A great review of my brand new book Martin Luther King: A Religious Life, just published (1 November 2021) by Rowman & Littlefield. This is from Publisher’s Weekly.

 Martin Luther King: A Religious Life

Historian and professor Harvey (The Color of Christ) plumbs the background and writings of Martin Luther King Jr. to provocatively build a religious frame around the civil rights leader’s beliefs and tactics. Delving into the formative intellectual and theological influences on King’s writings and activities, Harvey’s approach is not primarily as a biographer but rather a close reader of the evolution of King’s thought; as Harvey notes, “King’s radicalism had deep roots. The black religious tradition informed him through its history of protest and proclamation.” King’s ways of thinking are considered across his accomplishments and failures in civil rights campaigns including in Montgomery, Selma, and Chicago. Throughout, Harvey stresses King’s unwavering commitment to nonviolence; his political realism, derived in part from his study of Reinhold Niebuhr; and his fundamental economic radicalism. (King first read Karl Marx in 1949 while in seminary.) Harvey also acknowledges King’s “anxiety reduction” practices of drinking and sexual dalliance (which the FBI surveilled obsessively). Importantly, Harvey takes on in an epilogue the “distortions” (or “symbolism [over] substance”) of King’s message in the decades following his 1968 assassination. This careful and of-the-moment examination of King’s fundamentally religious worldview should take a prominent place on the shelf of literature about the man who changed 20th century America. (Nov.)DETAILS

My Professor and My Brother-in-Law:
A Dual Eulogy and Appreciation.

Within the course of 24 hours recently, I learned of two significant deaths, each of which affected me greatly emotionally, but also left me with gratitude for their presence in my life. And they made me think about what unites people across seemingly large divides.  

First, my graduate school mentor, Leon Litwack, passed away at the age of 91, at his home in Berkeley, California. He was surrounded by his beloved books, soon to be part of the storied Bancroft library at the University of California, Berkeley (he had said shortly before that he wished he could take them with him), and Rhoda, his wife since 1952. Leon taught history at UC Berkeley from 1964 to 2010, and changed the course of scholarship in American history through his teaching and publishing. The email informing a group of us of his passing mentioned that towards the end he no longer listened to music – a sure sign that he was ready to go. He loved to quote a line from Robert Palmer’s book Deep Blues: “How much history can be communicated by pressure on a guitar string?”; and once, driving me to some place in Berkeley in the mid-1980s, he told me and another person with us that day of his recently discovered love for country music, to go along with his equal passions for blues, rap, Beethoven, Mahler, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Creedence Clearwater Revival (whom he knew as young aspiring Bay Area rock musicians), and the early U2. For him, once there was no music, there was no life to be had.

The following day, my brother called me to let me know of the passing of our brother-in-law, Carroll McNish, who was 80 years old. He was husband for many years to our older sister Gayle, and was a beloved member of our family. As his daughter put it, “he was my number one fan, and everyone he ever met’s number one fan.” He passed at home in Yukon, Oklahoma, (I know this from Gayle) surrounded by immediate family and two irrepressible border collies and his amazing collection of model cars and memorabilia. His service was just held in Oklahoma City, and the affection of all for Carroll was abundantly evident.

Leon Litwack was a renowned American historian, known all over the world for his books and lecturing; Carroll McNish was by trade a professional and master car mechanic and instructor at a Vo-Tech school, a community college in Oklahoma City, and a General Motors Training School for many years, alongside many other jobs that he held. He was also a person who seemed to be able to fix anything, a rare quality among the men of our family, who generally are hopeless at such things. Well, me, at least.

Leon grew up in Santa Barbara, California, the son of Jewish immigrants, sailed the world as a young man working on ocean liners, and had a lifelong intellectual fascination with the American South and with American folk culture (I often heard him and a few of his colleagues fill out the roster of their fantasy Jewish all-time all-star baseball team, with Sandy Koufax starting on the mound); Carroll grew up in Del City, Oklahoma, and was a fan of automobiles, stock car racing, recreational vehicles, puttering about in the garage, driving my sister to agility trial competitions for her border collies, the Oklahoma State Cowboys, the Oklahoma City Thunder, country music, and, most recently and delightfully strangely, cross-fit competitions.

