Robert F. Kennedy is welcomed to Tougaloo College by students and by chaplain Ed King (the tall man to Kennedy’s left) in 1967. (Photo courtesy of The Tougaloo College Archive)
United Methodist Focus | July 23, 2026
I hope you have seen stories published following the death on July 4 of Ed King, my friend and colleague from my days as a Mississippi pastor. The obituary for Ed in the New York Times cites historian John Dittmer’s description of King as “the most visible white activist in the Mississippi [civil rights] movement, and he paid a heavy price for honoring his convictions.”
Formative Years
Ed grew up during the 1950s in Vicksburg, Mississippi, and in Crawford Street Church, the largest Methodist (now United Methodist) church in the city along the Mississippi River. The memories of the Civil War loom large there due to the city’s significance in the war. The siege of Vicksburg, lasting over a month, took place in 1863 with Union forces led by Ulysses S. Grant. Confederate forces surrendered on July 4, 1863, one day after the surrender of Confederate forces led by Robert E. Lee at the Battle of Gettysburg. In 1866 Congress established the Vicksburg National Cemetery, the largest Union Civil War cemetery in the nation. Over 17,000 Union troops, including 7,000 Black soldiers, are buried there.
In that Southern-plus environment, Ed attended public school and church shaped by the same forces regarding race as other children and youth of his era. But as a young person, Ed King came to see the evil of segregation and racism. He arrived at United Methodist-related Millsaps College in 1954 where he found some sympathetic faculty and students. In those days, interracial gatherings took place among students and faculty from Millsaps and Tougaloo College, another local college that was not only serving primarily Black students but was an increasing center of civil rights activity. There he met NAACP leader Medgar Evers who encouraged him to join the civil rights movement. Such mixed-race gatherings of peers were not happening elsewhere. This is part of Millsaps history that led the editor of the New York Times and Mississippi native Turner Catledge to call Millsaps “the most courageous damn little college” in the country. However, during King’s years there, community pressure forced the ending of these interracial gatherings.
Seminary in Boston and Return to Mississippi
After Millsaps, Ed entered seminary at United Methodist-related Boston University School of Theology where his roommate was Woodie W. White, a Black student from New York who is now a retired United Methodist bishop. While in seminary, he went with a group to Montgomery, Alabama, where he met Martin Luther King, Jr., and was arrested for the first time. He remained in Boston to complete two degrees before returning to Mississippi in 1963 as chaplain at Tougaloo College.
While previously admitted to the all-white Mississippi Conference “on trial,” the provisional step in the Methodist Church at the time, he would be considered for full membership at the 1963 annual conference. Just before the beginning of annual conference, Ed joined Tougaloo students in a sit-in at the Woolworth’s lunch counter in downtown Jackson. While the protesters remained nonviolent, the whites there attacked them and beat one student savagely. King and the Tougaloo group were arrested. King got out of jail just in time to attend annual conference that was meeting only blocks from where the demonstration took place. Although I was still in high school at the time, I remember hearing that he was turned down. The vote among clergy was 89 to 85 to discontinue his conference membership.
Bishop Charles Golden, a Mississippi native, was at the time serving as bishop of the segregated Central Jurisdiction Mississippi Conference. Readers may remember the pivotal roles Bishop Golden played in Jim Lawson’s ministry. Bishop Golden invited Ed to join the Central Jurisdiction conference, becoming the only white clergy member. Ed remained there until the merger of the two racially constructed conferences into one conference. That is when I first came to know Ed personally.
Tougaloo Years
Ed mentored a generation of Black civil rights leaders as chaplain of Tougaloo College in Jackson. One of those students was Mississippi Congressman Bennie Thompson, who chaired the U.S. House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Thompson, a United Methodist, said that King was his “spiritual and political guide” who “pulled me into the Civil Rights Movement.” King and Fannie Lou Hamer were among the cofounders of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party that challenged the seating of the all-white regular Mississippi delegation to the 1964 Democratic National Convention. While they were unsuccessful in unseating the white delegation, Hamer’s powerful testimony raised voting rights as a priority. Another student at Tougaloo was Constance Slaughter-Harvey, who became the first Black female graduate of the University of Mississippi Law School and the first Black female judge in Mississippi. Upon Ed’s death, she remembered him as “one who sacrificed himself for the good of the cause, and that cause was justice and service and love.”
