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Of This World is a podcast dedicated to discussing religion and politics. Co-hosts Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, a historian at Wesleyan University, and Nick Tabor, a journalist and author, talk with scholars, writers, and theologians working at the seam between faith and the secular. Across each episode they return to one question: can there be an effective religious left in the United States? A joint production with Commonweal magazine.
This is Nick Taber. I'm a journalist and author living in New York.
Speaker 2:And my name is Daniel Simons Jenkins. I'm an assistant professor of history in the College of Social Studies at Wesleyan University, and this is Of This World.
Speaker 1:Hello, this is Nick Taber. You're listening to Of This World. With me is my co host, Danny Jenkins. Danny, how are doing?
Speaker 2:I'm doing well. I feel refreshed because I just had a two week spring break, which, you know, realized that spending time away from my computer, at least if just for a few days really makes me feel calm and less anxious. So I had a nice weekend away from my laptop, but unfortunately I had to work the rest of it. But this last weekend I was able to take a bit of a break. So I'm doing well and looking forward to getting through the rest of this semester where I teach at Wesleyan.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I can imagine.
Speaker 2:How are you doing?
Speaker 1:Yeah, everything good on my end, enjoying the slightly warmer weather here in New York. And even if it's been cold some days, we've got more sunshine. So it feels like spring to me. Very happy about that. Still in the middle of Lent, of course.
Speaker 1:I think we're in the fifth week now. And, you know, I always really enjoy the Lenten season. It is a time of abstinence, you know, from various things, a time of of privation in some ways, but I also feel like it adds a lot of other stuff to my life. There are just more opportunities together with my friends from my own parish and from other Orthodox churches in the city. So I'm also very excited about our conversation with our guest.
Speaker 1:We've invited on Gary Dorrien, who's one of the authorities on the history of the Black Church and its theology. You know, we could have invited Gary on to talk about any number of things. I'm sure some of our listeners saw a headline in Jacobin recently that said Gary Dorrien is Christian Socialism's greatest champion. It was a piece by Matt McManus. And so maybe we'll have him on sometime in the future to talk about Christian Socialism more, but that's not even what we're talking about in this interview.
Speaker 1:As our listeners will know, Jesse Jackson died last month and his funeral, at the time that we're recording, was held just a few days ago in Chicago. And I've been fascinated by Jesse Jackson for years, and I know we both felt like doing an episode on him was was kind of a no brainer. And we could not think of anyone better for this than than Gary Dorrien. Gary is a professor at Columbia and at Union Theological Seminary, both here in New York. He's written a couple dozen books.
Speaker 1:He's just amazingly prolific. The ones that are most relevant here are a trilogy that deal with black theology and politics since the Reconstruction era. And one of those books, A Darkly Radiant Vision, has a lengthy chapter on Jesse Jackson that really puts Jackson's whole career into the context of what's happened with the Black Church since the death of Martin Luther King. And Gary has also been a member of the Democratic Socialists of America ever since it was launched in the early eighties, and he actually worked on Jesse Jackson's campaigns in the eighties. So I know we've we've both been excited for this discussion.
Speaker 1:Before we get to it, we also want to say thanks to our producer, Joel Myers, who does such a fantastic job with the show, cleaning up our audio, composes the music. So thanks to Joel and also, to my friend Landon Shealy who designed our logo. Landon's an artist in Wisconsin and, you can find his work on Instagram. He does great work. And as always, we wanna thank Common Wheel Magazine for hosting the podcast.
Speaker 1:So without further ado, we'll get to our interview with Gary Dorrien. Gary, welcome to the show. It's an honor to have you.
Speaker 3:Thanks, Nick. Thanks, Danny. It's so great to be with you.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So we're very excited to talk about the Black Church, the Black Social Gospel, and the legacy of Jesse Jackson. But before we get into that, we want to talk about the arc of your career. And I'm sure some of our listeners already know about your work, but for those who don't, we want to make sure we give a proper introduction. So your most recent book, as it happens, is a memoir, it's called Over from My Christian Left Intellectual Life, and we want to encourage listeners to check it out.
Speaker 1:Think that for anyone who likes this show, the book is exactly the kind of thing that they'll gobble up. So Gary, you tell your story, your own personal story beautifully in the memoir, but maybe you could give us just a short version of it here, you know, talk about how you came to be an authority on black theology. You come from a pretty small town in Michigan, and I know, from Michigan myself, I imagine it was not exactly a standard career path for people who grew up in your environment. So just kind of spell that out for us.
Speaker 3:Oh, thanks, Nick. Well, yes, I grew up poor and rural, semi rural, middle of Michigan called Bay County. So it's between Bay City and Midland, that part of Michigan. Those of you who know Michigan, I've got issues about just what it's going mean to sort of have a world, a worldview that's just something besides the prosaic everydayness of my sort of shacks and trailers to the right of me on Union Road, and then there is this kind of working class section over here, a part of this area called Flagyl Road. But yeah, that is my world, And early on, I'm just looking for kind of signals of transcendence, something that's just meaningful that's beyond just this world.
Speaker 3:The crucifix, Jesus on a cross at local Catholic church, that does get my attention. That is something beyond just my flat, poor world. That's the first thing that really got my attention. But then the second thing is the civil rights movement. I mean, it's just, why are children marching in Birmingham?
Speaker 3:Who is Martin Luther King Jr?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I wondered, say in the book, or you talk about how Martin Luther King became an icon for you at an early age, so maybe say a little bit more about how he captured your attention as just a, I guess as a teenager, right?
Speaker 3:Oh yeah, well in the ninth grade I read Crusader Without Violence, that's LD Reddick's biography of King, and I read it three times, so I memorized whole chunks of it, and that led me to Doctor. King's own book, Stride Toward Freedom, and he's got a whole chapter on these theologians and philosophers that he read in seminary. So now my head is just jock full of the names of theologians and philosophers who never came up in the ninth grade. Know, I've, through the rest of my high school years, I'm going to the public library looking for these people, these theologians that King talks about. None of them, you know, none of these people are on the library shelves.
Speaker 3:But I do have this idea that, you know, there's gonna come a point in my life when, yeah, I'm gonna be able to read these people once I get out of where I am. But in the meantime, you know, we lost Doctor. King while I was in high school. And so now this is, he's not just this leader of this great liberationist movement, the greatest of our time. Now, he becomes something like a Jesus figure who died for us.
