Students defied racial divide
The stories we Memphians like to tell say a lot about us. Perhaps the stories we tell of painful events that lead to redemption say more than any. Several years ago, I was introduced to a painful Memphis story by students conducting independent research on Memphis churches and the civil rights movement.
The story involves a series of “kneel-ins” — attempts to break the color line at white churches — that took place in Memphis in 1964. The protagonists were members of the intercollegiate chapter of the local NAACP, which that spring sent out student visitors in interracial teams to test local churches’ tolerance for integrated worship.
The Memphis kneel-ins garnered little attention until a pair of young men — Memphis State student Joe Purdy and Southwestern College student Jim Bullock — attempted to enter Second Presbyterian Church on Palm Sunday. They were blocked by a phalanx of church officials before being escorted from the property by armed guards.
When Purdy and Bullock returned with a group of their friends on Easter Sunday, they precipitated a bitter yearlong struggle at the prominent church, which, it was soon revealed, had adopted an explicit policy of segregation in 1957.
For the next two months, Second Presbyterian became the site of weekly prayer vigils by excluded visitors who, by virtue of being part of an integrated group, were considered “demonstrators” by the church’s leadership. Over the succeeding months, pressures inside and outside the church intensified until the pastors and congregation rebelled against the church’s elected leaders. The decision to integrate caused a schism that gave rise to Independent Presbyterian Church.
It’s a story fraught with the sort of tension and drama, denunciations and denials we still associate with racial conflict in the Bluff City. But the story also complicates the dichotomous black/white civil rights narrative by illuminating white Southerners’ conflicting attitudes toward the integration of local institutions.
Prominent church leaders (although they did not represent the view of the majority) were so disturbed by white students from Southwestern (now Rhodes) who were attempting to integrate their church that they sent accusatory letters and photographs to their parents
and threatened to end the church’s long- standing financial support of their college.
Meanwhile, the Southwestern students who participated in the kneel-ins proved remarkably willing to endure these and other forms of compulsion — including parents’ hunger strikes, disapproval from coaches and administrators, and threats of expulsion from campus Greek organizations. What made these young people, Deep Southerners who had grown up with Jim Crow and attended a segregated college, willing to risk so much for the right to worship with black students they hardly knew? And how did the decision to engage in this small act of defiance affect their subsequent lives?
To answer these questions, I tracked down the students involved and asked them. In fact, to get the broadest possible perspective on the story, I interviewed nearly 150 kneel-in in participants, church members, observers, and children who witnessed the spectacle. My goal was to weave these stories into a narrative that was honest to the painful history but which highlighted the attempts at reconciliation in which the churches in question had engaged. Current leaders at both churches were supportive.
But would my Memphis story capture the interest of a wider audience? To make sure, I supplemented the narrative with a lot of theory and analysis. But I needn’t have bothered, for after Oxford University Press agreed to publish the manuscript, the editor instructed me to “lose the academic stuff” and just “tell the story.”
I hope the result is something of which Memphis can be proud — if not the events themselves, at least our willingness to remember them and let the past inform our future.