The Color of Compromise

by Jemar Tisby

  9. W. Fitzhugh Brundage, “I’ve Studied the History of Confederate Memorials. Here’s What to Do about Them,” Vox, August 18, 2018, https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/8/18/16165160/confederate-monuments-history-charlottesville-white-supremacy.

  10. Wilson, Baptized in Blood, 33–34.

  11. Foner, A Short History of Reconstruction, 244–45.

  12. See C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002) for a thorough discussion of how Jim Crow segregation developed through a series of missed opportunities to form different patterns of social interaction between the races.

  13. Henry B. Brown, “Opinion,” Plessy v. Ferguson, May 18, 1896, Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School, law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/163/537.

  14. “Achilles V. Clark to Judith Porter and Henrietta Porter, April 14, 1864,” The Civil War: The Final Year by Those Who Lived It, ed. Aaron Sheehan-Dean (New York: Literary Classics, 2014).

  15. Michael Newton, White Robes and Burning Crosses: A History of the Ku Klux Klan from 1866 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014), 6–7.

  16. Newton, White Robes and Burning Crosses, 18.

  17. Michael Newton, The Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi: A History (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010), 36.

  18. Kelly J. Baker, The Gospel According to the Klan: The KKK’s Appeal to Protestant American, 1915–1930 (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2011), 6, italics original.

  19. Mark E. Benbow, “Birth of a Quotation: Woodrow Wilson and ‘Like Writing History with Lightning,’ ” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 9, no. 4 (October 2010): 509.

  20. George Robertson, “We . . . and Our Fathers Have Sinned (Daniel 9:8),” First Presbyterian Augusta, June 26, 2015, https://firstpresaugusta.org/resource/we-and-our-fathers-have-sinned-daniel-98/.

  21. Juan O. Sanchez, Religion and the Ku Klux Klan: Biblical Appropriation in Their Literature and Songs (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2016), 14.

  22. Kenneth T. Jackson, The Ku Klux Klan in the City, 1915–1930 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), xv.

  23. Linda K. Gordon, The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition (New York: Liveright, 2017), 1–3.

  24. Olivia B. Waxman, “How the KKK’s Influence Spread in Northern States,” Time, October 24, 2017, http://time.com/4990253/kkk-white-nationalists-history/.

  25. Jackson, The Ku Klux Klan in the City, 7.

  26. Waxman, “How the KKK’s Influence Spread in Northern States.”

  27. James W. Loewen, Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism (New York: New Press, 2005), 3–11.

  28. Danielle L. McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance—A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power (New York: Knopf, 2010), xv–xvii.

  29. McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street, xviii.

  30. Theodore Bilbo, Take Your Choice: Separation or Mongrelization (Poplarville, MI: Dream House, 1947), 88, in the US Archive, https://archive.org/stream/TakeYourChoice/TakeYourChoice_djvu.txt; see also Ian Millhiser, “When ‘Religious Liberty’ Was Used To Justify Racism Instead Of Homophobia,” Think Progress, February 27, 2014, https://thinkprogress.org/when-religious-liberty-was-used-to-justify-racism-instead-of-homophobia-67bc973c4042/.

  31. Douglas A. Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (New York: Doubleday, 2008), 1–10.

  32. Chris Myers Asch, The Senator and the Sharecropper (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008).

  33. “Most Horrible: Details of the Burning at the Stake of the Holberts,” Vicksburg Evening Post, February 13, 1904.

  34. “Most Horrible,” Vicksburg Evening Post.

  35. Walter White, “The Work of a Mob,” The Crisis 16, no. 5 (September 1918): 221.

  36. White, “The Work of a Mob,” 222.

  37. Darlene Clark Hine, William C. Hine, and Stanley C. Harrold, African American Odyssey, vol. 1, 7th ed. (Boston: Pearson, 2016), 386.

  38. Stephen Ward Angell, Bishop Henry McNeal Turner and African-American Religion in the South (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1992), 1–5.

