The Black Manifesto , one of the most curious documents produced from within the U.S. Black Power movement , was first presented during an evening session of the National Black Economic Development Conference (NBEDC) held in Detroit on April 25–27, 1969. Addressed to “The White Christian Churches and the Jewish Synogogues [sic] in the United States of America and All Other Racist Institutions,” it calls for relatively moderate ecclesiastical reparations—$500,000,000 for aiding, abetting, and profiting from the exploitation and oppression of Black peoples—and articulates a program through which the monies will be put to productive use. With stern phrasing and staccato delivery, the Manifesto envisions the establishment of a southern land bank, a National Labor Strike Fund, funding for four major publishing and printing industries in cities across the country, training centers, and support for the multifaceted work of the International Black Appeal—an attempt to establish an independent fund for addressing the needs of unemployed workers—among other initiatives devised to serve the cause of self-determination and community control of institutions.1
The Manifesto is also a document that represents, perhaps better than any other, points of confluence, tension, rupture, antagonism, and synergy among the era’s secular, religious, and antireligious activists. As a result, the Manifesto and its historical context provide an ideal space in which to consider the somewhat contentious relationship between religion, specifically Christianity, and the Black Power movement . The constitutive role of religion and faith remain nettlesome issues in the study of modern Black political activism and social movements, and this seems particularly true of more radical political configurations. Because the Manifesto was delivered publicly by James Forman , a Black radical figure with a notoriously anticlerical bent, it has been easy to overlook the degree to which the document is rooted in Black religious and theological traditions.
Forman , who was then international affairs director for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), was the principal, though not the sole, author of both the preamble, which incorporates a quasi-Marxist framework for revolution, and the main body of the Manifesto proper. The program from the Conference held at Detroit’s Wayne State University lists Forman as the “Dinner Speaker” for the evening of April 26, and the title of his talk as “Total Control as the Only Solution for the Economic Needs of Black People.”2 When he mounted the platform to set the Manifesto before the assembly on that second evening of the gathering, he knew that his actual presentation, which tendered the Manifesto as a major resolution to be voted on and collectively adopted, was not what most of those in attendance were expecting.
Nor was it a total surprise, or a brazen attempt by a radical outsider to capture the Conference.3 Many of the NBEDC’s key facilitators knew of Forman’s intentions and approved. He was, moreover, championed by a range of Black nationalist figures in attendance, including Milton Henry, vice president of the separatist Republic of New Africa; as well as the Reverend Lucius Walker, the executive director of the Interrreligious Foundation for Community Organization (IFCO), which provided the bulk of the funding for the NBEDC . In addition, one of the conference’s primary conveners, brought onto the IFCO staff by Reverend Walker , was Lorenzo “Renny” (sometimes also written as “Rennie”) Freeman, a Detroit activist with ties to the community-based, Saul Alinsky–style West Central Organization, from which he resigned in 1968 on the grounds that a racially integrated organization could not hope to be effective in Black ghettos. “What was radical two years ago,” he insisted, “isn’t radical today …and it takes radicals to bring about social change.”4 With this political and intellectual pedigree, the Black Manifesto represents the sharp edge of radical Black nationalist thought in northern urban industrial centers such as Detroit at the end of the 1960s. And this sharpness was enhanced by the Manifesto’s and the Conference’s shared rejection of “black capitalism,” especially the brand endorsed by the Nixon Administration, as a possible solution to the compounded problems of poverty and racism.5
The Manifesto was also a radical, religious document. Indeed, the central argument I want to develop in this essay and about the Manifesto grows out of my criticism of one dominant strain within studies of “the long civil rights movement” in twentieth-century America. There is a troubling dichotomy that depicts the postwar, southern-based Civil Rights Movement as primarily, even aggressively, religious—from its leadership in and around the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to the hundreds of mass meetings and gatherings in local churches where the spirit moved the congregants in song and prayer—while the northern-based, post-1966 Black Power movement is viewed as primarily, even aggressively, secular and anticlerical. My contribution calls for critical reflection on the ways in which the religious/secular divide has been inadequately and inaccurately invoked.
I want to insist that the story was also much more complex, especially in terms of the supposed de-Christianization of the Black Power movement . For instance, the Reverend Martin Luther King , Jr. had a counterpart in Minister Malcolm X . Both were men of the cloth who used their faith to inform and justify their political positions. Both were clerical organizers and activists. King’s success is nearly unintelligible without reference to his acumen as a Black political minister and much the same can be said of Malcolm X , whose power and appeal—he brought thousands of bodies and souls into the fold of the Nation of Islam—cannot be fully realized without reference to his religious orientation.6 Moreover, the “secular” Black Power movement that gave rise to Black consciousness and Black arts also helped to generate a Black theology that would force a reexamination of notions of sin, salvation, and God and of liberation, both spiritual and political. As was the case with the old progressive Social Gospel , and with more recent versions of Marxist liberation theology, salvation (rendered as a form of liberation) is decidedly collective in nature. The ability to read salvation/liberation as at once spiritual and temporal, along with a shared critique of the failings of mainstream Christianity and the old “Negro” Church, probably did the most to erect a bridge between Black Power and this incarnation of Black faith.
Despite the contributions of a range of religious individuals and organizations, most histories of the Black Power movement are insistently secular or at least not attuned to the movement’s religious aspects.7 Most notable for the degree to which it brings together a negative evaluation of the Black Power movement and an argument about the de-Christianization of Black radical politics is Charles Marsh’s The Beloved Community: How Faith Shapes Social Justice from Civil Rights to Today. Marsh affirms the moral vision of the southern Civil Rights Movement, and bemoans its abandonment and betrayal in the wake of Black Power. “The story of the civil rights movement in America concludes,” Marsh writes, “with this final period [after 1968] of fragmentation and disillusionment.” A religiously informed movement for social justice and the concomitant desire for “redemption, reconciliation and the creation of a beloved community” is not revived, according to Marsh, until well after the Black Power era has given way to the post-civil rights period of the 1980s and 1990s.8
A different story can be told from the vantage point of the religious men and women who were well represented among the roughly 600 delegates at the National Black Economic Development Conference in Detroit.9 Some within the Christian contingent were also members of the recently founded National Conference of Black Churchmen : a group of Black ministers and theologians who had already caused a stir with their “Statement on Black Power,” published in the New York Times in July 1966. “As black men who were long ago forced out of the white church to create and to wield ‘black power,’” that statement read, “we fail to understand the emotional quality of the outcry of some clergy against the use of the term today.
While serving as a spirited, yet not quite radical, defense of Black Power, the Churchmen’s statement also emphasized the need for human interaction, a vision of a common humanity, and a call for all Americans to work together to “rebuild our cities.”It is not enough to answer that ‘integration’ is the solution. For it is precisely the nature of the operation of power under some forms of integration which is being challenged. The Negro church was created as a result of the refusal to submit to the indignities of a false kind of ‘integration’ in which all power was in the hands of white people. A more equal sharing of power is precisely what is required as the precondition of authentic human interaction.10
The men and women of IFCO and the Black Churchmen were certainly distributed between those who ratified the Manifesto (by a vote of 187), those who rejected the Manifesto (63 votes), and the majority who a...