As Niebuhr boarded a train to depart Mississippi, he stated, “a newspaper falls in my hands with an account of a public hanging of two Negro boys, sixteen and eighteen years old.” Was not that lynching alone enough for Niebuhr to know that white supremacy could not be ignored in searching for economic justice, or explicating the meaning of the Christian gospel in America? Niebuhr himself preserved class solidarity at the expense of racial justice, which many liberal white-led groups were inclined to do when fighting for justice among the poor.[34]
