CHAPTER 5
At the end of World War II, American ecumenical Protestants had denounced segregation as a theological heresy and a political tragedy. In the course of the World Order movement, international events made it easier for the Federal Council of Churches to attack segregation. The flow of influence would soon reverse course, as the domestic criticism of segregation, in turn, began to shape discussions of international human rights. Ecumenical Protestants focused the international community’s attention on the incompatibility between human rights and segregation.
That human rights came to be understood as an indictment of racism may seem like a natural development. After all, the universal nature of human rights implies that all human beings are equal. But in the 1940s the link between human rights and anti-racism was anything but obvious. Competing human rights declarations, including those produced by the Catholic Church and by lawyers’ guilds, said little about racism. Indeed, the American Anthropological Association announced in 1947 that human rights were antithetical to decolonization. Ecumenical Protestants, however, argued that diminishing racism and ending colonialism went hand in hand with the spread of human rights. In doing so, they joined anti-colonial activists in the Global South and anti-racist activists in the United States in highlighting the anti-racist implications of human rights. Ecumenical Protestants used their public platform to broadcast these views widely.1
Ecumenical Protestant intellectuals were at the forefront of creating an anti-racist understanding of human rights. The work of missionary expert Edmund D. Soper and social ethicist Buell G. Gallagher, who are the subjects of this chapter, was especially important. Building on the anti-racist mobilization of the World Order movement, Soper and Gallagher developed comprehensive accounts of the link between anti-racism and international events. Soper penned the first systematic academic study of racism as a global phenomenon, while Gallagher produced one of the most forceful attacks on Jim Crow written by a white American prior to the 1960s. Both elevated anti-racist human rights above other priorities, like religious liberty and economic rights, which ecumenical Protestants were also drawn to. And their intellectual labor created the foundation of an understanding of human rights that went far beyond the specifically American and religious milieu. Soper and Gallagher promoted an anti-racist understanding of human rights that became popular across the world.2
Ecumenical Protestant intellectuals writing about racism in the 1940s moved increasingly toward structural criticism of racism, and they adopted a global framework. They also took steps away from color-blind liberalism and toward ensuring ethnic and racial pluralism. As this chapter shows, Soper and Gallagher criticized racism by drawing on social science and the missionary movement and by celebrating the racial cosmopolitanism of Brazil and the racial pluralism of the Soviet Union as two models for the United States to emulate. Their ideas, rooted in a global exploration of racism, made their way into the Federal Council of Churches’ pathbreaking statement on human rights in 1948, which was popularly understood as a condemnation of segregation. Human rights would be the most important and enduring expression of these new commitments.
Racism as a Global Phenomenon
A new anxiety gripped American ecumenical Protestants during World War II. Some began to wonder if the world was dividing itself into racial blocs that would one day go to war with one another. Soper warned his fellow Protestants in 1943 that “world racial consciousness … binds the minority groups together in a growing solidarity.” In the 1930s and 1940s ecumenical Protestants took seriously Japan’s claim that it was building a pan-Asian sphere of influence. The intensity of the rhetoric of the “master race” coming from Germany, combined with the ruthlessness of what one historian has called a “race war” between the United States and Japan, made the organization of the world into racial blocs seem not only plausible but likely.3 Some ecumenical Protestant intellectuals warned about looming race wars and worried that racism was the biggest danger to the postwar order they were working to create.
Decolonization was ascendant, but European powers showed little appetite for giving up their colonies. “I have not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire,” announced Winston Churchill in 1942.4 Imperial and anti-colonial forces, some ecumenical Protestants feared, were on a collision course and had the potential to realign global politics around race. As Gallagher put it, “Peace built on white supremacy is the guarantee of tomorrow’s global war on race lines.”5
Anxiety about a potential anti-imperialist coalition of colonial and postcolonial nations was built on a long history of warnings from cheerleaders of the West’s supremacy. Lothrop Stoddard warned white Americans in his 1920 book The Rising Tide of Color Against the White World-Supremacy that World War I had weakened global European domination and that “the colored world, long restive under white political domination, is being welded by the most fundamental of instincts, the instinct of self-preservation, into a common solidarity of feeling against the dominant white man.”6 Stoddard was especially concerned about immigration and called for America to stop the tide of foreigners from flooding the country. Turning Stoddard’s argument on its head, Gallagher and Soper argued that the United States could only avert war with the nonwhite world by renouncing white supremacy, ending imperialism, and distributing the world’s resources more equitably.
