Minister, socialist and Presidential Candidate Norman Thomas gave a lecture at Fountain Street Church in 1965

Editor’s note: I have been working with Fountain Street Church and looking at a substantial amount of archival materials they have. Today’s post is only possible because Fountain Street Church has provided me access to their archives and they want this information to be public and available to the community. I will be hosting the archival material on the Grand Rapids People’s History Project site, but also posting here on GRIID. This is the second in a series of postings from the archival material at Fountain Street Church.

So far I have posted talks by Kwame Ture/Stokely Carmichael, James Meredith, Dick Gregory, Amy Goodman, bell hooks, Jane Fonda and Jonathan Kozol all of whom spoke at Fountain Street Church.

Today, I want to share a talk that was given at Fountain Street Church by Norman Thomas in 1965. For those of you who don’t know who Norman Thomas is, he was a Presbyterian minister, a socialist, an organizer, a pacifist and ran as a Presidential candidate during six consecutive elections between 1928 and 1948 as a member of the Socialist Party of America. Norman Thomas was involved in labor struggles, anti-war organizing and the Civil Rights Movement. In fact, Norman Thomas sat on a Commission of Inquiry that the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) organized to address widespread police violence against the Black community. Thomas said at the end of his involvement in the committee, “Law enforcement attacks on the movement were nothing less than widespread police sadism.”

Here is the audio of talk that Norman Thomas gave at Fountain Street Church in 1965. The theme of his talk was on the importance of public dissent!