Speaker 3:And for me, it's like these two cross stories. There's this There's this Jesus story from the Catholic church, and this King story that are kind of melding together in my thought and feeling, and that's whatever is in that is pretty much all the theology I had at the end of high school. My family is very nominal in the Catholic church. Although I did hitch on when the neighbors, during golf season, when my father, I'm never going, I would hitch on to the neighbors to get to Catholic Mass, because there's something there, not just the cross, but just that sense of mystery, of sacred mystery that's in the Catholic sanctuaries is gall is arresting to me in a way that I realize does mean something, and that's the path for who I became.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm right there with you, and I love that term signals of transcendence. I associate it with Peter Berger, the sociologist. I don't know if he coined it or not, but That's right. Yeah, the phrase. Yeah.
Speaker 1:You studied at Alma College in Michigan and then you made your way to Harvard for Divinity School.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's so. You know, all the stuff that I write about that has something to do with democratic socialism, and maybe I should just say, one fully half of my work is theological and philosophical on one side. So it's Kant and Hegel and whitehead and all of that kind of thing. And then the other side is social ethical and political, including several books on democratic socialism and other things, two big books on neoconservatism and so on. But probably, yeah, if there's something that kind of holds it together, it's this epicenter concern and identification with a democratic socialist story, and also the social gospel, Christian socialism, the sort of Christian sort of version of all of that that's in that, and just writing books that are kind of, you know, intellectual history of all the traditions that are in and that cut through all of those things.
Speaker 3:And I got that way in college. I had a theology professor who told me he wouldn't let me in his classes. He only let me, I only took one course in theology the whole time I was in college, because that guy won't let me in. But he did let me, you know, I attached myself to him, and we talk shop till the cows come home. And I read all the great theologians of the you know, of that time.
Speaker 3:This the early nineteen seventies, and I'm in college. So I read all the great theologians of the twentieth century, and I didn't read them for some political purpose at all. And yet it does it it it occurs to me over time that virtually all of these people are democratic socialists. And meanwhile, I first read a bunch of these names in a book by Martin Luther King. So these two things came together for me in college, and so much of what then became my intellectual trajectory.
Speaker 3:Goodness, I gave a talk at Yale just earlier this week, and where I said, I've never said this in public before, I just said, you know, so many of these books I wrote about Immanuel Kant are just coming out of the very books that I read in college, writing notes to myself, arguing with Kant. So I, things are just taking shape for me in college right away that have everything to do with who I became.
Speaker 2:I'm curious about how your experience at Harvard Divinity and how you kind of had an awakening with the civil rights movement as a young person relates to your early work on the history of mainline Protestant liberalism. Because it would seem given your Catholic background and given your early interest in the civil rights, is what's the connection there? Is it is is are these democratic socialists that you encountered? Is that where you've kind of find them in The United States in this and and and kind of the progressive movement of the main coming out in Shaped by the Main Line? I ask that just because, you know, it was early, that was like an earlier book that you did, but seems kind of foundational for everything that has come since.
Speaker 3:Yes, it's true. Thanks, Danny. Yeah, I wrote a trilogy on American liberal theology, and then I've written other books that are sort of in that ballpark, in that venue. It's, to some degree, I could say, well, it's from a lack, cause I didn't grow up in it, and yet I ended up writing all these books about liberal Protestantism. And it could very well be that had I grown up in it, maybe I wouldn't have written so many.
Speaker 3:But in fact, in college, yeah, I'm reading Karl Barth from one side into the shelf to the next, and Paul Tillich, and Reinhold Niebuhr, and Walter Rauschenbusch. Well, just those four people right there, they're all coming out of churches that I know nothing about. But I'm thinking I don't really understand. Certainly not Niebuhr, certainly not Rauschenbusch without its understanding something way beyond what I my level of understanding of what what American liberal Protestantism is and where what it where it came from. So I just had to make myself a student of all of that in order to be able to write all those books, including the parts that go pretty deep into all four of those figures and a bunch of others.
Speaker 3:The fact is, yeah, in the twentieth century, the theologians that you would would know about from by virtue of just having read Martin Luther King and then basically going to Protestant schools. You started this with this way by referencing Harvard. Yeah, I went only to Protestant seminaries. I went to Harvard and Union and Princeton. Well, you know, there's not a single Catholic theologian assigned at any of those places when I was going there.
Speaker 3:And so I have to even get what Catholic theology I know, which is quite a lot, sort of on my own, because certainly, to me, it's important to know Catholic theology just as much as I know Protestant theology, but in fact, I'm at Protestant institutions where in the mid 1970s, they still think they own modern theology. You know, Vatican Council II was just a decade ago, and what's coming from it has just been very recently, it's just coming now. So certainly my teachers at Harvard Divinity School, they just thought modern theology is something that they just completely own, and that it's just out of what they were trained in. So, you know, that shows in various ways that you just then have to deal with. I mean, the difference when I got to union is that union is just so committed to different kinds of liberation theology already, that union has already made the turn from being what it was, which is the citadel of liberal Protestantism, sort of the epicenter of a certain kind of liberal Protestantism to its identification with liberation theology.
Speaker 1:Right, makes sense. So, you know, in addition to all of those things, continental philosophy, mainline Protestantism, Catholic theology, we could go on and on, democratic socialism, you also of course are quite an authority on the Black Church and Black Theology. You've written this trilogy on what you call the Black Social Gospel. I'll just give listeners the names. The first one, The New Abolition begins in the nineteenth century, the second one, Breaking White Supremacy focuses on the era of Martin Luther King, and then the third one, Darkly Radiant Vision covers the years after King and comes up to the present day.
Speaker 1:And so we're gonna get into Darkly Radiant Vision a little bit more in a moment, but I wonder if you could talk about what you mean by the Black Social Gospel as a term and also what it is about it that's kind of taken hold of your imagination in this way. You've obviously felt kind of a lifelong pull toward that kind of theology.
Speaker 3:Yes, that's right. Well, can already see, I've already talked about the Wellspring, I mean, just where I came from, Martin Luther King is just so much in my head and heart that indeed, it's a fairly early question in my career when I'm in graduate school training, when I'm reading all these books on the social gospel, and they're all about these famous, you know, some of them famous white social gospelers, and yet, you know, I got into this because of Martin Luther King. And I'm thinking, where's the literature about you know, I know there's just no way that Martin Luther King came from nowhere. Uh-huh. He's got predecessors.
