Racial Reconciliation Research Articles

Liberating and Diversifying Theological Education: A Subversive or Empowering Aspiration?

Liberating and Diversifying Theological Education: A Subversive or Empowering Aspiration? Amos Yong Historic institutions of theological education are struggling amidst the vulnerability and fragility that characterizes much of the higher educational enterprise. As a (practically ) tenured professor, however, I wonder to what degree such job security actually undermines rather than empowers my envisioning and then working toward a liberating theological education that can engage the opportunities and challenges of the twenty‐first century. Perhaps the underlying issue concerns whether theological education needs liberation in the present time and if so, from what, and what that means. To place the questions squarely on the table, I need to be honestly self‐reflective about issues related to diversity and context and perhaps enter into the vulnerability that assails the wider theological guild. I begin by reflecting about my recent visit to New York Theological Seminary (NYTS) just a week after the announcement (December 3, 2014) that the Staten Island grand jury had declined to indict the police officer under whose grip it appeared that Eric Garner had died (July 17, 2014). In part related to the release of my new book on Asian American evangelicalism in November of this year, my longtime friend and NYTS associate professor Peter Heltzel had invited me to address the NYTS community about issues of race and ethnicity. In the wake of the unrest related to the announcement, as well as the wider national issues related to police brutality and race relations (e.g., the Michael Brown case in Ferguson, Missouri), Peter continually urged me to press into issues regarding social justice and racial reconciliation from my Asian American evangelical location. Late Thursday, December 11, after having spent the afternoon and evening in discussion with NYTS faculty, staff, students, and others, Peter checked me into one of the Landmark guest rooms at Union Theological Seminary (kiddie‐corner from NYTS). A few minutes after he left, I heard a hurried knock on my door: Peter insisted that I needed to accompany him to join a rally a few blocks away. It was about 10 PM, I was almost in bed, and the temperature was in the low 30s Fahrenheit, as I recall. But Peter was persistent: I could not be in a hotel room in the City that night while things he cared so much about were unfolding down the street. Here, I have to digress and say a few words about Peter. Having grown up in Mississippi, he has been attuned to racial tensions from a young age. Although trained classically as a systematic theologian, since his arrival at NYTS almost ten years ago (at time of writing), he has been working intentionally at the intersection of racial reconciliation and social justice. But Peter is no armchair theologian. Deftly deploying his social and political capital as a white male anti‐racist/pro‐reconciliation ally with people of color and following the black leadership of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement, Peter has facilitated strategic dialogues, written op‐eds, helped organize rallies, participated in protests and marches, mobilized activists, advocated to politicians, and worked collaboratively as a faith‐rooted organizer across racial, class, gender, and religious lines. Along the way, Peter founded the Micah Institute, which mission, “[i]nspired by the Hebrew prophet Micah's call to act justly, love mercy and walk humbly with God, [is] to inspire and educate faith leaders to fight poverty and injustice” (see http://www.nyts.edu/the-micah-institute/). The Micah Institute's work is guided by a faith‐rooted organizing, gathering people for social change shaped by the deepest wells of their faith traditions. In contrast to the instrumental approach of national organizing networks in the Alinsky tradition, faith‐rooted organizing mobilizes public resistance, while treating all God's children with love and respect. Over the last decade, Peter has emerged as a public theologian and activist in New York City, thereby not only retrieving but also transforming and extending the legacies of Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich through boldly confronting the “powers and principalities” of systemic racism as an anti‐racist leader in the growing movement for a prophetic, intercultural future in our racially charged North American context of the third millennium...