Carroll’s stories and speech came from the stuff of everyday life. He had a tone of voice in speaking (albeit pitched at a baritone rather than a tenor level) that reminded me of the singer and fellow Oklahoman Vince Gill. Carroll was exactly the kind of person that Leon loved to talk with, in part to understand an American history that he felt had been denied him in his younger years, when “history” consisted of learning about Great Men and their Great Deeds. His career was about rewriting American history with people (good, evil, indifferent, brilliant, humanitarian, sociopathic — whatever their condition was) at the center. And, I suspect, they shared a mutual disdain for various kinds of political hypocrisies.

I know for sure they shared a mutual disgust for laziness and incompetence in their chosen fields of endeavor; ” deadwood” was Leon’s damning epithet for non-productive faculty members who neither published much or taught with the fierce passion that he did, and Carroll had any number of words, printable and otherwise, for people who didn’t know what they were doing but charged you for doing it anyway — the deadwood in his chosen fields of endeavor.

Both were men who radiated humanity, kindness, a well-earned pride in their competence in their work, a sly wit tinged with just a touch of ironic observation of human foibles, and a profound caring for other people, expressed most of the time more through actions than through words. And both were also devoted to their respective crafts; towards the end of his teaching career Leon suffered a stroke while lecturing and insisted on finishing his course that day, much to the horror of his teaching assistants, while Carroll, much to my own father’s warm approbation, was working on something or other, a car repair if I remember correctly, the morning of his marriage to my sister. “That’s a man after my own heart,” my father, a fellow devotee of work and family and caring for others, said of him around that time. Later in his life, Carroll took up a job as a testing proctor for some testing company (the kind that administers the ACTs and SATs and those sorts of standardized exams); Leon, meanwhile, continued teaching after his stroke, still mentally sharp as ever but now with a gravelly voice, his vocal cords never fully able to recover from the damage they had suffered in the stroke. But giving up his teaching post was hard, as he loved teaching and took justifiable pride in his reputation as a master of that craft. Likewise for Carroll, giving up a work routine was difficult, and so he continued working even when he didn’t have to, and despite the pain he suffered from a previous bout with pancreatic cancer and other assorted ills that ravaged him late in his life.

One essential thing that united the two was a love for teaching what they knew well, and a love for students. “Carroll loved teaching, the automotive industry, and especially loved his students,” the program for his funeral says; for Leon, simply substitute the history profession for the automotive industry, and you have the same thing.

I like to imagine what sort of conversation Leon and Carroll would have had, if they had ever met. Perhaps it would have started awkwardly, as both had some innate shyness and liked to repeat stories as a way of making conversation. But once Carroll would have started talking, Leon would have taken an immediate shine to him. Leon had an ear for authentic voices, and he loved listening to the stories of people talking about their lives. It was his great contribution to American history to bring those kind of people to the front and center of history, not because he romanticized them, but because he saw them as what history, ultimately, was all about. It was his calling, he thought, to bring them to the center of history, where they belonged.

Carroll’s soft Oklahoma accent and intonations would have appealed to him, and I can see Leon, clicking into oral historian mode, begin to ask him questions about what Carroll’s life had been like while younger, how he might have experienced the 1960s (everyone knows about Berkeley, but what was happening in Oklahoma City?); and what he had done as a Vo-Tech instructor, and what his favorite makes and years of cars were, and who his favorite country musicians were, and where might be the best barbecue or fried chicken place that he knew of in Oklahoma City.

And Carroll, once he got going on something, enjoyed talking and explaining how a certain piece of machinery worked, or why the cars lined up as they did as they rounded the curve on a race track, or why a certain kind of ethanol mix required in cars meant that the cars didn’t run as well, or why a particular home appliance broke down at the exact moment you needed it — or, most importantly, what his daughter Layne, my niece, had been up to lately (crossfit, it turns out).

Leon loved human speech of that sort, often quoted from it in his lectures, and struck up friendships with people from all walks of life in part because he loved to hear them tell their stories of everyday life that became part of his understanding of American history. His books are full of those stories, woven into masterful narrative interpretations of American social history.

In a way, the two had nothing in common; in another way, they had everything in common, each unerringly kind and supportive of those around them in their own ways, and both a master at communicating what they cared about, what they worked on diligently for many years, and what they wanted us to know about what was really important in life.

