by Jemar Tisby
It is far more difficult to trace the actions of Christian moderates when compared to the more bombastic resisters in the movement. Their actions were at times supportive of black civil rights, while at other times they stood against the movement. But what we must not ignore is that while segregationist politicians spewed forth words of “interposition and nullification,”23 while magazines published editorials calling civil rights activists Communists, and while juries acquitted violent racists of criminal acts, none of this would have been possible without the complicity of Christian moderates.
THE CIVIL RIGHTS ACT OF 1964
On July 2, 1964, Martin Luther King Jr. stood directly behind President Lyndon B. Johnson at the White House, beaming with satisfaction. King and a mixed-race crowd of observers looked on as the commander-in-chief signed into law the most sweeping piece of civil rights legislation since the nineteenth century. The act Johnson signed created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), which authorized the federal government to enforce desegregation and prevented other types of discrimination based on religion and sex.
The passing of the Civil Rights Act only happened in the wake of some of the most tumultuous events in modern American history. In 1961, the Freedom Riders tested law enforcement’s commitment to desegregation among interstate travelers, and the interracial group of riders ended up bloody and imprisoned. In 1962, a mob of white segregationists rioted in protest of the University of Mississippi admitting its first black student, James Meredith, which left a French journalist dead. In June 1963, an assassin murdered NAACP Field Secretary Medgar Evers outside of his home in Jackson, Mississippi. In August 1963, the March for Jobs and Freedom in Washington DC brought hundreds of thousands of people to the nation’s capital in support of racial justice. In September of that year, the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing stole the lives of four young black girls. And in November 1963, an assassin shot and killed President John F. Kennedy as he rode in a motorcade in Dallas.24
Martin Luther King Jr. and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference stood at the center of the prominent events of the civil rights movement in the early 1960s. King understood the price this piece of legislation had cost him and his fellow activists. After Congress approved the Civil Rights Act, King asserted that the law would “bring practical relief to the Negro in the South, and will give the Negro in the North a psychological boost that he sorely needs.”25 To King and his allies in the struggle, the Civil Rights Act and similar legislation represented significant steps toward his dream of racial equality. King recognized the necessity of changing the laws to ensure the rights of all citizens, and he did not shy away from direct action that caused constructive conflict in his efforts to bring about change.
By contrast, when we look at Billy Graham and the moderate Christians he represented, we see they took a more subdued stance toward the Civil Rights Act. Graham helped start and was intimately involved with the publication of Christianity Today, the de facto voice of white evangelicalism. The magazine refused to endorse the act, largely because it was not in keeping with the magazine’s evangelical belief that social change came best through personal conversion. A black journalist reflecting on Graham’s position on legislation like the Civil Rights Act remarked that Graham did not “walk with protestors or call for open housing or desegregated churches” because “he’s too busy praying.”26 While Graham did not denounce the civil rights legislation, he did not put forth much effort to commend it either.
The responses of King and Graham to the Civil Rights Act, and their participation or lack thereof in achieving its passage, illustrates the gulf between the approaches taken by Christian activists and Christian moderates. Throughout the civil rights movement, a small cadre of Christians courageously defied the status quo at the risk of their freedom, livelihoods, and even their very lives. Christian moderates may not have objected to the broader principles of racial equality, but they offered tepid support and at times outright skepticism.
URBAN UPRISINGS AND “LAW AND ORDER”
Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “I think we’ve got to see that a riot is the language of the unheard.”27 By contrast, in a sermon entitled “Rioting or Righteousness,” Billy Graham stated, “There is no doubt that the rioting, looting, and crime in America have reached a point of anarchy.”28 Each of these Christian leaders was responding to a recent string of urban uprisings involving black inner-city residents and their conflicts with the police. Throughout the 1960s, civil unrest bubbled over into rioting across the nation in places such as Harlem, Philadelphia, Omaha, and Newark. The differing responses of King and Graham to these riots further shows how Christian activists interpreted the civil rights movement differently from Christian moderates. The story of Ronald Frye illustrates the difference.
Ronald Frye wanted to celebrate. He had just been discharged from his service with the Air Force on August 11, 1965. Frye and his older brother Marquette went out for drinks. Later that night they got into a car to drive home. Just a few blocks from their house in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, police officers pulled the younger Frye over for weaving in and out of the lane. Frye, who was black, got into an extended verbal altercation with the white police officers, and as the argument continued crowds of neighbors gathered. Soon their mother, Rena Frye, heard about the commotion and walked over to where her sons and the police were clashing. Mrs. Frye berated her boys for drinking even as she tried to defend them from getting arrested. The tumult turned physical as more officers arrived, and they arrested all three Fryes as the crowd taunted and jeered at the police. Rumors of police brutality swirled throughout the growing crowd, and groups began throwing rocks at the dozens of officers who had gathered to quell the chaos. Then the crowd turned to other property, breaking windows, stealing goods, and roving the streets.29
The following six days of urban uprisings in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles resulted in 34 deaths, over 1,000 injuries, $34 million in damages, and nearly 4,000 arrests.30 The violence, damage, and vocal opposition to calls for civility contrasted with the peaceful marches and freedom songs of the civil rights movement in the South. Christians, like the rest of America, watched the events unfold with a mixture of curiosity and confusion.
