Abstract
The intense religiosity of the white South has always been related to the two central social problems of Southern life and history: the pervasive racism that mobilized small farmers and workers to defend a social and economic structure that treats them only slightly better than it does black farmers and workers, and the pervasive poverty that has condemned the poor and working classes of the South to lag behind other regions of the country. African Americans have been equally as religious, but black churches have sometimes been centers of resistance.
This book is a joint biographical study of two activist preachers—one black, one white—who emerged out of this Southern religious milieu in the late 1920s and were active during the period of the Depression and New Deal of the 1930s. Claude Williams and Owen Whitfield joined a fierce advocacy of working-class interests with a commitment to Southern “gospel” religion. This was not an opportunistic use of religion to appeal to their deeply religious audiences. For both men, and their equally active wives, Zella Whitfield and Joyce Williams, their faith reflected what they had in common with the people they were trying to organize.
Claude Williams, the better known during this period, was the subject of three biographies during the 1940s. This was, in part, because of the hope among leftists that a clear, progressive voice would emerge out of the Southern white poor and working-class communities. Williams seemed to be it.
Williams was raised in a conservative Presbyterian church in Tennessee and first ran afoul of the church conservatives when, as a young minister, he sponsored dances and baseball games. The church elders disagreed and Williams soon found himself without a pulpit and without the support of the church in which he had been raised. His concern with the real conditions of the workers and small farmers of Appalachia and the South led him to conclude that the fundamental cause of the hardship that he saw around him was the vast inequality and poverty of the region, built on a foundation of racism. Williams and Whitfield met as Williams was traveling through the South organizing for the Southern Tenants Farmers Union (STFU).
Whitfield was a sharecropper and Pentecostal preacher who had moved to Arkansas from Mississippi during the 1920s. Whitfield had been a sympathizer with Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, which had branches throughout the South. The meeting between these two preachers and activists occurred when Whitfield was asked by his sharecropper parishioners to allow the church to be used for an organizing meeting of the STFU. When Williams showed up at the church, Whitfield was taken aback; he had not realized that Williams was white. He is quoted here as saying, “What can that white peckerwood say to me?” (p. 40).
After hearing Williams preach, Williams and Whitfield became fast friends. Whitfield came to believe that the liberation of the black agricultural workers and sharecroppers of the South could be accomplished only with an alliance with the economically similarly placed whites of the region. Williams, for his part, understood that this alliance could be built only if white people directly confronted, and rejected, racist ideology in their own lives. Williams knew this process personally, because he had shared this racist culture and worldview and believed that his own personal liberation came only when he strove to overcome it.
During the 1930s, Williams and Whitfield organized the People’s Institute for Applied Religion and honed their approach to joining working-class organizing and preaching the gospel. Whitfield became an organizer for the United Agricultural, Packing and Allied Workers of America, the CIO union for agricultural workers.
Williams had a more extensive field of activity. During the 1920s and ’30s, he worked with both Commonwealth College and Highlander School training organizers and, in 1943, was sent to Detroit during the racist “hate strikes” to help mobilize white workers who had migrated to Detroit from the South. As he became more and more radicalized, Williams joined the Socialist and Communist Parties. He also had contact with Social Gospel theologians at New York City’s Union Theological Institute.
Both Whitfield and Williams were targeted during the 1950s by the anticommunist witch hunt. Whitfield withdrew from much political activity and returned to agricultural work. He died in 1965. Williams tried to fight back and ended up, once again, being ostracized by the religious community. He remained a figure in the South, and when the civil rights movement came to Birmingham, Alabama, he and his wife mentored a new generation of civil rights activists.
Reading this book in our current period, when the identification of Christian religious faith with extreme right-wing politics plays such an important role in our national politics, allows us to recognize that there is another Christian perspective. Claude Williams and Owen Whitfield were our own “liberation theologians.” They found in the Southern Christian tradition a perspective deeply rooted in Protestant theology and as deeply concerned with the social and economic oppression of the poor.