Richmond's Priests and Prophets

“Richmond's Priests and Prophets offers an empathetic, balanced, and unflinching assessment of the white congregants who stumbled their way toward at least official declarations of openness and inclusion across racial lines. This monograph provides an excellent model for historians interested in expanding the scope and significance of local studies of the civil rights era.”
—Reading Religion

“This local history will appeal to Virginians, but those interested in civil rights, the school desegregation battles, and how white Christians navigated this era also should take notice of this book. Thompson offers useful insight into how one religious community confronted the problem of racial segregation in the years before 1960 and should serve as an invitation for others to do likewise. Richmond’s Priests and Prophets should remind scholars that assessing historical change that is slow or incomplete is still crucial to understanding what comes next.”
—Journal of Southern Religion

“Through a fresh analysis of the various desegregation strategies and patterns of the era, Thompson offers a timely and significant insight into one of the most pivotal American movements.”
—The Project on Lived Theology

“Richmond's Priests and Prophets makes a substantial contribution to scholarship in an empirically grounded and conceptually engaging way.”
—Paul Harvey, author of Through the Storm, Through the Night: A History of African American Christianity
 

“Thoroughly examining the clergy in one upper-South city, but one that just happened to have been the capital of the Confederacy, Thompson provides a compelling argument that the standard evaluation of the white southern clergy as too invested in advancing up the ministerial ladder ‘ain’t necessarily so’ and raises a cautionary voice against the ‘Silent South’ thesis."
—Andrew Manis, author of A Fire You Can't Put Out: The Civil Rights Life of Birmingham’s Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth