Life has not been easy for Will D. Campbell. Born in a yeoman farmer's family in rural Mississippi some 68 years ago, Campbell has battled poverty, the Great Depression, bigotry, and the dehumanizing forces of bureaucracy. This author of 10 books is a Baptist preacher who lives on a 40-acre farm near Nashville, Tennessee with Brenda Campbell, his wife of 46 years. His friends know him as the model for Preacher Will B. Dunn of the Kudzu comic strip.
Campbell is a many-faceted person: scholar, activist, writer, preacher, disturber of the status quo, peacemaker and reconciler, champion of the underdog, humorist, country music singer, husband, father, and speaker to various student groups and church organizations. The list could go on and on.
Author Campbell's first book was Race and the Renewal of the Church (1962). For someone who circulated in liberal circles, it was a radical piece of writing (radical in the sense of going to the root of an issue, not in being reactionary). The book's main thrust was the miserable failure of formal religious organizations in the civil rights crisis.
Campbell has never talked much about his involvement in the civil rights and anti-war movements, but he was in the middle of both. He was the only white person present at the organizing of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He walked with children to integrate the schools in Little Rock, Arkansas.
However, Campbell wonders if it would have been better if the Supreme Court had not ruled for the end of segregation in public education in 1954. Individual Christians would thus have been left to resolve the struggle with their consciences themselves. Then they would be forced to declare, "Thus saith the Lord ..." instead of "The law of the land says ..."
EARLY EXPERIENCES burned deep impressions on Campbell's life. The first took place when he was about 18 years old, touring the South Pacific in the Army. He was in a medical unit -- young, lonely, and far from home.
At 3 a.m. he was called to scrub up and prepare to hand instruments for an operation. A 13-year-old native boy had been brought in with a ruptured spleen. His mother told the officer who brought him to the medical station that he worked for a French planter. The boy had dropped and broken an ashtray, causing the planter to kick him in the back. Campbell was painfully reminded of similar incidents back home in Mississippi.
Another soul-wrenching confrontation took place in the mid-1960s at P.D. East's home in Fairhope, Alabama, where Campbell and his brother Joe were visiting. Two young men, Jonathan Daniel and a Roman Catholic priest from Chicago, had been registering blacks in Lowndes County, Alabama. They had been arrested and held a few days in jail in Hayneville. As they left town with two black students, they stopped at a grocery to buy soft drinks. The storekeeper, alarmed by the racially mixed group, called in a sheriff's deputy named Coleman, who shot and killed Daniel. He then shot the priest, who fell mortally wounded.
Campbell, hearing the news on the radio while at East's home, reacted in anger. He condemned the breakdown of law and order, the rednecks who killed blacks, and said that all of Dixie was little more than Klaners.
East, recalling Campbell's concise definition of the Christian faith -- "We're all bastards, but God loves us anyway" -- listened and asked, "Brother Will, let's put your definition of the faith to the test: Was Jonathan Daniel a bastard?"
East asked again, this time his voice rising higher with emotion as he shouted, "So tell me, was Jonathan Daniel a bastard?" "Yes," answered Campbell.
"Is Thomas Coleman, the deputy who shot him, a bastard?" Then staring at Campbell, East pulled his chair closer to him, saying, "Well, if Daniel and Coleman are both bastards, which one of them do you think God loves the most?"
The question shook Campbell to the core of his being. He literally began to shake, choked up, and burst into tears. Then he began to laugh, at himself for his 20 years of sophistication in the ministry -- shaped by seminary and liberal thought and by the actions of the Supreme Court in 1954. Campbell thought to himself, "The Thomas Colemans of the world are my people. They, too, are loved by God, shotguns and all. And if they are loved, they are forgiven, and if forgiven, then reconciled." It was a major turning point emotionally as well as intellectually for Campbell.
Forgiveness comes first. That is the good news which permeates Campbell's life, work, and writing. We are freely forgiven by God through Christ's death and resurrection. It is good news that sets us free to live in community with one another. That is the goal. Meanwhile, back in the everyday world of sinners, Campbell continues his search for community (see "Restoring Prayer to the Home," below).
CAMPBELL'S autobiography is titled Brother to a Dragonfly, older brother Joe being the dragonfly. The New York Times cited it as one of the outstanding books of 1977. God on Earth: The Lord's Prayer was his next work (1983), followed by The Glad River in 1986.
Also published in that year was Forty Acres and a Goat. It recounted in truth and allegory the struggles of the civil rights and anti-war movements in which Campbell was involved. Convention: A Parable, a fanciful description of a church convention showing what might happen in the Southern Baptist Convention if Campbell had his way, was published in 1988. Chester and Chun Ling appeared in 1989.
Campbell's most recent book was published last year. Providence concerns a square mile of land, Section Thirteen of Township Sixteen, North Range, in Holmes County, Mississippi. Providence Plantation was located on Section Thirteen, hence the name of the book.
Campbell, like many Mississippians, is a master storyteller, and this book is full of them. Although the book is non-fiction, some fictionalized characters flesh out the stories. Thus the book becomes a kind of mystery thriller in which the reader is kept guessing who will finally get Section Thirteen when it is sold.
