From Reconciliation to Revolution

"Cline’s study of the Student Interracial Ministry (SIM) is both a meticulous institutional history of a lesser-known civil rights organization and a timely and thoughtful examination of the church’s role in confronting injustice. Highly recommended.” — CHOICE

“[The Student Interracial Ministry] consistently strove to realize a new ecumenism through its networking, boundary crossing, institution building, and organization. Members believed that new thinking and acting were necessary to realizing the beloved community and racial justice. With deft organization and excellent use of scholarly literature, Cline documents these impulses and stages them elegantly in ways that parallel the broader fortunes of the American religious Left. . . . [Cline’s] estimable book brings the group’s accomplishments the attention they deserve.” — North Carolina Historical Review

“Well-researched and illuminating. . . . From Reconciliation to Revolution offers a wealth of new insights into the civil rights movement of the 1960s, and to the theological debates within seminaries and the American Christian church at large. . . revealing the American religious left, often forgotten in contemporary society, as an importance source of social change. Cline reinserts SIM workers into their rightful place in a pivotal decade in American history.” — The Sixties

“Layer[s] and reimagine[s] the civil rights movement beyond the glow of Martin Luther King Jr. and organizations like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee (SNCC). . . . Explores how white Christians, working in relationship with black Christians, tried to bring the church more in line with the vision of a desegregated order. . . . His work on SIM students helps show why spotlighting these lesser-known stories reveals a great deal about what happened on the ground.” — History of Education Quarterly

“An important addition to our understanding of the civil rights movement and the connections between it and liberal Christianity. This book also moves beyond an emphasis on the South, which characterizes many works on the civil rights movement. . . . a lively and interesting read.” — The Journal of Southern Religion

“Chronicles a little-known cohort of theological students who aimed to promote racial understanding and justice within American Protestantism.” — Journal of Southern History

“Pulls SIM from the shadows, showing it to be more than just an organization designed to work in the background in support of other civil rights activist organizations during the 1960s.”—Oral History Review

“From Reconciliation to Revolution is the first book of its kind to document the accomplishments of a group that could be described as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)’s sibling organization. . . . A work of historical recovery aimed at unearthing [the Student Interracial Ministry’s] hidden history, Cline’s research often reminds us about the important contributions of overlooked individuals.”—Journal of African American History

“Using organizational records, newspapers and magazines, and interviews with participants, David P. Cline presents a well-written history of the Student Interracial Ministry (SIM), which operated between 1960 and 1968, and addresses a gap in the literature on civil rights and religious history.”—Journal of Religion

“How did liberal Christians committed to integration adapt to the changing politics of civil rights and black power? In this enlightening history, David Cline follows seminarians and civil rights activists on the journey from Social Gospel Christianity to Black Liberation Theology. This is a must-read book for historians of both the black freedom struggle and of modern American religious history.”—Thomas J. Sugrue, author of Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North