Speaker 3:He's got mentors, and they surely had mentors. And there's some kind of intellectual tradition behind him. Surely, there is. And I can't find literature on that. And to the extent that you find anything at all, I find these historians who say, well, there's no such thing.
Speaker 3:There was no black social gospel. Yeah. There were there were two or three people. You know, there's there's Adam Clayton Powell Sr, but he had no real impact outside, you know, Abyssinian. And Reverdy Ransom, you know, if you if you're really digging this literature, that name will come up.
Speaker 3:It takes a fair amount of digging even to come up with a name. And there, you got Gay Rod Wilmore saying, oh, don't look there. There's nothing just nothing to see. And people for decades, for a whole generation, they read this literature and just thought, oh, there there is. Apparently, there's no black social gospel to the extent that you're even asking the question.
Speaker 3:But mostly, it's just a question that just isn't even asked. And so you do get this sense that Martin Luther King just came from nowhere, as though he didn't have mentors, which is just ridiculous. So, yeah, for many years, I wrote, I countered this whole thing. I mean, I made myself an expert. I dug into archives and into AME Church Review and places where the story is gonna be.
Speaker 3:I know it's gonna be if I just dig. And indeed, of course, it's there. And just even to know enough about what the Federal Council of Churches was in 1910, 1915, 1920 in this country? Well, there are representatives of black churches in the Federal Council of Churches. So even that prosaic, ordinary, ecumenical story about the social gospel creating the ecumenical movement.
Speaker 3:Even there, the Black social gospel is in that. It's just you've just got generations of historians that just don't care, or don't think there's anything there to get. So I, for twenty years, I sprinkled this argument through various books. People who know my work kind of know that about me and know that it's in my work. But I spent all those years saying, We need someone to write this up.
Speaker 3:I mean, there's just a comprehensive intellectual history that needs to be written on the subject and written by somebody better than me. And it just never came along. Mean, were there is, to be sure, I mean, there's a great kind of wellspring of scholarship and all sort of aspects all around it that are, you know, a lot of them are my own, you know, best friends, so a lot of more people I'm writing about in volume three. But to actually go with this Black social gospel argument, per se, no. But I've got James Cone in my life, who's one of my best friends.
Speaker 3:So he just kept writing me to say, My goodness, Gary, it's your obsession. Just start But to get to the question, yeah, I'll go, what it is in itself. It is something I am marking. As historians, we always we gotta say, what's our period here? So first, just gotta be clear about where we begin.
Speaker 3:And of course, anytime you try to begin somewhere, you have to explain how those people got that way. So you gotta back off a bit from where you were. So of course, for me, it's an abolition. It's a Black Church abolitionist story. It's a story about, you know, the Black Church was born liberationist.
Speaker 3:It's just anti racist at its core, because it's the one thing that just founds it per se. That's what it is. Then it's kind of moving into a period where, yeah, there's an abolitionist story to talk about. But so far as in kind of in historiography kind of terms about when we're talking about a Black social gospel, per se. It is that moment when, yeah, there's also a white social gospel over on that side, but way more importantly, and differently, here, this is the question.
Speaker 3:These are Black Church ministers having to ask the terrible question, Well, what would a new abolition be? What's abolitionism today? Now that we're in a very different context, it's not like before. This is a different moment that's got a that is marked off. It's certainly marked off for us.
Speaker 3:Abolition came and went. Hell, slavery is coming and gone. Reconstruction is coming and gone. Now Reconstruction is being betrayed. And so what would a new abolitionism be in this context where there's kind of a mania of lynching going on, and the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments are already being lost in much of the country?
Speaker 3:What would it mean to build protest organizations that deal with this, whereby we actually enlist churches in struggles for social justice. That's the Black Social Gospel. And it's controversial, inherently. Most Black churches don't want this. Yeah, they're born liberationists, but they don't wanna get political.
Speaker 3:The church is just a place of refuge, of just being able to survive this racist country, and told, Oh no, we're gonna be involved now in ordinary political struggles in order to push back this thing that's beating us down, which means getting political in ways that just are very, very difficult. No, that's always my volume one, New Abolition. It's about this old group of founders, so many of them, but they all have some battle with their own church. All but one. Alexander Walters is the only one.
Speaker 3:He's got this radiant personality. People love him. He's holy. He just has this kind of aura of sanctity about him that he makes bishop early in the AME Zion Church. And so he's my one person among the founders who doesn't have this fight with his own church.
Speaker 3:And so he spends a lot of his discretionary time building protest organizations. I mean, just doing something that is new and that is difficult and that mostly fails. So you try it again and you try it again. Afro American League, Afro American Council, the Niagara Movement, that's with Du Bois and the National Black Political League and so on. The NAACP is the next one, except now you're cutting a deal with white liberals and radicals, you know, in a different kind of financial basis.
Speaker 3:Of course, that's the one that succeeds. Last point about that, Nick. I'll just say this.
Speaker 1:You
Speaker 3:know, the NAACP, the founders of the NAACP Mhmm. They wanted to call it the new abolition, because that's what they thought they're doing. They're the new abolitionists. But they thought, If we call it that, we'll never get a Southern chapter. So Du Bois and Villard come up with this mouthful name that nobody liked, and they always assume, oh, we'll end up coming up with something better, but they never did.
Speaker 1:Right. Yeah. Still stuck with it now. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Why were scholars so reluctant to acknowledge this black social gospel tradition, historians in particular? Is it are they just too empiricists? Are they too secularists? Why why something that seems, know, at least how you're describing it, right in your face was just basically seen as non existent. And then just the second question related, you mentioned James Cohn and you suggested, write about this, you're doing it so much.
Speaker 2:And I think it'd be interesting to hear you talk a little bit about his role in all of this and your life and your writings.
Speaker 3:Yeah, oh, thanks Danny. Well, firstly, there are four or five points here to kind of run through with regard to why there's no work on this for so long. The number one objection is just a mistaken belief that there were just hardly any, because this is the convention that just keeps being passed on, is that there just aren't any people, were there some awareness of, yeah, there were a few, yeah, there were three or four or whatever, we know who they were, but nothing came of it. Right, so that convention is just utterly deadly. If you think, yeah, there was such a thing, but that there's nothing to talk about, you just don't even have the curiosity to just ask yourself, well, actually, who were those ministers in the orbit of the NAACP who consider themselves followers of Du Bois?
