One of the most violent expressions of white supremacy occurred on Easter Sunday 1873 in the Baptist-dominated town of Colfax, Louisiana. The state was still reeling from defeat in the Civil War, and the 1872 election was only the second held under the auspices of the new 1868 state constitution that enfranchised black voters as part of Reconstruction. While antebellum state and local politics had been dominated by the pro-Confederate Democratic Party, the first Reconstruction election had resulted in widespread Republican victories for state and local office, including for the first time black officials such as Lieutenant Governor P. B. S. Pinchback.
Federal authorities had also reorganized the state after the war, with new towns and parishes taking on names of the Union victors. Colfax itself had been renamed in 1868. Originally called Calhoun’s Landing, after a wealthy slave-owning planter, Meredith Calhoun, it now honored Schuyler Colfax, vice president under President Ulysses S. Grant. And Grant Parish, for which Colfax is the county seat, was carved out of the larger Rapides Parish and named for the president. Determined to push back these changes, including what they saw as the humiliation of federal occupation and “negro rule,” whites revolted.
In Colfax, a group of armed African American Republicans, hearing of an impending attack, barricaded themselves inside the Grant Parish courthouse to defend the results of the elections and their lawful authority to assume office. Soon thereafter, a group of 150 whites surrounded the courthouse and opened fire. Leading the assault was Christopher Columbus Nash, the local sheriff and an ex-Confederate soldier who would go on to found the White League, a paramilitary organization that admonished whites in the South to organize and fight for “the maintenance of our hereditary civilization and Christianity menaced by a stupid Africanization [sic].”1
Nash’s followers turned a small cannon on the courthouse and set fire to the roof. Nearly seventy African Americans were killed in the initial battle. When the remaining African Americans inside surrendered, thirty-seven were marched outside and publicly executed in the town square.2 During the remainder of the day, more African Americans were rounded up and jailed, and approximately fifty more were executed that night. After the massacre, the bodies of the executed African Americans were hastily buried in trenches on the courthouse grounds, both as a terrifying symbol of what fate might await African Americans who attempted to assert political power and as an act of cruelty, since it denied their families the opportunity for proper Christian funerals and burials.3
Today there are two monuments to these events in Colfax, both erected by whites, which cast the occupation of the courthouse by black elected officials as a “riot” rather than what they were: a defense of the results of a lawful election that ended in a massacre by terrorists. The town cemetery is dominated by a white marble obelisk erected shortly after the event that reads: “In loving remembrance, erected to the memory of the heroes Stephen Decatur Parish, James West Hadnot, Sidney Harris who fell in the Colfax riot fighting for white supremacy.” The other is an official plaque, erected in 1950 at the request of the mayor by the Louisiana State Department of Commerce and Industry, which describes the incident this way: “On this site occurred the Colfax riots, in which 3 white men and 150 black men were slain. This event, on April 13, 1873, marked the end of carpetbag misrule in the South.” And although you might miss it because it is not formally marked, the “Colfax riot cannon,” as it is known by most local whites, still sits in the front yard of a Colfax resident.4
With success in Colfax, the White League then set its sights on New Orleans and the newly elected Republican governor. In 1874 more than five thousand armed members of the Crescent City White League, constituted primarily of ex-Confederate soldiers, attacked local New Orleans and state police and drove the governor from office, occupying government buildings for three days before President Grant sent federal troops that finally forced their retreat. This conflict became known as the battle of Liberty Place, and the white citizens of New Orleans memorialized this conflict with a monument installed prominently on Canal Street in 1891. Its inscription declared that the White League’s actions had overthrown the “carpetbag government, ousting the usurpers, Governor Kellogg (white) and Lieutenant-Governor Antoine (colored).” While the inscription noted that the “usurpers” were reinstated by US troops, it ended with this declaration of victory, echoing the Colfax monuments: “But the national election of November 1876 recognized white supremacy in the South and gave us our state.” This monument stood in place until it was finally removed in 2017 amid threats of violence by local whites.
As the inscription notes, the period of federal protection for African American rights across the South lasted approximately two presidential election cycles. Employing what can only be called organized acts of white Christian terrorism, whites ruthlessly clawed back power in the southern states, and the federal government largely withdrew, abandoning former slaves to fend for themselves.
Southern whites felt vindicated. Mapping the experience of Civil War defeat and the resurgence of white supremacy onto Christian conceptions of crucifixion, resurrection, and salvation, they dubbed this new period “Redemption.” After seizing back control of the formal political institutions, whites focused on reasserting their dominance in the cultural realm. And the means of enforcing racial dominance shifted from paramilitary clashes reminiscent of the war to the new tool of terrorism, using acts of extreme violence against individual victims to evoke widespread fear among African Americans. Their message was clear: anything but complete deference to whites could result in unspeakable forms of torture and death. For African Americans, the years immediately following the war were first elating and then devastating. W. E. B. DuBois famously described the period as one where “the slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.”5
One of the most chilling demonstrations of the compatibility of white Protestant Christianity with the racial violence of Redemption was the lynching of Samuel Thomas Wilkes, a black Georgia farmhand, on the third Sunday after Easter in 1899. Wilkes, who was referred to as Sam Hose or Sam Holt in contemporary news accounts, was accused of murdering Alfred Cranford, a prominent white planter, without cause as he ate dinner with his family. According to white newspaper accounts—each of which seemed motivated to outdo the other with shocking details—Wilkes snuck into the Cranford house, buried an ax deeply in Alfred Cranford’s head, then tore an infant from Mattie Cranford, dashed it to the floor, and subsequently raped her multiple times in a puddle of her husband’s blood.
Wilkes himself never denied killing Cranford but gave a very different account of the events. According to Wilkes, he and Cranford had a dispute after Wilkes asked to be paid for work completed and permission to go see his ailing mother. Cranford refused the request for pay and leave and told Wilkes if he pursued the matter, he would shoot him. The next day, while Wilkes was chopping wood in the yard, Cranford approached Wilkes, and they began arguing again. Cranford pulled out a revolver, and Wilkes threw his ax at Cranford, wounding him mortally in the head. He then fled directly into the woods, hiding and heading for his mother’s Marshallville cabin, near which he was eventually captured. He denied assaulting Mrs. Cranford until his last breath.6
On April 13, a day after the alleged crime, the Atlanta Constitution ran the headline “Determined Mob After Hose; He Will Be Lynched If Caught.” The article also included a subhead suggesting just how the lynching might proceed: “Assailant of Mrs. Cranford May Be Brought to Palmetto and Burned at the Stake.” With Wilkes still at large a week later, Governor Allen Candler, a member of one of Georgia’s most prominent Methodist families, offered a $500 reward for his capture. The paper put up another $500 and ran another article, declaring, “When Hose is caught he will either be lynched and his body riddled with bullets or he will be burned at the stake… the mob which is in pursuit of him is composed of determined men… wrought up to an unusual degree.”7
The word that Wilkes had been captured and was to be lynched in the nearby town of Newnan reached Atlanta on a Sunday morning. The scene was surreal. When the city’s white churches emptied from morning services, many worshippers streamed straight from church to the train station, hoping to participate in the much-anticipated lynching. To meet demand, the Atlanta and West Point Railroad put together a special run with six coaches; conductors roamed the platform, shouting, “Special train to Newnan! All aboard for the burning!” But that train was soon overwhelmed, with people hanging on to the outside of the cars and climbing onto the roofs to ensure they didn’t miss the spectacle. Police had to be called in, and the railroad commissioned a second ten-car train behind the first. Packed with approximately two thousand Atlanta citizens, both trains sped toward Newnan.8
Meanwhile, church was also letting out in Newnan just as Wilkes was escorted off the train by his captors, who were delivering him to the jail to collect their reward. The Atlanta Journal noted that a spontaneous and solemn procession formed behind Wilkes and his captors “as church people were leaving their churches.”9 Wilkes made it safely to the jail, but before he was locked in the cell, the crowd threw the bailiff aside, seized the suspect, put a chain around his neck, and brought him back outside. The scene abruptly shifted from solemn order to enthusiastic, cheering chaos.
Before the awful carnivalesque violence erupted, there was one moment of truth. Although there is no record of any Christian clergy addressing the crowd, as they reached the town square and courthouse, they were confronted by two community leaders: former governor William Yates Atkinson and Judge Alvan D. Freeman. Both had probably also just come from worship services, Atkinson from the Presbyterian church and Freeman from the Baptist church. From the courthouse steps, Atkinson pleaded with the crowd not to disgrace their state by circumventing the courts and taking the law into their own hands. This appeal created a momentary silence, but when someone yelled “Burn him!” mayhem ensued. Atkinson managed to regain a hearing for one final fallback plea. Conceding that he could not deter the mob from their plans, he pushed for a change of venue. Atkinson threatened to testify against everyone he knew if the crowd carried out the lynching “in the midst of our homes here in the city.”10 With a roar of agreement, the mob lurched into action.
Given that these events occurred on a Sunday just as worshippers were leaving church, it is striking to note the conspicuous absence of religious opposition to the mob violence. Central Baptist Church was a prominent, newly built structure, and its central location provided a viewing area for many of the swirling events. Historian Edwin Arnold noted the flow from church benedictions to the lynching processional: “members who had attended the Sunday morning services now stood on its steps watching or joined the procession as it passed by.”11 Certainly local clergy would have been aware of what was happening. Yet there is no record that any clergyman addressed the crowd.
