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

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

In other ways the civil rights movement remained controversial among Southern Baptists. Anecdotal evidence recounted continued hard feelings about King and the civil rights movement. Young preachers mentioning King in sermons often noted frowns on their parishioners' faces and occasionally even had listeners walk out on them before they could conclude their sermons. Baptist preacher-historians who have written books about Southern Baptists and the civil rights movement have been introduced to congregations without mention of their book titles. As late as 1989, a member of the Southern Baptist Executive Committee continued the longstanding and false criticism that King was a communist. Into the 1990s the local churches that commemorate the Martin Luther King National Holiday are almost all black Baptist churches and it remains uncommon to hear King's name or his movement mentioned in Southern Baptist sermons. (29)

RESISTANCE AS SOUTHERN CIVIL RELIGIOSITY

The southern civil religion, known also as the religion of the Lost Cause, forged after the Civil War, receded into relative hibernation after World War I. Occasional outbreaks of regional recrimination, such as during the 1930s Scottsboro case and the northern criticism of southern oppression of blacks, brought mild reawakenings of southern regional loyalty. These paled by comparison to the full-blown renascence of the southern civil religion sparked by Brown and the civil rights movement. Many traditional southern ideas were recycled in reaction to the movement and its goal of integration. Many southern political and religious leaders agreed with Virginia Senator Harry F. Byrd who called the movement "the most serious crisis that has occurred since the War Between the States." Herman Talmadge, the Baptist governor of Georgia, warned, "The die is cast. The challenge has been issued by the NAACP leaders. We must meet this challenge head-on or submit meekly and undergo a mid-Twentieth Century reconstruction period." (30)

Many saw the civil rights movement as the cutting edge of Communism that would destroy Southern traditions. In a veiled reference to King during the Montgomery bus boycott, Leon Macon thought it a strong possibility that "the Communists are aggravating the [segregation] problem here in our own state." More articulate than most, Tom Brady spoke for the many who saw the civil rights movement as the advance of communism and integration as the disappointed hope that the South would remain white man's country:

   Communist Russia's aim is the establishment of a beachhead through the
   Negro in these United States. To alienate racial groups and against racial
   groups, ... Negro against white, is what Russia desires.... The Communists
   of America have been trying since 1936 to destroy the South. The bait which
   attracts them is the Negro population. Hate campaigns against the Southern
   States were conducted in the North. Abuse and falsehoods were flagrantly
   utilized. Counsel and advice were given the Negro leaders.... If the South,
   the stronghold of democracy, could be destroyed, then the nation could be
   destroyed. (31)