Power in the Social Gospel: Howard Kester, Claude Williams and the Southern Tenant Farmers Union

Abstract

This essay explores how social gospelers in the U.S. South organized for relational power by building institutions for economic and political democracy in the 1930s and 1940s. In their organizing, Howard Kester and Claude Williams built relational power and institutions that fed the institutional ecology of the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s. While it might be surprising to find a worthwhile analysis of power by social gospelers like Kester and Williams, they keenly understood the role of power in theology, the work of the church, and movement building, especially as they organized for the Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU). Kester and Williams built relational power by building institutions through which grassroots people organized to build political and economic power to confront the ravages of racial capitalism.

1. Introduction

Howard Kester and Claude Williams helped build and sustain some of the more radical, class-based interracial organizing movements in the southern U.S. during the 1930s and 1940s. These organizations fed the institutional ecology of the Civil Rights movement that started in the 1950s (Harvey 2005; see esp. chapter 2, and pp. 97–106). While it might be surprising to find a worthwhile analysis of power in the life and work of social gospelers like Kester and Williams, their organizing with the Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU) and the Peoples Institute for Applied Religion (PIAR) demonstrates the importance of a nuanced understanding of the relationship between religion and power. In different ways and for different reasons, Kester and Williams built relational power as they organized with the STFU and PIAR.

The Section 2 of this essay sets up a conceptual frame of relational power. The concept of power, as philosopher Steven Lukes says, is “ineradicably evaluative and ‘essentially contested’” (Lukes 2021, p. 19). Rather than wading into the debates by adjudicating a definition of the concept, I adopt a relational understanding of power from the start and aim to show its merits through my larger argument. What we find in Kester and Williams is an implicit response to an often mishandled Niebuhrian criticism of the social gospel—that is, that social gospelers were naive idealists who lacked an understanding of power and individual and group interests in politics. While this critique certainly holds water for a number of theologians and clergy who might have self-identified as social gospelers, a recent trend in religious history has helped to complicate an easy one-size-fits-all notion of the social gospel, and so it makes an overarching critique of the social gospel’s relationship to power unlikely to succeed.1 Kester and Williams represent one tributary in a much larger waterway that is the social gospel movement in the U.S. in the early 20th century. This small but crucial line of thinkers represents a democratic socialist stream of thought that built relational power through institutions to organize for increased economic and political democracy.

This leads to the question of how the lives and work of Kester and Williams enfleshed their conceptions of relational power, especially through their work with the STFU and PIAR. With a working definition of relational power in hand, the Section 3 turns to the organizing biography of Kester and Williams in detail. The biographies of these two individuals and the history of the STFU provides an understanding of what was at stake in Kester’s and William’s organizing work with STFU and PIAR. To understand how relational power is built and sustained, we need to grasp—even briefly—figures in their own terms. To do this, we need a sense of their lives. Why is it they felt so committed to the radical social gospel? What did they sacrifice to live out their life’s calling? The sacrifices do not always bring successes—ironies, losses, and tragedies are common for Kester and Williams. Their sacrifices of relationships gain significance and complicate an easy understanding of how power is built in the harsh political, economic, and social conditions in which the STFU organized.

The Section 4 explores similarities and key differences between Williams and Kester and what we can learn from their different approaches to organizing in a class-based interracial organizing movement for working people that understands the power of religion. Kester is best captured as an institutional idealist, where his idealism strains his institutionalism. Williams, by contrast, is an instrumental institutionalist, whose alliances to institutions depended on his ability to organize through them.

In the Section 5, I offer several reflections on Williams and Kester as representatives of the radical social gospel organizing for relational power. First, we are able to re-evaluate stereotypical accounts of the relationship between religion and power in the social gospel. Second, the similarities and differences between Kester and Williams help to more keenly appreciate the role of institution-building as a strategy for building relational power on the left in the 1930s’ U.S. South. Third, Kester and Williams’ organizing demonstrates the value of a class analysis in power-building. Their lives demonstrate a lesson that the U.S. left learned in the early 20th century: that is, if you want to win politically, you need to build power outside of the ballot box and in the economy; you need to organize working people around their working conditions, which is undeniably a social question, and one that involves organizing churches, unions, racial and gender justice organizations, and so on. Political power needs economic power, and vice versa. Finally, these insights about institution-building help reframe the role that idealism and instrumentalism play in our contemporary politics on the political and economic left, especially for those of us who argue for an important role of religion in organizing movements.

