Jack Minnis was the creator and director of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s research department. He was a “crusty older white guy,” in the words of one of his SNCC comrades, “who smoked like a fiend, looked generally unkempt, and could get research from a turnip.” He was also a highly sought after lawyer, especially by D.C. think tanks, but he had chosen SNCC. Jack ran with ideas when they came up: one day when a fellow SNCC worker was pouring out some thoughts, Jack stopped him cold. He started “bellowing to various staff members that he wanted to have an executive meeting right then at that time and got up from his desk and gave me a hug that came close to breaking my back,” because apparently something in the flow of thoughts had struck Jack as brilliant. If research departments were the kinds of things that became legendary, SNCC’s research department would have had a legendary status. As Minnis recalled, “we had a research department either the DNC or RNC would have been proud of.” It was through that department that essential information was channeled to SNCC workers in the field, allowing them to be highly effective community organizers.
Part of Jack’s work was uncovering the stakeholders in the power structures that opposed SNCC’s civil rights work. For example, if plantation owners mobilized their local political power against a SNCC campaign, Jack Minnis would track down which corporations or major stockholders across the country had financial interests in the plantation. The majority stockholder of one plantation, he discovered, was the Queen of England, but more typically it would be a major U.S. corporation that didn’t want to be seen as supporting segregationist efforts. Such information was effectively leveraged by SNCC to put outside political and financial pressure on the Southern power structure at war with the civil rights movement.
Another task of the department led by Jack was researching the local legal systems of the counties and cities SNCC worked in. As Stokely Carmichael recalls, “I asked Jack Minnis to check out the laws on independent parties in Alabama . . . In less than a week he called back.” Based on an obscure Reconstruction-era law Jack discovered, Stokely initiated an independent Black political party in the primarily Black Lowndes Country. The Lowndes County Freedom Party began running Black candidates for everything from the sheriff to school board members. It was one of the major moments in the trajectory towards Black Power.
Jack’s example also impacted SNCC workers in other ways. As Bruce Hartford recalled, “Jack had the facts and he [laid] them out for all to see, and that did more to radicalize me than any fiery speech.” SNCC worker Judy Richardson – who later produced Eyes on the Prize – recalled being impacted by the way Jack organized his research in such a detailed yet concise fashion: his example helped her organize material for her famous documentary… as well some of her own research about police brutality in New York City.
After SNCC became an all-Black organization, the “crusty older white guy” retreated to a wooded cabin with other White SNCC comrades, finished off a bottle of Jack Daniels, and felt sad, but not bitter. And then SNCC called him. He couldn’t be on staff anymore, but they needed his research skills. So did groups like GROW, which had been founded by White SNCC workers to organize White southerners for racial and economic justice. Jack Minnis got back to work.
In the early fifties, Guy Carawan was an aspiring folk musician, inspired both by Southern folk music and songs from the labor movement. He visited the Highlander Folk Center for the first time in 1953. Located in the Appalachian Mountains of Tennessee, Highlander had been a training ground for labor organizing since the early days of the Great Depression. By the time Carawan arrived, the center was beginning to focus on civil rights organizing as well: it was one of the few integrated Southern spaces where such trainings occurred. In 1959, Guy returned to Highlander to lead the music program there and continue the legacy of Zilphia Horton, who had collected movement music from across the South and used it to support movement organizers. In Carawan’s words, “My job would be to help get people singing and sharing their songs. When someone began to sing, I’d back them up softly on my guitar so they’d get courage and keep going. Sometimes in sharing a song, people find bonds between themselves that they never knew they had.”
