God’s Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights
When the interview began it was hard for me to reconcile the man before me—calm and almost elegant in his pinstriped suit—with everything else I knew of him: that he had reigned over a campaign of terror in 1960s Mississippi. On that night, in the summer of 1994, the former Imperial Wizard of the Mississippi Ku Klux Klan had not yet been convicted of murder—not for his part in the 1964 deaths of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, nor in the 1966 firebombing death of Vernon Dahmer. He had served seven years in a federal prison for conspiracy to deprive Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner of their civil rights; and since being released, Samuel Holloway Bowers Jr. had been back in his hometown of Laurel, his life not so different from that of an aging Nazi in a Bavarian village. He read newspapers and magazines in the public library, went to church and taught Sunday school, and regaled old associates and new admirers with stories of his glory days. He also put his mind to working out a theology of ethnoracial nationalism.
Bowers and I sat across from each other at a table at Uncle Roy’s Home Cookin’ and Barbecue, a cement block annex to the 16th Street Exxon. While I had not expected him to show up in a white robe, the matching Mickey Mouse watch, belt buckle, and cuff links—and the missing front tooth—seemed to belie the pinstripes. What he said to me on the three evenings we passed together seemed, at the time, vicious but also almost quaint—which is to say, affected, prim, cunningly designed.
But there were moments in the exchange when I got a glimpse of the tempestuous rage that had made Bowers the most feared White southern terrorist of the civil rights era. I recently reread my handwritten notes of those interviews and came across this passage:
He starts talking about how much he hates liberals, or as he calls them “anarchists, communists, and demagogues of the Democratic Party.” He uses the word “academy” as a general description of the malign forces that threaten his ethnonational Christian mission. “I look on the academy with an obduracy and utter contempt. I hate it with a total hatred,” he says, as his tremulous voice breaks suddenly into raucous laughter. “The pagan academic savants and the media whore—the whores of Baal!—will inevitably descend into a ‘behavioral sink’ and rot away.” But if it doesn’t, he adds, “there are men willing to sacrifice their physical lives in attacking the academy at the very center of its power and prestige.” Witnessing his narrowed eyes and increased physical agitation in this moment is to understand his gifts of manipulation and control—the ease with which he would have inspired White men to do his violent biding. Abruptly, his voice assumes a measure and refinement; he leans back in his chair resting his head in the cup of his hands; and begins to discuss his grand theory of history and his important place in its unfolding.
The Klansman had introduced himself to me in a letter—mailed to me at my work address about six months before we met in person—as a “native Mississippi pinball machine operator, follower of Jesus the Galilean.” On this summer evening in 1994, he calls himself a “Roman Baptist priest.” “A preacher is an evangelist,” he says, “he calls people to repentance. A priest is interested in—inclined toward—visible, public power operations; this is what makes him powerful like a warrior. The preacher is concerned with sin and forgiveness. The priest is concerned with heresy. Sins can be forgiven; heresy must be eliminated.”
It was around this point that Bowers treated me to a lengthy disquisition on the metaphysics of national socialism, regarding which, he said, there is no task more urgent in the present struggle for White Christian supremacy. To this task Bowers was now called as the high priest of the anti-civil rights movement—“to get off his stinking ass,” to put “his gifts to work,” and thereby to “emasculate” the infidels.
“Most of the West are Nazis,” Bowers said, “though they do not understand it, much less recognize it to be the case. Most people cannot understand how nationalism and socialism can be combined; Goebbels wanted to think it through metaphysically. But a metaphysics has still not been designed which will synthesize these two into a metaphysical system. Hitler captivated Goebbels in a mystical way; Goebbels dies with him in the bunker. Hitler told the socialists that it’s not a matter of the design of the system but of who will be the Fuhrer.” Bowers grew excited as he ascended to his epochal conclusion. “Herein is the fatal weakness—the system is based on the individual rather than the design. We need a design open to the operations of the spirit of God.”
I spend the evening trying to follow the logic of his “Five-Tiered Crystallized Logos of Western Civilization,” writing furiously in my spiral-bound notebook. Bowers’s ideas were chilling, to be sure, but his discourses struck me at first as a post hoc rationale that cosseted his years of racist brutality in the lexicon of an antedated ideology of interest only to young scholars of religion with Mississippi roots. Bowers sounded like he was reading aloud from late nineteenth- or early twentieth-century racial theory—the kind of racial theory I associated with Europe and had certainly never heard from a southerner.
Twenty-five years later, Bowers’s vision of Christianity and America is no longer an idiosyncratic position forged in the crucible of the anti-civil rights movement by segregationists clinging to authority they’d quickly lose. Rather, Bowers’s theories sound like talking points for a generation of Christian nationalists who hold political office, run think tanks, publish sleek journals and newspapers, and permeate social media.
