So many of the best stories of the civil-rights movement are the smaller ones: not the stories of the waters parting and the people marching over, but of everyday bravery and long-forgotten failures. I am especially partial to the story of the church-visit campaign in 1963. Led by a white, Mississippi-native Methodist minister named Edwin King, along with a handful of black and white students, ministers, and professors, the church visits were part of an intensified effort to crack the iceberg of Southern segregation by focusing energies on Mississippi—"the most race-haunted of all American states,"1 where a brutal pigmentocracy and a fervent belief in Jesus Christ were endorsed with equal passion.

Ed King and company went straight for the jugular. Sunday after Sunday, he and his theological comrades appeared on the steps of Jackson's most segregated white churches, praying, singing, testifying—enacting time and again spectacular scenarios that teased out of the "church guards" darkly comic and ironic assertions about faith and social existence. As the campaign proceeded during the fall of 1963 and spring of 1964, it had all the makings of a theater of the absurd wherein the myriad theological contradictions of a closed and racist society became evidenced and pantomimed.

One Sunday morning during the autumn of the church-visits crusade, King drove a biracial group of students from Tougaloo College (the historically black private college where he served as chaplain) to the cavernous Galloway Memorial Methodist Church for an early-morning Communion service. The church guards, who had not been prepared this morning for the visitors' arrival, rushed to form a human barricade at the double doors, forcing the church regulars to find their way inside by entering the educational building on the opposite side of the grounds. (These guards were deacons or ushers who patrolled the sidewalks and entrances for black, integrated, or otherwise suspicious groups of worshipers.) But King and the students were not intimidated: leaning over the outstretched arms of the guards, they began knocking, then banging, on the heavy wooden closed doors of the sanctuary. Although people were kneeling inside at the altar, waiting on this Sunday to receive Communion, the loud knocking at the back doors echoed furiously through the recesses of the interior and interrupted the service.

Triumphant, King's vexing reply was aimed to agitate. "If we can't worship the same God together inside the same church buildings, then we will still knock on your door and so irritate you that you cannot worship your white God in peace, that you cannot escape thinking about the problems of segregation even on Sunday morning; for we are letting you know that every single aspect of your Southern Way of Life is under attack."2

The church-visit campaign elicited, time and again, symbolic gestures and comic self-contradictions that caricatured the closed society's celebrated piety. In King's mind, these moments during which white Christians betrayed all manner of theological incoherence were often just as important as the achievement of a desegregated church. When a black woman tried to engage an usher-guard in a dialogue about the church's racial policy, only to hear the response, "Please don't try to appeal to my conscience" or "Just leave Jesus out of this" or "This is a Christian church and we intend to keep it that way," the result was a dramatic default of theological credibility. King could then ascend to speak the prophetic word to the historical moment. In full view of divine and public scrutiny, authority was relinquished to the "outsiders"—and in a way that became deeply empowering, even reassuring. God must be on our side. He's surely not with all these white folks!

King himself was a large part of the campaign's fascination: a tall and wiry man of indefatigable energy, he made himself a menace to every white minister who presided over a segregated parish. He would appear in a well-appointed "pastor's study" at inconvenient hours, eager to explain that Mississippi was fast becoming a Nazi state and that he—the minister sitting irritably behind his desk—had better fast join ranks with Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Confessing Church. The presiding Mississippi Methodist bishop was so annoyed by King's antics that he had ordained him to "the ministry of the Christian tradition" without any denominational affiliation to a conference of the United Methodist Church. Tirelessly perfecting his role as the Lord's prophet, King rendered judgments and demands with a righteous anger bordering on arrogance.

What did the campaign accomplish? Virtually nothing by way of strategic successes. Yet of all the acts of nonviolent direct protest leveled against a segregated society, none registered as a more painful reminder of the South's own failed ideals than the pervasive inhospitality displayed toward black and interracial groups of Christians seeking a seat in the pews. The church visitors created a space where previously unspoken ideas on religion and race came to dramatic expression. The most common of these was the shaky, troubled inclination to value the integrity of the gospel less than the Southern Way of Life. When that inclination reached public articulation, as it did in the varied responses to the church visits, the default of theological credibility bore severe consequences—none more striking than the white church presenting itself as hostile to the gospel—indeed, to Christ himself. Even an occasional open door only confirmed in the final analysis the white church's failure to reckon with the cost of true discipleship—the all or nothing, the willingness to give up the securities of culture and custom for the sake of bearing witness to the power of the resurrection.