In 1960, Highlander hosted a workshop for the sit-in students. Guy Carawan introduced the students to a union organizing song that was an adaptation of a Black spiritual: “We Shall Overcome.” As one of Martin Luther King’s chief organizers C.T. Vivian remembers, “I don’t think we had ever thought of spirituals as movement material. When the movement came up, we couldn’t apply them.” Guy inspired C.T. Vivian, as well as the sit-in students, to “take the music out of our past and apply it to the new situation, to change it so it really fit . . . The first time I remember any change in our songs was when Guy came down from Highlander.” Once the sit-in students heard spirituals adapted for a movement context (as had been done earlier in labor movement songs), they ran with it, and adaptions flourished within the movement. Guy Carawan always emphasized that in his music workshops, the students had discovered a concept, originally developed by Black labor organizers. He hadn’t created it. But by working at Highlander, with it’s commitment to fusing labor and civil rights struggles as well as to building movement culture, Guy helped facilitate the transmission of the concept into the civil rights movement.
At Highlander, Guy met the woman who became the love of his life. Candie was a young White woman, who had been arrested during the Nashville sit-ins. While in the segregated jails, Candie recalled that “The only connection we had with the others was the music.” Whether at sit-ins or marches or in jail, the music served both to unite the people as a group, and to fortify the spirit. Experiencing this gave Candie a profound appreciation for the power of song. Guy and Candie soon married, and together the Carawans traversed the South throughout the 60s, hosting workshops and bringing the music of the movement to as many communities as possible. Their workshops also supported people in the movement in creating their own music to meet their own organizing needs.
For decades, the Carawans worked to record and preserve the music that had come out of the civil rights and other social justice movements. Guy continued to be the musical director of Highlander for 30 years. He passed away in 2015. Candie continues her culture-building movement work with Highlander to this very day.
Born in the 1890’s, Grace and Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin were raised by a resentful father from a once prominent slave-holding family. After the Civil War, the Confederate veteran joined the original Ku Klux Klan. As children, the sisters witnessed their father mercilessly beating the family’s Black servants. Although they were raised in an atmosphere of hardcore White supremacy, it was the awful witnessing of their father’s violence that led the sisters to have their first doubts about racial injustice.
After high school, the sisters attended an all-women’s college in Georgia. Although they were in the Deep South during the height of Jim Crow, it was also the Progressive Era: labor and women’s rights were much discussed, as was education reform, often through the lens of a Progressive Christianity. As has been true for other White southern women like Anne Braden, having the opportunity to attend college – and especially a women’s college – became the first opportunity for the Lumpkin sisters to be exposed to different ideas than those they were raised with.
When Katharine joined the Young Women’s Christian Association, she was shocked to hear that a Black woman was going to address the group. Afterwards, however, she realized that “the heavens had not fallen, nor the earth parted asunder to swallow us up in this unheard of transgression”. She began to question the racial beliefs she was raised with, and made further experiments with crossing the color line. Each time she did, not only did it not feel wrong… it felt right. She soon joined efforts to desegregate the YWCA. Inspired by her own discovery, she worked to create spaces for interracial contact within the YWCA – such as interracial study groups and conferences – with the hope that other White women would have the same experience she had. Many of them did: and because they had supportive community through the YWCA, these women were not faced with the severe isolation some other White dissenters from segregation faced. This allowed them to stay in the work of challenging segregation, even though it was the 1920s and the Klan was at the height of its powers.
Grace, meanwhile, joined picket lines, and was arrested at a protest supporting the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti. She published a piece in a Black newspaper titled “Why I as a White Southern Woman Will Vote Communist.” Soon, she grew into a literary star of the Left. In 1929 she worked with the Communist Party to organize Black sharecroppers in the South. Grace, however, grew deeply disillusioned with Communism after experiencing harsh party discipline and threats meant to keep her in line. She became an FBI informant to help take the Party down. Grace’s backlash against Communism – which supported racial justice – may have been what led her to reverse her racial beliefs as well: during the civil rights movement, the woman who once fought for Black sharecroppers now supported segregation.
