A Reflection Upon The Luminous Darkness
In his book, The Luminous Darkness, Howard Thurman investigates the insidious color line that ran through common places in America, like schools, bathrooms, restaurants, concerts, etc. From his vantage point, he found there to be a constituency of people on the other side of the line that seemed heartily invested in extending a helping hand over the color line so that Black people could survive within the confines of segregation. But, seldom were these people ever willing to walk across the color line and help erase it permanently.
It’s clear that although the people of goodwill wanted to see some sort of advancement for Black people in America, that advancement could not come at the cost of their own convenience.
Thurman referred to this group of Americans as the people of “good will [sic] in the white South,” and he made the observation that the Brown v. Board of Education decision “created a particularly traumatic experience” for them. Ironically, the same people that wanted “improvement of [Black] schools, decent buildings, and adequate salaries for Negro teachers” were disturbed by one of the greatest Civil Rights victories of the century. It’s clear that although the people of goodwill wanted to see some sort of advancement for Black people in America, that advancement could not come at the cost of their own convenience. Thurman also adds that among this constituency “were certain groups within the churches of the South and particularly the Methodist Church, South.” His account of segregation and the contradictory sentiments he saw from sympathetic white Americans, especially those within the Church, prompts the question: how is the Black Christian meant to navigate the ills of a racist American society with their white Christian brothers and sisters whose allyship is conditional and whose convictions about racism are lukewarm?
How is the Black Christian meant to navigate the ills of a racist American society with their white Christian brothers and sisters whose allyship is conditional and whose convictions about racism are lukewarm?
One answer to this question is found in Thurman’s anecdotal experience at an Interracial Commission meeting attended by many people of goodwill. He recounts one Black college president relaying to him that “if [they] do not work with these people, there are no others in the South with whom [they] can work”. One answer can be found in Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” In it, he describes the very same demographic of white Americans that Thurman mentions in his book, only King calls such people the “white moderate.” With his entire letter being a response to a statement made by white clergymen who thought his protest demonstrations were “unwise and untimely,” King not only exposes the “shallow understanding from people of good will [sic],” as Thurman did, but he makes the urgent call for them to “lift [the] national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity”. Choosing to fight for justice with complacent people of goodwill was no longer an option for King. Indeed, he believed that the white moderate posed more of a threat to his cause than “the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner”. And so, King lays out another choice available to the Black Christian when presented with the aforementioned question: hold fast to any and all of your convictions, calling all who can muster the faith to join you.
“We are called to be people of conviction, not conformity; of moral nobility, not social respectability. We are commanded to live differently and according to a higher loyalty.”
