William Davis Campbell (1924-2013) held a curious place in American Christianity. An early Civil Rights advocate, he practiced racial reconciliation so radically that he made friends in racist organizations to share the gospel. He studied for the ministry at Yale and wrote award-winning books but preferred to call himself a “bootleg preacher” who pastored rural Southerners. He became known as a spiritual advisor to all outsiders, from celebrities like Johnny Cash to death row inmates like John Spenkelink.
As Charles Marsh put it, he was a “Jesus-loving misfit” whose life shocked and inspired many. But his life may be especially important at the moment.
Why Does Will D. Campbell Matter Today?
While Christians today will certainly approve of Campbell’s work to fight racism and appreciate the need to explore his place in Civil Rights history, some may wonder what makes his writing and life especially important today.
For one thing, he spent much of his ministry focusing on rural white America. Decades before Christians began talking about “rural white rage,” Campbell taught that we cannot end racism until we heal the dysfunction that can flourish in small, poor communities.
He answered this problem the same way he answered any form of brokenness that came his way: serving people with humility. During the 1980s, after giving a eulogy for a neighbor with a complicated past, someone complimented him for giving a great sermon. Campbell replied, “If you can’t preach to a bunch of broken-hearted people, there ain’t much use in trying to preach.” In a time when we are more aware of injustice than ever before, Campbell provides an important reminder that we are called to care for “the least of these” (Matthew 25:40).
Campbell also demonstrated that we love the broken by living out the gospel, not just preaching it. Many pastors had larger audiences and incomes, but few had the empathy Campbell had for his audience—probably because he never saw people as an audience. He saw people he was called to love well. To him, the gospel message came first, and platforms, institutions, and political ideologies were all frills—and possibly idols if Christians weren’t careful. In his article “Christian Concern,” he reminded readers, “God has called you to smash the images erected which have become more important than God himself.”
His model for living out the gospel to the broken may be what we need in a polarized time. As important as it is to dialogue about problems, every new social media scandal or news debate reminds us that words alone can be taken out of context or lost in the noise. Relating to people, forging community across dividing lines, can come alongside words to achieve reconciliation. Campbell understood that we need the Word made flesh.
As seen below, Campbell learned to live out God’s word on a complicated journey that took him to places he couldn’t have imagined.
How Did Will D. Campbell Become a Civil Rights Activist?
Campbell was born July 18, 1924, in the rural farm country of Amite County, Mississippi. He was drawn to ministry early and preached his first sermon at 17 at East Fork Baptist Church.
Since he came from a lower-income rural family, higher education would not normally be an option. However, after serving in the Southwest Pacific as a surgeon assistant during World War II, the GI Bill enabled him to attend college. He studied at Tulane University and Wake Forest University before graduating from Yale Divinity School in 1952.
He pastored a church in Taylor, Louisiana, for two years but left when he realized his activist stance was creating problems. As he explained in a 1976 interview with Orley B. Caudill, he found that while he preached about race, no one listened. His interest in other activism (such as a labor protest at a nearby mill) didn’t gain him many friends either. He became a chaplain at the University of Mississippi in 1954 but resigned in 1956. Philip Yancey reports that Campbell got in trouble after he was seen playing ping pong with an African American man.
Campbell spent the next decade helping with Civil Rights causes. In 1957, he was the only white pastor that Martin Luther King Jr. invited to help start the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The same year, Campbell made history as one of the four people who escorted nine African-American students into a previously segregated high school in Little Rock, Arkansas. He participated in many crucial Civil Rights moments—including the Nashville sit-ins in 1960, supporting activist James M. Lawson Jr. when Vanderbilt University expelled him. Colleagues Bernard Lafayette and James Lawson described Campbell as a key background strategist. He was never at the forefront, but his wisdom and access to areas where his African American activists were forbidden made many things possible.
