Kerry Pimblott. Faith in Black Power

In much of the early historiography of the civil rights movement, Black Power got the short end of the stick, being portrayed as the violent little brother that emerged from the shadow of its elder sibling—nonviolent resistance—and shamed the civil rights family toward the end of the 1960s. The tone on Black Power has shifted considerably in the past decade plus, with a number of scholars re-representing the movement as a natural evolution of demands and tactics. What historian Kerry Pimblott sets out to do in Faith in Black Power: Religion, Race, and Resistance in Cairo, Illinois, is to further complicate this sibling relationship by highlighting the role of organized religion—often the centerpiece in civil rights portrayals—within the usually secular Black Power movement. Pimblott tells the story of the Cairo United Front, a grassroots organizing effort that combined Black Power ideology with faith-based organizing to advance social change for African Americans in Cairo, Illinois, from 1969 to 1974. Whereas most Black Power organizations either “cast aside the Christian underpinnings of earlier civil rights campaigns in favor of greater tactical flexibility,” were little interested in salvation when more immediate revolutionary needs were at hand, or rejected Christianity outright as the white man’s religion, the United Front, Pimblott asserts, employed a “reconstructed and relevant black theology centered on the black experience and committed to black liberation” (3, 1). Pimblott argues that the case of the United Front and Cairo is evidence of the continued centrality of the black church even as many civil rights activists adopted a more strident ideology of Black Power, and that the church was in fact central to “a coherent movement culture” (7).

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