Carter Dalton Lyon’s Sanctuaries of Segregation is a wonderful addition to the growing literature on the role of ‘white’ churches during the civil rights movement in the South. Careful study of local ‘kneel-in’ movements was delayed for several decades for reasons that are unclear. But now that new scholarly attention is being focused on church visit campaigns in cities like Atlanta, Birmingham, and Memphis, Lyon’s book helps fill out our knowledge—and our understanding—of this understudied chapter in the civil rights struggle. What is particularly notable about Sanctuaries of Segregation is Lyon’s rich recreation of the personal and institutional contexts in which the Jackson church visits took place. It was individual congregations that were targeted for visits by racially mixed groups; and the internal drama precipitated by these visits permanently marked the history of these churches. But responses to the visits also involved local police, state and federal courts, and quasi-governmental associations like the Citizens’ Council. The Jackson church visit campaign also roiled denominations—particularly the United Methodist Church, which was hurled into a national debate over the relationship of congregational preference and Church policy. Finally, the story of the church visits could not be told without attention to the students and faculty at Tougaloo College, many of whom were active in the campaign and suffered abuse and intimidation as a result. Lyon ties all these threads together in a compelling narrative based on exhaustive research. The result is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of southern churches during the civil rights movement."" - Stephen R. Haynes, professor of religious studies, Rhodes College, and author or editor of eleven books including The Last Segregated Hour: The Memphis Kneel-Ins and the Campaign for Southern Church Desegregation""This book represents a major achievement. Thanks to Carter Dalton Lyon’s deep and impressive research, we now understand the story of the Jackson church visit campaign in detail. This book demonstrates how the effects of this initiative rippled across the country, and it underscores the contradictory but crucial role that white Christianity played during the civil rights years."" - Carolyn Renée Dupont, author of Mississippi Praying: Southern White Evangelicals and the Civil Rights Movement, 1945-1975""Sanctuaries of Segregation is an intimate portrait of the strategy, tactics, and Christian witness of the Jackson movement’s 1963-64 church visit campaign, a determined appeal to convince white churches in Mississippi’s capital city of the theological and ecclesiological absurdity of their insistence on whites-only worship services. With remarkably thorough research, compelling analysis, and captivating narrative, Lyon uncovers another powerful story of the 1960s black freedom struggle and offers extraordinary insight into the perspectives of actors on all sides of the conflict."" - Joseph T. Reiff, Shelton Professor of Religion, Emory & Henry College, and author of Born of Conviction: White Methodists and Mississippi’s Closed Society""The moral and religious issues that swirled about the civil rights movement in the early 1960s have rarely been put in richer context than in Sanctuaries of Segregation. Looking closely at the local church communities of Jackson, Mississippi, Lyon shows civil rights activists seeking admission to white churches and the variety of responses to their efforts. Activists wanted to open the church doors of a closed society to testify to Christian brotherhood’s call for integration, offering the opportunity for a rare dialogue with white Christians who defended tenaciously their control of a key institution of the southern way of life. His analysis of the fraught relationship between white moderate ministers, many of whom favored racial integration, and their segregationist congregants, who often forced them from their pulpits, adds a new level of understanding of the moral battles within white southern churches."" - Charles Reagan Wilson, professor emeritus of history and southern studies at the University of Mississippi and author of Flashes of a Southern Spirit: Meanings of the Spirit in the U.S. South
