1954–1986

The Civil Rights Movement and the rise of black theology

The Baptist pastor Martin Luther King Jr. led the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 after Rosa Parks's arrest. He applied Gandhian nonviolence to the civil rights struggle. In August 1963 he delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech at the March on Washington. It helped secure the Civil Rights Act (1964) and the Voting Rights Act (1965). King was assassinated in Memphis in 1968.

The movement revived interest in African American religious tradition. Partly under the renewed influence of Bonhoeffer, it gave rise to black theology. Joseph Washington (1964) was the first, though critically, to describe black religion as a distinct phenomenon.

After the "Black Manifesto" (1969) came James Cone. In "Black Theology and Black Power" (1969) and "A Black Theology of Liberation" (1970) he proclaimed God and Christ "black." He made the liberation of the oppressed the essence of the gospel. Later he was criticized for his dependence on "white" concepts, especially Barth's. Answering this criticism, Cone turned more deeply to black history and culture as a source for theology.