Friends of Lived Theology:

Sixty years ago today, on August 6, 1964, a political party formed by black Mississippians – the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party – convened in Jackson, Mississippi, to celebrate the successes of the Freedom Summer Project. In July, President Johnson had signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the iceberg of southern segregation had been cracked. 

Today I’m pleased to announce the release of God’s Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights, as a Princeton Classic. As a white southerner and child of the southern Baptist church, Freedom Summer 1964 illumined for me a pathway from the closed doors of the segregated South to a Christianity with four sides open to the world. – to the joys of sharing in a global fellowship of reconciliation. 

A holy host of righteous women and men found themselves together, in the long, hot summer of 1964, working in common cause for a more just nation and a more capacious faith.

Among them: Ella Baker, Bob Moses, Jane Stembridge, Fannie Lou Hamer, Charles Sherrod, Joan Trumpauer Mulholland, Aaron Henry, Stokely Carmichael, Ed King, June Jordon, Cleveland Sellers, Casey Hayden, Tracy Sugarman, John Lewis, Bob Zellner, Dorothy Miller, and. Let us praise these peculiar people – as we preach the Gospel of Freedom Summer. 

Peace!
Charles