“The
question is not ‘Will the churches unite to build a kingdom?’ The question is
‘Here is a kingdom already. Will we enter it and bid others to enter it,
reminding them that it is a kingdom beyond caste?’” –Will D. Campbell (Crashing the Idols 28)
There’s
something special about Nashville—not its current hipster hype and
hyper-gentrification. There’s something special about Nashville—in its Bible Belt
collision with all the best of the American cultural revolutions in the last
half of the 20th century. The city that was called the “Protestant Vatican”
could be portrayed as a purely conservative hub, a somewhat citified mecca in
the vast landscape of rural fundamentalism, but Nashville’s musical nature and
diverse religious population never adhered to such rigid normativity. The city
always had its share of religious renegades and agile agitators.
There’s
something special about Nashville and the 1960s—the beloved collision of forces
for good: black and white college students from the likes of Fisk University getting
trained for the lunch-counter sit-ins under the leadership of preacher and
Vanderbilt Divinity School student James Lawson; the underground of outlaw
country musicians like Kris Kristofferson getting nurtured by the likes of a
bootleg Baptist preacher named Will Campbell who could befriend both Martin
King and the Klan; the artfully-crafted national magazine motive, produced by the United Methodist Church’s Board of Higher
Education, mingling counterculture scents with New Left incursions and Radical
Theology subversions. While much of our tale transpires in Cookeville, we
cannot get there without first passing through Nashville, because that is where
Tennessee kicked off the 1960s in bold relief as the sit-ins to desegregate
downtown Nashville were the spark that kindled the coming flames of a turbulent
decade. In early 1960, Bob Lewis was a 24-year-old seminarian from Nashville
with a history degree from Peabody College. Like many of his predominately
white peers at the Divinity School, Lewis was not a die-hard participant in the
movement, but also like other white people of conscience, he was deeply moved
by what was happening in the movement. Indeed, it’s difficult to imagine some of
the radical changes that transformed the Christian white youth culture in the
1960s without the inspired impetus of the black civil rights movement.
Like
the city and country that watched Nashville face the demons masquerading as
decency, Lewis was shocked by the rank-and-file white response to the sit-ins.
In a review of David Halberstam’s epic chronicle of the Nashville movement
called The Children, New York Times
reporter David Oshinsky details the distinction between the protesters and
their opponents: “Dressed impeccably, carrying books to read, they endured the
abuse of the white hoodlums who poured ketchup over them and crushed lighted
cigarettes into their necks.” Bob Lewis reflects some 55 years later that
seeing the violence of the whites and the Gandhian self-discipline of the students
changed his heart.
When
a lawyer who supported the students and their leaders had his house bombed,
Martin Luther King came to Nashville and spoke at Fisk University. Hearing King
was another turning point for Bob Lewis. Stories of the sit-ins even reached an
impressionable high-school student. Calvin Kimbrough recalls, “So one way that
I would begin this story is that growing up in Nashville, I had the great grace
of having a Sunday school teacher who actually tried to teach us about what the
sit-ins were all about in Nashville.” Even though the white community in
Nashville included the same ilk of racists seen elsewhere in the south, other
white folks—preachers, students, journalists, and citizens—were converted by
the witness provided by their black brothers and sisters. One of those white
allies was the renegade Baptist Will Campbell, whose remarks about entering the
kingdom are profoundly echoed by author, congressman, and civil rights pioneer
John Lewis, who described the Nashville movement as part of the coming Beloved
Community already realized, as “nothing less than the Christian concept of the
kingdom of God on earth” (qtd. in Cass).
To the enlightened Christian radicals of the 1960s, this kingdom and
community had no boundaries; as our story will reveal, it even extended 80
miles east to the small college town of Cookeville.
On
his first day at Tennessee Tech, Calvin met his life-long friend and
collaborator Dave McIntyre, who thought Calvin, even though coming from
Nashville, represented the “epitome of a Tennessee country boy, banjo in hand.”
Of course by September 1964, the banjo didn’t just represent the traditional
music of Appalachia but also the new folk music of the revolution. For Calvin
and others, it was the teaching tool of the icon who told us what it was like
to have a hammer and a bell, the profoundly important Pete Seeger. For young Nelia Tripp, she encountered a
beloved collision at the intersection of the white and black communities in the
town of Lawrenceburg, just north of the Alabama border. She remembers, “This
movement began in my early childhood because I grew up on a street in
Lawrenceburg, Tennessee, where the white community ended and the African
American community began. And our house was the second house above the big
hedge that separated the two communities.” This proximity for Nelia eroded the
chasm of segregation and nagged her young conscience. She explains, “The
African American community below that hedge—people literally lived in cardboard
and paper shacks. There was, however, a hole in the hedge, and the children
would move back and forth between the communities and play together.” Nelia
Tripp left Lawrenceburg for Cookeville, in part to follow a fellow
high-school-cheerleading friend and in part to flea her extended family’s
urging to attend Peabody College to live with her family’s lineage in a
Confederate dorm. Nelia reflects, adamantly: “And it was just like ‘over my
dead body, I’m not going there and living in the Confederate dorm!’”
Just
after Divinity School, Bob Lewis became a United Methodist minister and had a
short call to a church in Bell Buckle as well as the Webb School, but the
regional bishop found him a better fit as the campus minister at Tennessee Tech
in Cookeville. Like the colliding forces that made Nashville an unlikely nexus
for cultural revolution in the south, some modest collisions provided for the
even more unlikely undercurrent of change in the remote college town of
Cookeville. For people who place some faith in providence, though, the
collision course that brought our cast of characters to Cookeville turned out
to be a sacred synchronicity that nurtured the work of the kingdom in the
context of campus and small community.
Nelia
Tripp, Calvin Kimbrough, Bob Lewis, and Dave McIntyre all arrived in Cookeville
and Tennessee Tech from different places, but their plans converged. Calvin
“came to Tennessee Tech because it was inexpensive and I could get in” and
considers it a “great grace” that Bob Lewis showed up around the same time. Looking
back on the years of ministry, art, and activism, Calvin suggests, “Our human
efforts—Wesley Foundation, Patchwork Central, the Open Door—feeble as they are,
are attempts to be reconciled in Christ and to enter Jesus’ Beloved Community.”
As some communities disperse, other communities unite. Beloved collisions
sometimes seed the always already (and necessarily not-yet) of God’s Beloved Community.
If you would like a copy of the complete Banjo & Bread as an Adobe PDF, please send a message to Andrew Smith at:
professor.andy.smith [at] gmail.com with 'Banjo & Bread' in the subject line.
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