CHAPTER 4

“A Non-Segregated Church and a Non-Segregated Society”

In the spring of 1946, at the tail end of the World Order movement, the Federal Council of Churches condemned segregation for the first time in its history. “The Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America hereby renounces the pattern of segregation” as “a violation of the Gospel of love and human brotherhood,” the largest Protestant body in the United States announced. The organization pledged to “work for a non-segregated Church and a non-segregated society.”¹ This new attitude spread quickly to other ecumenical Protestant groups, who had previously criticized “race prejudice” but until 1946 had said little about Jim Crow in the South or segregation in the North. Nor had they said very much about racism within Protestant churches, which were among the most thoroughly segregated institutions in the United States. In 1946 ecumenical Protestants moved from criticizing race prejudice, which had focused attention on changing the hearts and minds of individuals, to attacking segregation, which called for social action, structural thinking, and political solutions.

The ecumenical Protestant turn against segregation was brought on by changes during World War II, when Japanese Americans were dispossessed of their homes and businesses, and forced into makeshift concentration camps in barren landscapes, from the deserts of California to the prairies of Texas.² In these same years, Black migrants from southern states moved to cities in the North and along the West Coast in search of freedom and work. As they arrived, they were forced into segregated slums and barred from well-paying jobs.³ At first, American ecumenical Protestants responded haphazardly to these developments and scrambled to come to terms with the changes World War II produced. But by 1946 they were clear: Segregation was incompatible with Christianity.

The sea change in attitude toward segregation among ecumenical Protestants was a product of the World Order movement, which linked domestic racism to global events. Just as African Americans launched the Double V Campaign against fascism abroad and racism at home, so too did ecumenical Protestants connect the creation of a postwar peace with a desegregated United States. An interracial coalition of activists, empowered by the World Order movement, engineered the ecumenical renunciation of segregation. The short-lived Commission on Church and Minority Peoples, composed of some of the most important anti-racist activists of the generation before the civil rights movement, drew on Protestant globalism and the new language of human rights as they convinced ecumenical Protestant groups to denounce segregation. The attack on Jim Crow became the first, and perhaps the most vital, way in which Protestant globalism transformed the United States.

Mobilizing Against Japanese American Internment

In the 1940s, ecumenical Protestant leaders closely connected to international organizations were some of the loudest critics of Japanese internment. Missionaries, in particular, played a vital part. In the 1920s and 1930s ecumenical Protestant missionaries in Japan had made connections between their evangelism, anti-racist activism, and a commitment to ending imperialism. They also loudly protested the 1924 Immigration Act, which banned immigration from Japan.⁴ During the early 1940s these missionaries were deeply worried about the domestic impact of the impending war with Japan.⁵ After years of embargoes, protests by the Roosevelt administration, and the first peacetime draft in the history of the United States, most Americans could see that war was on the horizon. Missionaries to Japan and China, many of whom had been recently expelled by the Japanese military and forced to return to the United States, worried about violence against Japanese Americans as tensions between Japan and the United States worsened in 1940 and 1941.⁶ In California, former missionaries Galen Fisher, Ruth Kingman, and Harry Kingman organized around fair treatment of Japanese Americans through the Committee on Fair Play for Citizens and Aliens of Japanese Ancestry, which they founded in October 1941.⁷

Galen Fisher had begun working as a missionary in Japan in the late nineteenth century and headed the Japanese YMCA there until his return to the United States in 1919. He continued his interest in Japanese affairs upon his return and joined the Institute of Social and Religious Research and the Institute on Pacific Relations, two prominent think tanks on East Asian affairs.⁸ Fisher was among the many American missionaries to Japan to speak out against the 1924 Immigration Act and to work in the 1920s and 1930s to diminish anti-Japanese racism.⁹ He also worked as the East Asia expert on William Ernest Hocking’s 1932 report, Re-Thinking Missions. By the 1940s he was also the chairman of the Pacific School of Religion.

Harry Kingman was born in Tianjin, China, the son of Congregationalist missionary parents. He spent his later childhood in California, excelling in sports and playing two seasons with the New York Yankees. In 1916 he accepted a job with the YMCA located next to the University of California, Berkeley, where he would remain until he retired in 1957. During this time, he periodically travelled to China and Japan as a missionary. Upon retiring he and his wife, Ruth, moved to Washington, DC, and worked as lobbyists for civil rights groups that were too small to hire their own.¹⁰ Ruth met Harry during her time as a student at UC Berkeley. She was born in California in 1900, the daughter of an itinerant Methodist minister. Her parents were briefly missionaries in Hawaii. Not long after she graduated from college she joined Harry in China, where she worked as a music director. They were married in Shanghai.¹¹

In 1941 Ruth Kingman, Harry Kingman, and Galen Fisher focused the activities of the Fair Play Committee on dispelling rumors and stereotypes about Japanese Americans. The idea of “fair play” drew on the long-standing belief promoted by the YMCAs and YWCAs that democracy, like sports, required playing by the rules.¹² When those rules were broken in local outbursts of anti-Japanese hysteria, they believed that the best way to handle these crises was to create civic unity organizations. Such groups usually included church leaders, government officials, and liberal corporate executives who could work with the local government to deal with racist incidents, property disputes, or even race riots.

Fisher wrote to the Reverend John M. Yamazaki, who was starting a branch of the Fair Play Committee in Southern California, to explain how to start a civic unity group. “Let some one or more well-known white Americans (not Japanese-Americans) take the initiative,” Fisher advised. “Secure some prominent man to be chairman, preferably not one who is known simply as a Japanophile, [and] ask Governor Olson to be Hon. Chairman.” While businessmen and politicians provided cover, the real power and initiative should remain with the churches, Fisher stressed. He told Yamazaki to consult with the “County Committee on Church and Community, especially its special committee on Racial Unity. Possibly that committee would take the initiative in pushing the whole plan.”¹³ Many civic unity groups, which grew in popularity during World War II, were formed in this way.

Figure 6. Former missionaries Ruth Kingman and Harry Kingman organized against Japanese internment during World War II. They are pictured here in Washington, DC, where they moved in 1957 and founded the “Citizens Lobby,” which represented ordinary Americans in congressional debates about civil rights legislation. Courtesy of Springfield College Archives and Special Collections.