In this manner, the church visits reconsidered also create a space for a new way of thinking about the civil-rights story as a whole—one more attentive to the deep religious texture of the movement, to the complex theological dramas at play. They remind us that, for many participants in the movement, the struggle for black equality under the law was, at the core, a struggle for the integrity of the gospel. They remind us that—in some perplexing way—God was there, too, working through the Holy Spirit toward a more vigorous expression of God's "spontaneous overflowing love."3

Theologian Karl Barth once raised the nagging question of how the world would look if we let ourselves be led far beyond what is elsewhere called history and into a strange, new world—into the world of God. "The paramount question," he wrote in an early essay, "is whether we have understanding for this different, new world, or good will enough to meditate and enter upon it inwardly. Do we desire the presence of 'God'? Do we dare to go whither evidently we are being led?"4 In other words, how would history be told if we let ourselves really believe that God was in Jesus Christ reconciling the sinful world to himself and people with each other? If that fact mattered more than the demands of academe, more than the laudable achievements of a sober methodology, more than anything else in the world?

In his luminous book The Preacher King: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Word That Moved America, Richard Lischer, a professor of homiletics at Duke Divinity School, takes Barth's question to heart and applies it to the story of the civil-rights movement. With his simple suggestion that we learn to see ordinary Southern towns as "theaters of divine revelation," Lischer offers nothing less than a new paradigm both for civil-rights historiography and (quite possibly) for theological discourse as well.

For Lischer, the church exists at the center of the dramas of the civil-rights movement: not the church as described in so much conventional wisdom as an instrument of social change ("a supportive social environment," in Charles Payne's words), though it undoubtedly is that, but rather the church as the body of Christ, the "colony of heaven" (in Martin Luther King's words) where the costly demands of the prophets and Jesus are preached without compromise.

Lischer's King is not a savvy Protestant liberal inspiring social movements with rhetorical brilliance and moral religion. To be sure, King could skillfully rehearse liberalism's intellectual repertoire and praise its bold commitments to human freedom. But no matter how many times he recited liberalism's itinerary—with all its confident bromides on human nature and its possibilities—he could never find a home there. As Lischer says, "[Liberalism's] Enlightenment vision of the harmony of humanity, nature, and God skips a step that is essential to the development of black identity. It has little experience of the evil and suffering borne by enslaved and segregated people in America. Liberalism is ignorant—even innocent—of matters African American children understand before their seventh birthday." Lischer's King is the "preacher King," the man who said, "In the quiet recesses of my heart, I am fundamentally a clergyman, a Baptist preacher." By measuring King's life and ministry against the message he preached—not only the effect but even more the content of that message—Lischer creates a groundbreaking theological narrative. He has not so much revised, reconstructed, or retold history but repositioned it from the perspective of the saving God of Jesus Christ.

Lischer's narrative shows us a theological realism, with the church properly fixed as reality's animating center—with the Christian doctrine of self-giving, agape love taking real form on the streets of Montgomery, Birmingham, Selma, and Chicago. "King himself became the sacrament of the Movement in whom his followers could participate by listening and responding to his appeal," Lischer explains. "Conversions to courage occurred. King-led demonstrations became symbolic enactments of Bible stories that his opponents thought safely banished from politics and secular affairs." The worldly presence of God is like this, King told a quarter-million people at the Lincoln Memorial: like white and black people from Georgia sitting down at a table together and "acting like kin." (Of course, after the 1965 Selma march, King began to understand that the kingdom might also be proclaimed with judgment and the winnowing fork.) Lischer's book opens our eyes to how the story might appear anew if we let ourselves be led beyond what is elsewhere called history and into the strange, new world of Jesus Christ.

Seen in the context of Lischer's work, the recent studies of the civil-rights movement by John Dittmer, John Egerton, and Charles Payne point toward a range of meaning broader than the parameters of social history generally construed.

