Williams, Claude

WILLIAMS, CLAUDE (1893–1977). A pioneer in liberation theology, Claude Williams devoted himself to a career of social activism that spanned from the early 1930s until his death. Born in western Tennessee, Williams underwent a transition from a Bible-thumping evangelist to an advocate of socialism and racial justice under the guidance of Dr. Alva Taylor of Vanderbilt University. He first attracted public attention for his work with miners in Paris, Arkansas, a small company town at the foot of the Ozarks. His work in organizing unemployed councils and support for a miners’ union got him expelled from his parish, but Williams discovered that religion could be a powerful tool in mobilizing previously conservative southern workers. Williams had developed biblical metaphors for class struggle and trade unionism, crystallized in charts and sermons, that he strongly felt were applicable throughout the South.

Williams next tried his approach with Black and white sharecroppers of eastern Arkansas who faced eviction and impoverishment as a result of the Depression and government crop-reduction programs. As an organizer for the Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU), Williams discovered that Protestant fundamentalism represented an important cultural link between Black and white workers that could be employed to unite them in struggle. After being driven out of eastern Arkansas by local planters, Williams assumed a position as director of Commonwealth Labor College in Mena, Arkansas, where he rallied support for the STFU among students and faculty.

Williams’s career in the STFU was cut short by conflict with Socialist leaders of the union over his Communist Party ties and his links to the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). In 1939 Williams left the union, along with several Black ministers who had been key local leaders. He thereupon formed the “People’s Institute of Applied Religion,” an organization designed to train Black and white lay preachers as organizers for the CIO. Armed with Bible charts, Williams supporters played an important role in CIO organizing drives in Memphis and Winston-Salem.

In 1942 Williams’ work attracted the attention of the Detroit Presbytery, who brought him to that city to help defuse tensions between Black and white southerners working in defense plants. Williams sent shop preachers into the factories to counteract the oratory of right-wing evangelists affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan and Gerald L. K. Smith. Williams refused to concede the terrain of fundamentalism to the religious Right; he was convinced that the “scriptural heritage of the people” could be given a progressive slant.

When the war ended, Williams moved to Birmingham, Alabama, where he hoped to aid in a renewed southern organizing drive of the CIO. But the growing atmosphere of anticommunism, coupled with segregationist agitation, made it difficult for him to make ties with the local labor movement. Williams moved his headquarters twenty-five miles south to Fungo Hollow, where he hoped to hold interracial “people’s institutes” outside the purview of Birmingham authorities. But the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and White Citizens Councils made it difficult to conduct open political work. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Williams endured cross burnings, beatings, and fires set on his land. By the early 1960s, civil rights activism had created a new audience for Williams’s message. He put his Bible charts and sermons in the service of a voter-registration campaign among Blacks in Bessemer, Alabama. He helped train some ministers and students for work in Mississippi. By the late sixties, as segregation finally crumbled, Williams’s home became a center of discussion for Black and white activists from all over Alabama. The work of Black ministers like the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., confirmed the approach that Williams had long advocated—finding a message in Protestant evangelism that could mobilize Black people in a struggle for racial justice and working people of both races in their quest for a better life.

Dunbar, Anthony P. Against the Grain: Southern Radicals and Prophets, 1929–1959. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1981.

Naison, Mark D. “Claude and Joyce Williams: Pilgrims of Justice.” Southern Exposure 1 (winter 1974).

Claude Williams Papers. Walter P. Reuther Labor Library. Wayne State University. http://reuther.wayne.edu/node/3084/