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

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

But for Brady and the Baptists who accepted his logic, this destruction of America and the South would come not by Soviet conquest but through racial amalgamation, which they believed would irreparably weaken the Anglo-Saxon race and render America incapable of defending against the Communist threat.

   "The Communist leaders of this world are not fools," argued Brady. "They
   know a mongrelized race is an ignorant, weak, and easily conquered race."
   He based this conclusion on his own historical analysis, asserting that the
   cultures of Egypt, India, Burma, Siam, Greece, Rome, Spain, and Central
   America had all been destroyed by "negroid amalgamation." (33)

To white southerners with lily-white images of their ideal America, the civil rights movement and its goal of integration symbolized an absolute threat. James McBride Dabbs noted that in the face of such threat white southerners would defend their traditions "as patriots who love their native land, as pious men who will not deny their past." In response to such threat, the South saw the Confederacy symbolically reborn. In this period, for example, Georgia redesigned its state flag to include the Confederate battle flag. It was an era in which Robert Patterson, founder of the Citizens' Councils, could confess: "We just felt like integration would utterly destroy everything we valued." Similarly A. A. Kitchings, a Baptist layperson from Mississippi, could write, "True Southerners know that racial integration will destroy everything that we cherish." (32)

The civil rights movement and its goal of integration revealed that black and white Baptists in the South hoped for the actualization of different Americas. Most black Baptists, many of whom were central figures in the civil rights movement, held the vision of a pluralistic society giving justice to all its citizens and showing the entire world how to live in harmony. White Baptists in the South, however, hoped for a homogeneous, Protestant, Anglo-Saxon America that would defend individual liberty in the world. Most Southern Baptists saw the civil rights movement and its goal of integration as a symbol of ultimate threat. The civil rights movement, itself an expression of a pluralistic version of civil religion, thus breathed new life into the century-old southern civil religion of the Lost Cause and made the South into a battlefield of conflicting civil faiths.

ENDNOTES

(1.) Quoted in Baptist Message 33 (March 1, 1956): 1.

(2.) John B. Boles, editor of the Journal of Southern History, suggested this analogy to the author. Boles received this piece of wisdom from one of his teachers, who no doubt got it from one of his. Where and with whom this tradition stops, this author does not know.

(3.) Criswell publicly announced a change in his racial views in a 1970 sermon, "The Church of the Open Door," see James E. Towns, The Social Conscience of W. A. Criswell (Dallas: Crescendo Publications, 1977), 157-71. Towns provides introductions to and the texts of both Criswell's 1956 speech and the later sermon. Though Criswell spoke of a truly Christian church being one that is open to all persons regardless of race, his recanting of his earlier views did not specifically mean he now approved of the civil rights movement. He could still reject the movement's timing and methods.