The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in the early morning of December 7, 1941, came as a shock to the West Coast and changed the circumstances under which Fisher was working. He continued to speak out in defense Japanese Americans even as the Native Sons of the Golden West, racist politicians, and farmers and shop owners who jealously eyed Japanese property called for the expulsion of all Japanese Americans from the West Coast. The FBI had arrested thousands of Japanese and Japanese Americans immediately after the Pearl Harbor attack but, not finding any evidence of disloyalty, released most of them soon after. Still, fear and anger persisted, and, at the behest of West Coast politicians, President Franklin Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which permitted the military to create an exclusion zone along the West Coast, where people of Japanese ancestry could not live during the war. Two days after Roosevelt’s order, the House Select Committee Investigating National Defense Migration, known popularly as the Tolan Committee, began public hearings on moving the Japanese out of the West Coast.¹⁴

Carey McWilliams, a liberal activist who was then working for the Immigration and Housing Department in California, had invited Tolan to come to the West Coast. McWilliams hoped the committee would welcome testimony on behalf of Japanese Americans. In February and March of 1942, civic unity groups testified that Japanese Americans were loyal to the United States and that removing them from the West Coast would be a terrible mistake. Ecumenical Protestants, and especially Quakers, offered testimony in front of the committee. So too did socialists like Norman Thomas, and a handful of liberals like McWilliams. But McWilliams’s hopes were dashed as nine out of every ten witnesses at the Tolan Committee spoke in favor of internment. By the end of the hearings it became clear that internment was inevitable. The army ordered all people who had at least one Japanese great-grandparent to report to relocation centers on March 31, 1942.¹⁵

When internment began in the spring of 1942, ecumenical Protestants faced a perennial dilemma. Should they make a public show of their opposition to internment or should they use their political connections to work with the government in a quieter but perhaps more effective way on behalf of Japanese Americans? Protestant pacifists viewed their options as a choice between complicity in a totalitarian attack on the citizenship rights of Japanese Americans or protest against it. Historic peace churches—Quakers, Brethren, and Mennonites, denominations more inclined toward pacifism—were the most critical of internment in its early days. Realists, on the other hand, viewed the choice as between responsibility or inefficacy. John Bennett, who was Reinhold Niebuhr’s right-hand man, told colleagues in April 1942 that they should “assume evacuation” and that trying to prevent it was “not good policy.”¹⁶ Like Bennett, most of the groups—from the Fair Play Committee to the Federal Council of Churches—preferred behind-the-scenes lobbying to direct confrontation with the government.

But even private lobbying could be quite critical of government policy. For example, the president of the Federal Council and other prominent leaders wrote to Roosevelt in 1942 in favor of review boards for Japanese Americans, so that each individual could be processed and released from the camps. The letter to Roosevelt called internment an “abrogation of the rights of citizens” characterized by “race discrimination.” It pointed out that internment “savours of totalitarianism and discrimination” and would be used by the enemies of the United States to “undermine America’s prestige and influence” abroad.¹⁷ It was quite a thing to tell a wartime president his policies were totalitarian.

The Federal Council’s passionate protest against internment stood in contrast to the tepid response of many other ecumenical Protestant organizations. Ecumenical Protestants often donned the mantle of Christian service, charity, and goodwill when speaking publicly about internment. The Berkeley Council of Churches opened up their facilities to Japanese Americans awaiting relocation. As an act of goodwill it wanted to “make the burdens of this trying time easier for [Japanese-Americans].” Lacking any sense of complicity in the government’s racist actions, it described the service of the churches, the service of American soldiers, and the “service” of the Japanese Americans in the same patriotic language that avoided serious discussion of the moral or legal implications of internment. “We rejoice to know that many of you are facing [internment] in the same spirit in which others are facing the possible loss of their sons, for much longer than the duration,” the Berkeley Council of Churches wrote to Japanese Americans on their way to Manzanar and other concentration camps.¹⁸

Others spoke out against internment publicly. Reinhold Niebuhr’s recently launched Christianity and Crisis issued a harsh editorial about Roosevelt’s actions. Niebuhr was disconnected from the pacifist and missionary groups that first brought the treatment of Japanese Americans to national attention. But Henry Smith Leiper, a former missionary to China and a major architect of the international ecumenical movement, was more attentive to the plight of Japanese Americans. In April 1942, only a few months after American entry into war and amid anti-Japanese hysteria, Leiper wrote “A Blot on Our Record.” This editorial denounced internment because it was so much like Germany’s Nuremberg Laws, the Nazi statutes that deprived Jews of citizenship. (This comparison to the Nazis also appeared in other publications, like the Christian Century).¹⁹ The cause of internment was clear to Leiper: racism and unscrupulous politicians standing to gain from the exploitation of some sixty thousand citizens were to blame.²⁰

The readers’ response to this editorial was swift, outraged, and came largely from ordinary churchgoers. Christianity and Crisis, a small magazine that rarely printed letters to the editor, dedicated nearly half of its pages in the following issue to angry responses to the Leiper article. Mrs. W. M. Mayes from Ojai, California, regretted the loss of civil rights of Japanese Americans but argued that internment prevented violence from breaking out. Mary Lillian Dodd of Millbrook, New York, was less generous. Leiper’s article “may serve the Axis propaganda better than our cause,” she wrote. Another letter—this one from a chaplain—accused the journal of succumbing to the idealism that its realist editors claimed to be fighting against. Leiper’s editorial had “all the gossamer grandeur of the era of utopian perfectionism.” Polley Dougherty from Santa Ana, California, went against the grain. She applauded Leiper for calling out the “injustice, unconstitutionality, and un-Americanism” of Japanese internment and she likewise feared “for the future of our country when it adopts such Hitlerian methods.” But she was in the minority. Most of the letter writers agreed that rights do not need to be respected during wartime. Besides, wrote Mayes, it was unfair to compare American camps to Nazi ones because “no internment is pleasant, but the main camp, Manzanar, is located in a part of the state famous for its scenic beauty and health-giving air.”²¹

Niebuhr personally responded to the torrent of criticism. He understood he was on thin ice with his constituency. He defended Leiper’s article but in a cooler tone, without the Nazi comparison. What was left of the original critique in Niebuhr’s hands was a firm commitment to due process of law without regard to race, which was no small commitment in 1942. In the wake of this outburst Niebuhr, Leiper, Bennett, and the other editors of Christianity and Crisis decided to avoid discussing internment. No further comments on Japanese internment appeared in the journal for the next several years. Niebuhr had more in common politically with pacifists, it must have seemed, than he did with his realist readers.

Other ecumenical Protestant groups sought to put Japanese internment front and center with an unrivaled intensity. The pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation remained consistently critical of government policy. Among its most vocal members was Caleb Foote, a Quaker who was hired by the fellowship to open an office in Northern California in 1941. Foote repeatedly denounced Dillon Meyer, the head of the War Relocation Authority, who other ecumenical leaders saw as a cooperative liberal bureaucrat.²² Foote even proposed using nonviolent resistance to protest internment, including picket lines and sit-down strikes at the entryway to the camps. Nevin Sayre, another fellowship official, entertained this idea, but he doubted that it would work and was certain that it would offend some of the nonpacifist Japanese prisoners in the camps.²³ In the end, nothing came of the proposal, but the fellowship kept protesting internment throughout the war.

Aside from public condemnation and private lobbying, ecumenical Protestant organizations mobilized their resources to combat anti-Japanese prejudice. But it took time, partly because of their large bureaucracies. The Congregationalists’ Social Action Committee reported, “this work got really under way at and following the General Council meeting at Durham, June 1942” after money was allocated.²⁴ Soon after, they mobilized a lobbying campaign to implement review boards meant to quickly differentiate the “loyal” and “disloyal” Japanese Americans. In 1943 and 1944, these boards allowed Japanese Americans deemed loyal to resettle outside the exclusion zone if they could find sponsorship by an outside group.

