From Reconciliation to Revolution

The Student Interracial Ministry (SIM) was a seminary-based, nationally influential Protestant civil rights organization that drew on the Social Gospel and Student Christian Movement traditions to simultaneously dismantle Jim Crow and advance Prorestant mainline churches’ approach to race. Entirely student-led and always ecumenical in scope, SIM began in 1960 with the tactic of placing black assistant pastors in white churches and whites in black churches with the goal of achieving racial reconciliation. In its later years, before it disbanded in mid-1968, SIM moved away from church structures, engaging directly in political and economic movements, inner-city ministry and development projects, and college and seminary teaching. In each of these areas, SIM participants attempted to live out German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer's exhortation to “bring the church into the world.” From Reconciliation to Revolution demonstrates that the civil rights movement, in both its “classic” phase from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s and its longer phase stretching over most of the twentieth century, was imbued with religious faith and its expression. It treats the classic phase of the civil rights movement as one manifestation of a theme of Liberal Protestant interracial reform that runs through the century, illustrating that liberal religious activists of the 1960s drew on a tradition of Protestant interracial reform, building on and sometimes reinventing the work of their progenitors earlier in the century to apply their understanding of the Gospel’s imperative to heal the injustices of the modern world.