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Reviewed by:
  • From Reconciliation to Revolution: The Student Interracial Ministry, Liberal Christianity, and the Civil Rights Movement by David P. Cline, and: Lynched: The Power of Memory in a Culture of Terror by Angela D. Sims
  • Anna F. Kaplan
From Reconciliation to Revolution: The Student Interracial Ministry, Liberal Christianity, and the Civil Rights Movement. By David P. Cline. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. 304 pp. Paperback, $29.95.
Lynched: The Power of Memory in a Culture of Terror. By Angela D. Sims. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2016. 208 pp. Paperback, $24.95.

There are numerous lenses scholars use to analyze African American struggles for freedom and equality: song, food, political action, children and family, [End Page 355] gender, class, and religious faith, among others. Two recent books, From Reconciliation to Revolution: The Student Interracial Ministry, Liberal Christianity, and the Civil Rights Movement, by David P. Cline, and Lynched: The Power of Memory in a Culture of Terror, by Angela D. Sims, add to the literature examining the role of religion in African American survival, resistance, and activism. Cline delves into student organizing in the mid-1900s, using the example of the Student Interracial Ministry (SIM) to discuss the role that Christian religious grounding played in efforts to combat racial discrimination, both domestically and internationally, during the civil rights movement. Sims buoys African American voices through oral history in her discussion of the persistent trauma of lynching culture and its continued effects on generations of African Americans.

From Reconciliation to Revolution brings to light the story of SIM, which grew out of the same 1960 conference at Shaw University that gave birth to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Cline describes SIM as "theological students—mostly from the mainline Protestant denominations but with a smattering of others, and hailing from every region of the United States and a handful of foreign countries—[who] worked in churches, participated in marches, registered voters, and contributed to many other aspects of the civil rights movement" (xii). In addition to fighting for racial equality, these students saw themselves as being on the forefront of a simultaneous change within both Christian institutions and cultures that reflected broader transformations in American society. The book's organization follows SIM's trajectory, from its creation in 1960, through its evolution in the mid-1960s (which was meant to match the members' perceptions of what the public needed), and ending with SIM's dissolution—like similar organizations at that time—in 1968, with the rise of Black Power.

Cline begins by looking at the students attending the Union Theological Seminary (a Presbyterian seminary) and at their responses to sit-ins in 1960, some of which became the basis for establishing SIM. He draws on the history of the Student Christian Movement (SCM) during the two World Wars to situate this early 1960s student debate about getting involved in the domestic struggle for civil rights within a tradition of social engagement. The SCM pushed American Protestantism and its international and domestic religious practices towards greater inclusivity and an equal treatment of people across racial and cultural lines. In response to World War II, more Union Theological Seminary "faculty and students … urged the mainline churches to take a stand on social issues and actively involve themselves in contemporary affairs," actions that folded into those at the height of the civil rights movement in the South (6). Cline describes SIM's formation in a swirl of burgeoning activist organizations, many coming out of higher-learning institutions, with fluid memberships and without rigid delineations. [End Page 356]

SIM's initial activities were focused on assigning white seminary students to African American communities and seminary students of color to white communities during summer breaks over several years; all participants were armed with training that prepared them and their parishioners for racialized and potentially violent confrontations. In response to white resistance and churches that were slow to realize the critical need for them to serve as allies in the struggle for equality, SIM expanded its activities to include participants from even more academic institutions and assignments beyond serving communities in or through local churches and for longer durations. By 1964, SIM's...

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