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God’s Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights

Amazon.com Price:  $33.95 (as of 02/05/2019 17:08 PST- Details)

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Description

In the summer of 1964, the turmoil of the civil rights movement reached its peak in Mississippi, with activists across the political spectrum claiming that God used to be on their side in the struggle over racial justice. This used to be the summer when violence against blacks increased at an alarming rate and when the murder of three civil rights workers in Mississippi resulted in national media attention. Charles Marsh takes us back to this place and time, when the lives of activists on all sides of the civil rights issue converged and their images of God clashed. He weaves their voices into a gripping narrative: a Ku Klux Klansman, for example, borrows fiery language from the Bible to link attacks on blacks to his “priestly calling”; a middle-aged woman describes how the Gospel inspired her to rally other African Americans to fight peacefully for their dignity; a SNCC worker tells of harrowing encounters with angry white mobs and his pilgrimage toward a new racial spirituality referred to as Black Power. Through these emotionally charged stories, Marsh invites us to believe the civil rights movement anew, with regards to religion as a powerful yet protean force driving social action.

The book’s central figures are Fannie Lou Hamer, who “worked for Jesus” in civil rights activism; Sam Bowers, the Imperial Wizard of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi; William Douglas Hudgins, an influential white Baptist pastor and unofficial theologian of the “closed society”; Ed King, a white Methodist minister and Mississippi native who campaigned to integrate Protestant congregations; and Cleveland Sellers, a SNCC staff member turned black militant.

Marsh makes a speciality of the events and religious convictions that led each person into the political upheaval of 1964. He presents an unforgettable American social landscape, one that may be by turns shameful and inspiring. In conclusion, Marsh suggests that it can be conceivable to sift among these narratives and lay the groundwork for a new thinking about racial reconciliation and the beloved community. He maintains that the one who embraces faith’s life-affirming energies will leave in the back of a most powerful legacy of social activism and compassion.

Charles Marsh thinks historians who argue the civil rights movement used to be about rights have made a big mistake. In God’s Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights, he takes a different stance. He says the civil rights movement used to be about God. Marsh defends this controversial thesis with five profiles of civil rights leaders (ranging from cotton fieldworker and political activist Fannie Lou Hamer to the Imperial Wizard of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi, Sam Bowers), each of whom understood their work in fundamentally theological terms. Marsh’s fluid, engaging prose aims to persuade readers that the ongoing fight for civil rights is best understood in spiritual terms and to arm believers with a clear understanding of the ultimate stakes of this country’s continuing struggle with racism. –Michael Joseph Gross

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