Hilton Head woman’s knees felt like jelly when she helped integrate America at a church ‘kneel-in’

Emma Campbell of Hilton Head Island dressed in her Sunday best to step into history.

It was Sunday morning, June 16, 1963. The sun was not nearly as hot that day as the searing racial tension in Jackson, Miss.

A week earlier, NAACP leader Medgar Evers was murdered by a white supremacist. Just the day before, a march following the funeral almost erupted into a violent clash with police in the capital city.

Evers’ widow, Myrlie, would write two weeks later in LIFE magazine: “We all knew the danger was increasing. Threats came daily, cruel and cold and constant, against us and the children. But we had lived with this hatred for years and we did not let it corrode us.”

Enter quiet college junior Emma Joffrion from Natchez, Miss., four years shy of marrying Emory Campbell of Hilton Head 50 years ago this weekend.

She volunteered for a new civil rights campaign called “kneel-ins.” It was a peaceful, graceful attempt by blacks to integrate “white” churches in Jackson. They hoped it would open doors not just to a pew beneath stained glass images of Jesus, but to dialogue and maybe reconciliation.

For the most part, it didn’t work. Ushers shooed the blacks away.

But on this morning, Campbell and three friends from Tougaloo College outside town became the first blacks to be seated in a “white” Protestant church in Jackson.

It was reported in The New York Times and Los Angeles Times. The Associated Press photo of them exiting the church is on the cover of a new book by Carter Dalton Lyon and the University Press of Mississippi: “Sanctuaries and Segregation: The Story of the Jackson Church Visit Campaign.”

It’s been the subject of other books as well.

But Campbell never told her parents.

That day

Campbell and her roommate were driven to church by the wife of the Tougaloo College chaplain.

They were to dress nicely, perhaps holding a Bible in a gloved hand. They were not to argue when they were told they could not come in.

Campbell and Camille Wilburn got out at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church across the street from the governor’s mansion. Twenty-six-year-old usher John Anderson saw them coming and dashed inside to ask a vestryman what to do. Sherwood Wise said, “John, we’re going to seat them.”

As the students were shown to seats near the rear, people asked why they were there.

“I’ll never forget the woman dressed so nicely who said, ‘You need to go to your own church,’ ” Campbell recalled last week in an interview at her home on Spanish Wells Road, filled with art, books and awards.

Two other friends from Tougaloo who had been booted from one church door that morning were seated behind them, but Campbell didn’t know it.

As the parishioners alternately stood up and kneeled down, Campbell said, “My knees were like jelly. They were shaky, almost liquid-like.”

She doesn’t recall the sermon, but the book says the Rev. Christopher Keller addressed the fear and tension in the community, and the murder of Evers. It says he “pointed out that in contrast to achievements in such endeavors as space travel, there were no concurrent achievements in human relations.”

Back on campus, the girls shared a “yessss!” moment.

Terror

Campbell’s father worked in a hardware store, and her mother was a nurse.

They kept their heads down, and didn’t stir the waters — so all five of their children could get a college education they were convinced would level the playing field.

The moderate preachers in Jackson who tried to edge their congregations toward integration all lost their jobs.

And job security was the fear of Campbell’s parents as well.

“That was the hold they had on us,” she said.

But Tougaloo was a breeding ground for dissent. It is a private school that had at the time an integrated faculty, and visits from Joan Baez and Martin Luther King Jr. Campbell called it an oasis in Mississippi, created in an old plantation house.

It had the “Tougaloo Nine” — students arrested at a “read-in” trying to enter a whites-only public library. At another time, 400 students were arrested and incarcerated at a fairground. The school had sociology professor Ernst Borinski, who fled Nazi Germany and became a civil rights leader. And it had white chaplain Ed King, who organized the “kneel-ins.”

As the civil rights movement crept into Jackson, Tougaloo students were going to hear speakers in black churches downtown almost every night.

They wanted to change the world but also keep up with their studies and not cost their parents their jobs.

Campbell’s class of 1964 was raised on “colored” water fountains, weaned on church bombings, then tossed into the world of the Freedom Summer.

“It’s hard to imagine,” Campbell said. “Just the fear of going out of your house. They talk about terrorism. That was a terrible thing, living in that kind of terror.”

New Jim Crow

Campbell got her degree in biology, taught briefly in a dirt poor Mississippi town where sharecropping dictated the school calendar, and then headed north to study at Brown University.

She then studied at a Harvard Medical School hospital, where she met Emory Campbell, a member of the Hilton Head Island Hall of Fame, director emeritus of the Penn Center on St. Helena Island, and the inaugural chairman of the federal Gullah Geechie Cultural Heritage Corridor Commission.

She taught sciences in Beaufort County schools for 15 years and was district director of sciences for another decade before teaching 11 more years at the University of South Carolina Beaufort.

She and Emory reared two children on Hilton Head: Ochieng, a mechanical engineer in Alabama, and Ayoka, an attorney in Atlanta.

Campbell didn’t tell her parents about the kneel-in, but she sure told her children.

“This generation needs to know, and I’m afraid they don’t,” she said.

She sees new signs of Jim Crow.

“We’re suffering from that same kind of pressure right now: people who want to do right, but society seems to want to hold them at bay,” she said.

She said, “It seems that to keep what you’ve got, you just have to keep at it. You can’t ever relax.”

On Hilton Head, she sees “economic segregation.” She sees inequities in the tax burden on residents of poor homes that now sit next to fine homes.

“It’s almost as bad as the ‘colored’ and ‘white’ signs,” Campbell said. “It deprives people of a livelihood and their land.”

She looks back on June 16, 1963, with a bit of wonder.

“I just think the momentum of the time called us to do whatever we could,” she said. “That and strong convictions.”

This story was originally published September 4, 2017 at 4:17 PM with the headline "Hilton Head woman’s knees felt like jelly when she helped integrate America at a church ‘kneel-in’."