Things changed in the closed society of Mississippi on January 2, 1963. That Wednesday, twenty-eight co-signers, white Methodist ministers in the Mississippi Conference, published Born of Conviction, a 565-word “manifesto” outlining their public commitment to a more racially inclusive church. Their prophetic intervention in the state's fraught racial politics was published in The Mississippi Methodist Advocate. Covered by every major Mississippi newspaper, reaction to Born of Conviction was swift: some ministers were immediately forced out of their churches; many others voluntarily left the state of their births within the year.
Professor Joseph T. Reiff chronicles the story of the manifesto and each of its twenty-eight signers in this important and painstakingly documented book. Reiff confesses that his project is deeply personal: his father, while not a signer, was a professor at Millsaps College, Methodism's higher educational home in Mississippi. Reiff also details watching would-be integrators of Capitol Street Methodist Church get arrested in 1963—heady stuff for an eight-year-old.
Reiff's argument is straightforward enough: Born of Conviction contributed to cracking the state's “closed society,” typified by a rigid and state-sponsored commitment to segregation—across nearly all institutions, including private ones such as the Methodist Church. That segregation would be strictly enforced in white Mississippi Methodism is attested to by the creation in early 1955 of MAMML, the Mississippi Association of Methodist Ministers and Laymen. The Methodist equivalent of the state's kudzu-like White Citizens’ Councils, MAMML pledged itself to work for “the preservation of present racial customs and the continuance of separate churches, conferences, and jurisdictions for the white membership and the Negro membership” (20). In brief the “brotherhood of man” extended only to the white Methodist church's outermost doors; an integrated church was shot through with the fevered twin bogeymen of white racists: intermarriage and communism.
Reiff's work participates in a burgeoning literature on how white-dominated churches and denominations reacted, and occasionally led, the racial revolution sweeping the United States in the 1950s and 1960s. Developed initially by the work of David L. Chappell, James Findlay, Mark Newman, and Andrew Manis, and recently extended by Carol V. R. George and a host of memoirs, religious rhetoric is at long last being taken very seriously when it comes to understanding the foundation stone of white supremacy and its extended reach into everyday institutions. Reiff's work provides fascinating evidence in that ongoing conversation.
Across eleven copiously documented chapters and nearly 400 pages, Reiff tells his story from the vantage point principally of the twenty-eight signers: who signed, why they signed, and what happened after they signed, in both the short and long term. While far from an apologist for Mississippi Methodism's exacting white supremacy, Reiff aims to dispel the “spoke out, forced out” narrative that could, in incautious hands, dominate the Born of Conviction story. That is, only a handful of signers were immediately forced out of their pulpits by congregants inflamed by the racially progressive manifesto. The great majority of the twenty signers who left Mississippi headed north and west simply because they had more auspicious career and family opportunities away from the closed society. That said, at the fifty-year anniversary/celebration of Born of Conviction’s publication, Reiff's interviews suggest that many signers and their immediate families paid a significant price for their public profession.
Reiff's narrative is dominated by the Mississippi Conference, which, geographically speaking, comprises much of the lower half of the state. Left unclear is why North Mississippi Methodist Conference members were largely ignored by the document's drafters as they moved toward publication. While the signees represented a youthful and new generation of white Mississippians, often educated at nationally recognized Methodist seminaries, what of that same demographic north of Jackson? Too, Reiff gives short shrift to the creation and reception of Born of Conviction among the Central Jurisdiction, the all-black group of Mississippi Methodist ministers who might have been a logical ally, if not audience.
Reiff goes a bit off-script to detail the careers of two important white Methodist Mississippians: Reverend Edwin King and Bishop Clay Lee. Neither man signed Born of Conviction: King because he was out of state in seminary at Boston University, and Lee because the statement wasn't radical enough. King eventually became chaplain at historically black Tougaloo College, which functioned as the only interracial safe zone in the state's capital. As a close friend and colleague to Medgar Evers, King sacrificed enormously in trying to integrate the Methodist Church; his memoir, Ed King's Mississippi, bears testament to that sacrifice. Bishop Lee was the young head pastor at First Church in Philadelphia, Mississippi; his sermon, “Herod Was in Christmas,” delivered in December 1964, served as a clerical shot across the bow to the suspected Klansmen in the Church—including his own. After three years of near-constant struggle, and the occasional death threat, Lee moved his family out of Neshoba County. When I initially received Reiff's book, I was disappointed to see that Bishop Clay Lee was not in his index. How could this remarkable man, who'd informed me personally that he'd been interviewed for the project, not be in it? Turns out that Lee's name was mis-alphabetized; he's very present, as he should be.
Finally, for a book whose entire reason for being revolves around 565 words of carefully calibrated public rhetoric, I was disappointed that so little time was spent exploring the creation of that text. As a rhetorician whose disciplinary first premise is invention, or the crucible of how public rhetoric comes to be, I was struck that hardly a word is said about its origins, as if Born of Conviction sprung fully formed from the heads of these young white clergy. Reiff even says otherwise, that the prophetic statement involved careful crafting and interpersonal debate, but readers are not privy to that critical context.
Born of Conviction: White Methodists and Mississippi's Closed Society is a very impressive and important contribution to our evolving understanding of how religion made the Civil Rights Movement move. In telling this story and his tireless pursuit of these brave clergy, Reiff has excavated a fascinating fissure in the cracks of Mississippi's closed society.
