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

by Jemar Tisby

redlining affected countless neighborhoods in metropolitan areas across the country—St. Louis, San Francisco, Chicago, Cincinnati, and New York City, just to name a few.

Members of the conference wanted to pose a “challenge to conscience” to compel white residents to embrace integration.

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.

Unfortunately, Levittowns repeated the patterns of residential racial segregation that existed in other communities. In a nod to social pressures, federal policies, and the pursuit of profit, Levitt & Sons maintained a policy of racial restrictions.

Soon after they moved in, a crowd of more than four hundred white protestors held picket signs and chanted to protest their new black neighbors.

Harassers frequently threw rocks and bricks at the home. An elderly white lady was found pouring salt on the lawn of the Wilsons’ property. Police posted a car outside of the Wilsons’ home on a twenty-four-hour basis, but even that did not help.

white residents in Detroit initiated more than two hundred instances of opposition to black integration, including “harassment, mass demonstrations, picketing, effigy burning, window breaking, arson, vandalism, and physical attacks.”

This phenomenon would become known as white flight—“a massive migration of whites to the suburbs”—and it certainly had many “nonracial” causes as

Salespeople used racial fears for financial profit: “Through blockbusting, brokers intentionally stoked fears of racial integration and declining property values in order to push white homeowners to sell at a loss.”50 Brokers would warn white residents of an impending “invasion” of black home buyers. Whites, who feared losing property value and who harbored stereotypes about black people, would sell at a lower price to the broker.

Over the course of the 1960s and 1970s, as neighborhood demographics changed, these churches relocated to suburbs where there was a higher population of white people.

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.

That evening King told reporters, “I have never seen such hate. Not in Mississippi or Alabama. This is a terrible thing.”

King’s foray into the North to continue the black freedom struggle illustrates the national scope of the civil rights movement and the pervasive problem of racism across the country—not just its ongoing presence in the South. The intractable problems of segregation and inequality contributed to a more self-confident assertion of “black power” that would later come to define the movement, especially after King’s assassination in 1968.

In reality, most of the black people who left the South encountered similar patterns of race-based discrimination wherever they went. Although they may not have faced the same closed system of white supremacy that permeated the South, they still contended with segregation and put up with daily assaults on their dignity, and the church contributed to this. Compromised Christianity transcends regions. Bigotry obeys no boundaries. This is why Christians in every part of America have a moral and spiritual obligation to fight against the church’s complicity with racism.

The ideology that had led to segregation had never provided for the equitable distribution of resources.

This analogy invokes the specter of interracial sex to frighten segregationists about the possibility of black men sleeping with white women. It also refers to color—the white dove and the blackbird, the redbird and the bluebird—as an allusion to the racial issue at hand.

Gillespie figured that “the same principle would apply with even greater force with respect to human relations.”

Gillespie also referred to warnings against intermarriage between the Israelites and non-Jewish tribes as a reason to prohibit interracial relationships and integration.

“We are now confronted by a series of demonstrations by some of our Negro citizens directed and led in part by outsiders. We recognize the natural impatience of people who feel that their hopes are slow in being realized. But we are convinced that these demonstrations are unwise and untimely.”

These clergymen likely had good intentions, but they did not realize that the talking and negotiating for which they advocated had been attempted and had yielded little to no progress. They denounced the violence that direct action would supposedly incite, but they did relatively little about the countless lynchings, church bombings, and beatings black people across the nation suffered at the hands of segregationists.

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

In response to government efforts to desegregate, moderate Christians, organized to oppose racial integration of neighborhoods, started segregation academies to keep their white children separate from black kids in schools, and continued to approve of church leaders who espoused prejudiced remarks and actions.

As a result, people can hold positions on social and political issues that disproportionately and adversely harm racial and ethnic minorities, but they can still proclaim their own racial innocence.

Though it was necessary to enact civil rights legislation, you cannot erase four hundred years of race-based oppression by passing a few laws. From the earliest years of slavery in the 1600s, through the legal end of Jim Crow in 1954, and in the numerous and varied ways in which racism is still enacted in law and culture today, the United States has had more than 300 years of race-based discrimination. A few short decades of legal freedom have not corrected the damage done by centuries of racism.

Today, the United States has just 5 percent of the world’s population but 25 percent of its incarcerated persons.

Thousands of Californians, most of them white and conservative, converted to Graham’s evangelical version of

Christianity, and over the next several decades nurtured their faith in the milieu of conservative Sunbelt politics.

The rise of the Religious Right was predominately a grassroots movement with origins among these “suburban warriors” of the 1960s who “set in place the ideas, strategies, and politics that would pave the road to national power.”

officially endorsed Nixon for president in the reelection campaign of 1972.

actively encouraged the president to court the evangelical vote.

Graham believed that evangelicals would be the critical constituency to “promoting the president’s vision of ‘law and order.’

But racism, since it is socially constructed, adapts when society changes. By the late 1960s, politicians at the national level had moved on from explicitly racist rhetoric (George Wallace’s prosegregationist platform

One of Nixon’s closest advisers, H. R. Haldeman, said, “[Nixon] emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The

Nowadays, all the American church needs to do in terms of compromise is cooperate with already established and racially unequal social systems.

any school—public or private—that discriminated on the basis of race could not hold the designation of “charitable” institution.

This ruling threatened the financial solvency of any Christian school that could not demonstrate an integrated student body or show positive efforts to desegregate.

A poor white person in the South had few advantages. They typically had little schooling and not enough food, and the richer white people often looked down on them. The only advantage many felt they had was their whiteness.

But Jones absorbed the cultural values of racism and eventually brought these ideas of racial hierarchy with him when he set out to found a new school.

Historian George Marsden, in his book Fundamentalism in American Culture, writes: “Fundamentalists were evangelical Christians . . . who in the twentieth century militantly opposed both modernism in theology and the cultural changes that modernism endorsed.”40 Fundamentalists espoused separatism from the modernizing culture and even from other evangelical denominations and churches considered

too liberal in their beliefs.

did finally admit its first black students in 1971, but they were only allowed if they were married.

Bob Jones III, who served as president from 1971 to 2005, stated in an interview: “There are three basic races—Oriental, Caucasian and Negroid. At BJU, everybody dates within those basic three races.”43 Anyone involved in an interracial relationship or those who promoted such pairings would face expulsion.

segregationists in the twentieth century considered it a “right” to separate people based on race.

“That’s it,” he said. “That’s what I’m going to call the organization, ‘Moral Majority.’ ”50 Falwell and his associates formed Moral Majority Inc. a month later. He explained their simple program in three steps: “Get ’em saved, get ’em baptized, get ’em registered.”

As an avowedly political organization, Falwell and other leaders of the Moral Majority courted people from across the religious spectrum including conservative Mormons, Jews, and Catholics as well as Pentecostals and a variety of Protestants denominations. Within a few years, the Moral Majority had an annual budget of $6 million, and its publication, Moral Majority Report, went to 840,000 households, with hundreds of Christian radio stations carrying their daily commentary.

Furthermore, Christian conservatives carefully coded any change, especially those related to race, as “liberal,” and they perceived themselves as constantly under attack by liberal operatives in the media and politics.

The introduction to this chapter stated that racism never goes away; it just adapts.

The forty-fifth president did not produce the racial and political divide between black and white Christians, but he exposed and extended longstanding differences while revealing the inadequacy of recent reconciliation efforts.

Those who have suffered much find much joy in God’s salvation.

Education must lead to liberation. The acquisition of knowledge should not result only in personal enlightenment but also the alleviation of oppression.