When Billy Graham learned of the unrest in Watts, he flew to the site to personally survey the scene. Graham strapped on a bulletproof vest and boarded a helicopter to hover above the devastation and destruction. Graham was appalled. He saw in Watts the unraveling of the fabric of the nation. “It cannot be overlooked that this kind of disturbance is being used by those whose ultimate end is to overthrow the American government.” He called it a “dress rehearsal for a revolution.” Graham said that the nation needed “tough laws” to crack down on such flagrant disregard for authority.31 This “law-and-order” rhetoric resonated with white evangelicals as well, and it led many to be critical of civil rights activists in general. These Christians were not denying that blacks were discriminated against or that conditions in the inner city were troublesome. But they believed the solution to the problem was to trust the system. Christian moderates insisted on obeying the law, working through the courts, and patiently waiting for transformation.
King and other activists took a different view. King understood that the chaos of Watts did not emerge from a single incident. While not excusing the violence or the indiscriminate lawlessness, he also knew that the black residents of Watts had witnessed the nearly all-white police force repeatedly brutalizing their neighbors. The people living in this South Central Los Angeles neighborhood felt trapped by the forces of poverty, incarceration, failing schools, and racism. Though activists had been working for change over the course of many years, the cries of the people went largely unheard. As an alternative to gradual change through the system, which was frequently ineffective and ignored, they used the riots to call attention to their plight. In contrast to moderates like Graham who emphasized respect for existing laws and a crackdown on the “rad
icals” as the solution to urban uprisings, King saw a different remedy: “Social justice and progress are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention. There is no other answer.”32
Many Christian moderates failed to incorporate the larger context of the years of systemic racism into their understanding of the civil rights movement. The failure on the part of these moderate Christians and the broader citizenry of the nation to respond to the evils of segregation and inequality experienced in black communities would, in subsequent years, help spur another expression of the black freedom struggle, the Black Power Movement.
BLACK POWER MOVEMENT AND BLACK ALTERNATIVES TO CHRISTIANITY
Stokely Carmichael of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) did not invent the phrase “black power,” but he certainly helped popularize it. In 1962, James Meredith became the first black person to integrate the University of Mississippi. Four years later, Meredith initiated his solo “March Against Fear,” but on the second day of his nonviolent walk from Memphis to Jackson, Mississippi, a gunman shot him. Meredith survived, and the incident mobilized activists across the country including the twenty-four-year-old Carmichael. After Carmichael was released from yet another stint in jail for protesting, he ascended a makeshift stage erected on the back of a pickup truck and said, “This is the twenty-seventh time I have been arrested. I ain’t going to jail no more.” Then, at the urging of his associate Willie Ricks, Carmichael unleashed a fateful phrase: “We been saying freedom for six years and we ain’t got nothin’. What we got to start saying now is Black Power. We want Black Power! We want Black Power!”33
The phrase “black power” resonated with black people all across the United States. It echoed Marcus Garvey’s exhortations of black pride and black self-sufficiency. The history of calls for black independence and racial defiance is a long one. The Nation of Islam (NOI) began in Detroit in the 1930s and became an alternative to Christianity for many black people who had become disillusioned with the Christian religion’s seeming impotence in the face of potent American prejudice. The movement gained several prominent adherents during the 1960s. Malcolm X served as its charismatic spokesman, and his penetrating insights about the racial conditions of black people and the corresponding racism of white people both enraged and enthused his listeners.
One of the most well-known Nation of Islam converts was the bombastic boxer Muhammad Ali. Born as Cassius Clay in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1942, Clay became a world champion heavyweight known for his braggadocio as well as his activism. In 1966, Ali refused to submit to the draft and fight in Vietnam, citing his religious beliefs for doing so. By this time Clay had changed his name to Muhammad Ali and had converted to the Nation of Islam. In a letter to his wife just a couple of years after his conversion, Ali explained in more detail why he had embraced “the Nation.” As a teenager, a NOI member had given him one of their newspapers, and inside was a cartoon depicting a white slave owner whipping an enslaved black man while also telling him to pray to Christ. As one biographer explains, “The cartoon awakened [Ali], and he realized that he hadn’t chosen Christianity. He hadn’t chosen the name Cassius Clay. So why did he have to keep those vestiges of slavery?”34 A century had passed since the Civil War, and it was the height of the civil rights movement, yet Ali and many other black people still saw Christianity as the religion of the enslavers, the belief system of those who oppressed black people.
THE EVERYDAY RACISM OF AMERICAN CHRISTIANS
Up to this point, the discussions about the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s have revolved around a few famous individuals and organizations—Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Billy Graham, the NAACP, SNCC, and others—but this should not prevent our examination of everyday Christians, those who never made headlines or marched for or against black enfranchisement. These women and men filled the pews in their churches on Sunday morning, prayed before family dinners, and did their best to work hard and provide for their loved ones. Some collaborated with the vocal and visible individuals who enforced racial segregation in their communities. Sadly, millions of everyday Christians saw no contradiction between their faith and the racism they practiced in subtle yet ubiquitous ways.
