Sanctuaries of Segregation

The year 1963 was one of explosive civil rights activity and brutal white repression across the South, including Mississippi. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was running voter registration campaigns in the delta and planning for a protest “freedom vote” in the fall. A boycott of downtown merchants in Jackson attracted national attention, culminating in the assassination of National Association for the Advancement of Colored People leader Medgar Evers. Students at the city's historically black Tougaloo College had been active in the Jackson movement and were also involved in a smaller, less publicized campaign to desegregate Jackson's white churches. In Sanctuaries of Segregation Carter Dalton Lyon tells the story of the church visitations, which began in the spring of 1963 and continued regularly until the summer of 1964. Led by the Reverend Edwin King, Tougaloo's chaplain and a native white Mississippian, small groups of students, black and white, put on their Sunday best clothes and tried to attend church in downtown Jackson. One of their goals “was to highlight segregation in the church as a way of tugging at the hearts of white Christians” (pp. 121–22). They met with some early success—St. Andrew's Episcopal Church welcomed the visitors—but ushers at the mainline Methodist and Baptist churches barred the doors to African Americans seeking entrance

Archaeology · Boycott · Downtown · Political science · Politics · White (mutation · History · Law · Race, History, and American Society · Religious studies

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