Word: blacks
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Negro scholars agree with the legitimacy of a separate black-theology movement. Dr. Joseph R. Washington Jr., author of Black Religion, argues that "if you mean by theology a cognitive body of knowledge and a means to intellectually and structurally understand it, then I question if there is a black theology. I tend not to think of theology as experience." But Cone, perhaps the most ardent exponent of an uniquely Negro Christianity, does not agree. "I don't intend to let black theology be a passing fad," he says. "Students for generations to come will be talking about...
Some theologians feel that such vehement denunciation of white Christians can only lead to a narrowly parochial vision at a time when the need is for wider understanding. As Dr. Rosemary Ruether of Howard University's School of Religion recently wrote in America, an authentic black theology "would understand the genus 'man' as the universal within which it places its own celebration of black humanity. In that form it would be a catholic theology, a theology with universal validity, and not a form of racism...
...Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which outlawed racial segregation in the public schools. Separate schools for Negroes were "inherently unequal," ruled the court, because the system generates feelings of inferiority in the black children "that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone." Brown helped to prepare public opinion for a long series of civil rights bills and later court rulings that enforced laws against discrimination in voting, public accommodations and housing...
Sphere of Iron. Appointed by President Eisenhower in 1953 after three terms as Governor of California, Earl Warren joined a court that was dominated by two more penetrating thinkers than he, Hugo Black and Felix Frankfurter. In his initial years, says Columbia Government Professor Alan Westin, the new Chief Justice was "a large, powerful sphere of iron drawn between two magnetic potes." Initially, he leaned toward Frankfurter, the ex-Harvard professor who argued brilliantly for a more restrained role for the court. But eventually Warren, more a man of action than reflection, found Black's judicial activism preferable...
...largely because of the strong moral direction that he imparted to it. A man of stern humanitarian ideals, he loomed on the bench as a kind of Old Testament lawgiver, who approached issues with a disarming simplicity. "You'd see this paterfamilias insisting on the justice of the black man's cause," noted Michael Meltsner, a young lawyer for the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense Fund, who has argued before the Warren court. "Almost every question was directed toward justice, not technicalities...