2. Relational Power and the Radical Social Gospel

In 1976, Bernard Loomer outlined two conceptions of power: unilateral and relational power (Loomer 1976). For Loomer, too much has been said and thought about unilateral power. This definition presumes that power is defined, “as the ability to produce an effect, or as the capacity to bring into being, to actualize or to maintain what has been actualized”.2 This is a “demonic” view of power in its “destructiveness” (Loomer 1976, p. 8). It is “nonrelational” and “nonmutual”. In this view, the agent who is exercising the influence, control, manipulation, or so on is unaffected by this action; even if the agent is somehow impacted by the power relationship, it is “external” to the actor. As Loomer says, “But the main thrust of this kind of power is to produce a desired effect on the other in accordance with one’s own purposes. Ideally, its aim is to create the largest effect on the other while being minimally influenced by the other” (Loomer 1976, p. 8). In this view of power, the agent who acts over and against the other gains in power while the one being acted upon diminishes in power.

Relational power, by contrast, is as much about reception as it is about exertion. Power in this sense involves the “strength” it takes to absorb or undergo an effect (Loomer 1976, p. 17). The basic difference between unilateral and relational power has to do with the manner in which relational power has a clearer understanding of how power is a value term. Attributing power to an agent signals their value; calling someone powerless diminishes their value. In relational power terms, the ability to be influenced by another without losing one’s sense of self or one’s sense of agency involves a significant degree of power more than unilateral power, which cordons off the agent from the outside world.3 Power in this sense includes the capacity to undergo influence without being overwhelmed, dominated, oppressed, or exploited by the other. For Loomer, “Power is the capacity to sustain a mutually internal relationship” (Loomer 1976, p. 17). In this view of power, relationships are constitutive of the concept itself and the agents at play.4

A relational understanding of power, while still maintaining that power is innately a capacity, positions this capacity in a larger scene and situation, unveiling hidden and structural forms of power that otherwise fade into the background. Here, power is more than exertion or mere force, but includes relationships that influence political and economic conditions that constitute our daily lives, but often go unnoticed.5 More than this, a relational view of power provides deeper insights into how power is generated and sustained, rather than confining the examination of power to decisions by individual agents. This understanding of power also helps to distinguish power from like concepts, such as influence, manipulation, coercion, force, and authority. Power is generated and sustained through relationships that enable (or prevent) action.6

Loomer is not alone in adopting a relational understanding of power, or similar concepts such as love, justice, or freedom.7 In the preface to The Making of the English Working Class, E.P. Thompson famously defines class as a “relationship, not a thing”. Here, Thompson adds further definition to the value of the constitutive role of relationships. “Like any other relationship”, Thompson says, “[class] is a fluency which evades analysis if we attempt to stop it dead at any given moment and anatomise its structure”. Moreover, “we cannot understand class unless we see it as a social and cultural formation, arising from processes which can only be studied as they work themselves out over a considerable historical period” (Thompson 1966, pp. 9–11). Historians have picked up this relational approach to concepts like class and power, as they have explored democratic socialists in the U.S. South, radical social movements in the U.S. Southwest, and the Black radical Communists in the South (cf. Gerteis 2007; Green 1978; Kelley 2015). Theologians have also helped us see the value in taking up the relational understanding of class, rather than stratification approaches (Rieger 2022). The point of the relational approach to concepts like “class” is to prioritize the “agency of working people” and “the degree to which they contributed, by conscious efforts, to the making of history” (Thompson 1966, p. 12). To define the concept of class without considering the agency of working people is to shorn the concept of any history—what you have left is a rigid, lifeless thing. The same is true of the concept of power.

Power, as a capacity of one agent (individual or group) to act meaningfully with another, is always in relationships. Power is generated through relationships and is equally about reception as it is about exertion. This capacity to act happens in a myriad of ways, through imposition, force, influence, conviction, manipulation, negotiation, or compromise, but the action is meaningful and significant only in a relationship. Long-standing community organizer of the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF)—the community organizing network Saul Alinsky founded in 1939—Ernesto Cortes talks of the difference between unilateral and relational power: “Unilateral power tends to be coercive and domineering. It is the power of one party treating another as an object to be instructed and directed. Relational power is more complicated. Developed subject-to-subject, it is transformative, changing the nature of the situation and of the self. The IAF has spent fifty years teaching people to develop such relational power, mastering the capacity to act, and the reciprocal capacity to allow oneself to be acted upon” (Cortes 2015, p. 366). A relational view of power admits that power, as Lukes noted, is an evaluative concept, but it also brings in tow with it a larger view of the relationship between the self and the world.

To sustain relational power, relationships are needed that can buffer one relationship against other exercises of power. Institutions, as organized and normed collections of relationships, are needed that mobilize and then organize the relationships toward collective action. Kester and Williams understood how relational power scales up to the highest levels, and so found themselves drawn to like-minded radical Christians in the U.S. South organizing for economic, political, and racial justice.