Kellogg Foundation CEO to Deliver Convocation Address

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Association NewsFull AccessKellogg Foundation CEO to Deliver Convocation AddressMark MoranMark MoranSearch for more papers by this authorPublished Online:8 Feb 2019https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.pn.2019.2b6AbstractThe Kellogg Foundation CEO has a message of racial healing through dialogue that should resonate with psychiatrists.La June Montgomery Tabron, president and CEO of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, believes racial healing needs to be rooted in relationship building and shared experience.The Kellogg Foundation CEO has a message of racial healing through dialogue that should resonate with psychiatrists.W.K. Kellogg FoundationThat’s why she also believes psychiatrists have a unique role in addressing disparities and building racial reconciliation. She’ll bring that message to the APA Annual Meeting in San Francisco when she delivers this year’s William C. Menninger Memorial Convocation Lecture, titled, “Psychiatric Leadership to Expand Equity and Well-Being.”Tabron’s address will take place at the Convocation of Distinguished Fellows on Monday, May 20, in the Moscone Center.In comments to Psychiatric News, Tabron said that the founder of the Kellogg Foundation, Will Keith Kellogg, recognized that for children to thrive, adults from every sector of society had to take an active role in removing the barriers to their health and well-being. “Children are at the heart of everything we undertake at the Kellogg Foundation,” she said. “But too many children live in families and communities where racism is a persistent obstacle to health, education, employment, and economic viability. Psychiatrists are in a unique position to recognize the interplay between these circumstances and well-being—physical, mental, economic, and social—and to bring their insight and leadership into addressing community challenges.”As the head of the Kellogg Foundation, Tabron leads its work to support vulnerable children and working families and create conditions necessary for children to thrive. She has played a leadership role in the foundation’s racial equity, diversity, and inclusion work for more than two decades—both internally through work with its board and staff and externally through its work with grantees, partners, and vendors.She helped develop the Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation (THRT) project, a national and place-based process launched by the Kellogg Foundation in 2016 to bring about a sustainable transformation and address the historic and contemporary effects and consequences of racism.“Our framework for racial equity begins with healing, and healing is deeply relational work,” Tabron told Psychiatric News. “If we want to change society so that it contributes to the health and well-being of more people, racial healing is a good place to begin. Healing lays the groundwork for expanding equity and engaging leaders from every sector into creating the society our children deserve.”APA President Altha Stewart, M.D., said Tabron’s message of racial transformation through dialogue is one that is consistent with her focus during her presidential term on diversity, equity, and inclusion in the practice of psychiatry. Stewart said that Tabron’s message will especially resonate with APA members and others in attendance who have witnessed recent challenges related to the policies and services provided to vulnerable populations—women, children, racial and ethnic minority groups, immigrants, prisoners, and transgender individuals.“Ms. Tabron has been a remarkable and transformational leader at the Kellogg Foundation, bringing people together in communities and creating a space for authentic dialogue, which we as psychiatrists know is the foundation of healing,” she said. “We welcome her as the keynote speaker at our meeting this year in San Francisco and look forward to hearing her message of a role for psychiatry in improving the nation’s health and emotional well-being.”As a community and civic leader, Tabron serves on the Detroit Workforce Development Board, the Board of Directors of the Alumni Association of the University of Michigan, and the Kalamazoo Chapter of the Links Inc. She also serves on the boards of Battle Creek Community Health Partners, Bronson Healthcare Group, and the Kellogg Company. She chairs the W.K. Kellogg Foundation Trust.Tabron holds a bachelor’s degree in business administration from the University of Michigan–Ann Arbor and a master’s degree in business administration from the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University. She received an honorary doctorate of humane letters from Marygrove College in Detroit and an honorary doctorate from Union Institute and University. She is a certified public accountant and certified management accountant licensed in Michigan. She is also a graduate of the inaugural class of the Council on Foundations’ Career Pathways Program.The W.K. Kellogg Foundation was founded in 1930 as an independent, private foundation by breakfast cereal pioneer Will Keith Kellogg and is among the largest philanthropic foundations in the United States. ■The Convocation of Distinguished Fellows will be held Monday, May 20, from 5:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. in Hall F, Exhibition Level, Moscone North. ISSUES NewArchived

You’re not welcome at my table: racial discourse, conflict and healing at the kitchen table

In this article, we reflect on the need for, and geography of, embodied cross-racial talk in the current political context. We reflect on our 2015 article ‘Kitchen Table Reflexivity: Negotiating Positionality through Everyday Talk’ to question whether we were too optimistic in our advocacy of the kitchen table as a space for racial reconciliation through interracial dialogue. We draw on our own experiences to explore multiple tables at which we may or may not both be present. In conclusion, we encourage everyone to do the hard work of determining which tables are the right ones for them to be present at to have the hard, but necessary, conversations about race and racialization in our contemporary society.