The Federal Council of Churches, the Foreign Missions Conference, and some denominational bodies cooperated in finding homes and jobs for Japanese Americans away from the West Coast. The Congregationalist Social Action Committee worked closely with the historic peace churches in setting up hostels and employment centers in cities like Chicago and Philadelphia, and they raised funds to support Japanese and Japanese American college students in universities away from the West Coast.²⁵ The Midwest branch of the American Friends Service Committee reported in late 1944 that it had helped 3,500 Japanese Americans relocate to Chicago, providing them lodging in a hostel, helping them find jobs and permanent homes, providing medical services and even small loans.²⁶ By 1945, church groups had placed more than 4,000 students in colleges and universities away from the West Coast.²⁷ As the war wound down, on January 2, 1945, the army lifted the exclusion order, and Japanese Americans were allowed to return to their hometowns on the West Coast. Ecumenical Protestant relocation efforts were redirected to California, Oregon, and Washington, where most of the internees had lived.

Ecumenical Protestants also mobilized during the war against further expansion of anti-Japanese laws. Congregationalists, for example, successfully acted to stop an alien land law from being passed in Colorado, which would have kept Japanese Americans from owning land in the state. The political efforts continued after the war, as activists demanded reparations for the harm done to Japanese Americans. The Federal Council also sent its staff to congressional hearings to testify on behalf of establishing an organization that would help internees rebuild their lives as they returned to their West Coast communities.²⁸

The same commitments that led ecumenical Protestants to rebuild Japanese American communities also drove them to reform the immigration system. Viewing immigration reform as primarily a racial justice issue, Walter Van Kirk worked closely with Congressman Walter Judd to end Chinese exclusion in 1943. Van Kirk had spoken out on behalf of China, a wartime ally, but he waited until 1946 to push for Japan to be placed on the immigration quota system. He testified in Congress and organized letter writing campaigns on behalf of a bill proposed by Judd to end Japanese exclusion. Despite the best efforts of Judd and Van Kirk, the bill failed to pass in 1949. By the time Japanese exclusion was finally ended with the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952, Van Kirk believed that the quota system itself was racist because it privileged Northern and Western Europeans. When Congress passed the act over Truman’s veto, the Methodist student magazine motive condemned it as “a bipartisan bit of racial bigotry.” Evangelicals, on the other hand, remained steadfast in their opposition to immigration reform and insisted that only groups capable of assimilating to the “American Christian Heritage” of the United States should be let in. Van Kirk and his allies regrouped for a long fight that ended with the Immigration Act of 1965, which did away with the quota system and eventually led to increased Asian immigration to the United States.²⁹

During the World War II era, the ecumenical Protestant mobilization on behalf of Japanese Americans occurred within an integrationist framework. As Japanese internees began returning to the West Coast, ecumenical Protestant leaders used the tragedy of internment to further integrate Japanese American Christians into white churches and white neighborhoods. Because the wartime hysteria had roots in ignorance and segregation, ecumenical Protestants reasoned that putting Japanese Americans in the company of white Protestants would lessen racism and make it less likely that this terrible history would repeat itself. Younger Japanese American pastors and religious workers rarely favored returning to the prewar pattern of separate Japanese churches and church associations.³⁰ A Japanese American churchgoer believed that “the war and the resultant evacuation has wiped away almost all vestiges of the segregated Japanese churches.” He warned Japanese Americans and Protestant churches to “take this unusual opportunity to start on the road to integration.”³¹ Ecumenical leaders’ desire for integration meant that Japanese Americans would be asked to blend in and risk losing their culture and language.

There were a few exceptions to this pattern. Whenever integration seemed unrealistic in the immediate future, ecumenical groups backed reconstituting Japanese American communities. Responding to reports that some Japanese Buddhists were unwilling to leave relocation camps because they feared being separated from their religious communities, the Congregationalists created a program that was “administered by Buddhists, subsidized by non-Buddhists.” “The thought which has guided us in making this proposal was that such a Buddhist ministry would encourage persons in the camps to relocate. If they knew they could continue their religious affiliations, they would leave the camps more readily,” the Congregationalists explained.³² But this was the exception to the rule. By 1945, ecumenical Protestants involved in fighting the internment of Japanese and Japanese Americans had decided that integrated churches must be the norm in postwar America. And their integrationist ethos carried over into their work fighting the segregation of African Americans.

Toward Desegregation: The Commission on Church and Minority Peoples

As some ecumenical Protestants rallied in the early 1940s to protect Japanese Americans, others responded to the dramatic protests by African Americans. The March on Washington Movement was among the most important. It began in 1940, when A. Phillip Randolph and a delegation of civil rights leaders met with President Franklin Roosevelt, during America’s arms buildup, to press him to give African Americans access to defense jobs. They had as much right as anyone else to help defend the United States from the fascist threat, Randolph told the president. The Oval Office meeting was cordial, and the Black leaders were optimistic that Roosevelt would come to their aid. But the president announced a few weeks later that he would take no action integrating defense work. Feeling betrayed, Randolph called for a nationwide protest to converge on Washington, DC, in 1941.

Roosevelt was worried about the march because it would show disunity as he was rallying Americans against Japan and Germany. To avert the public display of division, he made a deal with Randolph. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802 on June 25, 1941, which established the Fair Employment Practices Commission (FEPC) to review cases of discrimination in defense industries, albeit with no real enforcement powers. In response, Randolph called off the march.

Some ecumenical Protestants were early supporters of the March on Washington Movement. A. J. Muste, leader of the pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation, sent his lieutenants, James Lawson and James Farmer, to work with Randolph. When the march was called off, Lawson and Farmer carried on by forming the Congress of Racial Equality in 1942. The new organization would be a pillar of anti-racist activism through the 1960s.³³

On the whole, however, the initial Protestant response to the March on Washington Movement was muted. The issue of access to defense work for African Americans was brought up at a meeting of the Federal Council’s Executive Committee in 1940, before Randolph met with Roosevelt. Dr. Wilbur T. Clemens, a white Methodist minister from New York, suggested that “the government in wording contracts … attach a rider to the effect that any contract which is found to be discriminatory in its labor policy shall suffer a financial penalty.” But the Federal Council decided not to pursue the issue.³⁴ Like some of the Black press, even sympathetic ecumenical Protestant leaders initially worried about Randolph’s ability to mobilize African Americans and the possibility of a backlash against the movement. For example, Buell Gallagher, a white ecumenical Protestant who was the president of Talladega College and an NAACP vice president, worried that the march would incite violence by white southerners.³⁵

But once Randolph succeeded in pressing Roosevelt to create the FEPC, ecumenical Protestants eagerly joined in calls for the expansion of rights for African Americans. Black church leaders, including Federal Council Race Relations secretary George E. Haynes, wrote to Roosevelt in February 1942 to proclaim their loyalty to the United States and to push the president to use his emergency powers to expand the FEPC and to desegregate the military. Haynes pleaded with Roosevelt to expand the rights of African Americans out of “respect for the dignity of their personality” and the need for unity in fighting fascism.³⁶

Ecumenical Protestants justified their support for the FEPC by arguing it would make a big difference to both Christianity and the United States abroad. “The experience of our missionaries in dealing with people of India, China, Africa and other lands has shown conclusively that we need to achieve justice and fellowship among racial groups in our own land in order to show the sincerity of our belief in the Gospel,” the Federal Council announced.³⁷ Time and again, foreigners would ask American missionaries to square their religious views with the racist violence taking place in their Christian homeland. In response, some missionaries pleaded for their fellow believers back home to do something about racism, especially lynchings. The lessons learned from the missionary movement were applicable to the war effort, the council reasoned. America “has united with other nations to fight and work for justice and democracy in the world.” To continue do so, Americans needed to “set our own house in order.”³⁸

