| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Peter C. Murray. Methodists and the Crucible of Race 1930–1975. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. 2004. Pp. xix, 266. $44.95.

In 1961, a Commission of Thirty-Six (C36) representing the Methodist Church's governing body announced a plan to end segregation in the denomination by abolishing the Jim Crow Central Jurisdiction (CJ). The latter in its quadrennial conference responded by appointing a Committee of Five to explain to C36 how African Americans thought desegregation should proceed. Regional jurisdictional conferences, except those including most white southern Methodists, immediately joined the CJ in planning an end to segregation although the latter was always more insistent and specific than other bodies in attacking white Methodist racialism. These committees and commissions and jurisdictions and regions reflect the political and bureaucratic structure of an American religious denomination that probably represents a cross section of middle-class America better than any other. With their groups and plans and meetings and pronouncements and caucuses, their rhetoric, pragmatism and occasional idealism Methodists struggled with what Peter C. Murray calls "the Crucible of Race." Eventually, white southern jurisdictions, too, found ways to change by rearranging regional structures above the local level—always after the larger society, though civil law and social movement had already legitimized change. That is, the "church" followed; it did not lead—and this is a source of disappointment for the author and probably for progressive and conservative Methodists as well, if for differing reasons.

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