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University of Georgia Press - Walter Francis X. , Suitts Steve

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183 pages

English

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For years Southern minister Francis X. Walter was silent about the injustices of Jim Crow, blinded by the status quo, until the violent killing of a fellow priest during the civil rights movement. From Preaching to Meddling is the story of how Walter turned from passive objector to outspoken agitator, marked with Walters humor and personal recollections of the most formative period of modern American history.In a fascinating, funny, sometimes searing memoir, retired Episcopal priest Francis X. Walter shares his journey from the days of the Great Depression in Mobile, Alabama, across decades of Deep South segregation, and into the interracial struggles for racial justice and freedom in Alabama. The founder of the Selma Inter-religious Project, Walters story includes growing up in multi-ethnic, segregated Mobile and learning life lessons at theology schools in Sewanee and New York. Those disparate educations are described as prelude to his years as an Episcopal priest navigating how to serve white parishes in Alabama while challenging the racism that most congregants believed was a God-given right. After a tragic murder of a fellow priest shortly after the Selma to Montgomery March in 1965, Walter moves from pastoring to segregationists to agitating against them as he becomes a committed supporter of the struggles for civil rights and racial justice in George Wallaces Alabama. From Preaching to Meddling is a personal chronicle of some of Alabamas local civil rights struggles and of the memoirists own struggles with faith and fault. While recounting the people and communities he joined in fighting against the white Souths racial order in rural Alabama, Walter candidly shares his own questions, dilemmas, and perceptions of his own shortcomings. His is an engaging portrait of momentous times and of himself as both conflicted priest and crusading white Southerner.

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Histoire

USA

History of the Americas

États-Unis

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Publié par	University of Georgia Press
Date de parution	28 février 2021
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781588383914
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	4 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0598€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

F ROM P REACHING TO M EDDLING
Francis X. Walter, at home in Sewanee, Tennessee, 2007
FROM PREACHING TO MEDDLING
A White Minister in the Civil Rights Movement
F RANCIS X. W ALTER
FOREWORD BY S TEVE S UITTS
N EW S OUTH B OOKS
Montgomery
NewSouth Books
105 S. Court Street
Montgomery, AL 36104
Copyright 2021 by Francis Walter. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by NewSouth Books, Montgomery, Alabama.
Publisher s Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Walter, Francis X., author.
Title: From preaching to meddling: A white minister in the civil rights movement / Francis X. Walter ; foreword by Steve Suitts.
Description: Montgomery : NewSouth Books [2021]. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020948951 | ISBN 9781588383907 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781588383914 (ebook).
Subjects: Walter, Francis X., 1932-. | White civil rights workers-Alabama- Biography. | Religious leaders-Civil rights movement-Biography. | Civil rights movement-History-United States. | 20th century-History-United States. | South-History-United States. | Alabama-History-United States. I. Title.
Design by Randall Williams
Printed in the United States of America by Sheridan