Speaker 3:And who are those ministers who are coming to George Whidbey's rallies and George Slater's? And so there's just, there's a certain lack of curiosity about just even finding who are these people that I don't know, but you know, could find if I just sort of dug for it, because you've accepted this convention, that there just weren't any of them. Secondly, you've got the prejudice of a certainum, so much of the historiography, which is that to say, no, Black churches are conservative and provincial, and they can't be involved in this kind of work, because they're just survival institutions. And so many people in the field are just committed to that view, believing that there's actually nothing sort of actually liberationist in an early church. For goodness sake, Jim believed that early in his career.
Speaker 3:You know, that's all he knows about, you know, about, you know, late nineteenth century. Thirdly, you've got the Gayrod Wilmore problem, because Gayrod did write the book on this issue about what's the legacy of black radicalism, black religion and black radicalism, and Gayrod has quite thin line about what he calls the black radical tradition, and it's nationalists. And so people who fit into his nationalist frame are the ones he plucks from this story, and he virtually tells you don't bother to look at these social gospel figures, because they're accommodationists, right? They're still trying to assimilate to this racist society, which is just utterly a loser, and so the only people who are kind of holding fast to what you would recognize in a later time as black radicalism is, are these nationalists. So it's, you know, yeah, Turner comes through, or Alexander Grummel will come through a filter like that, but not George Slater, not Alexander Walters, not Grimke, or just, you know, Micah, just go on.
Speaker 3:All the people who just fall out from a frame like that. So people, you know, read that book and they're just told there's just no place even to look, even though he does, he has one sentence on Reverdy Ransom. Well, you know, go ahead, start reading Reverdy Ransom. Look what you're missing. It's just incredible.
Speaker 3:And yet Gayrod, he's it's such an important figure to me because we were involved in a lot of the same a lot of the same organizations in the National Council of Churches and stuff coming out of the civil rights movement, and such an important figure. He and I have a similar kind of orientation in terms of sort of digging out this historical legacy story. And yet there is this important sense in which I am, in some ways, the opposite of Gayrod, because I'm saying that was wrong to sort of cut us off from my history that was in fact there. To his credit, though, to Gayrod's credit, when Black theology now explodes in 1969, 'seventy, 'seventy one, and this is now James Cohn and J. Diodes Roberts and others, and people like Jim and Diodes are both saying that they are the first Black theologian.
Speaker 3:We've never had a Black theologian before, because they've got this view of their own history that is, you know, just based on historiography, that's really not right. To Gayrod's credit, he said, No, come on. You cannot be that you are the first Black theologian, that you are the first theologian just thinking through your Blackness. But this is something that has to be historicized. In Jim's case, it takes until the mid-1980s, when the first move is just to be able to talk about Martin Luther King differently than he did in his early career.
Speaker 3:When James Cone himself begins to write a book called Martin and Malcolm in America and is now saying, Oh, no, we gotta go forward with Martin on one side and Malcolm on the other, that in fact, Martin taught me how to be a Christian and Malcolm taught me how to be black. When that's the dialectic, now you've got a different kind of argument than what Jim was making with regard to King earlier on. But as you would expect, all of this is tied up with my subject here. There is a Black Social Gospel tradition all along here that's got fabulous figures in it, and also people you never heard of, and so much more to pull forward than what it seemed back when we were relying on histories that were kind of sending us astray. There are other things here, Danny.
Speaker 3:Mean, stuff that you and I would care about. Just historiography conventions, merely the convention that religion itself just isn't important after the nineteenth century. So many American historians believe that. They think that they that okay, they have to know something about religion through the nineteenth century, but past about 1,900, no, it doesn't matter anymore. And so they, you know, they just you know, whoever might there were black intellectuals of that of that generation that are king's predecessors, doesn't matter anyway, we've got a category here that says that they don't.
Speaker 3:And there's even the Reinhold Niebuhr problem. You know, that Reinhold Niebuhr, if you've gone to seminary, you've got a seminary education, well, Reinhold Niebuhr just tore hell out of the social gospel. So you've got generations of people that just said, you know, what little they know about the social gospel is just what they read in Reinhold Niebuhr, who told them that it's, you know, it's just idealistic and progressive and sentimental. And so just don't go there. It's nothing to redeem there.
Speaker 3:I've even got that working against me when making the argument. And I did have to go into all this in the introductory chapter to new abolition, because indeed, I am basically saying that all this historiography is wrong. So having to do a fairly extensive amount of kind of table setting before I could even really kind of dig in and say, see, look at this, what's been overlooked. And that's my foundation story. And then volume two, as Nick says, that's my volume about the King era, where now you're seeing the King era different based on what has Yeah, come
Speaker 1:so I think this is a good time to get to Jesse Jackson. Since he passed I've been thinking about the different ways that he's kind of come up in my life, you know, as long as I've been alive he's been a very well known figure. I think that when I was a kid seeing him in the context of the politics of the 90s, the Clinton administration, was, Denny and I both were in pretty conservative evangelical households, I know that in the atmosphere I was in, there was a sense that he was not a real minister and maybe not even taken seriously as a Christian because, you know, he signed on to the Democratic agenda which was pro choice and so on. But then later on I learned about his presidential campaigns in the 80s and the ways that they, to an extent, sort of reshaped the Democratic party and I thought, well, there's a lot more to this person than I ever realized. And of course he also had a close relationship with Martin Luther King, he was there on the balcony of the motel in Memphis when King was murdered.
Speaker 1:But at any rate, I want to kind of give the floor to you to talk about, just kind of give us a sketch of his life, tell us about his early life and maybe focus a bit on his relationship with Christianity. I know he went to seminary, but did Jesse Jackson ever pastor a church, or was it kind of straight from seminary into political movements?
Speaker 3:Yeah, well even that doesn't quite get it right, because he's actually already so far in it before he's a seminarian or then even becomes ordained afterwards.
Speaker 1:Right, yeah. You talk about how he considered going to law school, and he decided that that might set him up to run for governor or something like that, but he thought, No, I want to be more like a Martin Luther King figure.
