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Dying from the neck up": Southern Baptist resistance to the civil rights movement
Baptist History and Heritage, Wntr, 1999 by Andrew M. Manis
The angry, fearful views of Talmadge and Brady expressed the views of the South's most rabid segregationists, clearly a large proportion of whom were Southern Baptists. Particularly in Alabama, the most prominent battlefield of the civil rights movement and probably the most Baptist state in the union, segregationist politicians like John Patterson (1958) and George Wallace (1962) were elected governor, clearly with support of white Baptists. In Baptist discussions of these issues, however, such perspectives were largely hidden for two reasons. First was the longstanding doctrine of the "spirituality of the church," borrowed from antebellum Southern Presbyterians like James Henley Thornwell and which held that the church's concerns were spiritual rather than social or political. This became the basis for much criticism of Martin Luther King Jr. and other activist ministers who were criticized by Jerry Falwell (though not at that time a Southern Baptist) and the ministers whose letter spawned King's "Letter From Birmingham Jail." They complained that as a minister of the Christian gospel, King should more appropriately have been devoting his time and effort to seeking the conversion and spiritual development of his congregation. A second reason for muzzling Brady-like rhetoric in church circles was its inflammatory nature and the Southern Baptist penchant for attempting to avoid potential conflict. Nonetheless, the perspectives of Brady and Talmadge accurately represented the views of many less politically articulate followers whose letters often appeared in Southern Baptist literature, though such expressions were often filtered out by the mediating policies of the state newspaper editors.
On December 1, 1955, the civil rights movement proper began with Rosa Parks's refusal to give up her bus seat in Montgomery, Alabama. The boycott's eventual leader, Martin Luther King Jr., received remarkably little public criticism from Southern Baptist spokespersons in the early stages of his ascendancy as the nation's most prominent civil rights preacher. Again Baptist editors sought to keep such criticism private. After his assassination, however, harsh criticism and even denunciations of King finally emerged in the Baptist press. Those who supported or were sympathetic to King generally did not praise him by name in public. One leader who did take early aim at King was Henry L. Lyons Jr., pastor of Montgomery's Highland Avenue Baptist Church. Just after the end of the boycott in December 1956, Lyons used his weekly radio broadcast to make a biblical defense of segregation. Lyons was significantly elected as president of the Alabama Baptist state convention for 1955 and 1956. (13)
Similar to Lyons's pro-segregation argument, Carey Daniel, minister of the First Baptist Church of West Dallas, Texas, preached a sermon entitled, "God the Original Segregator." Appealing to the antebellum myth of Ham, Daniel cited Genesis 10:32: "These are the families of the sons of Noah ... in their nations: and by these were the nations divided in the earth after the flood." Holding that the biblical word for "nations" was the equivalent to "races," Daniel also found support in the New Testament. Like many segregationist preachers, he cited Acts 17:26 that asserted: "[God] hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and has determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation." (Interestingly enough, African-American preachers used the same text to draw the opposite conclusion about segregation, emphasizing that God had made all persons "of one blood"). (14)
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