The Last Segregated Hour: The Memphis Kneel-Ins and the Campaign for Southern Church Desegregation . By Stephen R. Haynes. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. xii + 324 pp. $29.95 cloth.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)The Last Segregated Hour: The Memphis Kneel-Ins and the Campaign for Southern Church Desegregation . By Stephen R. Haynes . New York : Oxford University Press , 2012. xii + 324 pp. $29.95 cloth.Book Reviews and NotesIn the introduction of The Last Segregated Hour, Stephen Haynes mentions the Walgreens in his Memphis neighborhood. In 1960, civil rights protesters were arrested there, and store managers soon removed their lunch counter instead of integrating it. Today, any memory of this store's contested history has all but faded away. In contrast, Haynes insists that longtime residents of Memphis who glance at Second Presbyterian Church (SPC) instantly recall biracial groups protesting the church's segregation policy in the mid-1960s. Similarly, many still sardonically refer to Independent Presbyterian Church (IPC) as "First Segregationist." "Clearly," the author resolves, "the moral standing of churches in this and other communities makes it difficult for people to forget, let alone excuse, what they perceive as immoral behavior on the part of church representatives" (6).With this comparison, Haynes vividly outlines his book's contribution to the history and historiography of civil rights. Church protests--or "kneel-ins"--were small in number across the South. But these prayerful petitions left indelible marks on the region's physical, social, and religious landscape. Alas, Haynes laments that historians have given scarce attention to this topic. His book begins to fill this gap by using the Memphis kneel-ins of 1964-1965 as a point of departure for investigating the protests and their legacy.The book's opening section--"The Forgotten Protests"--takes readers to the summer of 1960 when the first kneel-ins began in Atlanta. While some churches permitted protesters to enter, others did not, leading to what Haynes calls, "a spectacle of exclusion" (15). As media latched on to these accounts of rebuffed worshipers, leaders from the civil rights movement seized upon the idea and made it a key tactic in their campaigns. "Kneel-ins were staged not to protest unjust statues," Haynes explains, "but to dramatize a moral query: Would African Americans and their white accomplices be permitted to enter space in which white Christians worshipped a God they claimed loved all persons" (14)?The Memphis protests are the focus of the book's second part, "Contexts of a Kneel-In Movement." From March through May in 1964, members of the NAACP's inter-collegiate group targeted the city's Second Presbyterian Church. Denied entrance each Sunday, these weekly encounters became high-profile performances of mutual resistance. In addition to blocking the entrance, SPC members began urging Southwestern College to discipline the white students participating in the protests. College administrators refused to act on this demand, a decision that likely led to thin fundraising. Defenders of SPC's segregation policy also criticized reformers within the broader Presbyterian community who advocated for civil rights. Rev. Carl Pritchett from Bethesda, Maryland was one such reformer. Passionate enough about the cause, he traveled to Memphis to join the kneel-ins. …