Speaker 3:That is so, Nick. Well, know, he was born in 1941 in Greenville, South Carolina, and his father is this strapping, very self confident cotton trader there in town, highly kind of odd because he can defy Jim Crow conventions. He's the one person in Greenville who can defy Jim Crow conventions and can kind of get away with it. And no one else is black in Greenville can do so. But yeah, his real father, his biological father wants children of his own, and he's married to a woman who already has children from a previous marriage, and so she doesn't want any more children.
Speaker 3:And so, yeah, he wants his own children. So he goes next door, the teenage girl next door impregnates her, and that's Jesse. Jesse Jackson was Jesse Burns until he was 16 years old, as his mother's name, and he wasn't even adopted by his mother's subsequent husband, Jackson, until he was 16 years old. So there is something deep in him, just even knowing something about where he came from, someone who's so desperately seeking a father. And look, it's a source of pride to him when he realized that Noah Robinson is his actual, is his biological father, and has a kind of pining yearning for him.
Speaker 3:And Noah Robinson just doesn't pay any attention to him. And yet the more that Robinson sort of ignores him, the more Jackson is, you know, just seeking any kind of recognition from it. And he doesn't get it until what? Until he becomes a sports star in high school, and now of course he's a major sports star, he's the sports star of that high school, and now his father's coming to the game saying, Hey, that's my boy, kind of stuff. And you know Jackson got us a football scholarship to the University of Illinois.
Speaker 3:He also got an offer from the New York Giants in baseball, but he went to Illinois first. So that is the early beginnings of just of yes, seeking a father, of having one, and he does have an adoptive father, it's not like he doesn't have one, but his growing up is, it's so different from King in ways that are so important. Doctor. King grew up with people in his life telling you, You are somebody, and raised in a, it's a middle class church, and it's his father's church. So just even acquiring the skills of being able to deal with Daddy Gang, because Daddy Gang is someone who's in your face all the time.
Speaker 3:And so just becoming the kind of person who could become strong and get the best out of Daddy King, but then kind of hold him up. Jesse Jackson's got nothing like that. And he is in many ways a kind of product of the streets. He's a street hustler when he's in his early teens. But he has this grandmother who says to him, You know, you could be the greatest street hustler in the world, and that is leading nowhere.
Speaker 3:And so she takes him to church. He does, in fact, yeah, that's the place where people treat you with respect and with a kind of moral code. And it's all about how God loves you. You have infinite value in God's sight, no matter what this country is saying to you. You have sacred human dignity by virtue of being a child of God.
Speaker 3:And he gets all of that from the church and being in church with his mother and his grandmother. So when he went to Illinois and didn't make it. He wanted to be a quarterback, wanted to be a Big Ten quarterback. And part of the issue even there is that, you know, he's a child of the South who thinks, Oh, maybe the North would be different. Well, no, he barely gets there and he realized, Oh my God, the North is every bit as racist as the South.
Speaker 3:It's you know, different kind of manners. And it didn't go well. He kind of bombed out at Illinois. So he ended up at North Carolina A and T, where Proctor was the president at that time. And there he did get to play quarterback.
Speaker 3:But, you know, AMT, that's Greensboro. That's Greensboro, North Carolina, the place where the sit in took place.
Speaker 1:Yeah, at the Woolworths, yeah.
Speaker 3:You know, he's just coming in a little bit after that. He's not really part of that. And in fact, when he got there, this is early 1960s, and yet Jesse was not part of that protest scene at first. To him, this is a second chance to still play quarterback and just be a big man on campus, But the idea that he's gonna become part of some protest thing, no, he doesn't really have that in his head until he's been there a couple of years. But then he does get hooked in because there is, in fact, a protest community there.
Speaker 3:In fact, it's core. Greensboro core is a real thing that sort of grew up that protest. And once he became involved in it, he virtually took it over. And now, I mean, he's barely taken it over, when now he is leading demonstrations in the spring of nineteen sixty three that were actually bigger than Birmingham. I mean, he is a spellbinder from the beginning.
Speaker 3:Just supremely talented. And he would sometimes, he would go into a trance, holding this huge crowd. And afterwards, people come up to him and say, Can you get that down? Can we get that in the school paper? Or, you know, get that in the local paper?
Speaker 3:What you just said, can you just repeat what you just said? He has no idea what he just said, right? He has just gone into something. So, you know, that's what he's coming from. When then he goes to seminary, because the only reason he's in Chicago is to go to seminary, because Proctor told him, I got a buddy there, you go to that seminary, that's the place for you to go.
Speaker 3:Don't go to Duke, don't become a lawyer. Lawyering is just helping people keep their property. You could become like Doctor. King. Now that's a convincing argument to say, you go to seminary, you will get the kind of intellectualism that Doctor.
Speaker 3:King has. If you wanna be like him, you gotta do some of the things that he did. That's why he went to seminary, to go to actually get in him what Doctor. King has. And now here's the irony of all ironies.
Speaker 3:It's the very moment when Doctor. King Uh-huh,
Speaker 1:when King arrives, yeah.
Speaker 3:To Chicago. And now King needs someone who's in Chicago to be kind of one of his connections to Chicago, because he's got hardly any. In Black Church World, he's got hardly any connections there in Chicago. These people are all daily lieutenants, Mayor Daily. And SCLC's got no credibility at all in Chicago.
Speaker 3:So it's very, very hard, rough going getting in there. But that's the beginning of it, where Jesse makes the connection. Well, basically, he's in Chicago. I should tell this. I mean, he went to Selma, you know, two days in Selma, where he had already met King once already, but connects with him again.
Speaker 3:So now when King takes the struggle to Chicago, well, he's already met this guy, Jesse Jackson, and so the connection is made. And so the irony is that Jesse went to Chicago in order to become like King, to become an intellectual, and yet once King gets to Chicago, he says, No, you don't need to finish seminary. You need to join SCLC as a James Bevel protege. And so he actually didn't really finish in seminary. He didn't really go to class.
Speaker 3:This became an issue for people at the seminary that he never really got what he had come there to get. But meanwhile, he's just on his way because he made sure all of his own. And so he made it his base.
Speaker 1:Right, right. Yeah, he's kind of preternaturally gifted, as you said, and King does become a real mentor for him. I loved reading the descriptions in your book of his relationship with King. Obviously Jesse Jackson adored him, but he also I guess he kind of chafed against some of the other people in the organisation. And even even King himself found Jesse getting on his nerves.
