Dying from the neck up": Southern Baptist resistance to the civil rights movement.

In February 1956, almost two years after the U.S. Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education ruling declaring segregation unconstitutional, Wallie Amos Criswell, pastor of Southern Baptists' largest congregation and arguably Southern Baptists' most popular preacher, addressed the South Carolina Baptist Convention's evangelism conference. As he exhorted his fellow ministers to greater evangelistic fervor, his sermon veered temporarily off course as he began a bitter denunciation of the Brown ruling. Governor George Timmerman was so impressed that the next day he invited Criswell to address a joint session of the South Carolina legislature. Criswell enthusiastically accepted the invitation and reprised his uncivil rejection of the civil rights movement, the high court, and other Americans who supported the end of Jim Crow. "Let them integrate," he thundered, "Let them sit up there in their dirty shirts and make all their fine speeches. But they are all a bunch of infidels, dying from the neck up." (1)

Few chapters in American religious history prove as embarrassing as the response of the American churches to the issue of race. Of course, historians can always point to certain groups or individuals who provided important exceptions to this generalization. There were Quakers and the like who from the beginning of their American sojourn believed in brotherhood across racial lines and mounted a principled rejection of slavery. There were also representatives of Southern white Protestantism, a minority to be sure, who opposed segregation strongly enough to support the civil rights movement that sought to end segregation. Historians are often divided into two informal categories: the "lumpers," who lump their subjects into large generalizations, and the "splitters," who split up those generalizations by highlighting the exceptions to them. (2) In examining the reactions of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) and Southern Baptists to the civil rights movement, the responsibility of serving as "splitter" belongs to someone else. That presentation can be found elsewhere in this issue. This particular analysis, however, lands squarely in the "lumper" school of thought and will argue that though there were important exceptions and qualifications to be considered, the generalization still holds true that the majority of Southern Baptists upheld racial segregation and rejected claims of Christian brotherhood and the civil rights movement.

An important point to note is that forty-five years after the fact, virtually no Southern Baptists disagree with the U. S. Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education decision that ruled racial segregation unconstitutional. Others will say that segregation was unchristian, something their forebears from the 1950s and '60s would have been loath to admit. Fourteen years after his South Carolina speech, Criswell himself recanted his earlier racial views, though not necessarily the specifics of his Columbia comments. (3) Today's Southern Baptist leaders--all of whom are hard-line fundamentalists whose theological foreparents were the most vigorous critics of the civil rights movement--reject the explicit racism of the SBC past and acknowledge that those who stood for segregation were wrong. While current Southern Baptists are still far from liberal on issues related to race, few retain the hard-line approach that was so compelling in the mid-1950s. In this case, if only in this instance, the liberals won the war, though at the time they lost most of the battles.

Another important distinction has to do with whether one looks at the SBC as a denomination or takes a generalized look at the mass of Southern Baptists. In fact, the record looks a good deal better if one looks at the denomination as a whole. For as a result of its Christian Life Commission and other members of its "progressive elite," Southern Baptists in their annual conventions occasionally passed resolutions that made the SBC look as liberal on race as the mainline denominations in the North. (4) Such statements were important insofar as they reflected the divisions between the Convention's educated clergy, from whose ranks came Southern Baptists' racial liberals, and the racial traditionalists whose education levels were more mixed. These progressive resolutions, of course, caution the historian against over-generalizing about Southern Baptists' rejection of the civil rights movement. Still, the denomination's liberal racial statements modestly sympathetic to the cause of integration were often balanced by conservative forces that restrained the liberal impulses of the "progressive elite." Their calls for racial justice and the possible acceptance of black Christians into white churches were weakened by a concern to hold together a denomination largely dominated by cultural conservatism, theological fundamentalism, and unreconstructed segregationism. Further, the more local the responses, the more likely Southern Baptists were to reject the civil rights movement. In other words, their annual conventions were attended by the theologically educated at a much higher percentage than was typical of the denomination's state conventions, (usually) county associations, or local congregations. As a result, meetings of the SBC tended to be more liberal and less antagonistic to the civil rights movement than most Southern Baptists at the local level really were.

