Reframing Rhetorical Failure: Confession and Conversion in Sarah Patton Boyle’s Desegregated Heart

Abstract

Civil rights activist Sarah Patton Boyle initially encountered great difficulty when communicating about race and enacting civil rights resistance as a privileged white Southerner. This essay reveals how Boyle overcame this rhetorical failure by turning to the spiritual memoir and in so doing remade her career as a writer and a speaker. Through the concepts of confession and conversion inherent in this spiritual genre, Boyle successfully identified with white and black audiences who had previously ignored or criticized her, created a viable ethos, and delivered a sophisticated faith-based argument for social change.

Notes

1. ¹I thank RR reviewers Keith Miller and Matthew Abraham for their insightful feedback and suggestions. Also, I am grateful to Jess Enoch for her ongoing guidance and support.

2. ²While it is beyond the scope of this essay, future studies might productively pair rhetorical failure with theories of audience. See, for instance, Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbreichts-Tyteca’s discussion of “universal” and “specific” audiences (30–34).

3. ³Miller also urges scholars to teach these texts. I agree, particularly since texts such as Boyles offer fruitful examples of what Krista Ratcliffe calls rhetorical listening. Ratcliffe defines rhetorical listening as “a trope for interpretive invention, rhetorical listening signifies a stance of openness that a person may choose to assume in relation to any person, text, or culture” (17). In racial conversion narratives, a moment of rhetorical listening generally precedes the racial conversion. Writers often document these moments in insightful ways that provide important illustrations of rhetorical listening at work.

4. ⁴Rather than investigate the theoretical dimensions of how her rhetorical failures occur, I describe how Boyle’s failures set the stage for the more persuasive activism she takes up in her memoir. Such theoretical discussion, however, serves a worthwhile area of inquiry, and Thomas Rickert’s Acts of Enjoyment might serve as a useful starting point for such work.

5. ⁵It is true, of course, that Boyle’s white audience shares some of the blame for her rhetorical failures during this period. They were prone to be dismissive of her arguments because of deeply ingrained racist attitudes and beliefs. But it is also true that as a rhetor, Boyle thoroughly and completely misunderstood who she was speaking for, what they believed in, and their attitudes about race. As Egerton writes, “She saw herself as a catalyst, a reconciler; and she lacked none of the confidence or the courage to sustain her crusade. As events were to show, what she lacked was a real understanding of the protagonists whom she sought to reconcile” (135). By rethinking her relationship to this audience, Boyle is able to speak in terms, and a genre, more comprehensible to them. Thus the key to her overcoming her rhetorical failure occurs not because the resistance of her audience softens but because she gains a more sophisticated understanding of who they are and what they think.

6. ⁶While few scholars have begun to investigate the role of spiritual memoirs in the civil rights movement, feminist scholars Lisa Shaver and Lisa Zimmerelli have powerfully argued that in the nineteenth century, women employed the spiritual memoir to embolden their political activism. Boyle’s example further supports this argument, as she used the resources of her religion to rebuild her rhetorical career while also leveraging a new argument.

7. ⁷For a fascinating discussion of the distinctions between Christian and secular confession, see Dave Tell’s book, Confessional Crises.

8. ⁸In this way, Boyle might be said to anticipate twenty-first century discussions of race. See Danielle Allen’s Talking to Strangers. To some degree, Boyle makes the same argument as Allen: A productive citizenry must learn to speak as friends rather than strangers (Allen 171). Allen writes, for example, “One needs to display to strangers, as much as possible, that one is willing to given them the benefit of the doubt. … Democratic trust depends on public displays of an egalitarian, well-intentioned spirit” (167).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Elizabeth Ellis Miller

Elizabeth Miller’s research interests include civil rights rhetorics, genre studies, and feminist historiography. Her dissertation explores the civil rights mass meeting as a site for developing individual and collective rhetorical identities through religious genres. She recently completed her PhD at the University of Maryland where she teaches courses in rhetoric and writing and works as an assistant director in the Academic Writing Program.