The Wretched and the Damned: Gospel Music between Civil Rights and Urban Crisis

This article argues that between 1945 and 1965, Black Chicago gospel music critically and theologically reflected the tensions between the prophetic theology of the Black social gospel and the civil rights movement, and the Black confrontation with the emergent “urban crisis.” This critical theology infused what I call, drawing from David Marriott's reading of Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, gospel's aesthetics of wretchedness: its expression of the feeling of the pressure that the exhaustion of the supposed secular promise of the Black Great Migration to Northern U.S. cities exerted on the “motherless” and “fatherless” Black faithful to exhort other Black people to have faith in spiritual redemption. In this paper, I utilise James Baldwin, W. E. B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King, Jr., Shirley Caesar, Black Chicago gospel songs, and archival research on Black Chicago churches. Ultimately, postwar gospel's challenge to normative prophetic religion anticipated critical evocations of urban injustice in hip-hop.