Will Campbell (Baptist minister)

Will D. Campbell (born 1924 in Amite County, Mississippi, United States) is a Baptist minister, activist, author, and lecturer. Throughout his life, he has been a notable white supporter of civil rights in the Southern United States. In addition to his activism, Campbell also is a noted author, particularly with his autobiographical work Brother to a Dragonfly, a finalist for the National Book Award in 1978.

Activism

Campbell, the son of a farmer, was ordained as a minister by his local Baptist congregation at age 16. After serving in World War II, he attended Wake Forest University, Tulane University, and Yale Divinity School. Though he held a pastorate in Louisiana from 1952 to 1954, Campbell has spent most of his career in other settings. In 1954, he took a position as chaplain at the University of Mississippi, only to resign it soon afterward because of the hostility (including death threats) he received as a supporter of integration. He subsequently took a position as a field officer for the National Council of Churches. In 1957, he participated in two notable events of the Civil Rights Movement: he was one of four people who escorted the black students who integrated the Little Rock, Arkansas, public schools; and he was the only white person present at the founding of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference by the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

While Campbell never wavered in his support for civil rights, he later attracted criticism in some quarters with his insistence that "anyone who is not as concerned with the immortal soul of the dispossessor as he is with the suffering of the dispossessed is being something less than Christian" and that "Mr. Jesus died for the bigots as well" . These convictions led Campbell to minister to Ku Klux Klan members convicted of violent acts. In 1963, Campbell left the National Council of Churches to become director of the Committee of Southern Churchmen, which provided a home for his activism in the subsequent years. In the late 1970s he spoke out against the death penalty, particularly after forming a relationship with John Spenkelink, whom the state of Florida executed in 1979.

Writings

This list may not be complete.

• Race and the Renewal of the Church (1962)
• The Failure and the Hope: Essays of Southern Churchmen (1972, reprint 2005) (edited with James Y. Holloway)
• ... and the criminals with him ..." Lk 23:33: A first-person book about prisons (1972)
• Brother to a Dragonfly (1977): part autobiography, part elegy for Campbell's brother, part oral history of the Civil Rights Movement
• The Glad River (1982): novel
• Cecelia's Sin (1983): historical novel set among the early Baptists
• The Lord's Prayer for Our Time (1983) (with Will McBride and Bonnie Campbell)
• Forty Acres and a Goat (1986): autobiography
• The Convention: A Parable (1988): allegory based on the conflict between moderates and fundamentalists within the Southern Baptist Convention
• Covenant: Faces, Voices, Places (1989) (with photographs by Al Clayton)
• Chester and Chun Ling (1989): children's book, illustrated by Jim Hsieh
• Providence (1992, reprint 2002)
• The Stem of Jesse: The Costs of Community at a 1960's Southern School (1995, reprint 2002): account of racial integration at Mercer University
• The Pear Tree That Bloomed in the Fall (1996): children's book, illustrated by Elaine Kernea
• Bluebirds Always Come on Sunday (1997)
• Shugah and Doops (1997)
• Soul Among Lions: Musings of a Bootleg Preacher (1999)
• Robert G. Clark's Journey to the House (2003): a biography of the man who, in 1967, was elected Mississippi's first black state legislator since Reconstruction
• Up to Our Steeples in Politics (2005) (with James Y. Holloway)