For Atkinson’s part, facing the tinderbox of imminent mob violence, he would undoubtedly have reached for the most powerful rhetorical weapon at his disposal. But just moments after a significant portion of the crowd had shared pews, observed Communion, read the Bible, sang hymns, and listened to sermons, Atkinson appealed not to Christian principles and morality but rather to the rule of law as his best strategy for dispersing the crowd. The ex-governor must have instinctively understood that white Christianity, as it was believed and practiced by his fellow townspeople, was perfectly compatible with the mob lynching of a black man.
As the throng left the town square, Wilkes was paraded through the central business district to the Central Baptist Church. There the processional changed direction, moved past the cemetery out of town, and ultimately stopped at the edge of a nearby field, which was chosen to allow a large viewing area. Along the way, at each corner, Wilkes was held aloft periodically for everyone to see, resulting in loud cheers from the crowd.
At the site, he was stripped naked, and a chain was wrapped around his body from neck to foot, locked around his chest, and attached to a tree. Tree limbs and railroad ties were laid at his feet, and young boys scavenged for additional brush to add to the pyre. Before the fire was lit, Wilkes was tortured for a half hour. His ears were cut off, his fingers removed one by one, and his genitals severed—with each held up for the approval of the cheering crowd. With Wilkes in agony but alive, he was doused with kerosene, and the pyre was lit. At that point, he screamed his last words: “Sweet Jesus!” Wilkes struggled against the flames, breaking the chain and lunging forward, at which point several whites pushed him back into the flames with large pieces of lumber and pinned him down until he died. While the intensity of the violence and suffering caused some in the crowd to look away, it also inspired expressions of religious ecstasy reminiscent of revival meetings. “Glory!” an old man in the crowd was recorded as saying. “Glory be to God!”12
But even Wilkes’s gruesome death didn’t fully satisfy the frenzied crowd. The Atlanta Constitution described the aftermath in vivid detail:
“A few smoldering ashes scattered about the place, a blackened stake, are all that is left to tell the story. Not even the bones of the Negro were left in the place, but were eagerly snatched by a crowd of people drawn here from all directions, who almost fought over the burning body of the man, carving it with knives and seeking souvenirs of the occurrence.”13
This event became pivotal in W. E. B. DuBois’s understanding of how embedded white supremacy was in the psyches of many white Christians, who saw no conflict with attending a lynching on the way home from church, and of the most respected white civic and religious leaders who either looked the other way or actively aided the murder. As DuBois was on his way to confront the editor of the Atlanta Constitution about its role in promoting Wilkes’s lynching, he was stunned to see the victim’s fingers and toes proudly on display in the window of the local meat market between his house and the newspaper offices.14 The gruesome, menacing sight literally stopped him in his tracks. DuBois reversed his steps and returned to his office at Atlanta University. Realizing that facts and knowledge could not reach whites capable of such brutality in the bright light of a Sunday afternoon, he often recalled this event as one that “pulled me off my feet” and caused him to switch his career from scholar to activist. As he put it, “[I realized] one could not be a calm, cool, and detached scientist while Negroes were lynched, murdered, and starved.”15
Much of the recorded history of slavery, segregation, and racism gives scant treatment to the integral, active role that white Christian leaders, institutions, and laypeople played in constructing, maintaining, and protecting white supremacy in their local communities. Writing in the midst of these upheavals, even historians critical of racism and segregation often depicted white Christians as being merely complacent. They were guilty of committing sins of omission by ignoring the post–Civil War turmoil in the eras of Reconstruction, Redemption, Jim Crow, and the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and beyond.16 Even those who went further accused white churches only of complicity, of being unwitting captives of the prevailing segregationist culture.17 Both treatments are essentially protectionist, depicting the struggle over black equality as external to churches and Christian theology. More recent scholarship, however, has begun to document the ways in which white churches, religious leaders, and members aggressively defended segregation and “worked with the same enthusiasm for white supremacy inside the sanctuary as out.”18
While charges of complacency and complicity are accurate as far as they go, they overlook the proactive role white religious leaders and white churches played in creating a uniquely American and distinctively Christian form of white supremacy. One of the principal reasons white Christians fought so staunchly to ensure that their own churches remained segregated was because they understood the critical role these institutions played in the protection, production, and proliferation of white supremacy. And, as I note below, while actions of white southern evangelical churches have received most of the historical spotlight, one does not need to cast too far about to see similar actions and shared convictions in white mainline Protestant and white Catholic churches well beyond the former states of the Confederacy.
At a pragmatic level, white churches served as connective tissue that brought together leaders from other social realms to coordinate a campaign of massive resistance to black equality. But at a deeper level, white churches were the institutions of ultimate legitimization, where white supremacy was divinely justified via a carefully cultivated Christian theology. White Christian churches composed the cultural score that made white supremacy sing.
Southern white Christians, particularly Baptists, played a critical role in justifying a particularly southern way of life, including what they sometimes referred to as the “peculiar institution” of slavery. Central to this story, but not widely known, are the efforts of the Reverend Dr. Basil Manly Sr. Born into a wealthy North Carolina plantation family in 1798, Manly followed his mother into the burgeoning Baptist movement in the South over the protestations of his Catholic father. Leveraging his influence as the senior pastor of prominent churches in South Carolina and Alabama, Manly became a pivotal leader in both religious and political secessionist movements. He was the chief architect of the withdrawal of Baptists in the South from cooperative fellowship with their northern brethren over the issue of slavery that established the Southern Baptist Convention; and he was instrumental in building a southern alternative to ministerial educational institutions in the North, which he perceived to be increasingly under the influence of abolitionists.
Manly was widely recognized as the leading theological apologist for slavery in his day. While some other religious leaders would defend slavery by arguing that it was not a moral but a pragmatic or political issue, Manly asserted forcefully an unapologetic theology of white supremacy, arguing that slavery was not an unfortunate necessity but rather part of the divinely ordained hierarchical order of Christian society. Manly’s views were disseminated through his prolific writing, and he frequently engaged in debates with northern abolitionists. When challenged about the right of whites to own and sell African Americans as slaves during one of these exchanges, Manly delivered a vivid declaration of his unencumbered conscience, declaring, “I had no more doubt or compunction than in pocketing the price of a horse or anything else that belonged to me.”19 By the dawn of the Civil War, Manly was acknowledged as one of the most uncompromising religious voices supporting slavery.
Manly first issued a call for a new seminary for Baptists in the South in 1835 while he was serving as pastor of Charleston Church in South Carolina. Over the next two decades, he was “the driving force” in a movement to establish the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in May 1859.20 Manly tapped his connections with other Southern Baptist plantation owners to make the dream a reality. Because the seminary was to be located in Greenville, South Carolina, Baptist residents of that state agreed to raise half of the necessary $200,000 in funding (equivalent to more than $6 million in 2019 dollars). Nearly all of the initial South Carolina funds were provided from the proceeds of slave labor: James P. Boyce, who subsequently became a faculty member in theology and chairman of the faculty, tapped his family’s plantation fortune, which alone provided nearly $70,000; another $26,000 came from the prominent slaveholding Richard Furman family.21 For his efforts, Manly was elected the founding president of the Southern Baptist Seminary’s board of trustees, a position he held for the seminary’s first critical decade leading up to and through the Civil War (1859–1868), and his son Basil Manly Jr. was named a founding faculty member in the area of the Old Testament.22
As important as it was to have a southern place for training Baptist ministers, establishing the seminary was just one arm of a multipronged campaign to protect and sustain a separate southern way of life based on a slaveholding culture and economy. Just as Manly was beginning his first term as the founding board president at Southern Baptist Seminary, he relocated from Charleston to Alabama, where he received a call to become the pastor of the First Baptist Church in Montgomery. Manly wasted no time in putting his defense of slavery and support of Southern secession to work in his new state. At the 1860 Alabama State Baptist Convention, he introduced a successful resolution declaring that Alabama Baptists believed they could “no longer hope for justice, protection, or safety” with reference “to our peculiar property recognized by the constitution.”23 The resolution concluded boldly: “Before mankind and before our God, that we hold ourselves subject to the call to proper authority in defense of the sovereignty and independence of the state of Alabama, and of her sacred right as a sovereignty to withdraw from this union.”24 Prominent nineteenth-century historian Benjamin F. Riley argued that this declaration by the most populous religion in the state did “more to precipitate the secession of Alabama than any other one cause.”25
