The Scholar Who Chose the Dirt Road

Clarence Jordan earned his PhD in Greek New Testament from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in 1939. He could have claimed a comfortable professorship, a respected pulpit, a life among Louisville's well-spoken-of. Instead, he loaded his family into a car and drove to Americus, Georgia — one of the poorest counties in America — and founded Koinonia Farm. There, Jordan lived among sharecroppers, Black and white, farming side by side in the Jim Crow South.…