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

by Jemar Tisby

The well-deserved disgust that is common today at the mention of the KKK can make it tempting for those in the twenty-first century to disregard them as an extreme group with marginal views that did not represent the majority of the American people and certainly not the Protestant church. But the KKK of the 1910s through the 1930s was far from marginal. Their views were quite popular with mainstream white citizens. As Kenneth Jackson, in his work The Ku Klux Klan in the City, 1915–1930, writes, “To examine the Ku Klux Klan is to examine ourselves.”

The Klan capitalized on white fears of just about anyone they defined as nonwhite, non-American, and non-Protestant. 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.

The second wave of the KKK proved immensely popular. Linda Gordon estimates that membership numbered between three and five million in the North alone.24 Edward Young Clarke, one of the leaders of the public relations company that helped boost the Klan’s membership said, “In all my years of experience in organization work, I have never seen anything equal to the clamor throughout the nation for the Klan.”25 Gordon also points to white Protestant complicity in the racism of the KKK: “It’s estimated that 40,000 ministers were members of the Klan, and these people were sermonizing regularly, explicitly urging people to join the Klan.”

Under Jim Crow, the myth of the Lost Cause positioned white women as the epitome of purity and vulnerability, and by contrast, black men came to symbolize raw lust and bestiality. 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.

Among a litany of pseudoscientific reasons he listed for keeping the races separate, he also invoked the will of God: “Nothing could be more foreign to the ideals of the Christian religion than miscegenation and amalgamation. There is absolutely no foundation for advocating the mixing of the blood of the races as a part of our religious doctrines.”

Jim Crow proved devastating for black people. White racial terrorism during Jim Crow resulted in horrific atrocities like the development of the convict-lease system, reproducing what is often called “slavery by another name.” The Civil War led to the elimination of America’s most traditional form of forced labor—slavery—but the Thirteenth Amendment allowed for an exception. Those who were “duly convicted” of a crime could be forced to labor as part of their punishment. After the Civil War and emancipation, convict-leasing developed as a “legal” way for corporations to gain cheap labor and for state and county governments to get money. The process of convict-leasing began by entrapping black people, usually men but occasionally women, for minor offenses such as vagrancy, gambling, or riding a freight car without a ticket, and then saddling them with jail time and court fees. If the person could not pay the fee, as was often the case, they could have their sentence increased. A company, or even an independent employer, would then contract with a prison for inmate labor, putting them to work in mines, factories, or fields. In return the company would pay the local government entity a certain fee per worker. The workers themselves, as prison inmates, were never paid for their labor. They worked in appalling conditions that bred disease and violence. Many died and were dumped into unmarked graves.

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.

Jim Crow could not have worked as effectively as it did without the frequent and detestable practice of lynching. Laws alone were not enough to reify white supremacy; what bred terror was the combination of legal segregation coupled with the random and capricious acts of violence toward black people. Anyone black—man, woman, or child—could become the next lynching victim at the slightest offense, real or imaginary.

Few of the white people who participated in the lynching of black citizens ever faced legal consequences. Woods Eastland, who led the mob that lynched the Holberts, did face charges in the murders, but his acquittal was a foregone conclusion. After the all-white jury found him innocent, Eastland hosted a party on his plantation to celebrate.

Lynch mobs would sometimes target black preachers with their violent attacks. 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.

much of the violence occurred because of “the persistence of unpunished lynching” that gave whites permission to seek retribution through mob action. Individuals in these groups fed each other’s racial hatred so that “a trivial incident can precipitate a riot.”

The presence of racial hatred in these areas outside the South demonstrated that the violence of white supremacy was not confined to former Confederate states.

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 b...

Unfortunately, this form of Christian education also included complicity in racism. For the first ten years of its existence, Pepperdine admitted black students but did not permit them to live on campus.

FDR’s New Deal had problems as well. Like many churches, the politicians who promoted reforms to the political economy conformed to the contours of Jim Crow. Ira Katznelson argues that the interventions of the New Deal in the 1930s and 1940s “excluded, or differentially treated, the vast majority of African Americans.”37 Due to the resistance of high-level southern politicians seeking to insulate the racial hierarchy in their communities from federal interference, 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.

Racial discrimination did not end after World War II. 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.

Current residential segregation has roots going back at least to the Great Depression.

In 1933 the federal government created the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) to purchase the homes of people who were at imminent risk of defaulting, issuing new loans under new terms. 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 racial demographics of the neighborhood were often a key factor in assessing property values. “The HOLC created color-coded maps of every metropolitan area in the nation, with the safest neighborhoods colored green and the riskiest colored red.”41 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. The HOLC policy was a form of government-sponsored racism.

In addition to federal redlining policies, realtors and neighborhood associations used private measures to enforce residential segregation. For much of the twentieth century, “restrictive covenants” provided a legal, race-based mechanism to exclude black people from purchasing homes in white communities. “Private but legally enforceable restrictive covenants . . . forbade the use or sale of a property to anyone but whites.”

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. The company’s president, William Levitt, defended his racist policies by proclaiming his innocence in serving the needs of his customers: “That is their [white customers’] attitude, not ours.” He went on to emphasize that the commercial nature of the business precluded their ability to promote racial integration: “As a company our position is simply this: ‘We can solve a housing problem, or we can try to solve a racial problem. But we cannot combine the two.’ ”45 In this way, private businesses participated in forming the racially segregated housing patterns that have permeated municipal areas in every region of the United States, not just the South.

To maintain residential segregation, white homeowners would sometimes resort to forms of violence as brutal and terror-inducing as any found in the South.

Detroit illustrates a pattern that played out across the country. 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. The complex mix of issues—which include race—is a part of the way racism has adapted to changing social conditions in the United States.