The following year, Manly was elected to serve as chaplain to the Alabama Secession Convention when it met in the state capitol on January 7, 1861. His opening prayer, which was published the following day on the front page of the Montgomery Advertiser, captured the lofty mood of the convention and the conviction that the actions being considered were of momentous civic and religious importance. He began by praising God for reserving “this fair portion of the earth so long undiscovered, unpolluted with the wars and the crimes of the old world that Thou mightest here establish a free government and a pure religion.”26 And he concluded the prayer with an appeal for divine guidance for the representatives, that they might “promote the maintenance of equal rights, of civil freedom and good government, may promote the welfare of man, and the glory of Thy name!”27 Four days later, the Alabama convention voted to secede from the United States. Manly wrote home to his wife, Sarah, “God bless this State! You cannot conceive of the enthusiasm and feeling.”28
Over the next few months, Manly played a key role in the formation and theological legitimation of the Confederate States of America, while simultaneously performing his roles as pastor of First Baptist Church in Montgomery and board president at Southern Baptist Seminary in Greenville. Manly helped a fellow Baptist, Jabez Lamar Monroe Curry, draft Alabama’s new state constitution. When Alabama invited the other Southern states to attend a convention to form a new confederacy in February 1861, Manly was elected as the official chaplain of the Provisional Congress of the Confederate States. He offered the opening prayer, asking for divine protection and that the new Confederacy would last “as long as the sun and the moon.”29 He was in the room when the new government was organized and took credit for a preamble to the Confederate Constitution that invoked “the favor of Almighty God.”30
But the most prominent role for Manly was yet to come. Recognizing his standing as the leading religious voice justifying slavery and calling for secession, Jefferson Davis chose him to give the invocation at his inauguration as president of the Confederacy on February 18, 1861. As eager crowds gathered along the streets of Montgomery, Manly was the only person accompanying Davis and Vice President Alexander H. Stephens in an open coach at the head of a long procession to the Alabama Statehouse. Standing on the platform next to the new president of the Confederacy, Manly implored God to “let thy special blessing rest on the engagements and issues of this day.” He asked for special blessings on the Congress of the Confederate States and especially on Davis as a divine servant whose acts might be “done in thy fear, under thy guidance, with a single eye to thy glory; and crown them all with thy approbation and blessing.”31 In his diary, he concluded the entry for that day by saying, “May the blessing of God rest on this government of the Confederate States!”32
Within a span of nine months, then, from May 1860 to February 1861, Manly saw his strenuous efforts pay rich dividends: he delivered the first commencement address for the Southern Baptist Seminary’s inaugural class as the board president; he performed his duties as the pastor of the symbolically important First Baptist Church in Montgomery; and he became the official chaplain to the Confederacy. Historian James Fuller, author of a biography of Manly, emphasized the way in which each of these efforts was working toward one end: “In Manly’s eyes, the Confederacy was the culmination of God’s plan for the world.”33
Throughout the war, Manly continued these tripart duties. In service to the Confederacy, Manly was a steadfast and sought-after religious voice justifying slavery and white supremacy. As the Civil War ground on, he wrote defenses of the rebellion, offered prayers at public events, officiated at hundreds of funerals, and preached on fast days appointed by President Davis. Fuller summarized his ubiquitous presence this way: “Manly seemed always at hand to invoke the blessing of God upon the Confederacy.”34
While Manly’s success and influence were perhaps unmatched during his lifetime, the broad influence he held as a religious leader was not unique. This intimate dance between white churches, culture, and politics—and perhaps more important, the personal connections among white pastors, civic leaders, and elected officials—was a familiar pattern across the South. An example from my hometown of Jackson, Mississippi, illustrates just how intact this web of power, dedicated to preserving white supremacy and resisting calls for black equality, remained more than a century later.
Jackson’s influential First Baptist Church was undoubtedly the most powerful religious institution in the state during the civil rights years.35 Sometimes referred to by locals in the know as Jackson’s “Tammany Hall”—a reference to the political machine that infamously controlled New York politics in the late nineteenth century—FBC was a place where political influence and religious piety, social engineering and discipleship, white supremacy and Sunday school mixed easily. Situated across the street from the state capitol building, FBC was the single largest church of any denomination in Mississippi, boasting an 1,800-person sanctuary filled to capacity on Sunday mornings, seven assembly halls that housed a variety of programs and meetings, and a Sunday school program that enrolled 2,200 children and adults.36
FBC’s impressive facilities were a fitting symbol of its powerful membership. It was the church home of the powerful Hederman family, who controlled Jackson’s Clarion-Ledger and the Jackson Daily News, the largest newspapers in the state, along with the south Mississippi Hattiesburg American and, later, the Jackson television station WJTV. Multiple generations of Hedermans served as deacons at the church, wielded influence as its most generous patrons, and strongly shaped First Baptist’s stance on race issues.37 The church also counted among its prominent members Ross Barnett, Mississippi’s governor from 1960 to 1964, who served as a deacon and the long-standing teacher of the men’s Sunday school.38 And FBC touted as a member Louis Hollis, the executive director of the Jackson Citizens’ Council, who also served as the superintendent of the extensive Sunday school program.39 The church provided a religious and cultural hub for these men and the organizations they represented.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the Hederman brothers, Thomas and Robert, were among the most powerful segregationist forces in the South. Two examples from the civil rights era give a taste of the reporting that Hederman-owned entities regularly generated for the Mississippi public. When the Supreme Court ruled that the all-white University of Mississippi had to admit James Meredith in 1962, the Jackson Daily News included a front-page story featuring a picture of a cross that had been burned outside of Meredith’s assigned student housing with the headline “Greeting for Negro.”40 Similarly, the Clarion-Ledger’s coverage of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 March on Washington ran under the headline “Washington Is Clean Again with Negro Trash Removed,” featuring a photo of the National Mall littered with garbage. A 1967 national review of newspaper coverage of the civil rights movement by the Columbia Journalism Review dubbed the Clarion-Ledger and the Jackson Daily News “quite possibly the worst metropolitan papers in the United States.”41 Hodding Carter III, a rare progressive white voice on racial issues who was managing editor at the rival Delta Democrat-Times, and later assistant secretary of state for public affairs in the Carter administration, was more pointed:
The Hedermans were to segregation what Joseph Goebbels was to Hitler. They were cheerleaders and chief propagandists, dishonest and racist. They helped shape as well as reflect a philosophy, which was, at its core, as undemocratic and immoral as any extant. They weren’t hypocrites. They believed it. They believed blacks were the sons of Ham. The Hedermans were bone-deep racists whose religion 120 years ago decided that question.42
With the strong backing of the Hederman family, Ross Barnett rose to become the most powerful politician in Mississippi during the civil rights movement. He won the governorship by running an overtly segregationist campaign that appealed to religious conservatives by baptizing his white supremacist politics in Christian theology, with claims such as: “God was the original segregationist” and “The Negro is different because God made him different to punish him.”43 In addition to financing and positive media coverage from the Hedermans, Barnett received religious legitimization from the church. On the evening before his gubernatorial inauguration in 1960, for example, Reverend Dr. Douglas Hudgins, the pastor of the First Baptist Church, conducted a Christian consecration service for Barnett, presenting him with an ornate pulpit Bible in a special ceremony in the sanctuary.44
Barnett used Meredith’s arrival at Ole Miss as a high-profile opportunity to make good on his campaign promise to prevent integration in Mississippi schools. In a widely covered speech—including front-page coverage in Hederman-owned newspapers—Barnett opened with this sweeping assertion: “There is no case in history where the Caucasian race has survived social integration.” Drawing on racist hyperbole that would have been familiar to the white citizens of Mississippi, he declared defiantly, “We will not drink from the cup of genocide.”45 The next day’s Jackson Daily News headline read, “Mississippi Mix? Ross Says ‘Never!’ ” Just in case there was any confusion, the editorial page concluded flatly, “We support Gov. Barnett.”46
Reverend Hudgins, the state’s most prominent pastor during the civil rights era, filled the FBC pulpit from 1946 to 1969. Hudgins cast a long shadow in both religious and civic spaces. His sermons—a weekly dose of theology carefully curated to leave white supremacy undisturbed—were not only heard by the influential citizens sitting in the pews but also recorded and syndicated around the state via local radio. In addition, Hudgins held leadership positions in a number of civic groups. During his more than two-decade tenure as pastor, he served as director of the Jackson Chamber of Commerce, president of the Jackson Rotary Club, chaplain of the Mississippi Highway Safety Patrol, and a prominent member of the Masonic order.
For more than two decades, as the temperature climbed in Mississippi race relations, Reverend Hudgins built brick by brick a theological bulwark of personal and individual salvation, designed to protect white Christian power and white Christian consciences from black demands for justice. When the US Supreme Court handed down the historic Brown v. Topeka Board of Education decision in 1954, which ruled that state laws enforcing racial segregation in public schools were unconstitutional, the Southern Baptist Convention leadership surprisingly affirmed the decision not only as a pragmatic matter of legal concession but as consistent with Christian principles, angering many local churches. Here the SBC exhibited a trait that existed in virtually all white Christian denominations: a small group in the national leadership was considerably ahead of the regional and local church leadership. Reverend Hudgins, like many other local clergy, voiced his strong opposition to the denomination’s position, both at the national convention and at home.
Then the Hedermans went to work. In addition to prominently covering Hudgins’s statements, the Jackson Daily News carried a front-page story with extensive quotes from a number of deacons at First Baptist and included an editorial calling the SBC’s affirmation of Brown “a deplorable action.”47 One of the most blatantly white supremacist statements came from FBC deacon and assistant to the state attorney general Alex McKeigney, who asserted that “the facts of history make it plain that the development of civilization and of Christianity itself has rested in the hands of the white race.” He went on to declare that integration of any kind would ultimately result in racial intermarriage, “a course which if followed to its end will result in driving the white race from the earth forever, never to return.”48 On the editorial page of the same issue, the paper reassured its readers that Jackson’s Baptist clergy and lay leaders were aligned in opposition to Brown and would ensure that nothing would “change the complexion of Baptist congregations in this city.”49 FBC itself maintained its official policy barring attendance by nonwhites beyond Hudgins’s tenure, repealing it only in 1973.50
Underlying this interplay of religious, civic, and political activity was the core claim of Hudgins’s theological worldview: that the cross of Christ had nothing to do with the social and political upheavals outside the walls of the church. Noted church historian Charles Marsh, who dubbed Hudgins the “theologian of the closed society,” summarized Hudgins’s theology this way: “Had he stated the matter more explicitly, he might have said that the cross has nothing to do with the civil rights of black Mississippians. On the other hand, the cross ought [sic] inspire decent white people towards the preservation of the purity of the social body. And it certainly did.”51
In the 1950s and 1960s, First Baptist Church was a vortex of mutually reinforcing religious, social, and political influence. The Hedermans found in Ross Barnett their political champion of segregation and in Reverend Douglas Hudgins a theologian whose dignified, approving presence legitimized their power and whose sermons soothed white consciences against the mounting calls for justice outside the walls of the church. Governor Barnett found in the Hedermans patrons with nearly bottomless pockets and a media machine that lavished public praise and attention on his political life; and in Reverend Hudgins, a pastor whose approving presence signaled a divine blessing on his character. And the reverend found the church coffers full and his reputation burnished by being the pastor to such powerful men while enjoying positive and abundant personal media coverage himself. The Jackson Daily News, for example, lavished upon Hudgins the following praise: “Few among our theological leadership equal his power in exposition and amplification of the gospel message.”52
This collusion by the media, politicians, and religious leaders produced a nearly impenetrable cultural bulwark. Both white evangelical and mainline Protestant churches served as cultural hubs and moral legitimizers of white supremacy, while the power of the state protected their segregated sanctuaries.
These connections weren’t confined to the Baptists or even to evangelical denominations. Just a block away, Galloway Memorial United Methodist Church—a prominent congregation in the largest mainline Protestant denomination, the United Methodist Church—claimed Jackson’s segregationist mayor, Allen Thompson, and several leaders of the Jackson Citizens’ Council as prominent members in good standing.53 Convinced that defending segregation in public institutions at the local level depended on ensuring segregation in Jackson’s churches, Thompson led the city council to pass an ordinance in 1963 that made “disturbing divine worship” an offense punishable by a fine of up to $500 and up to six months in prison. He then instructed the police department that any attempt by an African American to worship at a white church qualified as a violation of this ordinance, even if the person was there peacefully or present at the invitation of a white member. The ordinance was enforced so aggressively that in several instances not only African American worshippers but also white members of the church who invited them were literally dragged from the church pews, arrested, and jailed.
The stances of white churches on the issue of integration were seen by civil rights activists and segregationists alike as the keystone holding the entire Jim Crow ediface together. In the wake of the 1954 Brown decision, with many national Protestant denominational offices approving the ruling, the Mississippi State Legislature moved quickly to protect the ability of local white churches to oppose their national offices and remain segregated, while still retaining their property. One of the authors of what became known as “the church property bill” argued explicitly that such a step was crucial because, he asserted, if integration came to Mississippi, “it will enter through the front door of churches.”54
On Sunday, June 9, 1963, an integrated group of four local students organized by local civil rights activists Medgar Evers and Reverend Edwin King, a white chaplain at Tougaloo College, attempted to cross the color line at both First Baptist Church and Galloway Memorial Methodist Church, the home congregations of the governor and mayor, respectively.
Evers, field secretary of the civil rights organization the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), drove the students to First Baptist Church himself. As the students attempted to enter, they were met by the head deacon. Using language clearly designed to establish the basis for arrest, the deacon told the students, “In view of the tension present today, I believe your presence would disrupt the worship of all our people.”55 According to media reports, the governor arrived for worship during this confrontation but bypassed it as he entered. Finding themselves barred from the largest Baptist church in the state, the students walked one block to Galloway, the largest Mississippi Methodist church, where ushers also refused to allow them to enter.
These actions led to remarkably different responses from the two churches. While the segregationist mayor had plenty of like-minded company at Galloway, the church’s senior pastor, Reverend Dr. W. B. Selah, had made his position clear to his congregation, preaching that “there can be no color bar in a Christian church.” Informed in the middle of the service that Galloway’s ushers had turned away the integrated group of students, Reverend Selah rose to the pulpit. After delivering a shortened sermon on “The Spirit of Christ,” he pulled out a prepared statement—one he had been keeping with him for weeks in case black worshippers were refused entry—and tendered his resignation. Reverend Jerry Furr, the associate minister, followed suit. In stark contrast, First Baptist Church hardened its position. Meeting the same afternoon, the board of deacons put forward a resolution endorsing the church’s actions, which passed without a dissenting vote. The resolution was unambiguous, stating that FBC would “confine its assemblies and fellowship to those other than the Negro race.”56
The attempt to integrate the largest white Baptist and Methodist churches in the state was the last action Medgar Evers would oversee. Just two days after these white churches turned away black worshippers, he and King held a sparsely attended meeting at the black New Jerusalem Baptist Church to discuss the weekend’s activities and the future of the movement. While Evers realized that most of the people in the pews opposed integration, he had been deeply moved by the resignation of Galloway’s ministers. He told King, “What they said, what they did—refusing to preach in a segregated church—now, that has made me feel better than anything in this whole movement in many days.”57 King told him he would pass his sentiments on to Selah and Furr, then said the last words he would say to his friend: “See you at the office tomorrow, Medgar. Good night.”
Evers stayed at the church to finish some work before heading home to his wife and three young children. As Evers got out of his car just after midnight, a gunman shot and killed him in the driveway. The murder weapon, including a fresh fingerprint on the rifle scope, was found in a field nearby and traced to Byron De La Beckwith Jr., a member of the White Citizens’ Council in Greenwood and an active member of the Greenwood Episcopal Church of the Nativity. Beckwith was well known across the Delta for his published letters to the editor that regularly mixed Christianity and white supremacy, with passages such as this:
“I shall oppose any person, place, or thing that opposes segregation. And further when I die I will be buried in a segregated cemetery. When you get to heaven, you will find me in the part that has a sign saying ‘for whites only,’ and if I go to Hades, I’m going to raise hell all over Hades until I get to the white section.… For the next 15 years, we here in Mississippi are going to have to do a lot of shooting to protect our wives, children, and ourselves from bad niggers.”58
Just two years before murdering Evers, when Beckwith heard rumors that black visitors might try to attend his own church in the Mississippi delta, he had arrived early and stood on the steps with a pistol, declaring to his fellow members that he would handle things.59 At Beckwith’s first trial for Evers’s murder, the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission—an official state agency operating from 1956 to 1977 to preserve segregation—illegally investigated potential jurors to help his defense attorneys weed out Jews and blacks. Governor Ross Barnett personally appeared in the courtroom, shaking hands with Beckwith in full view of the jury. Two successive trials with all-white juries failed to reach a decision. Beckwith was not brought to justice until a third trial finally convicted him in 1994.
The influence of the Hedermans and Barnett was difficult to escape in Jackson, even for families of modest means, such as mine, who didn’t run in elite social circles on the north side of town. The woods across from my childhood family home in southwest Jackson, fenced off with barbed wire and peppered with white “POSTED—No Trespassing” signs with faded red block lettering, were owned by the Hedermans to produce pulp for their sprawling printing business. And when my friends and I went water skiing or fishing, the most popular spot was the Ross Barnett Reservoir just outside town, a thirty-three-thousand-acre lake that is the state’s largest source of drinking water. At Mississippi College, the dorm across the street from mine was Hederman Hall, and when I received a scholarship as outstanding freshman male student, it was the T. M. Hederman III Memorial Scholarship, established in 1964 by the Hederman family, many of whom were Mississippi College alumni.
As a public school student, I grew up singing the official state song, “Go Mississippi,” which I still remember. What I did not know as a child was that the anthem took its tune from Governor Barnett’s segregationist campaign jingle.60 The original lyrics were:
Roll with Ross, roll with Ross, he’s his own boss
For segregation, one hundred percent
He’s not a moderate like some of the gents
He’ll fight integration with forceful intent.
The new lyrics are more in line with what one might expect from a rah-rah official state song, but they retain an unmistakable note of defiance: “Go, Mississippi, keep rolling along / Go Mississippi, you cannot go wrong.” The new song was officially dedicated by Barnett at the Ole Miss–University of Kentucky football game on September 29, 1962, the night before Meredith was to enroll. It was performed by the Ole Miss marching band in front of more than forty-one thousand fans.61 Since 2000, there have been at least four bills introduced in the Mississippi legislature to replace it because of its segregationist roots; all have died in committee.62
Third grade was a big year for me. The year before had been an adjustment both socially and academically, as I had arrived at our neighborhood public school, Oak Forest Elementary, as a “new kid” after moving to Mississippi from Texas in 1975. But this year, I told my third-grade self, would be more fun; I had friends, and, more important, I was now old enough to ride my bike to school instead of walking or taking the bus. What I didn’t know was that this would also be the year when the first African American kids would show up in significant numbers at our school.