Having signaled the simple argument that most Southern Baptists resisted and in many cases denounced the civil rights movement, this article adds a more complex argument: One should view resistance to the integrationist goals of the civil rights movement as more than merely a hypocritical rejection of Christianity's universal acceptance of all persons or as the captivity of the churches to the traditional Southern social and racial arrangements. This resistance also constituted a virtual pledge of allegiance to a Southern civil religion, or a white Southern version of the American civil religion, that viewed desegregation and the movement that fostered it as a threat to its understanding of America's sacred meaning as a nation. (5)

REACTIONS TO THE MOVEMENT

Southern Baptists did not wait for Criswell's 1956 pronouncements to register their vigorous rejection of both the ends and the means of the civil rights movement. Their immediate reactions to Brown mostly regretted the decision and pointed out the difficulty of implementing it in the South. Most echoed the sentiments of an editor who saw segregation as rooted in social custom and virtually impervious to change. Calling for calm and clear thinking, editor David Garner of the (Texas) Baptist Standard advised readers to adjust to the problem as "good citizens and loyal Americans." (6) In Alabama, the state that was not only the "heart of Dixie," but that would also become the heart of the civil rights movement, Leon Macon, editor of the Alabama Baptist, complained that the decision "jarred to the foundation a Southern institution" and warned against the dangers of "outside interference" into Southern concerns. After Brown, as historian Wayne Flynt has shown, Macon "slowly transformed his editorial page into a weapon against shifting moral values, racial integration" and a host of other conservative concerns. (7)

Within a few days of the Supreme Court decision, SBC liberals led messengers to the 1954 Convention to adopt the Christian Life Commission's report, which called on Southern Baptists to recognize the ruling as being "in harmony with the constitutional guarantee of equal freedom to all citizens, and with the Christian principles of equal justice and love for all men." Though the messengers voted to accept the report, the convention still saw much opposition to the section of the report dealing with Brown and several attempts to eliminate the Commission's recommendation. Local criticisms of both the ruling and the SBC's mild support of it came quickly. On June 9, the First Baptist Church of Grenada, Mississippi, unanimously passed a resolution repudiating the Convention's "endorsement" of Brown. A week later Mississippi Baptist editor A. L. Goodrich noted that he had received enough letters concerning Brown to last three months, and almost all of those he printed rejected it. (8)

In Georgia the minister of two part-time churches ran into vocational difficulty over his vocal support of the ruling. One of the churches asked for his resignation, while the other fired him outright. A similar situation occurred in Taylor, Louisiana, where Will Campbell, the young pastor of the Taylor Baptist Church, saw his congregation gradually become more aware of the implications of Brown, and realized that a clash over the issue of race loomed ahead if he remained their pastor. Within a few months of the ruling, Campbell, who would later become very much involved in the civil rights movement, resigned his Louisiana pulpit, never to return to pastoral ministry under the "steeples." (9)

State conventions sought to keep a lid on controversy over Brown and the race issue, but controversy nonetheless bubbled to the surface. In November, Georgia Baptists wrangled over a generic resolution calling for "justice and calmness" on the race problem, while remaining neutral on the Brown ruling itself. One vocal opponent, however, claimed that the majority of Baptists in Georgia opposed the ruling and argued that the resolution would in effect repudiate the intentions of Governor Herman E. Talmadge to close the state's public schools if integration were attempted. Supporters of the resolution were thus forced to convince the messengers that their popular governor's views were not being rejected. Later, Georgians, a majority of whom were Baptists, followed Talmadge's lead and voted for a constitutional amendment to abolish the public schools in the face of an integration order. The referendum passed despite the opposition of most Georgia Baptist leaders, who largely represented the "progressive elite," but not the rank-in-file members of Georgia Baptist churches. (10)

For his part, Talmadge, a member of a Baptist church in Hampton, Georgia, who garnered enough Georgia Baptist and other votes to be elected governor and U. S. senator, expressed his views in a small volume called You and Segregation. In it he accused the Court of misinterpreting the Constitution and "teaching error." Its rulings, he argued, "should be sternly disapproved by both officials and the general public. Such a decision is not `the law.' It is simply an enforceable or unenforceable pronouncement of the Court." (11)

Even more hysterical was Mississippi circuit court judge Thomas P. Brady's book-length diatribe called Black Monday. Not known for Baptist involvement at the associational, state, or national levels, Brady was nonetheless an active deacon and men's Sunday School teacher at the First Baptist Church of Brookhaven. His book can legitimately be cited as an example of far right-wing Southern Baptist views on the Supreme Court decision and the cause of integration. Appropriating a phrase that Southern reactionaries were using to sloganize the date of the Brown ruling, Brady expressed his unqualified distaste for the decision and support for Southern racism in its most virulent form. In addition, he viewed it, like Pearl Harbor, as a day that would "live in infamy" in the minds of Southern civil religionists:

   Black Monday ranks in importance with July 4th, 1776.... May 17th, 1954 is
   the date upon which the declaration of socialistic doctrine was officially
   proclaimed throughout this nation. It was on Black Monday that the judicial
   branch of our government usurped the sacred privilege and right of the
   respective states of this union to educate their youth. This usurpation
   constitutes the greatest travesty of the American Constitution and
   jurisprudence in the history of this nation. (12)