Lynnell L. Thomas, Desire and Disaster in New Orleans: Tourism, Race, and Historical Memory. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. Pp. 296. $83.57 (cloth); $24.95 (paper).

Lynnell L. Thomas, <i>Desire and Disaster in New Orleans: Tourism, Race, and Historical Memory</i>. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. Pp. 296. $83.57 (cloth); $24.95 (paper).

Peoples Temple

What is the legacy of Peoples Temple? Forty years after the events at Jonestown it seems that “Jonestown” has solidified itself as a landmark moment in American religious history. Jonestown has become synonymous with the problems of charismatic religious leadership and religious violence. Yet, the group who died at Jonestown, Peoples Temple, is largely unknown to people who reference the Jonestown murders/suicides. This article argues that revisiting Peoples Temple’s goals of apostolic socialism and racial reconciliation offer important insights for understanding the group’s legacy that can contribute insight into ways of solving ongoing social problems related to poverty and racial inequality in the United States.

The social life of DNA: racial reconciliation and institutional morality after the genome.

This 2017 British Journal of Sociology Lecture builds upon ideas developed in The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation after the Genome (Nelson 2016). I argue that one of the more significant developments of the postgenomic era is the circulation of DNA analysis outside of the life sciences, especially commercial applications such as direct-to-consumer genealogical testing. These tests are increasingly taken up in 'reconciliation projects' - endeavours in which DNA analysis is put to the use of repairing the past, including a recently launched attempt in the United States to locate descendants of enslaved persons sold by the Jesuit stewards of Georgetown College in order to bolster that institution's finances. With this reconciliation project, genetic genealogy has become a vehicle for a form of social repair, and most particularly, the reuniting of 'lost' kin. This use of genetic genealogy takes place against the backdrop of an expanding, national inquiry into ties between education and slavery. In the process, the legacy of racial slavery is rendered both contemporary and proximate, despite a 'colour-blind' racial project that aims to negate the significance of this history and its coeval development with US higher education. Elite educational institutions such as Georgetown that elect to excavate these histories are soon after faced with the choice of how to respond, on campus and beyond, to revelations of entanglements between edification and bondage. However imperfectly, colleges and universities are among the few institutional settings where the contested issue of structural racism (and remedies to it) may be aired. It is in these fraught debates that the exercise of 'institutional morality' can take shape; organizations engage in practices that articulate institutional values and are faced with a choice of symbolic and distributional responses.

The social life of DNA: racial reconciliation and institutional morality after the genome - a response.

The social life of DNA: racial reconciliation and institutional morality after the genome - a response.

Racial Reconciliation or Spiritual Smokescreens?: Blackwashing the Crisis Pregnancy Center Movement

Beginning in the early 2000s, evangelical crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) sought to establish themselves in areas where they perceive Black women, who have disproportionately higher rates of abortion relative to other racial-ethnic groups, will be drawn to their services. These efforts are tied to larger racial reconciliation efforts by white evangelicals. To this end, in this article we explore how the evangelical CPC movement understands Black women’s higher abortion rates, the solutions they seek to offer Black women to persuade them not to abort, the expansion of the movement into minority areas and how the CPC movement justified this encroachment, and the role of Black leaders and symbolic inclusion through “blackwashing” in this expansion. Drawing upon an ethnographic content analysis, we argue that CPC activism in urban areas is not substantially different from its approaches in white and/or suburban areas and inclusion of Black perspectives and activists is limited to a surface-level veneer we refer to as blackwashing. Throughout the paper, we also provide a counter-narrative examining CPC activists’ claims about Black women and abortion and find many of them to be lacking in veracity.

