Fellowship of Southern Churchmen

The Fellowship of Southern Churchmen was an interdenominational, interracial group of southern church people (lay and clergy) interested in race relations, anti-Semitism, rural dependency, labor conditions, and other social issues.

The Fellowship of Southern Churchmen, originally known as the Younger Churchmen of the South, called its first meeting at Monteagle, Tenn., 27-29 May 1934, and met again later that year. At its third meeting, held 11 November 1935, it adopted the new name. The Fellowship was an interdenominational, interracial group of southern church people (clergy and laymen) seeking to apply the Christian faith to social problems in the South. While changes in conditions caused shifts in emphasis and specific policies, the group's interests centered on race relations, anti-Semitism, rural dependence, and labor conditions.

The Fellowship sponsored workshops, work camps, conferences, and institutes throughout the South to advance the aims of the organization. Because the program was interracial and interdenominational, these activities served to promote the Fellowship's purpose of promoting human understanding and cooperation among people of different backgrounds. The Fellowship did extensive work with students, one of its aims being to bring southern students to choose vocations with a religious and social sense of mission. The Fellowship also promoted and participated in special schools and institutes for rural ministers and laymen.

The organization maintained close cooperation with other groups with similar interests and goals, i.e., the American Friends Service Committee; the Anti-Defamation League of the B'nai B'rith; the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; the Congress of Racial Equality; and many church, student, and labor groups. The Fellowship sponsored an organization known as Friends of the Soil, which sought to strengthen rural churches and join with them in encouraging and promoting better use of the soil, diversity and abundance in agriculture, and better economic and social arrangements. Friends of the Soil also sponsored legislation to promote the welfare of rural America.

The Fellowship also dealt with many emergency local situations involving issues of tenancy, labor, anti-Semitism, and other forms of discrimination.

Prophetic Religion, a mimeographed periodical, was the official organ of the Fellowship. It contained some news of the organization's activities, but seems to have been primarily concerned with discussions of faith and of topics relevant to the aims of the Fellowship of Southern Churchmen. The Newsletter was another mimeographed publication, designed to keep members and friends of the group informed of the work of the Fellowship and especially of its General Secretary. Fellowship Student News, as suggested by the title, was similar to the Newsletter, but written for student members. Aside from these regular publications, the Fellowship often issued special pamphlets concerning outstanding work of social significance being carried on by a southern minister or church group. They also published, or reprinted and distributed, pamphlets publicizing and condemning things such as the Ku Klux Klan and Jim Crow practices.