God's Long Summer

Rating:
Summary: A College Student's review
Review: God's Long Summer covers a very exciting and troubled time in American History. The various points of view Marsh used to complete this book is the key to understanding this time period. However, the unnecessary abundance of religious references and the slow pace of the book make it almost unreadable. It is heartbreaking to read through one uninteresting point of view, to discover the next chapter is just as dull.

Rating:
Summary: "Faith" and civil rights in Mississippi.
Review: Highly recommended account of the role of "faith" in the lives of five prominent figures in Mississippi during the civil rights movement. Saints (Fannie Lou Hamer, Edwin King, Cleveland Sellers) and sinners (Sam Bowers and Douglas Hudgins) are both represented. Hudgins and other Jackson elites come off nearly as loathsome as Bowers. Marsh's prose is brilliant, providing for a lively and inspiring read.

Rating:
Summary: middling civil rights scholarship
Review: This books uses biographies of a handful of people whose lives huddle around Freedom Summer in Mississippi to talk about the role of Christian faith in the movement. Its assumption that the role of faith has been underplayed is overstated; actually, the first wave of civil rights scholarship all focused on MLK and the black church as titles suggest: BEARING THE CROSS, PARTING THE WATERS, etc. Marsh's use of biographical portraits is effective, but he sometimes deals in stereotypes. Fanny Lou Hamer, far more interesting in life than in this account, is almost a mammy figure, strong and virtuous: we never find out that she kept a gun and called herself a black nationalist, and her humanity is somewhat diminished by the "indomitable" and angelic angle. Cleveland Sellers, who represents the "mistaken black radical" view, is sort of stuffed into the book, as though Marsh couldn't find a Black Power figure who was actually from Mississippi, and his portrait of Sellers is fundamentally wrong. His chapter on Sam Bowers, the twisted KKK theologian, takes his theology far too seriously, at the expense of his murderous life. The real jewel is Marsh's portrayal of Douglas Hudgins, a mainstream Baptist minister who supports segregation. I have twice succumbed to the temptation to assign this book to my students because it's nicely written and short. But the students don't like it much, and the smart ones like it even less. The design of the book is a model for historians, though, and there are some interesting things in this book, though I have not been able to get many of my students to find them.