Curbing the Delta Ministry

The adventuresome but much-attacked Delta Ministry, the National Council of Churches' two-year-old experimental instrument of reconciliation between Mississippi's white and Negro people, got a pat on the back and a rap on the knuckles last week from its sponsor. Faced with growing criticism of the project, the council's general board strongly endorsed the Ministry's aims and plans but ordered a study on reorganizing it--in effect conceding that this venture in Christian activism had by no means achieved its goals.

The burden of attack on the Delta Ministry has been that its 27 energetic, aggressive lay and clerical staff members, by ardently siding with Mississippi's Negro poor, tended to set them against other segments of society rather than reconcile the factions. Laudably, the Ministry helped set up preschool training centers under Project Head Start, badgered reluctant state officials to accept federal anti-poverty funds, worked with secular civil rights organizations to register Negro voters. Ministry leaders also actively organized a bitter and so far unsuccessful strike against cotton plantations, and encouraged the dramatic squatters' invasion of the Greenville Air Force Base by local Negroes last winter.

Uncle Toms. Mississippi critics of the Ministry include both white and Negro moderates. N.A.A.C.P. leaders in Mississippi charge that the Ministry has in effect created class warfare among Negroes by constantly accusing middle-class blacks of being "Uncle Toms." Negroes who refuse to support Delta Ministry projects all the way are arbitrarily ostracized.

White churchmen, themselves treated somewhat scornfully by the Ministry, complain that the Ministry has ignored Mississippi's numerous white poor in its projects; Greenville residents charge that one tangible result of the "reconciliation" has been a revival of Ku Klux Klan activity in areas where it had long been dormant. Yet they concede to the Ministry one ironic and important accomplishment: mutual distrust of its operations has for the first time driven Negro and white moderates toward the beginnings of true dialogue and cooperation.

Serving a Minority. Responding to a stream of complaints from Southern church leaders, the National Council last December organized an investigative team to examine the operation. Their report, presented to the council's general board last week, praised the Ministry for serving a much-neglected minority, the Negro poor, and for justifiably keeping pressure on Mississippi leaders to change their feudal society. But the report also criticized the Ministry's failure to work with the local community, its less-than-candid activity reports to the National Council, and its fiscal casualness (1966 spending is $15,000 a month above the allotted budget).

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