Saturday, April 25, 1998

Maverick preacher played key role in civil rights movement

By Art Jester / Knight Ridder Newspapers

It's not easy to say exactly who or what Will D. Campbell is, and he likes it that way, for he likes to confound the conventional.

The maverick Southern preacher and author, 73, is still a hero to both black and white veterans of the civil rights movement. He is cherished for his caring heart, sharp mind, earthy wit and quiet courage -- and for his disdain for pomp and pretension.

Campbell is pretty much a friend to all, and this is where the confusion comes in. The Mississippi native was a civil rights activist, a compatriot of Martin Luther King Jr., Andrew Young, John Lewis and others, yet Campbell's friends also include leaders of the Ku Klux Klan and the political right.

He holds a Yale theology degree, but he is wary of intellectuals and their smugness. He is an award-winning author, a pursuit that takes him as a speaker to many cities.

He remains, however, a rustic at heart. He lives with Brenda Fisher Campbell, his wife of 52 years, on a farm in Mount Juliet, Tenn., east of Nashville. He "runs with" friends from the country music world -- most notably Tom T. Hall and the husband-wife team of Waylon Jennings and Jessi Coulter -- and he hangs out with a beer-drinking, blue-collar crowd at the Fox on the Run tavern in Mount Juliet.

Campbell ministers to people every day -- marriages, funerals, just talking to folks in need -- but he abhors the institutional church and gave up any affiliation long ago. This doesn't mean, however, that he gave up his beliefs.

"I've been called to be faithful to Christ's story," he said. "Whether I am behaving as a Christian is another matter. How faithful I've been, the Lord will have to decide."

To those who know him, Campbell has been extraordinarily faithful to his challenging interpretation of Christianity.

"He's one of the few white Baptist ministers who basically felt that the (civil rights) movement was of God," said the Rev. James Lawson, pastor of Holman United Methodist Church in Los Angeles and a leader of the student sit-ins in Nashville in the early 1960s.

Lawson was the second black admitted to the Vanderbilt Divinity School, but he was expelled for his activism in 1960 when the university bowed to political pressure. Vanderbilt wanted Lawson to resign; Campbell advised him to force the university to boot him out.

Lawson recalled that Campbell worked "behind the scenes, but also effectively, to reconcile whites and blacks to one another. He was a radical Christian. By that I mean he took Jesus and the gospel seriously and tried to apply it. He was my personal friend and still is."

If a person's life can pivot on a single moment, summing up what has come before and setting the course for what is yet to be, then for Campbell that moment arrived on Aug. 20, 1965.

Jonathan Daniels, an Episcopal seminarian who was helping register black voters in Lowndes County, Ala., had just been killed by a shotgun blast fired by a temporary deputy sheriff, Thomas Coleman (who confessed immediately to the crime but was later acquitted).

Years earlier, Campbell's friend, P.D. East, an iconoclastic newspaper editor from Mississippi, had pressed his preacher buddy to define the meaning of Christianity in 10 words or less.

Campbell replied: "We're all bastards but God loves us anyway."

Now, as they sat only miles from Daniels' slaying, East wanted to test his friend again, to make him squirm theologically in the face of tragedy.

"OK. Let me get this straight," East said. "Jonathan Daniels was a bastard. Thomas Coleman is a bastard I Which one do you think God loves the most?"

Campbell turned and thought for a moment, and then he began to cry, and to laugh, for "everything became clear." He began to see altogether differently, as surely as Saul did after he was knocked to the ground on the road to Damascus.

Campbell had been "steeped in the doctrine of original sin," but with this revelation, he could see that "God loves and accepts us all," which gave him a "more mature notion of grace."

"I had become a doctrinaire liberal and a humanist, really," Campbell said, recalling his midlife conversion. He realized that he had looked to politics, to "Caesar," to make things right, that he had been "worshiping at the shrine of enlightenment and academia." He realized that he had come upon a deeper, if more difficult, understanding of Christianity. It meant that followers of Jesus are "loved. And if loved, forgiven. And, if forgiven, reconciled."

Campbell's emphasis on reconciliation -- taken from the writings of Paul -- has influenced many people, including a University of Kentucky student in the early 1970s.

"His work in civil rights first attracted my attention, but it was really the way he went about it," said the Rev. Dee H. Wade, pastor of the Anchorage Presbyterian Church, near Louisville, Ky.

"His work was at least as spiritual as political. A political solution doesn't get at the root problem -- our failure to be reconciled to God and to one another. He has this deep faith, but his non-pious way of doing things is refreshing."

Born in Amite County, Miss., Will Davis Campbell was called to be a Christian at 7. His childhood Baptist religion was fundamentalist, though he "didn't know what a fundamentalist was."

His Army service in World War II intensified Campbell's awareness of the nation's racial problems. After graduating from Wake Forest University, he went to Yale Divinity School. That led to two years in a Louisiana pastorate and two years as religious life director at Ole Miss.

His liberal views on race were not popular on that campus, so he took a job as the Southern field representative for the National Council of Churches during the civil rights movement.

He was the only white present at the meeting that led to the creation of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. In 1957, when black students had to pass through angry white mobs to integrate Little Rock's Central High School, Campbell walked alongside them.

"It wasn't something I thought about," said Campbell, with typical self-effacement. "I was doing that as a human being. Someone defined a Christian as someone who didn't think. It means you don't have to think; you go by instinct. It's what Paul meant when he said when one is a Christian, he's a new creature."

"Will was a great counselor when people were in trouble," said Claude Sitton, The New York Times' legendary Southern correspondent during the civil rights movement, now the retired editor of the Raleigh (N.C.) News & Observer.

"Will never pushed anybody. He eased into town and began to talk to people. You'd never know he had a Yale degree and all that. He was Southern to the core in his mannerisms and talk.

"He didn't look down on anyone for their views. He never said, 'Oh, you're a racist. Why do you think that way?' He remembered that he came from rural Mississippi, and he could say, 'There but for the grace of God go I.' "

One of Campbell's Nashville friends is John Egerton, who has reported on Southern race relations since 1965 and is author of the award-winning "Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement."

Egerton said Campbell's chief contribution to breaking down segregation was "his presence as a symbol of white male understanding and sympathy with this issue.

"It was his presence -- not his ability as a strategist, not his organizing efforts. Purely by his presence as a human being (he was) a symbol, really, of our better self, which was powerful, both to those who wanted change and to those who didn't. He was totally devoted to the whole notion of liberating the South -- the white South as well as the black South."

(c) 1998, Lexington Herald-Leader (Lexington, Ky.).

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