I am interested in exploring the ways in which religion influenced the civil rights movement for my second paper. To start my search for the “shelfie” book, I used the online Lafayette library catalog and searched “Christianity and Civil Rights Movement”. Since we read about Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X in class, I thought this topic would be relevant as a “shelfie” book as well as paper topic.

The book I found is entitled Rhetoric, Religion, and the Civil Rights Movement. It is 924 pages long and can be found on the upper level of Skillman. There were few texts surrounding it that included religion in the title, but several books about African-Americans and the Civil Rights Movement. The book itself is a collection of stories from people around the time of the Civil Rights Movement. The book stresses that religion played a huge part in the Civil Rights Movement as many turned to scripture and sacred texts throughout that time. There are two volumes of the book, each is a collection of stories from a specific time period during the Civil Rights Movement. The table of contents is sorted by year as it lists different stories from each year during the time period that the book covers. Some of the story titles include “Spiritual Rearmament”, “The Church Amidst Ethnic and Racial Tensions” and “The Disturbing Christ”.

As mentioned before, there were few titles containing religion as part of the title on the same shelf as this book, so I will most likely have to look in other areas as well to find more sources. This source will be an invaluable resource in my research, as will the second volume. The book contains endless support to an argument that says religion had a vast influence on the Civil Rights Movement, and I look forward to exploring that more as I conduct research for my paper.

Houck, Davis W., and David E. Dixon. Rhetoric, Religion and the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1965. Waco, TX: Baylor UP, 2006. Print.