Divine Agitators: The Delta Ministry and Civil Rights in Mississippi (review)

Newman's study of the Delta Ministry provides insight into an important but little-known civil-rights organization. Formed in 1964 by the National Council of Churches in response to the Mississippi Summer Project, the Delta Ministry (DM) set up permanent offices in the fall of 1964, and by the late 1960s was the most important movement operating in the Magnolia State. Although its initial leadership was northern and white, the DM developed an interracial staff, operating out of the Mississippi Delta but with projects throughout the state.

The Ministry's purpose was to support the civil-rights organizations operating in Mississippi under the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) banner. Within a year, however, COFO had collapsed, and the two major supporting organizations—the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE)—operated with a greatly reduced presence. The DM stepped in to fill the void, giving unequivocal support to the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, COFO's successor, and developing programs of its own. Specifically, the Delta Ministry helped to provide health care for poor blacks by assisting the Medical Committee for Human Rights; supported the Child Development Group of Mississippi (CDGM), one of the pioneer Head Start programs; fought for school desegregation; and promoted economic development through farm cooperatives and small businesses. The Delta Ministry also created "Freedom City," an ill-fated community experiment designed to provide housing and work for those who had been pushed off their land.

From the outset, as Newman skillfully demonstrates, the Delta Ministry was plagued by opposition from white Mississippians, both church people and politicians, who resented the presence of liberal northerners supporting the Freedom Democratic Party and black militancy. Hodding Carter III, the most prominent white moderate in the state, was originally on the DM board but soon attacked the Ministry in his columns in the Delta Democrat-Times. The state NAACP distrusted and resented the Delta Ministry for backing the Freedom Democratic Party, its major political rival. Faced with opposition at home from blacks and whites, the staff of the Delta Ministry had to fight hard just to maintain minimum funding from the NCC. By the mid-1970s, the Delta Ministry had gone into decline, kept alive by the dedication of Owen Brooks, its long-time leader, a black activist who had moved to Mississippi from Boston in 1964.

The major problem with Newman's book is that it makes little use of oral history. Newman conducted only six interviews, five of them in one week. He did not talk with key players like Brooks, who dominated the Delta Ministry throughout most of its existence, and Carter, a principle antagonist. On the other hand, James Findlay interviewed seventy-five participants, including Carter and Brooks, for his Church People in the Struggle (New York, 1993), an important study of the Delta Ministry that Newman, curiously, all but ignores (1).

In a fine concluding chapter, Newman surveys the scene in Mississippi during the late twentieth century, maintaining that although the Delta Ministry could not solve the deep-rooted problems of poverty and racism, it did "improve the lives of or at least lessen the burden for many thousands of the region's inhabitants. Given the resources available to it, the Ministry could have done little more" (225)