The Scripture and Civil Rights Travel Seminar is one-week intensive, taught by Jeremy L. Williams, Ph.D. and will meet January 5-11. This class will meet in person beginning in Fort Worth on January 5 and then will take a charter bus to various sites and return to Fort Worth on January 11. This course will require pre-work. It will also demand that students are fully engaged and prepared for daily discussions at the various sites. Each day students will have a film to view and reading assignments to prepare for the next day. Students will also make team presentations throughout the week and will complete a final exegetical paper.
This course is a travel seminar that tracks connections between racial violence and biblical interpretation in and around U.S. Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. The intellectual journey physically unfolds across sites in the U.S. Deep South. The sites include Whitney Plantation, The National World War II Museum in New Orleans, The Legacy Sites of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, The King Center in Atlanta, 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, and Stax Museum of American Soul Music in Memphis. The course through writings, music, and film engages key thinkers of the era to inform students of that period’s religious, cultural, political, and social contexts. Students will particularly tend to the role that the Bible and scriptural imagination played in the diverse work of Martin Luther King, Jr., Pauli Murray, Abraham Joshua Heschel, and Mavis Staples. The course engages how the Prophets, the Gospels, Paul’s Letters, and the Apocalypse contributed to how clergy and lay, scholars and entertainers, Christians and Jews envisioned freedom. The course’s premise is that there are throughlines from chattel enslavement to the prison industrial complex. A key question of the course is: How do Christians, Black people and others use scriptures for the unfinished projects of abolition and liberation?
Course Objectives:
Experience how stories of liberation and resistance are curated in physical spaces
Grasp how the Civil Rights Movement continued the work of abolishing enslavement and how that work is still unfinished
Understand how different thinkers used scriptures during the Civil Rights Movement
Explore avenues for using biblical texts to create a more just society, especially in terms of the judicial system and the prison industrial complex
Requirements:
Thoughtful, active participation
Pre-class Reflection (1,000 words)
Two Team Presentations (2,000 words each)
Ph.D. students will offer a 30-minute lecture on a topic or site assigned by the professor.
Final paper or project (4,000-5,000 words)
PhD. students will write a 6,000-7,500 word final research paper. Students are to submit a prospectus for the paper by January 18.
Questions?
Contact Erma Sinclair-Davis, Program Coordinator for the Center for Theology and Justice at erma.sinclair@tcu.edu