Summer for 1964 um and once again uh well in that group actually he said uh he liked it because they didn’t bother him and they didn’t make him go to meetings um um I have colleagues like this actually in my in my University who um who who would be just fine as long as they didn’t have to talk to other people um but uh um and Will Campbell um sorry I don’t want to go on with too many details but one of this fascinating things about Campbell’s life is that he lived most of his life as a visiting speaker kind of cranky kind of the Challenger people would invite him to events in which he would come and say um um events uh race relations events and he would come and say I don’t like institutions like the one that just invited me and I don’t believe in race relations but let’s go and so had had and but let’s let’s talk what he talked about was um that uh um he said that um Christian people could not should not believe in the concept of race he said that uh White churches had moved far too slowly had moved more slowly than businesses than political systems on issues of race um like Martin Luther King Jr uh who’s a friend um said that churches were white churches were not leading through Christian thinking said that Christian theology quote doesn’t make distinctions between people as Asians Africans Jews Greeks slaves free male female black white old young said quote for the Christian person to continue to place his brother and sister into classifications and categories is to deny the Christian faith that he claims uh two more people Thomas Merton native of France spent his last 25 years as a Trappist monk in Kentucky so we in southern history claim him um thank share him with uh um the uh um thas meron wrote a great deal about autobiography and spirituality the relationship between Christianity and other religions he only started writing about the concept of Brotherhood in the mid 1960s in relation to issues of of race and in relation to his observations of the Civil Rights uh movement uh Thomas meron lived in a monastery that did not have um communic ation technology uh radio television uh daily newspapers um he received news about the Civil Rights Movement through popular magazines uh read them two three four weeks after the events that they described and then talked about them and talked about them theologically in uh Church uh lessons to to other monks um in uh um northern Kentucky um he was extraordinarily impressed by the self-discipline and willingness to sacrifice uh that he saw among uh African-American activists um uh in the Civil Rights Movement by the commitment to non-violence by the acceptance of um of suffering um said that uh he saw in Catholic tradition uh saw examples of connections uh he was especially concerned about um youed Brotherhood especially uh as a concept um to think about um listening uh listening that white Americans need to listen to um to Black Americans uh rather than the Civil Rights Movement being an example of of giving rights as a gift he said um that too many white Americans were quote embracing our little black Brothers to welcome them into white Society uh he said that quote um um Brothers in the fullest sense of the word uh or um Brotherhood in the fullest sense of the word is a a practice of of equal listening equal respect for for dignity um uh equal learning as well as as teaching U he said quote a genuinely Catholic approach would mean Brothers like I said in the fullest sense of the word and then one more person I like to talk about because she is obscure uh Sarah Bole uh from Virginia um University of Virginia she had a a family crisis that left her um alone from her husband left her um and uh she had and she turned from that family crisis to uh uh to see what she could do as part of an early civil rights movement in Northern Virginia um she wrote an article that was full of optimism articles called Southerners are reader for integration than you think uh the magazine published that article with it its own title you’re going to like integration uh she woke up very shortly after that to see crosses burning from the Klux CL on her front yard so her optimism you know faced a challenge from almost the first point that she became a public figure in in in activism um she wrote a book called for human beings only uh um talking it was kind kind of an advice book about uh how white and black Americans should talk to each other and said let’s stop talking about race and talk about ethnic groups uh she has an essay called uh what is Brotherhood and for her Brotherhood was constant work constant learning constant listening uh she said that yes it could be frustrating uh to be ostracized by one group and uh not fully trusted by another uh so she said what she wanted to be was quote a bulldog for Brotherhood somebody who would who would um who would who would push the process uh uh as she imagined Bulldogs uh um kind of unrelenting sort of approach um the uh uh my point with all these brief examples these Brotherhood and Sisterhood um short biographies the point is that these individuals different religious backgrounds um all of these are Christian um but of from different groups uh some black some white many rejecting the concept of race some in the middle of activism some uh um on the side some supporting from the sidelines uh they all had something to say about this concept of Brotherhood and sometimes Brotherhood and Sisterhood um they all were experimenting with the concept they were being in their own ways creative with the concept uh thinking that it mattered thinking that it it was a theology that had to do with um racial discrim racial desegregation um the fact that they came up with these terms Brothers in the fullest sense of the word Brothers for bulldogs for Brotherhood uh Brotherhood of those who failed Brotherhood in a powder kick there are more um suggested that they were that it was a real concept and that