While Grace was diving deeper into radical labor movements, Katharine studied sociology in Northern universities, which continued her antiracist trajectory. As she recalled, “Until now, it came over me, I had never studied the South. I had never ‘gone to the sources,’ ‘checked facts against hearsay,’ sorted out ‘unbiased from biased history’ . . . I began to doubt my own characterizations.” In her memoir, “The Making of a Southerner,” Katharine describes her process of breaking away from her upbringing… and uses as source material her family’s own slave inventories and Klan records. By showing how far she had moved from her roots, she hoped to model the possibility for others. During the civil rights movement, as a sociology professor Katharine taught a class contextualizing and analyzing the events unfolding before the eyes of the students. When Stokely Carmichael initiated the Black Power movement in the late 60s, she wrote to him expressing her support.
Born in 1816, Frances Titus was a young woman during the era when abolitionism was growing into a major movement… and as a member of an antislavery Quaker community, she was in the thick of it. In 1856 she met Sojourner Truth at an antislavery Quaker gathering. Truth, who had escaped enslavement decades earlier, traveled the country speaking of the evils of slavery and the necessity of abolition, as well as of women’s rights. Frances Titus began supporting Sojourner Truth’s travels however she could, including securing housing for her children and grandchildren while Truth traveled.
After the Civil War, Truth and Titus worked closely together to secure land, employment, and education for former slaves. While Truth focused much of her efforts on securing land for former slaves in the expansive American West, Titus focused on local resettlement efforts, especially in Battle Creek, Michigan, where she leveraged her connections to wealthy White communities and founded a school for former slaves in the old city hall building. During Sojourner Truth’s old age, Frances Titus helped her revise her autobiography, and travelled with her on speaking tours serving as her business manger and personal secretary. When Truth fell ill in her old age, Titus tended to her and handled her correspondence.
Born in 1932, Fay Stender was raised in Berkeley in a middle-class Jewish household, by parents who dreamed of her being a concert pianist. At age 14 she was playing for the San Francisco Symphony: but it wasn’t the life Fay wanted. She studied literature in college in the 1950s, where she witnessed professors being redbaited and fired. Witnessing the antidemocratic McCarthy era as a student led her to conclude that the stories she had been taught in school about American freedom and justice were falsehoods. She became radicalized, changed her major to law, and graduated with a law degree from the University of Chicago. While studying there, she set an intention to walk regularly through the segregated slums of Chicago on the outskirts of the university, in order to expose herself to realities her otherwise privileged life prevented her from being aware of.
After college she returned to the Bay Area. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee had entered its Black Power phase, and Fay began doing legal work for them. Then, when Black Panther Party cofounder Huey Newton was accused of murdering a police officer in 1967, Fay became his lawyer. She played a major role in overturning his conviction. In the run-up to the trial, Fay visited Huey regularly in prison, and Huey told her about another member of the BPP who had been charged with killing a prison guard at Soledad Prison. That was George Jackson, who was being held in solitary confinement due to his ability to organize and revolutionize other prisoners. When Fay first visited him, she was shocked by the conditions and the dehumanization she witnessed there: she, as a Jew, called Soledad “America’s Dachau,” referring to the Nazi death camp originally constructed to hold political prisoners. Fay and George Jackson began a correspondence. Soon afterwards, she arranged for Jackson’s prison letters to be published as Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson, and recruited the French literary giant, radical, and Black Panther supporter Jean Genet to write the introduction. The book became a phenomenon and skyrocketed George Jackson to fame.
It wasn’t only George Jackson who leaped into celebrityhood: so did Fay Stender. Thousands of prisoners now asked for her representation, leading her to found the Prison Law Project. During this time, however, her relationship with George deteriorated when she refused to help him break out of prison. She abandoned his case in 1971. Six months later, he attempted an escape and was killed. In the anger over George Jackson’s death, many of his supporters came to see Fay as a traitor. Feeling like her work advocating for prisoner’s rights now put her in danger, she closed the Prison Law Project and refocused her legal work on women’s rights. Then, in 1979, a man who believed she had betrayed George Jackson broke into her house, tied up her family, and forced her to write the following words as he held a gun to her head: “I, Fay Stender, admit I betrayed George Jackson and the Prison Movement when they needed me most.” He then shot her six times in the form of a cross through her body, although the bullet aimed at her head only grazed her skull. Fay survived, although she was paralyzed from the waist down. Fearing further attempts on her life, she fled to Hong Kong, where she took her own life a year later.
