God’s Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights

"I chose this book because it’s written so well. It’s a smooth read. Every chapter takes up a different personality who was involved in the Freedom Summer, which I just spoke of, which was a summer of local organizing in Mississippi: to organize people to vote, to be involved and back local efforts for freedom and equality. Every chapter of this book takes a different look at one person’s life during that summer. What’s great about it is that it starts off with Fannie Lou Hamer, how she was transformed in that summer of 1964, and also how faith for her was something that encouraged her to get involved in these efforts. But it also includes a chapter on Sam Bowers, who was one of the Klansmen down in Mississippi, who saw himself as a Christian and was very much against Freedom Summer. His belief in white Christian nationalism led him to oppose equality and to use violence to defend white supremacism. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter It also has a chapter on Reverend Dr. W. Douglas Hudgins, Pastor of First Baptist Church, Jackson, Mississippi. It was the leading church in the state, boasting among its members and Sunday school teachers the likes of local and state officials including the Mississippi governor. Reverend Hudgins preached what he saw as a purely theological message, that the church was not to get involved in politics. Everything related to the structure of racism and inequality and terrorism, he didn’t talk about in his sermons. He avoided such politics, constructing a scaffolding for white supremacist terrorism to continue its reign. The book also examines Reverend Ed King, a white minister who promoted the cause of civil rights and the experience of Cleveland Sellers, a young African American student who was a member of SNCC. This book is a wonderful opportunity for students to read and figure out and understand that wonderful summer through the eyes of several different personalities. They gravitate towards it because of how it’s organized. It reads really well and allows undergraduate students to really put themselves in the moment. Sam Bowers was not at all converted, he was a part of some bombings and murders in Mississippi, including the murder of the three students volunteers: Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner. With Fannie Lou Hamer, it shows how her faith transforms from being one where she was just going to church and trying to be an honest human being as a sharecropper, into motivating her to want to get involved in the civil rights movement. But there’s no story of conversion in the book. Having said that, the story that ends the book does show how things can shift. Cleveland Sellers is shot during a student protest at South Carolina State University, several others are killed. The police are acquitted, while Sellers is convicted of inciting a riot. As a result Sellers’ ideas about the Christian faith and its implications for social change shift. So you do see these shifts in certain characters in the book, but there’s nothing like a white supremacist being converted to the cause of racial equality."