The Color of Compromise

by Jemar Tisby

  The sexual dimensions of Jim Crow deserve special attention. During this era, the prohibition against interracial sexual relations and marriage became one the most inviolable of social conventions in America. Under Jim Crow, the myth of the Lost Cause positioned white women as the epitome of purity and vulnerability, and by contrast, black men came to symbolize raw lust and bestiality. According to the racist myths about sexuality, brutish black men always prowled around for delicate white women on whom they could unleash their unholy appetites. In a stark demonstration of the hypocrisy and illogical nature of racism, Jim Crow advocates almost never mentioned the long-standing and more common pattern of powerful white men raping vulnerable black women.

  On September 3, 1944, Recy Taylor was on her way home from late-night worship at Rock Hill Holiness Church in Abbeville, Alabama. Historian Danielle McGuire wrote that Taylor had been walking with two other churchgoers when a green sedan filled with seven young white men pulled to a stop on the road. Holding her hostage at the point of a shotgun, they accused Taylor, who had been with her companions at the church all that day, of stabbing a white man earlier that night. They ordered her into the back of the car and drove her to a secluded pecan grove. “Get them rags off,” ordered the white ringleader. He and his companions took of their pants, and six of them raped her. Afterward, they left her on a dark highway, and she walked home alone. As word of the atrocity spread, the NAACP dispatched an investigator named Rosa Parks, who would launch what the black newspaper the Chicago Defender called “the strongest campaign for equal justice to be seen in a decade.”28

  Unfortunately, crimes such as the one Recy Taylor suffered had been an all-too-common feature of American life, beginning from the earliest days of slavery. In the Jim Crow era, rape persisted as a sexualized form of racial terror. Women were targeted for reasons as varied as retribution for perceived offenses to drunken fits of lasciviousness. As civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer would later explain, “A black woman’s body was never hers alone.”29

  One of the implications of the Christian attempt to justify slavery by positing the inferiority of black people was the belief that black and white people should not have sexual relations or risk having mixed-race children. In the minds of Christian segregationists, racial mixing would dilute the purity of the white race and result in the “mongrelization” of white people. Southern lawmaker and notorious segregationist Theodore Bilbo wrote a book entitled Take Your Choice: Separation or Mongrelization. Among a litany of pseudoscientific reasons he listed for keeping the races separate, he also invoked the will of God: “Nothing could be more foreign to the ideals of the Christian religion than miscegenation and amalgamation. There is absolutely no foundation for advocating the mixing of the blood of the races as a part of our religious doctrines.”30

  Jim Crow proved devastating for black people. White racial terrorism during Jim Crow resulted in horrific atrocities like the development of the convict-lease system, reproducing what is often called “slavery by another name.” The Civil War led to the elimination of America’s most traditional form of forced labor—slavery—but the Thirteenth Amendment allowed for an exception. Those who were “duly convicted” of a crime could be forced to labor as part of their punishment. After the Civil War and emancipation, convict-leasing developed as a “legal” way for corporations to gain cheap labor and for state and county governments to get money. The process of convict-leasing began by entrapping black people, usually men but occasionally women, for minor offenses such as vagrancy, gambling, or riding a freight car without a ticket, and then saddling them with jail time and court fees. If the person could not pay the fee, as was often the case, they could have their sentence increased. A company, or even an independent employer, would then contract with a prison for inmate labor, putting them to work in mines, factories, or fields. In return the company would pay the local government entity a certain fee per worker. The workers themselves, as prison inmates, were never paid for their labor. They worked in appalling conditions that bred disease and violence. Many died and were dumped into unmarked graves.

  The convict-lease system made black inmates “slaves in all but name.”31 Together with sharecropping, convict-leasing provided a way for white supremacists to methodically corral black people into the most menial jobs, depriving them of opportunities for economic advancement, and stripping them of their voting rights. Most notoriously, any perceived infraction of the Jim Crow codes could earn a black person “death by tree”—lynching.

  LYNCHING

  Jim Crow could not have worked as effectively as it did without the frequent and detestable practice of lynching. Laws alone were not enough to reify white supremacy; what bred terror was the combination of legal segregation coupled with the random and capricious acts of violence toward black people. Anyone black—man, woman, or child—could become the next lynching victim at the slightest offense, real or imaginary. Often, the murder followed a spurious accusation of sexual assault. Other misdeeds were more quotidian. For instance, white people lynched Elizabeth Lawrence for telling white children not to throw rocks at black children. Such voyeuristic and violent deaths represent the heinous apotheosis of American racism.

