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by
Jemar Tisby
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October 7, 2020 - February 8, 2021
“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.”
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.
Attorney Bryan Stevenson put it this way: “The North won the Civil War, but the South won the narrative war.”
Fundamentalists dissuaded other Christians from certain forms of political involvement and encouraged them instead to focus on personal holiness and evangelism.
The riot began when a local aluminum plant brought in black strikebreakers to replace white workers who refused to work. In response, a group of white men drove through a black neighborhood of East St. Louis firing their guns.
the Red Summer. In 1919, more than twenty-five cities across the nation, usually large urban areas outside of the South, descended into bloody racial conflict.
much of the violence occurred because of “the persistence of unpunished lynching” that gave whites permission to seek retribution through mob action.
Despite the pervasive racism that corrupted communities nationwide, it still seemed better for many black folks to live anywhere other than the Jim Crow South. This led to a mass movement of black people from the South to cities in the North, Midwest, and East and West coasts, which has been referred to as the Great Migration. It would not be wrong to cast these migrating blacks as refugees fleeing the racial terror of the South.
the school taught its students to distrust unionism and federal intervention, specifically in the form of welfare programs geared toward the poor.
Roosevelt and his administration compromised with racists to pass racially discriminatory laws. For example, while avoiding explicitly race-based language, Social Security provisions excluded most base-level agricultural and domestic workers—the vast majority of whom were black women and men.38 This exclusion was not accidental; it was by design.
Laws designed to benefit returning soldiers often did not apply to black veterans. The Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, better known as the GI Bill, included substantial aid designed to help military veterans reintegrate into civilian life. This welfare program assisted GIs in purchasing homes, paying tuition for college, and gaining health coverage. The GI Bill helped usher in a period of extended and rapid economic prosperity in America, but the privileges extended almost exclusively to white men.
The Veteran’s Administration, created to disburse benefits to returning soldiers, denied mortgages to black soldiers and funneled these veterans into lower-level training and education rather than into four-year colleges.
Through a series of rules and customs, government employees and real estate agents have actively engineered neighborhoods and communities to maintain racial segregation.
The racial demographics of the neighborhood were often a key factor in assessing property values.
Neighborhoods with any black people, even if the residents had stable middle-class incomes, were coded red, and lenders were unlikely to give loans in these areas. This practice became known as redlining.
Even after the 1948 Supreme Court ruling in Shelley v. Kraemer forbidding these racial covenants, real estate brokers simply dropped explicitly race-based language but still effectively excluded minorities from buying homes in white areas.
Although many white residents stayed and attempted to keep their downtown neighborhoods racially homogenous, many others decided to relocate to the suburbs. This phenomenon would become known as white flight—“a massive migration of whites to the suburbs”—and it certainly had many “nonracial” causes as well. White residents might have moved away from a neighborhood for issues related to “crime, schools, services, and property values.”49 But the presence of other factors in white flight does not preclude race from being an important consideration.
“Through blockbusting, brokers intentionally stoked fears of racial integration and declining property values in order to push white homeowners to sell at a loss.”
Rather than stay and adapt to a new community reality or assist in integrating the neighborhood, many white churches chose to depart the city instead.
Yet the very conspicuousness of white supremacy in the South has made it easier for racism in other parts of the country to exist in open obscurity.
In explaining the unanimous decision of the Supreme Court, Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote, “We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”
In 1954, clergymen in the conservative and mostly southern Presbyterian Church in the United States (PCUS) gathered for their regular regional meeting of churches, and this assembly of pastors heard a message from G. T. Gillespie, the president emeritus of a Christian school, Belhaven College, in Jackson, Mississippi. In a carefully argued speech to the pastors in attendance, Gillespie outlined a “Christian View of Segregation.”
Reverend Billy Graham, was a racial moderate when it came to segregation. To his credit, Graham went much further than many white evangelicals in an effort to desegregate his religious gatherings. At a crusade in California in 1953, Graham personally took down ropes segregating black and white seating in the audience. “Either these ropes stay down, or you can go on and have the revival without me,” he said.
Yet Graham, like many white evangelicals, held back from actively pushing for black civil rights. After the Supreme Court handed down the Brown v. Board decision, Graham deliberately avoided scheduling crusades in the South for a period to avoid getting embroiled in the more heated conflicts about desegregation.
During the civil rights movement, activists who courageously risked their well-being for black freedom were few and far between, but Christian moderates who were complicit with the status quo of institutional racism were numerous.
While he was incarcerated, eight white clergymen wrote a letter to King and his supporters advising them to depart and let the community handle race relations for itself. Today, much of the attention focuses on King’s letter, but the message King received from white, moderate Christians also deserves attention. Their message provides a stark illustration of how much of the American church responded to King and the civil rights movement.
King recognized the need for Christians to be allies, working together in the black freedom struggle, while acknowledging that most of the white church had chosen the path of complicity over advocacy.
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.
To King and his allies in the struggle, the Civil Rights Act and similar legislation represented significant steps toward his dream of racial equality.
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
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Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “I think we’ve got to see that a riot is the language of the unheard.”
The differing responses of King and Graham to these riots further shows how Christian activists interpreted the civil rights movement differently from Christian moderates.
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.
In contrast to moderates like Graham who emphasized respect for existing laws and a crackdown on the “radicals” 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.”
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!”
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.
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.
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.
“ ‘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.”
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.
Blood Done Signed My Name,
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.
Depicting Jesus as a white American man hampered the cause of the civil rights movement because, as Blum and Harvey explain, “fashioning Jesus into a particular and visualized body made it impossible for any universal savior to rise above the conflicts.”
Some of the more “radical” elements of King’s message—which included democratic socialism, ending the war in Vietnam, nuclear de-escalation, a Poor People’s Campaign to force the federal government to address systemic poverty, and support of a sanitation workers’ strike in Memphis when he was killed—have largely been omitted from popular American memory. Along with the unpopular elements of King’s and the civil rights movement’s platform, people have also forgotten how strongly many moderate Christians opposed him.
Some Christians opposed King’s activism because they considered race relations a purely social issue, not a spiritual one. They tended to believe that the government should not force people of different races to integrate. As shown above, some even thought that segregation was a biblical requirement.
Though it is evident that Graham did more than many during his time, he held back from making bold public proclamations of solidarity with black citizens and from demonstrating alongside activists during the March on Selma, a move he later said he regretted.
The Bible says, “A prophet has no honor in his own country” (John 4:44). We might extend it: A prophet (or truth-teller) has no honor in his or her own time.
Again, we must remember: racism never goes away; it adapts.
Politicians, including Nixon, began delivering a message of “law and order” to convey to voters their commitment to social stability.
Nixon was pointing to the civil rights movement and its nonviolent direct action, not as the endeavor to secure long-denied justice to black Americans but as the tarmac to tyranny and disregard for the law.
