Date of Award

Summer 2013

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

History

Committee Director

Maura Hametz

Committee Member

Annette Finley-Croswhite

Committee Member

Edward Ayers

Call Number for Print

Special Collections LD4331.H47 W455 2013

Abstract

The Norfolk, Virginia school closing crisis of 1958-1959 has served as a painful symbol of the Civil Rights political and social violence that gripped the region in the 1950s and 1960s. As political battles and legislative actions designed to prolong segregation made their way through the halls of Virginia government institutions, thousands of secondary school students were left without a formal public education program for months in the city, Extensive research has been conducted on the political rhetoric and government posturing but has often ignored the sentiments of Christian religious bodies functioning throughout the city and the region. This thesis seeks to address the relationship between predominantly white Christian ecumenical bodies throughout Norfolk and Virginia and the religious response to the greater Civil Rights movements through the Commonwealth and the South. The response of individual parishioners, independent congregations, and larger ecclesiastical bodies all played a role in the growing call of Civil Rights in Norfolk and Virginia.

This paper seeks to explain the role of white Christianity within the larger Civil Rights movement and attempts to offer a view into the mind of a Southern Christian attempting to find meaning in the traditional church while either seeking to support or reject the social liberation of a traditionally marginalized segment of the population. This paper uses the experiences of major mainline Protestant denominations including a study of regional Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian, and Episcopal churches. Further research includes work on the Unitarian-Universalist church and the Roman Catholic Church. By examining archives and manuscripts throughout Virginia at Old Dominion University, the Library of Virginia, the Norfolk Public Library, the Union Theological Seminary of Richmond, the Virginia Historical Society, the Virginia Baptist Historical Society, the Catholic Diocese of Richmond, and the Episcopal Diocese of Southern Virginia, this paper offers new understandings of the religious life of a city, state, and region struggling to define its religious mission in the 20'" century.

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DOI

10.25777/rpc7-qa32

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