(This guest blog is provided courtesy of our old friend, David Cline, assistant professor of history and director of the graduate certificate in public history at Virginia Tech. Many Library patrons will be familiar with David, through the dozens of video interviews he has conducted for the Civil Rights History Project (CRHP) and also because of several public presentations at the Library focusing on his research into various aspects of the long black freedom struggle, civil rights and social activism In this blog, David reflects on the sometimes unexpected, and always rewarding, ways in which disciplinary training, professional interests, personal relationships, and archival materials come together to produce remarkable stories about memorable people and events that shaped the course of the nation’s history. And, we at AFC are most appreciative that David’s diligent scholarship led to the use of images from one of our collections in his recent book, and more importantly, to making connections with the donors of those very same materials.)
In the fall of 2004, while noodling around for a research project idea that would help me explore my interest in clergy involvement in social activism, I happened upon the story of the Student Interracial Ministry. I had spent an afternoon visiting with Rev. Robert Seymour, retired pastor of the Olin T. Binkley Baptist Church in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Seymour was hired in 1958 as Binkley’s first minister, specifically because of his concerns with racial and social justice and a keen desire to create a church with an interracial congregation. Yet, as Seymour told me that afternoon, their experiment in an interracial and ecumenical church developed slowly and was not truly tested until 1962 when its pastor won approval from the board to request a black summer intern from something called the Student Interracial Ministry (SIM).
Seymour was attracted to SIM’s commitment, in the words of one of its student founders, to “attempt to..bring confrontation in depth [to the freedom struggle]. Just as each group has its own role to play, so SIM is concerned with grace, with reconciliation, with opening lines of communication where none have existed, and with reopening those which have been temporarily cut off.” So, while the half-empty college town lapsed into its usual sleepy summer life, the congregants of Binkley were roused from their torpor by a young, black preacher by the name of James Forbes whose visit marked a fundamental turning point in the life of the congregation. As Seymour told me that afternoon, “Our people were intellectually committed to an inclusive church, but having this black pastor with us for the summer helped them work through some of the emotional vestiges of feelings that were still there.”
The conversation with Reverend Seymour provided the spur for several years of archival research into the newly processed records of the Student Interracial Ministry in the Burke Library at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. I found therein the story of a hitherto overlooked religiously-based student-run civil rights organization that operated from 1960 through 1968 and that had been founded at the same place and at the same time as the better known Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). SIM members, however, walked a different path than their SNCC counterparts. I found out that Jim Forbes’ arrival at Binkley Baptist Church was in line with SIM’s tactic of placing black assistant pastors in white churches and whites in black churches with the goal of furthering racial reconciliation, this at a time when crossing the color line in the deep South was often an invitation to violence. I came to know that in the first summer of 1960, SIM sent seven students on interracial ministries and that at the height of its efforts in 1966, it sponsored 93 seminarians working as summer or yearlong assistant pastors. In total, nearly 350 individuals — white and black, male and female, Christian and Jewish — from over 40 seminaries and 10 undergraduate colleges in 24 different states participated in Student Interracial Ministry projects throughout the country and in congregations of all the mainline Protestant denominations.
When SIM officially ceased operations in 1968, it was operating urban ministry projects from Washington DC to Chicago to Los Angeles. Remarkably, despite its short life-span, SIM volunteers worked in nearly all of the civil rights movement’s “hotspots” and with many of the better-known movement figures, including Ella Baker,