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

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

Even theological moderates like popular Oklahoma City pastor Herschel Hobbs, known to many as "Mr. Southern Baptist," were critical of King. In a letter to Alabama editor Leon Macon, Hobbs expressed the private opinion that King was a "rabble rouser" and a "troublemaker." This assessment naturally buttressed Macon's opinion that the only positive element in the civil rights movement was that many segregationists were leaving other denominations to join Baptist congregations. (25)

The Convention's official response to King's death came in the form of a "Statement Concerning the National Crisis," which arose in early May. A group of denominational leaders in Nashville, led by Franklin Paschall, pastor of First Baptist Church and president of the SBC, drew up the statement and distributed it to other prominent Southern Baptists. Seventy-one agency and state leaders signed the document, which confessed "our share of the responsibility" for the racial crisis. Over the next month, articles and letters debating the Statement filled the Baptist papers. Before the Statement reached the floor of the annual convention, the SBC Executive Committee softened its expression of collective guilt and added a new section reviewing earlier Southern Baptist efforts toward racial harmony. On the Convention floor, messengers voted to amend the Statement to call on minority groups to exercise "respect for the person and property of others." Eventually, however, the Convention approved the Statement by a vote of 5,687 (72.85%) to 2,119 (27.15%). (26)

Thus did the 1968 Southern Baptist Convention make an official response to the racial crisis in America--in effect a response to the King assassination though without mentioning him by name. But though comfortably winning the vote on the Convention floor, the Crisis Statement made a large percentage of Southern Baptists uncomfortable and efforts at implementation at the local level stalled. By November 1968 a survey research by the Home Mission Board revealed that only eleven percent of Southern Baptist churches would admit African-Americans. Later that month the SBC Crisis Statement was reaffirmed by only eight state Baptist conventions, none of them in the Deep South. (27)

After the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, desegregation began to become a reality in the South. Most white Southerners, Baptists included, gradually but grudgingly came to accept it. Yet those with strong misgivings rapidly developed segregated private schools, many of which were called "Christian Academies" and utilized church facilities, especially among Baptist churches. Thus, objection to the goals of the civil rights movement remained a strong element in Southern Baptist life. On the rise of segregated academies, W. W. Finlator, pastor of the Pullen Memorial church in Raleigh, wrote an article called "Please Don't Call It Christian." He noted: "Just at the time when our public schools are required by law to exercise courageous and imaginative compliance [with federal desegregation edicts] there are mushrooming up across the state institutions ostensibly under the auspices of the church with the real, if not avowed, purpose of evading the compliance requirement." (28)