Letter: Theology and Civil Rights

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Re "The Ideas Behind the March" (column, Aug. 27): David Brooks has done us all a favor by recalling the deep theological roots that underlay the nonviolent self-discipline of the civil rights movement and the 1963 March on Washington. Those roots were already evident in 1947, when we met Bayard Rustin and a few others who were on a "Journey of Reconciliation," which anticipated the Freedom Rides that were to come later.

The first Journey of Reconciliation was in North Carolina, where they were taken off an interstate bus, beaten by segregationists and jailed by the local authorities. Despite such treatment, Mr. Rustin never wavered from his nonviolent strategies in the cause of justice. Those strategies and spirit are again at work in North Carolina.

Hundreds of blacks and whites together, led in nonviolent action by the N.A.A.C.P., do civil disobedience at the state capitol in Raleigh every Monday.

The spirit of Bayard Rustin, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and others lives on in these "Moral Mondays," resisting the state's recent laws that benefit the rich at the expense of the poor.

Such actions are the best way to memorialize the civil rights leaders.

ANNE L. BARSTOW
TOM F. DRIVER
Hightstown, N.J., Aug. 29, 2013

The writers are a retired history professor at the SUNY College at Old Westbury and professor emeritus at the Union Theological Seminary.

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