A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow. By David L. Chappell. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Pp. 344. $34.95, cloth.

Chappell's work already has received wide recognition in the scholarly and more generally intellectual press, garnering extended praise by Benjamin Schwarz in The Atlantic Monthly and Jonathan Rieder in the New York Times Book Review. Indeed, the initial reception was enough to provoke a dyspeptic counter-review by a very irritated David Garrow (a master of that genre) for the Washington Post Book World.

In short, this is not "just another civil rights book"; it's something of an event, and one sure to provide fodder for continued discussion and (one hopes) fruitful dialogue. Every reader of this journal should read this book; agree with it or not, the work is well-researched and written with originality and verve. The very extended and opinionated bibliographic essay alone is worth the price of admission, plus one gets the bonus of an extended intellectual tour into Chappell's extended dialogues with other scholars in the field (see Chappell's recounting of his debate with Ralph Luker, for example, on p. 308, in which Chappell explains why he is not persuaded that Personalism was particularly important in the development of King's thought. That is one of many entertaining and abundantly documented scholarly digressions, relegated to a portion of the book where fellow scholars will enjoy the internecine debates while general readers may safely ignore them).

Chappell is well-known already for his provocative study Inside Agitators: White Southerners in the Civil Rights Movement, published in 1994. Like that work, A Stone of Hope is contrarian, counter-intuitive, and on occasion downright cranky (my favorite example of the latter: in discussing intellectual influences on King, Chappell writes "It is no more useful to say that King was shaped by the black church than to say that he breathed air or was a Georgian. What sets him off from the black church is what makes him significant" [54]--an exaggeration that sets off Chappell's point about the deep influence of Niebuhr on King. But clearly, Chappell is not afraid to pick a fight!).

Chappell aims for nothing less than to explain why the civil rights movement succeeded. His argument, to cut to the chase: "The civil rights movement succeeded for many reasons. This book isolates and magnifies one reason that has received insufficient attention: black southern activists got strength from old-time religion, and white supremacists failed, at the same moment, to muster the cultural strength that conservatives traditionally get from religion." Chappell continues: "Who succeeded in the great cultural battle over race and rights in the 1950s and early 1960s? those who could use religion to inspire solidarity and self-sacrificial devotion to their cause. Who did not have such religious power? Two groups: those who failed--the segregationists--and those who succeeded only by attaching themselves to the religious protestors--the liberals" (8). In short, Chappell aims to explain not only the failure of segregationism, but also the relative weakness of mid-century mainstream liberalism, of the kind represented by Gunnar Myrdal and Arthur Schlesinger. The liberals, as it turns out, lacked the basis in prophetic religion--that is, the profoundly pessimistic take on human nature emanating from the Old Testament prophets, who nevertheless could hew a stone of hope from a mountain of despair. Chappell is quick to point out that "prophetic religion" doesn't have to be religious per se -- e.g.. the French existentialist Albert Camus, who emerges as a central figure in shaping civil rights activists such as Bob Moses, just as much as Reinhold Neibuhr was for cutting the teeth of the young Martin Luther King Jr. while in seminary (by contrast, Chappell is dismissive of the alleged influence of the "Boston Personalists" on King, pointing out that the Personalists graded him every semester, hence his frequent citing of them in footnotes in his papers, while Niebuhr did not, hence the fresh and distinctly non-plagiarized writing King produced on Niebuhr as a thinker).

Chappell portrays the movement's "nonviolent soldiers" as "driven not by modern liberal faith in human reason," but instead from a "prophetic tradition that runs from David and Isaiah in the Old Testament through Augustine and Martin Luther to Reinhold Niebuhr in the twentieth century." The prophetic tradition held that the "natural tendency of this world and of human institutions (including churches) is toward corruption. Like the Hebrew Prophets, these thinkers believed that they could not expect that world and those institutions to improve. . . They had to stand apart from society and insult it with skepticism about its pretensions to justice and truth." This prophetic view was the idea that made the civil rights movement move. By contrast, the liberal belief in the "power of human reason to overcome 'prejudice' and other vestiges of a superstitious unenlightened past" was weak and ineffectual once detached from the Prophetic power of the movement. (2-3). Thus, the "alliance between black Christian civil rights groups and American liberals was more an alliance of convenience than one of deep ideological affinity"; the former departed "from modern liberal faith in the future--from the Humanism that had been rising in Western culture, with occasional setbacks, since the Renaissance"--while the latter represented the culmination of that very trend (4).

