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

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

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)

After the successful close of the Montgomery bus boycott in December 1956 and the founding, mostly by African-American Baptist ministers, of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in January 1957, the civil rights movement became a ready topic of private conversation among Southern Baptists, but only occasionally in their public expressions. After 1956, with the exception of Christian Life Commission director Foy D. Valentine, most SBC agency heads tried to remain neutral regarding race issues. Among these were Alma Hunt, executive director of the Women's Missionary Union, as well as most seminary presidents. The year after helping negotiate a relatively peaceful solution to the 1957 impasse over school desegregation crisis in Little Rock, Arkansas, Congressman and SBC president Brooks Hays delivered an address calling on Southern Baptists to embrace the cause of integration. That Hays could be elected at all was, of course, a sign that Southern Baptist sentiment was far from monolithic and that the sort of Southern Baptist who attended the annual conventions was more likely to be educated, a member of the clergy, and pro-civil rights. At least they were more likely to be pro-civil rights away from home. The following year, however, when Convention messengers attempted to approve a statement commending Hays for his stand on integration, segregationist sentiment was strong enough to force the deletion of that section of the resolution. (15)