Ecumenical Protestant intellectuals were not the only Americans changing their minds about racism. As they began earnestly engaging with the complicated issues of race in the 1940s, they drew upon the social scientific research conducted in prior decades. Anthropologists, especially secular Jews and women in that profession, had done more than any other academic community to change the public dialogue on race by undermining the biological arguments that supported white supremacy. The first major challenge to biological racism came from the German Jewish émigré and Columbia University anthropologist Franz Boas, whose 1911 book, The Mind of Primitive Man, made the case for treating race and culture separately.7 Boas pioneered cultural relativism as a methodology, and he insisted that the environment shapes human difference. Later, his students declared that race has nothing to do with culture. Ruth Benedict made this same point in her popular works, including Race: Science and Politics (1940) and The Races of Mankind (1943). The latter book was co-authored with Gene Weltfish, another of Boas’s female students, who grew up in a German-speaking Jewish family. Ecumenical Protestant intellectuals cited these books frequently.
Jewish groups also mobilized against racism in the 1940s and focused on combatting antisemitic attacks emanating from Nazi Germany and from fascist sympathizers in the United States. Responding to antisemitism meant embracing both religious and racial tolerance through the framework of “human relations.”8 Catholics also experimented with new ways of combating racism. The most novel approach was the lawsuit launched in California with the help of the Catholic Interracial Council, which culminated in the 1948 court case Perez v. Sharp. The plaintiffs (a Mexican American woman, who was legally designated as white, and an African American man) were denied a marriage license because of a ban on interracial marriage. They argued that this was a violation of their religious freedom because their Catholic religion made no racial distinctions among the faithful. Although the court case eventually overturned California’s miscegenation laws on the grounds of the 14th Amendment, and not on the grounds of religious liberty, it nonetheless demonstrated that some Catholics were finding new ways to challenge segregation with arguments grounded in their religious tradition.9
On the whole, however, Catholic churchgoers and Catholic priests resisted integration in the 1940s. A commitment to the territorial boundaries of the parish system, along with congregations organized around ethnicity and language, often translated into resistance against a growing African American population in urban centers.10 Many Jews began to leave urban areas in the 1940s, moving to suburban areas from which African Americans were largely excluded.11 Protestants also moved to newly built suburbs in large numbers. Like most other American religious groups, ecumenical Protestantism remained thoroughly segregated by race.12
American ecumenical Protestants, Catholics, religious and secular Jews, and women all made important contributions to the dialogue on race in the 1940s, but, in that decade, it would be a foreigner who penned the most influential treatise on race in America. The Swedish sociologist Gunner Myrdal’s An American Dilemma, published in 1944, set the terms of the debate about segregation.13 Myrdal’s central thesis was that most Americans believed in a set of liberal principles, including “the essential dignity of man” and “the importance of protecting and cultivating his personality” against “the doctrines of caste, class, and slavery.”14 While Americans believed this “American Creed,” Myrdal argued, they rarely put these values into practice. Myrdal’s American Creed was more wishful thinking than a description of Americans’ beliefs in 1944, historians now argue.15 But Myrdal’s thesis was a powerful rhetorical weapon, and it echoed what some Protestant activists had been saying for many years. Along those lines, ecumenical Protestant intellectuals argued that Christianity stood in opposition to racism and that most Protestants knew it. The solution ecumenical Protestant intellectuals like Soper and Gallagher proposed was for the faithful to begin acting more like Christ.
While ecumenical Protestants borrowed from anthropologists and sociologists, and built upon their own long-standing concerns about racism, they also viewed diminishing white supremacy as central to the implementation of their postwar vision. American ecumenical Protestants worried that their World Order movement would run aground on the rocks of white supremacy. The two intellectuals who offered the clearest course to ending colonialism and racism were Soper and Gallagher. A social ethics professor at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California, Gallagher was a lifelong anti-racist activist. He had spent the 1930s as president of the historically Black Talladega College and served as a vice president in the NAACP. He represented a wing of Protestantism long involved in the Black freedom struggle in America.
