The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism

by Jemar Tisby

Often led by black women, freed people aggressively pursued their education. Having been denied the right to literacy

Sometimes family members were able to find one another, but more often than not they were unsuccessful, never to meet again in this earthly life.

The blatantly racist President Andrew Johnson, who ascended to the presidency after Lincoln’s assassination, ordered that the redistributed lands be returned to former enslavers, and many freed people went back to working the land under the sharecropping system.

The president claimed that using federal interventions to ensure black civil rights “violated ‘all our experience as a people’ and constituted a ‘stride towards centralization, and the concentration of all legislative power in the national Government.’ ” Johnson also made claims that interceding for black people actually discriminated against white people. “The distinction of race and color is, by the bill, made to operate in favor of the colored and against the white race.”4

“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction,”

The Fourteenth Amendment followed, granting citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States.” This did not apply to Native Americans who were still classified as “dependent” nations within a nation.

Lastly, the Fifteenth Amendment granted black men the right to vote: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

More than just a story about the political fortunes of the South, southerners blended Civil War memory and Christian dogma together as a way of confirming their shared suffering and giving their losses divine significance.

White supremacy lurked behind the Lost Cause narrative and helped cement the practice of segregation in the church as the new normal.

advocates of the Lost Cause, no individual figured as prominently or garnered more respect than Robert E. Lee. Lee came to symbolize valor in battle and a manly Christianity that was equally chivalrous and courageous. A Confederate chaplain named R. Lin Cave lauded Lee’s “reverence for all things holy.” Another

women played a significant role in memorializing the losses and portraying them in a positive light. They engaged in fundraising, lobbying for, and erecting Confederate monuments and memorials. Founded in the 1890s, the United Daughters of the Confederacy viewed the raising of monuments as a core objective of their organization, and by all accounts, they and several other organizations proved successful. To date, North Carolina has over 140 Confederate monuments scattered in various public spaces. Texas has nearly 180 such pieces, and there are hundreds of others found in both northern and southern states.

Tellingly, most of these monuments were erected several decades after the Civil War. There was a significant spike in monument construction from 1900 to the 1920s and a second explosion of Confederate flags and iconography from the 1950s to the 1960s.

They tended to be erected at times when the South was fighting to resist political rights for black citizens.”9 These monuments not only memorialized Confederate soldiers, but they also inscribed white supremacy into the landscape of public spaces across the North and the South.

In the South after the Civil War, the Christian-Confederate connection was visible in public spaces and in houses of worship.

tax. The poll tax charged people money to vote, money that black people and even some poor whites did not have.

which permitted people who could vote prior to 1867 and their descendants to vote. Of course, this excluded most black people.

“literacy tests” wherein potential voters had to read a portion of the state or national Constitution. Similarly, “understanding tests” asked black voters to answer obscure questions related to the Constitution. White “redeemers” selectively adminis...

This period of unrestrained abuse toward black people later led W. E. B. Du Bois to lament, “The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.” White “redeemers” brought back the clouds of oppression to obscure the bright rays of freedom.

Supreme Court ruled that Plessy’s rights had not been violated because it was a fallacy to believe that “the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority.”

legalized what soon became standard practice throughout the country for the next sixty years—the “separate but equal” doctrine.

Facing rising waves of European immigrants, many of them Catholic and Jewish, and the ongoing presence of free black people, the KKK crafted a vision of a white America and, more specifically, a white Christian America. Only native-born Protestant men, and a few women, were allowed to join. Many Klan members actively participated in their local churches, and some of the same men who conducted night rides on Saturday ascended to the pulpit to preach on Sunday.

In 1915, filmmaker D.W. Griffith adapted Dixon’s second book, a story about the founding of the Ku Klux Klan, into the nation’s first blockbuster movie, a three-hour silent film called The Birth of a Nation.

The KKK interspersed Christianity with racism to create a nationalistic form of religion that excluded all but American-born, Protestant white men and women. To maintain their concept of a well-ordered society, the KKK utilized lynching, rape, and intimidation to keep undesirable people groups in their place.

For example, Klan members successfully lobbied for the Immigration Act of 1924, also known as the Johnson-Reed Act, which limited immigration from select countries.

Larger cities, including New York and Tulsa, could not entirely exclude racial minorities, but they conducted periodic “purges” of black neighborhoods to intimidate residents into moving out or staying confined to certain parts of the city.

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.

In the minds of Christian segregationists, racial mixing would dilute the purity of the white race and result in the “mongrelization” of white people.

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.

Such voyeuristic and violent deaths represent the heinous apotheosis of American racism.

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.

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.

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.

In 1919, more than twenty-five cities across the nation, usually large urban areas outside of the South, descended into bloody racial conflict. A few of the more well-known riots occurred in Chicago, Washington DC, and Houston. Dr.

It would not be wrong to cast these migrating blacks as refugees fleeing the racial terror of the South.

The influx of southern black people changed white perceptions of the city and increased interracial tensions.

Prior to the 1930s, citizens viewed the role of the federal government as limited to protecting the rights of the people by providing checks on the government’s ability to interfere with the practice of religion, assembly, and speech.

The government became involved in proactively securing and protecting the rights of its citizens, not simply restraining action that might impinge on individual liberties.

Liberal Christians generally supported the New Deal and, more specifically, the efforts on the part of the federal government to assist the poor and to grant workers the right to organize against corporations to secure better conditions.

Quadragesimo Anno, an encyclical issued by Pope Pius XI in 1931 that warned of the dangers of unrestricted capitalism and declared that the function of the state was to protect everyone’s rights, but that “chief consideration ought to be given to the weak and the poor.”

Many conservative Christians were not enthused about the growing influence of the federal government and its attempts to impose regulations on public institutions and private enterprises.

Pepperdine admitted black students but did not permit them to live on campus.

Spurred by the open-market business philosophy of its founder and a growing number of Christian entrepreneurs, the school taught its students to distrust unionism and federal intervention, specifically in the form of welfare programs geared toward the poor.

white Christians with ideas that would lend educational and ideological support to an individualistic approach to race relations and that would lead to an aversion to government initiatives designed to promote and protect civil rights.

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.

Most of the training camps for soldiers were in the South, and military life reflected the segregation of the surrounding community.

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.

To manage the risk associated with purchasing homes and offering loans, the HOLC investigated the surrounding neighborhood and other potential properties to determine if they were likely to retain or increase in value.

“The HOLC created color-coded maps of every metropolitan area in the nation, with the safest neighborhoods colored green and the riskiest colored red.”

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.