When the “separate but equal” rationale for segregation was struck down by the US Supreme Court in the 1954 Brown decision, local Mississippi communities responded with more than a decade of inaction, followed by the swift erection—by both the White Citizens’ Councils and white churches—of private whites-only academies, as the last delaying tactics played out and desegregation finally looked inevitable. (As of this writing, there are thirty-five such “segregation academies” remaining in Mississippi alone, schools that were founded between 1964 and 1972, and all of them have fewer than 2 percent black students enrolled today63).
In the largest school district in the state, Jackson Public School District (JPSD), which I attended second through twelfth grade, the complexity of the district presented opportunities for a range of evasive tactics. The final legal blow to these strategies of resistance did not come until a 1969 court decision. And while an integration plan was implemented in fall 1970 by JPSD, the first African American kids did not actually arrive in significant numbers at Oak Forest Elementary School, in southwest Jackson, until 1976.
In my third-grade memory, I recall feeling more curious than tense. I did not really understand why black kids were arriving by the busful, but I still got to ride my bike, and most of my white friends from the neighborhood were still there. I didn’t give it much thought then, but now I can only imagine how different the experience must have been for my new black classmates as they stepped off the bus in our all-white neighborhood for the first time.
School integration did have the ripple effect of at least partially integrating related institutions such as sports leagues, which often drew upon school groups to form teams. While my elementary-school-age soccer teams were mostly white, we typically had two or three African American players. But there were clear episodic reminders that while my fellow black students attended the same schools and had the same teachers, we still lived in strikingly segregated social worlds, and that when those worlds overlapped, my black classmates and friends were tenuous guests in a world of white dominance.
We played many of our games at Battlefield Park, a public park commemorating the battle of Jackson, where Confederate forces resisted but lost a decisive battle to General Ulysses S. Grant’s Union forces as they pushed their way to Vicksburg, Mississippi. On at least one occasion, I recall seeing Ku Klux Klan members in full white regalia, handing out white supremacist pamphlets and collecting donations at the red light while we were waiting to turn into the park for a game. From my perch in the back seat of our gold Chevy Impala, I remember being struck by the fact that their hoods were pushed back to reveal their faces openly and that one of the men was holding his son, also robed, who was a few years younger than me. The boldness of the event was unusual enough to stick out in my memory, but also unsurprising enough to spark only a short conversation with my parents, who explained matter-of-factly that these people held negative views about black people and that we disagreed with them. As I recall, the game proceeded as planned, without any acknowledgment of my black teammates, who also had to drive past this threatening display of white power on their way to enjoy a sunny, crisp fall Saturday morning at the soccer field.
While my schools and sports teams became integrated, one place that remained strictly segregated was my Southern Baptist church, Woodville Heights Baptist Church, which cast a watchful eye on the neighborhood from its place on a hill a few blocks from my house. For most of my childhood and adolescence, I understood church segregation in benign terms, as the result of cultural preferences for different styles of worship. Neither group would be happy with racial mixing, the argument went, because each race naturally preferred its own type of preaching and music.
The first black person I recall seeing in the church sanctuary during a service was a man named Sheldon Gooch, an inmate from the notorious Mississippi State Penitentiary in Parchman, usually just called “Parchman Farm.” As part of a prison-approved temporary leave program, Gooch, a young man of about thirty, was making the rounds at a number of white churches to sing and testify about how finding God in prison had saved him from a dysfunctional childhood in inner-city Detroit and a life of violent crime as a young man in Mississippi.
I remember that Sunday-evening service as unusual, and certainly out of the comfort zone for my congregation, but I don’t recall anyone experiencing it as threatening. Our regular Sunday-evening service was always less formal and, from time to time, featured outside preachers, speakers, or performers. As the service began, our pastor rose to the pulpit, explained that we had a special guest, and introduced Sheldon Gooch. He did not introduce the other conspicuous guest: a prison guard who was required to accompany Gooch and ensure his return after the service. Both were easy to identify. Gooch was a muscular, dark-skinned African American man, and the white guard carried a sidearm; both wore uniforms: the easily identifiable blue pants with a darker blue stripe on the outside of the leg and matching denim button-up shirt for the inmate, and an ill-fitting tan and brown ensemble for the guard.
As our pastor took his seat and Gooch ascended the half dozen steps to the royal-blue carpeted stage, a silent and nervous anticipation filled the sanctuary. Knowing the curiosity and probable anxiety in his audience, he calmly grabbed the microphone, planted himself stage left of the pulpit, and went straight to his story. He opened by describing his childhood.64 “I grew up in the streets of Detroit, and I was living in a tough situation. I came up in a single-parent home with four brothers. We were on food stamps and welfare and the whole thing—just a typical ghetto statistic. And it was tough.” He then told of running with the wrong crowd, being strung out on crack and heroin by fifteen, and landing in prison for the first time at seventeen.
After being paroled, he moved to Meridian, Mississippi, where his mother had relocated, opened a school of self-defense, and seemed to be on a better path. But he slowly became involved again with drugs and found himself back in prison, facing a new sentence of life plus sixty years for three counts of armed robbery. A major influence on him was Wendy Hatcher, a five-foot-tall white prison chaplain who was originally from England. As Gooch told it, “Early each day, she would say, ‘Oh, good morning, Sheldon, the Lord loves you and has a plan for your life, and I hope you have a good day and God bless you,’ with that British accent. I’d see her coming in the gym in the morning, and I’d run and hide. And here I am, one of the most feared guys in this penitentiary, and I’m scared of this little bitty old white woman. But the spirit in me was on the run from the spirit in her.”
His prison work detail was in the gymnasium, and one day Gooch was assigned to set up for a church service Hatcher had organized. There, as he sat through the service involuntarily, he heard the message that he said changed his life. “I heard them say, ‘Jesus Christ can set you free no matter where you are.’ And I said, ‘Man, you know what, if anybody needs to be free, it’s me. Let me just listen.’ At that point, I knew I needed Jesus, and he was there to save me. And on that night, November 18, 1982, in Parchman Prison, I gave my life to Jesus Christ.” After a long, dramatic pause to emphasize the paradox, he wrapped up his testimony, saying, “Life plus sixty years, but I found freedom from the slavery and bondage of sin.”
Despite the more colorful aspects of his story, most of us gradually, if unconsciously, exhaled as his narrative assumed a familiar arc of evangelical testimony: lost but now found, sinful but now redeemed, captive but now free. Similarly, while his vocal performance contained flourishes and repetitions that were more at home in the black gospel tradition, on the whole he covered renditions of hymns and contemporary Christian songs that were familiar. More than the music, what stood out to me most was the central theme of Gooch’s testimony, which he drove home in his signature closing song, “I’m Free,” which he composed shortly after his conversion experience. The last minute of the five-minute song is an instrumental filled only with plaintive repetitions of the two-word phrase “I’m free… I’m free… I’m free…”
Although I wasn’t conscious of it at the time, in retrospect, I realize that Gooch’s easy acceptance hinged on the fact that his testimony reinforced a complex choreography of white supremacy. The powerfully built black man wore his prison-issued clothes and performed under the watchful eye of an armed white prison guard who would escort him back to prison after the service. His personal narrative evoked stereotypes of black inner-city ghettos and dangerous black male bodies that needed to be subdued and disciplined by white authorities before surrendering and submitting to a Jesus introduced to him by a white European woman. And the central point of Gooch’s testimony subtly evoked a common trope of Old South white ideology: the happy slave who finds his true purpose in the service of a white master, where he is better off than before his enslavement.
But it was another sanctuary visit that exposed just how rigorously the color line continued to be patrolled at church. My large church youth group, numbering more than a hundred, was known in southwest Jackson as a vibrant and safe place for teenagers to socialize. In addition to the typical Bible studies and Sunday school, we had a young, charismatic female youth minister (an anomaly in the male-dominated Baptist world) who scheduled regular activities, organized events, and turned part of the church educational space into a youth room—with couches and a pool table—that functioned as a social hub and kind of community center. These popular extrachurch events were intended as outreach and attracted kids from the neighborhood and area schools. And from time to time, the participants were not all white.
This occasional participation by a few black teens in the outside activities may have raised some individual eyebrows, but it never generated any public conversation of which I was aware. But in my junior year of high school, one of our African American friends—I’ll call him Michael—attended one of the Sunday-morning services. Since he had participated in an all-night “lock-in” event at the church gymnasium the night before, and everyone from that event was sitting together in the first three pews in the church, as was youth group tradition, I don’t think any of our friends gave it much thought.
But among the older members of the church, our friend Michael’s Sunday-morning visit generated a buzz of anxious conversation. It was one thing to allow black kids to participate in extracurricular church activities, but it was another to allow them to attend worship or Sunday school. His presence among us raised a frenzy of anxious questions. What if he wanted to join the church as a member? What if, in an era in which African American and white children sharing community pools was still uncomfortable to most whites in the South, he wanted to be baptized by full immersion in the sanctuary’s baptismal pool installed so visibly above the choir loft? What if his entire family wanted to join the church? And, God forbid, what if Michael became an active member of the youth group and wanted to date one of our white teenage girls?
