There is a book that would be very fitting for today

[gopiscrap]

called "God's Long Summer" it's about the struggle for equal delegate representation at the Democratic National Convention in 1964 held in Atlantic City. It's also about what life was like in Mississippi that summer.

[struggle4progress]

1. God's Long Summer

Stories of Faith and Civil Rights
By Charles Marsh

Chapter One: "I'm on My Way, Praise God": Mrs. Hamer's Fight for Freedom
Sticking with Civil Rights

On a night in August of 1962, Fannie Lou Hamer attended a mass meeting at the Williams Chapel Church in Ruleville, Mississippi ...

... James Bevel, one of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s, young colleagues in the SCLC, stood to address the people. His short sermon was taken from the sixteenth chapter of the Gospel of Matthew. He asked the congregation--mainly black men and women who worked on the nearby cotton plantations--to consider the words of the Lord when he rebuked the Pharisees and Sadducees. He read the Scripture: "Jesus answered and said unto them, When it is evening, ye say, It will be fair weather, for the sky is red. And in the morning, It will be foul weather today; for the sky is red and lowering. O ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the sky; but can ye not discern the signs of the times?" How can we discern the signs of the times, Bevel asked ...

On August 31, Fannie Lou Hamer and seventeen other people boarded a beat-up bus and rode the thirty miles to the county seat of Indianola ... The others on the bus slowly followed Mrs. Hamer to the voter registration desk in the courthouse, where they were asked by the circuit clerk to state their business. Mrs. Hamer explained that they had come to the courthouse to register. The clerk replied that all but two of the group would have to leave. Mrs. Hamer and a young man named Ernest Davis remained in the office to complete the application.

The "literacy test," as the registration application was officially called, consisted of twenty-one questions ... The most trivial of errors--like the absence of a comma in the date or a discrepancy in punctuation--would often result in an immediate failure. The registration form also included the question, "By whom are you employed?" ... This meant that you would be fired by the time you got back home," Mrs. Hamer explained ... Even more intimidating .. was the question, "Where is your place of residence in the district?" It was feared ... that the white Citizens' Council or the Ku Klux Klan would have the applicant's home address by the end of the day ...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/books/chap1/godslongsummer.htm

[gopiscrap]

2. How did you know about this book?

Very few people I talk to know about it. I used a part of it for a sermon that I preached about 3 years ago.

[struggle4progress]

3. I didn't. But I did know about Fannie Lou. In my own way, I preached a sort of sermon

on her a while back at a community poetry reading, in an effort to get folk to register to vote. It didn't produce any results that night, but a week or so later I got some voter registrations from it

http://www.democraticunderground.com/11022912
http://www.democraticunderground.com/1014257124

[gopiscrap]

4. how cool!

I have to laugh, the Methodist pastor that is my supervisor calls me a Communist and I always tell him that is a compliment.

[struggle4progress]

5. It's been a while now, but the Marxists are really the ones who brought me back to the church

The Reagan era was fast becoming a dangerous burn-out for me

I forget now who or how -- but somebody started me reading the liberation theologians: Belo's Materialist Reading of Mark, Cardenal's Gospel in Solentiname, Echegaray's Practice of Jesus, Miranda's Marx and the Bible, and his Marx Against the Marxists ...

It was a real eye-opener for me: I didn't have to read these old texts as bizarre conservative documents supporting the status quo -- they could be understood as demanding hearts in a heartless world and spirits in spiritless conditions