Soper was a professor of missions at Garrett Theological Seminary in Evanston, Illinois. For two decades he had written about the missionary movement and the encounter between different world religions.16 He represented a wing of Protestantism rooted in the missionary project, which grew concerned about racism because of the obstacles it created for the spread of Christianity in the Global South.17 Although their interests in combating racism emerged under different circumstances, Gallagher and Soper agreed that white supremacy was the chief challenge for the postwar world.
Soper’s efforts on the issue of global white supremacy began in 1942, when he was asked to prepare a position paper on “race” for a Methodist meeting, which was attended by such leftist luminaries as Vice President Henry A. Wallace (who would run for president in 1946 on the Progressive Party ticket) and Methodist bishop Francis McConnell, the sponsor of the left-wing Methodist Federation for Social Action. Soper, the consummate professor, dove deeply into the history and practice of racism by organizing an ongoing seminar on race in 1942 and 1943 at Garrett Seminary, an endeavor that included biblical scholars and church historians, but consisting mostly of missionary experts.18 Soper brought together the many ideas expressed by these professors into a single, authoritative statement on the Methodist views of race.
After hearing reports from fellow missionaries from around the world, Soper concluded that a “growing solidarity” between nonwhite peoples was emerging. Soper also warned that communism was spreading in places like China and among African Americans because it was convincing people that it was “the only movement which is taking seriously the task of brotherhood among men.” As Soper argued, Americans were constrained by their history, making it hard for them to oppose racism. If Protestants would rise up to challenge white supremacy, they would have to overcome racism, which is, as he put it, “of long standing and is rooted in our colonial history, in the feeling of superiority toward the Indians, and that this same feeling was carried over into our dealings with other races in other lands as well as in our relations with the Negroes.”19
Soper’s solution was in line with broader ecumenical Protestant thinking on racism in the 1940s. He called for a “Pacific Charter,” to be modeled on the Atlantic Charter, to grant self-determination and better economic conditions to the peoples of Asia. Moreover, eradicating racism at home, Soper concluded, would have global ramifications for the missionary movement. At home, he urged Christians to eliminate antisemitic references in their literature, and he pushed for Congress to eliminate the poll tax, extend the Fair Employment Practices Commission, and eliminate inequalities in education and social services among racial groups.20
Soper understood that he had to tread carefully. After all, the Methodist Church was segregated, and criticism of these arrangements would provoke church leaders more than discussions of poll taxes would. Without ever denouncing segregation, Soper called for a study on the segregated jurisdiction system of the Methodist Church (“to ascertain whether this plan involves anything else than separation for the largest mutual service,” he wrote cryptically) and to open up church schools and hospitals to African Americans.21 Ralph E. Diffendorfer, who served as executive secretary of the Board of Missions of the Methodist Church from 1939 to 1949, was so impressed with Soper’s work that he came to believe racism and colonialism would be the central issues for the missionary movement after the war ended. Diffendorfer therefore provided funds and connections for Soper to carry on research into racism across the globe.
Soper was no activist, but he arrived at many of the same conclusions held by Benjamin Mays, Dorothy Tilly, Channing Tobias, Thelma Stevens, Will Alexander, and Liston Pope during the World Order movement. Soper had been unaware of their work for the Commission on Church and Minority Peoples in 1942 and 1943, but by 1944 he had begun to collaborate with these figures, especially Stevens. He also began working closely with sociologist Robert Redfield and Howard University professor Rayford Logan, who lent social-scientific expertise to Soper’s research. In the mid-1940s, Soper regularly spoke with virtually every major Protestant intellectual who had an interest in racism.22 His efforts would result in the most systematic study of racism as a global phenomenon at the time.
