CAMPBELL, Will D(avis) 1924-

PERSONAL: Born July 18, 1924, in Liberty, MS; son of Lee Webb and Hancie Bea (Parker) Campbell; married Brenda Fisher, January 16, 1946; children: Penny Elizabeth, Bonnie Ruth, Lee Webb II. Education: Attended Louisiana College, 1941-43; Wake Forest College (now University), A.B., 1948; Tulane University, graduate study, 1948-49; Yale University, B.Div., 1952. Politics: Democrat. Religion: Baptist. Hobbies and other interests: Country music, farming.

ADDRESSES: Home—Vanderbilt Rd., Mt. Juliet, Wilson, TN 37122.

CAREER: Pastor of a Baptist church in Taylor, LA, 1952-54; University of Mississippi, Oxford, director of religious life, 1954-56; National Council of Churches, New York, NY, consultant in race relations, 1956-63; Committee of Southern Churchmen, Nashville, TN, preacher at large and publisher of Katallagete, 1963-72. Has also been a civil rights activist, itinerant social worker, farmer, commentator for CNN news and other media stations, and tour bus cook for country singer Waylon Jennings. Military service: U.S. Army Medical Department, medic, 1943-46; became sergeant; served in Pacific theater.

AWARDS, HONORS: Lillian Smith Prize, Christopher Award, and National Book Award finalist, all for Brother to a Dragonfly; Brother to a Dragonfly was also named one of the best books of 1977 by New York Times and one of ten books of the 1970s worthy of surviving by Time magazine; Lyndhurst Prize, 1977; first place award for fiction, Friends of American Writers, 1982, for The Glad River; Alex Haley Memorial Award for distinguished Tennessee writers, 1992; Tennessee Governor's award for the arts, 1994, and Governor's Humanities award, 1995; Lifetime Achievement Award, American Civil Liberties Union (Tennessee chapter), 1997; Richard Wright Prize, Natchez Literary Celebration, 1998, for Providence; first prize in nonfiction, Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters, for And Also with You: Duncan Gray and the American Dilemma; National Humanities Medal, 2000. Litt.D., University of the South, 1993; H.H.D., Mercer University, 1996; D.H.L., University of Southern Mississippi, 1999.

WRITINGS:

nonfiction

Race and the Renewal of the Church, Westminster (Louisville, KY), 1962.

Brother to a Dragonfly (memoir), Seabury (New York, NY), 1977, twenty-fifth anniversary edition with foreword by Jimmy Carter, Continuum (New York, NY), 2000.

Forty Acres and a Goat: A Memoir, Peachtree Publishers (Atlanta, GA), 1986.

Covenant: Faces, Voices, Places, photographs by Al Clayton, Peachtree Publishers (Atlanta, GA), 1989.

Providence, Longstreet (Atlanta, GA), 1992.

The Stem of Jesse: The Costs of Community at a 1960s Southern School, Mercer University Press (Macon, GA), 1995.

And Also with You: Duncan Gray and the American Dilemma, Hillsboro Press (Franklin, TN), 1997.

Soul among Lions: Musings of a Bootleg Preacher, Westminster John Knox Press (Louisville, KY), 1999.

Robert G. Clark's Journey to the House: A Black Politician's Story, University Press of Mississippi (Jackson, MS), 2003.

editor, with james y. holloway

Up to Our Steeples in Politics, Paulist Press (New York, NY), 1970.

The Failure and the Hope: Essays of Southern Churchmen, Eerdmans (Grand Rapids, MI), 1972.

… And the Criminals with Him: Luke 23:33: A First-Person Book about Prisons, Paulist Press (New York, NY), 1973.

Callings!, Paulist Press (New York, NY), 1975.

other

The Glad River (novel), Holt (New York, NY), 1982.

Cecelia's Sin (novella), Mercer University Press (Macon, GA), 1983.

Chester and Chun Ling (for children), Abingdon (Nashville, TN), 1989.

The Pear Tree That Bloomed in the Fall (for children), Providence House Publishers (Franklin, TN), 1996.

The Convention: A Parable (novel), Eerdmans (Grand Rapids, MI), 1991.

