July 16 Session Details:
Presenter: Keith D. Miller
Title: “All Nations, One Blood: How Abolitionists, Martin Luther King, and Fannie Lou Hamer Seized the Same Biblical Passage to Argue for Racial Equality and Undercut Nationalism”
Starting in the Eighteenth Century and continuing for three hundred years, British abolitionists, American abolitionists, Martin Luther King, and Fannie Lou Hamer all brandished the same scripture, Acts 17:26 (“God has made of one blood all people of all nations”), to crusade against white supremacy and undermine nationalism. This argument coheres with the Biblical origin story of Adam and Eve as the two ancestors of all humanity and also with the insistence of Charles Darwin (in contrast to other scientists) that all humans share common ancestors and that racial differences are, therefore, superficial.
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