Sanctuaries of Segregation
Sanctuaries of Segregation
The Story of the Jackson Church Visit Campaign
Winner of the 2017 Eudora Welty Prize
Sanctuaries of Segregation provides the first comprehensive analysis of the Jackson, Mississippi, church visit campaign of 1963-1964 and the efforts by segregationists to protect one of their last refuges. For ten months, integrated groups of ministers and laypeople attempted to attend Sunday worship services at all-white Protestant and Catholic churches in the state’s capital city. While the church visit was a common tactic of activists in the early 1960s, Jackson remained the only city where groups mounted a sustained campaign targeting a wide variety of white churches.
Carter Dalton Lyon situates the visits within the context of the Jackson Movement, compares the actions to church visits and kneel-ins in other cities, and places these encounters within controversies already underway over race inside churches and denominations. He then traces the campaign from its inception in early June 1963 through Easter Sunday 1964. He highlights the motivations of the various people and organizations, the interracial dialogue that took place on the church steps, the divisions and turmoil the campaign generated within churches and denominations, the decisions by individual congregations to exclude black visitors, and the efforts by the state and the Citizens’ Council to thwart the integration attempts.
Sanctuaries of Segregation offers a unique perspective on those tumultuous years. Though most churches blocked African American visitors and police stepped in to make forty arrests during the course of the campaign, Lyon reveals many examples of white ministers and laypeople stepping forward to oppose segregation. Their leadership and the constant pressure from activists seeking entrance into worship services made the churches of Jackson one of the front lines in the national struggle over civil rights.
Sanctuaries of Segregation is a much-needed addition to the literature on a lesser-known area of the civil rights movement in Mississippi.
This book represents a major achievement. Thanks to Carter Dalton Lyon’s deep and impressive research, we now understand the story of the Jackson church visit campaign in detail. This book demonstrates how the effects of this initiative rippled across the country, and it underscores the contradictory but crucial role that white Christianity played during the civil rights years.
Sanctuaries of Segregation is an intimate portrait of the strategy, tactics, and Christian witness of the Jackson movement’s 1963-64 church visit campaign, a determined appeal to convince white churches in Mississippi’s capital city of the theological and ecclesiological absurdity of their insistence on whites-only worship services. With remarkably thorough research, compelling analysis, and captivating narrative, Lyon uncovers another powerful story of the 1960s black freedom struggle and offers extraordinary insight into the perspectives of actors on all sides of the conflict.
The moral and religious issues that swirled about the civil rights movement in the early 1960s have rarely been put in richer context than in Sanctuaries of Segregation. Looking closely at the local church communities of Jackson, Mississippi, Lyon shows civil rights activists seeking admission to white churches and the variety of responses to their efforts. Activists wanted to open the church doors of a closed society to testify to Christian brotherhood’s call for integration, offering the opportunity for a rare dialogue with white Christians who defended tenaciously their control of a key institution of the southern way of life. His analysis of the fraught relationship between white moderate ministers, many of whom favored racial integration, and their segregationist congregants, who often forced them from their pulpits, adds a new level of understanding of the moral battles within white southern churches.
Carter Dalton Lyon’s Sanctuaries of Segregation is a wonderful addition to the growing literature on the role of ‘white' churches during the civil rights movement in the South. Careful study of local ‘kneel-in' movements was delayed for several decades for reasons that are unclear. But now that new scholarly attention is being focused on church visit campaigns in cities like Atlanta, Birmingham, and Memphis, Lyon’s book helps fill out our knowledge—and our understanding—of this understudied chapter in the civil rights struggle.What is particularly notable about Sanctuaries of Segregation is Lyon’s rich recreation of the personal and institutional contexts in which the Jackson church visits took place. It was individual congregations that were targeted for visits by racially mixed groups; and the internal drama precipitated by these visits permanently marked the history of these churches. But responses to the visits also involved local police, state and federal courts, and quasi-governmental associations like the Citizens’ Council.
The Jackson church visit campaign also roiled denominations—particularly the United Methodist Church, which was hurled into a national debate over the relationship of congregational preference and Church policy. Finally, the story of the church visits could not be told without attention to the students and faculty at Tougaloo College, many of whom were active in the campaign and suffered abuse and intimidation as a result.
Lyon ties all these threads together in a compelling narrative based on exhaustive research. The result is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of southern churches during the civil rights movement.
Carter Dalton Lyon is a native of Lexington, Kentucky. He teaches and chairs the History Department at St. Mary’s Episcopal School.
