Will D. Campbell (Alias Rev. Will B. Dunn) 1925-2013

Today's News and Observer announces the death Monday of the Reverend Will D. Campbell. The article provides a lot of background concerning Will Campbell's ground breaking work in Civil Rights that preceded the formal Civil Rights movement.

When I knew him, Will was Director of Religious Life at the University of Mississippi from about 1954 until the University encouraged him to leave in 1956. University authorities claimed that he wasn't fired, he just left to follow other paths. Right.

 The word avuncular was invented to describe Will Campbell. His head was egg-shaped, topped by a prematurely bald, avuncular dome. He smoked a  curved-stem avuncular pipe. In a discussion group, he stimulated discussions with avuncular questions.

Though he had been a preacher since he was ordained at the age of 17, he was never the flamboyant kind. It was only a year or two after he was ordained that Will answered his country's call and went off to World War II. It was his return from that war that transformed him and led him to what was to become his life's work. When the troop train reached the Mason-Dixon line, the soldiers, who had mingled freely in the railroad cars until then, were rearranged into segregated cars. "That's not right," Will recognized immediately.

Will used the GI Bill to go to college, eventually completing his BD at Yale. As Director of Religious Life at the University of Mississippi, he encouraged students to rethink the social arrangements referred to at the time as "the Southern Way of Life."

He was a dangerous man. Controversy dogged his heels.

In 1956, there was the Kershaw incident involving the Reverend Al Kershaw, a television quiz program, jazz music and the NAACP. That's a story for a later post.

There was another incident involving a student delegate from Ole Miss to the national Y convention.

The most famous incident involved a ping pong game in the Y building on campus.

I will share all of these stories at some point.

After leaving Ole Miss, Will worked for the National Council of Churches Department of Racial and Cultural relations. He appeared in Little Rock during integration of Central High, working behind the scenes to convince ministers to do the right thing. His success was limited.

He became an itinerant preacher and writer. He called himself a "bootleg preacher."

Will believed that, at least in the South, no people had more interests in common than the downtrodden African Americans and poor white rednecks.

In 1957, Will made a furtive visit back to Oxford, Mississippi. Will wasn't furtive about it, but the campus authorities placed furtive measures in place to make sure he didn't make his way back to the campus. A few of us met with Will at a local eatery. By then, we knew of his association with the Southern Christian Leadership Council. Someone asked him about Martin Luther King. "The man's a saint," Will replied.

My favorite book by Will Campbell is Providence, an account of what in Holmes County we always called Providence Plantation. He calls it Providence Farm, a not quite successful interracial collective farm eventually run out of (as in expelled from) Holmes County by the good, hard-working white folks around Tchula.

Will wasn't nationally famous. Might not have thought he did much good. But he did what he could among the people he knew best, with the tools at his command.

I think it's hard to ask for more than that.