they wanted to find their own ways to uh to use it um and the my my last point from their perspective or last Point um a lot of them said Brotherhood was beautiful it’s something it’s a concept that historians don’t address very much we address you know fairness equality uh uh issues of class uh not Aesthetics so much but Marther King Jr talked about uh this a Psalm of Brotherhood a symphony of Brotherhood Patty Bole uh wouldn’t stop um uh yes she wanted freedom and justice for all she said but more I want a new new life I want a life of serious Joy I want a life of genuine and continuing Joy um in general these I mean the um I said they were all creative thinkers or create um in their own ways um they were trying to deconstruct the idea of race through religion um we know of other ways uh through science uh physical science social science uh we know of attempts to deconstruct race through class and shared economic interests and shared work interests um their interest or their goal was racial deconstruction uh through religion um the uh so what happened pardon I said before that it’s can be easy to criticize the concept as Bland and unspecific maybe not useful maybe too Christian to deal with people who are not Christian um certainly too male um it had critics in its day um it had uh um uh opponents from the left and the right uh some of the loudest were opponents from the right and as I mentioned before um part of why I found this topic worth writing about was when I found I mean it’s possible to to to see the word Brotherhood a lot and say or Brotherhood and Sisterhood a lot and say Bland rhetoric I’ll move on to think something more specific but when I saw the opponents of the s Rights Movement turning Brotherhood into Brotherhood ISM uh that’s when I said okay it’s an actual argument let’s get in and study U that I’ll do that much more briefly but the words of right-wing politicians and journalists and ministers um uh were full of denunciations of of the concept of Brotherhood they used it they denounced it as um soft optimistic self-righteous Maybe hypoc critical uh they denounced it very much in the way that right-wing politicians denounced uh political correctness uh years later and maybe today I don’t really live in the present but maybe today uh they denounced in the way that right-wing politicians uh denounced the word woke as uh you know kind of a a popular movement uh disconnected from um from more possibly more serious issues um the uh um I don’t really like quoting I will only quote one uh um white supremacist politician uh the governor of the state where I live Ross Barnett in 1960 said The Average White American does not support desegregation despite all the phony Brotherhood ISM being talked about today he went on to criticize Brotherhood ISM in um television and journalism in uh um kind of national education magazines and movements um the uh more much more specifically in 1957 when uh the um the federal government supported the desegregation of schools in Little Rock Arkansas and sent the military uh to support that process um uh the um conservatives um called it Brotherhood by bayonet and had a uh a cartoon and even t-shirts of Brotherhood by bayonet of US military uh with uh with bayonets supporting forcing white and black uh girls uh to be in the same school the uh um they Ed the term Brotherhood ISM a lot as far as I can tell that is a brand new term from the mid1 1950s i’ I’ve I’ve looked and have not found it anywhere else it appears especially in uh right-wing Publications um the sort of Publications that can be um um troubling uh to spend much time with more specifically this is they made a couple of arguments and I will speak for them without quot speak I will I will give their arguments without uh without quoting they said this argument one Brotherhood and Sisterhood were about horizontal relationships about tolerance and love and kindness and Universal respect and all of that may sound good uh they said um but they said if we all are if all we have are horizontal relationships love and kindness and respect if all we have are horizontal relationships um then we live without Authority uh we don’t have God setting rules we don’t have parents telling children uh um how they uh should live so they said that Brotherhood and Sisterhood ISM was uh encouraging life without standards life without uh moral standards life that that’s just just based on uh getting along and being kind um as part of a of a of a broader argument the second argument um the uh Massive Resistance figures Massive Resistance the the uh general term for the opposition to the Civil Rights Movement especially on issues of schools public schools um Massive Resistance figures um um considered themselves to be um considered themselves to be leading a movement for the rights of parent to determine the associates and futures of their children uh and they said that uh a parents Rights Movement was fighting against a sibling to Sibling movement A brotherhood and Brotherhood and Sisterhood movement so they said that you know if parents get to determine what their children should live like should be with who they should be with what they should aspire to uh what their future should be um they said that Brotherhood and Sisterhood uh thinking was uh intruding into that was getting in the way uh of that um was undermining Parenthood the power of parents by substituting social science or optimistic language or U different sets of leaders um more broadly um a number of opponents of school desegregation um um said that school desegregation would lead to the end of the end of race uh by allowing uh white and black children to start associating with each other and then uh that would lead to uh to dating and marriage and sex and children uh and so a lot of them uh in this parents Rights Movement were imagining that the segregation would would uh would in its would in the same