by Jemar Tisby
Fourteen-year-old Emmett Till did not live in Mississippi, but he would die there. Emmett begged his mother, Mamie Till Mobley, to let him go down south so he could visit his cousins and get a break from the confines of city life in his hometown of Chicago. Mrs. Mobley relented, and Till headed to a small rural town in the heart of the “Closed Society.” On a hot August day in 1955, he and a few other black children went to Bryant’s Grocery in Money, Mississippi, to hang out. The precise details of what happened next are not clear. It seems likely that Till had crossed an invisible line of Jim Crow propriety by flirting with or whistling at the white shopkeeper, Carolyn Bryant.1 In any event, the perceived slight enraged Bryant’s husband and his brother-in-law enough to drive to the house where Till was staying. They planned to grab the boy and teach him a lesson. Emmett would never be seen alive again.
Till’s mutilated body—an ear sliced with a knife or shears, his femur broken, an eye missing, a cracked skull, and a bullet hole above his ear—turned up in a river a few days later. In a fateful and brave decision, Till’s mother decided to have an open casket funeral so that the world could see what the hatred of white racists had done to her boy. The shocking pictures of Emmett’s body showed up in Jet magazine and other media outlets and led to a national outcry.2
A few months later, Rosa Parks still had the lynching of Emmett Till on her mind when a white bus driver demanded she get up from her seat to allow a white person to sit there.3 Although many people remember Parks as a meek little old lady, she had long been a fierce civil rights activist. Parks helped advocate for the wrongly accused Scottsboro Boys. She helped defend Recy Taylor, a black woman who had been gang-raped by a group of white men, and helped bring the despicable crime to light. Just a couple of months prior to the incident on the bus, Parks had attended the famed Highlander Folk School to learn more about civil rights organizing and nonviolent direction action techniques. Parks’s refusal to move from her seat on the bus fit into a long history of her own defiance of Jim Crow and was just one prominent example of the vital role women have played in the black freedom struggle. Parks’s actions helped spark a boycott that would catapult a young minister named Martin Luther King Jr. to national renown.4
Just twenty-six years old at the time, King had been recommended as an able young preacher who could mobilize the black middle class and church community. King considered himself first and foremost a preacher. He wanted to attend to his first pastorate at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church and pay attention to his wife and newborn daughter, Yolanda, not even one month old yet. At a vote to choose officers for the newly created Montgomery Improvement Association, Rufus Lewis nominated King for the presidency. Still hesitant, King said, “Well, if you think I can render some service, I will.”5 Thus started the public career of one of America’s most well-known activists.
Examining the civil rights movement through the actions of Martin Luther King Jr. and another behemoth in American religious history—Billy Graham—provides two vastly different perspectives of the civil rights movement. King and Graham each had large grassroots followings and reached countless people in the United States and beyond through their speeches, sermons, and writings. Both show up frequently in the examples below because their views, while not universal, represent two approaches to religion and justice—moderation and activism.
This chapter focuses on the Christian moderates—mostly white and evangelical but also some black churches and ministers—who played it safe, refusing to get involved in the civil rights movement. These people of faith may not have given their full support to the most extreme racists, but neither did they oppose racists outright or openly disagree with racist objectives. While the civil rights movement has a well-earned reputation as a faith-based movement led by Christian pastors and lay people, our collective memory of the proportion of Christians involved may be somewhat skewed. In reality, precious few Christians publicly aligned themselves with the struggle for black freedom in the 1950s and 1960s. Those who did participate faced backlash from their families, friends, and fellow Christians. At a key moment in the life of our nation, one that called for moral courage, the American church responded to much of the civil rights movement with passivity, indifference, or even outright opposition.
BROWN V. BOARD AND “A CHRISTIAN VIEW OF SEGREGATION”
Nine-year-old Linda Brown likely had no idea that she would be part of a group of black families who would overturn the nearly sixty-year old Plessy v Ferguson decision and the nation’s legal commitment to segregation in public facilities. In 1951, Brown’s father simply did not want his little girl to have to cross railroad yards and a busy street to get to a school that offered a substandard education compared to the white schools in Topeka, Kansas.6 Sumner Elementary school stood much closer to the Brown home and offered better facilities, better-trained teachers, and more funding for its programs. It also happened to be all-white. When the school’s officials refused to let Brown’s daughter Linda attend there, he joined with four other cases in the now-famous court decision Brown vs. The Board of Education of Topeka.
In explaining the unanimous decision of the Supreme Court, Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote, “We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”7 Warren was merely making explicit what was quite evident, that black and white facilities—whether schools, hospitals, or housing—were definitely not equal. The ideology that had led to segregation had never provided for the equitable distribution of resources. The Brown v. Board decision removed the legal keystone that had propped up racial divisions in public spaces, and in doing so it outraged segregationists.
The Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board struck the South like a bolt of lightning. The reaction was swift and fiery. It came from all segments of southern society, including many white southern churches. Some preachers quoted the Bible to battle against the decision. In 1954, clergymen in the conservative and mostly southern Presbyterian Church in the United States (PCUS) gathered for their regular regional meeting of churches, and this assembly of pastors heard a message from G. T. Gillespie, the president emeritus of a Christian school, Belhaven College, in Jackson, Mississippi. In a carefully argued speech to the pastors in attendance, Gillespie outlined a “Christian View of Segregation.” His argument reveals some of the specific ways Christians compromised with racism during the civil rights era.
Although Gillespie utilized various biblical passages to argue for segregation, he acknowledged, “The Bible contains no clear mandate for or against segregation as between the white and negro races.” Segregationists like Gillespie resorted to so-called “natural law” arguments to bolster their case for racial segregation. In a section titled “Segregation Is One of Nature’s Universal Laws,” he stated, “There are many varieties of the bird family, but under natural conditions, so far as known, bluebirds never mate with redbirds, doves never mate with blackbirds, nor mockingbirds with jays.”8 This analogy invokes the specter of interracial sex to frighten segregationists about the possibility of black men sleeping with white women. It also refers to color—the white dove and the blackbird, the redbird and the bluebird—as an allusion to the racial issue at hand.
Then Gillespie’s speech turned from “natural law” arguments to examine Scripture from which he contended he could still make “valid inferences” about segregation. Leviticus admonished the Israelites not to mix “diverse things” like wool and linen as well as different strains of cattle and seeds. Reasoning from this injunction, Gillespie figured that “the same principle would apply with even greater force with respect to human relations.”9 In other words, if different fabrics, animals, and plants could not mix in the Old Testament, it was best for black and white peoples not to mix either. Gillespie also referred to warnings against intermarriage between the Israelites and non-Jewish tribes as a reason to prohibit interracial relationships and integration.
Other mi
nisters such as Carey L. Daniel, pastor of First Baptist Church in West Dallas, followed Gillespie’s example. In a sermon later adapted into a pamphlet entitled “God the Original Segregationist,” Daniel went so far as to make a direct comparison between desegregation and the schemes of the devil himself. Conversely, Daniel labeled Jesus the “Original Segregationist.”10 Though he could find no statements from Jesus supporting segregation, he argued that the Savior had never repealed the laws of segregation supposedly espoused in the Old Testament.11
Not all Protestant Christians were openly supportive of segregation, of course. Many were racial moderates, seeking to find a middle way between the various positions. One of the best-known and most respected evangelical leaders of the time, the Reverend Billy Graham, was a racial moderate when it came to segregation. To his credit, Graham went much further than many white evangelicals in an effort to desegregate his religious gatherings. At a crusade in California in 1953, Graham personally took down ropes segregating black and white seating in the audience. “Either these ropes stay down, or you can go on and have the revival without me,” he said.12
Yet Graham, like many white evangelicals, held back from actively pushing for black civil rights. After the Supreme Court handed down the Brown v. Board decision, Graham deliberately avoided scheduling crusades in the South for a period to avoid getting embroiled in the more heated conflicts about desegregation. Shortly after Brown, Graham stated, “I believe the heart of the problem of race is in loving our neighbor.”13 While few Christians would object that racism is a failure to love one’s neighbor, Graham did not carry that statement any further into the realm of institutional racism. Like many evangelicals, Graham believed race relations would gradually improve—one conversion and one friendship at a time. He viewed racial conflict as a local issue and a social matter. Furthermore, Graham was quite vocal in his denunciations of communism, something many conservatives also associated with the civil rights movement, and this association effectively dissuaded him and others from supporting the activists who protested racism.14 Ultimately, Graham made it clear that his primary goal was evangelism. He took measured steps to desegregate his crusades and encourage Christians to obey the Brown v. Board decision, but he assiduously avoided any countercultural stances that would have alienated his largely white audience and his supporters.
Of course, other ministers of the gospel spoke prophetically against segregation, and we should applaud their stand. But their numbers should not be overestimated, and the backlash they faced for their bold action should not be overlooked. During the civil rights movement, activists who courageously risked their well-being for black freedom were few and far between, but Christian moderates who were complicit with the status quo of institutional racism were numerous.
THE CHRISTIAN MODERATE AND THE “LETTER FROM A BIRMINGHAM JAIL”
The year 1963 had been an especially eventful year for the civil rights movement, especially for Martin Luther King Jr. and the city of Birmingham, Alabama. A slew of bombings—including over fifty in a white neighborhood that was slowly integrating and was nicknamed “Dynamite Hill”—earned Birmingham the moniker “Bombingham.”15 Earlier that year, King had helped lead a boycott of downtown businesses in protest of segregation. On April 12, Good Friday, he was arrested and put into jail where he penned his renowned “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” Then in the late summer of that year, 200,000 marchers converged on Washington DC for the “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom” where King delivered his most famous speech, “I Have a Dream.” The Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing happened just over two weeks later.