I’m happy to announce the publication of Howard Thurman and the Disinherited: A Religious Biography, with Eerdmans’s Press. This is the first modern biography of this absolutely central figure in American religious, racial, and intellectual history, one whose theology and writings provided a direct link to African American traditions of nonviolent resistance.

A small portion of this book was published as “Howard Thurman and the Arc of History in San Francisco,” a couple of years ago, and as Howard Thurman Inspired Martin Luther King’s Philosophy. A review of this book, just prior to publication, can be found here. 

In late 2016, I published two new books: 

**Christianity and Race in the American South: A History

**Bounds of Their Habitation: Race and Religion in American History

Below is a list of recent interviews, podcasts, and lectures based on work from these two books.

The Research on Religion podcast features an interview/podcast focusing on my book Christianity and Race in the American South: A History. The interview is sponsored by the Baylor Institute for for Studies of Religion.

The New Books Network podcast features an interview/podcast focusing on my book Bounds of Their Habitation. The interview is conducted by noted scholar Lilian Calles Barger.

Noted historian Thomas Kidd conducts an interview with me about the book Bounds of Their Habitation here, for the blog The Gospel Coalition.

John Fea’s regular feature “The Author’s Corner” focuses on my book Bounds of Their Habitation.

Noted Yale historian Tisa Wenger reviews Bounds of Their Habitation at the Reading Religion page sponsored by the American Academy of Religion.

A piece discussing my two book published in November 2016 appears here at the Religion in American History blog.

My 2015 lecture at Baylor University, “The Battle for Jesus During the Civil War,” is available here as a video. An article in the Baylor paper discusses the talk.

Recently at my blog Religion in American History, three outstanding scholars published the critiques they delivered of The Color of Christ at the 2013 American Academy of Religion meeting in Baltimore; and at the end of those, co-author Edward J. Blum and I responded. Click here to go first to our response, and then follow the days backward or click below on the links provided for the individual responses.

Response from Kathryn Gin Lum (Stanford University)
Response from Josh Paddison (Wittenberg University)
Response from Jennifer Graber (University Texas)

Professor’s book named outstanding academic title

 by Tom Hutton, reprinted from UCCS Communique

Hoping to see lots of blog friends, readers, and followers at the American Academy of Religion in Baltimore coming up in less than two weeks, for the special “authors meet critics” session on The Color of Christ, to be held Monday, November 25, 9 – 11:30 a.m., in Convention Center 310. The session is co-sponsored by the North American Religious History Section, and the Afro-American Religious History Group. There is a great lineup of respondents, noted below. Hope to see friends there. For those who can’t make it, there’s a great online forum on the book, published here. 

(Crossposted from the Religion in American History blog)

Paul Harvey

Some weeks ago I made quick visit to Augusta, Georgia, to give a lecture and have a public conversation and forum at the Augusta-Richmond County Public Library in downtown Augusta. The evening was moderated by Dr. Jeffery Thomas, pastor of the Trinity CME [Christian Methodist Episcopal] Church, a historic black congregation in the city. It was my first visit to the city.

I’m not going to lie; I wasn’t thrilled with myself for booking this particular venture, especially after I learned the exorbitant plane fare from COS to AGS was going to eat up my honorarium and then some, and after the last year of quite a bit of guest lecturing and seminar-ing all around the country, I was a little tired of plugging a certain book by one Edward J. Blum; but I agreed to do it back in the spring, so there I was driving to the airport at 4:00 a.m. for my 5:50 flight to Atlanta and then Augusta, mostly hoping I would be done with that coming evening’s events in time to retire to my room and watch Game 7 of the NBA finals.

As is surprisingly often the case in life, that which you get dragged into and just barely make after not being able to come up with a decent excuse to miss, turns out to be the thing that you would never have want to missed, one of those gifts life gives you. Many years ago, the single greatest jazz performance I have ever seen, at the late and lamented Koncepts Cultural Gallery in Oakland, came after I had spent two days in bed with an excruciating and blinding migraine, the cure for which was found from an astonishing tuba-piano-sax-drums quartet that tore through the entire history of jazz in a 2 1/2 hour set, the likes of which I have never seen repeated anywhere else.

