BORDERED BY strip malls, chain restaurants, and drug stores, four-lane Hillsboro Pike in Nashville, Tenn., carries cars from the Vanderbilt University area out to suburban neighborhoods. Every afternoon, thousands of drivers heading home from the city crest a ridge and pass a long, red-brick church.
That church, Calvary United Methodist, is where I was confirmed, participated in youth group, and sang in the choir. In the archives room off the education wing, a visitor can open a filing cabinet drawer, flip past photos of youth group retreats and church league basketball games, and find a manila folder labeled “Rev. Dr. Sam Dodson, 1958-1965.”
The folder is thin, but its contents are weighty. A letter to the local Methodist bishop from the church’s board explains that Dodson cannot adequately minister to his congregation while participating in political activities and suggests he be demoted to assistant pastor. A newspaper clipping from 1965 announces that Rev. Dodson and his family will be moving to Athens, Greece, where he will head St. Andrew’s American Church. I recognize some of the names signed to letters calling for Dodson’s demotion—an usher who pressed strawberry candies into my palm whenever I asked, a woman who looked me in the eye when I was 11 and told me I would be a leader in the church someday.
During the months and years immediately after the relative success of the 1960 sit-ins and before the 1964 Civil Rights Act passed Congress, a wide range of activist groups and individuals in Nashville sought to desegregate restaurants, movie theaters, churches, schools, and recreational facilities, many in predominantly white areas of town. “The ‘Whites Only’ signs were down, but we had not yet seen the white mind behind those signs,” remembered Kwame Leo Lillard, a college student in Nashville in the early ’60s who participated in Freedom Rides to the Deep South to desegregate interstate buses.
Sam Dodson, who passed away in 2002, was one of the leaders of the so-called “clergy movement” in Nashville, an ecumenical and interracial group of clergy and divinity students who participated in desegregation efforts. They faced considerable resistance, not just from hatemongers, but from moderates who feared their congregations would be targeted due to the activism of their ministers and rabbis. These clergy and students were encouraged to separate their religion from their politics, but they chose instead to act.
Throughout the early ’60s, black and white students from the Scarritt College for Christian Workers and Vanderbilt Divinity School went to all-white churches on Sunday mornings in the hopes of worshipping together. They were, as Rev. Rosemary Brown recalled, turned away if the black students were dressed in American-style clothes and welcomed if those same students returned wearing African garb. “It was all rooted in the fear that African Americans would actually join the church. It was just so blatant and un-Christlike.”
The white students, along with Dodson and other white clergy, protested whites-only policies at iconic Nashville restaurants such as the Pancake Pantry by what they called “sip-ins.” They filled booths for hours, ordering only coffee and water to slow business.
“I don’t even like coffee anymore,” Brown said as we lunched together at a pizza restaurant located where once stood a grocery store that the movement had protested for its hiring practices. “We had some good lawyers at the time, too,” Brown said. “We told the owner, ‘You have to let everyone eat here. If not, you have to put the words “private club” on the door.’”
People in Nashville who recall these efforts often refer to it as the clergy movement—though the group called itself “The Committee on Religion and Race” in at least one document. Truth is, very few working clergy could afford to be activists. It was simply too risky to their careers and their congregations.
“The Methodist Church in Nashville was not committed to integration—it was not. I was the black sheep of the church,” said Rev. Bill Barnes, a lifelong Nashville activist who pastored the all-white Carroll Street Methodist Church until 1965 and then took on the role of creating and supporting Edgehill Methodist, the city’s first interracial Methodist congregation. There were, Barnes recalled, only four full-time clergy who led marches, called for integration of churches, and joined sip-ins at segregated restaurants—Rabbi Randall Falk, Father Thomas Duffy, Rev. Kelly Miller Smith (of the prominent African-American congregation First Baptist Church Capitol Hill), and Rev. Dodson. “The divinity school was a big piece. And Sam [Dodson] really couldn’t do as much as the others. His congregation gave him a lot of grief,” said Barnes.
“They loved Sam,” remembered Brown, who was also an assistant at Calvary, “But Sam scared ’em. He scared ’em because they didn’t know if the church would be bombed. That was happening, you know.”
DODSON, BORN IN tiny Hampshire, Tenn., and educated at Vanderbilt and Yale Divinity School, did not set out to be an activist. He was assigned to Calvary in 1958, when he was 43. Though Dodson gave sermons supporting the sit-ins and made his views on integration clear from the beginning, the “trouble” did not start until Dodson accepted Gov. Frank Clement’s appointment to chair the Tennessee Human Relations Commission (THRC), which Clement created in 1963 specifically to investigate and propose legislation pertaining to civil rights issues.
“Now, that’s when the Calvary Church became very, very upset,” Dodson’s widow, Helen, who passed away in 2013, told me in a 2006 interview. No one overtly cited racial issues. Instead, the battle was cloaked under concerns that Sam had accepted the post without consulting the church board.