Dottie Zellner grew up in an immigrant Jewish household in New York City. As she recalls, “I had grown up with the heroic stories of resistance to fascism, particularly of the young Jewish fighters of the Warsaw ghetto.” She was also taught to value Black freedom struggles, and even saw Paul Robeson and W.E.B. Du Bois. Dottie was 22 when the sit-ins began and was drawn to their efforts. She enrolled in a nonviolent resistance workshop, headed south, and began participating in sit-ins. When an image of her being arrested appeared in a southern newspaper, Dottie’s father was so proud he cut the article out of the paper and showed it to everyone.
Soon Dottie was working for SNCC, where she put her skills as a writer to use for SNCC’s newsletter. SNCC workers would come in from their work in the field, describe to Dottie the events that were unfolding, and she would make sure their stories got told. She was struck by how nonchalant everyone was as they described to her not only the patient organizing of communities, but the inevitable brutality that ensued. The reports that Dottie wrote were used to inform SNCC supporters around the country. As an official staff writer, Dottie worked on whatever SNCC’s writing needs were, from pamphlets to press releases to the “ceaseless stream of telegrams” sent to the Kennedy administration, “reporting each and every atrocity and urging them to intervene.”
She also saw her share of protests, got knocked down by fire hoses and police clubs, and was indicted under Virginia’s ludicrous “John Brown law,” which made it a felony to “incite colored people to acts of war and violence against the white population.” She skipped town and was careful about travelling through Virginia for years afterwards. In the build up to Freedom Summer, Dottie headed back to the North East, where she was the chief recruiter for volunteers in the region. Then she headed to Mississippi herself. There, in the words of the SNCC Digital Gateway, she answered calls “from civil rights workers who had been beaten, arrested, or had disappeared, thereafter alerting local authorities, the press and family members.”
A couple of years later Dottie was at work in the SNCC Atlanta office when Stokely Carmichael “asked me to draw a panther for the Lowndes County Freedom Organization campaign. I said no, I wasn’t that capable an artist.” Carmichael came back to her with a “rough line drawing of a panther” that had been made by SNCC member Ruth Howard, based on the mascot from a local Black college. Dottie remembers: “I cleaned it up, added better whiskers, and made it black, at his request,” said Dorothy of the drawing. “The next time I saw it, that image was on TV sometime in 1967—I was shocked!”
After SNCC, Dottie founded GROW with her husband Bob Zellner, which helped organize poor White southerners for racial and economic justice for 10 years. After GROW disbanded, Dottie and Bob parted ways, and she returned to New York after 22 years in the South. Today she is especially active in Palestinian solidarity work.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was born in Germany in 1906, and received his Doctor of Theology degree in Berlin in 1927. He traveled to New York in 1930 for postgraduate work, where he studied under the renowned theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. While in New York he taught Sunday school at Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem… a church that had been named after the ancient Ethiopian Empire. It was one of the largest Black churches in the country. And it was led by the civil rights minister Adam Clayton Powell Sr., who had founded the Urban League, and whose son would soon represent Harlem in congress. The young German theologian had landed right in the heart of Black American spirituality… and of politics.