The angry, fearful views of Talmadge and Brady expressed the views of the South's most rabid segregationists, clearly a large proportion of whom were Southern Baptists. Particularly in Alabama, the most prominent battlefield of the civil rights movement and probably the most Baptist state in the union, segregationist politicians like John Patterson (1958) and George Wallace (1962) were elected governor, clearly with support of white Baptists. In Baptist discussions of these issues, however, such perspectives were largely hidden for two reasons. First was the longstanding doctrine of the "spirituality of the church," borrowed from antebellum Southern Presbyterians like James Henley Thornwell and which held that the church's concerns were spiritual rather than social or political. This became the basis for much criticism of Martin Luther King Jr. and other activist ministers who were criticized by Jerry Falwell (though not at that time a Southern Baptist) and the ministers whose letter spawned King's "Letter From Birmingham Jail." They complained that as a minister of the Christian gospel, King should more appropriately have been devoting his time and effort to seeking the conversion and spiritual development of his congregation. A second reason for muzzling Brady-like rhetoric in church circles was its inflammatory nature and the Southern Baptist penchant for attempting to avoid potential conflict. Nonetheless, the perspectives of Brady and Talmadge accurately represented the views of many less politically articulate followers whose letters often appeared in Southern Baptist literature, though such expressions were often filtered out by the mediating policies of the state newspaper editors.

On December 1, 1955, the civil rights movement proper began with Rosa Parks's refusal to give up her bus seat in Montgomery, Alabama. The boycott's eventual leader, Martin Luther King Jr., received remarkably little public criticism from Southern Baptist spokespersons in the early stages of his ascendancy as the nation's most prominent civil rights preacher. Again Baptist editors sought to keep such criticism private. After his assassination, however, harsh criticism and even denunciations of King finally emerged in the Baptist press. Those who supported or were sympathetic to King generally did not praise him by name in public. One leader who did take early aim at King was Henry L. Lyons Jr., pastor of Montgomery's Highland Avenue Baptist Church. Just after the end of the boycott in December 1956, Lyons used his weekly radio broadcast to make a biblical defense of segregation. Lyons was significantly elected as president of the Alabama Baptist state convention for 1955 and 1956. (13)

Similar to Lyons's pro-segregation argument, Carey Daniel, minister of the First Baptist Church of West Dallas, Texas, preached a sermon entitled, "God the Original Segregator." Appealing to the antebellum myth of Ham, Daniel cited Genesis 10:32: "These are the families of the sons of Noah ... in their nations: and by these were the nations divided in the earth after the flood." Holding that the biblical word for "nations" was the equivalent to "races," Daniel also found support in the New Testament. Like many segregationist preachers, he cited Acts 17:26 that asserted: "[God] hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and has determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation." (Interestingly enough, African-American preachers used the same text to draw the opposite conclusion about segregation, emphasizing that God had made all persons "of one blood"). (14)

After the successful close of the Montgomery bus boycott in December 1956 and the founding, mostly by African-American Baptist ministers, of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in January 1957, the civil rights movement became a ready topic of private conversation among Southern Baptists, but only occasionally in their public expressions. After 1956, with the exception of Christian Life Commission director Foy D. Valentine, most SBC agency heads tried to remain neutral regarding race issues. Among these were Alma Hunt, executive director of the Women's Missionary Union, as well as most seminary presidents. The year after helping negotiate a relatively peaceful solution to the 1957 impasse over school desegregation crisis in Little Rock, Arkansas, Congressman and SBC president Brooks Hays delivered an address calling on Southern Baptists to embrace the cause of integration. That Hays could be elected at all was, of course, a sign that Southern Baptist sentiment was far from monolithic and that the sort of Southern Baptist who attended the annual conventions was more likely to be educated, a member of the clergy, and pro-civil rights. At least they were more likely to be pro-civil rights away from home. The following year, however, when Convention messengers attempted to approve a statement commending Hays for his stand on integration, segregationist sentiment was strong enough to force the deletion of that section of the resolution. (15)

By 1961 Martin Luther King Jr. had risen to the unrivaled position as leader of the civil rights movement and probably the most hated man in the American South. In April of that year social ethicist Henlee Barnette at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, and several other professors learned that King would be preaching at a black Baptist church in town. Entering into correspondence with King, the professors invited him to speak in the seminary chapel and lecture in a few ethics classes. On April 19 King was enthusiastically welcomed to Southern Seminary with a rare standing ovation after his chapel address. In addition, some faculty and administrators inquired into his possible interest in joining the homiletics faculty of the school.