Unshackling the chains of coloniality: Reimagining decoloniality, Africanisation and Reformation for a non-racial South Africa

Racial divisions, polarisation and tensions are on the rise in South Africa today. A democratic dream of a rainbow nation remains just a dream with racism continuing to raise its ugly head in the democratic South Africa, to the detriment of the rainbow dream of a united South Africa. This article seeks to probe whether South Africans should continue to sing the song of racial reconciliation in the light of the continued racial tensions and post-colonial and post-apartheid legacies and stereotypes that continue to manifest in our private and public spaces. Based on an examination of the decoloniality project, Africanisation and Reformation, through literature study, the article calls for the decoloniality of faith in an effort to craft a vision for a non-racial society. This vision not only takes the importance of the redeeming memories of the 500 years of Reformation seriously, but also the notion of Africanisation and, in particular, the use of the African value systems in shaping and reconstructing a non-racial South Africa. This article taps into the resourcefulness of the Reformed faith in South Africa, as articulated in the theologies of Snyman, Tshaka and Botha, and applies them to South African discourses of decoloniality.

The Limits of Liberalism in South African Film: Recycling Black Stereotypes in Sarafina and Tsotsi

Twenty-two years into democracy, and South Africa is still producing white films for a black audience. In this film genre, black people participate as part of the cast but they are accorded questionable roles that distort important strides that the country has made to achieve racial reconciliation. Although black South Africans are participating in the production of films in South Africa, they have not been able to defeat the ghosts of liberalism that inform black films. The aim of this article is to draw attention to instances of stereotyping black children and young adults who are part of the casts of Sarafina! and Tsotsi. The article argues that, because people internalise the roles imposed on them, the cultural consequence of the creation of negative images is the production of a mentality among young black Africans that they are permanently disabled. Stereotyping is a pernicious mode of representing blacks because in the context of the post-1994 period, a numerical minority is a majority in terms of creating images and controlling the film industry, and a numerical majority is transformed into a numerical minority that assumes important role models and empowering images in films. This reality, which is informed by the ideology of white liberalism, has ensured that blacks remain marginalised in terms of the cultural creations offered through film in South Africa.

Racial Reconciliation and Inclusive Excellence at Church-Related Colleges and Universities

ABSTRACTIn recent years, the topic of multiculturalism has often been a divisive issue. Although some argue that highlighting particularities allows for richer and more productive dialogue across differences, others choose to emphasize humankind's similarities with the belief that this focus on commonalities will create a greater sense of unity. This article addresses how Christian colleges and universities can enter this conversation using the ideology of reconciliation and the framework of inclusive excellence to offer a way forward. The authors conclude with remarks on the characteristics of inclusively excellent institutions as well as recommendations for action.

Imagining Colonial Motherhood: Métissage, Mother Nation, and Marian(ne): Apparitions in Houat’s Les Marrons (1844)

Abstract: “Imagining Colonial Motherhood: Métissage, Mother Nation, and Marian Apparitions in Houat’s Les Marrons (1844),” examines two tableaux from Les Marrons , an abolitionist novel written by Réunion Island native Louis-Timagène Houat in 1844. Les Marrons marked a turning point in Réunion’s history: it was the first novel to be authored by a native, and the first written utterance of Reunionese political consciousness and imagination. The novel was conceived as an anti-slavery pamphlet, fueled by Republican ideals of social and racial reconciliation. It stages a colonial romance between a white woman and an African slave in Réunion, then a French colony, culminating in the birth of a métis child. Through a close analysis of two tableaux from Les Marrons, this paper investigates the ideal of motherhood that emerges in the French colonial imagination. Marie, the novel’s only feminine figure is imagined as a white mother, in an apparent denial of the Black mothers of the island’s origins. The white mother is likened to the island itself, as both island and woman are perceived as porous liminal grounds—sites of potential racial pollution. Houat’s novel offers a prime perspective onto the ambivalence that characterized the colonial apprehension of the white woman, through its iconic evocation of the Virgin Mary and the Mother Nation. This paper also suggests that the figure of the white mother, identified as a significant point of convergence of metropolitan and Reunionese antislavery discourses, helped tie a symbolic knot between France and its insular colony, and produced France as the motherland.

