Black Atheists: America’s ‘Unseen Civil Rights Heroes’ Kimberly Winston of Religion News Service reports on a group unnoticed by most: African-American humanists and atheists. Highlighting the contribution of black skeptics and freethinkers like A. Philip Randolph, labor organizer and close aid to Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., to American’s civil rights struggle, Winston asks: Why is King, a Christian, remembered by so many and Randolph, an atheist, by so few? Winston brings attention to the work of Norm R. Allen Jr., founder of African Americans for Humanism, a group working to promote the visibility of black atheists with the help of a billboard campaign throughout a handful of cities including New York and Chicago: Each one pairs a local black nontheist with a black nonbeliever from the past. “Doubts about religion?” the billboard reads. “You’re one of many.” Black atheists are a “double minority” Winston writes, and with such a high level of religiosity in the black community their point of view is often given short shrift. Religious historian Juan Floyd-Thomas likens their perspective to that of “New Atheists” like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, and is disappointed that so few in the African-American community have warmed up to their irreligious peers: One of the things that can be gained from shining a bright light on the contributions of nontheists to the broad sweep of the civil rights movement would have to be integrity. These people had a moral core and that’s something that is sorely needed, whether you are a theist or a nontheist. (Photo: “James Baldwin, poet, playwright and Civil Rights activist. Baldwin, once a Pentecostal preacher, never publicly declared his atheism, but was critical of religion.” RNS photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons.)
View Separately

Black Atheists: America’s ‘Unseen Civil Rights Heroes’

Kimberly Winston of Religion News Service reports on a group unnoticed by most: African-American humanists and atheists. Highlighting the contribution of black skeptics and freethinkers like A. Philip Randolph, labor organizer and close aid to Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., to American’s civil rights struggle, Winston asks:
Why is King, a Christian, remembered by so many and Randolph, an atheist, by so few?
Winston brings attention to the work of Norm R. Allen Jr., founder of African Americans for Humanism, a group working to promote the visibility of black atheists with the help of a billboard campaign throughout a handful of cities including New York and Chicago:
Each one pairs a local black nontheist with a black nonbeliever from the past. “Doubts about religion?” the billboard reads. “You’re one of many.”
Black atheists are a “double minority” Winston writes, and with such a high level of religiosity in the black community their point of view is often given short shrift. Religious historian Juan Floyd-Thomas likens their perspective to that of “New Atheists” like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, and is disappointed that so few in the African-American community have warmed up to their irreligious peers:
One of the things that can be gained from shining a bright light on the contributions of nontheists to the broad sweep of the civil rights movement would have to be integrity. These people had a moral core and that’s something that is sorely needed, whether you are a theist or a nontheist.
(Photo: “James Baldwin, poet, playwright and Civil Rights activist. Baldwin, once a Pentecostal preacher, never publicly declared his atheism, but was critical of religion.” RNS photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons.)

Source: topix.com

2 Notes/ Hide

  1. leftwing-secularist reblogged this from topixpolitics
  2. topixpolitics posted this