Kester and Williams and the organizations they helped found are solidly situated within a small but crucial stream of Christian socialist social gospelers.8 Christian socialists were a small but important part of the white and Black social gospel movements and many of their insights are shared today in various fields of liberation theology: especially the preferential option for the poor, the solidarity among the oppressed, and the attention to the interlocking nature of capitalism’s exploiting and expropriating reality. Many white Christian socialists in the early 20th century were horrible on race and gender issues (and Kester and Williams themselves developed in their own understanding of race throughout their lives), but those Christian socialists in the Black social gospel tradition made radical critiques of capitalism that are still seldom heard today in progressive theological circles (see Dorrien 2015, 2018, 2023). This tradition, led by theologians, pastors, church leaders, organizers, and activists, goes to the roots of the social gospel message. That social ethical message, which figures like Kester and Williams radicalized, is that “Christianity has a social-ethical mission to transform the structures of society in the direction of social justice” (Dorrien 2009, p. 1).

To be a radical, on the one hand, requires a specific analysis of the problems our society is facing; it means one’s analysis goes to the root of the problems. For some early Christian socialists, going to the root of the matter means identifying the economic basis of racial and gender oppression; bringing about socialism will solve the race and gender problems. That position is reductionistic, and as we explore Kester and Williams’ life, we’ll see how they wrestled with this seductively simple approach. Recently, some religious ethicists, theologians, and social ethicists have turned to racial capitalism’s exploitation and expropriation and (in some instances, the separate matter of) domination in their work (Day 2022; Tran 2022; Lloyd 2022). This is a welcome turn, in my mind, as it joins scholars in the wider humanities and social sciences who have expanded and deepened the field of racial capitalism.9 What tends to happen, however, is that terms and discourse stand in and take over, muddling our grasp of how organizing movements built power in order to counter racial capitalism’s institutionalized social order.10 Others, however, may ask for an ordered relationship between the ills we face and seek a blueprint model solution. This often leads to a one-size-fits-all power analysis. Such explanatory strategies and power analyses often neatly provide organizers with practical strategies for theories of social, political, and economic change. The lives of Kester and Williams find things to be more complicated than this power analysis and theory of change. Organizing is not a straightforward affair; building power at times involves negotiation, compromise, and even loses on individual issue campaigns that in turn strengthen relational power.

By positioning Kester and Williams as figures in the “radical social gospel”, I mean that they “radicalized” the social ethical mission at the heart of the social gospel. Principally, I mean to highlight how the problems we face today in racial capitalism are intersectional and interlocking: going to the root of one issue means going to the root of all of the racial, gender, sex, economic, and political problems confronted in contemporary society, and focusing on the relational, social, and shared basis of the ideas, practices, and institutions that uphold and sustain the root problems.11 Kester and Williams provide further grist for the mill in thinking through this relationship between religion and power.

3. Howard Kester, Claude Williams, and the Southern Tenant Farmers Union

As many have written over the years, the STFU is an odd mix of early 20th century agrarianism, Christian socialism, holy roller Pentecostalism, and secular union organizing. In 1936, Kester wrote Revolt Among the Sharecroppers, a short book that covers the violent reality of sharecropping in the U.S. South. For Kester and others organizing in the STFU, what was at stake was not merely the transformation of a system of farming that exploited its workers, but capitalism’s institutionalized social order.12

This is what Howard Kester aims to do in Revolt Among the Sharecroppers, namely by “portray[ing] the life of the Arkansas sharecropper and the struggles of the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union against the domination of the plantation overlords” (Kester 1997, p. 37). Born in Virginia in 1904, Kester spent the majority of his childhood in Martinsville, when his father, William, transitioned from being a salesman to a tailor (Martin 1991, p. 6). The Kesters were deeply shaped by Victorian values and soon moved to the outskirts of Martinsville, where they would remain until William Kester’s tailoring business collapsed and the family lost everything but their house. Howard quickly became responsible for part of the family’s income and took a job with a local road construction crew in Martinsville. William started a second tailoring business in nearby Beckley, West Virginia, a booming coal town. Beckley was a local industrial center and grew steadily during Kester’s time there—and so did the local Black population, which raised racial tensions. Kester’s father soon joined the local Ku Klux Klan, and, as one of Kester’s biographers put it, William, “shared its white, Protestant, middle-class bias and probably equated membership with good citizenship” (Martin 1991, p. 15). William, however, found the violence abhorrent and soon withdrew his membership. Howard’s mother, Nannie, was deeply religious, being raised as Southern Presbyterianism, and she more than anyone else impressed upon him the importance of religion and education (Martin 1991, p. 9).

Kester attended Lynchburg College, where he was active in the ministerial association and the Young Men’s and Young Women’s Christian Association (YMCA and YWCA), the World Student Christian Federation, and the Student Volunteer Movement, and served as a student pastor for two local Presbyterian rural congregations; one was in Thurmond, WV, where miners were actively striking. Kester soon joined them, causing local elders to investigate and reprimand him for his unorthodox behavior (Martin 1991, p. 9).

