Dennis C. Dickerson
Photo: Annette Hornischer

James M. Lawson, Jr. Professor of History, Vanderbilt University, Tennessee

Siemens Fellow - Class of Spring 2014

Dennis C. Dickerson is James M. Lawson, Jr. Professor of History at Vanderbilt University, where he specializes in the history of the US civil rights movement, African-American religious history, and the social history of medicine and labor. He has received grants and fellowships from the American Philosophical Society, the National Endowment of the Humanities, the Rockefeller Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Louisville Institute. Dickerson taught at Williams College from 1976 to 1999, as well as at Rhodes College, Yale Divinity School, and the Payne Theological Seminary.

 

His first book, Out of the Crucible: Black Steel Workers in Western Pennsylvania, 1875-1980 (SUNY, 1986), chronicles the failed century-long struggle of black steel laborers to attain occupational parity with their Caucasian counterparts. His book Militant Mediator: Whitney M. Young, Jr. (Kentucky, 1998) analyzes the leadership of a key civil rights activist, and was awarded the 1999 Distinguished Book from the National Conference of Black Political Scientists. Dickerson’s book African-American Preachers and Politics: The Careys of Chicago (Mississippi, 2010) examines the intersection between religion and politics in the careers of two clergy/politicians during the course of the twentieth century.

Project Description

A “Brother in the Spirit of Gandhi”: William Stuart Nelson and the Religious Origins of the Civil Rights Movement

Dickerson’s projects include A Short History of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, under contract with Cambridge University Press, and his Academy project, “A ‘Brother in the Spirit of Gandhi’: William Stuart Nelson and the Religious Origins of the Civil Rights Movement.” In the 1930s and 1940s, Nelson (1895-1977) belonged to an influential cadre of black religious intellectuals who studied and practiced nonviolence as a strategy for social change, and who helped to shape the generation of activists who would lead the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Educated at Howard University and Yale University, and in France and Germany, Nelson first taught at Howard before becoming president of Shaw University in 1931. He eventually returned to Howard, pioneering the first courses on nonviolence at an American divinity school. Deeply engaged with Quaker pacifism, “the great living religions,” and Gandhian satyagraha, which he studied during several trips to India, Nelson corresponded regularly with Martin Luther King, Jr., was advisor to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference King helped found in 1957, joined the Selma to Montgomery March in 1965, and otherwise contributed to ending segregation via the teaching and practice of nonviolence.

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