Interracialism in a Christian Community in the Postwar South: The Story of Koinonia Farm - Review

Cross Currents, Winter, 1998 by Elizabeth Rauh Bethel

Tracy Elaine K'Meyer. Charlottesville.: University Press of Virginia, 1997. 189pp Appendix, Notes, Bibliography, and Index. $35.00 (cloth).

The story of Koinonia Farm (from the Greek, roughly translated as church, fellowship, or community) lies at the intersection of three themes in southern history: the powerful imprint of fundamentalist Protestantism on the cultural fabric of the South; the shifting contours of race relations in the region; and the enduring struggle by Southerners to define and to realize the spiritual dimensions of community in daily life. In the tradition of the Southern Tenant Farmers' Union and the Highlander Folk School, and fueled by its founders' belief that Christian faith and the Social Gospel provided the potential for transforming the world, Koinonia Farm challenged the prevailing social and economic arrangements in Southern culture from its 440 acre farm near Americus, in Sumpter County, Georgia.

Established in 1942 by two white couples, Koinonia Farm initially mirrored many New Deal programs, adding a strong dose of Christian fellowship to its community education and outreach programs, while laying the foundation for "living in community" on the farm. Residents, visitors, and laborers shared meals, morning and evening devotionals, Bible study, and work. From the outset, the farm violated that most sacred of Southern race protocols, the segregation of meals. Still, the founders of Koinonia Farm initially received tentative acceptance from white Christians in the county. Within the decade, however, the local community began to mobilize opposition to the farm because it offered African Americans a kind of economic and social parity that went beyond regional conventions in race relations.

During the late 1940s and early 1950s, residents at Koinonia Farm struggled with balancing two core goals: living "in community" and fostering interracialism. Koinonians did not at that time define the latter goal as political, although the cultural shock waves that followed the 1954 Brown decision inevitably drew them into the politically charged climate of the 1960s South. In the mid-1960s the farm survived hostility, violence, and economic boycott. Still, many of the families that had been attracted to the farm during its first decade moved away. Those who remained were drawn deeply into the day-to-day struggle of the civil rights movement in southwest Georgia and were forced to reassess the meaning of "living in community."

By the mid-1960s, problems in finances, member transience, and the contradictions of communalism and interracialism forced the Koinonians to consider relocating the farm or disbanding it. The debate opened new opportunities for the Koinonians to extend their mission from the rural South to the institutional lecture circuit, where they advanced their interpretation of the social gospel to a public much changed by the civil rights and peace movements. The debate led to an alliance with civil rights activists and, during the 1970s, to partnerships with social reform movements such as Habitat for Humanity.

Tracy Elaine K'Meyer has cast her conceptual net into the waters of social movement theory in crafting the story of Koinonia Farm. The result is a story smoothed by the historian's ability to tell a tale and enriched by a sociologist's drive to frame that tale in a resonant analytic framework. She has lifted the community out of the arcane and placed it squarely in the larger narrative of southern history.

ELIZABETH RAUH BETHEL