Kester originally enrolled in Princeton Theological Seminary in the fall of 1925 but left that next spring after finding that the sort of education he was receiving there could not help him minister to or preach to his own working class Southern congregation. Kester was deeply involved in the YMCA, taking leadership roles and working to integrate the YMCA summer camps. His time with the YMCA was deeply impactful, throwing him deeper into racial and economic justice fights, as Kester joined others seeking to integrate student gatherings.

In 1926, he enrolled at Vanderbilt School of Religion, where Alva Taylor was teaching social gospel social ethics. Taylor attracted students like Kester, including Claude Williams, Ward Rodgers, and Don West, all of whom would become highly active in economic and racial justice fights in the South in the 1930s and 1940s (cf. Dunbar 1981; Grubbs 1971).

Claude Williams was born in 1895 in rural western Tennessee on a 14-acre farm Claude’s mother, Minnie, inherited. The farm was positioned south of present-day Union City, between the hills in the forks of the Obion river (Gellman and Roll 2011, p. 20). The family used it mainly for hogs, corn, berries, vegetables, and hens for their own subsistence, but were forced to sharecrop for their living. His father, Jess, taught Claude white racism and U.S. Southern exceptionalism; but Minnie came from a Republican family who “embraced Lincoln and abolition”, and instilled in young Claude his Cumberland Presbyterian Christian faith (Gellman and Roll 2011, p. 19). Minnie was slender and strong; and she pushed back against Jess’ Southern politics while disregarding Republican or Democrat alliances, instead asserting, “All I say is, I’m for the man that’s for the poor folks” (Belfrage 1944, p. 9). As a youngster, Claude would wake before sunrise with the family and travel by a mule-drawn wagon to the plantations in the “bottomlands” to sharecrop (Belfrage 1944, p. 11).

Claude spent his early years sharecropping. He was often at church revivals and his family and those who knew him told him he was called to the ministry. He briefly ran away from home when he was 11 and again at 13. He finally stayed away when he did it at 15 when he went to his cousin’s farm. His adolescence was spent in odd jobs with the railroad, or as a carpenter or painter’s assistant. Eventually, in 1916, Claude joined the army until 1921 when he returned home and his uncle asked him: “When are you going to take up your work?” (Belfrage 1944, p. 21). In 1922, Claude entered Bethel College, where he trained to be a minister and met and married Joyce King, who was also studying there. In 1924, Claude and Joyce left Bethel and the Cumberland Presbyterian Church, applying for a pastorate with the Presbyterian Church in the United States where he served several small churches outside of Nashville.

In the summer of 1929, Claude enrolled in Alva Taylor’s “special summer session on the Social Gospel” at Vanderbilt, where he met Howard Kester (Gellman and Roll 2011, p. 28). At Vanderbilt, Kester’s commitments to racial and economic justice led him to work with the Fellowship of Reconciliation, to work with the Fellowship Youth for Peace, to his own deep engagement with Christian socialism, to work with the Highlander Folk School (now Highlander Research and Education Center), and eventually to his work with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) as a lynching reporter. Traveling secretly to Southern towns, Kester wrote reports on major lynchings in the South that would help unveil the psycho-social, economic, and political roots of white supremacy and racial capitalism in the U.S. South. During that same summer when they met, Howard convinced Claude to attend a YMCA conference and Claude agreed but, “only on condition that he not be expected to share a room with a black man” (Dunbar 1981, p. 33). That was not to be the case, as a Black YMCA student secretly arrived late the opening night and “moved into bed with the sleeping Williams”. As Kester later said, “It was a brand new experience for Claude … but he made it through all right” (Dunbar 1981, p. 33; see also Belfrage 1944, pp. 57–58). As one chronicler of Kester’s and Williams’ work together narrates this moment, “Williams’s former race perspective was shattered, and in less than a year he uprooted his family and moved to Paris, Arkansas, to found a ‘Working Man’s Church’.” (Dunbar 1981, p. 33). It would be these relationships formed at Vanderbilt in the fights for economic and racial justice that would introduce Kester and Williams to the Southern Tenant Farmers Union and lead to Kester’s writing of Revolt Among the Sharecroppers.13

Revolt dramatically illustrates the political, economic, social, and personal conditions of sharecropping in the Arkansas Delta that the STFU were organizing to transform.14 In the pamphlet, Kester moves quickly to consider the historic and current conditions of sharecropping and its plantation form of capitalism. The plantation is the origin of Southern society, Kester writes, informing the “psychology of the people, the habits, manners, traditions, etc., which the plantation created and which now shadows the whole of southern life” (Kester 1997, p. 18). What the plantation set up has outlasted its original form—plantain capitalism pervades the “mills, mines and factories” that have come with increasing industrialization in the South (Kester 1997, p. 18). Beginning in the colonial period, where white and Black people were indentured slaves, plantation capitalism reaches its zenith in chattel slavery and King Cotton. For Kester, the point is that the Civil War never ended. “Free” labor—Black and white—now exists to only accept or reject what the planters offer sharecroppers for their labor. In plantation capitalism, white laborers quickly found themselves provided with racial reasoning to explain their domination. The “divide and rule” strategy of pitting poor white people against poor Black people was to the benefit of the planters.

