A Documentary Film by Carolyn Crowder Available to Stream on Amazon Prime

June 18, 2026

by Peter Slade

Carolyn Crowder’s remarkable documentary film  At the River: Grace and Struggle in the Segregated South is an impressive oral history project, a self-examination of the psychological damage inflicted by white supremacy on white children, a theological reflection on the failure of the white southern church, and a melodic love letter to the few white Presbyterian ministers who saved the filmmaker from the meanness of the religious white world that raised her.

At its core, At the River is a diligent work of oral history. Crowder interviewed thirty-five white Presbyterian ministers, all of whom served congregations in the Deep South in the 1950s and 1960s (she also interviewed twenty colleagues and family members). Growing up in First Presbyterian Church, Montgomery, Alabama, Crowder has an easy rapport with and a reverence for these Presbyterian men who are only half a generation older. Between them, these interviewees share memories of the civil rights movement in Greenville and Greenwood, Mississippi, kneel-ins in Memphis, the March on Washington, the March from Selma to Montgomery, and one even took part in the sanitation workers’ strike in Memphis. Their principal witness is not so much to well known historic events, but to what Crowder calls the meanness of white segregationist society: the meanness of members of their congregations and the session, their expulsion from their own communities, and the death threats to their families. 

This oral history illuminates an important part of southern history: segregationists imposed evangelical fundamentalism on white southern protestantism in an “unholy alliance” to preserve white supremacy. The old men in Crowder’s videos were raised and shaped by mid-century mainline liberal Protestant Southern Presbyterian congregations. Returning from seminary looking to serve these same churches, they found presbyteries reluctant to appoint their native sons. Instead, the segregationists preferred to fill the pulpits with “ecclesiastical carpet baggers” from the fundamentalist ranks of the northern Orthodox Presbyterian Church.

Alongside the minister’s tales of pain and rejection is Crowder’s own story of growing up in Montgomery and her spiritual and ethical awakening through the ministry of these Presbyterian misfit prophets. Crowder’s story is an interesting companion to Lillian Smith’s Killer’s of the Dream in which Smith outlines the psychological “Gothic curves” of a white girls segregationist upbringing. Crowder describes her mother’s diligence in raising her as a racist, even coopting her to spy on their Black maid while at the same time impressing on her never to ask a Black person about their lives. This hermetically sealed white world was the context of the interviewees’ prophetic preaching and ministry and the “racial cultural brainwashing” that Crowder escaped.

There is plenty here for theological and ecclesial reflection and puzzlement. For example, the octogenarian witnesses return to the claim that it was the love they demonstrated towards their congregations as young men that gave them some influence over their segregationist flocks; however, they also recount their eventual expulsion from these congregations. To a man, they insist that their primary and most significant job was to preach sermons. One is left pondering exactly what the impact of preaching scripture faithfully on a Sunday morning is on a congregation hellbent on maintaining a homogeneous white supremacist Society.

Almost as Crowder’s counter point, it is not preaching that provides the theological and emotional lodestone of this documentary: it is the hymnody that these Presbyterians grew up singing. With one exception, we do not see these preachers preaching. Instead, Crowder plays the piano as her interviewees open the Presbyterian Hymn Book and sing the old favorites. Aaron Price’s soundtrack sensitively picks up the melodies of these old hymns. The deep spiritual resonance of these hymns anchors us in a tradition deeper than the shallow meanness of segregationist Christianity. One melody prominently featured in the soundtrack is RESIGNATION from the shape-note song book Southern Harmony. The unsung text is Isaac Watts’ setting of Psalm 23, “My Shepherd will supply my need.”  It extends the truth that it is the Shepherd, not the preacher or the congregation, that will supply the “wandering spirit’s” need and will afford protection “in sight of all my foes”. It contains the beautiful hope that there may yet be a church community in which we will be “no more a stranger nor a guest but like a child at home.”

At the River: Grace and Struggle in the Segregated South is available to stream on amazon.com. For more information about the film and the filmmaker, go to http://carolyncrowder.com/