Consider, for a moment, the religious ethnonationalism proffered by the likes of Steve Bannon, Stephen Wolfe, and Sebastian Gorka as it echoes and amplifies the ideas of Sam Bowers and his White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan of Mississippi. Add “Islamic jihadist” to Bowers’s list of “soviets” and “heretics,” and the two genealogies reveal their common source. The Christian West and its apotheosis in American Christian supremacy remain the last and only hope in the “global war against Islamic fascism.” “Twisted souls plotting world domination in apartments and garages” (Bannon) join the Soros-funded “haters of humanity” (as Elon Musk recently tweeted, or x-ed, in the spirit of Sam Bowers’s reviled “banks and the academic-media Babylon”; read, the Jews) in a final unmaking of “the very fabric of civilization.” With only one modest revision—the twinning of Jew and Muslim—Bowers’s “Five-Tiered Crystallized Logos” emerges as the framing cosmology of the present era. “Our enemy today is again a totalitarian,” Gorka writes. “I call it the global jihadist movement. There is no middle ground. The infidel must submit or be killed.” Wolfe and Gorka, along with Steve Bannon, Richard Spencer, and their ilk, are not subtle, but they are more subtle than Bowers: “The Christian national is the complete image of eternal life on earth,” Stephen Wolfe writes in his Case for Christian Nationalism. “Blood relations matters for your ethnicity, because your kin have belonged to this people, this land—to this nation in this place—and so they bind you to that people and place, creating a common volksgeist.”
Bowers’s relevance became more personal for me on a Saturday in August 2017, when I drove two miles from my house to join what I assumed would be a not very memorable counter-demonstration of White hate groups opposing my city’s removal of a Confederate statue. I’d expected a ragged procession of southern secessionists intoning the sacredness of their sovereign South that would disperse back into their enclaves before night-fall. What I in fact observed and encountered over the next several hours was something quite different: it was the new face of American racism, registering no shame, supremely confident in its legitimacy, ready for war.
Although I had come of age in the epicenter of White southern terrorism, Charlottesville (a name that now signals as much an event as a town) was the first time I saw men—and women—attired in Klan regalia in full public display. And not only Klansmen but neo-Nazis, Aryan skinheads, and a variety of militias and other anti-Semitic groups connected historically to obscure Eastern European genocidal dictators. I heard men shouting obscenities and the vilest of insults; I saw men raising the “Heil Hitler” salute outside coffee shops and yoga studios; and I saw White nationalists pointing handguns and semiautomatic rifles into the line of clergy singing “This Little Light of Mine.”
In the days and weeks that followed, as I poured over the journalistic and academic accounts of the Unite the Right protestors, I increasingly began to realize that what I had witnessed was not really new—it was, rather, the xenophobic worldview of Sam Bowers, new only in being so emboldened by the president of the United States. I’d not been aware, when I was interviewing Bowers, that 150 miles northeast a handful of Bowers aspirants—scholars and professors most of them—was that very summer founding an organization called the League of the South. The League—everywhere burnished with Christian language—would join Bowers’s crusade “to advance the traditions of the Christian South against the secularizing and globalizing trends of the modern age.” And it, of course, would play a prominent role in the events of Charlottesville 2017—afterward declaring August 12 a “National, Sacred Holiday for White Americans.”
It feels as though we are living in Sam Bowers’s America. This is not why I hoped God’s Long Summer would be relevant twenty-five years after its original publication.
***
In my earliest notes for the book, I had correlated the five main characters with five representative theologians: Sam Bowers was the Jakob Wilhelm Hauer of the German Faith Movement; Fannie Lou Hamer was Dietrich Bonhoeffer; Douglas Hudgins was an amalgam of certain “gentlemen theologians”—confessionally southern; Cleveland Sellers was James Cone; and Ed King was an early Karl Barth.
Among this cast of characters, only two are still alive as I write this, Cleveland Sellers and the Ed King. The last time I saw Dr. Sellers was at Loyola University in Baltimore, where I was then teaching theology, a year after God’s Long Summer appeared. He was the main speaker at a symposium I’d convened on SNCC and the Black Power movement. In the first twenty minutes of his talk, read from a prepared manuscript, Sellers covered some helpful historical and philosophical background—but when he laid his written notes aside, the lecture became an event. By the end, students had moved to the front of the auditorium to encircle the organizer and storyteller in what resembled a training session for the summer volunteers. In time, Sellers would accept the call to serve as the thirty-eighth president of Voorhees College, the historically Black Episcopal college in Denmark, South Carolina, steps away from his childhood home. One of his sons, Bakari—whom I remember as the ten-year-old at Sellers’s knee, precociously asking and answering questions as I interviewed his father—published a memoir a few years ago; “my father is 75, I’m 35—and the problem we have in our country is that we’re still sharing many of the same experiences,” the younger Sellers said.