That strategy still rules as Kester is writing his pamphlet—even in the policies of the New Deal. Kester notes that nearly 70% of farms in the South are farmed by tenant farmers.15 Times were already hard in the Delta when the Great Depression hit, and times only got harder (Greene 2016). President Hoover’s “conservative response” for rural Southern workers did little to help, and President Roosevelt’s New Deal policies, especially the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA), only continued the hard times, just under the guise of the New Deal.16

The AAA was the result of political pressure starting in the 1920s from federations of farmers and corporations, such as the American Farm Bureau Federation. Cotton prices in the early twentieth century were volatile and unpredictable due to increased global and domestic production rates, along with rapid industrialization and alternative products to cotton.17 Cotton prices fell after the Great War and the 1920s had a few good years but were mostly bad or worse. As Alison Collis Greene writes, “The past decade had brought plummeting cotton prices, a flood that burst through the Mississippi River levees and filled the Delta like a bathtub, and a rash of deadly tornadoes that ripped through the buildings the flood left standing. The year 1930, hoped many desperate Delta farmers, just had to bring better luck than the 1920s” (Greene 2016, p. 9). At first, the AAA promised relief for sharecroppers. There was a glimmer of hope as progressive and conservative administrators shared the implementation of the AAA, but the liberals were quickly ousted (cf. Grubbs 1971, ch. 3). The key to the failure of the AAA was that it vested local control and accountability only in the planters and landowners, who often controlled the judiciary.18 The hallmarks of the AAA that impacted sharecroppers most were its “plow up” and reduction programs that paid subsidies to planters for plowing up portions of their cotton crop or simply not planting on a certain amount of land (Kester 1997, p. 28; Woodruff 2003, pp. 157–60). Planters were supposed to dispense a proportion of this subsidy to their tenants and sharecroppers. Few did. Plenty more planters forcibly removed their tenants and sharecroppers, kicking them out of their homes, separating them from their only source of food and income. The AAA laid bare the degree of domination planters had over sharecroppers.

Kester’s aim in illustrating all of these conditions is then to highlight the power and threat the STFU poses to the dominant power structure. As an “indigenous movement”, the STFU arose from the “very soil which bore the sharecroppers’ bitter grievances” (Kester 1997, p. 54). Those who organized with the STFU understood their condition in this way—as one of wage slavery and its domination over their economic, political, social, and personal lives. “Now the sharecroppers were no longer willing to be slaves” Kester says earlier; “Now that the white and black slaves had stopped fighting one another and had joined together to struggle against their common enemy, the planter could no longer use the white man to beat down the black man or the black man to beat down the wages and living conditions of the white man” (Kester 1997, p. 15). The promise of the STFU was that it was a class-based, interracial organizing strategy that understood the power of religion.

The STFU organizing strategy drew heavily from political and organization culture of Black churches. Union locals often met in Black churches and STFU organizers were often preachers (Woodruff 2003, p. 165). Indeed, as Roll and Woodruff have illustrated, the political culture of Black nationalism, especially through the United Negro Improvement Association, and the NAACP helped lay the groundwork for the success of STFU locals in certain Arkansas counties where the majority of sharecroppers were Black (Woodruff 2003, p. 165; Roll 2010, pp. 95–102). But the STFU and those who supported it drew heavily from white and Black Christian socialist visions of justice, as Kester himself found his way to the STFU through his colleague at Vanderbilt who was now a well-known STFU organizer, Claude Williams.

After Williams moved to Paris, Arkansas, in 1930 to pastor a Presbyterian congregation, he quickly became involved with farmers and miners in the area. Paris was a center of the mining industry in Arkansas in the 1920s, and Claude wasted little time in supporting the miners when they went on strike for better wages and working conditions (Gellman and Roll 2011, p. 41). In the lead up to the strike, Williams had invited the United Mine Workers to use his church building to help in their organizing strategy; Claude had already begun to reach out to miners pastorally (Gellman and Roll 2011, pp. 44–46). His own organizing work through his church brought him into contact with the labor college and commune, Commonwealth College, which he would eventually become president of for a short period in the late 1930s. These relationships with miners and the “Commoners”—as they were called—led to the establishment of the Proletarian Labor Church and Temple in Paris. As historians Gellman and Roll describe it, “Williams intended the Labor Temple to be a refuge, worship house, and school for workers, modeled in part on Commonwealth College. … The Labor Temple would ‘proclaim the Kingdom of God: that in a system founded, in fact and practices, upon the principles of righteousness, equality and brotherhood there should be no hunger, cold nor nakedness’. … Williams sought to expand the denominational church because ‘if the Church is to be the CHRISTian Church it must lead the way’. This strategy stemmed from something Alva Taylor had taught Williams at Vanderbilt: ‘one can accomplish more fighting within that without’.” (Gellman and Roll 2011, p. 47).

