social instability ultimately would lead to the civil rights movement in mid-twentieth century.
Tearing down Jim Crow segregation went against the will of southern Protestant denominations like the SBC, which did very little to support African Americans’ full humanity or their civil rights. The religious support of legal segregation tore at the social fabric of democratic society and eliminated any possibility of national Christian unity on issues of race and racism. Not only did white Christians disagree about the morality of segregation, they also created further chasms between themselves and African American Christians.
Examining public statements by the SBC, including resolutions at annual conventions, allows us to view both the continuities and the changes over time in the SBC’s stance on racism and Jim Crow segregation. Although such resolutions are not binding on individual member churches, these member-ratified public statements nevertheless represent the majority views of the entire denomination through votes cast at official conventions. Thus, these statements are both legitimated and preserved by the SBC.21 Because of its pro-segregation stance, which was consistent with its earlier support of slavery and the Civil War, in its public resolutions and official commission statements the SBC consistently avoided language on Christian charity and love toward African Americans. Its twentieth-century statements rarely, if ever, included biblical or theological language that challenged segregation. These public resolutions often demonstrated indifference to the sources of African American suffering to which the SBC had contributed. While they detailed the poor quality of African American life and its problems, nevertheless its rhetoric declared that it was not its role to solve these problems. As part of its 1905 official proceedings, for example, the convention declared, “It is no affair of this Convention to solve the negro problem … God will take care of the problem.”22 While it noted evidence of social improvement, the convention expressed concern about African American drug habits, low morality, crime, and the prevalence of insanity that had not existed before emancipation. It also observed, “By far the greatest force in leading the negroes up from savagery has been his varied contact with Christian white men and women, and especially the influence of the Christian home.”23 This was written just nine years after the Plessy case was decided in 1896 by the US Supreme Court, at a time when Jim Crow segregation legally subjugated African American citizens to a racial caste system that included myriad forms of oppression, including exploitation, marginalization, and mob and interpersonal violence.
The tone of this 1905 resolution was part of a consistent pattern in the SBC’s official resolutions, recommendations, and policies toward African Americans until the mid-twentieth century. Despite the social and political subjugation of American citizens who were denied the right to vote, proper and decent public education, and the daily humane civility accorded to white citizens, the SBC expressed that African Americans needed aid that would encourage self-help and self-respect. Its pattern of thinking, including absolution of responsibility for the consequences of segregation, made it clear that help from the convention to solve the major issues that denied African Americans’ equal humanity and justice would not be forthcoming. Instead, support of segregation formed the normal context for its resolutions, concerns, and calls for law and order to deal with responses to race problems and violence in the twentieth century. With regard to lynching, for example, it wrote in 1906 that although lynchings blunt the conscience, it also is important to condemn the horrible crimes that cause them.24
In 1915, the SBC voiced its optimism that African Americans would elevate their standing with education, moral, and religious development. Among the African American values the convention praised were their docility, respect, thrift, and being law abiding. What was needed, however, was patience and helpfulness by the “dominant” race.25 This resolution’s racist and paternalistic views of African Americans were reflected in their belief that African Americans not only were docile, but that the SBC’s ideal was the “worthy white man.” The SBC believed in working for African Americans’ equal opportunity along “parallel lines,” that is, within the structures of segregation. While it lauded some African American ministers as superior, it asserted that the mass of them was ignorant and deficient in moral character. What African Americans craved, according to the SBC’s resolution, was “the aid of their favored white brethren.”26 Finally, the SBC concluded that African Americans never could come into their own in American life without Christianity to overcome their defectiveness of character.27
However, the SBC was capable of voicing concerns about some kinds of human suffering. In 1919, for example, the organization issued a resolution on the condition and suffering of Jews through persecutions and massacres. It resolved that “All right-thinking men, and especially Christians, should let their voice be heard for the justice, humanity, mercy, forgiveness, and love of true Christianity, as taught by the Lord Jesus Christ; therefore, be it.”28 However, the SBC was unwilling to apply these same kinds of considerations to oppose racism, Jim Crow segregation, and African Americans’ persecution.
During the 1930s and 1940s, at the height of the African American humiliation during Jim Crow segregation, the SBC issued resolutions on race that challenged unequal pay, yet it did not believe that it was necessary to pay African Americans and whites equally.29 With regard to lynching and mob violence, the SBC never endorsed efforts in the US Congress to gain approval of anti-lynching legislation, although it did denounce lynching itself.30
The SBC’s 1941 resolution on race relations is worth note. First, although there was no call to take down the structures of Jim Crow segregation, there was a call to continue to work in “parallel lines” with African Americans. It encouraged the convention to maintain good relations with African Americans. Second, it noted the uptick in the number of victims of mob violence and emphasized the necessity for law and order and the suppression of mob violence.31
The SBC’s acceptance – even promotion – of African American racial stigma, of African American inferiority, was a dominant current in SBC public pronouncements throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Even after the 1954 Brown decision, however, it continued in its path of denial of Christian brotherhood to African Americans (see Box 3.6).
Box 3.6
The author has organized the discussion around key historical periods. The section covering the Jim Crow era is coming to an end; the second, post the 1954 Brown decision, now starts. The theme is that, right up to 1965, there is continuing evasion of any calls for real structural change in the organization of society that protects racism and white supremacy.
Southern Baptists and Racial Stigma after the 1954 Brown Decision
In an important study of southern Protestant denominations, David Chappell describes the dissension among white Christians in the 1950s and 1960s as racial concerns grew. He notes that southern Protestant religious bodies quickly desegregated their seminaries after the Brown decision, and the SBC did so in 1958.32 Since southern Protestant church members probably were as racist as the rest of the white South, what was significant, he argues, was that they generally did not join the anti-civil rights movement and unite with white southern politicians in defense of segregation.33 Chappell’s insight is important because it illustrates the willingness of southern Christians to abide by the law. However, they continued to deny church membership to African Americans.
The 1960s was an era of great racial upheaval because of the civil rights movement under the leadership of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., other ministers, and activists. The SBC’s 1961 resolution committed them “as Christians to do all that we can to improve the relations among all races as a positive demonstration of the power of Christian love.”34 Yet, it decried both mob violence and those who were involved in provocations – comments aimed at civil rights advocates. There was no mention of the problems with segregation that lay at the center of the civil rights movement, but it did mention the toll of racial prejudice on race relations. The resolution referred to the civil rights