Speaker 1:I think you say that that Jesse would say to him, don't send me away, doc. And so King would kinda defend him to other people when in his orbit and say, look, you know, I know he can be I know he gets on your nerves, he grew up without a father and he's looking for this kind of validation that he never had as a kid. So, but nevertheless, King himself, I gather was tempted at some moments to kind of send him off. Wanted to say, look, if you really would just wanna do your own thing, go off and do it. But could you describe that relationship in a little more detail than I just did?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Well, know, Martin Luther King himself was just almost superhumanly magnanimous. So this is just a pattern with him. He, there are people who can be just very difficult. You know, none of the Irish Lieutenant, they didn't like Ralph Abernathy either. And yet King just is going to have him as his sidekick.
Speaker 3:And King has relationships with all kinds of people who only really relate to the struggle through King himself, because they have a kind of misfit relationship to the rest of it. And indeed, Jesse Jackson is a load to deal with. He's extremely compulsive, and he's very demanding of Doctor. King's attention. So this is something that just offended all the other lieutenants, that Jesse would, in an evening when you just need to kick back and relax, and Jesse's just in his face asking him questions, and partly just asking him a question, so Doctor.
Speaker 3:King barely starts to talk, then Jesse's butting in with the answer in order to try to impress him, but just how brilliant he is and so on. Just all of this, just compulsive behavior that's turning off all the other lieutenants. And of course, to them, he's this kid who just showed up the day before yesterday. That's how they feel about him. And they also, they're wary of him, that this is the kid who's going end up claiming, you know, that he's ahead of all of us.
Speaker 3:And so they've got all of this against him from the beginning. And King himself, you know, it did wear on him. And it is the case that Jesse turned Operation Breadbasket into a thriving thing. Is, I mean, in 1966, he already, he tore through the dairy industry and the soft drink industry, affecting boycotts in order to leverage them in order to hire black employees, and was tremendously successful. So he is turning breadbasket into an operation that he thinks should be the model.
Speaker 3:I mean, he really thought that now that we got a Civil Rights Act and a Voting Rights Act, well, you know, what will we do next? He thinks he wants the SCLC to just adopt the whole breadbasket model nationally. And of course, all the other lieutenants say, Oh yeah, that's just an ego drift for you. So they resent this. And Jesse was against the Poor People's Campaign, and he was against the Memphis Campaign.
Speaker 3:Now, truth be told, most of the lieutenants were against both of those things, too. So this isn't just Jesse. But, you know, all of this, the fact that, yeah, Jesse's, all these things, it just got, it was wearing on Doctor. King, and very close to the end, I mean, just before the end, he kind of lashed out at Jesse and just said, Look, you know, if you want to go on and do your thing and just make breadbasket, you know, the big, you know, just your thing, fine. Just go in.
Speaker 3:Just leave me alone. If you don't wanna help me with the Poor People's Campaign, fine. Just get out of my face. And that is almost literally the last encounter they had, except for, of course, the assassination scene when Doctor. King did call out to Jesse over the balcony, a friendly word to him, and they had a little back and forth about that night, and then Doctor.
Speaker 3:King is assassinated. So for Jesse, the fact that they even had that, you know, that it's okay, you know, moment before, you know, you just imagine how deeply he felt that. But then, of course, this is immediately an issue of controversy because Jesse does tell a story about what happened that night that just offends all the lieutenants. And so this is the burden for him for years afterward, that he's just alienated, just all these people who are otherwise in the SCLC inner circle, they all they despise him. And he really is having him sort of make his own way.
Speaker 3:Except, you know, he did. I mean, what he did with Breadbasket and then later, Operation Bush, once it became Bush, there's nothing to compare to that with regard to, if you're and now this is my generation, this is our question, you know, what's the civil rights movement now? What do you join if that's the story of your life? You look to that to be kind of the thing in your life, in your activism, and whether it's got some kind of black power inflection or not, because, you know, we got issues about that, liberation theology and all that. But on both sides of that, and right in the middle of it, frankly, the whole question of, you graduate from Union Seminary in the mid 1970s, where do you go with this?
Speaker 3:Who's doing the work? It's Jesse Jackson. He's the one who's actually built something in Chicago. Thousands of people are turning out on Friday night and Saturday, and they've got things you can join, things you can be part of. It's liberation theology, and it's political activism, and it's church, and it's all this stuff.
Speaker 3:It's the whole, it's, yeah, it's the Black social gospel of that generation. It's him more than anybody. So the lieutenants had to deal with that, that he did sail past all of them, really except Andy Young. Mean, I Andy wasn't famous for a while than Jesse.
Speaker 1:So I think we should just maybe move on to the presidential campaigns in the '80s. I think you worked on those, right? At least one of them, or maybe both? Both of them. So what was that experience like?
Speaker 3:Well, firstly, in '84, I was in Albany, New York, and then in '88, I was in Kalamazoo College. I'm a late governor of the academy. I wasn't going to be an academic, so I was an organizer for a dozen years and an Episcopal pastor. So I was in Albany, New York during my organizer and pastor days when I was there. And I'm the president or the leader of three left organizations: C SPACE, Committee in Solidarity, People of El Salvador, Episcopal Peace Fellowship, and DSA.
Speaker 3:And we had a thriving local back there. We had almost 200 people in the local in DSA, and yet all of these organizations I'm in, plus also this Catholic piece of activism that I'm in, because all of the, when I first got there, it's Catholics who are doing most of the, virtually all the work in labor, religion, activism, that's all Roman Catholic. So all of my best friends that I first made when I moved to Albany, they're all Roman Catholic, and all working out of the diocese. So I'm working, you know, in that bailiwick as well. And yet this whole world of a kind of social Christian activism that I'm involved in, both secular and religious, so much of it is just, you know, it's like, there's no lack of Black people in Albany, so where are they all these that organizations of we think are so progressive?
Speaker 3:We call ourselves progressives, yeah, well, where's the evidence for it that if we're this white? That is my question the whole time. To me, it's just shameful. And when the Jesse Jackson campaign comes along in 'eighty four, I thought, All right, finally, there's something that happening is a way that we could actually be doing something where we could actually build bonds of trust across racial lines and religious lines and class lines that just doesn't exist for all of the wonderful progressive activism that does exist in Albany, New York. Yeah, we don't have this.