Campbell also promoted the movement’s values through writing. In 1964, he helped found the Committee of Southern Churchman, which promoted discussions about race and labor. Its journal was named Katallagete, from the Greek word “be reconciled,” and featured many famous (and often radical) writers exploring race and reconciliation: clergy like Thomas Merton, novelists like Walker Percy, and activists like William Stringfellow.
How Did Will D. Campbell Change as an Activist?
By the mid-1960s, Campbell was concerned that his activism may not be enough. His experience pastoring in Louisiana had left him wondering if a teacher changes people through words alone . . . or relationships. Yancey suggests that Campbell also knew that for all the good the Civil Rights movement was doing, it wasn’t affecting “the rednecks,” the undereducated blue-collar white communities that Campbell had come from.
A key moment came in 1965, when his friend, seminarian Jonathan Myrick Daniels, died shielding 17-year-old protestor Ruby Sales from a racist deputy, Thomas Coleman. Journalist P.D. East talked with Campbell after they heard about Daniels’ death on TV. East asked a tough question: Campbell had told East that the gospel message is that we are all broken, but God loves us anyway. So, who did God love more: Daniels or Coleman?
Campbell realized that East had cut the heart of his quandary. Does the gospel truly mean that we are all irredeemable on our own efforts, all loved by God anyway . . . and that loving our neighbors as ourselves extends to loving the Samaritans of our day? What would it look like to preach, and live, that message?
Campbell concluded that if he was going to live out the gospel, he needed to make some changes. He moved his family to Mt. Juliet, Tennessee, and started ministering to anyone he could. Songwriter Tom T. Hall recalls joining Campbell on unofficial pastoral visits where Campbell would hand out food to locals struggling with finances or addictions. His willingness to talk about the gospel to anyone, no matter their background, gained nicknames like “The Aquinas of the Rednecks.” He preferred the nickname “bootleg preacher.”
Campbell also met with people he had seen as bitter enemies—for example, Klu Klux Klan members serving time at Parchman Penitentiary in Mississippi. As Frye Gaillard reports in his book The Heart of Dixie, Campbell didn’t aim to convert inmates. He saw his goal as practicing 2 Corinthians 5:11-21: meet with people and make the possibility of repentance and reconciliation through Christ available. After that, it was their choice.
The results were sometimes surprising. Gaillard highlights some inmates who met with Campbell and radically changed. For example, Thomas A. Tarrants, a teenager serving a life sentence for trying to bomb a Jewish businessman’s home, became a Christian after meeting with Campbell and other Christians. Tarrants was released, pastored an interracial church, and became the president of the C.S. Lewis Institute. Tarrants has told his story in his book Consumed by Hate, Redeemed by Love.
Campbell continued to speak about causes that concerned him, whether it was the Vietnam War or the death penalty, always connecting his ideas to the gospel’s message of reconciliation. However, as Campbell became more interested in meeting people from all walks of life—Civil Rights advocates and racists, justice seekers and death row inmates—he became less fashionable in activism circles. Radical grace can be scandalous.
Campbell also continued to communicate his ideas through writing. His books, particularly the acclaimed memoir Brother to a Dragonfly, challenged readers worldwide to consider how we relate to broken people.
Some recognition came over time. In 2000, he received the National Humanities Medal. The same year, PBS released a documentary about him, God’s Will, where guests like Jimmer Carter and Waylon Jennings discussed his influence on their lives. In 2007, Yale gave him the William Sloane Coffin ‘56 Award for Peace and Justice. When he passed away in 2013, Wake Forest’s alumni magazine described him as “truly a distinguished alumnus, ahead of his time, and, through it all, as brave in the cities as in the backwoods.”
What Is Will D. Campbell’s Legacy Today?
People will continue to debate how much we can use Campbell’s methods today. For example, many terms he and his contemporaries used when talking about race, like “colored” or “Negro,” are no longer acceptable.
However, it’s interesting how many of Campbell’s fundamental ideas have become accepted and popularized.