Martin Luther King Jr. knew that there would be a price to pay for his decision to support the black civil rights campaign in Birmingham in 1963. He did not take this decision lightly. King and his compatriots knew that to take on the city of Birmingham meant taking on their public safety commissioner, Eugene “Bull” Connor. King and the executive leadership team of the SCLC spent two days at a retreat to consider the implications of a campaign in the city. Bull Connor had a reputation. During Connor’s tenure over the local law enforcement, several racially motivated bombings remained “unsolved.” There was such a substantial risk of physical harm and even death that King reportedly said to his fellow leaders, “I have to tell you that in my judgment, some of the people sitting here today will not come back alive from this campaign. And I want you to think about it.”16 At the same time, a grassroots campaign of civil rights activism was gaining momentum in Birmingham. But it needed a boost, something only King and the SCLC could offer, if it hoped to secure lasting victory.
As expected, police soon arrested and jailed King. While he was incarcerated, eight white clergymen wrote a letter to King and his supporters advising them to depart and let the community handle race relations for itself. Today, much of the attention focuses on King’s letter, but the message King received from white, moderate Christians also deserves attention. Their message provides a stark illustration of how much of the American church responded to King and the civil rights movement.
In a missive, which was published in the local newspaper, the ministers criticize both the protests and the involvement of non-Birmingham residents. “We are now confronted by a series of demonstrations by some of our Negro citizens directed and led in part by outsiders. We recognize the natural impatience of people who feel that their hopes are slow in being realized. But we are convinced that these demonstrations are unwise and untimely.”17 In their estimation, King did not know the contours of the local situation, and they believed his presence, along with the protests he led, threatened to undo the encouraging progress Birmingham had seen in recent months.
This group of mostly Christian, white moderates—which included Baptists, Methodists, a Presbyterian, and a Jewish Rabbi—contended that civil rights remedies should be pursued through litigation instead of through boycotts and marches: “When rights are consistently denied, a cause should be pressed in the courts and in negotiations among local leaders, and not in the streets.”18 While they recognized King’s rhetoric of nonviolence, they still believed that his tactics would actually undermine democracy and increase the likelihood of bloodshed.
What comes through in the letter, more than anything else, is their reasonableness. They acknowledge the “natural impatience” of black people whose civil rights have been denied. They affirmed that “hatred and violence have no sanction in our religious and political traditions.”19 They even allowed that black people had recourse to pursue remedies for certain issues in the courts. What then could be objectionable about a group of religious community leaders uniting to encourage restraint and patience in pursuing civil rights for black people?
But it is the very reasonableness of the letter that reveals the underlying problem of complicity with racism. This letter from white Christian moderates illustrates the broader failure of the white church, a failure to recognize the daily indignity of American racism and the urgency the situation demanded. These clergymen likely had good intentions, but they did not realize that the talking and negotiating for which they advocated had been attempted and had yielded little to no progress. They denounced the violence that direct action would supposedly incite, but they did relatively little about the countless lynchings, church bombings, and beatings black people across the nation suffered at the hands of segregationists. They were overly cautious when the circumstances demanded a measure of outrage and courageous confrontation. In general, this approach exemplifies how many Christian moderates during the civil rights movement responded, promoting a gradual approach to resolving racial issues and minimizing the suffering and hardship of the marginalized, who had been waiting centuries for justice.
Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” has since proven to be one of the greatest works of Christian political theology ever produced by an American. His eloquent and rich response conveys the philosophical and spiritual issues at stake in the civil rights movement. Kin
g recognized the need for Christians to be allies, working together in the black freedom struggle, while acknowledging that most of the white church had chosen the path of complicity over advocacy.
Even though King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” was a direct response to white Christians, we should acknowledge that not all Christian moderates were white. Rev. Joseph H. Jackson was the pastor of Olivet Baptist Church in Chicago and president of the National Baptist Convention. He was even known by some as the “Negro Pope.”20 His authoritarian style and influence over the largest black Baptist body in the nation made him either a valuable ally or a formidable opponent. Martin Luther King Jr. had known Jackson since King was ten years old because Jackson had been a frequent houseguest of King’s father, “Daddy King,” in Atlanta. But when the younger King became active in the civil rights movement and gained a reputation as the most prominent black minister, Jackson chose to strongly oppose the movement and King in particular. He labeled King a “hoodlum” and “powder-keg philosopher.” Jackson deplored the direct-action campaigns of civil rights activists, and Jackson’s opposition to the movement’s tactics ultimately led King and 2,000 others to leave the denomination and form the Progressive National Baptist Convention (PNBC) in 1961.21
But King was not alone in advocating for a more direct and active approach to securing civil rights for black Americans. Fannie Lou Hamer, a Mississippi sharecropper turned national civil rights icon, also advocated for direct action—and for good reasons. Born to sharecropping parents as the youngest of twenty children, Hamer grew up in the Mississippi Delta and experienced some of America’s worst poverty. In 1963, police officers arrested her and other black civil rights workers as they returned to Mississippi on a bus. The officers took the activists to a rural jail and proceeded to mercilessly beat them. Hamer’s abuse only served to fuel her conviction to secure racial equality and economic justice. Given all she endured, she had little patience for anyone too complacent to get involved in the black freedom struggle. Hamer frequently criticized “chicken-eatin’ preachers” who were more concerned about comfort and “selling out for the big Cadillacs” than sacrificing for the sake of justice.22