Also contributor to God on Earth: The Lord's Prayer for Our Time, text by Will Campbell, photographs by Will McBride, poetry by Bonnie Campbell, Crossroads (New York, NY), 1983; Mississippi Writers: Reflections of Childhood and Youth, University Press of Mississippi (Oxford, MS), 1986; and to A Life Is More Than a Moment: The Desegregation of Little Rock's Central High, text and photographs by Will Counts, Indiana University Press (Bloomington, IN), 1999. Contributor to magazines. Columnist, Christianity and Crisis; publisher, Katallabete (a journal on social issues).

SIDELIGHTS: Will D. Campbell "figures prominently as both an author and a civil rights activist," according to Bob Summers in Publishers Weekly. A Baptist minister who was active in the 1960s civil rights movement, Campbell attracted controversy for his rejection of most organized institutions, including churches, in favor of ministering to society's outcasts no matter what their beliefs, ethnic background, or financial means. A Southerner who was the only white person to attend the founding of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Campbell shocked his colleagues with his later willingness to minister even to people such as Ku Klux Klan members. Yet Campbell, who in later life has earned his living as a farmer and writer while continuing to spread God's word as a self-styled "bootleg minister," has maintained the philosophy that "we're all bastards but God loves us anyway," as Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service writer Art Jester quoted him. He feels justified, therefore, in showing no discrimination when talking to people about God.

Campbell came from humble origins. His father was a hard-working farmer who had a difficult time during the Great Depression. The family fell into poverty as his father suffered the indignities of going on welfare. Campbell tells of these early struggles in his award-winning biography Brother to a Dragonfly, which also concerns the tragic relationship between Campbell and his brother Joe. In a piece on the book for the New York Times Book Review, John Leonard stated that "Joe's slide into madness and Will's attempts to stop or deflect it are the stuff of literature. Brotherhood, sibling caring has seldom been so beautifully portrayed."

This background naturally left Campbell sympathetic to the plight of the poor, and his religious upbringing, which led him to be ordained as a minister at age seventeen, helped set his path in life. Another influence came when he read Freedom Road by Howard Fast; this book convinced him that he should work to repair what he called the "tragedy of the South," according to an essay in Religious Leaders of America. Enrolling at Louisiana College, Campbell studied there for only a year before enlisting in the army and serving as a medic in World War II's Pacific theater. He later drew on this experience for his award-winning novel The Glad River, which is about three southern men who become fast friends and suffer through hell while fighting in the South Pacific. The message in this novel—that we should love one another—becomes crystal clear when one of the soldiers tries to save the life of a Japanese man. The theme that we should love one another as brothers and sisters is a common thread that would appear throughout all of Campbell's writing.

After the war Campbell returned home, started a family, and earned a divinity degree from Yale University. His sympathies for society's outcasts then led him to join the civil rights movement, while working at the University of Mississippi; he later joined the National Council of Churches in 1956 and became involved in a number of civil rights negotiations. He writes about these years in his Forty Acres and a Goat: A Memoir.

While involved in this work, he was asked a question that, in essence, demanded why he defended African Americans so stringently—were there not oppressed, poor, white people as well? Campbell realized this was a legitimate question and that he should be applying the gospel to all those who were oppressed. Thus, he began to see that the issue of oppression was not just white against black but, in the main, organized institutions—governments, businesses, and even churches—against the outcasts of society. This realization led him to form the Committee of Southern Churchmen, a group that shared his contempt for organized institutions.

Abandoning the church, he moved to a farm outside of Nashville, Tennessee, and ministered from his house, becoming particularly controversial when it became known in the 1980s that he included Klansmen among those to whom he was willing to preach. The books he has written since then often seem to be about him and his ideals, even when he is writing on other subjects. In Providence, for example, Campbell tells the story of members of the Choctaw tribe who are evicted from their land and labeled as lazy and worthless when they cannot adapt to the white man's way of life. This theme echoes the experience of Campbell's own father. Campbell, as Christian Century writer Perry H. Biddle, Jr. explained, uses the example of the Choctaws, blacks, and poor whites in rural Holmes County, Mississippi, "as a microcosm of the whole nation and, in a sense, of the rest of the earth." The book, according to Biddle, presents nothing less than "the story of America, of the struggle over race relations and economic justice, and of the search for community."