Abyssinian Baptist Church was thriving in the era of the Harlem Renaissance, but Dietrich had also arrived during the onset of the Great Depression. The church was engaged in enormous community service efforts, helping to feed and clothe thousands of community members. Many Harlemites had recently fled the South during the Great Migration, and had emotional and spiritual needs as people who had uprooted themselves from former communities, only to face harsh realities in a new land. At Abyssinian, loving thy neighbor was practiced in a very concrete way. That practice was recognized as a form of walking in Jesus’s path. Furthermore, walking that path through embodying love and compassion in daily life was recognized as an essential form of honoring God… above any particular religious belief. As Reggie L. Williams, the author of Bonhoeffer’s Black Jesus puts it: the message of Abyssinian was that “We feed God when we feed our hungry neighbor.”
It was in the context of teaching and practicing his Christian faith in a Black community in Harlem during the Great Depression that Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s own liberatory theology took shape. However, he was also deeply impacted by witnessing White American racism, by experiencing how that racism impacted his Sunday school students and Abyssinian church members, and how White American Christianity served to uphold that oppression. Experiencing such a stark juxtaposition between Black and White Christian communities forced Dietrich to reflect deeply on what it meant to be a true disciple of Jesus. Those reflections would soon guide his own actions in Nazi Germany.
Dietrich returned to Germany in 1931. His year in Harlem had guided him into a more mature theology that moved beyond mere intellectual rigor, and towards addressing the reality of the world and the actual needs of human beings. As he put it, I “turned from phraseology to reality.” In Harlem, he had come to see racism as a Christian problem, that White Christians had a responsibility to confront. Back in Germany, it was Bonhoeffer who named what was happening to the Jews as the central problem that Christians themselves had to face.
Two days after Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, Dietrich offered a radio address urging Germans not to be seduced into a cult of personality, and by what he implied was an immature and romantic notion that “only a great figure would be able to restore order and unity.” “The leader,” Dietrich urged, “must radically reject the temptation to become an idol, that is, the ultimate authority of the led.” Germany, of course, would not be so lucky. Dietrich’s radio address was cut off mid-sentence.
Shortly afterwards, Dietrich became the first church leader to urge Christians to resist the Nazis and do everything they could to support the Jewish community with these famous words: “We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice, we are to drive a spike into the wheel itself.” He was soon running underground seminaries for anti-Nazi Christians in Germany. He travelled from village to village, cultivating grassroots Christian anti-Nazi opposition. These underground congregations provided Jews passage out of Germany at great risk. During these dark times, Bonhoeffer taught these underground congregations the Spirituals he had studied in Harlem, as a way to generate the inner strength needed to forge ahead.
In 1938, Dietrich’s brother-in-law, Hans von Dohnanyi, introduced him to members of the German military intelligence community who sought to overthrow Hitler. From them, he learned that war was imminent. Out of concerns that he would be drafted and potentially killed if he refused to serve, Dietrich left for the United States once more. However, once he was safely in the U.S., he was racked by guilt. He immediately returned to Germany, where Hans ensured his safety by securing a position for Dietrich in the military intelligence community, under the premise that Dietrich’s extensive church network would prove valuable.
Dietrich leveraged his new position within the intelligence community – and his connections with the anti-Nazi dissidents within it – to provide further support to Jewish communities. He also gave spiritual council to those in the innermost circle of the Resistance, plotting Hitler’s assassination. In order to provide cover and lend credibility to his new position within Germany’s military intelligence, Dietrich at times felt that it was necessary to publicly praise Hitler. In doing so, he sacrificed his reputation, and shocked his friends. To protect the plans to overthrow Hitler, however, Dietrich knew it was best not to explain the change in his behavior even to those closest to him. During this time, he felt profoundly alone, and within that aloneness he sought God’s council more than ever. As Dietrich’s biographer Eric Metaxas puts it: “He was involved in a high-stakes game of deception upon deception, and yet Bonhoeffer himself knew that in all of it, he was being utterly obedient to God.”
In April of 1943, Dietrich was arrested: although the Gestapo had no proof, he was suspected of being connected to the Resistance. On June 20, 1944, there was a failed attempt on Hitler’s life from within the military intelligence community. Dietrich was accused of being associated with the would-be-assassins, and was secretly transferred to a concentration camp, where he was hung during the final days of war.