“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. The brokers would then sell the properties at inflated rates to black people desperate for homes and comfortable neighborhoods. Blockbusting is an example of how some agents leveraged racism for their personal advantage.

“In many cases, churches not only failed to inhibit white flight but actually became co-conspirators and accomplices in the action.”

Christians of the North have often been characterized as abolitionists, integrationists, and open-minded citizens who want all people to have a chance at equality. Christians of the South, on the other hand, have been portrayed as uniformly racist, segregationist, and antidemocratic. The truth is far more complicated. 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.

Although many people remember Parks as a meek little old lady, she had long been a fierce civil rights activist. Parks helped advocate for the wrongly accused Scottsboro Boys. She helped defend Recy Taylor, a black woman who had been gang-raped by a group of white men, and helped bring the despicable crime to light. Just a couple of months prior to the incident on the bus, Parks had attended the famed Highlander Folk School to learn more about civil rights organizing and nonviolent direction action techniques. Parks’s refusal to move from her seat on the bus fit into a long history of her own defiance of Jim Crow and was just one prominent example of the vital role women have played in the black freedom struggle.

Examining the civil rights movement through the actions of Martin Luther King Jr. and another behemoth in American religious history—Billy Graham—provides two vastly different perspectives of the civil rights movement. King and Graham each had large grassroots followings and reached countless people in the United States and beyond through their speeches, sermons, and writings. Both show up frequently in the examples below because their views, while not universal, represent two approaches to religion and justice—moderation and activism. This chapter focuses on the Christian moderates—mostly white and evangelical but also some black churches and ministers—who played it safe, refusing to get involved in the civil rights movement. These people of faith may not have given their full support to the most extreme racists, but neither did they oppose racists outright or openly disagree with racist objectives. While the civil rights movement has a well-earned reputation as a faith-based movement led by Christian pastors and lay people, our collective memory of the proportion of Christians involved may be somewhat skewed. In reality, precious few Christians publicly aligned themselves with the struggle for black freedom in the 1950s and 1960s. Those who did participate faced backlash from their families, friends, and fellow Christians. At a key moment in the life of our nation, one that called for moral courage, the American church responded to much of the civil rights movement with ...

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.”7 Warren was merely making explicit what was quite evident, that black and white facilities—whether schools, hospitals, or housing—were definitely not equal. The ideology that had led to segregation had never provided for the equitable distribution of resources.

The Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board struck the South like a bolt of lightning. The reaction was swift and fiery. It came from all segments of southern society, including many white southern churches. Some preachers quoted the Bible to battle against the decision. 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.” His argument reveals some of the specific ways Christians compromised with racism during the civil rights era.

Then Gillespie’s speech turned from “natural law” arguments to examine Scripture from which he contended he could still make “valid inferences” about segregation. Leviticus admonished the Israelites not to mix “diverse things” like wool and linen as well as different strains of cattle and seeds. Reasoning from this injunction, Gillespie figured that “the same principle would apply with even greater force with respect to human relations.”9 In other words, if different fabrics, animals, and plants could not mix in the Old Testament, it was best for black and white peoples not to mix either. Gillespie also referred to warnings against intermarriage between the Israelites and non-Jewish tribes as a reason to prohibit interracial relationships and integration.

Not all Protestant Christians were openly supportive of segregation, of course. Many were racial moderates, seeking to find a middle way between the various positions. One of the best-known and most respected evangelical leaders of the time, the 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.12 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. Shortly after Brown, Graham stated, “I believe the heart of the problem of race is in loving our neighbor.”13 While few Christians would object that racism is a failure to love one’s neighbor, Graham did not carry that statement any further into the realm of institutional racism. Like many evangelicals, Graham believed race relations would gradually improve—one conversion and one friendship at a time. He viewed racial conflict as a local issue and a social matter. Furthermore, Graham was quite vocal in his denunciation...

Of course, other ministers of the gospel spoke prophetically against segregation, and we should applaud their stand. But their numbers should not be overestimated, and the backlash they faced for their bold action should not be overlooked. 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.

What comes through in the letter, more than anything else, is their reasonableness. They acknowledge the “natural impatience” of black people whose civil rights have been denied. They affirmed that “hatred and violence have no sanction in our religious and political traditions.”19 They even allowed that black people had recourse to pursue remedies for certain issues in the courts. What then could be objectionable about a group of religious community leaders uniting to encourage restraint and patience in pursuing civil rights for black people? But it is the very reasonableness of the letter that reveals the underlying problem of complicity with racism. This letter from white Christian moderates illustrates the broader failure of the white church, a failure to recognize the daily indignity of American racism and the urgency the situation demanded. 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. They were overly cautious when the circumstances demanded a measure of outrage and courageous confrontation. In general, this approach exemplifies how many Christian moderates during the civil rights movement responde...

Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” has since proven to be one of the greatest works of Christian political theology ever produced by an American. His eloquent and rich response conveys the philosophical and spiritual issues at stake in 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.

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.”

The differing responses of King and Graham to these riots further shows how Christian activists interpreted the civil rights movement differently from Christian moderates.

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.

King saw a different remedy: “Social justice and progress are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention. There is no other answer.”

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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

Importantly, it was everyday Christians, including many “mothers and fathers, Sunday School Teachers and new Christian entrepreneurs” who made this image of a white Jesus famous. 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.”46 Warner Sallman’s famous but contrived image of Jesus served to reinforce among Christians the status quo of the American racial hierarchy.

Although Martin Luther King Jr. remains the face of the mid-twentieth-century civil rights movement, our present-day social memory of him obscures much of his life.

King has been “endlessly reproduced and selectively quoted, his speeches retain their majesty yet lose their political bite.”48 For many Christian evangelicals, he has become the “quotable King,” whose entire message has been reduced to his dream when his children would “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” 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 m...