way that they were Imagining the end of white supremacy uh coming from their children or from their grandchildren and one more uh um particularly ugly argument uh a number of the massive resistance leaders said that uh uh that black families are particularly weak uh that there’s too many uh Teenage um single parents to to too many single mothers um they said that uh they didn’t want their white children associating with um U with the results of the weakness of black Family Life Learning the lessons of of black of kind of multiple definitions of family life so it was one more attempt at asserting the the power of ideas of Parenthood sometimes just fatherhood um to reject the a movement that that that came with the Theology of Brotherhood and and Sisterhood um that lasted a long time that idea that Brotherhood and Sisterhood was uh was speaking up for uh that Brotherhood and sister had worked against moral standards uh that led toward Anarchy or an amoral State um and I would say that and I argue in scholarship would have much more time than I than you’re have any reason to listen to me to to talk tonight uh that um this idea about vertical relationships that’s supposed to horizontal relationships uh saving the power of parents um that’s part of the background to Family Values thinking and religion part of the family part of the background to the Moral Majority and the the movement toward um certain ideas in in right-wing politics that we see in the 1970s and ever since um just a few minutes just a couple minutes and then I’ll be happy to to to see what you think about all this topic and and either answer questions or or or more productively I suspect uh uh listen to suggestions and uh potential objections um um in the mid 1960s late 1960s early 1970s Brotherhood as a concept faced criticism from the left as well especially from uh black activists who said their goals inv involved power and self-determination not desegregation not a symphony of Brotherhood but uh but Authority uh just two examples maybe three uh there’s a famous document in 19 66 uh when the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee uh decided it needed to be um needed to be all black in leadership and membership with with with white supporters but not members um the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee said in that document that Brotherhood was getting in the way of real issues of real communication uh a quote one white person can come into a meeting of black people and change the complexion of the meeting that’s a nice term complexion change the complexion people would immediately start talking about Brotherhood and love race would not be discussed uh they said that very few whites could understand anger or history uh they were wanting action that they said that Student Nonviolent Comm Coordinating Committee said that those whites were wanting to assuage their own guilt or to feel Superior to other whites not to address issues of power in the black community at about the same time stokeley carmichel in Washington DC from Washington DC who popularized the term uh black power um in my state of Mississippi uh uh car Michael spelled out what Brotherhood and Sisterhood meant to him he said Brotherhood and Sisterhood meant shared experiences of facing long histories of slavery violence segregation by our black brothers and sisters he meant the entire African diaspora with people identifying with and working with each other um he said that black quote black power is a search for home for something we can call our own he said the love we seek to encourage is within the black community the only American Community where men and women call each other brother and sister where we meet and in fact it was it was the 1960s when the terms brother and sister became synonymous with black man uh and black woman uh didn’t appear until in dictionaries until the early 1970s but dictionaries you know they take a few years um more speculatively I’ll mention just very brief ly uh 1964 some of you I mean you don’t have to follow this is a suggestion you don’t have to uh follow me on this but um many of you know um the Sam Cook song change going to come uh born in Born uh with in a little tent just like thei born near river in a little tent just like the river I’ve been running ever since uh there’s a line it’s uh and I go to my brother and I say brother help me please but he winds up up knocking me back down to my knees maybe that’s the brother as potential allies um uh that Carmichael was talking about and that the Student Nonviolent coord Coordinating Committee was talking about maybe not um the uh as as many of you are probably wondering am I going to talk about the feminist movement in responses to a language that is almost entirely male um the uh uh in general uh the feminist movement in the south used SAR used Sisterhood uh to mean uh specific common experiences facing legal discrimination political discrimination economic job discrimination uh violence and potential violence or Reproductive Rights uh issues sexuality issues um um there was a New Orleans um abortion Referral Services called sisters helping sisters there was a a new um lesbian religious Camp called Camp sister Spirit um there was a lot of discussion of of Sisterhood in a in a new movement in the 1970s uh to make um rape kits available um the they did not as I’ve read as I’ve seen as I’ve researched I did not find feminist groups attacking the concept of Brotherhood and in the ways that uh uh for example the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee uh document uh did um but by talking about Sisterhood as um groups of women with specific interests they made Brotherhood irrelevant uh Brotherhood was not uh uh not part of the language um the uh um Sisterhood was meaningful useful potentially uh beautiful and Powerful uh um in that setting Brotherhood was not this this big unifying concept uh to