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CHAPTER 9
Prophecy in the Streets: Prophetic Politics, Rhetoric, and
Practices during the Civil Rights Movement
Richard A. Thomas
Milburn Academy, Fort Worth
INTRODUCTION
The range of descriptions of African American religious experiences has traditionally
fallen between the sacred and the profane. Particularly, for African American religious
experiences the Black Church has been viewed as the most sacred aspect of Black
religious communities. Subsequently, the Black Church has been described as the
driving force behind the agenda of Black leaders during the Civil Rights Movement. 1
However, it was not the Black Church that was the defining attribute of African
American religious experiences during the middle of the twentieth century; rather, it
was a particular idea that many held most sacred. The way African Americans testified
to their own experience can be described as a prophetic testimony. The notion of
prophecy was the force that inspired many leaders to use their day-to-day experiences
as testimonies to start a movement that went beyond accommodation with the goal of
transformation. In this context, prophetic testimony must be examined through the lens
of political theology alongside history. The category of political theology helps to
emphasize the deep connection between faith (a theological claim) and the exercise of
faith (a political claim). In other words, political theology combines pragmatic functions
of faith with the way it is practiced.
1
Most notably this argument was made in David Chappell, A Stone Hope: Prophetic
Religion and the Death of Jim Crow (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
2004). In this work he argued that the church movements and revivalism were the key
elements that forced social and political change especially in the South.