  39. Angell, Bishop Henry McNeal Turner, 1.

  40. Angell, Bishop Henry McNeal Turner, 90–91.

  41. James H. Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2011), 158.

  42. Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, xviii.

  43. Ezra Klein, “Bryan Stevenson Explains How It Feels to Grow up Black amid Confederate Monuments,” Vox, May 24, 2017, https://www.vox.com/2017/5/24/15675606/bryan-stevenson-confederacy-monuments-slavery-ezra-klein.

  CHAPTER 7: REMEMBERING THE COMPLICITY IN THE NORTH

  1. Darlene Clark Hine, William C. Hine, and Stanley C. Harrold, African American Odyssey, vol. 1, 7th ed. (Boston: Pearson, 2016), 421.

  2. Patrick T. Reardon, “The World’s Columbian Exposition at the ‘White City,’ ” Chicago Tribune, n.d., http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/politics/chi-chicagodays-columbianexposition-story-story.html.

  3. Hine, Hine, Harrold, African American Odyssey, 421.

  4. Frederick Douglass, introduction to The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition: The Afro-American’s Contribution to Columbian Literature, by Ida B. Wells, with contributions by Frederick Douglass, Irvine Garland Penn, and Ferdinand Lee Barnett (1893), https://www.loc.gov/item/mfd.25023.

  5. Thomas Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Random House, 2008), xv.

  6. John T. McGreevy, Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth Century Urban North (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 33. See also David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1999).

  7. James and Patrick Healy were ordained as Roman Catholic priests and were biracial, but they “passed” as white and refused to be identified as colored.

  8. C. Vanessa White, “Augustus Tolton: Pioneer Pastor,” U. S. Catholic 79, no. 2 (February 2014): 55–56.

  9. Vinson Synan, “Pentecostalism: William Seymour,” Christianity Today, no. 65 (2000), https://www.christianitytoday.com/history/issues/issue-65/pentecostalism-william-seymour.html.

  10. Synan, “Pentecostalism: William Seymour.”

  11. Vinson Synan, The Holiness-Pentecostal Tradition: Charismatic Movements in the Twentieth Century, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1997), loc. 1063, Kindle.

  12. Frank Bartleman, Azusa Street: An Eyewitness Account (Alachua, FL: Bridge-Logos, 1980), 59.

  13. Synan, The Holiness-Pentecostal Tradition, loc. 1919.

  14. Synan, The Holiness-Pentecostal Tradition, loc. 1937.

  15. Paul B. Rauschenbusch, foreword to Christianity and the Social Crisis in the 21st Century: The Classic That Woke up the Church, by Walter Rauschenbusch (New York: HarperCollins, 2017), loc. 7620, Kindle.

  16. David R. Swartz, Moral Minority: The Evangelical Left in an Age of Conservatism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), loc. 227, Kindle.

  17. Charles R. Erdman, “The Church and Socialism,” in The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth, ed. R. A. Torrey and A. C. Dixon, vol. 12 (Harrington, DE: Delmarva, 2013), loc. 19862, Kindle.

  18. It must be noted, however, that Fundamentalist abstention from the political arena was selective. For instance, they decried the teaching of evolution in schools and sought to pass laws against it.

  19. Mary Beth Swetnam Mathews, Doctrine and Race: African American Evangelicals and Fundamentalism Between the Wars (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2017), 2.

  20. Mathews, Doctrine and Race, 45.

  21. Glenda E. Gilmore and Thomas J. Sugrue, These United States: A Nation in the Making, 1890 to the Present (New York: Norton, 2015), 106–8.

  22. Hine, Hine, and Harr
old, African American Odyssey, 458–60.

  23. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Returning Soldiers,” The Crisis 18 (May 1919): 13.

  24. Ethan Michaeli, The Defender: How the Legendary Black Newspaper Changed America from the Age of the Pullman Porters to the Age of Obama (Boston: Mariner, 2016), 80.

  25. Michaeli, The Defender, 80.

  26. “Red Summer of 1919,” Equal Justice Initiative, https://eji.org/reports/online/lynching-in-america-targeting-black-veterans/red-summer.

