Like many of the clergy leaders in the civil rights movement, Oliver embodied what Gayraud S. Wilmore identified as the radical tradition in Black religion. Unlike most of those leaders, Oliver was educated in predominantly white, conservative religious circles. He drew many of his theological convictions from the conservative Presbyterian tradition defined by the fundamentalist-modernist controversy and represented by J. Gresham Machen and Westminster Seminary. The interaction of these Black radical and conservative Reformed traditions resulted in a revolutionary understanding of the Reformed faith.