  The exact details of the conflict leading up to the lynching of Luther and Mary Holbert in February 1904 are not clear, but we know it was about love. According to historian Chris Myers Asch, Luther Holbert, a black worker on the James Eastland plantation in Sunflower County, Mississippi, had been living with Mary, who was the wife (or ex-wife) of another worker, Albert Carr. Holbert and Carr had a dispute over the romance, and the plantation owner, Eastland, intervened. Carr and Eastland went to the Holbert’s cabin armed with guns. Only the results, not the details, of the encounter are known. But at the end of the altercation at the cabin, both Eastland and Carr lay dead at the hands of Luther Holbert.32

  Jim Crow “justice” was quick and certain for any black man who killed a white man. Fearing for their lives, Luther and Mary Holbert went on the run. The alleged crime ignited the white population. Hundreds of white men, led by James Eastland’s brother Woods Caperton Eastland, pursued the Holberts with bloodhounds guiding them to their prey. Mary disguised herself as a man, and they hid in the swamp. Three days later, the Holberts were captured. What happened next is a horror of inhumanity.

  The lynching didn’t happen immediately. It was planned for the next day, a Sunday afternoon after church so a larger crowd could gather. The murderers strategically chose their location for maximum intimidation of the black populace. It was to take place on the property of a black church in Doddsville, Mississippi. The black church has historically been the locus of religious and communal life for black people, so performing a lynching on church grounds would send a message to all black people in the area that no place was safe from white power and hatred.

  More than a thousand people showed up to gawk at the lynching of Luther and Mary Holbert. The lynchers tied up the Holberts and commenced with “the most fiendish tortures.”33 First, the white murderers cut off each of the fingers and toes of their victims and gave them out as souvenirs. Then they beat the bodies of Luther and Mary so mercilessly that one of Luther Holbert’s eyes dangled from its socket. Then followed the most heinous abuse. The Vicksburg Evening Post reported, “The most excruciating form of punishment consisted in the use of a large corkscrew in the hands of some of the mob. This instrument was bored into the flesh of the man and woman, in the arms, legs, and body, and then pulled out, the spirals tearing out big pieces of raw quivering flesh every time it was withdrawn.”34 Finally, the Holberts, who were still alive, were taken to a pyre. The white men cruelly forced two black men under threat of death to drag the Holberts to the fires. They burned Mary first, so Luther could see his beloved killed. Then they burned him.

  Sadly, this was not an isolated incident. In 1918, Walter White of the NAACP, writing about a recent spate of lynchings in Georgia, warned readers of his article that “the method by which Mrs. Mary
Turner was put to death was so revolting and the details are so horrifying that it is with reluctance that the account is given.”35 Mary Turner had been vocally protesting the lynching of her husband, and her cries for justice made her a target for a white racist lynch mob. When they caught up to her, they tied her ankles and hung her upside down from a small oak tree. Turner was eight months pregnant at the time, but that fact elicited no mercy from the mob, who applied gasoline and oil to her pregnant body. They struck a match and lit it, burning off her clothes. Then, while she was still alive, one man took a knife commonly used for killing hogs and cut open her womb. The child fell from Turner’s midsection, and according to White, “The infant, prematurely born, gave two feeble cries and then its head was crushed by a member of the mob with his heel.”36 In the aftermath of this event, five hundred black people fled the community.

  The tragic and infuriating lynchings of the Holberts and Mary Turner are just two examples among thousands. Lynchings usually took place because of a perceived crime—the killing of a white person in self-defense, calls for justice by the spouse of a lynching victim, or even for something less. Antilynching crusader Ida B. Wells found that many lynchings were over economic disputes. In 1892, white supremacists in Memphis lynched one of Wells’s close friends, Thomas Moss, and two of his companions for no other reason than the fact that they ran a prosperous grocery store.37 Imagined sexual predation on the part of black men toward white women was frequently an excuse too. But whatever the cause, the violence and exhibition of brutality were all too common features of the racial tyranny of lynching.

  Few of the white people who participated in the lynching of black citizens ever faced legal consequences. Woods Eastland, who led the mob that lynched the Holberts, did face charges in the murders, but his acquittal was a foregone conclusion. After the all-white jury found him innocent, Eastland hosted a party on his plantation to celebrate.

  Lynch mobs would sometimes target black preachers with their violent attacks. Clergy often had the most education and influence in the black community and were more likely to be engaged in politics, either as advocates of specific candidates and policies or as elected officials themselves. This made black church leaders natural targets of white supremacist brutality. One such minister singled out for silencing by the Ku Klux Klan was Henry McNeal Tuner, a well-known and sometimes controversial bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church. Born in 1834, Turner led a remarkable life as the first chaplain for “colored troops” during the Civil War, as a state legislator in Georgia, and as a bishop in the AME church during a period of unprecedented denominational growth.38

  Turner’s political activism and theology helped position the black church as a staunch opponent of racism and an advocate for the dignity of black people. According to a biographer, “For anyone wanting to know about forerunners of the modern civil rights and black power movements, Turner will be of great interest.”39 In one incident in 1869, the KKK warned, in a letter addressed to the “Radical H. M. Turner,” that “your course of conduct is being closely watched by the owls of the night; do not be surprised if you should be aroused from slumber ere long by a boo hoo, boo hoo.” Not to be intimidated, Turner responded with a public reply in the newspaper that said he attempted to live “square with God and man.” Turner said, if that made him a radical, “I thank God for it.” Turner concluded with a word of defiance: “If this Ku Klux don’t like it, let him bring on his owls, and [see] if I don’t send them to pandemonium faster than lightning ever crossed the heavens.”40

  Many white Christians failed to unequivocally condemn lynching and other acts of racial terror. Doing so poisoned the American legal system and made Christian churches complicit in racism for generations. While some Christians spoke out and denounced these lynchings (just as some Christians called for abolition), the majority stance of the American church was avoidance, turning a blind eye to the practice. It’s not that members of every white church participated in lynching, but the practice could not have endured without the relative silence, if not outright support, of one of the most significant institutions in America—the Christian church.

