HOUSES OF WORSHIP

Davidson College Presbyterian Church Social Justice Committee presents a special screening of the film “At the River: Struggle and Grace in the White South.” The screening will be held at 7:00 p.m. on Sunday, March 24 at DCPC Congregation House – 218 Concord Road.

A Question and Answer session with the Filmmaker, Carolyn Crowder, will follow the screening.

What did white Southern Presbyterian ministers do during the Civil Rights Era? Often isolated in small towns in the Deep South, some chose to be brave in spite of dangerous circumstances.

There are a lot of people who think ministers did nothing – or worse. Carolyn Crowder, raised in Montgomery, Alabama, during those hard times knows differently. She set out to uncover this generally unknown history through interviews with ministers who are now in their elder years. The result is the oral history project AT THE RIVER.

Focusing on Southern Presbyterian ministers who as very young men stood up to the culture, their churches and, sometimes their own families, AT THE RIVER provides witness to their brave actions and their clarity of thought and conviction. They were fired, defrocked, brought up on heresy charges, and threatened by the KKK and the White Citizens’ Councils. A simple sermon that mentioned in any way the unrest going on around them could get a man run out of town. They went on with the rest of their careers and never spoke much about what had happened to them during that era. One reason that this history is not commonly known is that they are humble and believed that whatever actions they took, small or large, were nothing compared to the suffering of black people around them who were facing sure violence or death.