Back home, however, away from the theologically progressive halls of Southern Seminary, news of King's visit was received with a great deal more criticism. Throughout the SBC, individual Baptists denounced the visit, with between thirty and thirty-five Alabama churches voting to withhold financial contributions from the seminary. The controversy raged strongly enough to force the seminary trustees and president Duke K. McCall to issue a public statement of regret over King's visit. (16)

The following year Alabama editor Leon Macon, whose public statements did not express his views quite so bluntly, wrote a letter to Southern Seminary professor Samuel Southard, indicating that white Baptists opposed the civil rights movement and its goal of integration because it would result in "a mongrel race" (17) and lower the moral conduct of whites to that of blacks. That same year, Norman Jimerson, a Northern Baptist minister who worked to establish interracial dialogue in Birmingham through the Alabama Council on Human Relations, began searching to find a Baptist church in Birmingham where he could be admitted into membership and still acknowledge his sympathies with the civil rights movement. He was not able to find such a congregation, and discovered that Baptist churches occasionally competed for prospective members by boasting that "no niggers will ever come to our church." (18)

Of course, during the watershed 1963 Birmingham civil rights demonstrations, Earl Stallings, pastor of the city's First Baptist Church, joined the small contingent of ministers who criticized King and the movement in an open letter in the Birmingham News. In response, King penned his classic defense of the movement, "Letter From Birmingham Jail." During the height of those demonstrations, messengers to the Southern Baptist Convention meeting in Kansas City considered a resolution critical of Birmingham officials and expressing solidarity with "2,400 of our brethren in Christ" jailed in the city. Prominent Birmingham minister Lamar Jackson, pastor of the Southside Baptist Church, immediately opposed the statement, asking his fellow Southern Baptists "to hold in abeyance [their] judgment of our good city." (19)

That fall, when the desegregation of Birmingham's public schools was begun, ministers were asked by Jefferson County Sheriff Mel Bailey to use their pulpits to call for order and peace during the next week's first efforts to integrate Birmingham's schools. Many white ministers did so, most of them calling for Christian obedience to law and order. The next night, however, Ferrell Griswold, pastor of the Minor Heights Baptist Church, addressed a meeting of some one thousand Klan supporters. Criticizing King and the Kennedys, the minister attributed the troubles between the races to "me Communist scheme for world domination." Nine days later Griswold spoke to 5,000 persons at a local "Parents for Private Schools" rally, imploring parents to "keep your children away from these integrated schools." Crowds of students followed Griswold's advice, with virtually the entire student body of West End High School staying away from their classes. On Saturday, September 14, crowds of high school students gathered across from City Hall and heard George Fisher, pastor of the Edgewater Baptist Church, address the same issue. After the minister's speech, they stormed the mayor's office, waving confederate flags, dropping lighted cigarettes on the carpet, and standing on the mayor's desk. The next morning a bomb exploded at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, which had been the nerve center of the spring demonstrations, killing four young girls as they studied a Sunday School lesson on "The Love That Forgives." (20)

The following week a member of the SBC Executive Committee proposed a resolution to be addressed to the pastor and membership of the Sixteenth Street Church. The resolution sought to join the stricken congregation "in mourning your dead," pledged "energetic efforts in healing the rift between the races" and "to encourage our people to contribute toward the restoration of your building." Not only did the Executive Committee defeat the resolution, but it also instructed Southern Baptist state newspaper editors to remain silent on the debate on the resolution. Instead of passing a resolution specifically naming the Birmingham situation, the Executive Committee approved a vague statement about the tragedy of racial strife. In Alabama a number of laypersons objected to efforts by some other Southern Baptists to help repair the damage to the Sixteenth Street Church calling such efforts "a misuse of money." (21)

The unfolding civil rights movement occasionally elicited timid responses from Southern Baptists. In 1964 when the Christian Life Commission proposed a strong anti-segregation resolution to the annual convention, conservatives mustered enough support to weaken its language. The most sustained reaction to the movement came in the wake of the April 4, 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Most Southern Baptist newspapers had studiously avoided specific mention of King during his life. Most pastors who sympathized with King and the movement tended to keep their sentiments to themselves. Even in the most liberal corners of Southern Baptist life, there were occasional complaints about King. The Pullen Memorial Church of Raleigh, North Carolina, heard activist pastor W. W. Finlator address the race issue more often than suited the tastes of most Baptists. One story has it that on a particular Reformation Sunday the relative of a member noticed Martin Luther's name in the order of worship and exclaimed, "Does he have to preach on that man every Sunday." (22)

Nevertheless, coupled with other expressions of civil unrest during the explosive year of 1968, King's murder struck a nerve among Southern Baptists. While some ministers and editors lamented King's death, the tragedy did not keep some ministers and laypersons from leveling harsh criticism of him. One Alabama preacher wrote the Alabama Baptist arguing that many of the state's Baptists were tired of hearing about racism from SBC officials and resented Baptist leaders who compared King to Moses or evangelist Billy Graham. Others complained about the federal government's calling for flags to fly at half-staff in memory of someone they considered a law-breaker. Robert Tenery, later a leader of the fundamentalist faction of the SBC from North Carolina, charged that Jesus was interested in sinners rather than the poor. An Arkansas pastor denied that King was a Christian because of his unorthodox theology. (23)

