The Hardings, Academic Activism, and Religion as Orientation

Kaylen Smith is a History Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University. Her dissertation explores the transition from the modern civil rights movement into the Black Power era through the lens of religious expression and activism. Kaylen received a Stuart A. Rose Library Short-Term fellowship to study the Vincent A. Harding papers and the Rosemarie Freeney Harding sound recordings at Emory University.

During my fellowship at the Stuart A. Rose Library, I examined the Vincent Harding papers and the Rosemarie Freeney Harding sound recordings. My dissertation, tentatively titled “Black Power Prophets?: Redefining Religion and Spirituality in the Black Power Movement,” examines various sub-movements throughout the span of the Black Power era and aims to complicate the prevailing view of the Black Power movement as secular. To do so, I engage in an established tradition of scholarship that rejects the characterization of the Black Power movement as the inevitable decline of the modern civil rights movement; by instead focusing on religion as a constant between the two movements, “Black Power Prophets?” explores the lives and work of various activists who asserted their authority in offering more expansive definitions of what it means to be “religious.”^[1] Often disillusioned by the pastoral leadership of the civil rights movement, many of the public “faces” of Black Power worked without expressed belief in or affiliation with any of the mainline Christian institutions (namely, Black Protestant institutions), yet still advanced political arguments grounded in theology. Indeed, religion and politics might be better understood as having been synthesized through the Black Power focus on culture and connection to higher power(s) through “spirituality.”

My research at Emory provided insight to multiple components of my dissertation project: (1) the purpose, writings, and activism of the Institute of the Black World (IBW) and its associated members, (2) Vincent Harding’s interpretation of the meaning and goals of Black activism, and (3) Rosemarie Freeney Harding’s multi-faceted spiritual beliefs.

Serving as some of the source material to the book (Remnants: A Memoir of Spirit, Activism, and Mothering) she co-authored with her daughter Rachel, Rosemarie Freeney Harding’s sound recordings emphasized her blended spiritual beliefs— influenced by Anabaptist Christianity, Afro-Brazilian Candomblé, and Buddhism (amongst other traditions). While analysis of Rosemarie Freeney Harding has revolved mostly around her activism as part of the Southern Freedom Movement in the broader context of the civil rights movement, her spiritual views and how they informed her activism provide insight into the transition between the seemingly disparate civil rights and Black Power eras. Harding’s understandings of spirituality throughout the 1960s and into the ‘70s helped shape ideas of freedom and spiritual liberation throughout the Black Power era in ways that pushed other activists to broaden their own conceptions of faith and activism. And though Rosemarie Freeney Harding seemed to have no formal connection to the IBW, her prior activism speaks to the tensions that emerged later in the IBW and other Black Power organizations around issues of gender and “untraditional” spiritual practice.

As I looked through Vincent Harding’s collection of papers, I focused on those detailing his experiences with the Mennonite church and the Institute of the Black World. While scholars have analyzed Vincent Harding as advancing a “religious Black nationalism” during the height of Black Power, few have related this back to his work of co-constructing the framing for the Institute of the Black World.^[2] As I found through my archival research at Emory, Harding, alongside other members of the IBW in the mid-1970s, explained the IBW as having originated in spirit with W.E.B. Du Bois’ Atlanta University Center studies.^[3] This framing of the IBW as having roots in the work of Du Bois also coincides with what Harding asserted as the scholar’s “Black messianic vision.”^[4] In this sense, the IBW and all of its work and scholarship, over which Harding extended great influence as the founding director of the IBW throughout the early 1970s, was grounded in what Harding understood as a black messianic tradition that not only invested blackness itself with religious meaning, but also understood black scholarship, specifically, as a prophetic means of advancing this vision.^[5]

