Will Davis Campbell (Amite County, Mississippi, July 18, 1924 – Nashville, Tennessee June 3, 2013) was a Baptist minister, lecturer, and activist. He was a Southern white supporter of African-American civil rights. Campbell was also a lecturer and author, most notably for his autobiographical work Brother to a Dragonfly, a finalist for the National Book Award in 1978.
Early life and career
Campbell was born in Amite County, Mississippi, in 1924, the son of a farmer and his wife. He credited his family with having raised him to be culturally tolerant, even though his family church had Bibles emblazoned with a Ku Klux Klan symbol. He was ordained as a minister at age 17 by his local Baptist congregation.
He attended Louisiana College, then enlisted in the army during World War II. He served as a medic. After the war, he attended Wake Forest College (BA, English), Tulane University, and Yale Divinity School (B.D., 1952).
Though he held a pastorate in Louisiana from 1952 to 1954, Campbell spent most of his career in other settings. In 1954, he took a position as director of religious life at the University of Mississippi, only to resign in 1956. This was in part due to the hostility—including death threats—he received for supporting racial integration.
He subsequently took a position as a field officer for the National Council of Churches (NCC), and joined the civil rights movement. In 1963, Campbell left the NCC to become director of the Committee of Southern Churchmen (CSC), which was his base for continuing activism.
The CSC published a journal, Katallagete, its title deriving from New Testament Greek for the Pauline phrase 'be reconciled', a reference to 2 Corinthians 5:20. The journal published articles about politics and social change, as understood through the lens of the Christian faith. It expressed ideas of the neo-orthodox movement, which Campbell had become acquainted with at Yale. Edited by James Y. Holloway of Kentucky's Berea College, Katallagete was published from 1965 until the early 1990s. The CSC relinquished control of the journal to Campbell and Holloway in 1983.
By 2005, Campbell described the CSC as "nothing ... a name and a tax exemption and whatever I and a few other people were doing on a given day." He continued to work on his own together with a network of acquaintances, including singers Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson, comedian Dick Gregory, cartoonist and playwright Jules Feiffer, and writer Studs Terkel.
Although remaining a Baptist, Campbell reportedly conducted house church worship services at his home in Mt. Juliet, Tennessee until late in his life.
Campbell died on June 3, 2013, in Nashville, from complications of a stroke he suffered in May 2011. He was 88 and was survived by his wife of 67 years, Brenda Fisher, a son, Webb, and two daughters, Bonnie and Penny.
Activism
Civil rights
In 1957, while working for the National Council of Churches, Campbell participated in two notable events of the civil rights movement: he was one of four people who escorted the black students who integrated the Little Rock, Arkansas, public schools; and he was the only white person present at the founding of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) by Martin Luther King Jr. Some black delegates opposed including him, but Bayard Rustin sponsored him. In 1961, he helped "Freedom Riders" of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to integrate interstate bus travel, despite white mob violence, in Alabama. In a 1964 interview with Robert Penn Warren for the book Who Speaks for the Negro?, Campbell discussed many of the issues of the civil rights movement, including the assassination of Medgar Evers by Byron De La Beckwith, desegregation busing, and the relationship between theology and social activism.
He appealed to Southern Christian churches to end their own segregation and fight discrimination, rather than remain silent. Campbell eventually left organized religion, though he remained firmly Christian.
Campbell later said, "I never considered myself ... an activist in the civil rights movement, though a lot of other people considered me an activist."