conclude finally and thank you for your patience um the uh um I find when I have a microphone I talk faster than I usually talk I’m not sure why that is I don’t know if anybody else does that um the uh um um but I I appreciate uh your patience um the question uh what good might Brotherhood be um I start to answer that I’m just a historian I talked earlier uh that I’m just a historian reminds me of Elvis Presley telling people uh just an Entertainer ma’am I’m just an Entertainer uh and I don’t really want to identify with Elvis Presley but but uh um but that comparison comes quickly uh the answer uh is uh no not really uh I don’t think there’s I’m not a spokesperson for the concept of of Brotherhood um I’m I think it’s fascinating uh I think Brotherhood is is too male too gender it cannot be uh overcome to be effective uh the idea of rejecting human categories um uh would be complicated in a in a world where we have so many so many people have worked so hard to to to argue for uh the rights and dignity and worth of of all of their categories um the uh uh it may just not be useful on a lot of topics um and we talked about this in an earlier group uh the term racial reconciliation maybe a little closer to what some of the go people who talked about Brotherhood um maybe the temporary term um words I hear that that seem to line up with Brotherhood are things like um Civic strength Civic courage um uh if I can end tonight talking about strength and courage I I can’t imagine a better place to end so I thank you very much and I’m happy to uh to hear what you uh might want to ask or might want to say or might want to contribute on this topic thanks we did discuss other earlier whether the concept of Brotherhood lines up equally with lines up easily with the French concept of fraternity I don’t I don’t think it’s the same thing I I think it’s U uh I think Brotherhood Brotherhood and Sisterhood has so much of a um it’s so much of a religious language that that I’m not I’m not sure that it’s that it has a immediate uh um um French parallel but I’m happy to hear that that’s right or wrong in that sense Ted If I Could an excellent question in the back um so I have a cod in front of me uh from the uh buring biringham sorry biringham Jail uh letter of uh Mar Luther King uh which is a ne ne event social club with no meaning for the 20th centur uh so my question would be um was there more tension uh that Maring felt from the church or from political entities motivation I may have missed the first part motivation for uh tension was there more well uh Mar Luther King felt more tension uh from the churches or from political institutions um he had a fascinating life in relation to uh to different churches he was a practicing Minister for a good part of his life uh there were um there were um within the organizations of of black Baptist Churches there were he had he faced opponents as well um the uh um by the time he was in Birmingham this would be the last um um sadly last five years of his life he was a uh he was above all a a a professional activist um so he he was facing um he was facing a great deal of opposition from State local and now we know national government um he uh uh he he was frustrated that uh um black and white churches weren’t weren’t joining him to weren’t joining uh in their own forms of activism not weren’t joining him but wer joining in his own forms of activism uh um part of what’s so effective about letter from Birmingham Jail is that you know it’s so specific that he’s got he has five people who criticized him and he’s criticizing and he’s defending himself and and criticizing their approach uh in response um and and and those five saw themselves as you know as the responsible you know the good guys uh the the responsible people that were not on the right wing and were not supporting uh uh Massive Resistance um but uh uh but I’d say he faced a lot more opposition from the state than from churches and and uh uh he um like a number of the people I talked about um he could be frustrated that other church people were not doing their own form of creative thinking let say it that way thank you thank you for your uh your historical views on what happened uh 40 50 60 years ago um I’m interested to know what you think about the Brotherhood ISM that you referred to and how you think it might equate or not with the wokeism that people are talking about today um I think it served the same purposes and I think it is actually a historical it’s historical background I think the um that uh kind of rhetorically it sounded about the same thing um that is rejections by people who believe that there were there should there need to be clear lines of authority the parents should be able to tell their children um um how to live that the media is getting in the way the their kids today watch television uh too much in the 19 uh 50s and 60s our kids today are completely online in the in the 21st century and the messages that they’re hearing are all about humanism or e egalitarianism um the uh um I I think um the the I should mention again just a historian I don’t really live in the present um I live I live in past sources but um my impression is that the condemnation of wokeism uh probably has a longer list of oppositions condemnation of Brotherhood ISM was about you know the single issue of school desegregation and then the the range of ways that its supporters thought um School desegregation would would lead to moral collapse um I think wokeism is is a much you know is multifaceted you know um with you know with lots more lots more issues and lots more um um possible enemies but but it’s the same thing but I’m happy to if happy to have your or other uh it’s the same tendency and approach uh but but but yes or what well it’s hard to put in definition to wokeism today and when it seems to be a right-wing uh catchphrase that a lot of people are are using and I was aware of the Brotherhood ISM as a right-wing catchphrase at the time but it I also remember that for the black community woke was was something that was very specific people who were were were in in that part of the community when you awoke you were aware of what was happening because the white people were going to do something to you and you had to be awake enough to know what to do and it seems to have morphed into something completely different is into this right-wing catchphrase that I still don’t have a definition for but I was hoping that you as a as a as a historian might be able to shed some light on on on the historical point of view of woke in the 1960s um as a historian I I think I may have done that all that I’m comfortable doing by pointing out the the the lines um that uh from Brotherhood ISM to political correctness you know which again multifaceted um uh to uh um to uh anti-woke the uh um the the the criticism of people for being woke uh certainly includes a kind of individual morality of of suggesting that that uh that either you are or not and um and and if you’re not that you’re you’re you’re still sleeping so U so thinking you know bro broader than than the black community that that you were mentioning I think the the critics of the concept um you know don’t like being called as sleep you know and and uh um but I don’t know that there is yet the scholar of wokeism and it won’t be me so uh Yes actually about being work as mentioned before it meant uh to tell somebody to stay work meant to tell someone that they should be aware of different social problems around them and I think that it’s the fact that very in the very recent years we’ve moved to a different meaning of the word is partly due to uh the misuse and the bastardization of African-American vernacular English which uh happened very fast online which happens regularly because uh as I remember back in uh when at the beginning of the black Liv matter movement in 2013 uh I would very rarely see the word work being misused as it is now and workism wasn’t really a thing and it was it still meant to stay work but it is something that has has been spread online really quickly and has been misused mostly by people who don’t speak a AV so I think that’s how we we ended up with this with the right wing being made aware of the word and using it to mean anything that uh can be politically correct but they don’t agree with for example because very a lot of things are also uh are being described as work but just maybe fake situations that they but a strong man for the right to to blame uh different issues on on the left and on people who are more socially aware so I think that’s that’s partly the reason why workism has developed I I I think that’s a better answer to the gentleman’s question than I gave so thank you um and uh and if if if you’re ready to write that that that work um um good the uh um you know when people refer start referring to something as something they don’t like as ISM you know that’s immediately a way of distancing themselves from the the from the uh um you know the the real meanings um the uh uh I I um real so I mean not real meanings the the the previous uses of the meetings but uh um the uh I think along with ISM but also today so I mean the right-wing uses the word woke in quotation marks just the way that critics of Brotherhood use the word Brotherhood in quotation marks as a way of distancing themselves immediately but uh no I I I will look forward to you know to the thoughtful scholarship that may be already there or that needs to be there there there quickly about this you know the multi-step process that you’re describing so thank you um do you think that despite all the Brotherhood there’s still as much racism in America or in the United States as as though once was um um this is a a rare moment where where Elvis is attractive um to but uh um the uh the the very straight forward historians answer is that um a lot of that racism has changed its language um and so instead of uh outright discussions of superiority and inferiority uh of uh um clear disparaging comments um um a lot of of people practicing their form a form of white supremacy um mask that in in language they talk about um um Law and Order above all uh um um but uh uh I think also um a lot of the forms of white supremacy now um are not exclusively um anti-black that so much uh um anti-immigrant on the on the especially on the um on issues of of Latin America Latino immigration and uh um so that uh there are different types um how to put it together and say um uh things are better things are worse um uh I I want to be hopeful and say there are clear signs that some things are um some forms of insult and humiliation are harder and uh um um um but uh but beyond that uh I don’t really want to so I mean I I uh but beyond beyond that I I don’t have a comfortable way to answer that but um um that U um thank you for thank you for a question that that I will that I I Stumble through i’ appreciate I can in the back row hello um uh you might have mentioned this earlier I’m sorry if you did I couldn’t get here on time um did any black artist or non-religious uh people in general participate in the Brotherhood movement or was it something that was necessarily necessarily linked to Christianity no that’s a great question it may be that I I so frequently looked at religious sources that I didn’t find um I didn’t find other uses of the term in in secular language um I found a lot of examples of of groups that had been that had not used religious language not used Brotherhood and Sisterhood before starting to use them in the late 1940s and 196 1950s um in aacp I mentioned um I like to study this group of of social scientists at the University of North Carolina uh almost all of them white um uh activist in all sorts of ways of antiviolence um anti-poverty Pro labor union anti- lynching um and in the 1930s they’re full of