I am seeking a grant from the Louisville Institute to provide funds that will enable me to complete research on a study of the involvement of Episcopalians in the civil rights movement. This project is conducted under the auspices of John Booty, the official historian of the Episcopal Church, and Arthur Walmsley, retired bishop of Connecticut, who coordinated Episcopal civil rights activities in the mid-1960s. I have been engaged in research since July 1993 and intend to produce a book for the new Anglican Historical Monographs Series of the University of Illinois Press. I believe that my project will make an important contribution both to the historiography of the Episcopal Church and to the analysis of the Protestant churches and their relationship with American society in the twentieth century.

My study will focus on the critical middle decades of the twentieth century. It begins in 1952 with the uproar that followed the refusal of the University of the South, a college supported by the southern dioceses of the Episcopal Church, to admit African Americans to its theological seminary. In the aftermath of this crisis the church, including many of its leaders in the South, first publicly affirmed the value of racial integration. As the nation’s civil rights crisis intensified in the late l950s, the Episcopal Society for Cultural and Racial Unity (ESCRU) was founded to press the denomination to remain true to its racially inclusive principles. ESCRU became a widely recognized agency mobilizing Episcopalians for participation in civil rights activities.