Responses from laypersons tended to be even more vitriolic. One wondered why King did not go preach the gospel in Africa, "the home of his ancestors, where they still live like savages." Another wrote North Carolina editor Marse Grant: "Forget about the niggers for that is all you seem to think about. The Biblical Recorder is full of it every week. You can stop mine. I don't want another one in my house." Of course some letters honored King and used his demise to call for Southern Baptist ministry in the area of human rights. Nevertheless, letters criticizing King and other Baptists sympathetic to him were much more numerous. (24)

Even theological moderates like popular Oklahoma City pastor Herschel Hobbs, known to many as "Mr. Southern Baptist," were critical of King. In a letter to Alabama editor Leon Macon, Hobbs expressed the private opinion that King was a "rabble rouser" and a "troublemaker." This assessment naturally buttressed Macon's opinion that the only positive element in the civil rights movement was that many segregationists were leaving other denominations to join Baptist congregations. (25)

The Convention's official response to King's death came in the form of a "Statement Concerning the National Crisis," which arose in early May. A group of denominational leaders in Nashville, led by Franklin Paschall, pastor of First Baptist Church and president of the SBC, drew up the statement and distributed it to other prominent Southern Baptists. Seventy-one agency and state leaders signed the document, which confessed "our share of the responsibility" for the racial crisis. Over the next month, articles and letters debating the Statement filled the Baptist papers. Before the Statement reached the floor of the annual convention, the SBC Executive Committee softened its expression of collective guilt and added a new section reviewing earlier Southern Baptist efforts toward racial harmony. On the Convention floor, messengers voted to amend the Statement to call on minority groups to exercise "respect for the person and property of others." Eventually, however, the Convention approved the Statement by a vote of 5,687 (72.85%) to 2,119 (27.15%). (26)

Thus did the 1968 Southern Baptist Convention make an official response to the racial crisis in America--in effect a response to the King assassination though without mentioning him by name. But though comfortably winning the vote on the Convention floor, the Crisis Statement made a large percentage of Southern Baptists uncomfortable and efforts at implementation at the local level stalled. By November 1968 a survey research by the Home Mission Board revealed that only eleven percent of Southern Baptist churches would admit African-Americans. Later that month the SBC Crisis Statement was reaffirmed by only eight state Baptist conventions, none of them in the Deep South. (27)

After the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, desegregation began to become a reality in the South. Most white Southerners, Baptists included, gradually but grudgingly came to accept it. Yet those with strong misgivings rapidly developed segregated private schools, many of which were called "Christian Academies" and utilized church facilities, especially among Baptist churches. Thus, objection to the goals of the civil rights movement remained a strong element in Southern Baptist life. On the rise of segregated academies, W. W. Finlator, pastor of the Pullen Memorial church in Raleigh, wrote an article called "Please Don't Call It Christian." He noted: "Just at the time when our public schools are required by law to exercise courageous and imaginative compliance [with federal desegregation edicts] there are mushrooming up across the state institutions ostensibly under the auspices of the church with the real, if not avowed, purpose of evading the compliance requirement." (28)

In other ways the civil rights movement remained controversial among Southern Baptists. Anecdotal evidence recounted continued hard feelings about King and the civil rights movement. Young preachers mentioning King in sermons often noted frowns on their parishioners' faces and occasionally even had listeners walk out on them before they could conclude their sermons. Baptist preacher-historians who have written books about Southern Baptists and the civil rights movement have been introduced to congregations without mention of their book titles. As late as 1989, a member of the Southern Baptist Executive Committee continued the longstanding and false criticism that King was a communist. Into the 1990s the local churches that commemorate the Martin Luther King National Holiday are almost all black Baptist churches and it remains uncommon to hear King's name or his movement mentioned in Southern Baptist sermons. (29)

RESISTANCE AS SOUTHERN CIVIL RELIGIOSITY

The southern civil religion, known also as the religion of the Lost Cause, forged after the Civil War, receded into relative hibernation after World War I. Occasional outbreaks of regional recrimination, such as during the 1930s Scottsboro case and the northern criticism of southern oppression of blacks, brought mild reawakenings of southern regional loyalty. These paled by comparison to the full-blown renascence of the southern civil religion sparked by Brown and the civil rights movement. Many traditional southern ideas were recycled in reaction to the movement and its goal of integration. Many southern political and religious leaders agreed with Virginia Senator Harry F. Byrd who called the movement "the most serious crisis that has occurred since the War Between the States." Herman Talmadge, the Baptist governor of Georgia, warned, "The die is cast. The challenge has been issued by the NAACP leaders. We must meet this challenge head-on or submit meekly and undergo a mid-Twentieth Century reconstruction period." (30)

