In Struggle for the Soul of the South: White Evangelical Protestants and Operation Dixie, Elizabeth Fones-Wolf and Ken Fones-Wolf have written white southern Christians back into the labor-centric pre-Brown civil rights narrative. This is long overdue, and very welcome. Whereas important books have addressed the role of communists in the various organizing campaigns of the pre– and post–World War II era, those books have neglected the religious beliefs of white Southerners and the intersections of those beliefs with notions about unions, white supremacy, and black civil rights. The CIO made the same mistake in 1946, and Operation Dixie paid for it.
At the same time as popular white southern religious culture has been neglected by scholars so too have the long roots of interracial egalitarian, nonsectarian Christian politics in the cause of civil rights and social justice. An important part of that story concerns leftist white Christian activists...