statistics and full of of social science theories um their Journal suddenly in the 1950s just reads like a bunch of of sermons um and uh Brotherhood and sister hood are are are there a great deal in the social forces magazine um I suspect there are uh is the easy answer um that probably was that’s my mistake for that because of the limits of who I was studying that’s also recognize that’s a very safe answer probably but I didn’t study them is not the sharpest response to any question thanks yeah uh thank you for your for sharing um what you said today um so maybe my question kind of bounces back from the one just asked um do you think that um so like you said brother Brotherhood maybe was um a notion brought brought up to discon to disc construct um dis desegregation uh through religion um because I assume that that a lot of um well racial theories also were born from um from religious um let’s say arguments or uh so do you think that Brotherhood ISM or well just Brotherhood was just uh like specifically targeted to to speak more to a a religious to religious people and that it didn’t resonate as much in other circles I don’t know if my question is really clear I hope it’s I’ll answer what I think is your question and if if I miss it apologies um the uh um a lot of the religious activists who use the term Brotherhood uh were responding uh to histories of conservative uses of religion um for a lot of them it was conservative uses of religion that talked about um hierarchy um uh for a lot of them it was conservative uses of religion that said that religion should be non-political um that they called it the the spirituality of the church in some some denominations and so talking about Brotherhood as the couple of the people that I mentioned uh was for them their way of saying we’re not giving up on salvation and conversion as part of what Christianity does uh we’re trying to make it more of an active uh process um for a long time that was one of the divisions in American protestantism was politically active protestantism and politically not active where protestantism that is geared toward um adding new members to the church and staying out of issues uh with the occasional exception prohibition uh for example um um so the people that I talked about including Martin Luther King Jr uh came from a came from a tradition where they could easily see uh one or both of those forms of conservatism and they were trying to uh reject that um uh how many of them I’d have to pause and consider how many of them and in what ways were they trying to release trying to um influence people or Reach people uh outside of of a religion setting is a is a harder question uh and we I’ve talked and other lots of Scholars have talked better than I can that did this L did this really specifically Christian language that that uh that these individuals used um could they use it to people to to to address people outside who weren’t Christian they thought the the best Christianity that they knew was universalizable and welcoming to all people um but were those people part of the same language and and and ready to listen in the same way is a is is another question I think the answer to that is pretty obviously it’s it’s going to be hard um but uh um there were also moments sorry to Rattle on there there were certainly moments when some of the um on the other hand when some of the um less religiously some of the activists who less likely to use religious language um really appreciated the attention and inspiration um the um NAACP was you like I said this legal organization um and uh suddenly in the late 1940s there’s a spike in their membership um uh for from different and spike in their significance for for different reasons but uh um but they appreciated it when they were you know whether you call it people attracting uh other people through public relations or or just people kind of elevating the stakes um so it’s a a positive thing but my my first point is I think is more specific to your question is probably more important that these were Christians who believe that their Christianity uh could speak to all people in the world uh without possibly with Thomas meron as the example without a lot of work on on thinking about how all those people in the world uh um were hearing or using that language thanks thank you um do you think the importance of Brotherhood has decrease throughout the years yes that’s uh um the uh we’re not supposed to answer questions yes or no academics are are never get to do that yes it has um I think in part because of the gender I mean it’s just a gendered term it’s a um um and uh as much as people used it thinking that it meant all of all human beings that it’s still a gendered term um the uh and I I was intrigued occasionally to see people using Sisterhood and Brotherhood because it was a very intentional effort to to make the point that it shouldn’t be a gender term but it is a gender term um but uh um more broadly it just has its it just has its limits and also there are lots of there are lots of human problems where the concept of Brotherhood just doesn’t help um maybe it does but it hasn’t helped at least um so I think it’s um to me as a historian let’s talk about it because it doesn’t seem immediately relevant that’s part of what we do hey look this was important um but uh but I think the the the question uh where is it now Brotherhood primarily means today what it had before that is men’s groups with specific interests thank you it’s part of what academics are supposed to do is say oh it’s far more complex but no it’s not far more complex thank you Ted mer mer Ted thank you again for for for an excellent conference uh rich and uh uh full of lessons and so again thank you very much uh we hope to see you again Thursday night or at the end of the month for other activities here at the Institute thank you thank you thank you mer thank you very [Applause] much