From Preaching to Meddling

In a fascinating memoir, retired Episcopal priest Francis X. Walter shares his journey from the days of the Great Depression in Mobile, Alabama, across decades of Deep South segregation, and into the interracial struggles for racial justice in Alabama. The founder of the Selma Inter-religious Project, Walter grew up in multiethnic, segregated Mobile and learned life lessons at theology schools in Sewanee and New York. Those disparate educations were a prelude to his years as an Episcopal priest navigating how to serve white parishes in Alabama while challenging systemic racism.

Autorentext

Francis X. Walter is a retired Episcopal priest from Mobile, Alabama. Walter's dismissal as rector of an Alabama church after helping to establish an Episcopal group advancing cultural and racial unity led to his founding the Selma Inter-religious Project (SIP) shortly after the historic Selma March of 1965. He began working as one white man's voice of conscience but later transformed SIP into a multi-pronged organization whose lawyers, organizers, and experts fought for civil rights and racial justice, advanced community development, and enabled the advocacy for poor people in the heart of Dixie.

Klappentext

In a fascinating, funny, sometimes searing memoir, retired Episcopal priest Francis X. Walter shares his journey from the days of the Great Depression in Mobile, Alabama, across decades of Deep South segregation, and into the interracial struggles for racial justice and freedom in Alabama. The founder of the Selma Inter-religious Project, Walter's story includes growing up in multi-ethnic, segregated Mobile and learning life lessons at theology schools in Sewanee and New York. Those disparate educations are described as prelude to his years as an Episcopal priest navigating how to serve white parishes in Alabama while challenging the racism that most congregants believed was a God-given right. After a tragic murder of a fellow priest shortly after the Selma to Montgomery March in 1965, Walter moves from pastoring to segregationists to agitating against them as he becomes a committed supporter of the struggles for civil rights and racial justice in George Wallace's Alabama. A Race Memoir is a personal chronicle of some of Alabama's local civil rights struggles and of the memoirist's own struggles with faith and fault. While recounting the people and communities he joined in fighting against the white South's racial order in rural Alabama, Walter candidly shares his own questions, dilemmas, and perceptions of his own shortcomings. His is an engaging portrait of momentous times and of himself as both conflicted priest and crusading white Southerner.