One Womanist's View of Racial Reconciliation in Galatians

In contemporary society, the devaluation of black and brown bodies in the United States is a continuing problem. Black and brown bodies falling as a result of police violence along with the continued degradation of black female sexuality or transgender sexuality (as opposed to cisgender women) in the context of Women's Marches is also problematic. In her various works, Kelly Brown Douglas highlights how Christian theology has not adequately addressed its complicity in degrading black and brown bodies. Moreover, critical social theorist Pierre Bourdieu highlighted habitus and body capital as ways to theorize around body issues. Engaging these scholars, this essay problematizes Paul's privileged use of his own body as "bearing the marks of Jesus" in Galatians 6:17. This essay argues that biblical scholarship has not adequately wrestled with the uncritical wholesale adoption of Pauline "identity" and "body" language while thinking through initial steps out of this conundrum.

Saving/Staging Whiteness: Racial Reconciliation in &lt;em&gt;42&lt;/em&gt; and &lt;em&gt;FIFA 2017/2018&lt;/em&gt;

The sporting fields are often imagined as level playing surfaces that empower those who work hard and those who deliver in the name of victories. That is, sports are the ultimate meritocracy. As a meritocracy, sports are also widely praised as a space that brings otherwise divided communities together, breaking down barriers and borders of race, gender, class, sexuality, and nation. Within this context, this paper enters into the racial sporting pedagogies of both Hollywood films and sports video games, offering a critical discussion of 42 and FIFA 2017/2018, reflecting on their views of sports as a vehicle of racial harmony. Focusing on the ways that each imagine sports as unifier, as a source of racial reconciliation and upward mobility, this paper looks at how sports films and video games both deploy and erase racism in its effort to sell sports as a postracial playground.

The Poitier Effect: Racial Melodrama and Fantasies of Reconciliation by Sharon Willis (review)

Reviewed by: The Poitier Effect: Racial Melodrama and Fantasies of Reconciliation by Sharon Willis Derek C. Maus Sharon Willis, The Poitier Effect: Racial Melodrama and Fantasies of Reconciliation University of Minnesota Press, 2015. iv + 255 pages ($22.50 paper/$79.00 hardcover). It is not often that one can say that a scholarly book whose central thesis recedes into the background for lengthy stretches is still successful at developing that thesis convincingly. It is even more rare to be able to say without qualification that such work is also engaging, thought provoking, and insightful. But Sharon Willis’s broad-ranging and raucous examination of what she calls “the Poitier effect” on the last fifty years of Hollywood filmmaking is just such a book. As much a collection of six interrelated essays – an introduction, four substantial body chapters, and a lengthy conclusion – as a unified monograph, this study manages to transcend traits that would doom lesser works to incoherence, a situation that testifies not only to the clarity of Willis’s prose but also to her unquestionable command of the formal, textual, and contextual aspects of her subject matter. The introduction and opening chapter of the book work together to establish its critical framework, the titular “effect” that Willis sees arising from the “obsessive sameness” (16) of the characters played by actor Sidney Poitier in a series of films dating from the late 1950s through the late 1960s. She argues cogently that Poitier’s “iconicity” as “the only black male lead in Hollywood in this period meant that he was always appearing as himself alongside whatever character he was playing” (24); this constant state of dual perception created a “familiar singularity” around Poitier that facilitated a “dream of achieving racial reconciliation and equality without any substantive change to the ‘white’ world or to ‘white’ culture, and, especially, to white privilege” (5). Without accusing Poitier himself of being a rube or a “sellout,” Willis nevertheless suggests that the “nonthreatening goodwill and...eager and patient pedagogical impulses” of the characters he played helped in “averting or deflecting the possibility of a kind of critical thinking that would involve a serious reciprocal interracial exchange, instead offering a fantasy of racial understanding and ‘assimilation’ that requires no effort on the part of white people” (5). The opening chapter of the book traces the development of this effect by intricately explicating a series of films starring Poitier, beginning with The Defiant Ones (1958), and moving through Lilies of the Field (1963), A Patch of Blue (1965), To Sir, With Love (1967), In the Heat of the Night (1967), and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967). As she does throughout the book, Willis expends considerable effort interpreting these films’ plots and characterizations, but she also pays special attention to the manner in which extranarrative cinematic techniques reinforce and/or complicate the films’ more overt racial representations. She is especially conscious of the composition of, and camera movements within, particular shots, the use of such methods as focus-pulling or conspicuous point-of-view in controlling viewers’ perceptions, and the cinematic interactions between image and sounds. For example, after noting that “[i]n Poitier’s films, disenfranchised blacks often register only as a marked absence or as an undifferentiated amalgam at the edge of the frame and the drama it encloses,” Willis literalizes this observation beyond simple metaphor: “At the level of sheer physicality and bodily performance..., the [visual] frame often has difficulty containing [Poitier].” Moreover, she extends into the realm of the acoustic by adding that “equally often, the film frame is strained by the sound track’s pressure on its [End Page 86] visual field” (23), resulting in a situation in which “[m]usic haunts the image and the story, much as the actor’s iconicity ‘ghosts’ his characters.” Here, Willis is both establishing the “Poitier effect” and simultaneously “troubling” (24) its overly saccharine depictions of a pathway to racial harmony. In sum, the chapter on Poitier is a wholly convincing demonstration of the Poitier effect’s narrative and technical construction. In the next three chapters, though, the “Poitier effect” becomes more of an undertone than an organizational principle, a development that initially threatens to...

