God's Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights

In the summer of 1964, the turmoil of the civil rights movement reached its peak in Mississippi, with activists across the political spectrum claiming that God was on their side in the struggle over racial justice. This was the summer when violence against blacks increased at an alarming rate and when the murder of three civil rights workers in Mississippi resulted in national media attention. Charles Marsh takes us back to this place and time, when the lives of activists on all sides of the civil rights issue converged and their images of God clashed. He weaves their voices into a gripping narrative: a Ku Klux Klansman, for example, borrows fiery language from the Bible to link attacks on blacks to his "priestly calling"; a middle-aged woman describes how the Gospel inspired her to rally other African Americans to fight peacefully for their dignity; a SNCC worker tells of harrowing encounters with angry white mobs and his pilgrimage toward a new racial spirituality called Black Power. Through these emotionally charged stories, Marsh invites us to consider the civil rights movement anew, in terms of religion as a powerful yet protean force driving social action.

The book's central figures are Fannie Lou Hamer, who "worked for Jesus" in civil rights activism; Sam Bowers, the Imperial Wizard of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi; William Douglas Hudgins, an influential white Baptist pastor and unofficial theologian of the "closed society"; Ed King, a white Methodist minister and Mississippi native who campaigned to integrate Protestant congregations; and Cleveland Sellers, a SNCC staff member turned black militant.

Marsh focuses on the events and religious convictions that led each person into the political upheaval of 1964. He presents an unforgettable American social landscape, one that is by turns shameful and inspiring. In conclusion, Marsh suggests that it may be possible to sift among these narratives and lay the groundwork for a new thinking about racial reconciliation and the beloved community. He maintains that the person who embraces faith's life-affirming energies will leave behind a most powerful legacy of social activism and compassion.

"Marsh celebrates the importance of Christian faith in founding the civil rights movement, [exploring] as well the devastating dichotomy of hate and prejudice."--Andrew Young

"Mississippi Freedom Summer tested my commitment and my faith.... To this day, I wonder how those who opposed us reconciled their faith with their hatred and their anger or even their inaction. [Marsh] admirably attempts to explore this unfathomable paradox."--John Lewis, Member of Congress, 5th District, Georgia

"This wonderfully narrated book offers truths about the civil rights struggle of the 1960s often overlooked-the intensely moral and spiritual side of an effort that had an enormous impact on our secular life."--Robert Coles

Publishers Weekly

The summer of 1964 in Mississippi was in many ways the peak of the civil rights movement, culminating in the murder of three civil rights workers. Marsh, who directs the Project on Theology and Community at Loyola College in Baltimore, revisits the summer of '64 by exploring the ways that each of the key players in this racial drama were motivated by their religious claims that God was on their side. Marsh chronicles the stories of Fannie Lou Hamer, the famous black activist who said she "worked for Jesus" in the struggle for civil rights; Sam Bowers, the Imperial Wizard of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi, who understood that his elimination of blacks was God's calling for him to purge heretics from the Christian ranks; William Douglas Hudgins, a white Southern Baptist minister whose messages to his congregation at the beginning of the civil rights movement, according to Marsh, focused on personal piety and not on social justice; Reverend Edward King, the white chaplain at all-black Tugaloo College in Jackson, Miss., who believed that his religious vision as a Christian demanded that he work for social justice in practical ways like voter registration campaigns; and Cleveland Sellers, an SNCC staff member whose Christian vision of nonviolence was changed by his encounter with the spirituality of black nationalism under Stokely Carmichael. Marsh traces the growth and development of each of these leaders, and he shows the ways in which their religious visions of racial change and racial justice came into often violent conflict in the hot Mississippi summer of '64. Marsh's slice of history is imperative reading for understanding the religious foundations of social movements. (Oct.)

Charles Marsh is professor of religious studies and director of the Project on Lived Theology at the University of Virginia. A graduate of Harvard Divinity School, he is the author of "Reclaiming Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Last Days" and, most recently, T"he Beloved Community: How Faith Shapes Social Justice, from the Civil Rights Movement to Today".