From Reconciliation to Revolution: The Student Interracial Ministry, Liberal Christianity, and the Civil Rights Movement by David P. Cline (review)

In From Reconciliation to Revolution: The Student Interracial Ministry, Liberal Christianity, and the Civil Rights Movement, David P. Cline chronicles a little-known cohort of theological students who aimed to promote racial understanding and justice within American Protestantism. The Student Interracial Ministry (SIM) traced its shared origins with the better-known Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to the 1960 Easter weekend conference at Shaw University. Theological students at the Shaw conference created SIM with goals similar to SNCC's, except that SIM intended to work in the church. Like SNCC, SIM changed over its eight-year existence. Its field of endeavor expanded beyond its original confines, and its members often worked in key centers of civil rights movement activity and embraced changing movement philosophies.

SIM grew from its initial cohort of seven students—four of whom were white and three black, six men and one woman—into a ministry that placed scores of students for summer, semester, or full-year internships in interracial ministry settings. Operating mostly from Union Theological Seminary in New York, SIM interns developed projects in locations as far apart as Minneapolis and southwest Georgia. Student interns lived in interracial settings, "created pastoral exchanges," ran urban ministries, staffed youth programs, and joined forces with existing civil rights organizations (p. xiii). They endured arrest, received little pay, and lived in difficult situations, but they often asked for more work, sometimes returning to positions for a third or fourth time.

A chapter on SIM's work in southwest Georgia is especially intriguing. Most readers versed in civil rights history will recognize Charles Sherrod from his work organizing Albany's black community in 1961 and 1962. Indeed, traditional narratives suggest Martin Luther King Jr. famously sabotaged the Albany movement in July 1962, humiliating himself and leaving the local movement demoralized and stalled. Cline, however, follows Sherrod as he returned to southwest Georgia under the auspices of SIM in 1965. Over the next three years, SIM and SNCC worked to politically and economically empower African Americans in twenty southwest Georgia counties. The two organizations argued regularly over the role of white people in the movement and about Sherrod's leadership style, but Sherrod and SIM ultimately outlasted SNCC in the area. SIM workers created a Freedom School, built and staffed Head Start Centers, and offered cultural programs to black southwest Georgians.

SIM collapsed abruptly in 1968, ostensibly due to loss of financing. But Cline shows that broader debates about the goal of theological education, the purpose of the church, the direction of the civil rights movement, and the complicity of American Christianity in black oppression also precipitated SIM's demise.

SIM's story intersects with the career trajectories of important civil rights leaders. In addition to Charles Sherrod and his wife, Shirley Sherrod, Jane Stembridge and the Reverend James Lawson also figure into this narrative. Of interest to historians of religion, future scholars in the discipline served with SIM, notably Lawrence H. Mamiya, coauthor with C. Eric Lincoln of The Black Church in the African American Experience (Durham, N.C., 1990), and RalphE. Luker, author of The Social Gospel in Black and White: American Racial Reform, 1885–1812 (Chapel Hill, 1991). As the subsequent careers of these figures demonstrate, SIM worked perhaps its most profound transformation on the interns themselves.

Ultimately, From Reconciliation to Revolution is the history of an organization. Though Cline's narrative is always well contextualized, it sometimes struggles to extend its analysis broadly enough and lacks the drive of a vigorous argument. Cline's meticulously researched story may not offer enough to readers who want to understand the broadest trends in American Protestantism, especially as they relate to the civil rights movement. Still, the work of SIM is a...