The ecumenical Protestant embrace of the FEPC legislation was widespread. Harry Kingman, who had fought against Japanese internment, became the West Coast head of the FEPC in 1943. Methodist bishop G. Bromley Oxnam lobbied Congress in 1944 for a permanent FEPC. And Walter Van Kirk, the head of the Federal Council’s International Department and the secretary of the Dulles Commission, and whose “Religion in the News” broadcast reached millions of listeners weekly, noted in his book on Christianity and the postwar order that “the colored peoples of India, Africa and Asia are watching the churches,” and he made a permanent FEPC the centerpiece of his domestic reform program.³⁹ In 1945, Haynes sent a letter to ten thousand ministers, asking their congregations to pray for the FEPC, and he urged them to send letters to their senators and representatives.⁴⁰ Support for the FEPC was broad among ecumenical Protestant leaders and caused quite a bit of excitement because it was one of the few anti-racist policies (in addition to anti-lynching legislation) that Protestant activists could rally around in the early 1940s.

The cause of the FEPC was not enough for some ecumenical Protestants who protested Japanese internment and African American economic segregation. Many of these activists were displeased with the churches’ record and wanted a long-term approach that would shift ecumenical institutions from piecemeal, local work to a more organized and forward-looking effort against racism. After all, the churches were talking about reshaping the postwar world order, and few things mattered more to peace than the racism that had motivated the Nazis’ treatment of the Jews, Japanese treatment of the Chinese, and the American treatment of its Black and Japanese citizens. Their efforts led to the Federal Council’s pathbreaking renunciation of segregation in 1946.

The path toward renouncing segregation began inauspiciously, with a memorandum sent by Haynes. In June 1941, Haynes asked other Federal Council departments whether they would support a broad study of the areas of life “where interracial conflict needs to be lessened.”⁴¹ He had suggested that the proposed committee be composed of different racial groups. Samuel McCrea Cavert, the perennial Federal Council bureaucrat, told Haynes to stress expertise. “Have it done by people who look at it as social scientists rather than as advocates of some particular interest,” Cavert argued, which would make it look more objective. Cameron Hall, of the Labor Division of the Federal Council, told Haynes and Cavert to fill the group with “church people” rather than social scientists. Churchgoers “will not take the work of non-church groups in the same ‘at homeness’ as if it comes from the churches.”⁴²

Others chimed in, arguing that the problem of racism must be studied in a global context. Missionary head Ralph Diffendorfer argued that a narrow focus on racism would ignore “the larger issues involved,” and, instead, he “would like to see this problem set in the midst of a broad base that would really register in the total life of the Church.” Channing Tobias, head of the YMCA’s Colored Work Division, retorted that “we are not isolating this subject. It is the church itself that is isolating it.” Speaking just before the 1942 Delaware conference, Tobias went on: “On the Dulles Commission they have not only dealt inadequately with it as a basic problem within our own nation but it has not been dealt with adequately from the national groups that come within the whole picture. Questions are raised by people of other countries as to our sincerity when we attack problems and overlook race.”⁴³

Cavert disagreed with Tobias. The Dulles Commission “can hardly deal with race adequately insofar as that is a domestic measure.” Cavert did believe there was a need to study racism in the United States, but if it was taken up by the Race Relations Department it “would be regarded as a special group of pleaders.” He had a solution: Tackle the race issue but make sure the study came from the Federal Council as a whole. Conditions had changed over the past twenty years, he said, and Protestants needed to think more deeply about the meaning of democracy. “The relationships between groups is all-important to what we mean by democracy,” he said. Cavert wanted “something that would attract public attention.” In the end it was decided that Haynes would be sent to the 1942 Delaware conference to see what the Dulles group was doing, but that this inquiry into democracy should be kept separate and should involve a broad membership of church people.⁴⁴

The bureaucratic wrangling had ended, and what began as an outline for a study of “democracy” and its relationship to “minorities” was turned into a campaign that would transform ecumenical Protestantism’s relationship to Jim Crow. The study commission continued a long-standing focus on “our ethical and religious concerns,” but it also broadened its scope to include “our civic and social activities” outside the churches. Although the phrasing was ambiguous enough to escape the watchful eye of conservatives, it nevertheless brought the relationship of racism and the churches into the political arena. The study also sought to describe the connection between racism and “the international problems and the bases for a just and durable peace.”⁴⁵ The anti-racist initiative would benefit from the publicity of the Dulles Commission as Haynes, Cavert, and Tobias popularized an argument that gained tremendous moral force during World War II: that racism at home mattered deeply to American and Christian interests abroad.

The idea that white people could remain objective, while others were merely lobbyists for their racial group’s narrow interests, was widespread among ecumenical Protestants in the 1940s. So when the Federal Council approved the proposal for a twenty-five-person Commission on Church and Minority Peoples, it requested that a “large majority … be white persons, in order to guard against creating the impression that the study is merely ‘special pleading.’ ”⁴⁶ The ever-present Tobias was on the commission, along with Haynes and Benjamin Mays. Haynes and Tobias were born in 1880 and 1882, respectively, and Mays was born a little more than a decade later in 1894. These three African Americans were born in the South and initially educated in the region at Black colleges with ties to Northern Protestant denominations. It was through their tremendous talents and these denominational networks—Baptist for Mays, Congregationalist for Haynes, and Methodist for Tobias—that they secured admission to research universities in the North, combining a religious education with graduate work in the social sciences. Haynes, for example, was the first African American to receive a PhD at Columbia University. These men were particularly adept at crossing the boundaries between Black and white institutions, and often moved between the North and the South. Each one was shaped by a religious upbringing in a Black congregation and a lifelong commitment to seeing African American churches thrive. But they were also critical of some aspects of Black churches, especially the role of uneducated ministers, the preponderance of women in the pews, and their otherworldly theology. “The Negro ministers will be challenged to assume more and more the role of a true prophet,” Mays announced in an influential book on the “Black church” in 1933. The minister must become “the one who interprets the will of God to men—in personal, social, economic and religious life.”⁴⁷

Mays, Tobias, and Haynes took on important institutional roles that they used to combat racism. Mays would become the first African American to serve as vice president of the Federal Council. He was also president of Morehouse College in Atlanta, where he would mentor a young Martin Luther King Jr. Haynes coordinated the Federal Council’s anti-racist initiatives for two and a half decades. And Tobias was a longtime YMCA leader who would serve as chairman of the NAACP in the 1950s. These giants of mid-century anti-racism were also adept at negotiating with white liberals. Although they would occasionally publicly embarrass their white colleagues for their prejudices, they tended to prefer negotiation, behind-the-scenes pressure, and bridge building over confrontation.⁴⁸