But the Labor Temple was not to be, as the UMW and the Presbyterian Church pulled its support of the Temple and Williams. Conditions for miners got worse in Arkansas before they got better. His organizing and preaching from the harsh conditions of the miners led his church to eventually dissolve their relationship with him, claiming he was derelict in his ministerial duties, was a Communist, and “preaches a doctrinal view and belief which is at variance with the recognized tenets of his Church” (Belfrage 1944, p. 126). Williams grew despondent and desperate as he was out of work and without a direction. In 1934, Williams’ old Vanderbilt colleague Ward Rodgers had moved to Paris to stay with Claude and Joyce (Dunbar 1981, p. 70). There, Rodgers told Williams about the STFU and its potential. Soon after, one of the founders of the STFU, H.L. Mitchell, later spent some time in Paris at the Williams’ home and then, “urged Kester to help provide Claude ‘some sort of support so as to continue his work’”. (Gellman and Roll 2011, p. 56). It was through Christian socialists like Howard Kester and Ward Rodgers, and STFU organizers like H.L. Mitchell, that Claude found his way into southern tenant farmer organizing.

4. Power in the Social Gospel

Kester’s work with the STFU coincidences with a transformation in his understanding of the role of churches in radical social transformation. In the 1920s, he was “indifferent” to the role of churches (Martin 1991, p. 147). Now, he saw congregations and the Church qua Church as a crucial tool. “We will keep hammering away in the church, at the church, with the church”, he wrote, “in the knowledge that we stand on solid ground and with the ages and not on the sand which already slips away as the rains descend and the winds of a new day blow with might” (Martin 1991, pp. 147–48). For Kester, the promise of the congregations in radical social justice movements outweighs the problems. Kester saw the power in relationships and he continually sought out new networks through which he could work in order to build more power.

Two points bear mentioning here in considering how the organizations Kester and Williams were a part of translated their relational power into action. The first is a successful strike by STFU. The second is an unsuccessful alliance.

At the end of the summer in 1935, the STFU went on strike for higher pay. When the union was first polled regarding the strike, the results were overwhelming and dramatically in favor. The strike caught the planters off guard and at first they regarded the strike with little concern. Soon, however, the planters and their newspapers were silent and violence spoke: striking laborers were beaten, jailed, and kidnapped. “Partly to head off a possible revival of terrorism” Donald Grubbs relates, “but mainly because pay scales were actually raised by the strike to a new average level of seventy-five centers per hundred, the STFU called off the strike at the start of October” (Grubbs 1971, p. 85). The successful strike led to a swift increase in their membership roles and garnered national attention for its success in incredibly difficult circumstances.

This example illustrates how the relational power the STFU generated through mobilizing and organizing of sharecroppers is actualized into political and economic power through its striking. The political and economic opportunity structure was well suited for a strike—and thus in their first strike the STFU was able to claim success. This was not always the case—conditions shifted in later years when other strikes were attempted and failed.

The second point revolves around the fact that STFU leadership had long sought recognition from a national union that could deliver critical support and scale up their power to the federal level and it was the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO) that they were after. With the birth of the CIO in 1935, the STFU felt that it was poised to join and strengthen its cause. “With figurative horns blowing and cymbals crashing”, Grubbs tells us, “the greatest bandwagon in the history of the American labor movement was rolling onward—and the leaders of the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union wanted to jump aboard so badly that their legs hurt” (Grubbs 1971, p. 162). But at the 1937 annual convention, no clear pathway existed for alliance: there was a deep tension between the senior leadership of the CIO and the more radical unions whom were under the thumb of Communist Donald Henderson. As Grubbs puts it, the question was whether to obey the “hunter” (the CIO senior leadership in John L. Lewis and the United Mines Workers’ hierarchy) or to go with the “bird dogs” of Donald Henderson (Grubbs 1971, p. 163). Kester and Williams found themselves on opposite ends, which led to bitterness and hostility between the two.

In June, however, a proposal was struck between Henderson and the CIO. In July, the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers of America (UCAPAWA) was born. It would be through UCAPAWA that STFU could join the CIO. Kester and Mitchell clung to the hope that Lewis would recognize the STFU on its own, while Williams brought STFU delegates to their feet when during the September vote he cried, “The Lord spake unto the children of Moses: Go Forward. He that putteth his hands to the plow and looketh backward is not fit for the Kingdom of God. Go forward, forward into the CIO!” (Grubbs 1971, p. 168).

Problems began almost immediately, beginning with the promised autonomy of STFU within UCAPAWA. Soon came increased dues’ payment to UCAPAWA. Principally, for our purposes here, came the personal complaints of opportunism that Kester, Mitchell, and Williams all threw at each other (Grubbs 1971, p. 168). Relational power is only as strong as the relations that ground it. Distrust, bad faith, manipulation, and deception all eat away at power’s foundation. The relationship with UCAPAWA went from bad to worse, ending in 1939. Power, while certainly a capacity to act, needs to be grounded in relationships and a plan. You cannot organize with those you do not trust.