The anxious need to be prepared for, and possibly intervene in, these potential eventualities resulted in an emergency deacons’ meeting the following week. I don’t know what happened at that meeting, and the issue quickly dissipated, as our friend had simply wanted to visit and had no interest in joining the church. But the events stayed with me and pushed an uncomfortable fact into my consciousness: that a black kid sitting in the pews among us was perceived as a much greater threat than a black prison inmate performing on our church stage.
White Christians, and even my own childhood home denomination, are gradually beginning to face the bare fact that white supremacy has played a role in shaping American Christianity. But they have been too quick to see laments and apologies as the end, rather than the beginning, of a process. They also remain full of contradictions and too quickly avert their gaze when the weighty implications of history require concrete, sustained action in the present.
At a 1995 meeting in Atlanta that commemorated the 150th anniversary of its founding, the Southern Baptist Convention finally got around to apologizing for its perpetuation of racism, its role in defending slavery and Jim Crow, and its failure to support the civil rights movement. The messengers at the convention voted to pass a formal resolution that repudiated “historic acts of evil such as slavery from which we continue to reap a bitter harvest.” They also acknowledged that SBC churches “failed, in many cases, to support, and in some cases opposed, legitimate initiatives to secure the civil rights of African-Americans” and issued an apology “to all African-Americans for condoning and/or perpetuating individual and systemic racism in our lifetime.”65
The 1995 convention also saw Reverend Gary Frost of Youngstown, Ohio, elected to second vice president, making him the first African American to reach that level of leadership. Shortly after the resolution passed with only twelve minutes of discussion, Frost rose to the podium to play out a piece of contrived cultural theater that seemed to imply that a kind of magical reconciliation had instantaneously occurred. Frost issued a brief declaration: “On behalf of my black brothers and sisters, we accept your apology, and we extend to you our forgiveness in the name of our Lord and savior, Jesus Christ.” Enthusiastic applause erupted from the overwhelmingly white delegates. In less than fifteen minutes, 150 years of Southern Baptist white supremacy was seemingly absolved.
Given the SBC’s white supremacist legacy, this resolution received widespread attention, including front-page coverage in the New York Times.66 But while some black religious leaders welcomed the move, many others, such as Reverend Arlee Griffin Jr., pastor of the four-thousand-member Berean Missionary Baptist Church in Brooklyn and historian for the historically African American Progressive National Baptist Convention, were more skeptical. Citing the denomination’s long legacy of racism, Griffin replied, “It is only when one’s request for forgiveness is reflected in a change of attitude and actions that the victim can then believe that the request for forgiveness is authentic.”67
Twenty-five years later, the SBC is still wrestling with the legacy of white supremacy and still attempting to step straight from confession to absolution without pausing seriously over the question of restitution or repair. The trajectory of two prominent white denominational leaders who were a part of the 1995 working group that produced the apology demonstrates just how difficult real changes of attitude and actions are, just how deep the defensive impulses live, even when there is an explicit attempt to move away from a racist past.
In spring 2012 Richard Land—the director of the SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission and one of the chief architects of the denomination’s racial reconciliation efforts—made incendiary comments on his radio show about the killing in Florida of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager, by a self-appointed neighborhood vigilante. Land asserted that President Obama had “poured gasoline on the racialist [sic] fires” and that Reverend Jesse Jackson and Reverend Al Sharpton were “race hustlers” who were using the case “to try to gin up the black vote for an African American president who is in deep, deep, deep trouble for reelection.”68 After a public outcry, Land lost his radio show, was forced to apologize publicly twice, and by the end of the year had stepped down from the position he had held for twenty-five years.69
The second key figure is Al Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Seminary—the oldest SBC seminary, which was founded in 1859 in Greenville, South Carolina, but relocated to Louisville, Kentucky, after the Civil War. Mohler presents a case study in the limitations of how far even well-intentioned white evangelicals are willing to go to reckon with their white supremacist past. On the one hand, Mohler has a long history of working to address the denomination’s racist history. In 2015, twenty years after his work on the SBC apology on slavery, a self-described white supremacist named Dylann Roof murdered nine worshippers at a historic black South Carolina church. Mohler responded by posting an article on the seminary’s website addressing the legacy of “white superiority” in the theology of the seminary’s founders. And, most prominently, in 2018 he led Southern Baptist Seminary to create a report documenting and lamenting the institution’s support of slavery, racism, and Jim Crow.
But Mohler’s approach represents what I’ve dubbed “the white Christian shuffle,” a subtle two-steps-forward-one-step-back pattern of lamenting past sins in great detail, even admitting that they have had pernicious effects, but then ultimately denying that their legacy requires reparative or costly actions in the present. It’s a sophisticated rhetorical strategy that emphasizes lament and apology, expects absolution and reconciliation, but gives scant attention to questions of justice, repair, or accountability. A careful reading of Mohler’s 2015 language helps illuminate the inner workings of this strategy.
After the 2015 South Carolina church shooting, Mohler posted his boldly titled response: “The Heresy of Racial Superiority—Confronting the Past, and Confronting the Truth.” The piece began strongly. Defining heresy as an error “so important that those who believe it… must be considered to have abandoned the faith,” Mohler flatly named the idea of “racial superiority” as a Christian heresy. And he declared that Roof’s actions were “a hideous demonstration of the deadly power of this heresy.” Mohler also declared directly that “one cannot simultaneously hold to an ideology of racial superiority and rightly present the gospel of Jesus Christ” or “defend the faith once for all delivered to the saints.”70 And he directly connected the dots between the white superiority that animated the SBC’s founding and contemporary racial violence:
“The Southern Baptist Convention was not only founded by slaveholders; it was founded by men who held to an ideology of racial superiority and who bathed that ideology in scandalous theological argument.… We bear the burden of that history to this day. Racial superiority is a sin as old as Genesis and as contemporary as the killings in Emanuel AME Church in Charleston. The ideology of racial superiority is not only sinful, it is deadly.”71
And in 2018 the seminary’s report on the legacy of Slavery and Racism in the History of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, which Mohler had commissioned, noted:
“The founding faculty of this school—all four of them—were deeply involved in slavery and deeply complicit in the defense of slavery. Many of their successors on this faculty, throughout the period of Reconstruction and well into the twentieth century, advocated segregation, the inferiority of African Americans, and openly embraced the ideology of the Lost Cause of southern slavery. What we knew in generalities, we now know in detail.”72
The report is fairly thorough in its treatment of the white supremacist views of the four founding faculty of the seminary, noting that all owned significant numbers of slaves, some on multiple plantations in multiple states. It notes that one of them, James P. Boyce, who served as the seminary’s first president, was a chaplain to the Confederate army who described himself in a letter to his brother-in-law as “an ultra proslavery man.” It highlights John Broadus’s leadership in drafting and presenting articles at the 1863 Southern Baptist Convention pledging the denomination’s support for the Confederacy. (It does fail to fully represent Broadus’s judgments about the capabilities of African Americans: “the great mass of them belong to a very low grade of humanity.”) The report documents the white supremacist views of Basil Manly Jr., son of the seminary’s founding president, and his desire to reestablish white political control during Reconstruction. Writing to his wife, Sarah, after the Civil War, for example, Manly Jr. declared that the presence of freed slaves was an “incubus and plague” upon Greenville, and that it “might become a desirable place of residence” if it “could be cleared of negroes and establish a system of free schools.” And the report notes that in an 1866 interview with a New York newspaper after the close of the war, the fourth founder, William Williams, declared that even though slavery was abolished, “we still maintain that slaveholding is morally right.”73
Mohler even asks the right ultimate question in his cover letter to the seminary report:
“Eventually, the questions come home. How could our founders, James P. Boyce, John Broadus, Basil Manly Jr., and William Williams, serve as such defenders of biblical truth, the gospel of Jesus Christ, and the confessional convictions of this Seminary, and at the same time own human beings as slaves—based on an ideology of race—and defend American slavery as an institution?”
So far, so good. But while in each case Mohler’s logic would seem to have painted the seminary into a corner of accountability, he consistently finds a way out, interspersing indictments with a quick two-step of qualifications and evasions. In the 2015 online article, Mohler declared, “I gladly stand with the founders of the Southern Baptist Convention and the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary,” and lauds them as “titans of the faith once for all delivered to the saints.”74 But how can these men be both saints and heretics?
Follow the footwork. Although Mohler notes that both Boyce and Broadus served as chaplains for the Confederate army, he also defends them as “consummate Christian gentlemen, given the culture of their day.” He also makes the outlandish assertion that each of these men “would have been horrified, I am certain, by any act of violence against any person.” This is plainly false, since the Manlys were known to have theologically defended, tolerated, and on occasion ordered their slaves be beaten.
Beyond even all of this rhetorical maneuvering, however, is a strategy of marginalizing the central character: the Reverend Dr. Basil Manly Sr. Mohler omits any mention of the senior Manly in his 2015 article. While there is a longer treatment of Manly buried in the body of the 2018 report, Mohler makes no mention of him in his three-page cover letter, nor is there any reference to Manly in the report’s four-page, thirteen-bullet executive summary. Instead, both focus the critical spotlight on the four founding faculty members, leaving the seminary’s founding institutional architect and board president in the murky shadows.
