This dissertation is an intellectual biography of James Hudson (1903-1980), a black minister and philosopher of religion. Standing just over five feet tall with a body that lacked a right arm and weighed less than 140 pounds, Hudson was a small man who became a giant in the mid-twentieth century struggle against Jim Crow. As a college chaplain in the Floridas capital city, he played an indispensable role in building that communitys civil rights movement. Specifically, Hudson connected Tallahassee to a powerful network of black religious intellectuals that, with his avid participation, built a freedom curriculum which systematized a militant ethics of Christian nonviolence. By teaching from this curriculum, he inspired local students and churchgoers to engage in noncooperation against segregation, beginning with a 1956 boycott of Tallahassees bus system. The Inter-Civic Council (ICC) Hudson and others founded to coordinate this protest, which followed the lead of similar boycott organizations in Baton Rouge and Montgomery, became an integral part of what sociologist Aldon Moris called the institutional soil from which the [Southern Christian Leadership Conference] would emerge. Furthermore, as one of the black Baptist churchs most widely read Personalist philosophers on the eve of the Civil Rights Movement, Hudson laid a critical foundation for Martin Luther King, Jr., another black Personalist, to become the movements premier spokesman. This manuscript examines Hudsons life, with particular emphasis on his thought and praxis. It adds to a small but growing body of literature about the movements ideational origins.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VANDERBILT/oai:VANDERBILTETD:etd-07202010-124847 |
| Date | 02 August 2010 |
| Creators | Rivers, Larry Omar |
| Contributors | Dennis C. Dickerson, Michael Bess, Thomas Schwartz, Lewis V. Baldwin |
| Publisher | VANDERBILT |
| Source Sets | Vanderbilt University Theses |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.library.vanderbilt.edu/available/etd-07202010-124847/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to Vanderbilt University or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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