Many saw the civil rights movement as the cutting edge of Communism that would destroy Southern traditions. In a veiled reference to King during the Montgomery bus boycott, Leon Macon thought it a strong possibility that "the Communists are aggravating the [segregation] problem here in our own state." More articulate than most, Tom Brady spoke for the many who saw the civil rights movement as the advance of communism and integration as the disappointed hope that the South would remain white man's country:

   Communist Russia's aim is the establishment of a beachhead through the
   Negro in these United States. To alienate racial groups and against racial
   groups, ... Negro against white, is what Russia desires.... The Communists
   of America have been trying since 1936 to destroy the South. The bait which
   attracts them is the Negro population. Hate campaigns against the Southern
   States were conducted in the North. Abuse and falsehoods were flagrantly
   utilized. Counsel and advice were given the Negro leaders.... If the South,
   the stronghold of democracy, could be destroyed, then the nation could be
   destroyed. (31)

But for Brady and the Baptists who accepted his logic, this destruction of America and the South would come not by Soviet conquest but through racial amalgamation, which they believed would irreparably weaken the Anglo-Saxon race and render America incapable of defending against the Communist threat.

   "The Communist leaders of this world are not fools," argued Brady. "They
   know a mongrelized race is an ignorant, weak, and easily conquered race."
   He based this conclusion on his own historical analysis, asserting that the
   cultures of Egypt, India, Burma, Siam, Greece, Rome, Spain, and Central
   America had all been destroyed by "negroid amalgamation." (33)

To white southerners with lily-white images of their ideal America, the civil rights movement and its goal of integration symbolized an absolute threat. James McBride Dabbs noted that in the face of such threat white southerners would defend their traditions "as patriots who love their native land, as pious men who will not deny their past." In response to such threat, the South saw the Confederacy symbolically reborn. In this period, for example, Georgia redesigned its state flag to include the Confederate battle flag. It was an era in which Robert Patterson, founder of the Citizens' Councils, could confess: "We just felt like integration would utterly destroy everything we valued." Similarly A. A. Kitchings, a Baptist layperson from Mississippi, could write, "True Southerners know that racial integration will destroy everything that we cherish." (32)

The civil rights movement and its goal of integration revealed that black and white Baptists in the South hoped for the actualization of different Americas. Most black Baptists, many of whom were central figures in the civil rights movement, held the vision of a pluralistic society giving justice to all its citizens and showing the entire world how to live in harmony. White Baptists in the South, however, hoped for a homogeneous, Protestant, Anglo-Saxon America that would defend individual liberty in the world. Most Southern Baptists saw the civil rights movement and its goal of integration as a symbol of ultimate threat. The civil rights movement, itself an expression of a pluralistic version of civil religion, thus breathed new life into the century-old southern civil religion of the Lost Cause and made the South into a battlefield of conflicting civil faiths.

ENDNOTES

(1.) Quoted in Baptist Message 33 (March 1, 1956): 1.

(2.) John B. Boles, editor of the Journal of Southern History, suggested this analogy to the author. Boles received this piece of wisdom from one of his teachers, who no doubt got it from one of his. Where and with whom this tradition stops, this author does not know.

(3.) Criswell publicly announced a change in his racial views in a 1970 sermon, "The Church of the Open Door," see James E. Towns, The Social Conscience of W. A. Criswell (Dallas: Crescendo Publications, 1977), 157-71. Towns provides introductions to and the texts of both Criswell's 1956 speech and the later sermon. Though Criswell spoke of a truly Christian church being one that is open to all persons regardless of race, his recanting of his earlier views did not specifically mean he now approved of the civil rights movement. He could still reject the movement's timing and methods.

(4.) See Wayne Flynt, Alabama Baptists: Southern Baptists in the Heart of Dixie (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998), 459.

(5.) For a fuller elaboration of this argument, see Andrew M. Manis, Southern Civil Religions in Conflict: Black and White Baptists and Civil Rights, 1947-1957 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987).

(6.) S. H. Jones, "Segregation and the Schools," Baptist Courier (June 3, 1954), 2; "Segregation's Problems," Baptist Standard (June 10, 1954), 2.

(7.) Flynt, 456.

(8.) Annual, Southern Baptist Convention, 1954, 55-56, 407; Baptist Record (June 10 and 17), 1954.

(9.) "Pastor Fired Again," Baptist Standard (January 1,1955), 6-7 (Interestingly, the story was not covered in Georgia's Baptist newspaper, the Christian Index); Merrill M. Hawkins Jr., Will Campbell: Radical Prophet of the South (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1997), 29.

(10.) "Justice, Calmness Keynote Plea of Commission on Racial Issues," Christian Index (November 25, 1954), 19; Len G. Cleveland, "Georgia Baptists and the 1954 Supreme Court Desegregation Decision," Georgia Historical Quarterly 59 (Supplement, 1975), 107-08. Talmadge was listed as a Baptist in Who's Who in the South and Southwest (Chicago: A. N. Marquis Co., 1950), 729-30; James Wesberry, telephone interview with author, May 4, 1985.

