Oxford Professor Explores Faith, Civil Rights

Stephen Tuck, professor of American history at the University of Oxford, explores the intersection of faith and civil rights at a free lecture, “Losing My (Jim Crow) Religion: The Battle Between Church and Civil Rights Leaders in the Segregation Era,” Monday, Feb. 27, at 3:30 p.m. at Westmont’s Kerrwood Hall in Hieronymus Lounge. The Erasmus Society Lecture, sponsored by the provost’s office, is free and open to the public.

The lecture will uncover civil rights activists who urged African-Americans to give up their Christian faith that they saw as tainted by its association with American whites, and explore the impact of this ferocious debate on the early civil rights movement.

“Stephen has worked both on the broad history of the civil rights movement in America, but also at the grass roots, interviewing dozens of African Americans in rural Georgia,” says Alister Chapman, Westmont associate professor of history.

Tuck most recently co-authored the book, “Fog of War: World War II and Race in America.” He also wrote “We Ain’t What We Ought To Be: The Black Freedom Struggle from Emancipation to Obama” and “Beyond Atlanta: The Struggle for Racial Equality in Georgia.” He has contributed numerous articles including “King of All Nations,” which ran in the New York Times on Martin Luther King Jr. Day 2012.

Tuck is a Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellow at the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard, the nation’s oldest research center dedicated to the study of the history, culture and social institutions of Africans and African-Americans. He earned a master’s degree and doctorate from the University of Cambridge.