Dodson drafted legislation and ran meetings with the THRC, even as he continued to preach his always-12-minute sermons at Calvary every Sunday. Some church members protested, some left and started a new church, and many settled into an uneasy truce, willing to wait out their minister’s involvement in activism.
Then came the events of May 5, 1964. Frustrated over the slow pace of change from city hall, the clergy movement decided to march through downtown—an effort they called “The Ministers’ Witness to Human Rights.”
“That march was just, ‘Why don’t we all walk together and show them that we can walk together?’” remembered Rev. Brown.
With Dodson, Smith, Falk, and Duffy leading the way, about 150 clergy and students, both black and white, marched to city hall and presented a document to Mayor Beverly Briley. The document complimented the mayor on the racial progress that had been made thus far and made four additional demands: the immediate desegregation of all grades in all public schools, the passage of a public accommodations ordinance to ensure complete access to all public places for all citizens, full access to recreational facilities, and equal employment opportunities in city government.
“It is for recognition and attainment of these basic human rights that Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish [clergy] have joined on Tuesday, May 5, 1964, in a Ministers’ Witness through the downtown area of the city of Nashville ... We pursue these goals in fulfillment of our obligation as interpreters of Judeo-Christian heritage which ‘Proclaims liberty throughout the land unto all the inhabitants thereof’ in the name of the One God of all.”
According to a newspaper account of the day, Mayor Briley responded with the somewhat vague rhetoric of an elected official in a moderate town, telling the ministers, “I shall proceed to carry out the laws as they are given to me.” The march is barely a footnote in Nashville history books, but at the time newspaper wire services picked up the story. Letters of support and derision poured in to the congregations from around the country. At Congregation Ohabai Sholom, where Falk was rabbi, police apprehended angry citizens as they made their way onto the grounds. “There were overt threats,” Paul Cohn remembered. “It was everything you all [Christians] had, in spades. We were afraid [Rabbi Falk] was a lightning rod to attract violence. But he was speaking from a moral conviction. He was fearless and steadfast in his principles.”
For Dodson, the fallout after the march was complete and life-altering. The bulk of the hate mail was sent in May and June of that year. The Calvary Church board attempted to demote him shortly thereafter, and the Dodson family moved to Greece a year later.
Of all the mail I read, one letter stands out. A Calvary member wrote Dodson decrying not just the fact that he had been marching and going to meetings, but that he had left a church picnic to do so. Ministers, she said, should tend to their flocks first and deal with “personal,” political matters later. What’s more, she wrote, “I was sorry to see you leading the parade [as she called the march]. I think it would have been much better to protest ‘Printer’s Alley,’” a slightly seedy stretch of jazz bars and night clubs downtown.
Many of the letters were hateful, but many more took on a question we recognize in contemporary debates—to what extent should the church involve itself in civic life? Dodson never wavered in his belief that he was morally obligated to work toward true integration. He never ceased his attempts to bring his congregation along that same path.
“Sam was in his time,” said his granddaughter Karin Dodson-Gignoux. “You are confronted and then you respond. That is what Sam did. I think he knew pretty well there would be repercussions.”
Bill Barnes, who was forced out of his own church shortly after Dodson left Calvary, summed up his own activism: “It’s ‘God so loved the world,’ not ‘God so loved the church.’ It’s not a question of politics vs. religion. It’s a question of the moral tenor of the world we live in.”
DODSON STAYED at Calvary for a year after the march. During those months, the Civil Rights Act passed and the Voting Rights Act gathered the momentum it would need to become reality in August 1965. Though a long battle over school desegregation remained, the legal tide had turned, Jim Crow finally loosened its stranglehold over the city, and public opinion showed the faintest hints of a coming sea change. After The Tennessean printed a story about the Dodsons’ planned departure for Greece in spring 1965, letters of support began pouring in.
“You will be missed in Nashville. Your willingness to stand up for what you believe made your ministry here a constructive one.”
“I still believe Calvary should be the church in this conservative town to stand on the hill and be the ‘beacon’ of the future. You have started us in the right way.”
Reconciliation, however, requires more than kind notes, and racial progress requires an acknowledgement of the deep pain of racism.
For decades, the story of the clergy movement and Dodson’s activism was forgotten or ignored, particularly at the church that had been his home. Gradually since the early 2000s, some have pulled this story into the light. Church members who left because of Dodson have returned and apologized. After Dodson’s death in 2002, he was eulogized on the front page of the church paper.
In 2013, a committee at Calvary set to work on a permanent memorial to Dodson’s work and courage. Thanks to its efforts, the story of Dodson, the Tennessee Commission on Human Relations, and the Ministers’ Witness has escaped from the filing cabinet. A colorful timeline and display is now mounted on the wall outside the senior pastor’s office. Written in script across the top are the words “Dr. Rev. Samuel R. Dodson, Jr.: Man of Courage.”
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