Rev. Will D. Campbell, Maverick Minister in Civil Rights Era, Dies at 88
Henry Groskinsky/Time & Life Pictures, via Getty Images
The Rev. Will D. Campbell, right, and the Rev. Ralph D. Abernathy comforted each other on April 4, 1968, at the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis after the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
By ROBERT D. McFADDEN
Published: June 4, 2013
The New York Times
The Rev. Will D. Campbell, a renegade preacher and author who joined the civil rights struggle in the 1950s, quit organized religion and fought injustice with nonviolent protests and a storyteller’s arsenal of autobiographical tales and fictional histories, died on Monday night in Nashville. He was 88.
A family friend, John Egerton, confirmed the death. He said Mr. Campbell had moved to a nursing home in Nashville from his family farm near Mount Juliet, Tenn., after a stroke in 2011.
Mr. Campbell, one of the few white clerics with an extensive field record as a civil rights activist, wrote a score of books that explored the human costs of racism and the contradictions of Christian life in the segregated South, notably in a memoir, “Brother to a Dragonfly” (1977), a National Book Award finalist.
A knot of contradictions himself, he was a civil rights advocate who drank whiskey with Klansmen, a writer who layered fact and fiction, and a preacher without a church who presided at weddings, baptisms and funerals in homes, hospitals and graveyards for a flock of like-minded rebels that included Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Dick Gregory, Jules Feiffer and Studs Terkel.
Most of his scattered “congregation,” however, were poor whites and blacks, plain people alienated from mainstream Christianity and wary of institutions, churches and governments that stood for progress but that in their view achieved little. He once conducted a funeral for a ghost town, Golden Pond, Ky., where the residents had been removed in the late 1960s to make way for a Tennessee Valley Authority project.
After a fashion, he was also an eccentric voice of wisdom in the funny papers — the model for the Rev. Will B. Dunn, the bombastic preacher with the broad-brimmed clerical hat in “Kudzu,” Doug Marlette’s syndicated comic strip about rural Southerners.
Followers and friends called Mr. Campbell hilarious, profound, inspiring and apocalyptic, a guitar-picking, down-home country boy who made moonshine and stomped around his Tennessee cabin in cowboy boots and denim uttering streams of sacred and profane commentary that found their way into books, articles, lectures and sermons.
“Brother Will, as he was called by so many of us who knew him, made his own indelible mark as a minister and social activist in service to marginalized people of every race, creed and calling,” former President Jimmy Carter said.
The son of Mississippi cotton farmers, Mr. Campbell grew up in a backwater of segregated schools, churches and cracker-barrel country stores where men chewed tobacco and spat bigotry. He was ordained a Baptist minister at 17 and attended three colleges and Yale Divinity School before embarking on an unsatisfying life as a small-town pastor and then chaplain at the University of Mississippi. He left Ole Miss amid death threats over his integrationist views.
As a race-relations troubleshooter for the National Council of Churches from 1956 to 1963, he joined the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, James Farmer, Bayard Rustin, John Lewis and other civil rights luminaries in historic confrontations across the South.
Mr. Campbell was the only white person invited by Dr. King to the founding of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta in 1957. Months later, Mr. Campbell helped escort nine black students through angry crowds in an attempt to integrate Central High School in Little Rock, Ark. (The students were turned away by mob violence, but succeeded the next day with an escort of federal troops.)
In 1961, he counseled and accompanied Freedom Riders of the Congress of Racial Equality and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee who integrated interstate bus travel at the cost of beatings by white mobs in Anniston, Birmingham and Montgomery, Ala.
And in 1963, he joined Dr. King’s campaign of boycotts, sit-ins and marches in Birmingham, one of America’s most segregated cities. In scenes that stunned the nation, protesters were met with snarling police dogs and high-pressure water hoses.
“If it hits you right, the pressure from a fire hose can break your back,” Mr. Campbell said years later. “I remember seeing adults and children hit and rolling along the sidewalk like pebbles at high tide.”
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This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: June 4, 2013
An earlier version of this obituary referred incorrectly to Mr. Campbell’s siblings. He had two brothers and a sister, not two sisters and a brother.