I won’t say my experience in Augusta rocked my world in quite the same way, but it did result in an evening at the Library and day of visiting religious sites there that I will never forget, and for which I’ll always be grateful.

After arrival, I made my way in my rental car from the hotel towards the downtown area. I had meant to check my map to see where the Augusta National Golf Club (where The Masters is played) was, but had forgotten to do so. Never fear — as I drove on the street that empties into John C. Calhoun Expressway — yes, that John C. Calhoun — the massive green ivy walls protecting the former indigo plantation that is the Master’s course appeared before me. I got in the right lane, looking to see if there was any place to turn in and sneak a peek at any of the famous holes — heck, maybe I could get lucky enough to see one of the most sacred sites of all: Hogan Bridge, in the middle of Amen Corner, leading to the 12th green. But no, a mighty fortress is The Masters, and the ample security in and around the facility is there to make sure loiterers like me don’t hang around long.

I was so busy trying to sneak my way into the course that I missed the entrance to the Expressway and instead continued down Broad Street, which quickly emerged as a lengthy row of dilapidated shotgun houses and abandoned former mill houses and small plants which reminded me of neighborhoods I have driven through in the Mississippi Delta, or some parts of other southern cities. Between The Masters and Broad Street, I was getting a sense of the book-ends of this place, and a little parable of economic inequality in American history and in the American present.

Augusta Confederate Monument

Arriving at the library, I was given a tour of what is a beautiful new facility there, and some time later met the moderator, Jeffery Thomas. He was a native of Augusta, who had gone to college there, went to Claremont in Los Angeles for his Ph.D., and had returned to Augusta to pastor a historic congregation. He was also serving as a Professor of Religion at Paine College, an institution I had researched previously for a portion of chapter two of Freedom’s Coming. We immediately fell into a fascinating conversation about various black congregations in the city, and in particular of the history of his own, Trinity, which emerged from a long relationship with a local (white) Southern Methodist Church.

Dr. Thomas had come prepared with questions for me, and as we began, an audience primarily of local African Americans (many from his congregation, I believe), and a few folks from Georgia Regents University (formerly Augusta State University — including my longtime friend John Hayes) listened as we went back and forth on various questions of religion and race in American history. He was a gracious moderator, but had his own strongly held views on the subject and freely interjected them, which only enlivened the conversation. It became evident that while my favorite word is some variation of “history,” his was “subjectivity,” apropos of his training in the psychology of religion.

Following an abbreviated lecture I gave about “Suffering Saint: Jesus in the South,” the dialogue began. The crowd, as it turned out, featured some very devout folks who were a bit uncomfortable with some of what I had to say, some religious liberals who wanted me to condemn the religious right, some freethinkers who just wanted me to condemn religion period, and some academics who queried me on specific points of my talk as they would do at a conference. At one point, the microphone went to an older woman in the audience, who, in a very kind and friendly but determined fashion, gave me a piece of her mind about various points with which she took issue with me. There was some good-natured laughter after her peroration, and the moderator Dr. Thomas immediately said, “I just thought I should mention, the person who just finished talking is my mother.” I learned after the talk that she had been a schoolteacher in Augusta for many years, and it was evident that she wasn’t going to let some upstart out-of-town professor from someplace dissuade her from her views.

I completed the evening with some book signing (the way to an author’s heart is through a book signing), great conversation with various audience members, and a lengthy catch-up conversation with Nancy Bristow, a professor of History at the University of Puget Sound whom I had gone to graduate school with but hadn’t seen in something like 20 years; she happened, by the most bizarre of coincidences, to be in Augusta for a few days, and had just happened upon a flyer for this lecture. These moments of serendipity were building.

Following the evening at the library, I went with my friend John Hayes (whose book-in-progress may be previewed here in the form of the article “Hard, Hard Religion: The Invisible Institution in the NEw South,” and whose great piece on Johnny Cash graces the new volume Gods of the Mississippi edited by our own Mike Pasquier) and one of his colleagues, walking a few blocks through some desolate streets only to stumble upon a couple of blocks of hipster eateries and the like that would not be out of place in Durham. We shared tapas and great conversation, and agreed to meet up the next day.