Egerton's Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South is a sweeping chronicle of the iconoclasts and radicals who prepared the ground for the civil-rights movement of the late 1950s and 1960s. The seeds of dissent—which would burst fully into life then—were planted by an earlier generation of Southern men and women who refused to participate in "the bleak rituals of keeping Negroes in their 'place' " (as white Georgia writer and racial progressive Lillian Smith wrote).

With a broad historical knowledge of the period, a keen eye for comic detail, and a brisk narrative style, Egerton surveys the wide landscape of Southern radicalism from 1929 until 1955 (the year Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat in the front of a Montgomery city bus) and paints a big, lively canvas filled with extraordinary people acting bravely, and thus "behaving badly," in an extraordinary time. His descriptions of the varied social and cultural backgrounds of his characters are rounded and rich, and include the religious and the theological in such obvious cases as Clarence Jordon (author of the Cotton Patch Gospels and founder of the interracial Koinonia community in Americus, Georgia) and Myles Horton (the theology student who founded the Highlander Folk School in eastern Tennessee). Egerton succeeds in capturing the apprehension and excitement of a pivotal moment in American history—"a crossing from darkness into light, a hinge of time swinging shut on a constricted past and opening to an expansive future," and perhaps even the stirring of the Spirit toward the even greater conflagration to come.

Dittmer's Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi and Payne's I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle are beautifully written accounts of what Bonhoeffer once referred to as "history from below, from the perspective of the outcast, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless." Payne tells the story of the movement in the Mississippi Delta, from Amzie Moore's pioneer work in black organizing in the 1950s, through SNCC's Fannie Lou Hamer and the pursuit of the beloved community, to the collapse of the activist tradition in the black community in the wake of Black Power and its "Blacker Than Thou, More Dedicated Than Thou, More Revolutionary Than Anybody" pretensions.

Payne's chapter, "Mrs. Hamer Is No Longer Relevant"—recalling the judgment of one SNCC militant that Fannie Lou Hamer's commitments to Christ-shaped forgiveness and reconciliation were "no longer relevant," no longer at SNCC's "level of development"—is a provocative account of the collapse of the movement as an interracial fellowship of men and women embodying the ideal of the Beloved Community. At the same time, the chapter is the finest analysis of the historical context of current racial tensions I have read.

The troubling and, at least to many academics, politically awkward fact that black nationalism increasingly pulled black activists away from real black people in real situations of impoverishment has neither been adequately discussed nor appreciated. John Lewis, one of SNCC's last interracialists and now a U.S. congressman from Georgia, explained in the wake of his own resignation from SNCC that most black people "will never identify with black nationalists and other black reactionaries who talk loud and use cutting words like 'Black Power,' but also never engaged in confrontation to bring about change."5 While black separatists vilified whites, summoned power to the people, and promoted Panafricanism, projects in black communities floundered throughout the South. Charles Payne, an African American historian, courageously reckons with the lessons and meanings of this hard truth.

John Dittmer's masterpiece, 11 years in the making, tells the larger story of the civil-rights movement in Mississippi and makes clear why "the Magnolia State" was regarded widely as the solidmost core of the iceberg of Southern segregation. The story opens with the return of black veterans of World War II to the "closed society" of Jim Crow Mississippi. Men like Charles and Medgar Evers, having fought valiantly for America on foreign soil, were welcomed home by Gov. Theodore Bilbo with the reminder that America "is strictly a white man's country … and any dream on the part of the negro race to share social and political equality will be shattered in the end."

The progressive Memphis newspaperman Kenneth Toler would report that during the 1946 Democratic primary Bilbo told white voters the way to keep blacks from voting was "to see them the night before the election." In fact, Bilbo's message was lost on no one. As Dittmer says, "Lynching had always been the ultimate form of social control, and neither youth, old age, nor social class offered protection to Negroes who did not stay in their place."

Still, returning black veterans brought with them new experiences of interracial life (particularly those men stationed in France) as well as rising expectations for black progress in Mississippi. In turn, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People—which had been slowly chipping away at the iceberg of Mississippi segregation since 1918—intensified its efforts after the war, adding branches throughout the state and focusing on voter registration. And then came the 1954 Supreme Court decision outlawing segregation in public schools, and everything changed.

