Reinhold Niebuhr And The Civil Rights Movement

Reinhold Niebuhr was a Civil Rights ethicist. From Brown vs. Board of Education in 1954 to late 1968, Niebuhr published articles and editorials, and held public conversations interpreting the Civil Rights Movement’s ongoing actions to abolish juridical segregation and anti-black discrimination. As with the movement itself, these writings and discourses exhibit moments of optimism, celebration, misfire, disappointment, and reassessment. Niebuhr engages in what might called moral publicity, reflecting on many of the landmark and tragic events in ethical and political terms, including the Supreme Court’s rulings, desegregation resistances, bus boycotts, the March on Washington, the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, the Freedom …show more content…
Niebuhr scholars, for the most part, in the later years of Niebuhr’s life, have looked to other areas of his authorship in their assessments of his thought and ethics, with some exceptions. During Niebuhr’s later years, he is often read in relation to his role in international politics and especially in influencing Cold War policy. If the connection is made between Niebuhr and Civil Rights, it usually is mediated by his relationship to and influence on Martin Luther King Jr. While there are important lines to draw between King and Niebuhr in terms of strategy, theology, and politics, as this scholarship has shown, this emphasis also tends to cloud the fact that Niebuhr’s theological role in the Civil Rights Movement is not exhausted by tracing his influence on King and other organizers and leaders who valued his writings in one way or another. Niebuhr lived and wrote through the entirety of this period, producing a significant amount of public moral reflection which should be appraised on its own right, in addition to its connection with the question of