Will D. Campbell

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Will D. Campbell (born 1924 in Amite County, Mississippi, United States) is a Baptist minister, activist, author, and lecturer. Throughout his life, he has been a notable white supporter of civil rights in the Southern United States. In addition to his activism, Campbell also is a noted author, particularly with his autobiographical work Brother to a Dragonfly, a finalist for the National Book Award in 1978.


Contents

[edit] Career

Campbell, the son of a farmer, was ordained as a minister by his local Baptist congregation at age 17. He attended Louisiana College, then enlisted in the Army during World War II. After the war, he attended Wake Forest College, Tulane University, and Yale Divinity School. Though he held a pastorate in Louisiana from 1952 to 1954, Campbell has spent most of his career in other settings. In 1954, he took a position as director of religious life at the University of Mississippi, only to resign it in 1956, in part because of the hostility (including death threats) he received as a supporter of integration. He subsequently took a position as a field officer for the National Council of Churches, where he had his closest contact with the Civil Rights Movement. In 1963, Campbell left the National Council of Churches to become director of the Committee of Southern Churchmen, which provided a home for his activism in the subsequent years.[1] [2] By 2005, Campbell described this last organization in the past tense as “nothing ... a name and a tax exemption and whatever I and a few other people were doing on a given day," and he continued his work on a personal basis among his network of acquaintances.[3] Although remaining a Baptist, he has moved toward the Episcopal Church.

[edit] Activism

[edit] Civil rights

In 1957, while working for the National Council of Churches, Campbell participated in two notable events of the Civil Rights Movement: he was one of four people who escorted the black students who integrated the Little Rock, Arkansas, public schools; and he was the only white person present at the founding of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference by the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.[4] Despite these efforts, Campbell later claimed, "I never considered myself ... an activist in the civil rights movement, though a lot of other people considered me an activist."[5] His uncompromising theology has led him to keep his distance from political movements. He has insisted that "anyone who is not as concerned with the immortal soul of the dispossessor as he is with the suffering of the dispossessed is being something less than Christian" [6] and that "Mr. Jesus died for the bigots as well" [7]. These convictions sometimes caused friction between Campbell and other civil rights figures -- for example, when Campbell ministered to members of the Ku Klux Klan. He remarked in 1976, "It's been a long time since I got a hate letter from the right. Now they come from the left."[8]

[edit] Other issues

While Campbell is best known in connection with civil rights activism, he also has taken an interest in other political issues. He participated in protests against the Vietnam War[9] and helped draft resisters find sanctuary in Canada.[10] In the late 1970s he spoke out against the death penalty, particularly after forming a relationship with John Spenkelink, whom the state of Florida executed in 1979.[11] Campbell has also expressed an opposition to abortion. [12] Campbell retains a healthy distrust of government and a belief that people must make their own history.

[edit] Writings

This list contains every, or nearly every, book-length work authored primarily by Campbell, but it makes no attempt to list shorter works.

  • Race and the Renewal of the Church (1962)
  • The Failure and the Hope: Essays of Southern Churchmen (1972, reprint 2005) (edited with James Y. Holloway)
  • ... and the criminals with him ..." Lk 23:33: A first-person book about prisons (1972)
  • Brother to a Dragonfly (1977): part autobiography, part elegy for Campbell's brother, part oral history of the Civil Rights Movement
  • The Glad River (1982): novel
  • Cecelia's Sin (1983): historical novel set among the early Baptists
  • The Lord's Prayer for Our Time (1983) (with Will McBride and Bonnie Campbell)
  • Forty Acres and a Goat (1986): autobiography
  • The Convention: A Parable (1988): allegory based on the conflict between moderates and fundamentalists within the Southern Baptist Convention
  • Covenant: Faces, Voices, Places (1989) (with photographs by Al Clayton)
  • Chester and Chun Ling (1989): children's book, illustrated by Jim Hsieh
  • Providence (1992, reprint 2002)
  • The Stem of Jesse: The Costs of Community at a 1960's Southern School (1995, reprint 2002): account of racial integration at Mercer University
  • "Elvis Presley as Redneck" (1995). Address delivered at First Elvis Presley Symposium, University of Mississippi.
  • The Pear Tree That Bloomed in the Fall (1996): children's book, illustrated by Elaine Kernea
  • And Also With You: Duncan Gray and the American Dilemma (1997): a tribute to the Rt. Rev. Duncan M. Gray, whom Campbell calls one of his heroes.
  • Bluebirds Always Come on Sunday (1997)
  • Shugah and Doops (1997)
  • Soul Among Lions: Musings of a Bootleg Preacher (1999)
  • Robert G. Clark's Journey to the House (2003): a biography of the man who, in 1967, was elected Mississippi's first black state legislator since Reconstruction
  • Up to Our Steeples in Politics (2005) (with James Y. Holloway)

[edit] Further reading

[edit] References

  1. ^ Biographical sketch at University of Southern Mississippi library
  2. ^ "By the Fire" (interview with W. Dale Brown). In Of Fiction and Faith: Twelve American Writers Talk About Their Vision and Work, ed. W. Dale Brown. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1997.
  3. ^ Joseph Sweat, "Nothing Sacred", Nashville Scene, December 1, 2005
  4. ^ Biographical sketch at University of Southern Mississippi library
  5. ^ Will D. Campbell oral history (1976)
  6. ^ Campbell, Brother to a Dragonfly, p. 201
  7. ^ Frye Galliard, "The Scandalous Gospel of Will Campbell". In Race, Rock, and Religion: Profiles from a Southern Journalist. Charlotte: East Woods Press, 1982, p. 46
  8. ^ Will D. Campbell oral history (1976)
  9. ^ Will D. Campbell oral history (1976)
  10. ^ [1]
  11. ^ Galliard, "The Scandalous Gospel of Will Campbell"
  12. ^ Will D. Campbell oral history (1976)
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