Dittmer's account of the massive white resistance that took shape in opposition to Brown v. Board of Education is an unforgettable trip through what William Faulkner called "the wacky logic of segregation." At the same time, Dittmer offers a surprisingly helpful analysis of idolatry and the evolution of cultural religion.

In the aftermath of the Supreme Court decision, white Mississippi became obsessed with the preservation of social orthodoxy. According to Dittmer, the Brown decision so frightened whites that a siege mentality "encompassed virtually every citizen and institution." Indeed, "a homegrown McCarthyism took hold in the Magnolia State. Books were banned, speakers censored, and network television programs cut off in midsentence." The white public appeared collectively devoted to the protection of a state sovereignty undefiled by federal imposition.

Agencies like the Citizens' Council (or "the uptown Klan," as Hodding Carter once said) and the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission were created as guardians of racial separation, vigilantly monitoring the goings-on of outsiders and dissidents.

The Citizens' Council, formed by a group of 13 civic leaders in Indianola just two months after Brown, rallied around the notionthat the South had again become a victim of ravenous federal expansion. Ostensibly, the council eschewed the violent measures later associated with the brutal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, advocating instead the use of economic and social pressure to enforce segregation.

But Dittmer is correct to add that the council's constant attack on human rights "fostered and legitimized violent actions by individuals not overly concerned with questions of legality and image." By 1956, the council boasted a membership of 80,000, scattered throughout most of the state's 82 counties and all six congressional districts. The council's publications—the newspaper The Citizens' Council and, after 1961, the journal The Citizen—offered a wide range of pro-segregationist opinion, from Paul Harvey reprints to quasi-scientific accounts of black inferiority to biblical defenses of white supremacy.

At the heart of the council's fear was the terrible certainty that the new social landscape would encourage intimacy between blacks and whites— the dreaded "mongrelization" of the races. "Negroid blood," warned the council in Racial Facts, one of its most popular pamphlets, is "like the jungle, steadily and completely swallowing up everything." The editor of the Jackson Daily News lamented the Brown decision as "the first step, or an opening wedge, toward mixed marriages, miscegenation, and the mongrelization of the human race." Princeton- educated Judge Tom P. Brady, the most revered intellectual of Mississippi white resistance, explained in his widely read polemic of 1954, Black Monday:

Very few negroes have true respect and reverence for their race. They sense their racial limitations. If there is a short cut they want it. They are unwilling to try to evolve and develop through growth and struggle as has the white man. Evolutionary advancement, the only way in which a substantial lasting contribution to their race and to this country can be made, is far too tedious and slow. Oh, no, they desire a much shorter detour, via the political tunnel, to get on the inter-marriage turnpikes. These Northern negroes are determined to mongrelize America!

Brady, who was later to serve as a Mississippi Supreme Court justice, then forecast bleak consequences for the future in a telling juxtaposition of images: "When a law transgresses the moral and ethical sanctions and standards of the mores, invariable strife, bloodshed and revolution follow in the wake of its attempted enforcement. The loveliest and purest of God's creatures, the nearest thing to an angelic being that treads this terrestrial ball is a well-bred, cultured Southern white woman or her blue-eyed, golden-haired little girl."

In 1956, a new organization appeared, predisposed to the same political concerns of the Citizens' Council, but now underwritten by the state legislature. The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission was formed to broaden the scope of protecting "the Southern Way of Life."6 Its expressed purpose was "to do and perform any and all acts and things deemed necessary and proper to protect the sovereignty of the State of Mississippi, and her sister states, from encroachment thereon by the Federal Government"; it operated, in journalist Wilson Minor's words, as "something akin to NKVD among the cotton patches." With an extensive surveillance network solidly in place, the Sovereignty Commission closely monitored civil-rights activists and any Mississippi citizens suspected of heterodoxy—"persons whose utterances or actions indicate they should be watched with suspicion on future racial attitudes." The commission dispatched investigators and spies to gather information on civil-rights workers, white liberals, and anyone else suspected of racial indiscretion, spending as much time and energy tracking down reports of interracial sex as it did investigating the activities of so-called subversive groups. By 1967, the commission had amassed an archive of more than ten thousand reports on people who worked for or represented "subversive, militant, or revolutionary groups." By 1974, the files would grow to 87,000 names.

