One common verdict on the civil rights generation runs like this: they marched, sang hymns, absorbed blows without striking back, and that patience belongs to a world that no longer exists. Many younger people inherit that verdict without examining it. Justin Giboney, an attorney, political strategist, ordained minister and co-founder of the AND Campaign, a Christian civic organization, thinks the verdict gets the history backward. He also thinks the misreading helps explain why so many Christians come out of today’s culture war bitter, exhausted and less like Christ than when they went in.
His answer to the question of how believers can fight injustice without becoming what they oppose is to recover what that generation actually did. They fought hard. They refused to hate the people they fought. They kept correcting their own community. They planned before they acted. In Giboney’s account, the grace was a source of strength. It came from the faith that drove the fight, and it was a large part of why the fight worked.
What did that generation actually do?
Giboney is describing a specific people in a specific period: the Black Christians who came of age under Jim Crow, roughly the generation of today’s grandparents. What he sees in them is a double posture. They confronted what he calls real wickedness, right in front of them and right beside them, and they were tenacious about it. They also carried a grace that showed they wanted redemption even for the people doing these things to them. He holds both halves at full strength. “I need to be able to fight against injustice and the people who are being unjust with all the strength that I have, and I need to take it seriously,” he says. Then comes the limit: “That doesn’t mean that I have to reciprocate the hate.”
People who call that approach weakness, he argues, misunderstand it completely. It was strategic, and “it was courageous and it was effective.” He points to its discipline as evidence. The organizers did not simply run out and protest. “They actually took the time to train people and to say, this is what our objective is. Here’s what we will do, here’s what we won’t do.” Set beside that, Giboney says, many of today’s “public temper tantrums” make people feel they did something while accomplishing little.
His central claim is that this outlook comes before any tactic. He puts it in two short sentences that carry the whole argument: “you can be fighting against something evil and become evil. Not every resistance to evil is good.”
Why is that a theological claim and not just good manners?
Giboney is saying the fighter’s own soul is at stake in the fight. What you become while resisting evil is a moral fact in its own right. Paul makes the same move in Romans 12:21: “Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good.” In that verse, a person can lose to evil even while winning, by winning on evil’s terms.
Lisa Fields, Jude 3 Project’s founder, brings this tension to the life of Jesus. Reading the Gospels, she was struck that “Jesus loves the Pharisees so much that he died for them.” He also corrected them sharply, because they were misusing the law to harm people on the margins. In her words, “his love for them didn’t go without correction, but his love for them still led him to lay down his life.” She calls it a hard tension to live in. It has the same shape as the posture Giboney describes, where correction and love both stay at full strength.
Giboney gives a reason the posture holds together: the oppressed can be corrupted too. People are rightly outraged that a stranger could wrong them, he observes, and then commit infidelities against the people closest to them. Seeing that capacity in ourselves lets us press others for justice “not less forcefully, but without hatred,” because “we see our own brokenness.” He hears this self-knowledge in “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” often called the Black national anthem. Its closing prayer asks God to keep his people from growing drunk on the wine of the world and forgetting him. A people who sang that prayer knew their own cause could go bad, and Giboney warns that a movement that forgets this becomes more likely to do the very thing it condemns.
Is criticizing your own people a betrayal?
This is where the posture costs something. Lisa Fields names an expectation many Black readers will recognize: “don’t critique black people in front of white people.” Social media makes the rule harder to keep, since anything said to one audience can be seen by everyone. If every word is public, every self-critique can look like handing ammunition to the other side.
Giboney grants the concern its strongest form: “there are people who’ve made an industry out of being the black person that critiques other black people,” for white audiences. That counterexample is real, and he does not wave it away. He simply refuses to let its abuse end the practice. “The white gaze is not gonna stop me from saying, Hey, we can do this better,” he says. Waiting for a safe, private moment fails, because “there’s never a right time.” Eventually even closed-door correction gets treated as disloyal.
He roots the practice in Jesus, who lived under Roman occupation and still did not reserve his rebukes for Rome. “He critiqued his own people too, because they needed to have moral improvement.” Giboney suspects secular activism has been discipling people in the church to treat self-criticism as self-hatred. Against that he sets the church’s own inheritance: “we always critique each other out of love, because that’s the only way that you can grow.” Ephesians 4:15 ties the same two things together, where “speaking the truth in love” is how believers “may grow up into him in all things.”
His historical examples make this concrete. He describes Nannie Helen Burroughs as someone who championed women’s education and opportunity and also told the Black community plainly what it needed to do better. He tells of Fred Shuttlesworth working on a bus boycott one day and, the next, gathering pastors to close a neighborhood juke joint that was draining money from families and pulling fathers out of homes. Shuttlesworth sorted his moral concerns by what was right, whichever political tribe usually claimed them.
Was the movement progressive, conservative, or neither?
