Dickerson's Outline of the AME Lineage

The Dickerson article outlines how African-American Methodism affected the modern civil rights movement. He mentions that the theology and ethos for slave liberation are "embedded" within this Methodist movement, citing Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. Du Bois as leaders of a nascent civil rights movement that led to the one we are all familiar with headed up by Martin Luther King, Jr. They adopted a "Wesleyan social holiness" that informed their social justice work to end societal discrimination by demanding a re-creation of God's kingdom of salvation on earth. Dickerson brings up civil rights leaders whom I had not previously identified, including our familiar Richard Allen, Henry M. Turner, and A. Philip Randolph, who worked tirelessly through both governmental and grassroots movements to promote non-violence, which in turn affected the tactics of the 1960s movements. Archibald J. Carey, Jr. also took these tactics but moreover worked within the government itself, which I found surprising for the era before the 60s. In particular, I loved reading about Rosa Parks simply because we have the same hometown - and I had no idea she worked to investigate rape victims. In general, the article does a very good job of establishing the connection between the AME civil rights leaders' work that led to and helped catalyze the 1960s civil rights movements, and it clarified the nature of the pacifism rise within the movement due to these leaders' academic interactions.