By all reasonable applications of Mohler’s own criteria, the inescapable verdict should be that the founders of the SBC and the seminary, including the pivotal Basil Manly Sr., were indeed slaveholding, theological apologists of white supremacy and therefore heretics. Yet Mohler ultimately absolves them of responsibility and accountability—along with himself and contemporary Southern Baptists—by citing mitigating circumstances and continuing to hold on to a theology, cultivated and passed down by these very founders, that frees contemporary white Christians from any responsibility beyond lament and apology. Finally, Mohler makes a sweeping excuse that is simply absurd: “So far as I can tell, no one ever confronted the founders of the Southern Baptist Convention and the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary with the brutal reality of what they were doing, believing, and teaching in this regard.”75 Yet Basil Manly Sr., for example, was deeply involved in the abolitionist debates, and came to prominence precisely because, in the face of public challenges to his views, he was an unflinching religious defender of chattel slavery—including theological defenses of brutal practices such as whipping slaves and selling slaves even if it broke up families.
In his 2015 article, Mohler declared, “We must repent and seek to confront and remove every strain of racial superiority that remains.” Yet in the cover letter to the report, he distances himself from current action required by this past with the following theological flourish: “We must repent of our own sins, we cannot repent for the dead.” One foot forward, shuffle back.
Notably, following the release of the 2018 report, Mohler and Southern Seminary have taken no consequential steps to act on their own weighty conclusions. While both the 2015 article and the full 2018 report are available on the seminary’s website, there has been no attempt to update the biographical entries of these four founding faculty members with these new revelations on the regular pages of the site. The biographical page describing Broadus, for example, makes only a passing reference to the Civil War, no references to his support for slavery, and closes with this summary: “Broadus dedicated his life to teaching Southern Baptist ministers how to have a passion for biblical, doctrinal, and vibrant preaching in order to bring glory to the name of Christ.”76
This inaction is also visible on the seminary grounds. Today the Southern Baptist Seminary campus features older buildings named for these founders, such as the James P. Boyce Centennial Library and Manly Hall, a dormitory. But it also contains newer buildings dedicated to their legacies by Mohler himself just a handful of years after the historic SBC apology: Boyce College, which opened in 1998, grants undergraduate degrees in biblical studies; and Broadus Chapel, which opened in 1999, serves as a two-hundred-seat venue that is used for worship, weddings, lectures, and a preaching lab.
In his 2015 article, Mohler says three separate times that he will not consider removing the names of these men who are honored on the seminary’s buildings but will “stand without apology with the founders and their affirmation of Baptist orthodoxy.” And his cover letter accompanying the 2018 Southern Baptist Seminary report doubles down on his intention to preserve these names on the school’s buildings:
In light of the burdens of history, some schools hasten to remove names, announce plans, and declare moral superiority. That is not what I intend to do, nor do I believe that to be what the Southern Baptist Convention or our Board of Trustees would have us to do. We do not evaluate our Christian forebears from a position of our own moral innocence. Christians know that there is no such innocence. But we must judge, even as we will be judged, by the unchanging Word of God and the deposit of biblical truth. Consistent with our theology and the demands of truth, we will not attempt to rewrite the past, nor can we unwrite the past. Instead, we will write the truth as best we can know it. We will tell the story in full, and not hide. By God’s grace, we will hold without compromise to the faith once for all delivered to the saints.
In May 2019 Mohler’s response to a petition from a coalition of black and white local ministers in Louisville demonstrated the limits of Southern’s conception of repentance. Prompted by the seminary’s report lamenting its slaveholding and white supremacist roots, the group suggested that Southern could “make an act of repentance and repair to descendants of American slavery for its leading role in crafting a moral and biblical defense of slavery.” Specifically, they suggested that Southern could gift a biblical tithe (10 percent) of its nearly $1 billion endowment to Simmons College of Kentucky, a nearby historically black Christian college. Mohler’s response was unyielding. “We do not believe that financial reparations are the appropriate response.”77
I’ve highlighted these responses—and nonresponses—to the legacy of racism and white supremacy by Southern Baptists not because they are extraordinary but because they are typical of a self-protectionist rhetorical strategy that white Christians deploy too often to give the appearance of accountability while shoring up the status quo of white supremacy.
White evangelicals have captured most of the historical spotlight because of their overt support for slavery, Jim Crow laws, and segregation, and because of their concentration in the former states of the Confederacy. And it is true that white mainline Protestants and white Catholics—due to both geographic and theological divergences from white evangelicalism—do have different historical stories they can tell about their relationships to white supremacy and black claims to equality in America. But these differences at the national institutional level hide similarities among white Christians at the congregational level.
White mainline Protestants were the first to publish Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail”—one of the most eloquent and enduring examples of public theology in the twentieth century—in their flagship magazine The Christian Century. The National Council of Churches (NCC) lobbied strongly for civil rights legislation, and the United Methodist Building on Capitol Hill served as a staging area for King’s 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. In a 1957 address at the NCC annual meeting, Reverend King himself acknowledged the Council’s consistent support for civil rights, stating, “This great body, the National Council of Churches, has condemned segregation over and over again and has requested its constituent denominations to do likewise.”78
There were prominent Catholic religious and political leaders who were strongly supportive of the civil rights movement, such as Archbishop Patrick O’Boyle of Washington and Archbishop Joseph E. Ritter of St. Louis, who desegregated their cities’ churches and parochial schools years before the Brown decision.79 And at their 1958 national gathering, the US bishops released a major statement titled “Racial Discrimination and the Christian Conscience,” which declared that “enforced segregation” could not “be reconciled with the Christian view of our fellow man.”80 President John F. Kennedy, who first introduced comprehensive civil rights legislation in 1963 that would not be passed until after his death, was, of course, Catholic. And white Catholic churches were at times the exception to the rule of white segregated churches that turned away black worshippers in the Deep South.
However, the pro–civil rights orientation of white mainline Protestant and white Catholic leaders is not an accurate barometer of the influence of white supremacy among white Christians sitting in the pews. Declarations on racial justice by national institutions and hierarchies were more often than not ignored or actively flouted by local clergy and their congregations. For example, in late 1940s Los Angeles, Reverend W. Clarence Wright, the pastor of Wilshire Presbyterian Church, headed the fight to keep the well-to-do Wilshire district all white. When an African American war veteran moved into the elite, Waspy neighborhood, the clergyman personally sued to evict him. Wright lost the case. In one of the few early cases where courts held that racially restrictive neighborhood covenants were unconstitutional, the judge issued a sharp rebuke to the pastor, declaring that there was “no more reprehensible un-American activity than to attempt to deprive persons of their own homes on a ‘master race’ theory.”81
Despite this local victory, racially restrictive housing covenants remained common practice in cities across the country until they were finally struck down nationally by the Supreme Court in Shelley v. Kraemer in 1948. In this landmark case, based on an attempt by whites to prevent a black couple from buying a house in their St. Louis neighborhood, white mainline Christians were on the wrong side of history. J. D. and Ethel Shelley had moved from Mississippi to St. Louis to escape the oppressive racial atmosphere of the Deep South. They saved and purchased a house, only to have the transaction challenged in court by a white neighbor, Louis Kraemer, because the original deed to the house specified that no “people of the Negro or Mongolian Race” could purchase the house.82 The court sided with the Shelleys in a broad ruling. Because deeds barring sales to nonwhites require judicial enforcement, the court found, they could not be construed as merely private discrimination but rather violated the Fourteenth Amendment, which prohibits state governments from participating in segregation.83
This important case is widely studied by law students as a turning point in dismantling decades of segregationist practices not only by the federal, state, and local governments but also by developers, real estate agents, and neighborhood associations. With a single stroke, it opened all neighborhoods to all people. It was argued and won by NAACP attorney and future Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall, and it has the distinction of being a rare unanimous decision that was determined by a 6–0 vote. Three of the justices had to recuse themselves after finding that their own houses were entangled in racially restrictive neighborhood covenants.84 Today the modest Shelley House has been designated a National Historic Landmark.
But few law students are taught that the restrictive covenants in the neighborhood had been organized by the Marcus Avenue Improvement Association, a white home owners’ association that was sponsored by the Cote Brilliante Presbyterian Church. Kraemer’s legal attempt to evict the Shelleys was funded from the church’s coffers, an action officially approved by the congregation’s trustees. Waggoner Place Methodist Episcopal Church South, another nearby mainline Protestant church, was also a signatory of the restrictive covenant. Six years earlier, its pastor had defended it in court in a case the association brought to prevent a local distinguished black attorney from purchasing a home in the neighborhood.85 And few took notice of the actions of the white church members following the court decision that opened their neighborhood to African Americans. In less than a decade after the Shelleys moved in, most of the white church members had moved out of the neighborhood and abandoned the church: the white congregation held its last Communion service on May 27, 1956.86
Perhaps the most glaring example of the chasm between national denominational positions and local sentiment among white mainline Protestants occurred in 1963. Six years after Reverend King praised the National Council of Churches for its leadership on civil rights, and in the same year that the Christian Century published his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” Atlanta’s Lovett School, affiliated with the New York–based Episcopal Church, notified Reverend and Mrs. King that their six-year-old son, Martin Luther King III, was being denied admission on the basis of his race.
