Elizabeth Ellis Miller’s Liturgy of Change: Rhetorics of the Civil Rights Mass Meeting examines a central but understudied rhetorical event of the civil rights movement: the mass meeting at which organizers, citizens, and even civil rights detractors gathered to learn more about civic issues in the local community, engage in rhetorical performance, and determine plans for participating in future acts of resistance. The people who attended mass meetings joined together as one collective body, relying on Black cultural, rhetorical, and spiritual traditions to generate excitement and energy in the meeting space. In reviewing the origins of mass meetings, the rhetorical genres and texts that sprouted from them, and the acts of the everyday people who attended them across different locales in Georgia, Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, and Virginia, Liturgy of Change offers a detailed rhetorical history of how the mass meeting became an influential component of the Black freedom struggle during the mid-twentieth century.To understand the nature of the mass meeting, Liturgy of Change turns first to the role of the Black church in the fight for equality and Black freedom. By focusing on the term liturgy, which includes the order, genres, and practices of a religious service, Miller contends that meeting leaders and participants, highly literate in liturgical forms, integrated its structures into their civic meetings. The book, then, explores how the work happening in mass meetings to create societal change occurred via song, prayer, and testimony, genres known widely in liturgical contexts, which Miller calls faithful genres. Since many of the attendees were familiar with the liturgy of the Black church, mass meetings became public sites where Black people were in control of Black expressive and cultural practices and felt safe to contribute to the events as a collective by putting into use the genres that they knew and understood. Given the sacred-secular continuum of the African American rhetorical tradition as well as the fact that the Black church served during the civil rights movement as the training ground for many Black activists, meeting participants repurposed their religious experiences and expertise not only for the mass meeting but for nonviolent direct-action protest efforts as well.While there have been several studies of the importance of rhetoric during the civil rights movement, Liturgy of Change demonstrates that traditional movement texts and activities such as speeches, marches, and sit-ins were not the only examples of rhetorical action. Working with primary sources such as audio recordings, photographs, memos, programs, posters, memoirs, and interviews, Miller argues that mass meetings were fundamental venues for both the individual and the group rhetorical performances that established the movement’s goals and initiatives. In chapter 1, “Becoming Hopeful: The Civil Rights Mass Meeting as Liturgy of Change,” Miller draws on African American religious history to illustrate how liturgies have been wielded to attain “both individual sanctification and social transformation” (25). The liturgical structure enabled Black churchgoers to engage in rhetorical and literacy practices that not only aligned with their spiritual traditions but also showcased their experiential knowledge and their culture. Once liturgies became staples of the mass meeting, leaders and participants leaned on well-known faithful genres to welcome people who might be hesitant to join the movement and ease their anxieties about the work ahead. In doing this, Liturgy of Change highlights the fact that the adoption of liturgical structures in mass meetings encouraged everyday people to contribute to the movement and challenges top-down approaches to studying and remembering civil rights rhetorical history. Chapter 1, therefore, exemplifies the “each one, reach/teach one” mantra of the African American literacy tradition, in which every person, regardless of educational training or background, was capable of sponsoring or brokering someone else’s journey to acquiring literacy. Accordingly, mass meetings were instrumental not because of the famous or credentialed men who often appeared and spoke at them but because of the diversity of congregants, from women to young people, who decided to attend, participate, lead, and make a difference in their local communities.In chapter 2, “Sounding Civic Identity: Freedom Song Invention at the Mass Meeting,” Miller highlights how the formation and singing of freedom songs created opportunities for Black people to demonstrate their commitment to achieving full citizenship rights. Concentrating on Montgomery, Alabama, Nashville, Tennessee, and Jackson, Mississippi, during the 1950s and 1960s, this chapter details how the construction and performance of freedom songs—a rhetorical genre infused with features from both sacred and secular musical traditions—enabled meeting participants—and Black women in particular—to emerge as civil rights leaders. In singing freedom songs like “Onward Christian Soldiers” and “My Country ’Tis of Thee” that communicated not only biblical principles but also patriotic ideals, Black meeting participants proclaimed their identities as American citizens even as white Americans denied them civic rights and practicing Christians wronged them.A central argument of this chapter is that the act of singing freedom songs was “an interracial, peaceful action and mode of response to racism” (58). Miller points out that many of the Christian hymns and patriotic ballads repurposed as freedom songs were recognizable in both Black and White churches and schools and were used to depict Black Americans as nonviolent unifiers and not threatening agitators. Although Miller claims that achieving unity between Black and White movement participants is a fundamental component of the freedom songs genre since the songs sometimes incorporated sonic choices that were legible to White, mainstream audiences, it is just as crucial to remember that freedom songs belong to Black church and activist traditions, in which, in the midst of the persistent fear of racial terror, the sounds, styles, and experiences of