All the while, evangelistic crusades in every hamlet summoned the unsaved and backsliding to surrender their lives to Christ; prayers were rendered for sick and dying loved ones, for unsaved friends and the heathen in jungle forests. Everywhere Bibles were read with abandon, underlined and annotated in red ink along the margins of the King James Version. Mississippi was the most Christian state in the most Christian region of the country. Those few ministers who dared speak against the day were sent packing; and in Southern Baptist Churches, the polity structure offered no court of appeal beyond the local congregation. The renegade Baptist preacher, Will Campbell, who had served as the director of religious life at Ole Miss before getting fired for his racial progressivism, once explained that a white conservative minister could stand at the pulpit of any Baptist church of the deep South and preach from Paul's Letter to the Corinthians that Jesus Christ reconciles all people to God and each other, and he would undoubtedly receive an enthusiastic chorus of "Amens" from the congregation; yet if that minister proceeded to explain that the gospel message requires brotherhood and sisterhood with black people—and justice and mercy for them—he would be chased out of town by sundown.7

Dittmer shows us the cultural and historical elements of this bifurcated faith in which the proclamation of the gospel and social existence in the world have little to do with each other. However, he does not analyze the theological impulses that shaped the cultural idols—this is not his intention. What one would learn of the white Southern Protestant church in such an analysis would be on the surface not all that surprising: that, by and large, white Christians adhered to an evangelical faith, the heart of which was the confession of "a personal Lord and Savior"; that, in most cases, their confession was deracinated from race relations, and often from social matters altogether. For these evangelicals, the Christian life was about personal union with the saving God, secured in one decisive but continually repeated encounter with the risen Jesus. Nothing else mattered.

The consequences were devastating. When salvation was reduced to the soul's competency before God in an individual encounter with the risen Christ (also "down in my heart"), the Christian obligation to do right by black men and women lost what force it may have otherwise had. Justice became secondary to faith's real intent, to my own walk with Christ in my own private spiritual garden. In the end, concern for black suffering had nothing to do with following Jesus.

By the time the 1964 Summer Project began—warranted in part by the theological bankruptcy of the white church—and an even larger core and sncc presence appeared in Mississippi along with a thousand volunteers (mostly white and Northern), the stage was set for a crisis that seemed to many cosmic in scope. At the end of the long, hot summer of 1964, after massive efforts were made toward voter registration and black political empowerment, Mississippi would never again be the same. As one local black activist later recalled, "You saw people with relatively low levels of education, very little money, beginning to stretch themselves, beginning to see themselves as worthwhile, to overcome the years of deprivation." Years of struggle and frequent disillusionment for black Mississippians would surely not end just now, but the iron-hard grip of massive resistance had been permanently loosened.

On the hot, humid night of August 7, 1964, Ed King participated in a memorial service for James Chaney, the African American CORE worker from Meridian, Mississippi, who, along with coworkers Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, had been murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in the early summer. Before a packed congregation of 700 at the First Union Baptist Church, King boldly reclaimed the cross from its abuses at the hand of white extremists. "[Our] cross is not a burned cross," he said, "it is the one cross of Calvary that is stained with the blood of Jesus, God's son. God gave his son for all of us and this is the cross that we follow—the cross that means victory, not emptiness and decay; the cross that means victory over death, the victory in this life; the cross that means we can forgive, that God will help us to love; the cross that means we will have a new beginning, a new resurrection, a new birth."8 In this manner, the reclaimed cross—not in symbolic form but in all the exquisite literalness of Jesus' suffering body—gave decisive theological sense to the movement's own sacrifices.