John picked me up the next morning and for the next few hours took me around on a rather amazing tour of southern religious history within the space of a couple of miles of Augusta. We started at the oldest (or second oldest, depending on whose history you believe) black Baptist church in the country, the Springfield Baptist Church, home after the Civil War to the Rev. William Jefferson White (a personal hero of mine) and to a school in the basement which eventually became Morehouse College (now, of course, in Atlanta). It’s always kind of amazing when places you have written about extensively but have never seen suddenly appear before you. Out of Springfield, as well, emerged several other early black Baptist churches in the area, a couple of which we drove by later in the morning.

From there we drove from the riverwalk to some of the downtown streets, and before long we were looking at the Augusta Confederate Memorial, which competes with those of Richmond for Lost Cause sentimentality. Its inscription reads (in part):

For the honor of Georgia

For the rights of the States

For the liberties of the South

For the principles of the Union, as these were handed down to them

By the fathers of our common Country.

We then made our way to the original church building where the Southern Baptist Convention was established in 1845 — and if you know anything about my scholarship, you will recognize that’s a site I should have (but haven’t) seen a long time ago. The building remains fairly simple and beautiful, but is abandoned, the Baptist church there long since having fled for the suburbs (I gather it is rented out periodically for other events, but not regularly used). If I’m not mistaken it’s own by a Baptist Historical Society (or Foundation, or something — maybe someone can give me the details), but besides the historical marker there, one would simply mistake it for another of Augusta’s downtown abandoned buildings. Nearby, I should add, is James Brown Boulevard, and the Jessye Norman Center for the Performing Arts, both of these luminaries being raised in the city. (Brown’s family moved there from South Carolina when he was four).

 From there, we toured a beautiful and evidently very thriving Catholic church just caddy-corner from the former Baptist church (which featured, I’m happy to report, a plethora of white Jesus images), and then on to the Reverend C. T. Walker’s historic Tabernacle Baptist Church, getting towards the black neighborhood of the downtown area. But even more exciting (because unexpected) for me was the huge and architecturally fascinating United House of Prayer for All People (of “Daddy Grace” fame) church building, a structure with New York Public Library Lions on the outside guarding it, a paint scheme which might have come from a Moorish Science Temple, and a stone modernist exterior that gave it an imposing feel. I was dying to look inside — but alas, it was locked.

site of founding of Southern Baptist Convention, 1845

For the remainder of the morning we drove around Paine College (the black Methodist college in town where some folks who appeared in my book Freedom’s Coming taught), the old mill village just a bit away from downtown, and some Holiness-Pentecostal congregations in the area. We saw the congregation that met in a church that in the late 19th century had literally been “rolled down the hill” for the villagers, a story recounted in the late and lamented young scholar Julia Walsh’s article “Rolling Religion Down the Hill.,” about religion and working-class politics in Augusta around the turn of the 19th/20th century. (I still miss Julia terribly).

We then had organic and locally-sourced burgers at a very popular downtown spot, where the local congressman was working the crowd. I found my way back to the airport and back to Colorado Springs, happy and even exhilarated both by the lively conversation at the library, my meeting up with friends old and new, and by a feast of religious history within the spans of a few blocks of the downtown.

I was a bit tardy in writing a note of thanks to the library, but finally having done so, I got this message back in response: “By the way, I heard today that our facilitator for the evening, Rev. Dr. Jeffery Thomas . . .  died yesterday.  He felt rather ill on Sunday…and died on Monday.  That’s all I know…” 

He was, I have since learned, 49, 3 years younger than me. One of the last things he said to me concerned my picture of a black Jesus from the black Miami street artist Purvis Young, which appears in my book Moses, Jesus, and the Trickster in the Evangelical South. I had indicated that Young had passed from the scene just at the time of the flowering (and increasing value of) the work of self-taught artists, and that he had thus not enjoyed the true fruits from his labor. Dr. Thomas said, “but he was, actually, a wealthy man; it shows in the spirit of his work.” We agreed to stay in touch as I went back to work on my book-in-progress Trouble the Waters: Religion in the South from Jamestown to Katrina. Shortly thereafter, we shook hands and bid each other well and farewell. That could be the last time, maybe, I don’t know.