For their part, white Catholics also resisted, sometimes violently, influxes of African Americans into their own ethnic neighborhoods in the industrial cities of the Midwest and Northeast.87 The widespread opposition to racial equality by the US Catholic Church led W. E. B. DuBois to single it out for particular criticism. In a 1925 letter to Reverend Joseph B. Glenn, a priest in charge of St. Joseph’s mission in Richmond, Virginia, a parish established in 1884 specifically for black Catholics, DuBois wrote a stinging indictment of the church’s relationship to African Americans:
The Catholic Church in America stands for color separation and discrimination to a degree equaled by no other church in America, and that is saying a great deal.… The white parochial schools even in the North exclude colored children, the Catholic high schools will not admit them, the Catholic University at Washington invites them elsewhere, and scarcely a Catholic seminary in the country will train a Negro priest. This is not a case of blaming the Catholic Church for not doing all it might—it is blaming it for being absolutely and fundamentally wrong today and in the United States on the basic demands of human brotherhood across the color line.88
Catholic clergy, churches, and laity were also active in policing neighborhood boundaries in major cities across the country. When the United States entered World War II in 1941, the government commissioned a new bomber plant in Willow Run, a suburban area of Detroit. The Federal Works Agency (FWA) was put in charge of building temporary housing for workers, and included a segregated housing project for African Americans, designated as the Sojourner Truth Housing Project. After considerable controversy following the objections of white elected officials, which resulted in the firing of the FWA director who had proposed the project, it was nonetheless eventually greenlighted. When blacks began to move in, whites in the nearby neighborhoods rioted. The clash between whites and their new African American neighbors resulted in more than a hundred arrests and thirty-eight hospitalizations, almost all of which were among African Americans.89
The riot made national news. A less acknowledged fact was that this violent white resistance was organized by a home owners’ association that was headquartered in a local church, the St. Louis the King Catholic Church. When the association appealed to the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) to cancel the project, their spokesperson was the church’s priest, Reverend Constantine Dzink, who gave the following testimony: “Construction of a low-cost housing project in the vicinity… for the colored people… would mean utter ruin for many people who have mortgaged their homes to the FHA, and not only that, but it would jeopardize the safety of many of our white girls.” His closing remarks also contained a thinly veiled warning about how far his own church members and fellow white community members were willing to go to resist the housing project: “It is the sentiment of all people residing within the vicinity to object against this project in order to stop race riots in the future.”90
In New York, the response of the Roman Catholic Church, in many instances, was to facilitate the flight from historically Irish and Italian inner-city neighborhoods out to the suburbs, where new churches and schools were built. While the bishops often did not immediately close the original parish churches and schools, now populated by black Catholics, they did shift resources away from them to the new white parishes. Reflecting on his personal experience with these dynamics in 1970, Father Lawrence Lucas, a black Catholic priest, described how these actions left many black Catholics angry and hurt, feeling forsaken by a white Jesus and a white church:
When blacks appeared on the scene, the white Christ, after fighting like hell to keep them out, fled and abandoned their buildings to the niggers as one step better than blowing them up. In the cities, the abandoned edifices of this white Jesus’ love are allowed to die a slow death from lack of upkeep and support.… When the white Jesus ran away from the invading niggers he did not put his buildings—churches, schools, hospitals—in his pocket or put a match to them. No, he was in such a hurry that he just left them behind and appointed some “heroic” white lieutenants to keep the niggers from utterly destroying his investments while feigning a response to their needs.91
The first meeting of the National Black Catholic Clergy Caucus in 1968 opened with a sharply worded statement: “The Catholic Church in the United States is primarily a white racist institution, has addressed itself primarily to white society and is definitely a part of that society.”92 On January 8, 1969, a group of twenty mostly white Catholic priests similarly called out the Archdiocese of Newark, New Jersey, for neglecting the needs of more than a half million African Americans in the archdiocese’s inner city. They issued a public statement, covered in the New York Times, that read in part: “For a decade, the drama and urgency of the desperate need of the inner city has been ignored by the official Church in Newark. The official Church is apathetic. It is racist.”93 Less than four years later, with none of the initial demands addressed by the archdiocese, seven of the twenty priests who filed the original complaint had left the ministry, including the two leading spokesmen and the only black priest in the archdiocese. Four of the original priests who remained in their posts, all in their thirties, lodged an additional complaint in 1972. Reverend Michael Linder reiterated the charge in an interview with the New York Times: “They were very much racist and they still are, if you define racism as not allowing black and Spanish-speaking people to project themselves into leadership positions in the Archdiocese.”94
In The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, Richard Rothstein summarizes how prevalent white Christian support for enforcing neighborhood segregation was:
Church involvement and leadership were commonplace in property owners’ associations that were organized to maintain neighborhood segregation. In North Philadelphia in 1942, a priest spearheaded a campaign to prevent African Americans from living in the neighborhood. The same year, a priest in a Polish American parish in Buffalo, New York, directed the campaign to deny public housing for African American war workers, stalling a proposed project for two years. Just south of the city, 600 units in the federally managed project for whites went vacant, while African American war workers could not find adequate housing.95
We could easily continue to pile up examples, but a pattern is clear: white Christians and their institutions, especially at the local level, were not just passively complicit with but also broadly and actively resistant to black Americans’ claims of equality. This massive religious resistance was happening even as white Protestant mainline denominational offices and the American Catholic bishops, at the national level, were issuing statements calling for their constituents to support aspects of the civil rights movement. In the same 1957 speech in which Reverend King praised the NCC for its consistency as a national body in supporting civil rights, he also had this to say:
“All of these things are marvelous and deserve our highest praise. But we must admit that these courageous stands from the churches are still far too few. The sublime statements of the major denominations on the question of human relations move all too slowly to the local churches and actual practice. All too many ministers are still silent while evil rages.”96
The US Catholic bishops followed up their initial 1958 statement a decade later with a 1968 statement titled “The National Race Crisis,” which noted, “Now—ten years later—it is evident that we did not do enough; we have much more to do.… It became clear that we failed to change the attitudes of many believers.”97 Yet another decade later, in 1979, the bishops issued a statement titled “Brothers and Sisters to Us,” which declared, “Racism is an evil that endures in our society and in our church. Despite apparent advances and even significant changes in the last two decades, the reality of racism remains.”98 The statement went on to conclude that “too often what has happened has been only a covering over, not a fundamental change.”99
On the tenth anniversary of “Brothers and Sisters to Us” in 1989, the Bishops’ Committee on Black Catholics conducted a survey of the impact of the statement and issued a sharply worded conclusion: “The promulgation of the pastoral on racism was soon forgotten by all but a few. A survey… revealed a pathetic, anemic response from archdioceses and dioceses around the country. The pastoral on racism had made little or no impact on the majority of Catholics in the United States.”100
At the twenty-fifth anniversary of the statement in 2004, the bishops again conducted a survey to assess its impact. They found that only 18 percent of US bishops had issued statements condemning racism as a sin. Moreover, Bryan Massingale, a priest and author of Racial Justice and the Catholic Church, notes that “most of these statements were written by only a handful of bishops” and that few move beyond personal attitudes to deal with systemic racism. Most tellingly, the study found that nearly two-thirds (64 percent) of Catholics reported that they had not heard a single sermon on racism or racial justice over the entire three-year cycle of the lectionary.101 In other words, even while working through the entire text of the Bible over that period, the overwhelming majority of priests did not find a single occasion to preach on racial justice issues.
To be sure, there are important questions about the ultimate resolve of the leadership of the National Council of Churches, the mainline Protestant denominations, and the US Catholic hierarchy to connect their declarations with discipleship at the local church level. But this disconnect between official positions of church leaders and the attitudes of their flocks is also testimony to the entrenched power of white supremacy in American Christianity, built up over centuries. As I noted in chapter 1, this massive white Christian resistance was happening, to echo Father Lucas, not just in the “bad, bad” South but in the “good, good” North.102
While white evangelicals were providing Christian legitimization of the Confederate Lost Cause, white mainline Protestants in the pews were protecting their long-claimed title to the throne of white Anglo-Saxon Protestant dominance. For their part, Catholics seized the moment to transform the terms of the conflict. Amid the turmoil, they ceased to perceive the fight as one between Irish and black or Italian and black ethnic groups. Rather, the flight out of their old parishes in the wake of black encroachment was the critical moment when the Irish and Italian and other European Catholics—who each had long thought of themselves as an immigrant group with a distinct ethnic heritage from a specific country of origin—discovered that they could be white.
A moment of reckoning is upon us, and it’s time that we white Christians do better, to see what is plainly in front of us and to wrestle with the unsettling implications. What if the racist views of historical “titans of the faith” infected the entire theological project contemporary white Christians have inherited from top to bottom? If white supremacy was an unquestionable cultural assumption in America, what does it mean that Christian doctrines by necessity had to develop in ways that were compatible with that worldview? What if, for example, Christian conceptions of marriage and family, the doctrine of biblical inerrancy, or even the concept of having a personal relationship with Jesus developed as they did because they were useful tools for reinforcing white dominance? Is it possible that the white supremacy heresy is so integrated into white Christian DNA that it eludes even sincere efforts to excise it?
White Christianity has been many things for America. But whatever else it has been—and the country is indebted to it for a good many things—it has also been the primary institution legitimizing and propagating white power and dominance. Is such a system, built and maintained not just to save souls but also to secure white supremacy, flawed beyond redemption? If we’re even going to begin to answer these questions, we need to take a deeper dive into the inner logic of white Christian theology.