In a book on the development of modern conservatism titled White Flight, historian Kevin Kruse details how many Christians actively opposed residential desegregation in their Atlanta neighborhoods. In the mid-1950s, Christians in Kirkwood, Georgia—a neighborhood in the city that was “Too Busy to Hate”—declared the boundaries of their racial tolerance to be their own backyards. In a survey that asked, “Do you attend church in this neighborhood?” seventy percent of respondents said yes, indicating a clear Christian, or at least churchgoing, majority.35 Pastors and other church leaders actively urged their members not to sell their homes to black people. “ ‘If everyone simply refuses to sell to colored,’ the pastors assured residents, ‘then everything will be fine.’ ” They pleaded with church members: “Please help us ‘Keep Kirkwood White’ and preserve our Churches and homes.”36 When these efforts failed, and one or two black families moved into the neighborhood, many of the white residents moved out. Churches shut their doors or fled to the all-white suburbs.37 Today, even more than fifty years later, many of these communities remain almost as racially segregated now as they were then.38
Schools also became a battleground for Christians committed to segregation. Some Christian parents, faced with the unconscionable prospect of little white girls attending school with little black boys and eventually growing up, falling in love, and having brown babies, started “segregation academies.” Because these were private schools, these institutions did not have to abide by the Brown v Board mandate for racial integration, which only applied to public schools. A 1972 report entitled “It’s Never Over in the South” found that many of these newly formed schools used the word “Christian” or “Church” in their name. The report went on to state that “individual Protestant churches in most cities have participated and often led the private school movement during desegregation.”39
In the book Blood Done Signed My Name, an autobiographical narrative of a lynching in his hometown, historian Timothy Tyson speaks of his experience growing up as a preacher’s kid in segregated Sanford, North Carolina. His father, Vernon Tyson, was a relatively progressive Methodist pastor who intentionally sought to work for racial justice and integration. Rev. Tyson’s Christian convictions about race earned him frequent trouble with his congregation and the local townspeople. Inspired by MLK’s leadership and the sacrifices of the activists in the Birmingham campaign of 1963, the elder Tyson wrote a letter to the editor of the local newspaper. Echoing themes from “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” Tyson enlisted churches in the task of racial reformation. “Our churches ought to open their doors to every person for whom Jesus Christ died and thus become the headlights of our community rather than the tail-lights.” In response, the newspaper editor chided the pastor that leaders who went “too far, too fast” ended up without anyone to lead and possibly without a pulpit too.40
In another instance, Rev. Tyson opened a house where the Methodist Youth Fellowship could meet. The “hippies” with long hair and guitars soon showed up, and a few of them even had black friends who accompanied them. When word got out that young white girls might be associating with young black boys, the preacher recalled, “some of my members came in and asked me to keep the blacks out.”41 On multiple occasions, Rev. Tyson had to decide whether to preach the word or pursue popularity. The younger Tyson recalls a time when his father invited a well-known black preacher, Dr. Samuel Proctor, to preach for his congregation. Upon hearing of the invitation, fifty of Tyson’s church members called a “protest meeting” to compel the minister to rescind the invitation. Tyson even received several death threats. In the end, though, Dr. Proctor came to preach and won over a great many of the congregation.42
Vernon Tyson’s experience is just one example of one person in one town. But it reminds us of the countless
preachers and lay Christians who worked to promote racial integration, even as they faced reprisals from other white Christians. Many a well-meaning minister has been held hostage by the racial prejudices of the congregation. Preachers who desired to hasten the day of racial equality often face speed bumps and road blocks put in place by the racial prejudices of their parishioners.
The barriers to overcoming racism are not easily removed. Even the material culture of the postwar and civil rights era surreptitiously supported an ongoing racial caste within the American church. Edward J. Blum and Paul Harvey, in their book The Color of Christ, demonstrate how images of Jesus created or printed during this time betray the racial assumptions of the culture. One of the most famous images of Jesus ever promulgated is called “Head of Christ” by Warner Sallman. According to the authors, by the 1990s this image had been printed over 500 million times and had “achieved global iconic status.”43
You can probably picture it now. “This new Jesus had smooth white skin, long flowing brown hair, a full beard, and blue eyes.”44 Sallman painted the image in 1940, but it has enjoyed a decades-long international influence. This image of a white Jesus even became ubiquitous among black Christians. In fact, the bombing at Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, the one that killed those four girls and blew out the face of Jesus, destroyed a stained-glass window picturing a white Jesus. This picture, and hundreds of others like it, subtly reinforced the idea that Jesus Christ was a European-looking white man, and many added to that the assumption that he was a free-market, capitalist-supporting American as well. One Lutheran from Chicago distributed wallet-sized pictures of Sallman’s Christ so that “card-carrying Christians” could oppose “card-carrying Communists.”45