Born in a small town in Georgia in 1912, Clarence Jordan was troubled by the poverty he witnessed amongst the local sharecroppers. In college, he pursued a degree in agricultural science, hoping to help sharecroppers grow more abundant and nutritious food for themselves. However, Clarence viewed the sharecropping system as impoverished in another way: a system so unjust could only have arisen from a great spiritual poverty within American society.
This belief guided Clarence into the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He was ordained as a Southern Baptist minister in 1934, and earned a Ph.D. in the Greek New Testament in 1938. In 1942, he founded a farming community in southern Georgia, based on his understanding of what a community grounded in Jesus’ teachings would look like. He named the community Koinonia (κοινωνία), from the Greek word for communing together. Koinonia referred to the community of Jesus’ followers after his death. Part of their spiritual practice was a form of communal ownership: whatever one member owned was shared freely with all. Koinonia Farm followed this example of early Christian community: in a radical departure from American norms, private ownership held little sway on Clarence Jordan’s Koinonia Farm.
A second radical departure was that Koinonia Farm was interracial. For Clarence, the commitment to interracial living was part of the commitment to Christian faith. In his words: “God is the father of men, irrespective of their race. We agreed that we would hold to that, regardless of the consequences.” For ten years, there were surprisingly few consequences to the interracial living experiment in the Deep South. There was some controversy when it was discovered that Koinonia paid its Black and White workers the same wages. But for the most part, the interracial community flew under the radar.
However, once the civil rights movement began, fear and anger rippled through the White South, and Koinonia soon became a target. The farm faced a crippling economic boycott, and members were excommunicated from their churches. Vigilantes came onto the property and destroyed cars, cut down hundreds of trees, stole crops, set fires, burned crosses, and sprayed machine gun fire into the homes. Koinonia’s roadside market was bombed numerous times. The interracial Christian farm also became a target of the McCarthyist era, in which anything associated with racial equality was deemed a “Communist threat.” During these difficult years, the community stacked piles of wood around the houses to stop bullets. Neighboring Black farmers would sneak fertilizer into Koinonia after dark so the farm could continue to produce crops.
The members of Koinonia Farm’s commitment to authentic Christian community helped them hold on… for a while. 60 members endured the first period of violence together, but by 1968 only two families remained. Farming was no longer viable. As Koinonia looked for a new mission, the region’s dire need for humane housing stood out. Clarence Jordan marked off 42 half-acre plots on Koinonia with his friend Millard Fuller, and they began building houses. The first house went to a Black family who was living in a shack just up the road from Koinonia. Inspired by this effort, Millard and his wife Linda went on to found Habitat for Humanity, which is still headquartered in Georgia.
Starting in the 1940s, Clarence Jordan also began composing his Cotton Patch series, in which he translated original Greek transcripts of the New Testament into stories that took place in contemporary Georgia. Rome became Washington D.C.; Jerusalem became Atlanta. In the Cotton Patch series, Jesus is not crucified but lynched. The translations are also full of earthy humor: Upon his resurrection, Jesus appears and says “Howdy.”Clarence spent much of his time in his writing shack on Koinonia Farm, where he died in 1969, while working on a sermon.
Koinonia Farm remains a thriving intentional Christian community to this day.
In 1904, a British priest named Charles Freer Andrews traveled to India. Troubled by the degrading way the English treated the Indians, he began to preach that true Christians would never seek to dominate or control others. Before long, this man joined the struggle to liberate India, causing him to be considered a traitor by his own people. Fighting for the rights of all Indians, he traveled to China, Fiji, and South Africa, where South Asians worked under slave-like conditions. In South Africa, he met Gandhi, became one of his closest friends, and stayed by his side as one of his chief advisors for over two decades.
