Summary Of God's Long Summer

Charles Marsh uses his book God’s Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights in order to discuss several of the prominent figures of the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi during the summer of 1964. In this book, Marsh writes about Fannie Lou Hamer, Sam Bowers, William Douglas Hudgins, Ed King, and Cleveland Sellers. These five people, in some way, had a very important impact on the Movement. Through this book, Marsh intends to “tell the story of what happened when differing images of God intersected, and then clashed, in one violent period of the black struggle for freedom and equality under the law.” Marsh achieves this goal by spending one chapter per individual examining his or her early life, religious development, and the way his or her religious convictions played a role in the Civil Rights Movement.

First, Fannie Lou Hamer was a woman who stood up for herself and her community, despite physical beatings and emotional manipulation initially to gain the right to vote fairly. Next, Sam Bowers also had a very strong religious motivation behind his work during the Movement, which pointed him in an entirely different direction than Hamer’s; Bower used his beliefs to justify his work for The White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, a branch of the KKK that was seen to be the most violent and militant part of the group. While these two individuals are perhaps the most different from the examples Marsh uses, this paper will examine Marsh’s treatment of a third figure of the Civil Rights Movement during the summer of 1964: Ed