Book Review: "Dear White Christians: For Those Still Longing for Racial Reconciliation, by Jennifer Harvey"

Book Review: "Dear White Christians: For Those Still Longing for Racial Reconciliation, by Jennifer Harvey"

Another look at the Good Samaritan: Luke 10:25–37

The story of the Good Samaritan reminds us of one of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s most pointed statements on racial reconciliation: “The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.” Most of us are familiar with the challenge to “love your neighbor” as emphasized by Jesus in the telling of the story, but we seldom think about loving the perpetrator. In this exposition of Luke 10:25–37, Burris moves us from a call to love the challenging neighbor to a love for all humanity that is deep enough and great enough to enable one to participate in night walks on the streets of Richmond, CA—a city riddled with gun violence.

“Tearing Down the Walls of Segregation”: Race, Conservatism, and Evangelical Rap

Evangelical rap may sound like an oxymoron, but it was one of the most important trends in evangelical America as the Christian right rose to new levels of power in the 1990s. The trio DC Talk sold millions of album and dominated the Christian charts from the early 1990s and into the early 2000s. This was more than pure entertainment. Popular culture, and especially popular culture targeted at teens, is an important venue for disseminating values and sustaining religious identities. The artists promoted by the Christian music industry have to reflect the ideas and values that parents and central evangelical institutions wish to teach their children. In the 1990s, racial reconciliation was one of the most important issues to evangelical America and DC Talk were poster boys for a multiracial and multicultural America. Therefore this article takes DC Talk as a starting point to discuss evangelical engagement with race issues in the 1990s. DC Talk wrapped up evangelical individualism and color-blind conservatism in hip-hop garb, trying to reinvent a group with a checkered past when it comes to race relations as the hope of a racially harmonious America.

For the Love of (Black) Christ: Embracing James Cone's Affective Critique of White Fragility

Throughout his written work, James H. Cone proclaims a message of liberation that takes into account both the sociopolitical structural and emotional dimensions of life together. Cone suggests that we cannot settle for—in fact, we cannot even have—love without justice, or justice without love. In this article, I look at Cone's body of work to uncover and reclaim what he performed, but did not explicitly theorize, in his pursuit of love and justice: the dismantling of white fragility, a white supremacist affective construct that shapes much Christian theology, including what seeks to further the cause of racial reconciliation. I then theorize the distorted love that Cone critiques, drawing on the affect theory of Sara Ahmed and the critical whiteness theory of Robin DiAngelo, finally suggesting an alternative vision of love that is consistent with Cone's theology. This alternative vision presents love as acceptance of one's radical, even fundamental, need for the beloved. In contexts of racial tension, this love does not guarantee happiness or comfort, but instead offers aid toward repentance and salvation. In this view, black love for white people cannot be expected to take the form of endless affirmation and encouragement, but instead should look like belief in the capacity of white people for moral and ethical action.