Black Americans were to be preserved, respected, protected, and employed to pursue social change.In chapter 3, “Embodying Peace: Prayer as Reverent Resistance,” Miller maintains that, despite its status as an understudied genre of the Black freedom struggle, prayer has played a notable role in African American rhetorical history. Black rhetoricians—from Frederick Douglass and Maria Stewart in the nineteenth century to James Weldon Johnson, W. E. B. Du Bois, and civil rights workers in the twentieth century—turned to prayer for consolation and guidance and as a way of practicing tranquility in times of racial strife and moments of violence. Like the freedom songs, the prayer genre combined Christian dogma with commentary on the sociopolitical conditions of the United States and afforded more occasions for Black women to serve as movement leaders. Each of these factors situated prayer as “reverent resistance,” since Black rhetoricians depended on the genre to fight back nonviolently with their voices and by asking for divine intervention.The voices of civil rights workers are also centered in chapter 4, “Speaking Truth in Love: Testimony in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and Danville, Virginia.” Here, Miller notes how testimony is a vital storytelling genre in African American rhetoric and was included in the liturgy of the mass meeting because it empowered participants to convey their experiences and announce their willingness to remain involved in the movement. She also insists that the implementation of the testimony genre in the meeting space indicated the Black church’s influence on creating programming for mass meetings as local participants exerted the genre not just for sacred purposes but for secular ones as well. This shift inspired attendees to apply their cultural and rhetorical traditions to speak out against anti-Black racism and generated more chances for Black women and young people to express themselves freely and engage in activism.Even as the testimony genre fashioned situations that allowed people to participate in the movement in very direct and open ways, there were also instances in which participants chose to speak and share their stories privately, perhaps owing to the constant threats of White surveillance, retaliation, and violence. Chapter 5, “Reckoning with White Violence and Resistance: Audience(s) and the Civil Rights Mass Meeting,” describes how meeting attendees prepared for and grappled with dangerous encounters in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, Albany, Georgia, and Selma, Alabama.As public programs, mass meetings often attracted the presence of unsympathetic police officers and White supremacists who wanted to hinder mobilizing efforts aimed at dismantling segregation. Despite this strategy, meeting leaders and participants moved forward with their programs and continued to promote Christian nonviolence. Even as attendees endangered their lives, families, jobs, and communities to appear, contribute, and remain peaceful at mass meetings, and while violence did occur in some instances, Miller argues that, even when the stakes were at their highest, the mass meeting developed into a “pedagogical forum.” This argument is reflected in Miller’s analysis of a 1965 meeting in Selma, when the civil rights leader Reverend Ralph Abernathy instructed the audience to react to White surveillance not with apprehension or hostility but with laughter. Miller’s breakdown of this directive reminds us that methods of resistance varied and that responses considered passive still validated the tactical and rhetorical efficacies of meeting participants and movement activists. As the Black rhetoric scholar Carmen Kynard has theorized, the expectations, beliefs, and behaviors of White people do not dictate the expressions of Black people. Even as White backlash was imminent, Black communicative and pedagogical traditions remained intact.Liturgy of Change concludes by examining the roles of faithful genres and liturgy in contemporary movements for social and racial justice. In this current age of Black Lives Matter protests, many people have attempted to apply the strategies of the civil rights era to the problems of the twenty-first century. Miller addresses this viewpoint in the final chapter of the book, “Conclusion: Faith, Racial Justice, and Rhetorical Activism in the Twenty-First Century,” and outlines three paradoxes for why the methods used during the civil rights movement were not flawless and might not function as well in today’s sociopolitical climate. These shortcomings—which range from power imbalances between movement leaders and local participants to the mistreatment and silencing of women—were not in line with the democratic ideals of freedom and equality that the movement frequently endorsed. Although mass meetings allowed all individuals to contribute in some capacity, Miller questions the civil rights movement’s apparent emphasis on heteronormative Black men as the quintessential representatives of Black America and its lack of a more intersectional focus. On the contrary, she mentions how a Black feminist tradition has influenced the Black Lives Matter Movement to consider a variety of Black experiences and identities as it confronts systems of power, contests state-sanctioned violence, and opposes all forms of anti-Black racism.Liturgy of Change presents a strong case for how religion and the faithful genres advance movements for racial and social justice, making a timely contribution to the fields of rhetorical history and African American rhetoric. For scholars who are interested in the rhetoric of the civil rights movement, this book confirms that the religious institutions and rhetorical and literacy traditions and practices of local Black people sustained the daily grind of movement work, even in tense and perilous times. Readers of Liturgy of Change will not only deepen their knowledge about lesser-known events of the civil rights era but also recognize how these events are part of a much larger African American rhetorical and liturgical tradition that continues to shape and support acts of protest and resistance today.
Brandon M. Erby (Sun,) studied this question.