In And Also with You: Duncan Gray and the American Dilemma, Campbell tells the story of Gray, the rector of St. Peter's Episcopal Church in Oxford, Mississippi, who supported the integration of the University of Mississippi in 1962. When Gray argued in front of a large crowd that African American James Meredith should be allowed to enroll at the university, his "speech almost cost the young rector his life," according to Merrill Hawkins, Jr. in Christian Century. This event was somewhat reflective of Campbell's experience at the same university, where he lost his job in 1956 when he supported the Brown vs. Board of Education decision. "In writing about Gray," continued Hawkins, "Campbell has a forum to express his own ideas—themes that have been with him throughout his writing career. Campbell has long critiqued the evil power structures. The people who perpetuated violence in the name of segregation were themselves victims and symptoms, rather than causes." The author also criticizes churches for allowing secular law to determine their position on race issues and he "calls on religiously oriented social activists to find in the teachings of the church the motivation to address social issues."

More recently, in his Robert G. Clark's Journey to the House: A Black Politician's Story, Campbell tells of one African American's struggle up from poverty in Mississippi to become a state legislator. In the process, he was an activist for civil rights, became highly educated, and lost the trust of his fellow activists by working with segregationists in his negotiations to gain more rights for blacks. "This is a unique biography in that it is as much about the author as the subject," observed Vernon Ford in a Booklist review in which he saw many parallels between the two men's lives.

Through his writings and lectures around the country—he has become known as an appealing speaker whose wit and humor make his message sound less like preaching and more like storytelling—Campbell has striven to show that we can all be reconciled to God because He loves us all despite our faults. Solutions to social crises reflect not political problems but, as Campbell's colleague the Rev. Dee H. Wade put it in Jester's article, "our failure to be reconciled to God and to one another."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

books

Connelly, Thomas L., Will Campbell and the Soul of the South, Continuum (New York, NY), 1982.

Contemporary Southern Writers, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1999.

Religious Leaders of America, 2nd edition, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1999.

Wright, Lawrence, Saints & Sinners: Walker Railey, Jimmy Swaggert, Madalyn Murray O'Hair, Anton LaVey, Will Campbell, Matthew Fox, Knopf (New York, NY), 1993.

periodicals

Booklist, March 1, 2003, Vernon Ford, review of Robert G. Clark's Journey to the House: A Black Politician's Story, p. 1128.

Christian Century, May 12, 1982, John McEntyre, review of The Glad River, p. 578; May 26, 1982, review of The Glad River, p. 638; January 28, 1987, Myron A. Marty, review of Forty Acres and a Goat: A Memoir, p. 89; January 25, 1989, Andrew Pratt, review of The Convention: A Parable, p. 88; June 16, 1993, Perry H. Biddle, Jr., review of Providence, p. 649; June 17, 1998, Merrill Hawkins, Jr., review of And Also with You: Duncan Gray and the American Dilemma, p. 621; January 17, 2001, "People," p. 12.

Detroit News, May 16, 1982.

Humanities, January-February, 2001, Katie Towler, Maggie Reichers, and Chrissa Gerard, "Making a Difference: The 2000 National Humanities Medalists," p. 20.

Journal of American History, December, 1995, E. Culpepper Clark, review of The Stem of Jesse: The Costs of Community at a 1960s Southern School, p. 1290.

Journal of Southern History, May, 1996, Bill J. Leonard, review of The Stem of Jesse, p. 423.

Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service, April 22, 1998, Art Jester, "Maverick Preacher Played Key Role in Civil Rights Movement," p. 422K2968.

Library Journal, May 15, 1982, Grace Jones, review of The Glad River, p. 1008; October 15, 1986, Anthony O. Edmonds, review of Forty Acres and a Goat, p. 88.

New York Times, November 29, 1977.

New York Times Book Review, November 27, 1977, John Leonard, review of Brother to a Dragonfly; April 27, 1980, review of Brother to a Dragonfly, p. 39; November 16, 1986, Alison Friesinger, review of Forty Acres and a Goat, p. 25.

Publishers Weekly, February 26, 1982, review of The Glad River, p. 142; August 29, 1986, review of Forty Acres and a Goat, p. 381; October 24, 1986; September 9, 1988, review of The Convention, p. 119; October 13, 1989, review of Covenant: Faces, Voices, Places, p. 42; January 23, 1995, review of The Stem of Jesse, p. 55; March 15, 1999, review of Soul among Lions: Musings of a Bootleg Preacher, p. 515; May 17, 1999, "May Publications," p. 73.

other

Here's Will (video), University of Alabama.