secrets of the civil rights movement

Pablo F. del Real -

Students of Movements and Social Prayer

It’s spring again.

  • Last Thursday, April 3, the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute saw its projected funding in the State of Alabama draft budget for the next fiscal year: $0. In 2024, the state funded the institute at $100,000.
  • April 3 is the day in 1963 when Project C began in Birmingham, a turning point in American history and the epitome of one secret of the Civil Rights Movement.
  • And just yesterday, April 5, protesters gathered nationwide under the banner of Hands Off, “voicing opposition” to the policies of the executive branch of the U.S. government.

Last month, Zen Peacemakers invited me to give a presentation, thanks to friend and colleague Francisco PacoGenkoji Lugoviña. It was called Secrets of the Civil Rights Movement. I made the presentation on March 19, in anticipation of Zen Peacemakers annual Racism In America retreat, scheduled for April 24-28 this year.

I have been a student of the movement for 17 years. It’s been a guiding light for me ever since I learned, in November of 2007, that much of it was rooted in love of god.

Children and teens hold signs during the Birmingham Campaign of 1963.

Children and teens hold signs during the Birmingham Campaign of 1963.

In the 1930s and 1940s, forerunners of the Civil Rights Movement had been studying the secrets of a powerful and peaceful uprising rooted in love and liberation halfway around the world: the Indian independence movement.

Across three decades, serious lovers of god made pilgrimages to meet with the leaders and the people of Indian Independence:

The interest was not new. A Black-Indian alliance sprang up in the early 1900s among freedom fighters who “saw, in their respective conflicts, a common oppression: white-supremacist colonialism, manifested in the United States by Jim Crow and in India by the British Raj.”

United by this common struggle, figures like W.E.B. Du Bois, Lala Lajpat Rai, Marcus Garvey, Jawaharlal Nehru, and many others spent decades cultivating and advancing a radical notion of transnational unity between “colored people.” Together they created a powerful intellectual force that significantly shaped their respective successful struggles for freedom.

(“The History of the Black-Indian Alliance” by Rohit Tallapragada in Georgetown Journal of Law and Modern Critical Race Perspectives)

That is secret number one in this essay: study effective movements – be students of movements – learning directly from and with members of those movements whenever possible. Predecessors and organizers of the Civil Rights Movement, that’s what they did. They studied and shared the secrets of the Indian independence movement.

Students studying nonviolence at Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, Birmingham, spring 1963.

There are many secrets to the Civil Rights Movement. I have yet to see a comprehensive treatment of all the secrets. I certainly have not understood or gathered all of them myself. My focus has been on a particular vein of the movement: the spiritual campaigns. And that brings our attention back to Birmingham, Alabama.

No history of spiritual campaigns of the Civil Rights Movement would be complete without Project C, the codename of the Birmingham Campaign in the spring of 1963. (By the way, it was not until 2023, 60 years later, that a book devoted to this campaign was published as a standalone volume: You Have To Be Prepared To Die Before You Can Begin To Live: Ten Weeks in Birmingham That Changed America, by Paul Kix.)

The Birmingham campaign perfected what I call social prayer. That’s secret number two in this essay.

Do love of god and prayer seem insufficient to this moment and our challenges? Love and nonviolence seemed insufficient to overcome Jim Crow and the British Raj. Yet they won. Hear me out for a moment.

True prayer engages god (or source, or lifeforce, or whatever term you prefer), and there are five types of prayer:

  1. individual prayer
  2. group prayer
  3. private prayer
  4. public prayer
  5. social prayer

Of course there are many forms and modalities of prayer – meditation, prostration, chanting, petition, etc. But here we are talking about the types of prayer, not the modes or forms prayer takes.

  • Individual prayer is done alone; group prayer is done with others.
  • Individual and group prayer, for the most part, are done in private places – homes and places of worship.
  • Public prayer is incorporated into select public functions – city commission meetings, inaugurations, etc. – and public prayer is ritualistic, predictable, and uncontroversial.

Social prayer is different.

Fred Shuttlesworth leads a social prayer in Birmingham, Alabama, spring 1963.

Social prayer addresses injustice by engaging God, neighbor, and oppressor. Look at what members of the Birmingham campaign did with their marches and their sit-ins. These were social prayers, entreating God to address the injustice of racial segregation. They walked and sat, often in places where they were unwanted or prohibited from being. They called (often in silence) upon the conscience of God – living and breathing human beings – to see them and hear their silent prayer, the prayer of their bodies, their social prayer.

Despite a ban on marches, organizers of the movement marched on, risking arrest.
The so-called children’s crusade was controversial yet gave children a role in the struggle.
Children also went to Birmingham jail.

To be sure, there are other approaches to overcoming structural racism: the legal approach, the political approach, the economic approach. They have their merit. But for someone who aspires to love god and/or love neighbor as self AND not cooperate with unjust systems, well, I think the only choice is the spiritual approach.

Compartmentalizing is really not possible for people who choose to love god. If god is always present, then I always have an opportunity to love god, everywhere, all the time. Not only do I have an opportunity. Maybe I have an obligation. …

For the record, I should say that to my mind prayer and mindfulness are synonyms. So we could also say that social mindfulness is a secret of the Civil Rights Movement. More about that later, god willing.

Bringing our attention back to the present moment, here and now: Are the Hands Off protests social prayers? I have not seen them promoted as such. But I was not there. I drove by one by accident, in downtown Lake Worth Beach. It did not seem to have an aura of prayer, but I could have missed it.

And what is the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute going to do about its potential budget shortfall? I don’t know. But I do know they have studied the movement that climaxed in their city. May they continue to study the riches of that movement. And may they lead a social prayer.

Happy spring, again.