A U.S. American educator, co-founder of the Highlander Folk School, and fellow socialist traveler with Kester and Williams once claimed that Kester was a “saint”, and someone who, in the end, “did what he thought was the right thing to do” (Horton 1984). Howard Kester might be most accurately described as an institutional idealist. Kester was ultimately concerned with pursuing the “basic ideals and ideas of the Christian faith” (Kester 1974, p. 32). He had an aversion to pragmatists who compromised on strategy for achieving their goals. For Kester, his own commitment to the radical social gospel dictated that the means and the ends needed to align; to choose otherwise was to adopt a “disregard for truth”, where “the end justifies the means” (Kester 1974, p. 26). His own biography includes a long list of ecumenical social justice organizations that incubated, developed, and drew new folk into the racial and economic justice efforts. To call Kester a “saint” here is not to lionize him, but instead to highlight his idealism and his willingness to sacrifice relationships (and, thus, power) in order to maintain his ideals.19

Williams, however, was not an institutionalist; or, at least he was until the institutions abandoned him and then his instrumentalism kicked in. If Kester is an institutional idealist, Williams is an instrumental institutionalist. As Grubbs puts it, “Everyone who knew Williams recognized that, for him, program was everything and party was nothing” (Grubbs 1971, p. 173n28). For Williams, if his current outfit didn’t approve of his work, he would not let that stop his organizing; he’d organize around, within, or without. Kester’s life attests to the way he was committed to his ideals, building relationships—and breaking them—to live out his radical social gospel Christian faith. Kester’s idealism strained his institutionalism. By contrast, Williams was pragmatic in the sense that institutions and ideas are tools for reshaping the world. It was his instrumentalism that strained his institutionalism.

For example, one of the more notorious stories of social gospeler involvement in the STFU is the trial and expulsion of Claude Williams.20 In 1938, Claude Williams was running a series of seminars for labor leaders across Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas, and Missouri. Alongside fundraising tours for Commonwealth College, these seminars were in part for the benefit of STFU. In August, he planned to visit his STFU and future PIAR colleague, Rev. Owen Whitfield, in the Bootheel of Missouri to speak. On his way, he visited the house of J.R. Butler, a longtime friend and STFU leader. Claude stayed the night and left without his coat. When Butler’s nephew later picked it up, some papers fell out that outlined Commonwealth’s plan to take over the STFU for the Communist Party. Butler was furious. He released the papers to the red-baiting press and called for Williams’ expulsion from STFU. Kester jumped in, breaking a friendship nearly a decade old, for as one chronicler of the story related, “As committed mainline Socialists, Mitchell, Kester, and the other union leaders were suspicious and alarmed by what they perceived as a Communist wolf hiding under a non-factional Red Riding Hood disguise at Commonwealth” (Cobb 2000, p. 179). A full trial was held by the STFU and despite Claude’s appeal and protestations, by the end of the year, Claude’s work with the STFU was over.

After Williams was ousted from the STFU, he started the People’s Institute of Applied Religion (PIAR). Bringing together his closest friends and allies, he developed a mobile curriculum that sought to apply the ethics of Jesus and prophetic religion to the economic problems facing working people (Gellman and Roll 2011, chp. 4). PIAR held mobile seminars across the South and Midwest, enlisting Owen Whitfield and Winifred Chapel, among others. PIAR proved to be effective enough so that the Presbytery of Detroit eventually extended a short-term contract to Williams as the “Presbyterian Minister to Labor” (Gellman and Roll 2011, p. 127). But even here, Williams was eventually defrocked on “technical grounds” of heresy in what amounted to a red-baiting scam of a trial on bad evidence (Gellman and Roll 2011, p. 163).

Williams’ relationships with institutions are more fraught and dramatic than Kester’s. Williams grasped that relational power exists in institutions. Even when Williams was ousted by institutions, he sought to form his own to build relational power within the church. Rather than leaving the church, he found strength from associating himself with the denominational church and sought to follow Taylor’s advice to work from within congregations rather than from without.

5. Conclusions

Calling Kester an institutional idealist and Williams an instrumental institutionalist highlights their similarities and crucial differences. Both organized in a way that grounded power in relationships. Their organizing work demonstrates the difference between relational power and mere influence: relational power is about reception and exertion. Kester and Williams offer at least several lessons for contemporary reflections on the relationship between religion, power, and politics.