The composition of the Commission on Church and Minority Peoples revealed the long-standing links between ecumenical Protestants and organizations supporting better treatment for African Americans. Eugene Barnett, the YMCA secretary, who was also a regular at Federal Council meetings, joined the group. The commission also contained a group of white southerners. The southern Methodist Dorothy Tilly joined the Federal Council’s commission. (She would later serve on the 1946 Presidential Committee on Civil Rights, along with Tobias). Tilly was joined by white southerners Howard W. Odum and Will W. Alexander, both members of the Commission on Interracial Cooperation.⁴⁹ (Tobias had also served on the Commission on Interracial Cooperation from 1935 to 1942). Lastly, the group had a number of prominent officials who cooperated but had little immediate impact except to lend prestige (and money) to the organization, like Anson Phelps Stokes of the Phelps Stokes Fund, a philanthropic organization that supported African American groups. A prominent exception was the best-selling author Louis Adamic, who consistently showed up to meetings and contributed to discussions.⁵⁰

Figure 7. George E. Haynes led the Federal Council of Churches’ efforts to combat racial prejudice from 1919 until his retirement in 1946. A trained sociologist, he was the first African American to receive a PhD at Columbia University. Courtesy of James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection in the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

Bradford Abernethy was transferred from the Dulles Commission to run the day-to-day operations of the group. In many ways he was a typical product of the culture the Protestant establishment had created. He was not a standout figure during the 1940s, yet he and countless others like him worked largely behind the scenes to make the socially engaged programs of the Protestant establishment possible. Abernethy was the son of William Abernethy, the senior pastor of the Cavalry Church in Washington, DC, during the 1920s and 1930s, who was a major figure among American Baptists. The younger Abernethy received his bachelor’s of divinity at the premier Baptist seminary, Colgate-Rochester Divinity School, in 1933. While there, he married the school president’s daughter. He went on to become a pastor in Columbia, Missouri, where he stirred controversy within his congregation by supporting the Missouri Supreme Court decision to admit an African American to the dentistry school in the 1930s. Growing frustrated by local church work and annoyed at the racial conservatism of his congregation, Abernethy gave more and more attention to ecumenical work, heading the Missouri Council of Churches immediately prior to being summoned to work for the Dulles Commission. As Walter Van Kirk noted, Abernethy had traveled extensively prior to his arrival in New York, including to Edinburgh and Oxford for study, as well as to Scandinavia, Continental Europe, the Middle East, and to Mexico for a year. By the time he transferred to the Commission on Church and Minority Peoples, Abernethy had all the qualities and experiences of ecumenical leaders: a high-quality education at a leading university and liberal seminary, involvement with idealistic youth groups, firsthand experience with Jim Crow, international expertise that included contact with non-Europeans, and a deep knowledge of bureaucratic procedures.⁵¹ His formative experiences made him an ideal person to work with both local churches and Federal Council leaders.

As the Commission on Church and Minority Peoples began its work in 1942, it found that Protestantism was deeply segregated in the United States. There was “a tendency toward self-examination of the policies and practices of the churches’ own institutions,” like hospitals and schools. Moreover, denominational meetings tended to be carried out under nonsegregated conditions, and the denominations were looking more favorably at sending nonwhite missionaries abroad. But virtually all churches were segregated. No denominations had a stated policy on the admission of nonwhites into white churches. Few nonwhite students were being admitted to Protestant schools, and college and seminary faculties had few, if any, nonwhite professors. Moreover, denominations had no stated policies about segregation at their hospitals, leading to widespread de facto segregation.⁵² While the commission held out hope that denominations were becoming more self-critical, their assessment of the situation was bleak. As Frank Loescher, one of the commission’s researchers, wrote in a widely circulated manuscript, “Protestantism, by its policies and practices, far from helping to integrate the Negro in American life, is actually contributing to the segregation of Negro Americans.”⁵³

Church segregation garnered attention partly because of the massive movement of peoples during World War II. In California, for example, the availability of jobs along with more hospitable attitudes toward African Americans attracted a large influx of Black women and men from the western edges of the South, where conditions for African Americans were much harsher. The Black populations of California cities like San Francisco and Berkeley, and especially Oakland and Richmond, skyrocketed. Many Black residents who lived in the region prior to the migration of the 1940s commented on the worsening race relations in the area. Informal segregation and a relatively liberal atmosphere gave way to animus against African Americans.⁵⁴

Some liberal clergy tried to capitalize on these changes and create integrated churches. The first was the Community Church in Berkeley, California, led by the white Congregationalist minister Buell Gallagher, followed shortly by a church in San Francisco headed by African American theologian Howard Thurman. Gallagher’s and Thurman’s churches were two of several dozen experimental churches created in northern and western cities during World War II.⁵⁵ With roots in the interfaith and interracial activism of the 1930s, their proliferation during World War II was an attempt to create integrated neighborhoods, especially in places that appeared to be “transitioning” from a previously all-white to an all-Black neighborhood. These churches usually had both a Black and a white minister, along with integrated staffs, and tried to attract multi-racial congregations.

Ministers hoped that by creating integrated churches, they would freeze the transition from white to Black neighborhoods mid-way. But it did not work. The Community Church in Berkeley attracted African Americans from the neighborhood, but virtually all of the white members were supportive racial liberals from other areas, undermining the attempt to create integrated neighborhoods.⁵⁶ Despite their limits, Gallagher regarded these churches as a “prophecy” of an unsegregated nation and hoped these few integrated churches would be “the spiritual center of the integrated community.”⁵⁷ By 1945, just about every metropolitan area in the United States, outside of the South, had a self-consciously integrated church.⁵⁸ But these churches were the exception in a religion that was largely segregated by race. Integrated churches did important work, like providing gathering spaces for anti-racist organizations. They also dramatized what most people already knew: that the vast majority of American churches were segregated.

The nearly total segregation of America’s churches presented a roadblock to the Commission on Church and Minority Peoples. The commission tried to get local churches to go along with desegregation by meeting with minister after minister and asking for their input. During three weeks in March 1944, Bradford Abernethy and Will Alexander traveled to five cities in different regions to listen and discuss local views on race relations. Abernethy reported that local leaders appreciated being consulted, but he and Alexander were disappointed with the views they encountered. Abernethy reported, “Although churchmen have a troubled conscience on this issue, there was lacking a sense of prophetic zeal and earnestness about the church’s relation to the problem of race and culture. Only rarely is a ‘Thus saith the Lord’ heard.”⁵⁹

In the North and the South there was “not enough difference in the pattern of segregation to warrant drawing any sharp distinction between attitudes,” the commission found. In all the regions, hostility breaks out about the same issues: “housing, employment, transportation, blood bank, etc.” There were a few hopeful signs, like some interracial churches and a “very definite mood … for clarifying the matter of ‘social equality.’ ” And as activists knew, all conversations eventually involved a heated discussion of interracial marriage. This difficult subject, which most anti-racist activists avoided, needed to be faced head-on in the commission’s study, Abernethy believed.⁶⁰

The other great challenge the commission members faced was the lack of a statement by African American religious leaders unequivocally denouncing segregation. Many white Protestants were skeptical that African Americans themselves wanted an end to segregation. There was a grain of truth to this skepticism. The segregated religious bureaucracy gave many Black men and women experience in leadership positions and secured jobs for them in tough times.⁶¹ Integration of an organization often meant simply the integration of the membership, while the leadership positions of the new organization would go mostly to whites. This was the kind of integration African Americans did not want.