Speaker 3:And partly, there's also a function that we have, there's no real history of interfaith community activism that just hadn't been there. So that's how I got in on the Ground floor in 'eighty four in the Jackson campaign. And yet, you know what they told me, right away. They just, You gotta go organize your own people. I'm gonna make some new friends here, People who don't join any of my organizations.
Speaker 3:And of course, for me, it's been a burden for years anyway. It drives me crazy that I can't even get people who are in one of my organizations to join the other one. They're just like, these are like different cultures in these different kinds of organizations themselves. And now I got the same thing going with the Jackson campaign. I'm trying to pull people from my own organizations into them, and had minimal success with each of them, but not very much success with any of them.
Speaker 3:And of course, back in the day, in DSA, far as that goes, to get DSA people to work in the Jackson campaign, no, not going to happen. I mean, you get a who end up going for this argument that I'm making to say, This is our chance to become less white.
Speaker 1:Right. Right.
Speaker 3:But for them, no. We've got a good candidate coming here, and we gotta get our ducks lined up against Ronald Reagan. And of course, you know, get it lined up for Walter Mondale. I take for granted that once primary season is over, of course I'll be working for Walter Mondale. The time that that will come, time enough.
Speaker 3:But in the meantime, there's just something so important that could change just what organizing culture is here, if this rainbow coalition, it was real to me. Then later, 1988, I'm starting my academic career. Okay. Same thing there. This is how I got to even know the organizing committee in Kalamazoo, except there it's better.
Speaker 3:There's no special pleading that we needed to make to say there's such a thing as a rainbow coalition. We've got one. And in fact, Jesse Jackson won Michigan because of it. It was the first big industrial state he'd ever won. Right, And it's because of Kalamazoo and Lansing and Detroit, those places that turned it out.
Speaker 3:So it was just a fabulous experience, And it gave me my own gateway to what, you know, the whole organizing culture of in that part of the world for the next eighteen years.
Speaker 1:Quite a legacy of those campaigns even though they didn't obviously give him the nomination either time. And I think that when people think about the rainbow coalition, if they're familiar with that history at all, think about the racial diversity that those campaigns attempted to foster. But I think Jesse Jackson also talked a lot about religious diversity and my understanding is that he wanted to foster a left political culture where various religious traditions could flourish. I'd noted at one point in your book where he said, We must return to higher ground, we are bound by Moses and Jesus, also connected with Islam and Mohammed, saying Jews and Christians and Muslims all need to unite here under the banner of this political agenda. So wanted to ask kind of how that went over.
Speaker 1:One of the questions that we talk about a lot on this show is what it would mean for a for a, kind of religious left to to to be revived. And so curious about, yeah, how that how that project went, in the eighties.
Speaker 3:Yes, of course, you know, Doctor. King was that way too. He closed out the Riverside address a very strongly and beautifully interfaith note, and it was equally real to Doctor. King. But of course, he is coming from, I mean, what we call the civil rights movement is actually two civil rights movements that are mostly interacting with each other through Doctor.
Speaker 3:King. So he's got all that he can handle, just being the person that the entire civil rights movement is kind of organized around and is operating through. But Doctor. King, it is very important to Doctor. King when Rabbi Heschel shows up at Thelma, and he's got every bit that same kind of interfaith sort of consciousness, partly just because that's his personalist theology, you know, that the divine spirit is in all people, that everyone has the sacred dignity in them as a child of God, and therefore you have to care about everybody.
Speaker 3:In fact, that's just the key to King's own democratic socialism, something he can't talk about in public. To him, democratic socialism is just shorthand for actually believing in the freedom and dignity of every human being, period. Who knows what kind of political economy arguments you wanna make that go with this or or the like. But, really, to him, that that's what it is. It's a kind of shorthand for talking about that.
Speaker 3:And indeed, he thinks it should be enough just to say Christian. The word Christian should connote all of that, except it doesn't, right? So many people, that's the last thing they would hear. And so Doctor. King is very much in that world.
Speaker 3:Well, Jazzy Jack, a generation later, is actually doing it. Just for example, the connections he makes, not just to black nationalists, but also to black Muslims. He just, he has personal relationships. My goodness, he has black Muslims who are his own bodyguards trusting his life to them going from place to place. And so he just has, he has much thicker and kind of, you know, lived kind of level of a kind of interfaith life.
Speaker 3:That to him is just second nature. It's not like he's read a bunch of books about interfaith dialogue or the like, he didn't. And in fact, the fact that he's not that much of a reader of things intellectual is, you know, why there's no autobiography. People kept trying to get him to write one, and they would commission the ghost writers, you know, to write it, And it's not like he's not willing to talk about himself. He can do it at top of a hat, but he's not willing to intellectualize about himself or about what he's involved in and not willing to go reflective in the way that a biographer wants, right?
Speaker 3:So he'll go into blustery sermon mode, and just every one of these projects that tried to produce an autobiography runs aground there. So it's hard for these people that got assigned to write the autobiography to just see that what feels like blustery sermon mode is just really him, right? There's not some other Jesse Jackson, not underneath, not outside, and I do mean in that, not just an interfaith sense, but in a very deeply Christian sense. Jesse Jackson asked himself every day of his life whether he's with Jesus and Martin or not. Now, just all that, that is the question for him all the time.
Speaker 3:That's, know, whether he can say yes to that, that means he's pretty close to the moral center, what he calls the moral center, if he's paying attention to that. With regard to the way you started this whole thing with the evangelicals, I have to say here, one reason that you heard that is that, in fact, people said it all the time. And it doesn't just even start with Jesse. Organizations like the Moral Majority and Focus on the Family and the other, what we ended up calling the Christian Right that came along, those organizations all started just after Jimmy Carter enters the White House. And it's an act of dissociation from what?
Speaker 3:From the first true blue evangelical ever to occupy the White House. They have dissociated and dissociate themselves from what that is, from who he is. Jimmy Carter was burned by this, as was Andrew Young, as was Jesse Jackson, where you've got to delegitimize the actual Christianity of people who are actually deeply Christian, and who are only in public life because it's their faith that brought them into it. And yet now they've got this whole right wing thing that is saying no, no, no, you got it, you know. They're talking stuff about Jesse before it was even true, before he even actually became a Democrat.
