smash-pacifism-zine

lack newspaper, the church provided the information
network. It also provided the meeting places, the fundraising
machinery, and the means of organizing an
alternative transportation system [during bus boycotts].”
(To Redeem the Soul of America, pp. 14-17)
The church culture and organization permeated the
SCLC and its affiliates. Shortly after its establishment in
1957, the SCLC adopted the slogan “To Redeem the Soul
of America,” revealing its evangelical mentality. It had also
added the “Christian” part to its title. These were
adopted to counter charges of communist
influence, and because almost the entire SCLC
leadership were ministers.
SCLC meetings, rallies, and protests
were organized in churches and conducted as
church gatherings. Hymns by choirs and speeches
by ministers dominated. Protests to courthouses
or city halls were termed “prayer pilgrimages,”
and pickets outside businesses were often referred
to as “prayer vigils.” The churches provided not
only an organizing base, but also a welldisciplined
body of people, accustomed to the
church hierarchy and moral codes.
Beyond this core of church-going
members, however, the SCLC was not able to
recruit substantial numbers of non-church goers.
In fact, the church purposely avoided many of
those who did not attend church because of their
“corrupting” morals. Consequently, they were
unable to organize a substantial number of
working class Blacks into the movement. This was even
more pronounced when the SCLC attempted to expand into
the North (i.e., Chicago 1966), where the church had far
less influence:
“The SCLC also made little attempt, apparently, to
assimilate and interpret its experience in Rochester [New
York, where it sent workers after the riots in 1964]. It had
always recruited in the churches; it went against SCLC's
grain to organize among the people who shunned the
churches and frequented bars, pool halls, and street
corners.”
(To Redeem the Soul of America, p. 197)
King's Role in SCLC
Like Gandhi, King has been described as an
“autocrat” in his organizing and leadership methods,
revealing once again the intense authoritarian nature of
middle-class pacifism:
“SCLC was not only dominated by King, its very
structure appeared to be built around him. On paper, the
board of directors acted as SCLC's governing body. In
practise, as far as policy was concerned, it functioned as a
rubber stamp. Consisting for the most part of King's own
nominees, it rarely questioned, and even more rarely
opposed, the policies and statements that King placed
before it. Equally striking was the extent to which SCLC
framed its public image and appeal around the King
persona... the black leader of heroic proportions... SCLC
became an autocratic organization which revolved around
King, and this absence of internal democracy... eventually
contributed to its decay.”
(To Redeem the Soul of America, p. 38)
Ella Baker, a long-time civil
rights worker.
60
King's persona began to irritate Ella Baker, the
SCLC worker who had done
extensive organizing in the civil
rights movements since the 1930s,
and who assisted the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
(SNCC) when it began in 1960:
“Baker also found it
difficult to get along with King. 'He
wasn't the kind of person you could
engage in dialogue with,' she later
stated, 'if the dialogue questioned the
almost exclusive rightness of his
position.' She came to regard King as
a rather pompous preacher, with
little political awareness but with an
inflated sense of self-importance and
a condescending attitude to women.”
(To Redeem the Soul of America,
p. 49)
During the emergence of
the student sit-in movement and the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee, in 1960, Ella Baker urged
students to establish “group-centered leadership” and not a
“leadership-centered group.”
“From her vantage point in Montgomery, Virginia
Durr catalogued the grumblings and complaints of local
activists who felt that the MIA [Montgomery Improvement
Association] had become a one-man band, with everything
revolving round King. 'He cannot stand criticism,' she
observed, 'and has to be a LEADER of sheep, not a real
democratic worker along with the others.' Lawrence
Reddick, the historian from Alabama State College who sat
on SCLC's board, referred to these criticisms in his 1959
biography of King, Crusader without Violence. There was a
growing feeling, he wrote, that King was 'taking too many
bows and enjoying them... forgetting that Montgomery had
been the result of collective thought and collective action.'
This, plus his obvious liking for fine clothes, expensive
restaurants, and first class hotels, placed a question mark
over his sincerity; even some of his MIA colleagues 'felt
that he was bent on making a fortune.' King was also 'too
much in motion,' Reddick thought, 'flying about the
country, speaking almost everywhere.'
(To Redeem the Soul of America, p.50)