Charles Marsh - Gods Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights

CHARLES MARSH

STORIES OF FAITH AND CIVIL RIGHTS

With a new preface by the author

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Copyright 1997 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,

Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press,

6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW

All Rights Reserved

First published 1997

Paperback edition, 1999

Reissue, with a new preface by the author, 2008

ISBN 978-0-691-13067-5

The Library of Congress has cataloged the first edition of this book as follows

Marsh, Charles, 1958

Gods long summer : stories of faith and civil rights / Charles Marsh.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-691-02134-1 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Afro-AmericansCivil rightsMississippiHistory20th century. 2. Civil rights movementsMississippiHistory20th century. 3. Civil rightsMississippiReligious aspectsChristianity. 4. Civil rights workersReligious lifeMississippiHistory20th century. 5. MississippiRace relations. 6. MississippiChurch history20th century. I. Title.

E185.93.M6M26 1997 97-10668

305.896'0730762dc21

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

Elizabeth Sewell, Ballad, from Five Mississippi Poems, reprinted
from Signs and Cities (Chapel Hill, University of
North Carolina Press, 1968).

This book has been composed in Berkeley Book

Printed on acid-free paper.

press.princeton.edu

Printed in the United States of America

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

T O

JOE PORTER,

JEROME JOHNSON,

TERRY CAVES,

WALTER CHANDLER,

JOEY ROBERTS,

and all my other classmates

in the first integrated school

in Laurel, Mississippi

You can sense it where youre lying, open-eyed, upon your beds,

O the iron and the weeping such as loving eyes afford,

Where the tigerish divisions tear Gods body into shreds,

O the iron and the weeping where the grapes of wrath are stored,

Through the worship, through the concert, through the phalanx of police,

Where merely to be Coloured is disturbance-of-the-peace,

And you begin to wonder if this sound will ever cease

O the iron, O the weeping, O inexorable Lord!

Elizabeth Sewell, from Five Mississippi Poems (1968)

PREFACE TO THE 2008 EDITION
xi

ABBREVIATIONS
xvii

With God on Our Side: Faiths in Conflict
3

Im on My Way, Praise God: Mrs. Hamers Fight for Freedom
10

High Priest of the Anti-Civil Rights Movement: The Calling of Sam Bowers
49

Douglas Hudgins: Theologian of the Closed Society
82

Inside Agitator: Ed Kings Church Visits
116

Cleveland Sellers and the River of No Return
152

Clearburning: Fragments of a Reconciling Faith
192

AFTERWORD
195

NOTES
205

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
255

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
259

INTERVIEWS
267

INDEX
269

I N THE SUMMER of 1994, while teaching at a Jesuit college in Baltimore, I packed a few bags into my Honda station wagon and headed south. I had a notion that I would write a book about the civil rights movement. I had no knowledge of field research or oral history, and couldnt really tell you what I was hoping to accomplish; yet for a variety of unavoidable reasons, some of which I later wrote about in the memoir The Last Days: A Sons Story of Sin and Segregation at the Dawn of a New South, I had begun thinking a lot about my Southern childhood, after having spent a decade trying hard to forget it. Despite a lengthy training in philosophical theology, and my current efforts as an assistant professor to write the monographs and scholarly articles needed for tenure, I had come to the conclusion that my journals and notebooks, filled now with images, words, and fragments evoking those anxious years, offered a more reliable guide to my future plans than the expectations of the guild. So I plowed ahead into the unfamiliar territory of narrative nonfiction and historical research.

An interview with Victoria Gray Adams in Petersburg, Virginia, led to a visit with Will D. Campbell in Mount Juliet, Tennessee, which led to a conversation with Bishop Duncan Gray, in the Jackson office of the Mississippi Episcopal Diocese, which led in turn to the first of many lunches and day trips with Ed King, in Jackson and in the small towns where the civil rights movement had once taken hold. My trip followed only an itinerary of the willing and ricocheted back to Georgia, to South Carolina, to congressional offices in Washington, and to my neighborhood in Baltimore, which had raised a community of Jewish social progressives, a fair share of whom had traveled to Mississippi in 1964.

I spoke with anyone willing to tell their story. The cast included not only movement heroes like Cleveland Sellers, Jane Stembridge, John Lewis, Bob Zellner, Andrew Young, and Joan Trumpauer, but also people who sat on the fencewhite ministers, school teachers, attorneys, business leaders, black moderates, and members of my own family. Eventually I talked with the men who so greatly despised the prospects of black freedom that they organized terrorist cells and plotted murder and mayhem. In a private dining room in the back of a gas station on a two-lane highway outside of Laurel, Mississippi, the Imperial Wizard of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi, Sam Bowers, broke his decades-long vow of silence and recounted to me in harrowing detail why he had killed infidels and heretics in the name of God. He also expressed his hope that were he summoned by higher powers in 1994 (the year we spoke) to take up the cause of Christian terrorism, he would show the same courage as when he regularly orchestrated killings, beatings, fire bombings, and church burnings in the 1960s. He told me all this while I sat across the table and tried to calmly transcribe his comments into a spiral-bound notebook.

The only person I recall who ever refused an interview was an unlikely sort. At least his refusal took me by surprise. The heir of a racist Mississippi media conglomerate, who had renounced his cultural (though not his monetary) inheritance, left the South, and bought a liberal magazine in New York. Im not telling my story anymore, he said in our final phone exchange. I was not aware that he had ever told his story, but such is the pretense of white privilege that in pitching timidity as a class virtue it becomes an accomplice of wounded memory. By contrast, the generosity of black Southerners in sharing their stories, photographs, and scrapbooks, and often in sitting down for meals and leisurely chats, felt to me then, as it still does today, like a precious giftmerciful, uplifting, and wholly undeserved.

In time, a book took shape. It was not a comprehensive study of religion and civil rights, but the intricate story, or stories, of five people believing wholeheartedly in the Christian religion, who stuck themselves into the chaos of history according to differing images of God, often with devastating results. The beliefs and actions of ordinary men and women caught in the whirlwind of the movement, and, in particular, in the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project of 1964 and its aftermath, illuminated in my mind a fresh perspective on the story and the promise of new insights on faith and justice.