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This paper reconsiders the cultural memory of black religious leadership during the civil rights movement in light of the work and influence of the Rev. Dr. Prathia Hall, the renowned civil rights leader, pastor, professor, and womanist theologian. This paper will consider her own rhetorical presence and performances in relation and contrast to the reproductive logics that produced a particular succession of representative race men in the wake of King’s assassination. Hall embodies the intimately engaged yet frequently overlooked modes of leadership taken up by women in the long civil rights movement and beyond. I interrogate how her commitments to womanist theology and praxis shape both her public speech and her communal investments, offering an alternative account of black leadership that harmonizes more thoroughly with the collective charisma suggested by Cedric J. Robinson in his classic text Terms of Order: Political Science and the Myth of Leadership.
This paper examines the continuation and transformation of Martin Luther King Jr.’s theological vision of the Beloved Community through the leadership and activism of Jesse L. Jackson, particularly in the formation of Operation PUSH. Drawing upon Transformational Leadership, this paper argues that Jackson operationalized King’s moral and theological framework into a structured socio-economic movement aimed at empowerment, political participation, and economic justice. While King articulated the Beloved Community as an eschatological and ethical vision rooted in agape love, nonviolence, and social reconciliation, Jackson translated these ideals into institutional strategies that mobilized marginalized communities toward collective agency. Through Operation PUSH, Jackson reframed Kingian theology within the language of economic justice, political advocacy, and self-determination, demonstrating how prophetic theology can become sustained social infrastructure for liberation and community empowerment.
This paper brings into conversation the witness of Martin Luther King Jr. and Óscar Romero through the lens of the ethics of care. Although they lived in different contexts, the struggle against racial segregation in the United States and the political violence of El Salvador, both leaders understood Christian love as a public and demanding commitment to justice. Drawing on feminist ethics of care and liberation theology, the paper argues that their ministries can be read as examples of a subversive ethics of care: a form of love that resists injustice and refuses neutrality in the face of suffering. King’s vision of agape and Romero’s pastoral defense of the poor both show that care is not simply compassion or charity, but a practice of prophetic responsibility. By placing these two figures in dialogue, the paper highlights how nonviolent resistance can be understood as a form of organized love that protects human dignity and challenges systems that produce exclusion and violence.