  Black Christians struggled to make sense of lynching from within their Christian faith. Writing many decades later, James Cone penned The Cross and the Lynching Tree as a theological reflection on racial terrorism. “Both Jesus and blacks were ‘strange fruit,’ ” he wrote. “Theologically speaking, Jesus was the ‘first lynchee,’ who foreshadowed all the lynched black bodies on American soil.”41 Cone goes on to explain, “The cross helped me to deal with the brutal legacy of the lynching tree, and the lynching tree helped me to understand the tragic meaning of the cross.”42 Cone showed that black people could better understand Christ’s suffering by recalling their own sorrow as it related to the lynching tree. At the same time, the cross provided comfort because black people could know for certain that in his life and death, Christ identified with the oppressed.

  The decades after the Civil War proved that racism never goes away, it just adapts. Although the Union had won the military victory, the ideology of the Confederate South battled on. Attorney Bryan Stevenson put it this way: “The North won the Civil War, but the South won the narrative war.”43

  Some white Christians used their faith to support the fiction of the Lost Cause narrative and notions of a romanticized white Protestant South. Others bent Christianity to support the Ku Klux Klan and its racial terrorism designed to reinforce white power. The American church’s complicity with racism contributed to a context that continued to discriminate against black people even after the deadly lessons of the Civil War. As the next chapter will show, this racist atmosphere and Christian complicity therein did not reside only in the South but permeated the entire country.

  CHAPTER

  7

  REMEMBERING THE COMPLICITY IN THE NORTH

  Ida B. Wells, the antilynching activist who always had her senses attuned to matters of racial justice, had a complaint with the organizers of the World’s Columbian Exposition. Held in Chicago in 1893, the fair commemorated the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s encounter with North America, and it sought to showcase the country’s innovation. The massive event spanned 600 acres, featured the world’s first Ferris wheel, and attracted twenty-seven million visitors. At the heart of the fair stood the White City, a cluster of white buildings in the neoclassical style that glowed at night from the illumination of electrical lights.1

  Even at this amazing fair, white supremacy reigned. Black visitors had a special day set aside just for them called “Colored American Day” when organizers promised to serve 2,000 free watermelons.2 Black people participated in the fair in many ways, but most controversial was an exhibit featuring sixty-nine Fon, black African people colonized by the French. Onlookers gawked at these human beings, and one journalist remarked on their “barbaric ugliness.”3 Ida B. Wells, who had moved to Chicago from Memphis in 1893, strongly opposed the underrepresentation and misrepresentation of black people at the fair, and Wells, along with others such as Frederick Douglass, wrote a protest pamphlet entitled “The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition.” In a portion written by Douglass, he aimed to “explain the grounds of the prejudice, hate and contempt in which [black people] are still held. . . . So when it is asked why we are excluded from the World’s Columbian Exposition, the answer is Slavery.”4 Douglass, himself a former slave, understood better than most that racist ideas of black inferiority not only persisted but permeated the country, including urban areas of the North.

  The racism Wells and Douglass objected to at the World’s Fair happened not in Charleston, Birmingham, Memphis, or some other southern city, but in Chicago, Illinois. Popular imagination has cast the South as racially backward while the North, although not perfect, has been characterized as more open-minded and accepting, a land of tolerance and freedom for black people. This notion harmfully depicts racism as primarily a southern problem while exonerat
ing white people in the North of racism. In reality, the struggle for black freedom took place everywhere throughout the country, not just in the South.5

  This chapter takes a closer look at the racial dynamics of areas outside the South, especially in urban areas of the Midwest, California, and the East Coast. The illustrations derive mainly from the Jim Crow era, but some examples from the civil rights era and beyond are included to further emphasize the national scope of racism. Racism played out differently across different regions but stretched from coast to coast and border to border. As the following examples will show, the church’s complicity with racism was not just a southern problem but an American one.

  CATHOLICS AND PENTECOSTALS WRESTLE WITH RACISM

  Most of the stories included in this book speak about the racism of Protestant Christians, but some American Roman Catholics outside of the South demonstrated complicity in racism too. Although Catholics had maintained a presence in North America since the sixteenth century, waves of immigration in the early 1800s—mostly German and Irish at first but then others from southern and eastern Europe—resulted in large populations of Roman Catholics in the urban North and on the East Coast. Recent immigrants soon adapted to America’s biracial system of social segregation and subsumed their ethnic heritage under the label of whiteness.6 Catholic schools generally excluded black people or included them only on a segregated basis.