Much of this can be seen from what other scholars have detailed about the relationship between the IBW and its initial umbrella institution and primary funding source, the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Center. As the King Center “demanded strict adherence to civil rights liberalism” throughout 1970, the IBW’s emphasis on diverse yet collective scholarship led to their eventual separation from the King Center.^[6] While undoubtedly a split over irreconcilable differences in political thought, the tensions between the King Center and the IBW’S varying visions for social change might also be examined through the lens of spiritual meaning. As the MLK Center pressed for the IBW to explicitly affirm its commitment to MLK’s earlier philosophy of Gandhian-inspired nonviolent resistance, the IBW’s underlying foundation of (a very broadly defined) Black messianism influenced their refusal to question staff as to their “allegiance or non-allegiance to the philosophy of non-violence.”^[7] As the Governing Council of the Institute of the Black World reported (in response to the King Center’s critiques), “If our work on the Black experience is to be of true significance, it must of necessity encompass all ideologies in the struggle for liberation of black people, whether they be non-violent or violent.”^[8]

Overall, my time at the Rose Library afforded me the opportunity to engage with materials that call for broader discussions of religion, spirituality, and faith-informed politics. Visiting this collection has furthered my analysis of how understandings of the Black Power movement might be reconceptualized while also offering up another set of questions to drive future research for my dissertation.

 

Notes

[1] See: Jacquelyn Dowd, Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” Journal of American History 91 (2005): 1233-1263; Ashley D. Farmer, Remaking Black Power: How Black Women Transformed an Era (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2017); and Peniel E. Joseph, Waiting ‘Til the Midnight Hour: A Narrative History of Black Power in America (New York, NY: Henry Holt and Company, LLC, 2006).

[2] Derrick E. White, The Challenge of Blackness: The Institute of the Black World and Political Activism in the 1970s (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2011), 11.

[3] “Education and Black Struggle: Notes from the Colonized World,” Harvard Education Review 2, 1973, Vincent Harding Papers, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University;“Black World Without End,” The Atlanta Inquirer, August 7, 1971, Vincent Harding Papers, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University.

[4] Vincent Harding, “W.E.B. Du Bois and the black messianic vision,” in John Henrik Clarke, Black Titan: W.E.B. Du Bois (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1970), 52-68. Harding states of Du Bois: “So Du Bois called upon black people to have faith in themselves, in their past, and in a glorious messianic vocation. His peroration— and in spite of himself he was a preacher— included these words: ‘We must be inspired [he wrote] with the divine faith of our black mothers that out of the blood and dust of battle will march a victorious host, a mighty nation, a peculiar people, to speak to the nations of the earth a Divine truth that shall make them free’” (58). 

[5] It is notable here that the degree of influence Harding exerted over the IBW became an issue for other members of the IBW, both before and during the IBW’s “reorganization” — the process of redefining and reorganizing the Institute after its split from the King Center. During the phase of reorganization, women members of the IBW (many of them having come on board in 1971) urged for a formal committee through which to funnel official decision-making processes. This lessened Harding’s control over institutional decisions and (somewhat) addressed IBW women’s critiques of the “conservatism” of the Institute on the issues of “class, sex, religion, life styles in general”; from: White, The Challenge of Blackness, 101; Letter from Sharon Bourke, July 18, 1971, Vincent Harding Papers, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University. On Harding’s beliefs of his own scholarship, his daughter, Rachel E. Harding, writes that her father work “resonate[d] in the DuBoisian tradition of scholarship firmly yoked to social justice activism;” from: Rachel Elizabeth Harding and Rosemarie Freeney Harding, Remnants: A Memoir of Spirit, Activism, and Mothering (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), xv.

[6] White, The Challenge of Blackness, 60-62.

[7] Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Center Report of the Committee Appointed to evaluate the Institute of the Black World, 1970, Vincent Harding Papers, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University.

[8] Institute of the Black World Governing Council Meeting, August 4, 1970, Vincent Harding Papers, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University. It is also important to note here that Vincent Harding himself espoused beliefs, at least early into the freedom movement, of “Christian brotherhood,” nonviolence, and “religiously based reconciliation,” like Martin Luther and Coretta Scott King, from: Harding and Harding, Remnants, 140.