Ed King I’ve seen more recently. In summer 2022, my wife and I traveled to Jackson, Mississippi, for an event at Lemuria Books—a bookstore so grand it should be included on every civil rights and literary pilgrimage to the deep South. I was pleased that Ed could join us for a visit to the new Civil Rights Museum. The museum is stunning. Built into the LeFleur Bluffs overlooking the old state fairgrounds, the exterior evokes the fractures and discord of social conflict in its colliding triangles and carceral monoliths. A guide at the front door waved the three of us out of the furnace of the midsummer afternoon into the cool lobby. I walked ahead as Karen pushed Reverend King in his wheelchair.
The museum begins with slavery, civil war, and reconstruction, but the visual energy of the galleries moves toward Jim Crow, massive resistance, and civil rights, which is where we soon find ourselves—in a central atrium illuminated by a lavender montage of civil rights legends—with a young clerical Ed King on the highest panel. Freedom Songs stream through an elaborate network of speakers. Ed takes charge, spooling out names, places, and events—we’ll visit all eight galleries in the hour or so before closing.
“Okay that’s Marion Wright. That’s Tom Hayden. First time I met him was in McComb, he was writing about SNCC. Came down from the University of Michigan. That’s Lawrence Guyot. Larry and I were supposed to be arrested with the Chicago Seven, you know. Bill Kunstler called me to say the FBI was coming after you. Now that’s me—photo on the ceiling. Oh, this is a magnificent picture. Three Black women at the library sit-in. One of the students is crying; another is massively dignified—I am ready for this. The third is mad as hell. There’s Carolyn Goodman. Okay, here’s Martin and Medgar. Martin always trusted me, I felt. Medgar had asked me to take the chaplaincy at Tougaloo College. And Martin respects Medgar. Okay, now I want you to take a picture of Mrs. Hamer’s dress. As soon as she began her testimony in Atlantic City, Lyndon Johnson went nuts. Roy Wilkins couldn’t stand her either though. I’ve written about all this—I need to get it out. But there have been so many disruptions in my life.”
***
The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s vision of social reform came to its most vivid expression in the 1964 Summer Project, at center stage in God’s Long Summer. The Mississippi Summer Project, or Freedom Summer, clustered around voter registration, community-based organizing, and innovations in teaching, in religious community, and in the arts. The historian Wesley Hogan speaks of these tumultuous months as “the high summer of transformation.”
Effective organizing at the local level meant finding a way “for the matron in the fur coat to identify with the winehead and the prostitute and vice versa,” the brilliant Ella Baker explained of SNCC’s vision. Only “redemptive community” could supersede “systems of gross social immorality,” said James Lawson, and prepare the conditions “in which reconciliation and justice become actual possibilities.” Victoria Gray Adams spoke of SNCC as an “enfleshened church.” Prathia Hall spoke of the summer as “worship that contained within the reality of its expression a power affirming life and defying death.” John Lewis said that as a young seminarian from the South he came to movement out of obedience to Jesus’s teaching of the Kingdom of God, while Jean Wheeler delivered the difficult truth that “we’re really not going to make any major changes in our lifetime.”
Some colleagues and friends found it odd that I followed my first book— an academic monograph on the philosophical theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer—with a book on religion and the civil rights movement. I found it a little odd myself that after a decade in the modern German canon I would turn my theological attention to the South. But the two are deeply allied in my mind—and more importantly, in their exemplification of a worldly faith. The founding mothers and fathers of the civil rights movement saw in southern and American exceptionalism “a dangerous tendency to turn the [region and] nation into an idol, and Christianity into a clan religion,” as the late historian Albert Raboteau wrote in his 2005 essay, American Salvation: The Place of Christianity in Public Life (Albert Raboteau, The Boston Review, April 4, 2005). The story of the civil rights movement (1955-64), interpreted as a theological narrative, introduces us to a people who enact, embody, and exemplify costly Christian witness in American history—to see, after Bonhoeffer, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the campaigns in Birmingham and Memphis, the freedom rides and the sit-ins, the voter registration drives, and the long, hot summers as attestations of nonreligious Christianity, the Christ for others, a worldly faith. Blacks and Whites gathering together in tension-filled COFO offices, in mass meetings in Black churches, in smoky debates in cafés and freedom houses, and wherever chaos broke out for the sake of the beloved community were “like church,” one movement activist said, “but better!”
