Treading Our Path Through the Blood of the Slaughtered: Race and Martyrdom in America, 1830-1968

<p>The United States has a longstanding practice of ascribing the language and imagery of martyrdom to political and cultural figures, resulting in a variegated canon of American martyrs outside the strict bounds of religious tradition. As a contribution to religious studies, American studies and African American studies, this dissertation identifies and examines the language, imagery and trajectory of the strain of American cultural martyrdom I term “Black American martyrdom.” I trace the genealogy of Black American martyrdom from the 1830s, when martyrdom rhetoric flourished among the zealous Northeastern immediate abolitionists, to the 1960s, when Martin Luther King, Jr. influentially cast civil rights martyrs as key players in a great cosmic melodrama. Through examining the martyrdom language and imagery of antebellum abolitionist newspapers and oratory, nineteenth-century Black historiography, and the Black press of the twentieth century, I argue that Black American martyrdom is best understood as a rhetorical category concerned with the pursuit of racial justice and that it provides a new lens for understanding the dimensions and voices of the long Black freedom struggle. The story that emerges is one of deep creative agency among racial justice activists, and analysis of the rhetoric of martyrdom within this activism provides new ways of examining questions of identity, race, citizenship and Americanness. Furthermore, I argue that the intentional rhetoric of Black American martyrdom provides the foundation for the wider concept of American cultural martyrdom – and its attendant understanding of privilege, power and identity – suggesting that the work of activists for racial justice has influenced broader American discourse more substantially than previously understood.</p>

Name thesis:degree_name

Religion, PhD

Level thesis:degree_level

Open Access Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

School of Arts and Humanities

Year dc:date.available

2024

Author dc:creator

• Veach, Katherine J.

Contributors dc:contributor

• Daniel Ramírez
• Kevin Wolfe

• abolition
• American martyrdom
• cultural martyrdom
• martyrdom
• NAACP
• rhetoric
• African American Studies
• American Studies
• Religion

Repository record dc:identifier

https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cgu_etd/821

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:scholarship.claremont.edu:cgu_etd-1843