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The Student Interracial Ministry, Liberal Protestantism, and the Civil Rights Movement, 1960-1970 View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Carolina Digital Repository Revolution and Reconciliation: The Student Interracial Ministry, Liberal Protestantism, and the Civil Rights Movement, 1960-1970 David P. Cline A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for a degree of doctor of philosophy in the Department of History. Chapel Hill 2010 Approved by: Advisor: Jacquelyn Dowd Hall Reader: W. Fitzhugh Brundage Reader: William H. Chafe Reader: Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp Reader: Heather A. Williams © 2010 David P. Cline ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT DAVID P. CLINE: Revolution and Reconciliation: The Student Interracial Ministry, Liberal Protestantism, and the Civil Rights Movement, 1960-1970 (Under the direction of Jacquelyn Dowd Hall) The Student Interracial Ministry (SIM) was a seminary-based, nationally influential Protestant civil rights organization based in the Social Gospel and Student Christian Movement traditions. This dissertation uses SIM’s history to explore the role of liberal Protestants in the popular revolutions of the 1960s. Entirely student-led and always ecumenical in scope, SIM began in 1960 with the tactic of placing black assistant pastors in white churches and whites in black churches with the goal of achieving racial reconciliation. In its later years, before it disbanded in mid-1968, SIM moved away from church structures, engaging directly in political and economic movements, inner-city ministry and development projects, and college and seminary teaching. In each of these areas, SIM participants attempted to live out German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer's exhortation to “bring the church into the world.” Revolution and Reconciliation demonstrates that the civil rights movement, in both its “classic” phase from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s and its longer phase stretching over most of the twentieth century, was imbued with religious faith and its expression. It treats the classic phase of the civil rights movement as one manifestation of a theme of Liberal Protestant interracial reform that runs through the century, illustrating that liberal religious activists of the 1960s drew on a tradition of Protestant interracial reform, building on and iii sometimes reinventing the work of their progenitors earlier in the century to apply their understanding of the Gospel’s imperative to heal the injustices of the modern world. By examining the Student Interracial Ministry’s role in the civil rights movement, this dissertation contributes to the scholarship of social justice movements and of American religious activism by showing how progressive Christian young people worked for social change at the community level, and in the process created reform within both the seminary and the institutional church. By demonstrating the centrality of liberal Protestantism as a transformative force in twentieth century America, Revolution and Reconciliation offers a nuanced understanding of the student participants in the civil rights movement and a new perspective to the ongoing debates about the social, cultural, and political roots and legacies of the 1960s. iv To Shelley and Genevieve v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The best part of writing this dissertation was the people to whom this project introduced me. I accumulated many debts of gratitude along the way, only a portion of which I will be able to recall here. If you don’t see your name, and you’re not grateful for the omission, consider yourself thanked. First in line, by dint of her great display of patience, support, and more patience is Shelley Nichols Cline. Genevieve Louise Cline came along part way through the writing and provided much need perspective on the project, as well as on many other parts of life. My friend Tracy K’Meyer, a fantastic scholar of history and religion and overall insanely busy person, cut into vast swathes of her personal time to read and re-read and advise on this dissertation in its final phases. My father, Dr. Martin J. Cline, was my other faithful reader and adviser, whose close eye for language and timely sideline speeches got me through the last months. Thanks be unto you. I also owe a great debt of gratitude to the many former participants in the Student Interracial Ministry who happily gave of their time to recall their important past for me. I would especially like to thank several individuals who not only showed great enthusiasm for the project but nearly adopted it as their own. This has produced special relationships through the life of this research and so I thank, in no particular order, my friends and advisers John Collins, Maynard Moore, George Walters, Bob Seymour, Bob Hare, and Steve Rose. David