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

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

Having signaled the simple argument that most Southern Baptists resisted and in many cases denounced the civil rights movement, this article adds a more complex argument: One should view resistance to the integrationist goals of the civil rights movement as more than merely a hypocritical rejection of Christianity's universal acceptance of all persons or as the captivity of the churches to the traditional Southern social and racial arrangements. This resistance also constituted a virtual pledge of allegiance to a Southern civil religion, or a white Southern version of the American civil religion, that viewed desegregation and the movement that fostered it as a threat to its understanding of America's sacred meaning as a nation. (5)

REACTIONS TO THE MOVEMENT

Southern Baptists did not wait for Criswell's 1956 pronouncements to register their vigorous rejection of both the ends and the means of the civil rights movement. Their immediate reactions to Brown mostly regretted the decision and pointed out the difficulty of implementing it in the South. Most echoed the sentiments of an editor who saw segregation as rooted in social custom and virtually impervious to change. Calling for calm and clear thinking, editor David Garner of the (Texas) Baptist Standard advised readers to adjust to the problem as "good citizens and loyal Americans." (6) In Alabama, the state that was not only the "heart of Dixie," but that would also become the heart of the civil rights movement, Leon Macon, editor of the Alabama Baptist, complained that the decision "jarred to the foundation a Southern institution" and warned against the dangers of "outside interference" into Southern concerns. After Brown, as historian Wayne Flynt has shown, Macon "slowly transformed his editorial page into a weapon against shifting moral values, racial integration" and a host of other conservative concerns. (7)

Within a few days of the Supreme Court decision, SBC liberals led messengers to the 1954 Convention to adopt the Christian Life Commission's report, which called on Southern Baptists to recognize the ruling as being "in harmony with the constitutional guarantee of equal freedom to all citizens, and with the Christian principles of equal justice and love for all men." Though the messengers voted to accept the report, the convention still saw much opposition to the section of the report dealing with Brown and several attempts to eliminate the Commission's recommendation. Local criticisms of both the ruling and the SBC's mild support of it came quickly. On June 9, the First Baptist Church of Grenada, Mississippi, unanimously passed a resolution repudiating the Convention's "endorsement" of Brown. A week later Mississippi Baptist editor A. L. Goodrich noted that he had received enough letters concerning Brown to last three months, and almost all of those he printed rejected it. (8)

In Georgia the minister of two part-time churches ran into vocational difficulty over his vocal support of the ruling. One of the churches asked for his resignation, while the other fired him outright. A similar situation occurred in Taylor, Louisiana, where Will Campbell, the young pastor of the Taylor Baptist Church, saw his congregation gradually become more aware of the implications of Brown, and realized that a clash over the issue of race loomed ahead if he remained their pastor. Within a few months of the ruling, Campbell, who would later become very much involved in the civil rights movement, resigned his Louisiana pulpit, never to return to pastoral ministry under the "steeples." (9)