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

Baptist History and Heritage, Wntr, 1999 by Andrew M. Manis

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.