The mistrust between Black and white leaders made the statement produced by the African American members of the Commission on Church and Minority Peoples, and signed by 106 prominent Black religious leaders, all the more remarkable for its forthright denunciation of segregation in church life. The statement was organized by Benjamin Mays, who was elected vice president of the Federal Council in 1944, a first for an African American. He used his clout to press the Black clergy to denounce segregation. It received widespread coverage in the press as the first collective condemnation of segregation in American churches produced by Black religious leaders.

The statement was surprising to both the white and Black press, since both thought of Black church leaders as conservative, apolitical, and obliging on the issue of segregation. It was part of a long-standing critique of the Black church. “In the first half of the twentieth century, the dominant political narratives treated African American religion with despair and disdain” before the southern civil rights movement offered “a powerful and startling departure from that story,” writes Barbara Savage. A long tradition of social scientific literature, including writings by Mays himself, had categorized the “Black church” as a problem to be solved.⁶²

The ministers’ statement itself contradicted all of this, demonstrating that African American clergy had a long tradition of anti-racist activism. They called for an “open-door” church for people of all races. This open letter to white church leaders emphasized that segregated churches fell short of the Christian ideal of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. “Freedom of worship, if it means anything, means freedom to worship God across racial lines and freedom for a man or woman to join the church of his or her choice,” Black church leaders insisted. There might still be Black and white churches after the religion desegregated, but they would be operating according to “the requirements of the Christian ideal.” Sensing that the wind was at their backs, the Black leaders called for immediate action, both religious and political. After all, “the time is always ripe to correct a wrong.” Now was the time to “equalize educational and work opportunities; to administer justice in the courts; to give the ballot equally to all citizens, irrespective of race; to provide opportunities for all to live in a healthy environment; and to guarantee equal access to health and hospitalization.”⁶³ The Commission on Church and Minority Peoples could now clearly say that Black clergy were against the segregation of religion. And they could do so with the confidence that both Black and white voices in the ecumenical leadership were speaking the same language.

Soon after the letter was published, in early 1945, the commission finalized their plans for a large conference on racism and the churches. To their dismay, they were unable to find a suitable location. Restrictions on wartime travel made it difficult to gather large numbers of people. The Dulles Commission, with its close ties to the State Department, was able to regularly circumvent these restrictions, but the Commission on Church and Minority Peoples was not able to meet as they had hoped. Instead of a 250-person conference somewhere in the Midwest, they settled for a 26 person, three-day conclave in Princeton, New Jersey, beginning May 8, 1945.

At Princeton, they charted a path forward. Liston Pope wrote the plan. Pope—an awkward name for a Protestant—was a young Yale professor of social ethics, who would later become editor of the influential Social Action magazine and dean of the Yale Divinity School. Like Will Alexander, Pope was a white southerner, a fact that privileged him at these kinds of meetings. But as organizers quickly found out, he viewed Jim Crow and Christian racism as great evils. His blistering condemnations were frequently edited by other commission members for the sake of diplomacy.⁶⁴

Some of Pope’s recommendations were reminiscent of older strategies, like breaking down stereotypes through face-to-face meetings. At the local level, he urged white churchgoers to socialize with non-whites, to establish interracial youth camps, to choose a co-pastor from a minority group, and, if “the church is willing to take this stand,” to publicize that people of all races were welcome.⁶⁵

In addition to these traditional “race relations” techniques, Pope urged activism and political agitation. He argued that congregations should start drives against restrictive covenants and lobby union locals to admit nonwhites. In addition, local councils of churches should make sure that minorities were represented in local government. At the denominational level, leaders should critically analyze the policies of their institutions to make them more inclusive, especially hospitals and schools. This should apply not only to patients and students but also employees and executives. One of the ways to do this was to no longer inquire about race on job applications, Pope wrote. Denominations should also use “experience gained in missionary work for the illumination of interracial problems at home,” he advised. Pope also anticipated future calls for socially responsible investing when he urged ecumenical Protestant institutions to “invest denominational funds in housing projects open to members of minority groups, and in other such projects which are remunerative socially as well as financially.” But most especially, denominations should outlaw discrimination based on race within their group and abolish their segregated bureaucracies. At the highest levels of the ecumenical movement, leaders should press for an international bill of human rights and an end to colonialism.⁶⁶

Pope’s program was revolutionary because it went beyond changing individual hearts and minds and focused attention on political and structural issues. Racism was not only a matter of attitudes but also of laws, institutions, and economics. But these ideas still flew below the radar in 1945. Because of its small size, the Princeton meeting did not produce the kind of publicity generated by the Dulles Commission. Instead, Princeton became largely a strategy meeting, with commission members seeking to refine their arguments and create a clear plan for influencing the Federal Council.

Pope’s plan for influencing the Federal Council began with theology, “so that initial debate, if any, would be on Christian Principles rather than Church Procedure.”⁶⁷ The theological statement he submitted to the Federal Council began by recognizing the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of all men, which was at the heart of building “the Kingdom of God on this earth.” It chastised Christians for the sin of arrogance and pride in seeking the promotion of the interests of some over the interests of the whole. “Any discrimination within the Church because of race, negates the nature of the Church. Let the Church be the Church, cleanse its own life, and so live out its principles as to create new faith, new conscience, new hope in the world.”⁶⁸

Protestant personalism figured prominently in Pope’s efforts. Personalism’s emphasis on dignity and human personality played an influential role in both anti-racist efforts and in debates about human rights. The Commission on Church and Minority Peoples argued that learning from different peoples was part of “God’s purpose” to see “the creation, development, and enrichment of human persons,” who are invested with “infinite dignity and promise.” The commission further stated, “Human progress is measured and human institutions are judged by the extent to which the sacredness of human personality is recognized, enriched and fulfilled, and the opportunity offered to all men to live in the dignity and freedom proper to those who are God’s children.”⁶⁹

The theology of anti-racism simultaneously drew on multiculturalism—the celebration of difference—as well as color-blind liberalism, which emphasized instead the similarity of all people. On the one hand, ecumenical Protestant theologians argued that “the true principle of human society is unity in diversity.” At other points in the same statement they played down diversity and emphasized the similarities of all people: “In God all men are brothers regardless of the accidents of antecedents, entitled to equal and unsegregated opportunity for self-development without distinction either in law or fact on account of race or nationality.”⁷⁰ Thus ecumenists promoted color-blind liberalism while sowing the seeds of a multiculturalism that became popular in later decades. The Federal Council officially adopted this anti-racist theology in 1945.

All of the institutional wrangling that Haynes, Mays, and Pope were doing would eventually sway ecumenical Protestants to take a public stand against segregation. With the Federal Council’s official approval of the theological statement decrying racism, the members of the Commission on Church and Minority Peoples pressed on. They saw an opportunity at the emergency meeting of the Federal Council in Columbus, Ohio, in the spring of 1946. The meeting was called by Federal Council president G. Bromley Oxnam, who decided that there was a need for ecumenical Protestants to speak quickly and decisively about the postwar world order as World War II came to an end.