That example leads to Giboney’s sharpest historical claim. He argues that revisionist history has recast the civil rights movement as simply progressive, when “the civil rights movement very clearly was a Christian movement” that welcomed partners from outside the church but was “based on the authority of scripture.” As white America split into conservative and progressive camps, he says, Black writers in the church judged both sides wrong, not always equally and not on the same issues. He summarizes their reasoning this way: “if we go to the right, we lose our bodies because of the injustice. If we go to the left, we lose our souls because they’re not believing in the authority of scripture.”
Readers should hold this as Giboney’s reading of the record, an argument he makes in his book, and test it against the denominational publications he points to. Other observers would stress the movement’s ties to labor, secular and interfaith activism, which Giboney acknowledges were part of it. The disagreement is about emphasis and ownership, and the evidence to settle it is available.
The principle he draws stands on its own: “Choose the right position.” He is not asking Christians to sit on the fence when one side is plainly wrong. He is refusing the pressure to adopt a whole package because it gets six out of ten things right. His complaint about some Christian voices today is that they follow one side, water it down and add religious symbols. In his view, the civil rights generation led.
Isn’t this just nostalgia for a cleaner past?
A fair skeptic might say this argument romanticizes the dead. Giboney does not claim that generation was pure. He notes that the movement had its own denominational tensions and classism, between people coming out of the Holiness tradition and those in AME and Baptist churches, and that “people got hurt over them.” The model is a posture that flawed people chose under far worse pressure.
He also refuses to treat Black Americans as a single bloc. “Black people aren’t a monolith,” he says. He criticizes classism in both directions: looking down on people who don’t speak in polished ways, and treating a rougher style as more authentic. Recovering the civil rights posture means people who differ still choosing to talk, correct and work together.
Doesn’t this ask wounded people to carry too much?
This is the strongest objection. Telling people who have been slandered, pushed out or mistreated to keep extending grace can sound like asking the injured to manage the comfort of those who injured them.
Giboney meets it directly. “My message isn’t, oh, it’s not that bad. Get over it,” he says. Some of what people have suffered really is that bad. He makes room for rest: “sometimes when you’ve gone through it so much, you do have to step back and you do have to heal. And I think that’s fine too.” What he resists is a permanent, wholesale giving up on entire groups of people. “I don’t see anywhere in the Bible where we can just give up on a whole group of people,” he says, whether the group is Black Christians who disagree with you politically or white evangelicals who have done harm.
His evidence is again the generation itself. He sends discouraged friends back to Martin Luther King Jr.’s speeches to listen for contempt, arguing they will not find it: “he didn’t hold any punches, but he took the time to be artful in how he responded to things.” He names Fannie Lou Hamer and Fred Shuttlesworth among those who suffered as much or more than people today. “They still maintained that hope and that joy, not based on what their neighbor did, but based on what God had done for them and what God said was possible.” Their grace rested on confidence in God, the confidence behind Jesus’ command in Matthew 5:44 to “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you.” For Giboney, “part of having faith is truly believing that everybody is redeemable.”
Where does the fight actually happen?
If rage is corrupting, the question becomes who keeps supplying it. Giboney calls them conflict entrepreneurs, voices who profit from outrage, and his test is blunt: “any influencer or leader that keeps you enraged, you cannot trust.” Rage makes a person irrational and unredemptive, and “you’re easily manipulated when you’re enraged.” Constant exposure to the worst person on the other side warps our sense of who our neighbors are. “We can never allow our neighbors just to be political abstracts,” he says.
Lisa Fields adds a point about Black life in particular: “we don’t have the privilege of separating ourselves.” Daily life requires working alongside people who think differently, so a posture trained by online combat fails where people actually live. Giboney points to local work. “Your church, your community can have a greater impact on people in that area than the president does if you’re deliberate.” If you are angry at Washington, he suggests, “go teach a kid how to read,” since “Ain’t nobody in Washington DC stopping you from doing that.”
He also rejects the instinct that a vulnerable group’s suffering is someone else’s problem. “You never just fight for yourself,” he says. Christian moral authority, in his view, comes from the fact that “we’re not respecter of persons,” an echo of Peter’s discovery in Acts 10:34 that “God is no respecter of persons.” He adds that pushback against mistreatment has to be ethical and prudent as well as strategic, or it backfires on the people it means to protect.
Freedom for what?
Lisa and Giboney end up in Exodus, and it explains why the posture matters. God’s demand to Pharaoh named a purpose for freedom: “Let my people go, that they may serve me” (Exodus 8:1). Before the book is half over, the freed people receive the law. Giboney frames this as part of his response to liberation theology, which he says has some merits: “to be free without direction is to be lost.” Without moral direction, he warns, “sometimes we’re freeing people into the lion’s den.”
That is the deepest reason the civil rights generation refused hatred. They were trying to defeat an unjust order and also to become a people fit to live in the freedom they sought. A movement that wins its battles while losing its capacity for honesty, grace and self-correction has gained freedom without direction. The forgotten model asks more of Christians than outrage does, because it asks them to fight for justice and to remain the kind of people justice is for.