Special to United Methodist Insight | Dec. 2, 2025
People speak of the current political situation in the United States as unprecedented in its suppression of dissent, and so it is. But anyone coming of age in Mississippi prior to the mid-1970s will remember that Mississippi had a series of politicians some would liken to Trump that led historian James Silver to call Mississippi of that era “The Closed Society.” His book, sparked by an insurrection attempt in 1962 to prevent James Meredith’s entrance to the University of Mississippi, came out just before three young civil rights workers were arrested in 1964 on a Sunday night, murdered, and buried in a pond dam in Neshoba County.
U.S. Senator and former Mississippi governor Theodore G. Bilbo. (Public Domain Photo by Harris & Ewing, from U.S. Library of Congress(
Mississippi’s original “closed society” politician was Theodore G. Bilbo. He served as governor twice and was elected to the U.S. Senate three times where his antics and racism were so notorious that the Senate refused to seat him after his 1946 election. He died the next year before his seating was resolved. Bilbo used his tremendous oratorical skills to slander anyone who opposed him. He was said to have “a thorough command of invective.” A shameless self-promoter, he boasted of being “a marvel of intellectual brilliance.” He fired three university presidents and the dean of the medical school, replaced them with unqualified people, thus costing the schools their accreditation for two years.
It was into this closed society that 28 men, later to become Methodist ministers, were born—a society where Bilbo made sure racism was the one and only issue that mattered for whites and no deviation from white supremacy was permitted. Unfortunately, the Bilbo legacy did not die with him. The racist narrative was enforced by every level of government, media, and the social establishment, including white religion. The only exceptions were Black church traditions and the Roman Catholic church spearheaded by a young crusading priest, Bernard Law, editor of the diocesan newspaper.
It was in 1963, the white-hot period between the Ole Miss riot and Neshoba County murders, that these 28 white Methodist pastors in Mississippi issued a statement called “Born of Conviction.” It called for racial tolerance and keeping open the public schools in the face of expected racial integration. The words, published in the Mississippi Conference newspaper, were fairly tame, even in those times. The reaction was not. Silver would write a year later that the statement “still has the state and the church in an uproar.”
I was in high school at the time. I remember hearing a teacher who was Methodist say sarcastically, “All of them will probably get promotions next year.” That showed how little she knew about the politics of the Mississippi Conference (in those days, the white churches in the southern half of the state) and the rage that came from white laity. Instead of receiving support, some of the 28 pastors never entered their current congregations again to preach.
Originally published in 2015, Joe Reiff’s masterful book Born of Conviction: White Methodists and Mississippi’s Closed Society, is now available in a paperback edition from Oxford University Press, making it far more accessible to all who can benefit from it. His book tells a crucial and overlooked story from some of the worst days of the civil rights movement in Mississippi. It is a captivating social, cultural, and religious account with exhaustive and impeccable scholarship, revealing the deeper narrative beyond the pastors' statement and its aftermath.
Anger among whites in Mississippi accelerated after the use of federal troops in 1962 to integrate the University of Mississippi. The year 1963 was an election year in Mississippi, and race was the dominant issue in virtually every campaign with an electorate still made up almost completely of whites. The significance of the “Born of Conviction” statement was not in its content or in the disproportionate reaction to it among whites. Reiff shows how the statement and its aftermath served to unmask the myth that all white Mississippians shared the dominant racist narrative of the time.
These 28 clergy paid a price for conscience, but they would be the first to acknowledge that in those dire times the greater and more lasting pain was born by the Black population of the state and their leaders. And they would acknowledge the sacrifices of the handful as well of whites who joined civil rights advocates and often lost connections to place and family with some of them needing to leave Mississippi.
Most of the 28 left the state, but several completed their entire ministries in Mississippi. Both groups represented some of the finest pastors Methodism produced in that era. Only six are still living, but none will ever be forgotten for a small act that cost them dearly but became a symbol of hope in an era of despair that feared things could ever change.
The Rev. Lovett H. Weems Jr.
Wesley Theological Seminary Photo
The Rev. Dr. Lovett H. Weems Jr. is senior consultant at the Lewis Center for Church Leadership, distinguished professor of church leadership emeritus at Wesley Theological Seminary. His most recent book, The Right Questions for Church Leaders, was published earlier this year by Abingdon Press.