The Black Belt, defined by its dark, rich soil, stretches across central Alabama. It was the heart of the cotton belt. It was and is a place of great beauty, of extreme wealth and grinding poverty, of pain and joy. Here we take our stand, listening to the past, looking to the future .
To my mother, Martha Marsh Walter, pianist, outboard motor racer, mother, wife, fighter of racism.
And to my wife, Faye, a wise woman who never stops loving once she starts.
Contents
Foreword
Invocation
1. Four Times with Dr. King
2. Boss Hague Pols Teach Seminar
3. Did You Ever Get Shot at or Beat up? Part II
4. Roots: Mobile and Mon Louis Island
5. A Creole Look-Ahead Correction
6. To Spring Hill and School
7. My Father s Love
8. Books to Edify the White Southern Child
9. Max and Me
10. High School
11. The Michael Sisters
12. Nice Parents-The Michaels and Simisons
13. Seminary and Racism
14. New York City, General Seminary
15. At Christ Church, Mobile, 1958
16. Family Grief
17. A Call to Good Shepherd
18. To Mobile
19. Meeting with Good Shepherd s Vestry
20. Capitulation
21. Misses Gladys and Victoria
22. Eufaula: Segregation in Moderation
23. The Sexton s Father
24. Shaking Hands
25. David Frost Jr., Eufaula Historian
26. Ditches to Die In or Avoid
27. Dining Room and Kitchen
28. Confirmation Class, 1959, Eufaula
29. Carl and Anne, Eufaula, 1959
30. Charity vs. Social Justice
31. Leaving Eufaula
32. Breitling Cousins Dissed by Miss Amelia
33. Bishop C. C. J. Carpenter Tries to Cope
34. Beginning of the Selma Project
35. Jonathan Daniels Is Murdered
36. Twelve Tons of Books and Miss Lilly Walker
37. Settling into Life in Tuscaloosa
38. Selma Project s Evolving Office Space
39. Another Way to Steal from the Poor-1965
40. Retaining Control After the War
41. The Freedom Quilting Bee
42. Cahaba
43. Me and the Bishop, Licensed in Alabama
44. Adoption and Revelation
45. Excursus on Two Bishops: No Baby
46. Newsletter Report of Selma Project s Activities
47. Lois Deslond s Surprise Birthday Party
48. Day Care
49. Comparing the Small to the Great
Acknowledgments
Appendix 1: Letters
Appendix 2: FQB Member Statements
Sources
Index
Foreword
B Y S TEVE S UITTS
Francis Walter was my first boss more than fifty years ago when he was director of the Selma Inter-Religious Project, an organization that began as one white Southern man s mission of faith and became an interracial, multipronged catalyst for ending white supremacy in the Black Belt of the Deep South. My job interview ended with Francis stating, I ll be glad to hire you, but we don t have any money to pay you a salary. It was an offer I luckily could not refuse.
Looking back, I am startled by the fact that Francis was my boss for no more than thirteen months before he resigned and moved from Tuscaloosa to Birmingham to accept a pastorate. The impact Francis had as a person and as a leader on me-and on others who worked with him-has been so enduring that I find it hard to accept that our days working together out of an old boardinghouse represent little more than a year of my life.
It is not that Francis has a larger-than-life Southern personality. I have had those friends, too. Quite the opposite, as this memoir illuminates, it is Francis s humility, his gentle, if subversive, humor, and his disarming honesty about himself and others that has made a permanent impression on those who have come to know him.
I knew very little about Francis s life before the 1960s and Selma Project, and, as a twenty-two-year-old, I was not actively interested in his past when we worked together. I should have been-as these pages prove. The stories of Francis s life before the Selma Project are rich and fascinating, whether about his immediate and extended family members, some of whom have helped to give the word character a special Southern meaning, or about his awakening into the wider world as he grew up around Alabama s Mobile Bay, went off to Sewanee (today, the University of the South), and tried to become a good Episcopal priest navigating how to avoid condoning the racism and white supremacy that most of his extended family and most of his Southern congregants believed were their God-given right.
His recollections are at times funny, baffling, and heart-saddening, but always relentlessly honest. Francis writes in a gentle, intimate style that encourages us readers to believe that he has written these recollections only for us and Memoria, his semi-reliable muse. In fact, they comprise the many dimensions of a white boy growing up and coming of age in the heat of Alabama racism amid a confluence of interracial and inter-ethnic diversity.
I was surprised to discover that Francis s family does not fit neatly into the traditional white South s social hierarchy. They were on hard times when he arrived in this world, but, as he grew up, they included a bevy of elderly women whose heritage provided the family some claim and access to Mobile s higher white society. His life as a boy and young man around Mobile Bay was not in many ways anything like the rest of Alabama, except, of course, on matters of race.
Race and racism were the central organizing themes of both the world in which Francis emerged and his own journey through it. His abiding Christian faith and his many years as pastor evidently caused him to question his own motives and actions at several junctures in his life-at moments to find almost as much fault in his own shortcomings as with those who held segregation dear. But, there is never a doubt in his actions and thoughts of rejecting the wrongs of the South s system of white supremacy. It was not for him a question of what to believe. It was a lifetime of questions about how to live out what he believed. You will find few who tell this story so honestly, so well.
This memoir includes the dramatic events and experiences in Alabama that moved him as a Southern white minister from pastoring (and pestering) segregationists, including Alabama s own Episcopal Bishop, to agitating for and supporting black and white community leaders in the work of challenging segregation and economic injustice. These events also were some of the defining moments of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. But, Francis never-from the first pages to the last-attempts to overstate his role and his place. No, he seems truly unaware in his telling of how significant his example was, then and later, for young white Alabamians who wanted to find a constructive role in deconstructing racism and making the South better for all people.
Francis s mischievous muse helped him write a profound, personal tale, revealing so much of himself and the interracial but separate South of his day, In so doing, this memoir is one of the best, enduring examples of a Southerner whose conscience and actions remain a meaningful guide to anyone of any race or ethnicity wishing to combine soul-honest reflection and intentional action for change today. This book is both an understanding of and undertaking in the collective journey toward realizing a South and nation that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Congressman John Lewis always envisioned as the beloved community. It is a journey worth your joining.
Steve Suitts is an adjunct at the Institute for Liberal Arts of Emory University and author of Hugo Black of Alabama . Steve began his career as a staff member of the Selma Project, then was founding director of the Alabama Civil Liberties Union, executive director of the Southern Regional Council, and vice president of the Southern Education Foundation. In recent years he has been chief strategist for Better Schools Better Jobs, a Mississippi-based education advocacy project of the New Venture Fund .
F ROM P REACHING TO M EDDLING
Invocation
Memoria, help!
Undependable friend, yet to go off with you is bliss. This is why I tell your stories, even when my hearers look at their watches.
About this memoir: stop hiding things from me! Then pulling them out when I m without pen and paper.
Another thing-stop improving, making me a little sun around which the past revolves; the man who gave a perfect put-down fifty years ago, the one who saw the lie. Who nursed a thing to bear fruit. The one who got it done.
You know my faults. You know the small white-man part I played in the movement of thousands.
1. Four Times with Dr. King
When people hear I was in the racial justice struggles of more than a half century ago-if they have any interest-they will often ask three questions:
Did you ever meet Dr. King?
Were you ever in jail?
Did you ever get shot at/beat up?
The short an