Clarence Jordan's Sermon in the Soil

In 1942, Clarence Jordan — a Greek scholar with a doctorate in New Testament — did something his colleagues found baffling. He left a promising academic career and bought 440 acres of depleted farmland outside Americus, Georgia, to start an interracial farming community called Koinonia Farm.

In the Jim Crow South, this was not merely countercultural. It was dangerous. Night riders shot up the farm's roadside market. Insurance companies canceled their policies. Local merchants refused to sell them seed or fuel. Their children were expelled from school. A Ku Klux Klan delegation arrived one evening and told Jordan he had until sundown to leave.

Jordan stayed. He kept translating the Greek New Testament into what he called "the Cotton Patch Version," rendering the Sermon on the Mount in the red-clay dialect of rural Georgia. He kept welcoming Black and white families to the same table. He kept planting.

When a reporter once asked him how he could endure such hostility, Jordan replied simply, "We didn't say it would be easy. We said it would be worth it."