The story begins with the Choctaw people who lived in this area. There are accounts of people who lived on the section, both Native American and the newcomer Europeans.
The book continues with the story of Providence Plantation and the slaves who were brought to work on the cotton plantations, far from their African homeland. Then the Civil War disrupts the plantation system, ending the Cotton Kingdom, which surprisingly lasted a brief 30 years.
Sharecropping becomes the next system governing this region. The very people who had been slaves now lived on and worked the land. But if the land owner was unhappy with the sharecroppers, they were simply moved off, often with the force of the county sheriff. The Southern Tenant Farmer's Union, which was influenced by Norman Thomas, Reinhold Niebuhr, Sherwood Eddy, and others, began to protect these workers. This movement was interracial and sought to empower poor tenant farmers. But farmers sympathetic to the movement were systematically evicted from the land they worked.
In this microcosm we see injustice, oppression, and violence, but also deep human relationships of caring, sharing, and love.
The first lines of Providence are: "There is something about land. Something magisterial, at once basic and august ..." While the story centers on Section Thirteen, it relates the tales of the people who lived there: their struggles, failures, and successes. It is an amazing story with some characters going on to prominence in national affairs, while others lived out their lives in quiet obscurity.
Campbell speculates that if one square mile of Earth were removed down to the center and then out to the other side the small amount lost would disturb the balance of the Earth's rotation. This is true of any square mile, declares Campbell. Hence all sections are equally important.
WILL CAMPBELL IS not only a critic of the social and political scene; he is also a musician, playing the guitar and singing country ballads on weekends at Gass's Tavern near his home in Mt. Juliet, Tennessee. He is often referred to as the chaplain of the country music community of nearby Nashville.
In fact, when he became field agent for the National Council of Churches in the 1950s, he moved to Nashville in order to be in the middle of country music. His office was in an older house on Music Row in Nashville where he made friends with aspiring young musicians. Campbell sings about the heartbreaks and woes of humanity. He says he knows about 200 country songs and has composed some himself.
Campbell once took a sociology professor friend to Gass's Tavern for lunch. They saw the usual construction workers, unemployed people, and retired folks in overalls and baseball caps. As they were driving away, the friend asked if he couldn't find a little better class of people to associate with. Campbell replied, "How many people do you know you can call anytime, day or night or 3 a.m., and ask for help and they will come as soon as they can get their britches on?" After a few moments the professor said, "No one." Will said, "All the folks in there would do that for me, and I would for them."
"Preacher," as Campbell is known in the country music community of Nashville, is often called on to perform weddings, baptisms, and funerals for those in the music business. He says he's married about two-thirds of the people who frequent Gass's ... at least once, he adds with a grin. And he recently conducted the memorial service for Roger Miller, the singer and composer of the hit musical "Big River."
Will Campbell has been called many things, including "gadfly" and "guerrilla warrior against injustice and intolerance." He calls himself a "bootleg preacher" but refuses to claim to have a ministry of any kind. Instead, he declares, he has a life. A life that has touched thousands through the years and now, through his writings, is touching millions of people around the world. "Preacher Will" is the kind of gentle spirit you would covet to have at your bedside when breathing your last breath. For he would give you assurance that God is love and that nothing, not even death itself, can separate us from God's love.
Perry H. Biddle Jr. was a Presbyterian minister living in Nashville, Tennessee and the author of 10 books when this article appeared.
Restoring Prayer to the Home
While interviewing Will Campbell, I asked him about the ethnic and religious strife in the former Yugoslavia, Northern Ireland, South Africa, and Somalia. Obviously these people have not grasped Jesus' message about community rooted in commandments to love God and neighbor as oneself.
"Nor have we," shot back Campbell. "We have just completed an election where I didn't see much sense of community illustrated ... One of the parties began talking about family values. That didn't fly very well. There were accusations about God not being in the platform of one party. But God doesn't appear in the U.S. Constitution, and for good reason ..." Campbell continued.
"The new Religious Right, which isn't so new, seems to be attempting to impose a particular religious agenda on the whole of society," I commented.
"There's no question about it," Campbell agreed. Then with a twinkle in his eye, Campbell said he thought it would be a good idea to require prayer in public schools, but only if assigned as homework! "That puts it where it should be, with family values. The kids would be told by teachers, 'Don't come back until you have prayed for 15 minutes, or five minutes, or whatever. Your parents will help you with your homework.' To me that would solve the problem. But these people are not talking about prayer," Campbell observed. "They are talking about power."
"And of all people, my people, the Baptists -- I don't know how they miss it ... It was our idea, for God's sake," Campbell continued. "John Leland and Isaac Backus, two Baptist preachers in Virginia were the ones who lobbied and cajoled and pressured for the First Amendment with its separation of church and state. They did it because they had been oppressed by the Church of England and English governors. They succeeded in getting Madison and others to write this into the Constitution." Campbell paused for a thoughtful moment and then continued, "But now the Baptist descendants of John Leland and Isaac Backus are insisting that God and school and society be one."
I pointed out that the Pilgrims came to this land to be free to worship according to their consciences, that faith in God and the values associated with such faith were the bedrock of our nation.
"And if God is omniscient then every thought is a prayer," commented Campbell. "You can't stop a child from praying."
-- PHB
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