David P. Cline's history of the Student Interracial Ministry (SIM) is another contribution in a growing list of works that layer and reimagine the civil rights movement beyond the glow of Martin Luther King Jr. and organizations like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). The book examines how a small group of students from Union Theological Seminary in New York ended up at a conference convened by Ella Baker of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and began a church movement. It was the same meeting at Shaw University Easter weekend 1960 where SNCC was formed and which energized the Union students to form SIM to bring about social change in race relations.

From Reconciliation to Revolution explores how white Christians, working in relationship with black Christians, tried to bring the church more in line with the vision of a desegregated order. On almost every page, Cline highlights how SIM workers—first students from Union and then students from other seminaries across the country—participated in the formative moments of the era, whether at Shaw for the beginning of SNCC or in Albany, Georgia, working on the Albany Campaign. SIM students were in Chicago before King and SCLC arrived and, in almost every case, worked behind the scenes and without much fanfare. The small band of seminary students focused initially on direct involvement through church exchanges—white seminary students working as summer interns in black congregations and vice versa. James Forbes's summer work at Binkley Memorial Baptist Church in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, serves as an example of many like it across the South. As the civil rights movement and the backlash against it intensified, students began to see the gradual approach to change—one congregation at a time—as too slow and adapted to the changing circumstances. The final phase of their program occurred as the Black Power movement ridiculed interracial work, a resistance the students could not overcome. SIM had a short lifespan of eight years but, as Cline noted, its impact continued long after it disbanded.

Cline carries the narrative in a chronological fashion through six chapters, showing in the preface how SIM fit within the larger transformation occurring within Christian student and mission organizations at mid-century. This spirit of change appeared on seminary campuses across the country, but the seedbed at Union with Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich found particularly fertile soil for the type of liberal Christianity that would inspire social change in the 1960s. Early 1960s students, however, found Niebuhr and Tillich as well as the Union curriculum “stuffy” and worked to move beyond its narrow constraints, which led to their participation at Shaw (p. 29). The student involvement in civil rights work gave them a way to make sense of their theological explorations in real-world circumstances. This approach had a negative effect on SIM long term. As the civil rights movement in the form of SNCC became more confrontational and willing to risk life and limb, the initial slow-change model appeared to make less sense. Even as the group transitioned to urban ministry models, the student wing of the civil rights movement became divided on the issue of Black Power. White students who had committed their vocational lives to the “beloved community,” which to them was not racialized, found the ground shifting under them in the turbulence of 1968. From the sit-ins and kneel-ins through King's death and the apparent fracturing of the civil rights movement—and it is clear from Cline and others it was always fractured—SIM workers helped transform a remarkable number of lives and places in the short life cycle. Cline's handling of their “under the radar” story helps shine a light on the less sensational moments that changed the decade (p. 101).

The most intriguing chapter is on Charles Sherrod and the Southwest Georgia Project. Sherrod, a member of SNCC, had been sent along with Cordell Reagon to see if enough local support existed to push for desegregated accommodations at bus and airport terminals in Albany, Georgia, which carried out a particularly punitive form of segregation. With the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NCAAP) branch in Albany and enough local support from African Americans, Sherrod and Reagon encouraged students at Albany State University, the region's black college, to begin protests. Events moved quickly, and the Albany Campaign leadership called on King and SCLC to come to Albany. Three arrests of King later and what appeared to be a concession by white leaders in Albany, King and the cameras left town. In the civil rights narrative, this campaign registers as one of SCLC's failures. Cline alters the focus and stays on Sherrod, who by this time had moved to Union to pursue a master of sacred theology. While there, he tapped into SIM and recruited students to Albany and what he called the Southwest Georgia Project. For more than a decade, SIM workers lived and breathed the air of Albany and the surrounding counties, putting their lives and those of their host families at risk. At a moment when SNCC leaders removed white students from leadership, Sherrod remained committed to biracial work. By 1967, the Southwest Georgia Project helped put seven black farmers on the ballot for the Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Service (p. 109). It would take several more years to get someone elected, but change was coming. “The story of the perseverance of the Albany movement after King,” Cline writes, “directly challenges the assessment that the movement there collapsed after 1962” (p. 96). His work on SIM students helps show why spotlighting these lesser-known stories reveals a great deal about what happened on the ground.

Cline's focus on the students and the actual work of SIM in the organizational sense does mean that the institution that gave shelter to SIM does not always reveal the same complexity as the rest of the book. Union Theological Seminary often acts as a foil to the students. The comment that students found the curriculum around Niebuhr and Tillich out of date came from students, who often find curricular issues burdensome and not relevant to their lives. Cline examines one example of how the curriculum helped SIM: the ministerial experience component, in which students received course credit for working with SIM. This criticism is not directed at Cline because the story he needed to tell focused on the students. Cline's work, however, points to the need for a history of theological education in the twentieth century. A significant shift is under way in American life during the “Christian century.” Seminaries and theology schools helped shepherd through a number of change-makers. What about theological education allowed for this type of reflection and engagement with some of the most substantive social issues of the mid-century? The students at Union did not appear in a vacuum to bring about change in the world; dedicated teachers and administrators had toiled for decades creating an environment that touched off the changes the students wrought.