Charles Marsh | August 6, 2024
When the interview began it was hard for me to reconcile the man before me—calm and almost elegant in his pinstriped suit—with everything else I knew of him: that he had reigned over a campaign of terror in 1960s Mississippi. On that night, in the summer of 1994, the former Imperial Wizard of the Mississippi Ku Klux Klan had not yet been convicted of murder—nor for his part in the 1964 deaths of James Chaney, Andy Goodman, and Mickey Schwerner, nor in the 1966 firebombing death of Vernon Dahmer.
He had served seven years in a federal prison for conspiracy to deprive Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner of their civil rights, and since being released, Samuel Holloway Bowers Jr. had been back in his hometown of Laurel, his life not so different from that of an aging Nazi in a Bavarian village. He read newspapers and magazines in the public library, went to church and taught Sunday school, and regaled old associates and new admirers with stories of his glory days. He also put his mind to working out a theology of ethno-racial nationalism.
While I hadn’t expected him to show up in a white robe, the matching Mickey Mouse watch, belt buckle, and cuff links—and the missing front tooth—seemed to belie the pinstripes. What he said to me on the three evenings we passed together seemed, at the time, vicious but also almost quaint—which is to say, affected, prim, cunningly designed. Yet, there were moments when I caught a glimpse of the tempestuous rage that had made Bowers the most feared white terrorist of the civil rights era.
I recently found my handwritten notes of those interviews and came across this passage:
Liberals, anarchists, communists, Jews, the demagogues of the Democratic Party and the pagan academics – these are our infidels, and the last is the greatest threat. I look on the academy with an obduracy and utter contempt. I hate it with total hatred. Infidels cannot be forgiven – they can only be eliminated.
Bowers felt called by God to “the high priesthood of the anti-civil rights movement” –that he believed the holy crusade against the “pagan academic savants and heathen media hysterics” remained as urgent today as anytime during the 1960’s.
I sat across from the Klansman at a table in an empty dining room annexed to a gas station, trying to follow the logic of his “Five-Tiered Crystallized Logos of Western Civilization,” writing furiously in my spiral-bound notebook. Bowers’s ideas were chilling, to be sure – though his discourses struck me at first as the lexicon of an antedated ideology.
But when I reread my decades-old notes – in preparation for writing a new preface to my 1997 book about Freedom Summer – Bowers’ views sounded rather like talking points for the present day Christian nationalists – the men and women, though mostly men, who hold political office, run think tanks, publish sleek journals and newspapers, and permeate social media in pursuit of an ethno-national supremacy – and don’t know, or care, that their ideology is built on the same foundations that fueled the Ku Klux Klan’s violent crusades against blacks, white dissidents, including liberal Christians, outside agitators, and southern Jews.
“Our enemy today is again a totalitarian,” Sebastian Gorka wrote, in a passage that could be cribbed from the Imperial Wizard. “There is no middle ground. The infidel must submit or be killed.” Gorka, you might recall, held the position called White House strategist in the Trump administration.
More recently, the Heritage Foundation’s PROJECT 2025 is premised on a theo-pathological consciousness and appeals to a stream of enormous historical events and to the certainty of a divine mandate to justify the seizure of power.
“America is on the brink of destruction,” begins the 900-page manifesto. “The long march of cultural Marxism through our institutions has come to pass…with freedom and liberty under siege as never before. In his forward to Heritage executive director Kevin Roberts’ new book, Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America, originally subtitled Burning Down Washington to Save America, J.D. Vance, the Republican nominee for Vice-President, summons American patriots to “circle the wagons and load the muskets…[for] the fights that lay ahead.”
Former President Donald Trump’s efforts of late to distance himself from the Project’s extreme ideas remind me of a homeschooled teenager on his first stroll down Bourbon Street. Feigned outrage with the mind to get back there real soon.
There is much to find alarming in this discourse now so close to the centers of power in Washington (though it’s good to see Vance acknowledge the original intent of the Second Amendment). There is much in Christian nationalism to criticize as an American—but perhaps even more as a Christian. Christian Nationalism is not only a denial of American democratic virtues; it is also a betrayal of the moral ecumenism of Christian faith.
