One Mississippi, Two Mississippi: Methodists, Murder, and the Struggle for Racial Justice in Neshoba County by Carol V. R. George (review)

The murder of three civil rights workers outside Philadelphia, Mississippi, in the early summer of 1964 is a standard part of the civil rights narrative taught in classrooms across the country. In One Mississippi, Two Mississippi: Methodists, Murder, and the Struggle for Racial Justice in Neshoba County, Carol V. R. George, a professor of history at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, reconstructs the familiar story of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner’s murders, but from a perspective never before considered in published histories of the incident. Rather than using the three men as the focal point of her research, George instead casts Mt. Zion United Methodist Church—the church whose burning Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner were investigating the night they were killed—as her central protagonist. In using Mt. Zion as the object of her study, George has produced a book that has implications far beyond the 1964 murders. Indeed, this sweeping work considers the 130 years of history that preceded the killing of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner, as well as the fifty years since. George’s study reveals the degree to which religion and race have always been bound together in the American South and how this entwined relationship has changed over time.

Using Mt. Zion United Methodist Church as the primary vehicle for her analysis enables George to make several interpretive moves in this book. The church’s arson, of course, played a significant role in the death of the three civil rights workers, and George’s riveting narration of that fiery tragedy—which includes recollections from church members—is the book’s most powerful chapter. But more significant, Mt. Zion’s existence as a black Methodist church in a majority-white denomination allows George to demonstrate how white supremacy and racial segregation were practiced and sustained by American churches well into the twentieth century. When northern and southern Methodists mended their antebellum fracture and reunified as a single denomination in 1939, they did so as a Jim Crow church with black congregations like Mt. Zion segregated into separate church conferences and jurisdictions. Black and white Methodists struggled for the next three decades to overcome or sustain this religiously sanctioned segregation. George uses the memories of Mt. Zion parishioners and records of various Methodist bodies to tell the history of those “who knew personally the indignities of the white supremacist social code, yet often found ways to evade it and soldier on” (p. 8). This book, then, is the local history of a single church in central Mississippi that served for its members “as a retreat and a sanctuary” against its white supremacist surroundings (p. 39). And it is a national history of a denomination attempting to forge a path forward out of its racialized past.

One Mississippi, Two Mississippi begins in the antebellum South and concludes by recounting events that occurred in 2014, but the book centers on the civil rights workers’ deaths. In fact, the chapter in which George recounts the murders appears at the literal middle of the book. Framing the study in this way produces at times unbalanced results in the book’s two halves. George occasionally has to rely on overgeneralizations to cover the more than a century of history in the book’s first 120 pages. Conversely, the book’s second half sometimes falters by becoming repetitive and tedious as George brings her narrative into the present. Specialists in southern religious history will likely not find much in this book that is surprising, but for general readers unfamiliar with the history of Methodism George’s book will raise some eyebrows. Both camps of readers will appreciate George’s sparkling prose and inclusion of voices that have never before been heard.