Prison Fellowship founder Chuck Colson may not have taken Campbell’s stance on the death penalty, but he agreed with Campbell that we should remember God loves people no matter their criminal record.
Author and pastor Brennan Manning may not have taken Campbell’s activist role, but he preached a similar message: the gospel is scandalous and freeing because it says that God loves us all, no matter our history.
Writers like Robert Wuthnow may not share Campbell’s gospel-centered approach to healing rural white American communities, but they affirm his point that we must learn empathy for those communities before we can address their dysfunctions.
Wherever we see “ministries to the margins” today emphasizing hospitality and relationship with the broken, we see Campbell’s values practiced.
At the same time, more work remains to be done. Hatred of “the other” continues to be a major problem in American society—these days, it seems more vocal than ever. In a time when polarization has become common, where it seemingly becomes harder every day to relate to other people, we can consider Campbell’s claim: can we offer grace to those who don’t agree with us?
Best Books by Will D. Campbell
Campbell wrote 17 books and many articles during his lifetime. Most of the articles are in the Katallagete archives at the University of Mississippi. His best books include the following works.
Brother to a Dragonfly is his first, and probably best-known, memoir. The book covers his early life, the beginnings of his Civil Rights activism, and his relationship with his older brother, who died young of substance abuse.
Forty Acres and a Goat tells the second half of his Civil Rights period and his shift to localized ministry and living by example.
The Glad River is a novel about three outsiders who become friends in the army despite religious and racial differences and how their friendship is tested when one of them is tried for murder.
Cecelia’s Sin is a novella spin-off from The Glad River, a story that one of its characters tells about the life of Dutch Anabaptist Cecelia Geronymus.
Robert G. Clark's Journey to the House: A Black Politician’s Story tells the story of the first African-American man to serve on the Mississippi Legislature since 1894.
And Also With You: Duncan Gray and the American Dilemma explores the life of Civil Rights activist Duncan Montgomery Gray Jr., Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Mississippi for nearly 20 years.
The Stem of Jesse: The Costs of Community at a 1960s Southern School tells the story of Ghanaian student Sam Oni, the first non-white student admitted to Baptist Mercer University in 1963.
Chester and Chun-Ling is a children’s book about a guitar and a violin learning to become friends despite their differences.
Convention: A Parable is a novel about the dangers of religion being abused for political power over truth.
Covenant is a collection of vignettes about characters dealing with racial issues in the South.
Soul among Lions: Musings of a Bootleg Preacher is a collection of short meditations on faith and how it informs our stances on politics, race, and other important issues.
His writings on prison reform, plus reflections by new writers, appear in And the Criminals With Him: Essays in Honor of Will D. Campbell and the Reconciled edited by Richard C. Goode.
His classic work Race and the Renewal of the Church was republished with other material on his life in Crashing the Idols: The Vocation of Will D. Campbell (and Any Other Christian for That Matter) edited by Richard C. Goode.
A wide selection from his writings appear in the anthology Writings on Reconciliation and Resistance edited by Richard C. Goode.
Books to Learn more about Will D. Campbell
Biographer Thomas L. Connelly covers Campbell’s life through the 1980s in Will D. Campbell and the Soul of the South.
Merrill M. Hawkins considers Campbell’s place in political activism in Will Campbell: Radical Prophet of the South.
Tom Royal’s book Conversations with Will D. Campbell includes 12 interviews from 1971 to 2009.
Charles Marsh interviewed Campell about his Civil Rights work and included the material in several books, including God’s Long Summer and Wayward Christian Soldiers.
Robert Penn Warren interviewed Campbell for a collection of Civil Rights profiles called Who Speaks for the Negro?
Tapes and transcripts of his interview with Warren have been made available through Vanderbilt University.
Gaillard’s profile of Campbell appeared in Heart of Dixie and also in Watermelon Wine: Remembering the Golden Years of Country Music.
W. Dale Brown’s conversation with Campbell about writing appears in Of Faith and Fiction.
Photo Credit:©GettyImages/SafakOguz
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