A comment Rickey L Cole made the other night about grace and reconciliation made me think of the late Rev. Will Campbell who was a Southern Baptist minister from Amite County, Mississippi. Campbell, ordained at only 17 and later a graduate of Yale Divinity School, was the Director of Religious Life at Ole Miss from 1954-56 during the years immediately after Brown vs Board of Education and was in the inner circle of the civil rights movement. In his later years he became a part of what is known as Radical Christianity, toured with and was chaplain to Waylon Jennings and other country music stars. The character Rev. Will B. Dunn in the comic strip Kudzu was based on Campbell. When I was at Ole Miss some decades ago, one of my classes was fortunate to hear Campbell when he was invited back to speak by our instructor. He had left in 1956 after s many death threats were made. PBS profiled him in their documentary Gods Will some years ago which is well worth watching. Campbell was a part of many of the most historic events in American history as civil rights came to the South. He was one of the escorts of the first black students at Central High in Little Rock, was with Dr. King and others at the major sit-ins, boycotts, protests, and marches throughout the South, the march on Birmingham in 1963, the march on Selma in 1965, and even on the last night at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis where his image was captured in an iconic Henry Groskinsky photo standing alone after Dr. King was shot . At the same time that he was an important figure in the civil rights movement, he also was a minister to members of the KKK, visited James Earl Ray in prison, and ministered to both the Dahmer family and Sam Bowers at Bowers trial for the murder of Vernon Dahmer. He embraced Bowers during a recess at the trial and had tears in his eyes when the conviction was announced. His belief of Christianity was I came to understand the nature of tragedy. And one who understands the nature of tragedy can never take sides. He was a major part of the now almost forgotten Southern intellectual journal Katallagete: Be Reconciled that began publication in 1963 and grappled with the civil rights and anti-war movements mostly from a Christian perspective. It published contributions and had support from a number of notable people including Thomas Merton, Philip and Daniel Berrigan, Fannie Lou Hamer, Billy Graham, Walker Percy, Wendell Berry, Noam Chomsky, Norman Cousins, Dorothy Day, Jacques Ellul, J.W. Fulbright, Rev. Duncan M. Gray, Jr, Paul Greenberg, Dick Gregory, Vance Hartke, Mark O. Hatfield, Brooks Hays, Ivan Illich, John Lewis, Eugene J. McCarthy, George McGovern, Karl Menninger, Reinhold Niebuhr, Frank William Stringfellow, Robert Penn Warren and others. When he died in 2013, Rev. Gordon C. Stewart wrote: “He confused his critics – first the Right and then the Left – by insisting that his soul did not belong to any team – racial, political, religious, cultural. It belonged to the Kingdom of God. There was only **one** team, and that was the family of ALL God’s children everywhere. Compassion came first in his hierarchy of values. Compassion led him to campaign for justice in the Civil Rights Movement, and compassion led him to sip whiskey with the cross-burners in the rocking chairs on their front porches. His was a ministry of reconciliation, a living, idiosyncratic expression a bold declaration of the biblical Gospel that God was in Christ reconciling the world to God’s own Self.” vimeo/55126898
Posted on: Sat, 08 Nov 2014 03:31:14 +0000
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