Abstract

This article reconstructs the Birmingham civil rights mass meetings of 1963 as one setting for reengaging the theoretical tensions between canonized and marginalized rhetorics. I consider how Ralph Abernathy's May 3rd speech epitomizes one way blacks used religious oratory to destabilize the boundaries that proponents of standardized writing have traditionally attributed to African-American discursive strategies. After summarizing the history of the mass meetings from Montgomery to Birmingham, I advance the claim that during his speech Abernathy functions as a folk preacher and a “revisionist historian.”