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

by Jemar Tisby

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. Although Gillespie utilized various biblical passages to argue for segregation, he acknowledged, “The Bible contains no clear mandate for or against segregation as between the white and negro races.” Segregationists like Gillespie resorted to so-called “natural law” arguments to bolster their case for racial segregation. In a section titled “Segregation Is One of Nature’s Universal Laws,” he stated, “There are many varieties of the bird family, but under natural conditions, so far as known, bluebirds never mate with redbirds, doves never mate with blackbirds, nor mockingbirds with jays.”8 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.