William F. Winter and the New Mississippi: A Biography by Charles C. Bolton

Reviewed by: William F. Winter and the New Mississippi: A Biography by Charles C. Bolton Glenn T. Eskew William F. Winter and the New Mississippi: A Biography. By Charles C. Bolton. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2013. Pp. viii, 338. $35.00, ISBN 978-1-61703-787-0.) Civil rights historiography has taken several turns since the publication of the initial scholarly accounts of the movement, and Charles C. Bolton’s excellent biography of Mississippi governor William F. Winter reflects yet another approach to understanding that turbulent period in American history. Here one finds the struggle of the white southern moderate who, although tangential to the fight on the front lines for race reform, nevertheless played a crucial role in the saga of the long civil rights movement. Born into a prominent political family from Grenada County in 1923, William Forrest Winter attended the University of Mississippi, earning a bachelor’s degree in 1943 and law degree in 1949. Named in honor of the Confederate general with whom his grandfather rode, and elected to the state legislature in 1947, just prior to the Dixiecrat revolt, Winter seemed one to man the barricades in defense of white supremacy. Yet this descendant of Mississippi Whigs, Unionists, and Reconstruction Republicans received from his parents a heavy dose of paternalism, Christian fairness, and New Deal liberalism. Such inherited ideals and the awakening of academic freedom he experienced under the mentorship of history professor James W. Silver at [End Page 219] Ole Miss, where Winter defended Hodding Carter’s right to speak, nurtured an open-mindedness and honesty that marked his years of public service. Bolton finds Winter’s lukewarm support for white supremacy “more a function of political survival than heartfelt belief,” for during the rise of massive resistance, the freedom rides, and Freedom Summer, Winter honed a reasoned approach as a racial moderate that kept him viable in hidebound Mississippi (p. 74). As a staffer under U.S. senator John C. Stennis, Winter learned the art of political survival. When friends encouraged Winter to join the White Citizens’ Council, he demurred, and he avoided the fray of racist campaigns by accepting a political appointment as Mississippi tax collector. Winter held the profitable job from 1956 to 1964, all the while advocating its abolition, something he accomplished by combining its tasks with those of the state tax commission. Winter was then elected state treasurer, holding the new position until 1968. Yet the plum he desired for the longest time hung out of reach. Winter ran his first campaign for governor using the playbook of Mississippi congressman Frank E. Smith, deflecting race and focusing on progress, but in 1967 obeisance to custom failed to persuade white voters who demanded a fiery defense of segregation. Nearly a decade later, after a stint as lieutenant governor from 1971 to 1974, Winter ran again, but this time the honest bond salesman lost out to a charismatic trial lawyer. The corruption scandals that ensued over the next four years convinced enough Mississippians to elect Winter to the office so that he might clean up state government. Like New South governors Jimmy Carter of Georgia a decade earlier and Bill Clinton of Arkansas, Winter “transform[ed] the image of Mississippi in the eyes of her citizens and the rest of the nation” (p. 191). From 1980 through 1983, the Winter administration removed divisive symbols, celebrated black and white distinguished citizens, reorganized state government, and most significantly passed the Education Reform Act of 1982 that began the process of modernizing Mississippi’s schools. As Bolton makes clear, “Winter’s signal victory in his long crusade for educational improvement in his native state advanced the cause of racial reconciliation, which Winter’s political career had helped promote” (p. 231). Unable to serve a consecutive second term as governor, the Democrat Winter lost a bid for the U.S. Senate in 1984 to the Republican Thad Cochran, although Winter’s staffers, such “Boys of Spring” as Ray Mabus, Bill Cole, and Dick Molpus, continued in government (p. 193). As a senior statesman, Winter helped organize the Institute for Racial Reconciliation at the University of Mississippi in 1998 that today bears his name and...