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

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

By 1961 Martin Luther King Jr. had risen to the unrivaled position as leader of the civil rights movement and probably the most hated man in the American South. In April of that year social ethicist Henlee Barnette at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, and several other professors learned that King would be preaching at a black Baptist church in town. Entering into correspondence with King, the professors invited him to speak in the seminary chapel and lecture in a few ethics classes. On April 19 King was enthusiastically welcomed to Southern Seminary with a rare standing ovation after his chapel address. In addition, some faculty and administrators inquired into his possible interest in joining the homiletics faculty of the school.

Back home, however, away from the theologically progressive halls of Southern Seminary, news of King's visit was received with a great deal more criticism. Throughout the SBC, individual Baptists denounced the visit, with between thirty and thirty-five Alabama churches voting to withhold financial contributions from the seminary. The controversy raged strongly enough to force the seminary trustees and president Duke K. McCall to issue a public statement of regret over King's visit. (16)

The following year Alabama editor Leon Macon, whose public statements did not express his views quite so bluntly, wrote a letter to Southern Seminary professor Samuel Southard, indicating that white Baptists opposed the civil rights movement and its goal of integration because it would result in "a mongrel race" (17) and lower the moral conduct of whites to that of blacks. That same year, Norman Jimerson, a Northern Baptist minister who worked to establish interracial dialogue in Birmingham through the Alabama Council on Human Relations, began searching to find a Baptist church in Birmingham where he could be admitted into membership and still acknowledge his sympathies with the civil rights movement. He was not able to find such a congregation, and discovered that Baptist churches occasionally competed for prospective members by boasting that "no niggers will ever come to our church." (18)

Of course, during the watershed 1963 Birmingham civil rights demonstrations, Earl Stallings, pastor of the city's First Baptist Church, joined the small contingent of ministers who criticized King and the movement in an open letter in the Birmingham News. In response, King penned his classic defense of the movement, "Letter From Birmingham Jail." During the height of those demonstrations, messengers to the Southern Baptist Convention meeting in Kansas City considered a resolution critical of Birmingham officials and expressing solidarity with "2,400 of our brethren in Christ" jailed in the city. Prominent Birmingham minister Lamar Jackson, pastor of the Southside Baptist Church, immediately opposed the statement, asking his fellow Southern Baptists "to hold in abeyance [their] judgment of our good city." (19)

That fall, when the desegregation of Birmingham's public schools was begun, ministers were asked by Jefferson County Sheriff Mel Bailey to use their pulpits to call for order and peace during the next week's first efforts to integrate Birmingham's schools. Many white ministers did so, most of them calling for Christian obedience to law and order. The next night, however, Ferrell Griswold, pastor of the Minor Heights Baptist Church, addressed a meeting of some one thousand Klan supporters. Criticizing King and the Kennedys, the minister attributed the troubles between the races to "me Communist scheme for world domination." Nine days later Griswold spoke to 5,000 persons at a local "Parents for Private Schools" rally, imploring parents to "keep your children away from these integrated schools." Crowds of students followed Griswold's advice, with virtually the entire student body of West End High School staying away from their classes. On Saturday, September 14, crowds of high school students gathered across from City Hall and heard George Fisher, pastor of the Edgewater Baptist Church, address the same issue. After the minister's speech, they stormed the mayor's office, waving confederate flags, dropping lighted cigarettes on the carpet, and standing on the mayor's desk. The next morning a bomb exploded at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, which had been the nerve center of the spring demonstrations, killing four young girls as they studied a Sunday School lesson on "The Love That Forgives." (20)