Among these people of exuberant faith, Fannie Lou Hamer, a former sharecropper in Ruleville, Mississippi, and a prophetic voice of poor African Americans in the Delta, gave voice to a lush and inviting faith, and a fierce and disciplined love of Jesus Christ. Likewise, the simple, subversive act of Black students sitting down at a Whites-only lunch counter, praying over their meals, praying for strength through the ordeals of abuse and violence, contained the seeds that would flower “into the greatest social witness of Christian nonviolence in American history,” as Thomas Merton wrote in his book Faith and Violence. “It’s kind of like in the twenty-third Psalm,” Mrs. Hamer said in 1963 at a Freedom Vote Rally in Greenwood, Mississippi. “When Jesus says, ‘Thou prepareth a table before me in the presence of my enemies. Thou anointed my head with oil and my cup runneth over.’ And as a result I have walked through the shadows of death. But as long as you know you going for something, you put up a life. You trust God and launch out into the deep.”
And the story of African American Christianity, Al Raboteau wrote, from the diaspora through slavery, Jim Crow and the civil rights movement, has “continuously confronted the nation with troubling questions about American exceptionalism.” For slavery, segregation, discrimination, and racism “contradicted the mythic identity of Americans as a chosen people.” Black Christianity makes “a prophetic condemnation of America’s obsession with power, status, and possessions.” Divine election does not bring “preeminence, elevation and glory”; “chosenness,” as reflected in the life of Jesus, “led to a cross, and lives of the disciples were signed with that cross. Chosenness means joining company not with the powerful and the rich but with those who suffer: the outcast, the poor, and the despised” and learning to live with “a quality of sad joyfulness,” with yet an affirmation of the human person as embodied spirit and inspirited body, of the deep and grace-engendered integration of spirit and matter.
SNCC’s John Lewis told me during a visit in his congressional offices in Washington,
To go and sit in at a lunch counter, knowing that you’d never done it before, you’d never been in a situation like this before, the possibility that you are going to be beaten, or light a cigarette that will be put out in your hair or down your back, or someone will hit you, or you could be shot or killed, or you will be arrested and jailed. . . . We had to be persistent in following this path, to be consistent and persistent, knowing that something may happen to us, knowing that we even may die, but you know, it was the price that you had to pay, and that if we died, that our suffering would be redemption.
Is this not the lesson of the civil rights movement that clustered around convictions, energies, and disciplines of the Black Freedom Church in the years 1955-64? I would add: these years form a canonical theological text, and in this manner, an intensive incarnational immersion in this text illuminates the clearest way forward in imagining, or even questioning, the prospect of American salvation.
And yet, I pick up God’s Long Summer now with chastened hopes. Like many scholars writing about the movement in the 1990s, and people in the movement, I knew then that we were a long way from the promised land, but I believed we were on a trajectory. On the way toward “redemption, reconciliation, and creation of beloved community,” to recall Martin Luther King Jr.’s words spoken at a mass meeting in November 1956, after word came that the U.S. Supreme Court had decided in favor of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. For most of these last twenty-five years, I have been able to find examples—abundant examples—of men and women who saw a light in the darkness and became, compellingly and fruitfully, lovers of the earth and healers of its distresses. I no longer quite so confidently point to congregational and social innovations as evidencing those ends. In any case, it is difficult sometimes to see them and hear them amid the noise. Lament seems as apt these days as praise.
Of course, it is for moments like these—moments when the present does not seem fertile ground for hope—that we insist on being surrounded by a cloud of witnesses. I cannot offer a well-developed, formal hagiology, but I do believe the saints are praying for our present situation—prayers of imprecation, as well as prayers of encouragement and resolve. Mrs. Hamer, Cleve land Sellers, Bob Moses, Ed King, and the countless others who worked for freedom and liberation in those sweltering Mississippi summers shine lights over the present that are finally brighter and more reliable than the tiki torches of the right: the God to whom those saints witness is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow. So I return to them to borrow hope from their courage and imagination—our civil rights mothers and fathers, who I imagine, after the writer of the New Testament Epistle to the Hebrews, as a great cloud of witnesses. I hear Mrs. Hamer say: “Before I leave you, I would like to quote from an old hymn my mother used to sing: ‘Should earth against my soul engage, and fiery darts be hurled, [then] I can smile at Satan’s rage and face this frowning world.’”
EDITORIAL NOTE: This article is excerpted from God’s Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights, Princeton Classics Edition (Princeton University Press, 2024). All rights reserved.