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

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

(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.