Langston, an alum of Union Theological Seminary’s turbulent years in the late 1960s and vi early 1970s, although not of the SIM program, similarly adopted me and my research project and has given me many, many hours of his time. I am of course grateful to the members of my committee for their guidance and superlative scholarly models; thanks to: Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Fitz Brundage, Bill Chafe, Laurie Maffly-Kipp, and Heather Williams. It is worth repeating the name of Jacquelyn Dowd Hall again. I benefitted greatly from her guidance and especially from her close and careful attention to the writing within this dissertation. A number of other scholars and archivists have been greatly helpful to me over the past few years, including David Strickland, Clinton Stockwell, Craig Werner, Rhonda Lee, Laura Clark Brown and her colleagues at the Southern Historical Collection, and above all, Ruth Tonkiss Cameron, archivist extraordinaire at the Burke Library, Union Theological Seminary. Friends and colleagues and teachers in North Carolina who made living and researching here a pleasure include Beth Millwood, Seth Kotch, Anne Olivar, Rhonda Lee (again), Wayne Lee, Michael Hunt, Jason Bivins, Nina Bivins, Adriane Lentz-Smith, Christian Lentz, Katherine Charron, Brett Whalen, Malissa McCloud, Emily Burrill, Harry Watson, Ayse Erginer, Dave Shaw, Joseph Mosnier, Kendra Cotton, Sally Greene, Emily Baran, Josh Davis, Mark Sheftall, Bryan and Kelly Gilmer, Gordon Mantler, Christina Headrick, Bethany Keenan, Ryan and Katie Sabino, Christina Snyder, Aidan Smith, Willoughby Anderson, and Paul and Mindy Quigley. My thanks, too, to my friends and co- workers at the Southern Oral History Program and the Center for the Study of the American South. For their “soul support,” I thank my family and the Nichols clan far and wide, and the kind staff of Elmo’s restaurant in Durham. Mmmmm. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction………………………………………………………………..……...………...…1 Part One: “A Stirring in the Mulberry Trees”: Interracial Ministry and the Civil Rights Movement Chapter One: First Stirrings: Seminarians and the Call to Join the Southern Struggle……………...………………………..………………………………..22 Chapter Two: “So That None Shall Be Afraid”: Establishing and Building the Student Interracial Ministry, 1960-1961…………..….……………………74 Chapter Three: To be Both Pastor and Prophet: Interracial Ministry in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 1962………...………………....…………….109 Part Two: “These Walls Will Shake”: New Forms of Ministry for Changing Times Chapter Four: Beyond the Church Walls: Adopting New Strategies, 1963-1966…...………………………...........………………………………145 Chapter Five: The Church at Work in the World: Ministry in the Fields and Towns of Southwest Georgia, 1965-1968……………………….………….190 Part Three: “Living Completely in This World”: Into the City and Back to Campus Chapter Six: Seminarians in the City: Embracing Urban Ministry, 1967-1970..............241 viii Chapter Seven: Seminaries in the Storm: Educational Reform, Union Theological Seminary, and the Final Years of the Student Interracial Ministry……………..……...297 Afterword………………………………………………..……………………………….....330 Bibliography…………………………………………………………..……………………337 ix LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS National Council of Churches: NCC Southern Christian Leadership Conference Student Interracial Ministry: SIM Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee: SNCC Union Theological Seminary: UTS x INTRODUCTION When God enters, history for the while ceases to be, and there is nothing more to ask; for something wholly different and new begins – a history with its own distinct grounds, possibilities, and hypotheses. – Karl Barth, The Word of God and the Word of Man 1 Our Christian calling does not [give us] the answers to every social problem, and all conflicts have not been decided beforehand in favor of our side. Our job is to struggle along with everybody else and collaborate with them in the difficult, frustrating task of seeking a solution to common problems, which are entirely new and strange to us all. – Thomas Merton, Faith and Violence 2 The Reverend David Jones sang loudly in a vibrant, clear baritone. While his wasn’t the only voice singing freedom songs that day in July 1963 in Wilmington, NC, it was the one that the angry judge would remember. Jones, a Presbyterian from St. Louis, Missouri and a student at McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago, was arrested along with other civil rights demonstrators after a downtown protest against racially discriminatory businesses. The next day Judge H. Winfield Smith dismissed the charges against all the demonstrators except Jones, to whom he added an additional charge of contempt of court after the seminarian began singing on the courthouse steps. As he sentenced Jones to thirty 1 Karl Barth, The
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