Chappell also wants to understand why an undermanned and outgunned minority managed to topple a generations-old system designed to subjugate them at every turn. Segregation's destruction, he writes, "appears a feat of moral and political alchemy," made even more remarkable by the relatively few casualties taken during the battle (more South African freedom fighters were slaughtered at Sharpeville in one day in 1960 than in the entire civil rights struggle). Part of the reason, he suggests, is the relative weakness of the segregationists. They certainly appeared to be strong, but in fact they were fatally divided and ultimately weak in ways not unlike midcentury liberals; both lacked "a basis for solidarity and self-sacrifice" (188). Chappell analogizes pro-segregationists to proslavery thinkers a century before, and finds the latter produced an extraordinarily coherent and persuasive mode of thought in comparison to the weak and incoherent attempts of segregationists to dredge up obscure Scriptures and hoary Son of Ham tales to support their views: "Compared to the thorough, confident support that slaveowners received from their leading theologians and other cultural authorities a century earlier, the segregationists look disorganized and superficial" (8). Chappell devotes three chapters to analyzing segregationist thought, and at every turn pronounces segregationist religious thinking to be so obviously silly as to be embarrassing to serious opinion makers such as James J. Kilpatrick. Thus, religion did not provide a unifying force for any anti-civil rights movement, leaving a gaping hole in the Jim Crow South's defensive line that those on the offensive exploited beautifully.

Full disclosure: I have spent several years quarrelling on email with Chappell about his interpretation of segregationist theology; and, for a strongly argued counter-view, see Jane Dailey's piece "Sex, Segregation, and the Sacred" in the June issue of the Journal of American History. At the risk of self-promotion, I would also point to the contrasting (but not entirely contradictory) view presented in chapter five of my forthcoming work Freedom's Coming: How Religious Culture Shaped the South from Civil War Through Civil Rights (University of North Carolina Press). (The reviewers for the popular press appear to believe that Chappell is the one and only writer who has taken up the topic of the religious basis for segregationism, a frequently cited point that annoys me to no end. Helpfully, Chappell's bibliographic essay provides four pages of extended discussion on his arguments and disagreements with other scholars, present reviewer included, on segregationist thought). In brief, I believe that Chappell's focus on segregationist thought focuses too much on a relatively few ministers, who did in fact produce some pretty idiotic tracts, and not enough on the pervasiveness of the white southern obsession with "purity," which ultimately drew from deep religious roots. This makes the triumph of the movement more, rather than less, remarkable, and thus ultimately buttresses the argument of the first half of this book better than Chappell himself does.

In a brief epilogue, a "philosophical note of historical explanation," Chappell comes close to disowning his whole approach, pronouncing himself leaning "further in the direction of materialism and economic determinism" than average; for him, "material forces are prime movers in human history and prime limiters of human motivation. That may still be the most important single idea to keep in mind about human society" (193). If so, it makes one wonder why Chappell did not focus precisely on the interaction of these material forces and the intellectual history he relates in this book. For example, to raise the analogy pointed to above, proslavery ideology obviously had a profound attachment to "material forces"--like, oh, say, the "entire fabric of southern society," to quote Thaddeus Stevens, or the "cornerstone" of southern society, as so well expressed by the Vice-Presidency of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens--that segregationism clearly lacked. White economic control was not obviously dependent on whether Rosa Parks could or could not sit in a particular seat, and white business owners recognized that fact (as did black civil rights leaders, who brilliantly deployed consumerist actions such as boycotts to pressure the white business establishment to dissociate themselves from demagogic politicians). Moreover, the mechanization of southern agriculture made particular forms of control over black labor, notorious in the South since the slave patrols and the Black Codes, less immediately important (though someone forgot to tell that to the chicken factory owners in North Carolina where just over a decade ago 25 mostly black women were burned to death when they could not escape the conflagration because of the locked doors).

This is one book I looked forward with gusto to reviewing, precisely because it is so much fun to think hard about Chappell's deeply personal and engaging take on the ideas that made the movement move. I commend A Stone of Hope to everyone's reading list. It will surprise you at every turn, likely irritate at points, but ultimately leave you with a fresh and invigorating perspective on the most important social movement of twentieth-century American history. Chappell is to be congratulated for producing one of the most interesting books of the new millennium.

Paul Harvey, University of Colorado