23 A Stone of Hope

I noticed a mention in the Wall Street Journal of "A stone of hope; prophetic religion and the death of Jim Crow" by David Chappell about a week ago.

"In his famous "I Have a Dream" speech at the Lincoln Memorial, Washington, D.C., in 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. said that he was going back to the South with faith that his people could hew "a stone of hope" from "a mountain of despair." That image captures the philosophy of the civil rights movement. The faith that drove black southern protesters to their extraordinary victories in the mid-1960s, this book argues, grew out of a realistic understanding of the typically dim prospects for social justice in this world. Despair was the mountain. Hope was by comparison small, hard to come by. "Freedom isn't free," one of the movement's songs observed: "You gotta pay a price, you gotta sacrifice, for your liberty." In another one of his 1963 speeches King said that the jailed black children of Birmingham were "carving a tunnel of hope through the mountain of despair." "
Introduction to Stone of Hope

The author explains why white liberals were completely ineffective in overthrowing Jim Crow--they had no sustaining religious faith that the black activists had in abundance.

Another reviewer at LA Times, Jim Sleeper is also worth looking at.