Reviewed by Stephen Fox
My father was the pastor of Bethany Baptist Church in Gaffney, South Carolina, from 1962 to 1978. The church. a mission of FBC Gaffney, was only six years old when my Dad arrived,. I graduated high school there in 1971, the third year of integration of a school roughly 60/40 white to black and was on the bi-racial committee my senior year.
The last four years of our family's stay got a little dicey over matters of race. To make a long story short, several families were disgruntled over the fact that my family pretty much had an open door policy at the pastorium with a paved driveway and basketball goal to which anybody of any color was welcome at any reasonable hours. I am proud to have played with the cousins of the great David Thompson, who were later the uncles of Southern Conference Basketball player of the Year, Donald Simms, the mixed race grandson of future South Carolina Governor Richard Riley's best friend in Greenville, Don Gannt. Riley became President Clinton's Secretary of Education.
My sister came home from Mars Hill College in the fall of 1976 with a group who had recently returned from a mission trip with her to Baltimore. One was a missionary's son, a black basketball player. Things got more tense for the Fox family after that and soon we were headed to Knoxville, Tennessee, by the summer of 1978.
I was writing some provocative unsolicited opinion pieces in the local paper and it got to the point where a relative of an outspoken resistor to the “Fox agenda” came looking for me late one afternoon. I was out of the neighborhood when this former “freedom of choice” school board member came calling at our home, but I placed a phone call to him when I got home. The upshot was that if I didn't quiet down and let his sister and her group have their way in the church, he would "stand on my toes and beat my ass into the ground."
One other memorable quote of that late spring of 1978 came from a former leader in the local Klan who had donated the land for the pastorium right behind Bethany Baptist Church, the house our family lived in 14 of the 16 years my father was pastor. I asked Mr. McCluney, “Joe, if my Daddy had tried to integrate Bethany in 1965, what would you have done?” He said, “I woulda’ shot him.”
I said “What do you think about him now?” He said, “I love the damn preacher. If somebody tried to harm him now, they would have to go through my ass to get to him.”
So it is with some existential understanding that I come to the wonderful new book, God with Us, by my fellow Furman alumnus, Ansley Quiros.
Quiros takes a deep dive into the Civil Rights struggle of 1965 in Americus, Georgia, home of Martin England and Clarence Jordan's Koinonia Farms. Just seven miles from President Carter's Plains, Georgia, it is also the place the Baptist preacher's son, Marshall Frady, highlighted in a piece white race progressive Warren Fortson, an attorney and Sunday School teacher at First Methodist Church who was run out of town for taking a moderate stance on the upheaval in 1965.
In her provocatively titled introduction, "Sweet Jesus and the Unbearable Madness," Quiros does a magificent job covering the territory of Civil Rights era studies to date. She cites Dorothy Sayers’ 1931 effort, The Dogma is the Drama, to get at what Flannery O’Connor described as the underbelly of forces that motivate people into action when communities are in conflict. Conceding her debt to Charles Marsh of the University of Virginia's Project on Lived Theology, she takes his prescription for reckoning and reconciliation as the thesis of her book. At the same time, she tells the historical story in a manner akin to a John Grisham southern drama. Here she is in the guts of her book in her own words:
“Marsh describes lived theology as a probing and careful narration of life inside the movement of God in the social world….Lived theology effectively expands what can be categorized as theological, and who can be a "theologian". Theology belongs not only to Barth and Aquinas but also to a more 'varied cast of everyday sinners and saints.'”
In a chapter on the white churches of Lee Street in Americus in 1965, she drives home the point of just how much the laity masterfully used the concept of local church autonomy to control their whites-only policy to the frustration of the pastor, Harold Collins. Collins, who at one time was called a coward by Koinonia founder, Clarence Jordan, moderated his ideals of equality on the altar of Baptist church polity of majority rule. The Methodists weren't any better and got international condemnation after a famous picture of several men with locked arms standing on the steps of the church, forbidding a kneel-in demonstration of folks from entering their house of worship one Sunday morning. That picture evoked a cartoon In the Los Angeles Times that caricatured these church leaders as hooded Klansman.
Collins left the First Baptist Church in frustration and defeat but was called back as pastor about 15 years later when the church adopted an open door policy.
The Lee Street Methodists, Baptists and Presbyterians–those “tall steeple” congregations, as all readers of this essay are well aware of–were characteristic of white churches across the south. Their laity members were of a type. The Duke Civil Rights narrator and historian, Tim Tyson, in his Blood of Emmett Till, published in 2018, has a startling segment on just how fast White Citizens Councils spread across the Deep South after Brown v Board of Education. It started with just several hundred people in a small province of Mississippi in 1954 and grew to almost a quarter million members in two years. Most White Citizen Council members were recruited in churches and civic clubs, like the Rotary, Lions and Kiwanis organizations, where the deacons and elders in the influential congregations gathered in those days.
One reverberating element of this book, which I believe will have legs, entangles the chatter in the wake of Furman University’s and Southern Baptist Seminary's recent examinations of the slave-holding founders and other early supporters. Both Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and Furman University were recipients of the largesse of the same slave-holding men. Today, some at Furman are convinced the school is currently in the throes of a headlong dash toward secularism just a few decades after the university’s official break with the South Carolina chapter of the Southern Baptist Convention. This dash is also fueled by the threat they feel from fundamentalism, which is chronicled in Seeking Abraham, a 40-page report available online.
In her book’s introduction, Quiros has some words of advice for those at Furman who may be caught up in identity politics and too much political correctness. Speaking to "secular snobbery" in academic studies of the Civil Rights era, she says early on:
"Besides being poor scholarship, historian's marginalization of unsavory religious views has perpetuated an overly simplistic, triumphalist narrative of the civil rights movement, one that misses the heart of the struggle."
Quiros, now in her early 30s, shows promise for many conversations in the center and the margins of the progressive Baptist movement for some time to come. In the fall of 2018, she wrote a major piece published in the Washington Post about fundamentalist Southern Baptists in the town of Luverne, Alabama, and how they were preternaturally disposed to be stalwarts of the Trump Base. In the fall of 2017, she made a presentation at Furman on three “Paladins” key to the Civil Rights milieu of Americus: Marshall Frady, Martin England and Harold Collins.
Other than England, there is only incidental coverage of Frady and Collins in God with Us. If there is a reprint, I hope publishers can find a way to include her Furman presentation. Speaking as a crusade of one, I am adamant that Frady and England deserve notice on what I hope is a third pole celebrating Furman greats at Fluor Field–home of single A Red Sox minor league baseball—in downtown Greenville, South Carolina. And in 15 to 20 years, it would not surprise me if Dr. Quiros is on a fourth pole or added to one of the three that I hope by that time continues to stand.
This book is deserving of the attention of every Southerner and anyone wishing to understand the role, or the lack thereof, of the mainline white Protestant churches in the small town South during the days of the Civil Rights Movement. As of early January you can read the introduction of Quiros’ book online by entering: yurl.com/ybb2fzy7
— Steven Fox (class of 1975) is, like Quiros, England, Frady and Collins, a graduate of Furman University. He is a blogger and freelance writer currently living in Collinsville, Alabama. A longer version of this essay and other writings can be found online at: www.foxofbama.blogspot.com
