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Excerpt from Oral History Interview with Nancy Kester Neale, August 6, 1983. Interview F-0036. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) See Entire Interview >>

Buck Kester's vigorous style outdoes his successor

Neale compares her father's tenure at the Fellowship of Southern Churchmen to that of his successor. Her father's style was more dramatic, less intellectual, and better connected to southerners in need.

Citing this Excerpt

Oral History Interview with Nancy Kester Neale, August 6, 1983. Interview F-0036. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Full Text of the Excerpt

DALLAS BLANCHARD:
Back to the fellowship itself, what do you see as the differences of the fellowship under your father as compaired to under Nell?
NANCY KESTER NEALE:
Again, I was not immediately involved very direct. I was off in my own direction at the time. My sense of that is the difference in style. Again that was the more intellectual group, or intellectualizing group. They had not been out in the corn fields so much or been threatened with guns or ropes. And that sort of did things once they had experienced it, or had not lost their pulpits at that point, which a number of people had. But it was a little bit more intellectual style, a little bit less of a fervor I think and drive. But then early on the organizaitonal development you need that kind of drive. So I don't know that it was inappropiate or less useful for the life of the organization at that time. It was different. It was real different. For me being used to and confortable with the old style with a lot of preachers and a lot of vim and vigor and a lot of lay people who were conserned and interested and active and groups who would get into it from the south, it seemed kind of a cooling off period to me. But that could have been just simply somehow a group that sort of distanced themselves a little bit or seemed a little more distant. But that is just an impression I got.