FROM PREACHING TO MEDDLING

A White Southerner reflects on race, White privilege, and justice.

In a rambling memoir filled with lively anecdotes, Walter, a retired Episcopal priest, candidly recounts his evolution as a civil rights activist, from his childhood in Mobile, Alabama, during the era of Jim Crow to his courageous efforts in church and civic leadership. Describing himself as “a polite Southerner, of northern European stock, educated, and soft-spoken,” he came to reject the racist culture into which he had been born, to acknowledge racism within his church, and, in 1965—the year the Voting Rights Act was passed—to become director of the Selma Inter-Religious Project. Staffed largely by Whites, the project “was directed toward supporting the movement of blacks to free themselves from the control and domination of white people in the Black Belt counties of Alabama.” That domination was pervasive and insidious. “Cultured whites,” Walter observes, “were charming and yet sometimes cruel, depending. They kept, as their patrimony, the right to impose violence, subjugation, contempt, and, at times, condescending charity on people of color. This was justified because their forebears had lost a great war that ravaged their land and property.” The author’s advocacy for racial justice was repeatedly thwarted by the church in Alabama and even by his own family, who protested his “going against rigid social norms” when he accepted a call to lead a Black congregation. Walter’s outspoken beliefs impeded his and his wife’s efforts to adopt a baby; only after four years—and outside influence—were they successful. At many points in his life, the author was moved to question his own assumptions, and he came to realize “that the privilege we white folks carry around may hide itself from us or get stamped down, but it never goes away and is completely obvious to people of color.”

Unvarnished testimony of decades-long activism.

Unvarnished testimony of decadeslong activism.