(11.) Herman E. Talmadge, You and Segregation (Birmingham: Vulcan Press, 1955), 75.

(12.) Information on Brady's church involvement comes from the following personal correspondence: letter to author from Robert E. Self, pastor of First Baptist Church, Brookhaven, Mississippi, April 24, 1984; letter to author from Talmadge E. Smith, director of missions, Lincoln Baptist Association, Brookhaven, Mississippi, May 1, 1984; Thomas E Brady, Black Monday (Winona, Miss.: Association of Citizens Counsels), foreword.

(13.) On Lyons's radio program and prominence among Alabama Baptists, see Flynt, 466-69.

(14.) See DeWitte Holland, Sermons in American History: Selected Issues in the American Pulpit, 1630-1967 (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1971), 513-22. On the myth of Ham, see Thomas Virgil Peterson, Ham and Japheth: The Mythic World of Whites in the Antebellum South (Metuchen, N. J.: Scarecrow Press, 1978); on black usage of Acts 17:26, see William H. Ballew's editorial in American Baptist, June 11, 1954, 2.

(15.) Flynt, 459-61.

(16.) Personal papers of Henlee Barnette; Letter from Allen Graves to Martin Luther King Jr., March 30, 1961, SCLC files, Martin Luther King Jr. Papers, Mugar Library, Boston University; author's conversation with Barnette. On Southern Baptist criticism of the visit, see Alabama Baptist, August 10, 1961, 1; Flynt, 461.

(17.) Flynt, 461, citing Macon's personal papers.

(18.) Author's personal conversation with Norman C. Jimerson, Washington, D. C., June 13, 1989.

(19.) Stallings was named as one of the original recipients of King's letter Jonathan Bass has uncovered the careers of the eight ministers before and after their letter to King. Stallings was a racial moderate who in reality sought to move his Birmingham congregation toward more openness on racial issues. For his trouble he was called a "nigger-lover" and eventually pressured to leave his pastorate at First Baptist Church. Nonetheless he believed the timing of the Birmingham demonstrations to be unfortunate, and though he himself took a more liberal view of the civil rights movement, the actions of his congregation indicate a strong level of resistance. See S. Jonathan Bass, "Eyes on the Press: the Media, the Ministers and the Letter from Birmingham Jail," paper presented to the Southern Historical Association, Birmingham, Ala., November 12, 1998. See King, Why We Can't Wait (New York: Harper and Row, 1964); On Jackson's defense of Birmingham at the Southern Baptist Convention, see New York Times, May 9, 1963, 1, 17; May 10, 1963, 1, 14.

(20.) Birmingham News, September 2, 1963; September 14, 1963.

(21.) Bynum Shaw, Divided We Stand (Durham, N.C.: Moore Publishing Company, 1974), 186; Christian Index, September 26, 1963, 3, 6; Biblical Recorder, September 26, 1963, 3; minutes of the SBC Executive Committee and of its administrative subcommittee, September 18, 1963; correspondence of SBC Executive Secretary Porter Routh, October 23, 28, 1963; correspondence of Woman's Missionary Union Executive Secretary Alma Hunt, September 21, 1963; correspondence of the Baptist Student Union, University of North Carolina, October 20, 21, 1963. Thirty years later Baptists affiliated with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, led by Baptist Peacemaker editor Ken Sehested, signed "The Birmingham Confession." This statement asked the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church for forgiveness for White Baptists' "failure of nerve." See also Flynt, 466.

(22.) G. McLeod Bryan, Dissenter in the Baptist Southland: Fifty Years in the Career of William Wallace Finlator (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1985), 101.

(23.) James Swedenburg, letter to editor, Alabama Baptist, June 13, 1968, 3; L. B. Jordan, letter to editor, Arkansas Baptist Newsmagazine, May 9, 1968, 4; Robert M. Tenery, letter to editor, Biblical Recorder, May 11, 1968, 12.

(24.) E. E. Fike Jr., letter to editor, Alabama Baptist, July 25, 1968, 3; quoted in "The "Recorder Expects Response--and Gets Plenty," Biblical Recorder, May 11, 1968, 15.

(25.) Letter, Herschel H. Hobbs to Leon Macon, April 14, 1965, Leon Macon Personal Papers, cited by Flynt, 469, 471.

(26.) Baptist Messenger, June 13, 1968, 4; Annual, Southern Baptist Convention, 1968, 66-68.

(27.) Baptist Standard, November 6, 1968, 21. State conventions that reaffirmed the Statement were California, Hawaii, Indiana, Maryland, Missouri, Oklahoma, Utah-Idaho, and Virginia. See Annual, Southern Baptist General Convention of California, 1968, 36; Annual, State Convention of Baptists in Indiana, 1968, 30; Annual, Baptist Convention of Maryland, 1968, 36; Annual, Missouri Baptist Convention, 1968, 33; Western Recorder, December 12, 1968; 7, 9.