Speaker 3:Because you know, Jesse, this is a struggle. This is an issue. He was in fact pro life and was not pro LGBTQ early in his career because he's a child of the National Baptist Convention and wants to bring that into the social gospel. That's the burden of his life. And in fact, he is someone that, you know, someone who grows up with this story that, you know, he was almost aborted.
Speaker 3:So he's got quite a thing to get over. And it was only when he did start running for president in 1984 that he changed his position on those two moral issues. So they're dismissing him before even that before that even happened, trying to claim that he's not really Christian, not really a minister and so all that stuff was going on already before he then did before he did do what yeah. You're gonna run for president of the Democratic party. It is true, as they would say, you gotta line up in certain ways with what that is.
Speaker 1:Was that coming mostly from white evangelicals, or was he also getting pushback from conservative black churches?
Speaker 3:Oh yeah, this is something. Mean, black church evangelicalism is never, I mean, it is different, is always different. For one thing, you just don't have in all of Black Church evangelicalism. There's just no real history of obsessing over the inerrancy of the Bible the way you do have in white conservative evangelicalism. So that kind of obsession with a kind of intellectual security that's only secured by having a truly inerrant text that's perfectly authoritative and so on, and no errors and so on.
Speaker 3:That whole mentality that's so defined so much of conservative white evangelicalism, that is not really a thing the Black Church. But it's certainly, of course, there is a it's it's unmistakable. It's evangelicalism of a kind. It's gospel centered. It's it's Jesus centered.
Speaker 3:It's it's gathered at the foot of the cross. It's the blood of the lamb. It's, you know, my goodness, virtually all Black Church enmity is right there at the cross. Were you there? And so on.
Speaker 3:And so there is a deep sort of gospel orientation kind of almost second nature evangelical. And then what you make of it, yeah, then becomes an issue of how you parcel this out. And for parts of the Black Church where you got pastors who never even went to seminary, have had kind of theological arguments about this, it's just not really something you would talk about. I see. So now the question is just, are you living, you know, in a personal faith?
Speaker 3:Are you living as though you think it makes all the difference in the world, whether you believe in God or not? And how does it show up in your life?
Speaker 1:So it's interesting that as Jesse Jackson was getting criticised, you know, on one side by especially white evangelicals, he was also kind of taking heat on the other side, on the political side, for being too involved in faith and religion. In particular, Adolf Reid, the political scientist who I think a lot of our listeners will be familiar with, he wrote this book about Jesse Jackson in the eighties, Jesse Jackson phenomenon, And I'll just kind of lay my cards on the table and say that I really like Adolf Reid's writing in general, but he is, I think, pretty militantly secular and I can't really go there with him. So he criticised Jesse Jackson from that perspective, saying that he felt like the country was getting to a point where black politicians didn't have to do that anymore, didn't have to steep themselves in the culture of the black church in order to develop an audience or get people to listen to them. And so he thought of Jesse Jackson as kind of a throwback. But as I said, one of the questions that we talk about on this show is whether it's realistic to imagine a revival of a religious left, and if so, what that would look like.
Speaker 1:So I'm curious about where you think things stand now, how the relationship between black politicians and the black church has changed since the eighties, and what lessons Jesse Jackson can teach us about mixing religion and politics.
Speaker 3:His book on Du Bois is just one of the best that we've got out there. And I so appreciate how the emphasis the political Du Bois, that Du Bois is never not political. He's just so got that right. Yes, as you would gather, I've certainly got my issues with that book that he wrote about Jesse back in the day. Of course, back in the day, when he's saying that, he's basically calling out people like me who are involved in this rainbow coalition, saying that what we're doing is just a waste of time.
Speaker 3:And we certainly didn't think so. So yeah, we didn't appreciate this sort of argument. Although, of course, you know, I'm in DSA back then, too, so I know Adolf says the same thing about DSA. You know, we were he thought we were squishy and, you know, not enough, strong enough, glass based, and don't know our marks and all this stuff. So hell, same thing with us.
Speaker 3:And my goodness, you know? We're the democratic socialist organization in the whole country.
Speaker 1:Yeah, pretty much the only thing going at that time.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Sometimes it helps. It can help to be involved in more than one thing and just see it from how it looks from another angle. I do think that Jesse Jackson, there's a line that takes you straight from Jesse to all these other people I wrote about in volume three. And when I wrote volume three, I was looking, there's so much in it.
Speaker 3:Volume three is more like volume one in as much as there's so much ideological heterogeneity. The Black Social Gospel is not just one thing, not politically, not theologically, not socio ethically, not where it lands or so on. So there are lots of different things here that can go with it. I've got four main ideological traditions in volume one that just are defining what this is, even to get to a point where you've got, where you form the NAACP. And so volume three is more like volume one for me in that respect, respect, and having to chart all of this.
Speaker 3:And yet I was very concerned to hold with centerline, to say there are certain figures who just kind of represent a kind of quintessential centerline, where you put them in any generation of this story, and they show up the same way, that they, you know, this is what it is, and it quintessentially, and certainly King is such a figure. And Benjamin Mays is, and Howard Thurman is, and Jesse Jackson definitely in our time. So I'm going in the end for people who are like that. And so winding, driving to the very end of that book, I'm on my way to Tracy Blackman and William Barber and Raphael Warnock and Willie James Jennings to some degree as well, though that's mostly an intellectual argument that I've got Willie into it. But these are all people that who are not very not very ideological, not ideological at all, according to them.
Speaker 3:They don't make ideological claims per se, they try to kind of keep that at bay, don't identify with a party per se, because this is to them, this is a whole idea of it is that this is just Christian conscience entering public space, where Christian moral concerns take you into public space where we're dealing and gathering with each other in order to deal with public problems. That's how they see their work. It's just, it's the social gospel in a way that, yeah, it gets political, but not in a partisan way. And I wanted to end with people who were like that, because indeed, are people like that in any generation, you put them in any generation of this story and no trouble at all recognizing it, right? And recognizing it, you know, what it is.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well said. All right, well, thanks so much for coming on the show. This was very enlightening. I think we both really enjoyed it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Gary, thank you so much. Long time admirer of your work and we're just so grateful to have you on the show.
Speaker 3:Thanks, guys. It's a great delight for me to be with both of you. Take care. Take care.
Speaker 1:That's all the time we have for this episode. We wanna thank Commonweal for sponsoring the show, and we'll see you next time. Thanks for joining us.