Williams and Kester help debunk the common assumption about the social gospel and power analysis. Their lives illustrate a concrete relationship between the social gospel and organizing movements on the ground. This places the radical social gospel in good company—along with certain strands of Latin American Liberation Theology and Black Liberation theology (cf. Pimblott 2017; Payne 2007; Whelan 2020). All three of these theological traditions play crucial intellectual, theological, institutional, and financial support roles in liberation struggles. Understanding the organizing conditions of the STFU in which Kester and Williams organized helps make clear why this matters: this was a life and death struggle for black and white tenant farmers in the South. Williams and Kester knew this. Their organizing for relational power demonstrates the impact of the radical social gospel in a class-based, interracial movement in the heart of Jim Crow America.

The long-standing and sadly dominant assumption that the social gospel always lacks an analysis of power is stubborn and inaccurate. Indeed, the very figure who popularized this critique, Reinhold Niebuhr, was a close colleague, supporter, and fundraiser for Kester and Williams. Not only is there a vital and important strand of radical social gospelers who understand the relationship between religion and power, furthermore their organizing work demonstrates that social justice movements need to build a certain sort of power—relational power, rather than unilateral power—that builds economic and political democracy. Kester and Williams and their organizing demonstrate the crucial focal point of organizing against racial capitalist cultural and social formations—organizing workers in the congregation, in the field, in the workplace, and in addressing racial capitalism’s entire institutionalized formation. Relational power operates in a wider timeframe than unilateral power; it is less brittle than unilateral power, and it is more sensitive to the environment in which relationships live. But for Kester and Williams here, economic power is just as crucial as political power. As Kester once said, “Whether you like it or not, we are already involved in class struggle” (Kester 1974, p. 16). As they organized for power, they sought to build relational, class-based power. Class and power, here, are best understood relationally.

The radical social gospelers and the movements they were a part of built real power; although ultimately the STFU collapsed, in its early years, it won in conditions that were some of the harshest organizing conditions in the early 20th century. Kester and Williams sought to build up organizations that fostered and incubated racial and economic democracy. These organizations did not replace grassroots organizing and organization development, but instead often played crucial supportive, amplifying, fundraising, and educational roles. And, as Williams shows us, institutions often frustrate the ethical mission that gave birth to them.

Part of the point here is to talk intentionally about relationships of economic and political power and their force in our lives. That is why it is important to talk about organizations—not just individuals or communities—as if organizations form organically without intention or struggle. Institutions and organizations consist of certain relationships of and between people and communities—building organizations is slow, patient work that involves getting those people, communities, and relationships organized together in a certain way and to do something specific. It is not enough to talk about communities or people as if they naturally come together to form organizations or to do things—it takes struggle and intention that often involve loss and sacrifice; success is not guaranteed as Williams and Kester knew well.

Kester’s idealism is a cautionary tale, especially in the way he broke relationships in order to maintain his own purity of ideals. While Kester’s (or William’s) life might be viewed as a failure—neither man found complete success in the organizations they founded or joined, nor were the movements they joined successful in achieving all their economic or political goals—what should not be missed is the reality that radical social gospel organizing often calls for as much pragmatism as it does idealism. Pragmatism in this sense does not necessitate moral compromise, but instead places agents in a larger situation and scene where relationships are viewed in their full context and friction, where easy answers and resolutions to conflict and political differences or strategies are not readily had; where ideas are tools; and where truth is as much about fitness to the world as it is about accurately representing ideals. Kester’s idealism teaches us that relational organizing is about building relational power and that this is not a straightforward affair unless one is willing to sacrifice relationships for a false sense of security that accompanies moral purity.

But if Kester teaches us a cautionary tale about idealism, Williams teaches us a lesson on the limits of instrumental politics. Williams’ instrumentalism accompanied a lone-wolf mindset that, at times, elided into a personality-driven form of politics grounded in the charisma of Williams and less one of relational power. Williams’ strategy within the STFU and PIAR largely depended on his personal ability to draw people into the movement and his organizations. PIAR is an excellent example of Williams’ engaging personality and organizing skill, and the limits of this strategy. Relational power is always dialogical, involving two or more agents who have a plan for action. But action itself cannot be the goal; and receptivity is as crucial to the generation and sustaining of power as exertion is—one voice cannot dominate the conversation, even if it is a charismatic, theatrical one tinged with a “rococo flair”.21

Economic and political democracy are built through relational power and it is sustained through the collective organization of cooperative economic and political bodies that vest power democratically in working people for working people’s communities. In different ways for different reasons, Kester and Williams organized with and in churches because they understood the social gospel to play a crucial role in radical social movements. Indeed, this is reflected in both of their varied histories in STFU. Kester at times played the role of a pastor, author, speaker, organizer, and educator. Williams, too, was an organizer, preacher, executive council member, and speaker. Social change happens when people come together to build economic and political democratic power for working people and their communities. Social change needs institutions, ideals, and instruments, and a keen balance between the three. Williams and Kester’s lives provide an important example for how relational power is built and sustained along with the ironies and losses that come with an ethical commitment to the radical social gospel.