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

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

(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.