Responding to Oxnam’s call for an emergency meeting on international affairs, Haynes sent out two memos on November 19, 1945, urging Oxnam to tackle racism. Haynes recalled the violence after World War I, when he began working for the Federal Council, and he believed World War II would follow a similar pattern. He also noted attempts to defund the FEPC and the new self-confidence shown by returning Black and Japanese American veterans. Most of all, local churches needed guidance. “Local church leaders,” he wrote, “are eager to do something and are anxious for guidance on what to do and how to gear their local church groups into methods of doing them. A program of action is the call of the hour.”⁷¹

The Commission on Church and Minority Peoples, unable to bring attention to racism 1945, would have a second chance at Columbus. The Columbus meeting began on March 5, 1946, following the long-established pattern of several hundred Protestant leaders gathering with prominent intellectuals, politicians, businessmen, labor leaders, military officials, and State Department officials. Even President Harry Truman attended. But despite the staid bureaucratic procedure, it felt like a new day was dawning. The United Nations was a reality. There were “religious, social, economic, and political” tensions in the world, especially “in the case of the Soviet Union and the western democracies” but the United Nations would create “sympathetic understanding” and undertake “constructive tasks of common concern.”⁷² The sense of hope that a new world was coming in the spring of 1946 was also palpable for theologians. At the Columbus conference, a group of biblical scholars released the Revised Standard Version of the New Testament, a theologically liberal translation that threatened the dominance of the popular King James Version for the first time. This hopeful feeling was mixed with a sense of responsibility. According to the Federal Council, the church “must come to grips with and speak to the issues which imperil the very existence of humanity: imperialism, militarism, racism, nationalism, and class conflict.”⁷³

Despite the millenarian spirit of 1946, it was not entirely clear which way the Federal Council would go on segregation. And Mays’s experience at Columbus shows why. On the second day of the 1946 Columbus conference, President Harry Truman arrived to give an address. Mays was originally scheduled to sit with other Federal Council dignitaries on stage behind the president, he recalled in his autobiography.⁷⁴ An unnamed conference organizer decided, however, that sitting a Black man behind the president would be inappropriate and moved Mays’s seat to the front row, away from the gaze of cameras. Only a last-minute intervention by a New York delegate got Mays back behind the podium. Mays’s case underscored the Federal Council’s indecision about the place of African Americans in the United States.

Mays hoped to turn the tide against segregation, as well as the Federal Council’s indecision, by appealing to Protestant globalism. The working group on “race relations” at Columbus, staffed largely by members of the Commission on Church and Minority Peoples, announced that “as a nation, our world leadership is imperiled by the existence of undemocratic patterns at home.” Moreover, “Large numbers of Negro, Japanese, and Spanish veterans who fought in the United States Army against these theories of racial superiority are now denied free access to an opportunity to earn a living” and have “only restricted citizenship.”⁷⁵

Mays decided to use one of the latest examples of the harmful effects of segregation on the world stage that resonated with an ecumenical Protestant constituency enthralled by the United Nations. The location of the UN headquarters was still in doubt as of early 1946, but it seemed increasingly likely that it would be located in an East Coast American city, which brought worries about the treatment nonwhite dignitaries might experience. The Indian delegation complained loudly about their encounter with segregation in Washington, DC.⁷⁶ Indeed, large swaths of America were never seriously considered as a UN site because of segregation.⁷⁷ The Federal Council called it a “source of great embarrassment to our leaders” and “a discouraging factor” as the United States was beginning “to play our part in the new world unity upon which our future existence depends.”⁷⁸

Mays and Haynes had skillfully positioned racism at the center of the Federal Council’s postwar plans, but it would be white activists who shepherded a clear-cut denunciation of segregation through the Columbus conference. Alexander had recovered from surgery for cancer in time to attend, but it was recently retired Union Theological Seminary president Henry Sloane Coffin whose role was decisive at Columbus. Coffin, an heir to the W. & J. Sloane fortune, chaired the working group on race at Columbus and used his clout to denounce segregation. It mattered to other Federal Council delegates that a white, wealthy, and well-positioned clergyman said it was time for Jim Crow to go. During a fiery speech by Coffin, “The southern members got up and left,” recalled Alexander. “They knew what was coming and they quietly got out. They didn’t bolt, or anything. They just got away so they could say when they got back home that they weren’t there.”⁷⁹

But it was not only southerners who opposed integration. At least one Methodist bishop from the North understood the implications of the attack on Jim Crow for the segregated Methodist hierarchy. Realizing that what Coffin was proposing indirectly called for the Methodists to desegregate, the bishop “was pretty violent in saying they weren’t going to do it.” But with the southern exodus and the strong support for the resolution, Alexander reported, “The brethren handled him pretty roughly, and passed the thing overwhelmingly. It was a pretty sensational thing for a church body to do.”⁸⁰

In 1946, the Federal Council officially renounced segregation “as unnecessary and undesirable and a violation of the Gospel of love and human brotherhood” and pledged to prove its sincerity by working “for a non-segregated Church and a non-segregated society.” It was a once-in-a-generation shift. The Federal Council had for years decried “race prejudice,” but it had not attacked Jim Crow. The Federal Council continued to emphasize lessening prejudice through education and moral suasion among individuals, in order to “create new men with new motives.” But now the Federal Council also attacked something that the churches had “neglected” to do: “to deal adequately with the fundamental pattern of segregation in our society.” Creating “a non-segregated society” would mean focusing on structural patterns and political solutions.⁸¹

The Federal Council’s new attitude toward segregation went far beyond anything it or its predominantly white member denominations had said about Jim Crow. The report anticipated the 1954 Brown v. Board decision because of its insistence that segregation “has always meant inferior services” to minorities and that segregation is “always discriminatory.” Segregation expressed the sense of superiority held by “vast numbers of Americans” and helped transmit that attitude “from one generation to another.” Moreover, it denied jobs and an adequate standard of living to millions of Americans, hampered the effectiveness of the armed forces, disenfranchised citizens, encouraged demagoguery, and incited racial violence. Worst of all, segregation was given “moral sanction” by churches, which had “accepted the pattern of racial segregation in their own life and practice.”⁸²

For the Black press, the “Non-Segregated Church” statement was like a bolt of lightning coming from a clear blue sky. Calling the Columbus conference “history-making” and the Federal Council’s actions “revolutionary,” the front-page headline of the Chicago Defender announced that “Jim Crow and the church were divorced this week by the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America.”⁸³ Ecumenical journals likewise understood the importance of the statement calling for a non-segregated church. The Christian Century called the declaration on race relations “the most far-reaching denunciation of racial segregation ever to emerge” from a body of American Christians.⁸⁴

Despite the pathbreaking renunciation of segregation, Haynes, Alexander, Pope, and Tobias did not get everything they had hoped for. Interracial marriage was the most challenging issue for church leaders and that was precisely why some commission members had pushed for a forthright statement on the matter. A draft of the Federal Council’s “Non-Segregated Church” statement had emphasized the need to stop using miscegenation as an excuse for segregation. It was unlikely that much interracial marriage would occur, given previous experience with seminaries and schools that were integrated, Pope and others reasoned. Interracial marriage was treated by the Federal Council not as a moral right but as a legal one that should not be abridged, particularly because miscegenation laws had done nothing to stop elicit interracial relationships. The anti-racist activists stressed “that each race is rightfully grateful for its own heritage and desirous of preserving its own identity,” reassuring church leaders that Black people did not really want to marry whites, and vice versa. This pluralist language is striking because it provided such a strong counterpoint to the color-blind attitude present in virtually everything else written about race by ecumenical Protestants during the 1940s.

