Breaking White Supremacy: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Black Social Gospel

by Gary Dorrien

Publisher:

Yale University Press

, 2022

The award–winning author of The New Abolition continues his history of black social gospel with this study of its influence on the Civil Rights movement.

The civil rights movement was one of the most searing developments in modern American history. It abounded with noble visions, resounded with magnificent rhetoric, and ended in nightmarish despair. It won a few legislative victories and had a profound impact on U.S. society, but failed to break white supremacy. The symbol of the movement, Martin Luther King Jr., soared so high that he tends to overwhelm anything associated with him. Yet the tradition that best describes him and other leaders of the civil rights movement has been strangely overlooked.

In his latest book, Gary Dorrien continues to unearth the heyday and legacy of the black social gospel, a tradition with a shimmering history, a martyred central figure, and enduring relevance today. This part of the story centers around King and the mid-twentieth-century black church leaders who embraced the progressive, justice-oriented, internationalist social gospel from the beginning of their careers and fulfilled it, inspiring and leading America’s greatest liberation movement.

Product Details

• Title: Breaking White Supremacy: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Black Social Gospel
• Author: Gary Dorrien
• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Print Publication Date: 2022
• Logos Release Date: 2024
• Language: English
• Resources: 1
• Format: Digital › Ebook
• ISBNs: 9780300231359, 9780300205619, 0300205619, 0300231350
• Resource ID: LLS:9780300231359
• Resource Type: Monograph
• Metadata Last Updated: 2024-08-28T13:16:34Z

About Gary Dorrien

Gary Dorrien is Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics, Union Theological Seminary, and Professor of Religion, Columbia University. He is the author of more than twenty books and three hundred articles that range across the fields of social ethics, philosophy, theology, political economics, social and political theory, religious history, cultural criticism, and intellectual history. He is a two-time recipient of the American Library Association’s Choice Award, a 2012 recipient of the Association of American Publishers’ PROSE Award, and a 2017 recipient of the Grawemeyer award for his book The New Abolition: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Black Social Gospel.