The white church had forgotten that it had a right to exist—more, was called into being—only when it gave itself away. The white church had only deceived itself by thinking otherwise, though such deception often became irresistible by its wealth of associations, councils, bureaucracies, ecclesiastical agencies, and (as Barth said in a different context) its "interesting nooks for the soul, of dogma, cultus and morality." The white church did not, and would not, tolerate the possibility of its own sinfulness; of the fact that its confidence and traditions hovered above an abyss of increasing self-doubt. Not even the spectacle of the church visits could bring home this sobering fact. In the end, the white church lacked that character of pilgrim, stranger, and peculiar people that alone could distinguish its presence as "the body of Christ." The closed society had taken the divine into its own possession; it had brought God under its arrogant though quite nervous management.

I have not meant to suggest that there is a single adequate theological understanding of the civil-rights movement. Rather, I have wanted simply to remind us that for many of the local people in the struggle, from Martin King to Ed King, from Rosa Parks to Fannie Lou Hamer, the movement was in a profound sense about getting things right with God. Those of us who tell the story would do well to remember not only the faithful who overcame, but the faith itself—and even more the God of our faith whose "spontaneous overflowing love" is movement in its most basic sense. To quote Barth once again, it is "movement from a third dimension, so to speak, which transcends and yet penetrates all these movements and gives them their inner meaning and motive."9 We should work hard to understand the rich and complex legacy of those local men and women who believed that God was really there, in the thick of things, working mightily toward a more just society.

Charles Marsh is associate professor of theology and director of the Project on Theology and Community at Loyola College in Baltimore. He is the author of God's Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights, recently published by Princeton University Press, and Reclaiming Dietrich Bonhoeffer: The Promise of His Theology (Oxford University Press).

30 Years After Martin Luther King

There penciled in against the sky stick men motionless, angular Olympians pushing back the night; as if their cold and practiced sight could penetrate a madness and reveal if now, today, we hear a speech or watch the speaker die. —"Election 1968" by Mark Noll

Despite all the ink spilled, we are only starting to take the measure of what historian Taylor Branch boldly calls "the King years," a time of change and hope and tragedy culminating in the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in April 1968, and of Robert Kennedy two months later.

In this special section, what we offer is not a summation but the beginning of an assessment of what we have to learn from the King years and of where we are as a nation 30 years after King's death. Charles Marsh invites us to rethink the civil-rights movement as a theological drama. Peter Chattaway reads the movie Amistad in the light of Hollywood's prejudices. Conservatives who call for a "colorblind" society (often citing King for authority), Glenn Loury writes, lack an appreciation of irony and a sense of the tragic. Eugene Genovese affirms the achievements of Black Studies as an intellectual discipline and delivers a scathing indictment both of those who would deny its validity and of the way in which such programs have been administered. And Willie James Jennings reflects on the burdens of the black leader, torn between the demands of black nationalism and American democracy.

These writers don't constitute a unified front—they disagree on some significant points—but they are all convinced that their subject is important. We agree. Look for more essays on this theme in future issues of B&C.—JW

1. Neil R. McMillen, Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow (Univ. of Illinois Press, 1990), p. xiii.
2. Edwin King, Life in Mississippi, unpublished manuscript.
3. Martin Luther King, Jr., cited in Lischer, The Preacher King, p. 214.
4. Karl Barth, The Word of God and the Word of Man, tr. Douglas Horton (Peter Smith, 1978), p. 37.
5. Lewis cited in Jack Nelson, "Los Angeles Times Report" July 29, 1966, SNCC Papers, Box 6, King Center.
6. The Citizens' Council primer for third and fourth graders explains the concept: "God wanted the white people to live alone. And He wanted colored people to live alone. The white man built America for you. White men built America so they could make the rules. George Washington was a brave and honest white man. … The white man has always been kind to the Negro. … Negro people like to live by themselves. Negroes use their own bathrooms. They do not use white people's bathrooms. … This is called our Southern Way of Life." Cited in Nicholas von Hoffman, Mississippi Notebook (David White Company, 1964), p. 46.
7.Will D. Campbell, Interview, June 5, 1993.
8. Edwin King, "Eulogy for James Chaney, August 7, 1964," transcribed from audiotape by Carlene Bauer.
9. Barth, The Word of God & the Word of Man, p. 283.

Copyright © 1998 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail bceditor@BooksAndCulture.com.