The cover image is of Robert F. Kennedy’s visit to Tougaloo that occurred in April 1967 when Kennedy was in Jackson for a Senate Subcommittee hearing on the War on Poverty featuring, among others, Fannie Lou Hamer and NAACP attorney Marian Wright. I attended that hearing and for the first time met many of the key figures in the Mississippi civil rights movement. The Tougaloo visit that involved Ed King was in the evening. At noon that day, Senator Kennedy had come to Millsaps College to speak, where I had the opportunity to hear him. Marian Wright approached Senator Kennedy’s aide Peter Edelman and said the senator should meet the people with whom she worked. The next day Kennedy toured the Mississippi Delta and encountered children suffering from malnutrition comparable to those seen only in poor nations. That revealing visit and its media coverage led to the creation of the Citizens’ Board of Inquiry into Hunger and Malnutrition. Perhaps most importantly, the time in the Delta made an indelible and haunting impression on Senator Kennedy.
Following his time as chaplain at Tougaloo, Ed taught sociology at the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson and remained active throughout the state in justice causes.
Faith Formation Matters
Interestingly, Ed’s convictions about racism and the sin of segregation came well before he left Vicksburg for college and seminary. Heather Hahn, in her excellent story for United Methodist News Service, reports speaking with John Elford, who had talked with Ed when writing Elford’s informative book Our Hearts Were Strangely Lukewarm: The American Methodist Church and the Struggle with White Supremacy. When Elford asked Ed about the influences on him as a young person that led him into social justice, Ed gave him a surprising answer. Elford reported, “He said it was Sunday school classes and youth meetings at his Methodist church growing up. There he first learned that the Methodist Church had Social Principles.”
Today most see Sunday school as a model of another era, and so it is in many ways. For much of Methodism, it was the driving force for formation and growth. And in the 1950s, a church like Crawford Street would typically have a fine Christian education program. Keep in mind that it was common until the late 1950s or early 1960s for Sunday school attendance to be larger than worship attendance. In fact, it was 1961 before worship attendance was even recorded as an official statistic. In 1961, several years after Ed left Vicksburg but the first year where attendance can be compared, Crawford Street had 1,433 members, 1,036 Sunday school members, and average attendance of 427 in Sunday school and 331 in worship. That was not uncommon, particularly in the South.
Furthermore, the denominational publishing house prepared age-level literature to educate students about the issues of the day and Methodist principles, including dealing with the explosive subject, among whites, of race. White clergy from that era in Mississippi will remember the battles to keep denominational literature in churches. Boycotting Methodist curriculum came just after withholding apportionments in the arsenal of church resistance on race. Other publishers gladly filled the gap. The alternate literature carefully avoided the subject of integration and would not feature pictures of mixed-race groups. But a church with the status of Crawford Street would never have abandoned Methodist literature for fear of being associated with the most racist churches.
As the Sunday school movement continues to wane, we still need faith formation for all ages and resources from those who understand both Wesleyan theology and Wesleyan justice. There must be a plan and material to meet the needs.
As the Sunday school movement continues to wane, we still need faith formation for all ages and resources from those who understand both Wesleyan theology and Wesleyan justice. There must be a plan and material to meet the needs. Suppliers other than United Methodist will gladly sell materials, but they will not ensure that the training in Wesleyan holiness of heart and life is embedded in every resource.
How else will witnesses like Ed King experience the faith formation that led him to the courageous actions so different from others who grew up in the same culture of racism and segregation?