  27. Gilmore and Sugrue, These United States, 143.

  28. Tony Martin, Race First: The Ideological and Organizational Struggles of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (repr., Dover, MA: First Majority, 1986), 359–60.

  29. Alison Collis Greene, No Depression in Heaven: The Great Depression, the New Deal, and the Transformation of Religion in the Delta (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 2.

  30. Thomas Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Random House, 2008), xvii.

  31. Pope Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno: On Reconstruction of the Social Order, May 15, 1931, 25, http://w2.vatican.va/content/pius-xi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xi_enc_19310515_quadragesimo-anno.html.

  32. Heath W. Carter, Union Made: Working People and the Rise of Social Christianity in Chicago (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 179.

  33. Carter, Union Made, 180.

  34. Darren Dochuk, From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots and the Rise of Conservative Evangelicalism (New York: Norton, 2012), 69–70.

  35. Dochuk, From Bible Belt to Sunbelt, 67–69.

  36. Dochuk, From Bible Belt to Sunbelt, 70, 81. For a discussion of how Christian colleges in the South inculcated their students with a faith in the free-market see Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).

  37. Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Norton, 2005), x.

  38. Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White, 22.

  39. Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White, 84.

  40. Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: The Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (New York: Norton, 2017), 167.

  41. Rothstein, The Color of Law, 64.

  42. Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit, rev. ed. (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2005), 193–94.

  43. Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty, loc. 3751, Kindle.

  44. Joshua Ruff, “Levittown: The Archetype for Suburban Development,” American History Magazine, October 4, 2007, http://www.historynet.com/levittown-the-archetype-for-suburban-development.htm.

  45. Ruff, “Levittown.”

  46. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis, 231–33.

  47. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis, 232–33.

  48. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis, 233.

  49. Rachael A. Woldoff, White Flight/Black Flight: The Dynamics of Racial Change in an American Neighborhood (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), 3, 13.

  50. Kriston Capps, “How Real-Estate Brokers Can Profit from Racial Tipping Points,” City Lab. March 3, 2015, https://www.citylab.com/equity/2015/03/how-real-estate-brokers-can-profit-from-racial-tipping-points/386674/.

  51. Mark T. Mulder, Shades of White Flight: Evangelical Congregations and Urban Departure (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015), loc. 127, Kindle.

  52. Mulder, Shades of White Flight, Loc. 235.

  53. Martin Luther King Jr., “Thou, Dear God”: Prayers that Open Hearts and Spirits, ed. Lewis V. Baldwin (Boston: Beacon, 2012), 171.

  54. David Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, (repr., New York: HarperCollins, 2004), 431–33.

  55. Garrow, Bearing the Cross, 427.

  56. Taylor Branch, At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965–1968 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), 510.

  57. Branch, At Canaan’s Edge, 511.

  58. Matthew J. Countryman, Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 3.

  CHAPTER 8: COMPROMISING WITH RACISM DURING THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

  1. Carolyn Bryant in 2007 confessed to historian Timothy Tyson that the most sensational part of her testimony in court about Till touching her was “not true.” See Sheila Webber, “How Author Timothy Tyson Found the Woman at the Center of the Emmett Till Case,” Vanity Fair, January 26, 2017, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/01/how-author-timothy-tyson-found-the-woman-at-the-center-of-the-emmett-till-case.

  2. Timothy Tyson, The Blood of Emmett Till (New York: Simon & Schuster. 2017), loc. 1041–60, Kindle.

  3. Tyson, The Blood of Emmett Till, loc. 3609; Lily Rothman and Arpita Aneja, “You Still Don’t Know the Whole Rosa Parks Story,” Time, November 30, 2015, http://time.com/4125377/rosa-parks-60-years-video/.

  4. See Jeanne Theoharis’s The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2013) for a fresh reinterpretation of the civil rights activist’s life.

  5. David Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (New York: William Morrow, 1986), 22.

  6. Emanuella Grinberg, Sheena Jones, and Amir Vera, “Linda Brown, Woman at Center of Brown v. Board Case, Dies,” CNN, March 26, 2018, https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/26/us/linda-brown-dies/index.html.

