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Book focuses on religious women in civil rights era


From "NewsDesk" <NewsDesk@UMCOM.ORG>
Date Wed, 29 Jan 2003 15:14:05 -0600

Jan. 29, 2003 News media contact: Linda Bloom7(212)870-38037New York
10-31-71BP{037}

NOTE: A photograph is available with this report.

A UMNS Feature
By Linda Bloom*

When the Rev. Rosetta Ross was a girl growing up in South Carolina, a deeply
religious woman named Victoria Way DeLee was changing the lives of African
Americans in her state.

DeLee's Christian upbringing fueled her social action work, which ranged from
leading protests and boycotts to organizing voter registration campaigns and
school desegregation efforts. "I knew her and knew about her and grew up
going to those mass meetings," Ross says, adding that her parents, Thomas and
Bertha Ross, participated in civil rights activities with DeLee.

Ross, who later became an ordained elder in the United Methodist Church,
remembered 
DeLee and used her as an example when writing her dissertation about people
living out their faith.

The work on DeLee also heightened her curiosity about other women prominently
involved in civil rights issues. Ross, now the McVay Associate Professor of
Christian Ethics at United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities in
Minnesota, eventually expanded that interest into a book exploring how the
religious consciousness of African-American women related to their work as
civil rights activists.

The result, Witnessing and Testifying: Black Women, Religion, and Civil
Rights, was published in January by Fortress Press.

Though she considers the seven women that she chose to highlight to be
"pretty central" to the civil rights movement, Ross notes that the extent of
their influence has not received as much attention as the influence of the
prominent men in the movement, either then or now.

Common elements of the lives of all seven women - DeLee among them - include
being strongly influenced by an elder or elders and by traditions of faith in
early life; having deep connections to their communities through community
work motivated by religious traditions; and seeking, in general, to improve
society.

In the preface to her book, Ross explains that the civil rights activism of
these and other African-American women "is their female enactment of black
religious values that reflected an internal concern for the black community's
survival and flourishing and a related external concern to address society's
formal and conventional sources of inequality."

One of the earliest examples is Sojourner Truth, the former slave turned
abolitionist and women's rights advocate. 

"Perhaps most important in Truth's moral vision is affirmation of her own
human identity," Ross writes. "She expected divine intervention in behalf of
her own life and her children's lives. Her religious perspective sustained
her emotionally and guided her social activism. In addition, her use of
Scripture to support her arguments and her expectation of divine protection
as she lectured about the rights of all women and black persons reflects a
perspective that divine intent included full life for all human beings."

In the early 20th century, Nannie Helen Burroughs helped found and led the
National Baptist Convention's Women's Convention, which supported education,
the resettlement of black people moving to cities, and social and moral
reform. She also helped connect middle-class women with female industrial
workers, including housekeepers and laborers, and supported the unionizing of
domestic workers.

In those earlier times, according to Ross, religion affirmed the humanity of
black people even as the outside world did not. "The church and religious
perspectives were so important to affirming people who were told in society,
'You're not even human,'" she explains.

So being religious also meant being socially responsible, dealing with
structures that held blacks down and then "attending to society so that every
person can life a full life," she adds.

For Ella Josephine Baker, who helped found the Southern Christian Leadership
Conference and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, that message
was carried by her mother and grandfather, who were able to "clearly
communicate to her through the work that they were doing that what you did
with your life is make the world a better place," Ross says.

Both Baker and Septima Poinsette Clark were college-educated professionals
born around the turn of the last century who "not only carried on the work of
improving African Americans' immediate material conditions but also saw the
bigger picture and more possibilities. They helped inaugurate and shape the
civil rights era," she writes. Clark created the Citizen Education Program, a
method of teaching literacy for voter registration that was replicated across
the South.

Women like DeLee and Fannie Lou Hamer, who both grew up in poverty and had
limited formal education, had to deal with survival issues first for their
own families before expanding into the needs of society. But once they became
activists, their work was acknowledged, even by men. "I don't think their
leadership in the community was ever debated or challenged," Ross says.

She believes it would be difficult for someone with Fannie Lou Hamer's
background to succeed today. "There was a sense, in the civil rights era, a
sense of possibility that I think we're very far removed from right now," she
explains. That sense included "the possibility that Fannie Lou Hamer could be
elected to Congress or that Fannie Lou Hamer could be a delegate to the
Democratic National Convention." Hamer ran for Congress in Mississippi in
1964 and was a delegate to the 1968 and 1972 conventions.

Christian women were not the only ones with influence on the civil rights
movement. In her book, Ross also profiles Clara Muhammad, who comes from the
same generation as Baker and Clark but had less education and grew up in
poverty. Muhammad and her husband, Elijah, founded the Nation of Islam. That
Muslim organization's emphasis on black self-esteem and racial pride was the
genesis of the black power movement that became a part of the civil rights
movement. "Her work was directly related to that," Ross says.

Ross hopes the stories of some later movement workers - Diane Nash and Ruby
Doris Smith Robinson - will be inspiring to younger readers of her book. Both
became active in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee while
attending college in the late 1950s and early 1960s and served jail sentences
for participating in sit-ins and other protests. Robinson eventually became
the committee's highest-ranking and most authoritative woman.

Although young people often are not given credit for what they do, the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was an example of a group that
"helped shake up the society," Ross says.

Witnessing and Testifying has a list price of $23 and can be ordered online
at www.fortresspress.com or by calling toll free (800) 328-4648.

# # #

*Bloom is United Methodist News Service's New York news director.

*************************************
United Methodist News Service
Photos and stories also available at:
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