"When 'Spirituality,' Social Conservatism, and White Racism Were Intricately Linked": A White Southern Church Confronts Its Past

Jacquelyn Dowd grew up in Paul's Valley, Oklahoma, and, as a faithful young Presbyterian, attended Southwestern College (now Rhodes College) in Memphis. While there, she became embroiled in the controversy of desegregating Second Presbyterian Church (SPC) in the city. SPC was the home church of the college and one of the leading congregations in the region and among Southern Presbyterians generally. As the daughter of a Presbyterian deacon, Hall was "shocked at the sight of church leaders barring students' way into the church" (p. 142) and disillusioned by the "icy and hostile" reaction that administrators at Southwestern gave to students who participated in "kneel-ins." Her experience led her into "questioning authority" more generally and eventually towards graduate work in history. From there, as almost all readers of this journal will know, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall has had an illustrious career as a professor of history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Hortense Spillers was a native Memphian who sought to attend Southwestern in the early 1960s, but was told that the college would not open its doors to black students until a few years later. This was at a time when a number of private colleges and seminaries already had desegregated. "They had a model opportunity to be progressive and forward and they did not take that chance," she remembered later (p. 154). She did not go to school there, but she found some of Southwestern's students on the front lines of the kneel-ins, where she met deacons guarding the church with "bold-faced" and "adamant" resistance. Like Jacquelyn Dowd, Hortense Spillers grew disillusioned with the gulf between ideals and reality in the Memphis white church establishment and learned to question authority more broadly. And like Hall, Spillers since has enjoyed a career of great distinction in academia, including her current post as the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English at Vanderbilt University.

Jacquelyn Dowd and Hortense Spillers were both participants in one of the most dramatic moments of cultural conflict in the civil rights-era South: church "kneel-ins," in which integrated bands of young Christians sought to dramatize the persistence of segregation in Southern (usually Protestant) churches. This is a book full of personal stories; I chose the two above because the names will be familiar to many scholars of American history and literature, but dozens of other lives intersect in the work.

To my knowledge, this is the first full-length work investigating the history of kneel-ins in one city. There are memoirs recounting these episodes and a number of studies focusing particularly on dramatic episodes such as those at Galloway Methodist in Mississippi. But no such work has been done on Memphis, and even those familiar with the larger history of church kneel-ins will likely know little or nothing about the specifics of the controversy at SPC in Memphis. I certainly did not.

Among other contributions, Haynes' work documents that story in close detail, featuring interviews with many of the surviving participants on all sides. As a professor in religious studies for many years at Rhodes College in Memphis, where he led students who investigated the relationship of Rhodes (then Southwestern) College to the church desegregation struggles of the 1960s, Haynes comes at this book with a unique set of qualifications. And he delivers on the promise, making this the finest study of the church kneel-ins that I have read, and more generally a signal contribution to Civil Rights Movement historiography. This book does for the kneel-ins approximately what Raymond Arsenault's recent work did for the Freedom Rides. Both provide definitive accounts but set their stories in broader contexts and trace, as well, the legacies of the movement.

Beyond being a local study of the kneel-ins in Memphis, this book is also a broad-based theological and cultural exploration...