Despite assurances that African Americans did not really want to marry whites, the section on interracial marriage was crossed out of the working draft of the “Non-Segregated Church” statement. Exactly who called for this section to be deleted is unclear. Perhaps it was the strongly pluralistic language or the difficulty of the issue that led to its removal. One of the drafters wrote “finally deleted” on the last revision of the statement, likely with a measure of relief.⁸⁵

Federal Council officials were also weary of the political implications of the “Non-Segregated Church” statement. The Federal Council publicized some of the goals enumerated by Pope. But in an act of censorship, the Federal Council’s Executive Committee refused to print many of them, fearing what churchgoers would think of their new anti-racist agenda and its social and political implications. The most widely distributed pamphlet communicating to everyday churchgoers what the Federal Council had decided on segregation at Columbus simply listed a number of self-interrogating questions ecumenical Protestants should ask themselves: Is your church racially segregated? Is racial segregation practiced in the administration of your church-affiliated school, college, seminary, hospital, or youth camp? Does your church hire minorities? Does it hire enough of them? In 1946 the Federal Council had empowered anti-racist activists to act politically against segregation, but it did so in hushed tones. Ecumenical leaders, aware of the gap between their critical stance on segregation and the widespread support for segregation among churchgoers, kept the implications of their views hidden from their congregations.⁸⁶

Instead of political mobilization and structural thinking, churchgoers received a course on the “Clinical Approach” to “race relations.” It was based on the thinking of Haynes, who was a human relations expert. He believed misinformation and stereotypes caused racial conflict. By the late 1940s, “human relations” emerged as an interdisciplinary field of study, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, as well as the Ford and Carnegie philanthropic arms. Human relations explained racism as a problem of individual behavior and offered a solution to prejudice through adjustment of attitudes. If only people of different races could be brought together in a neutral atmosphere and confronted with the facts on race, they would have their prejudices broken down and, over time, they would change their beliefs and behaviors.⁸⁷

Haynes had studied with sociologist William Graham Sumner, whose notion of “folkways” underpinned Haynes’s approach. For Sumner, folkways resulted from community experience securing its basic human needs and were deeply ingrained in ethnic groups. For him, the tenacity of folkways was a reason why ethnic groups should be left alone and kept apart. But in Haynes’s view, folkways could be undone under the right circumstances because he had a more expansive definition of basic human needs. For Sumner, basic needs were material, like working and eating. But for Haynes they included spiritual needs, which could be tapped to overcome the drive for economic and social dominance.⁸⁸ What exactly these religious and spiritual needs were, however, was never clearly spelled out. They reflected Haynes’s optimism about the transformative power of religion.

What made Haynes different from many social scientists of the era was that he did not separate out the scientific inquiry into racism from reformist activism to diminish it. And despite its resemblance to earlier efforts, Haynes’s “Clinical Approach” was far more ambitious than interracial Sundays, a yearly event that urged churches to cross the color line and worship together. Haynes’s “clinics” not only encouraged people to overcome prejudices but to make plans of action for their communities. Haynes’s goal was to get church people to cooperate with “the leaders of social, labor, business and civic agencies of the community” to diagnose and “deal with such questions as discrimination in employment, housing, education, health and leisure-time activities.” With a strong emphasis on “factual analysis and through democratic agreement” these groups would “formulate a community-wide plan of action” to solve these problems. For Haynes, the goal was always “social action.”⁸⁹

By the end of World War II, ecumenical Protestants pushed a two-pronged approach to the problem of segregation. On the one hand, they revamped earlier “race relations” efforts under the banner of “human relations” and civic unity campaigns. For example, Fisher’s Fair Play Committee merged with the California Federation for Civic Unity shortly after World War II.⁹⁰ This was the public face of ecumenical Protestants’ efforts and the one they communicated to most churchgoers. On the other hand, the Federal Council and its allies took a stand against Jim Crow for the first time and empowered their intellectuals, activists, and policy makers to fight Jim Crow from city halls to the halls of Congress. This important departure had been engineered by activists who seized upon the enthusiasm for postwar peace planning and showed that it could not be done without ending segregation. After all, as they put it, a just and durable world peace and an effective United Nations required a democratic and desegregated America.

From Anti-Prejudice to Anti-Segregation

Soon after the Federal Council condemned segregation in 1946, a half dozen denominations, the YWCA, and YMCA followed its lead in opposing Jim Crow.⁹¹ Between 1942 and 1946, American ecumenical Protestant leaders had taken a major leap from mild resolutions criticizing “race prejudice” to clearly denouncing segregation. While other white liberal groups continued to attack “prejudice,” which emphasized changing white attitudes, the Federal Council and its allies began, however haltingly and ambivalently, to denounce Jim Crow and work for its abolition. The move from anti-prejudice to anti-segregation signaled a more political and structural critique of racism, and a growing determination to use legal and political tools to dismantle segregation. The willingness to name segregation as the problem signaled an important shift in the attitudes of ecumenical Protestants toward racism.

It took a war fought against fascism, and a moment when the global ramifications of racism were made crystal clear, to get ecumenical Protestants to commit to creating a non-segregated church and a non-segregated society. It also took an ad hoc emergency commission—the Commission on Church and Minority Peoples—to gather the clout to push through the “Non-Segregated Church” statement. Finally, the Federal Council’s attack on Jim Crow required a special context—the World Order movement—when Protestant globalism dominated the minds of the Protestant establishment and desegregation seemed to fit neatly with the ecumenical vision of the postwar world.

The public call for desegregation marked an end of an era, and several figures took the opportunity to move on. Haynes, one of the architects of the turn against segregation, retired soon after the 1946 Columbus conference, where the call against segregation was first heard. After twenty-five years of work on “race relations” on behalf of the Federal Council, he had succeeded in getting ecumenical Protestant leaders to formally renounce segregation and to commit to a program of interracial clinics that he had designed. It was the culmination of his career. Soon after his retirement, Haynes felt the pull of global Protestant institutions. He was approached by the YMCA’s world headquarters to study the organization’s work on the African continent. In January 1947, he embarked on a tour of fifteen colonial territories in Africa, which resulted in a massive study called Africa: Continent of the Future.⁹²

Tobias also retired soon after the conference. He had been senior secretary of the Colored Work Department of the YMCA, but the position itself disappeared when the organization desegregated its administration in 1946 in concert with the Federal Council’s “Non-Segregated Church” statement. That same year he became the first Black director of the Phelps-Stokes fund and one of the members of the President’s Commission on Civil Rights. Tobias stayed involved in the NAACP, becoming its chairman in 1953.

Other members of the Commission on Church and Minority Peoples moved on as well, including the young Bradford Abernethy, who accepted the position of University Chaplain at Rutgers University. Abernethy stayed connected to anti-racist activists, helping Quakers send students to the Global South and bringing figures like Benjamin Mays and Bayard Rustin to his campus. He later worked with New York’s James Robinson to set up the Operation Crossroads Africa program, a predecessor of the Peace Corps.⁹³ In these ways, the anti-racist work done by ecumenical Protestants during World War II rippled through other institutions in the United States and beyond.

Protestant globalism had enabled the ecumenical turn against segregation. American ecumenical Protestant commitment to anti-racism and desegregation would, in turn, shape how the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was understood and would help make anti-racism a mainstay of human rights politics for much of the twentieth century.