Reconciliation
Elford writes about the extensive visits beginning in 1963 to segregated white churches in Jackson by integrated groups organized by King and Medgar Evers. As the groups were turned away, more joined the movement. Woodie White, by then a pastor in Detroit, joined a group that tried to worship at St. Luke’s Methodist Church and were turned away. On June 9, 1963, a group was turned away from Galloway Memorial Methodist Church. Word of the action reached the longtime pastor, W. B. Selah, during the service. The much-beloved pastor cut short his sermon to read from a statement he had prepared for such a day. He said he loved the congregation but could no longer serve where people were turned away because of race. The associate pastor, Jerry Furr, left as well. Then on Easter Sunday 1964, two Methodist bishops, James K. Mathews (white) and Charles F. Golden (Black), were turned away from Galloway.
Galloway’s policy of racial exclusion only ended in 1966. By that time hundreds of members had left to form an independent Methodist church. Bishop Woodie White would return to St. Luke’s to preach, although decades later. Within a few years of being turned away (and a change in the local bishop), Bishop Mathews returned to Galloway to speak. But perhaps more significant is the relationship of Ed King with Galloway that Hahn describes. He made Galloway his church home, and upon his death, plans for his funeral to be held at Galloway began. A former Galloway pastor Joey Shelton said of Ed, “He held no malice.”
The Last COFO Sign in Mississippi
COFO sign from 1964 (Photo Courtesy of Lovett Weems)
I end with events that capture Ed King’s passion for never forgetting history and his consummate thoughtfulness. When Ed worked with the University of Mississippi Medical Center, he often traveled through the state. When he came near where I was serving as a pastor, he would stop by – always with a purpose. Ed was always up to something and seeking help. One time his request was far different than usual. Ed told me that he had discovered that the last remaining COFO sign with the original logo from the 1960s was in my town, hanging on an unoccupied building now owned by a white man. The Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) was a coalition of national organizations engaged in civil rights activities in Mississippi. The organization focused on voter registration and education. COFO launched the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project in 1964. Ed was anxious to obtain and preserve this piece of history.Ed suggested that I explain to the property owner the significance of the sign and ask if he would donate it for the sake of civil rights history. I was supportive but doubted the wisdom of the approach Ed had in mind. I knew the owner probably had no idea of the significance of the sign and perhaps had never noticed it since the building was currently unused. I told Ed, “I think I can get the sign for you, but you need to leave it to me and some local allies to obtain it.”
Some months later, Ed called again late in the day as I was preparing for an evening event. He wanted to stop by our house for a few minutes. He brought me a gift. He had recently attended an estate sale for a descendant of Bishop Charles Betts Galloway. Bishop Galloway was the most influential Mississippi Methodist of the 19th century. He graduated from the University of Mississippi at 19, became pastor of First Church, Jackson, at 24, and became bishop at 36, serving until his death in 1909. All federal, state, and local offices in the state closed the day of his funeral. Galloway Memorial Church is named after him. Knowing I shared his passion for our history, Ed had purchased for me two books from Bishop Galloway’s library containing the bishop’s signature. I was surprised by the gift – and deeply touched by his thoughtfulness.
Ed King was the most courageous person I have ever known. I was not surprised to hear that Bishop White, his friend of almost 70 years, described Ed as “the bravest person I’d ever met.” Ed seemed to have no fear when his convictions were at stake. He bore the scars, including physical scars, of a brave life without regrets.
Notes
I have benefited greatly from the superb job Heather Hahn did of capturing the richness and significance of Ed King’s life and ministry in her story at the time of his death. One of her sources was Joe Reiff, author of Born of Conviction: White Methodists and Mississippi’s Closed Society (Oxford University Press, 2015, 2025 [paperback]). His book covers much of the same period dealing with a statement of conscience by 28 white Mississippi Methodist ministers in January 1963 shortly before Ed returned to Mississippi. Joe’s father, Millsaps College professor Lee H. Reiff, was a close friend of Ed King and shared in many of the critical civil rights events of the 1960s. Several of the citations I use are from Hahn’s article.
Cynthia Slaughter-Harvey comments. “Legacy Celebrates the Life and Legacy of Rev. Ed King” by Constance Slaughter-Harvey, Scott County (MS) Times, July 9, 2026.