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So many of the best stories of the civil-rights movement are the smaller ones: not the stories of the waters parting and the people marching over, but of everyday bravery and long-forgotten failures. I am especially partial to the story of the church-visit campaign in 1963. Led by a white, Mississippi-native Methodist minister named Edwin King, along with a handful of black and white students, ministers, and professors, the church visits were part of an intensified effort to crack the iceberg of Southern segregation by focusing energies on Mississippi—"the most race-haunted of all American states,"1 where a brutal pigmentocracy and a fervent belief in Jesus Christ were endorsed with equal passion.
Ed King and company went straight for the jugular. Sunday after Sunday, he and his theological comrades appeared on the steps of Jackson's most segregated white churches, praying, singing, testifying—enacting time and again spectacular scenarios that teased out of the "church guards" darkly comic and ironic assertions about faith and social existence. As the campaign proceeded during the fall of 1963 and spring of 1964, it had all the makings of a theater of the absurd wherein the myriad theological contradictions of a closed and racist society became evidenced and pantomimed.
One Sunday morning during the autumn of the church-visits crusade, King drove a biracial group of students from Tougaloo College (the historically black private college where he served as chaplain) to the cavernous Galloway Memorial Methodist Church for an early-morning Communion service. The church guards, who had not been prepared this morning for the visitors' arrival, rushed to form a human barricade at the double doors, forcing the church regulars to find their way inside by entering the educational building on the opposite side of the grounds. (These guards were deacons or ushers who patrolled the sidewalks and entrances for black, integrated, or otherwise suspicious groups of worshipers.) But King and the students were not intimidated: leaning over the outstretched arms of the guards, they began knocking, then banging, on the heavy wooden closed doors of the sanctuary. Although people were kneeling inside at the altar, waiting on this Sunday to receive Communion, the loud knocking at the back doors echoed furiously through the recesses of the interior and interrupted the service.
Triumphant, King's vexing reply was aimed to agitate. "If we can't worship the same God together inside the same church buildings, then we will still knock on your door and so irritate you that you cannot worship your white God in peace, that you cannot escape thinking about the problems of segregation even on Sunday morning; for we are letting you know that every single aspect of your Southern Way of Life is under attack."2
The church-visit campaign elicited, time and again, symbolic gestures and comic self-contradictions that caricatured the closed society's celebrated piety. In King's mind, these moments during which white Christians betrayed all manner of theological incoherence were often just as important as the achievement of a desegregated church. When a black woman tried to engage an usher-guard in a dialogue about the church's racial policy, only to hear the response, "Please don't try to appeal to my conscience" or "Just leave Jesus out of this" or "This is a Christian church and we intend to keep it that way," the result was a dramatic default of theological credibility. King could then ascend to speak the prophetic word to the historical moment. In full view of divine and public scrutiny, authority was relinquished to the "outsiders"—and in a way that became deeply empowering, even reassuring. God must be on our side. He's surely not with all these white folks!
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