In my book God’s Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights – published today (August 6) as a Princeton Classic on the 60th anniversary of Freedom Summer –the white Christian terrorism of Sam Bowers was set against the world-affirming faith of SNCC’s founding mothers and fathers – denim-clad dreamers and doers, domestics and mechanics, black business owners and field hands – whose social hopes were nourished by deep spiritual waters. Fannie Lou Hamer once compared the student volunteers to the Parable of the Good Samaritan, reading Jesus’s famous parable as a description of the New Kingdom emerging amid the summer fields of the Mississippi Delta.
Freedom Summer began with training sessions in non-violent direct action, in prayer meetings, and in the martyrdom of three civil rights workers, and it unfolded as a series of events framed by the singing, testifying, and emboldened church. “Our goal was to reconcile,” SNCC’s Diane Nash said, “to create a community redeemed or recovered. To redeem means to rehabiliate, to heal.”
Fannie Lou Hamer, who left the cotton fields at the age of forty-four to work full-time “for Jesus” in civil rights spoke of the movement as a “welcome table”, the kind you saw on the grounds of rural southern churches, the kind that shared the abundant deliciousness of southern cooking with all who joined the feast.
“We had wondered if there was anybody human enough to see us as human beings instead of animals. These young people were so Christlike.” Mrs. Hamer’s Christianity, like so many of the black church people in the movement, was exuberantly Christian in its singing and testifying, and exuberantly generous to non-Christian fellow travelers. Of the thousand volunteers who traveled south from universities across the nation – half were Jewish.
But building Beloved Community was more than an inspiring idea. Freedom Summer clustered around the pursuit of concrete goals for the sake of black flourishing: it was about voter registration campaigns, freedom schools, black economic empowerment, interracial alliances, civil disobedience and arrest, and the disciplines of organizing. The summer culminated in the formation of a political party of the poor, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), which staged a dramatic but unsuccessful challenge to the legitimacy of the all-white Mississippi Democratic delegation, sixty years ago this month, at the National Democratic Convention in Atlantic City – claiming their place as political agents in the National Democratic Party.
“We were seed people; no matter how bleak the terrain looked out there, we were planted for a rich harvest,” Victoria Gray Adams, a small business owner in Hattiesburg and SNCC leader later told students at the university where I teach. “We didn’t have much of anything really except the church, but the church was there for us; the church as the representation of the spirit of love—of God. I don’t care whether you call yourself a Christian, Jew or Muslim.”
Anchored in the convictions of the Black Freedom Church, Freedom Summer exemplified a capacious and cosmopolitan spiritualty -and it made us a better nation. In July of 1964, President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, outlawing discrimination and segregation in public accommodations.
As a white southerner, Freedom Summer illumined for me a pathway from the closed doors of the segregated South to a Christianity with four sides open to the world. The joys of sharing in a global fellowship of reconciliation and the essential affirmations of the Christian movement: showing hospitality to outcasts and strangers; affirming the dignity of created life; embracing the preferential option of nonviolence; practicing justice and loving mercy.
Ella Baker, Bob Moses, Jane Stembridge, Fannie Lou Hamer, Lawrence Guyot, Charles Sherrod, Joan Trumpauer Mulholland, Aaron Henry, Marshall Ganz, Stokely Carmichael, Ed King, June Jordon, Cleveland Sellers, Casey Hayden, Mary King, Tracy Sugarman, John Lewis, Bob Zellner, Dorothy Miller, Bud and Biddie Cole, Annie Devine, Diane Nash, Howard Zinn, Charles McDew, Amzie Moore, Aaron Henry, Bernice Johnson – and all the other aristocrats of conscience who found themselves, in the long, hot summer of 1964, working in common cause for a more just nation, exemplifying a more capacious faith. Let us praise these American lives – as we proclaim the Gospel of Freedom Summer.
Charles Marsh is Commonwealth Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. He is the author of numerous books including Evangelical Anxiety: A Memoir (HarperOne, 2022) and Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (Knopf, 2014). Portions of this essay appear in the preface to his award-winning book God’s Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights, which will be released on August 6 as a Princeton Classic.