(28.) W. W. Finlator, "Please Don't Call It Christian," Baptist Program (June 1970), 8.

(29.) Much of the evidence for these points comes from the author's personal experience in and observation of Southern Baptist church life. On one occasion a pastor friend of mine mistakenly told his congregation about my book on King (Southern Civil Religions in Conflict, which is about the movement but not specifically about King). After that service another friend who was a member of that congregation told me that the pastor "did not win you any points" with that allusion. In 1989 the author was asked to speak at a Christian Life Commission conference on racism that had been planned in part to counter the public statements of an Executive Committee member who had recently made disparaging remarks about Martin Luther King Jr.

(30.) Numan Bartley, The Rise of Massive Resistance: Race and Politics in the South During the 1950s (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969), 110; Talmadge, You and Segregation, 25.

(31.) Brady, 54, 60-61.

(32.) Alabama Baptist, March 8, 1956, 3; Brady, 1-6, 54, 60-61.

(33.) James McBride Dabbs, Haunted By God: The Cultural and Religious Experience of the South (Richmond: John Knox Press, 1972), 128-29; Patterson quoted in John Bartlow Martin, The Deep South Says "Never" (New York: Ballantine Books, 1957), 3; Letter to the editor, Baptist Record, May 30, 1968, 4.

The Birmingham Confession

The Statement

The 1992 Cooperative Baptist Fellowship Assembly's confession of complicity with racism, modeled after a similiar statement adopted in 1990 by the Alliance of Baptists, was made in light of an immediate crisis--the violent upheaval which struck Los Angeles and other cities following the acquittal of police officers accused of beating an African American.

In both these statements we, as Southern Baptists, acknowledged our own historic complicity with racism. We pledged ourselves to repentance in order to commit ourselves to be agents of Christ's reconciling peace.

The immediate crisis which prompted last year's confession is with us still. Indeed, it is rooted in actions taken in years past. Among the historic acts of racism was the failure, in 1963, of the Southern Baptist Convention's executive committee to speak to the terrorist bombing of Sixteenth Street Baptist Church here in Birmingham. As Scripture warns, the sins of our forebears are still being visited upon our nation.

We acknowledge that we cannot simply forget the past. Even though we may not have personally participated in Such distant acts of evil, the consequences of injustice are with us still. And we continue to map the bitter harvest of the resulting inequality.

We acknowledge that, according to Scripture, forgiveness only comes

by remembering, by confessing to God and to each other, openly and in public, the specific failures which mark our lives and betray our calling. The wounds of our souls cannot be cleansed until they emerge from the shadows and into the light of God's mercy.

Therefore, as Baptists reared in the SBC--mercifully joined in this confession by friends in the larger Baptist and ecumenical family:

We hereby confess to our brothers and sisters in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. Thirty years ago our Southern Baptist leaders suffered a profound failure of nerve in refusing to speak out against the violence perpetrated against you. We confess that this failure was not simply an administrative mistake but a sin against the Holy Spirit. We believe that God's heart grieved at that failure. Yet we make this bold confession with humility, wondering if the outcome of that vote could have been different if ours had been the moment for such derision.

Each spring our congregations remember and retell the story of Pentecost, celebrating the birth of the church, recalling the time when people of many races, cultures, languages and nations were reconciled by the atoning work of Christ and the faithful preaching of the disciples. Our preaching has not been so faithful. Our most ambitious missionary endeavors are undermined by the continuing reality of racial injustice within our own ranks.

Therefore, we ask for your forgiveness. In doing so, we acknowledge that our own healing is at stake, that racism impedes our own development as a people and discredits our own preaching. We affirm with the Apostle Paul that "godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation and brings no regret" (2 Corinthians 7:10). We long to lean into this salvation, to know the joy of life lived in the fullness of the Spirit, a life freed of shame, restored to fellowship, authorized to redemptive and reconciling presence in the world.

Finally, we acknowledge that the dream of the beloved community is painfully slow in coming. The roots of racial discrimination are deeper than we thought. The larger work of confession, repentance and restoration is yet to be completed.

Thus we hereby commit ourselves to diligent patience, to sustaining the struggle against racism for all the days of our lives, to the small steps of reconciling action which will someday blossom forth in the healing of communities, of cities, of the very nations themselves. As the Word of the Lord was spoken to the prophet Habakkuk, "For still the vision awaits its time; it hastens to the end--it will not lie. If it seems slow, wait for it; it will surely come, it will not delay" (2:3).

Andrew M. Manis is editor, Religion and Southern Studies, Mercer University Press, Macon, Georgia.