Date of Award
2024
Degree Type
Open Access Dissertation
Degree Name
Religion, PhD
Program
School of Arts and Humanities
Advisor/Supervisor/Committee Chair
Matthew Bowman
Dissertation or Thesis Committee Member
Daniel Ramírez
Dissertation or Thesis Committee Member
Kevin Wolfe
Terms of Use & License Information
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Rights Information
© 2024 Katherine J Veach
Keywords
abolition, American martyrdom, cultural martyrdom, martyrdom, NAACP, rhetoric
Subject Categories
African American Studies | American Studies | Religion
Abstract
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.
ISBN
9798383371534
Recommended Citation
Veach, Katherine J.. (2024). Treading Our Path Through the Blood of the Slaughtered: Race and Martyrdom in America, 1830-1968. CGU Theses & Dissertations, 821. https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cgu_etd/821.