  7. “Transcript of Brown v. Board of Education (1954),” ourdocuments.gov, https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=false&doc=87&page=transcript.

  8. G. T. Gillespie, “A Christian View of Segregation,” speech, November 4, 1954, University of Mississippi Archives “Citizens’ Council” Collection, p. 5.

  9. Gillespie, “A Christian View of Segregation,” 10.

  10. Carey L. Daniel, “God the Original Segregationist,” pamphlet, 1955, electronic version, McCain D. Williams Pamphlet Collection, University of Mississippi Libraries.

  11. David Chappell argues in A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005) that part of the reason the Christian case for segregation failed is that white ministers and theologians could not marshal the same level of biblical sanction for the practices of segregation. Their rationale withered amid the prophetic messaging of civil rights activists.

  12. Steven P. Miller, Billy Graham and the Rise of the Republican South (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 28.

  13. Miller, Billy Graham and the Rise of the Republican South, 31.

  14. Miller, Billy Graham and the Rise of the Republican South, 16.

  15. Howell Raines, “The Birmingham Bombing,” New York Times, July 24, 1983, https://www.nytimes.com/1983/07/24/magazine/the-birmingham-bombing.html.

  16. Garrow, Bearing the Cross, 229.

  17. A Group of Clergymen, “Letter to Martin Luther King,” April 12, 1963, TeachingAmericanHistory.org, https://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/letter-to-martin-luther-king/.

  18. A Group of Clergymen, “Letter to Martin Luther King.”

  19. A Group of Clergymen, “Letter to Martin Luther King.”

  20. Taylor Branch, At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965–1968 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), 262.

  21. Branch, At Canaan’s Edge, 262.

  22. Kay Mills, This Little Light of Mine: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky 2009), 238.

  23. Martin Luther King Jr., “I Have a Dream,” speech, Washington DC, August 28, 1963, during the “March on Washington.”

  24. “Civil Rights Movement Timeline,” History, https://www.history.com/topics/civil-rights-movement-timeline.

  25. “Civil Rights Act of 1964,” The Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education In
stitute, Stanford University, https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/civil-rights-act-1964.

  26. William Martin, A Prophet with Honor: The Billy Graham Story, rev. ed. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2018), 319.

  27. Martin Luther King Jr., interview with Mike Wallace, CBS Reports, September 27, 1966.

  28. Miller, Billy Graham and the Rise of the Republican South, 129.

  29. Taylor Branch, At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965–1968 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), 284.

  30. “The Civil Rights Movement Moves North,” Digital History, http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtid=2&psid=3332.

  31. Martin, A Prophet with Honor, 320–21.

  32. Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (Boston: Beacon, 2010), loc. 481, Kindle.

  33. Aram Goudsouzian, Down to the Crossroads: Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Meredith March Against Fear (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2014), 142–43.

  34. Jonathan Eig, “The Real Reason Why Muhammad Ali Converted to Islam,” Washington Post, October 26, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2017/10/26/the-real-reason-muhammad-ali-converted-to-islam/?utm_term=.b83ef354fe22.

  35. Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 88.

  36. Kruse, White Flight, 92.

  37. Kruse, White Flight, 89.

  38. Joseph P. Williams, “Segregation’s Legacy,” US News and World Report, April 20, 2018, https://www.usnews.com/news/the-report/articles/2018-04-20/us-is-still-segregated-even-after-fair-housing-act.

  39. Alabama Council on Human Relations, “It’s Not Over in the South: School Desegregation in Forty-Three Southern Cities Eighteen Years after Brown,” May 1972, p. 142, https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED065646.pdf.

  40. Timothy Tyson, Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story (New York: Three Rivers, 2004), 71–72.

  41. Tyson, Blood Done Sign My Name, 16.

  42. Tyson, Blood Done Sign My Name, 73.

  43. Edward J. Blum and Paul Harvey, The Color of Christ: The Song of God and the Saga of Race in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 211.