Born of Conviction: White Methodists and Mississippi's Closed Society

Winner of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters' Nonfiction Award

The dominant narrative of the role of white citizens and the white church in Mississippi's civil rights era focuses on their intense resistance to change. The "Born of Conviction" statement, signed by twenty-eight white Methodist pastors and published in the Mississippi Methodist Advocate on January 2, 1963, offered an alternative witness to the segregationist party line. Calling for freedom of the pulpit and remindin...