By Dr. Charles Kiker

Faith played a major role in the Civil Rights movement of the 1950’s and 1960’s, and the concomitant dismantling of the old Jim Crow. To be sure, not all people of faith, maybe not even a majority and certainly not a majority in the South, held the Civil Rights movement in high regard. I remember hearing one active Baptist layman say shortly after the assassination of Martin Luther King, “He was a dadblamed communist, and somebody should have killed him a long time ago.”

But the faith and the liberation songs inspired by the Exodus from Egypt helped to sustain the civil rights movement through fire hoses, police dogs, beatings, and murders. And the civil rights movement insured the demise of Jim Crow I. The progress of the mid-twentieth century civil rights movement created an officially color blind society.

Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness) has shown convincingly that mass incarceration is designed to produce a new Jim Crow, with grossly out of proportion imprisonment for African Americans and people of Hispanic origin. And there is no civil rights movement regarding Jim Crow II.

Why not?

Ignorance of the problem may be the chief reason. But that ignorance may be a willful ignorance. It will take a new civil rights movement to defeat the New Jim Crow. And this new civil rights movement, like the one of the mid-twentieth century, will need a powerful faith underpinning.

Unfortunately, a Baylor University survey shows that those farther to the theological right are more socially conservative as well, with a significantly positive correlation between theological fundamentalism and support of harsher punishment for lawbreakers and more likely to support the death penalty—just the kind of attitudes that help to sustain Jim Crow II.

Fortunately, there is a theological middle which comprises a majority over both extreme left and extreme right. (See Wesley J. Wildman and Stephen C. Garner, Lost in the Middle?). It is from this theological middle that support must be garnered for a movement to end the New Jim Crow.

As I sat meditating in my church pew Sunday morning, I was pondering the issue of mass incarceration, and for reasons I cannot explain our Catholic friends’ custom of making the sign of the cross came to mind. I thought, “That’s it! We start with the head and convince people of the reality of the New Jim Crow. We go from head to heart to move people to outrage at the injustice of the New Jim Crow. And then we move to our hands to get the job done!”

Commitment of the head; commitment of the heart; commitment of the hands, and by God’s grace, the job can be done.

Dr. Charles Kiker is a retired American Baptist minister and founding member of Friends of Justice. He has lived in Tulia, Texas since shortly before the infamous drug sting came down.