And One Was a Priest: The Life and Times of Duncan M. Gray Jr.

PREFACE

ix preface I sing a song of the saints of God . . . Patient and brave and true, Who toiled and fought and lived and died For the Lord they loved and knew And one was a doctor, and one was a queen; And one was a shepherdess on the green: They were all of them saints of God —and I mean, God helping, to be one too. They loved their Lord so dear; so dear, And his love made them strong; And they followed the right for Jesus’ sake, The whole of their good lives long. And one was a soldier, and one was a priest, And one was slain by a fierce wild beast; And there’s not any reason—no, not the least— Why I shouldn’t be one too. They lived not only in ages past, There are hundreds of thousand still, The world is bright with the joyous saints Who love to do Jesus’ will You can meet them in schools, or in lanes, or at sea, In church, or in trains, or in shops, or at tea, For the saints of God are just folk like me, And I mean to be one too.1 In the world of the twenty-first century the words of this children’s hymn tend to strike us as quaintly naïve and perhaps impossibly hopeful , but fifty years ago these were impressive words to me. In the apparently safe, secure world of 1950s Mississippi in which I, a privileged and somewhat overly sensitive white child, grew up, these words from the 1940 x preface edition of The Hymnal of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America were familiar ones. We sang them so frequently at the Sunday morning children’s service at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Oxford , Mississippi, that even these many years later I still have them all but committed to memory. But those words from the “Hymns for Children” section of the Episcopal hymnal are only one set of words that represent for me a kind of partial frame for the story I have to tell. The second set of lyrics is very different: Oxford Town, Oxford Town Ev’rybody’s got their heads bowed down The sun don’t shine above the ground Ain’t a-goin’ down to Oxford Town.2 These words are, of course, the lyrics to a song written and sung by folksinger Bob Dylan in the early 1960s after two people had been killed and many more injured in the small, peaceful, segregated campus community of Oxford. The violence occurred during a riot fomented in reaction to the efforts of a black Mississippian by the name of James Meredith to enroll as the first African American student at the University of Mississippi. I first heard the Dylan song, I believe, when I left Mississippi to enroll as a freshman at Duke University in the fall of 1966. My enrollment at Duke came four years after Meredith finally registered as a student at Ole Miss—with the help of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the Fifth District Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court, the U.S. Justice Department, a federalized contingent of the Mississippi National Guard, twenty-four federal marshals, and two battalions of U.S. Army troops. Needless to say, my enrollment at Duke was an uneventful as Meredith’s at Ole Miss had been full of incident. Even though I was only thirteen years old on September 30, 1962, when the outbreak of mob violence over Meredith’s admission took place, I was well aware of the event that occurred on the campus that night and of the reactions of university faculty and Oxford residents to them. In a town of a few thousand and a university community of a few thousand more, one couldn’t help but be. In addition, I had seen with my own eyes the beginning of the disturbance. My mother, who taught in the university’s English Department, had come for me and a friend after our church youth group meeting at St. Peter’s that Sunday evening and had driven us around the campus just as crowds of students began to gather outside the university’s administration building. xi preface She wanted us to see for ourselves “history in the making” and help us to understand better what it was like to be present...