Jo Freeman Reviews From Preaching to Meddling: A White Minister in the Civil Rights Movement

 

Fr. Francis X. Walter was an apostate.  Raised in Mobile, Alabama by a family with deep Southern roots, he renounced white supremacy while a youth, without fully realizing that it was the state religion of the South, especially the Deep South.

 

He found out when he received a call to pastor a black Episcopal Church in Mobile, only to be told that his family would be financially ruined if he accepted.

 

Francis Walter inherited his views on race from his mother, who had something of a conversion experience in 1951, when her son was a student at a local college.  She died of cancer in 1954 while he was attending the Episcopal Seminary at the University of the South in Sewanee, TN.  Just as this book is dedicated to his mother, so was his life dedicated to putting into action her reformed views on white supremacy.

 

Ordained a priest in 1957, Fr. Walter spent two years as a fellow and tutor at the General Theological Seminary in New York City.  He later served Grace Episcopal Church in Jersey City, a ghetto church.  Its black congregants enabled him to see racism from the perspective of those who suffered from it. (Right, Francis Walter, Encyclopedia of Alabama)

 

He wanted to return to Mobile to be near his family and friends but was challenged by the problems of serving a congregation in a segregated city.  The members of Southern churches were either black or white, even when in the same denomination in the same city.  White churches did not open their doors to blacks; white Southerners did not go to black churches. 

 

When a post opened up at the black Episcopal Church in Mobile, he sought it.  The Alabama Bishop didn’t really want him there, but the black church did.  Walter visited Mobile so everyone could check each other out.  He and the church liked each other, but the Alabama Bishop wasn’t happy and he got an earful from family members and their business associates about what would happen to them if he pastored a black church.