Divine Agitators: The Delta Ministry and Civil Rights in Mississippi

The National Council of Churches established the Delta Ministry in 1964 to further the cause of civil rights in Mississippi--the southern state with the largest black population proportionately and with the stiffest level of white resistance. At its height the Ministry, which was headquartered in Greenville, had the largest field staff of any civil rights organization in the South. Active through the mid-1970s, the Ministry outlasted SNCC, CORE, and the SCLC in Mississippi, helping to fill the vacuums when these organizations fell apart or refocused their energies.

In this first book-length study of the Delta Ministry, Mark Newman tells how the organization conducted literacy, citizenship, and vocational training. He documents the Ministry's role in fostering the growth of Head Start and community-based health care and in widening the distribution of free surplus federal food and food stamps.

Newman discusses, among other Ministry successes, the Delta Foundation, which created jobs by channeling grant money to small businesses that could not secure bank loans. At the same time, he details the Ministry's problems from its chronic underfunding to its uneasy relationship with the Mississippi NAACP, which pursued civil rights objectives through less confrontational methods. Newman examines the Freedomcrafts manufacturing cooperative and other ministry failures, as well as mixed efforts such as Freedom City, a collective agricultural and manufacturing community built by displaced agricultural workers.

Divine Agitators looks at many inadequately studied events across a time span that extends beyond the widely accepted end dates of the civil rights movement. It offers new insights, at the most local levels of the movement, into conflict within and between civil rights groups, the increasing subtlety of white resistance, the disengagement of the federal government, and the rise of Black Power.

Mississippi, and particularly the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta region, offered the most determined resistance to the civil rights movement of the early 1960s, says Newman (history, U. of Derby). He describes Delta Ministry, inaugurated in 1964 by the National Council of Churches with the cooperation of local civil rights leaders. It was a ten-year program of relief, literacy, voter registration, economic development, and community development. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Mark Newman is a reader in history at the University of Edinburgh. He won the Southern Regional Council's Lillian Smith Book Award for Getting Right with God.