During those years, W.E.B. Du Bois developed a correspondence with Charles Andrews. The two men met for the first time in 1929, when Charles arrived in the United States. While in the U.S., Charles toured Black universities, lecturing on the nonviolent resistance strategies Mahatma Gandhi was using to force the British out of India. Although many Black Americans questioned whether those tactics could be adapted to their own freedom struggle, they were also intrigued and inspired. Gandhi’s disciple cultivated ties with Black leaders, and then returned to India where he informed Gandhi of the brilliance of Black leadership and the potential for revolutionary nonviolent civil disobedience in the U.S. It was through Charles Andrews that W.E.B. Du Bois – and George Washington Carver – were put in direct correspondence with Gandhi.
In 1935, another European disciple of Gandhi’s named Madeleine Slade – who Gandhi had given the spiritual name Mirabehn – arrived in the United States. Mirabehn met with the great Black mystic and theologian, Howard Thurman… who then traveled to India to meet directly with Gandhi. Howard Thurman would later have an enormous impact on Martin Luther King, who reportedly carried Thurman’s book Jesus and the Disinherited with him everywhere he traveled… reading it so often that the pages became tattered and worn.
In 1810, Cassius Marcellus Clay was born into one of the wealthiest slave-owning families in Kentucky. However, while studying at Yale, he heard the radical abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison speak. It was a powerful experience that seriously challenged the beliefs Cassius was raised with, and set him on the path to embracing abolition.
This prominent son of wealthy slave owners later served three terms in the Kentucky House of Representatives, where his anti-slavery views led to attacks and assassination attempts. The stories of Cassius Clay fighting off assailants sound like the stuff of legend. During a heated public debate, for example, a hired killer fired a bullet into Cassius’ chest… just as Cassius was unsheathing his bowie knife, which took the hit and saved his life. Despite having just taken the impact of a bullet, Cassius tossed the would-be assassin over an embankment… after slicing off his nose and one of his ears. When six men wielding knives and clubs attacked Cassius at a public meeting, he was stabbed in the back… but was still able to end the fight by gutting one of them and causing the rest to flee.
In 1845, Cassius Clay began publishing an anti-slavery newspaper called True American. He installed armored doors at the printing press, as well as two cannons. It didn’t stop a mob of 60 men from storming the press, and forcing the publication to relocate to a free state (even as Cassius himself remained in Kentucky.)
A decade and a half later, Cassius Clay would organize the defense unit that protected the White House when the Civil War erupted. He served as minister to Russia during the war, where he helped to secure Russia’s support for the Union. When President Lincoln recalled him from Russia in 1862 to serve as a general in the Union Army, Cassius publicly refused the position unless the President issued a proclamation freeing all slaves under Confederate control… which Lincoln did later that same year.
However: it must be said that, like most White people who opposed slavery, during his career Cassius Clay called for the gradual, rather than the immediate end to slavery. And as Ta-Nehisi Coates writes, “Even as Clay freed those people whom he personally held enslaved on his estate [at a loss of $50,000 to himself, in 1860 dollars], he ‘retained in slavery a number of Negroes who were attached to the estate without being his personal property.’” Furthermore, much of the reason why Cassius wanted to end slavery was because he worried that it drove down wages for White people. After the Civil War, he did not align himself with the Radical Republicans, who called for greater systemic overhauls that would have created a more equitable society for formerly enslaved people. Cassius Clay is, in other words, an example of the messiness of White antiracist history: someone who was willing to put his body on the line and make economic sacrifices for the cause… but who was also far from perfect. When we look at this history, it’s important to look at it warts and all.
Nine years after Cassius Clay’s death in 1903, a man named Herman Heaton Clay – whose ancestors had been enslaved by the Clay family – named his son after the knife-wielding abolitionist. The Cassius Clay born in 1912 would later name HIS son Cassius Clay, Jr. – better known to the world as Muhammad Ali.