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Martin Luther King Jr. Day And The Politics Of Race, Jill Gill

Jill K. Gill

The last few states to adopt the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday were largely non-southern, overwhelmingly white, and rural. Gill explores the political process by which one of these, Idaho, in 1990 became the 46th state to claim the holiday. In a conservative libertarian-leaning state with no significant non-white voting bloc and a weak understanding of King’s historical significance, politicians saw little need for the holiday until the Aryan Nations’ violent white-supremacist actions hurt the state’s image. Ironically, the Aryan Nations became Idaho’s “Bull Connor,” not only shaming the state into creating King Day, but schooling it in the pertinence …

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The Political Price Of Prophetic Leadership: The National Council Of Churches And The Vietnam War, Jill Gill

Jill K. Gill

The National Council of Churches (NCC) felt called by church bureaucrats to take a prophetic leadership role on the Vietnam War. Therefore it moved beyond the sentiments of its denominations’ parishioners to articulate antiwar positions on this controversial issue. Council leaders met several times with Dean Rusk to persuade him to change the presuppositions undergirding America’s Vietnam policy, while Rusk tried to sway the Council into accepting the necessity of the government’s actions. The Council’s staff failed to realize that government weighed the NCC’s clout not by the quality of its information, staff, or moral vision, but rather by the …

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