The Southern Saints You Should’ve Learned About in Church but Didn’t

You know the Sunday School lineup:
Moses, David, Mary, Paul… maybe a dash of MLK if your church had a diversity initiative.

But there’s a whole communion of saints they never told us about—
folks who didn’t get stained-glass windows or LifeWay study guides,
but who embodied Love so loud it shook the steeples.

So today, we’re passing the mic to the prophets who preached without pulpits.
Who caught hell for speaking of heaven on earth.
And who showed us that faith without justice is just performance art in a polyester Sunday suit.

Fannie Lou Hamer: The Sharecropper Prophet

She was “sick and tired of being sick and tired,”
and holy hell, did she mean it.

Fannie Lou didn’t have degrees or fancy theology,
but she had a spine made of Southern soil and scripture.
She took on the Democratic Party and white supremacists
with nothing but truth, fire, and faith that wouldn’t flinch.

She lost her job for trying to vote.
She was jailed and beaten for her voice.
And she still showed up at the mic and told the nation
exactly what Jesus sounds like with a southern drawl.

You want a saint?
She fed people, housed the unhoused, built political power from scratch.
She didn’t “quietly resist” – she flipped tables from Mississippi to D.C.
And she did it all while calling on God, quoting scripture, and demanding the damn kingdom come.

Bayard Rustin: The Gay Architect of the Dream

You’ve heard the “I Have a Dream” speech.
But you probably didn’t hear about the Black, gay Quaker who organized the whole March.

Bayard Rustin was the strategy, the scaffolding, the soul of the civil rights movement.
He taught nonviolence to MLK.
He planned the logistics that moved a nation.

And what did he get in return?

Erased.
Because he was queer.

The same Church that quotes Dr. King like scripture
has never repented for silencing the man who taught him how to march.

But Bayard knew what they were doing.
He said, “We need, in every community, a group of angelic troublemakers.”

And Lord, did he live up to it.
He’s one of our saints, not in spite of his queerness, but because of it.

Pauli Murray: Theologian, Lawyer, Priest, and Pronoun Disruptor

Before the Church debated whether women could preach…
Pauli Murray was out here becoming the first Black woman ordained as an Episcopal priest.
Except Pauli didn’t always identify as a woman.
And that’s important too.

Pauli was a legal genius, a spiritual visionary, and a gender nonconforming pioneer
who helped dismantle Jim Crow and inspired both Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Thurgood Marshall.

They read scripture expansively.
They prayed with their whole body.
And they demanded justice in courtrooms, classrooms, and chapels alike.

Pauli didn't wait for permission to exist.
They just did it… with brilliance, grace, and no small amount of holy mischief.

They Weren’t Extras. They Were Part of the Plot.

Let’s be clear:
These folks didn’t orbit history.
They made it.

And if your church didn’t tell you about them?
It’s not because they didn’t matter.
It’s because they were too Black, too queer, too loud, too holy, and too damn free.

They didn’t play nice with empire.
They got in the way.
And thank God they did.

If There’s a Heaven…

...then somewhere up there is a potluck table where Bayard’s setting chairs,
Pauli’s blessing the biscuits,
Fannie Lou is running the agenda,
and Jesus is clapping off-beat but having a blast anyway.

Because these are the saints of Southern resistance.
Not the sanitized ones.
Not the safe ones.
But the ones who made Love real enough to march on.

And they’re not done.

Their voices are still echoing in every drag queen with a protest sign.
Every disabled activist getting loud at the courthouse.
Every trans teen writing poetry to survive.
Every grandma running voter drives from her front porch.

The saints weren’t just in stained glass.
They were in the streets,
in the jails,
in the courtroom chaos,
in the thunderclaps of justice,
in the holy disruption.

And they’re still with us.