"Count On Me": Reverend M. L. Price of Texas, a Case Study in Civil Rights Leadership

BRIAN D. BEHNKEN

SCHOLARS STUDYING BLACK leaders prominent during the civil rights movement generally have focused on activists like Martin Luther King, Jr., Ralph Abernathy, or Fred Shuttlesworth, and to a lesser degree on conservatives like Joseph H. Jackson or J. L. Ware. They have portrayed the activists as nonviolent warriors who battled not only the forces of white supremacy, but also the conservative black leaders who opposed the struggle. For example, in his fine history of the movement in Birmingham, Alabama, historian Glenn Eskew chronicled the tensions arising in the early 1960s after Rev. J. L. Ware refused to support protests begun by Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth and instead offered Birmingham's white leaders an accommodationist alternative to the radical preacher. Likewise, Taylor Branch described Dr. King's longstanding conflicts with the conservative Rev. J. H. Jackson, head of the National Baptist Convention (NBC), who refused to aid the civil rights movement. King hoped to use the NBC to mobilize "the power of the Negro church to break the hegemony of white segregationist voters," but Jackson rejected his efforts and later denounced the March on Washington as dangerous and unwarranted.