The years of discussions and studies Soper headed in the 1940s culminated in the publication of his 1948 book, Racism: A World Issue. This text was the first systematic study of the past and present of racism across the world.23 That such a pioneering study emerged in the ecumenical Protestant milieu demonstrates the importance of international affairs for this community, and the academic resources it wielded at mid-century. Racism took a historical perspective, with each chapter devoted to exploring how racism emerged in a different region of the world. Chapters began with a description of the genesis of ethnicities in a given country, followed by a chronology of the migrations of peoples in and out of the area. Soper then demonstrated that racism in each country was not a timeless phenomenon but that it had emerged at some moment in history for specific purposes. In the countries he surveyed, including India, China, Japan, Indonesia, and South Africa, Soper revealed the tenacity of racism by showing its links with economic, religious, and linguistic differences. Soper’s book emphasized the variability of patterns in race relations, both historically and comparatively, and the complexity and uniqueness of racism in different regions of the world. A product of missionary thinking, Racism: A World Issue reflected a global frame of reference among ecumenical Protestants that was decades in the making.
Brazil and the Soviet Union as Model Societies
While Soper was deeply influenced by missionary activity, Buell Gallagher was shaped by his experiences within the United States. Gallagher had a long history of working closely with African Americans, which made him more sensitive to their mistreatment than were other Protestants. Gallagher was more critical of segregation, more open to working with secular organizations, and more willing to offer concrete political solutions to America’s domestic and international problems. One of the more notable features of his 1946 book, Color and Conscience, was his familiarity with the contemporary writings on African American history and culture. Because Gallagher had spent a decade in the Jim Crow South, his outlook was strongly shaped by the Black-white binary. His understanding of world events was distinctly American.
Color and Conscience emerged at the same historical moment as Gunner Myrdal’s more famous An American Dilemma, and both books emphasized the chasm between ideals and practices. As Gallagher put it, “Our difficulty is that, while we give theoretical assent to the idea [of racial equality], we postpone the day of ethical action until the irreversible course of history has carried us beyond the point where affirmative action is creative.”24 Gallagher’s Color and Conscience was, in a way, a radical Christian’s guide to An American Dilemma.25
The two books diverged in important ways. Historians sometimes chide Myrdal for turning segregation into a moral issue, rather than a political or economic one.26 But Gallagher wove morality together with a structural understanding of racism. And he wrote with an urgency missing in Myrdal’s book. “Our racial caste system has its historical roots in slavery but thrusts its contemporary tentacles into every crevice and cranny of the social structure throughout the nation,” Gallagher told his readers. “Slavery as ownership of chattel is gone: as a caste system, it remains.”27
Gallagher understood American racism in an international light with important consequences for America’s role in the world. “The fanatical glee with which Radio Tokyo seized upon reports of racial difficulty in the United States and beamed them toward India and the Americans south of the Rio Grande is not accidental. [The race riots in] Los Angeles, Detroit, Houston, Beaumont, Sikenston, New York, Philadelphia, and other American cities have made headlines in the nonwhite world.”28 Gallagher made an argument that would later be mobilized by Cold War liberals against Jim Crow: that racism at home undermined America’s fight against totalitarianism abroad.29 The history of American imperialism and the news of white supremacy at home aided Japan, Gallagher told his readers. If the United States wanted to gain allies against fascism, it would have to jettison white supremacy more quickly than it was doing.30
Gallagher’s goal was not only to condemn white supremacy but also to help Americans imagine an integrated future. When Protestant intellectuals imagined an America without racial segregation they looked abroad, especially to Brazil and the Soviet Union. The comparative perspective appealed to them because American history seemed to offer so little hope. One could hardly find a “better” time for race relations that America could return to. It would not be until 1955 that C. Vann Woodward wrote the pioneering work The Strange Career of Jim Crow and popularized the idea of a usable past in race relations. Woodward argued that white and Black people lived together without strict segregation for a long period after the end of slavery in 1865 and before segregation was systematically implemented in the 1890s. If Jim Crow was constructed so late, and for political reasons, Woodward argued, it could also be undone.31 But the 1940s were a period dominated by the historian U. B. Phillips, who depicted slavery in positive, uplifting terms, and the Dunning School’s books on post–Civil War Reconstruction, which argued that Reconstruction was an irresponsible failure on the part of northern radicals. Gallagher, who was thoroughly conversant with the writings of W. E. B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, and Melville J. Herskovits, came closest to a historically rooted path to ending segregation in the United States. But, in general, ecumenical Protestant intellectuals believed comparisons with other nations were the best means of provincializing American racism and imagining other ways to organize their society.
Soper and Gallagher were taking part in a broader project among mid-century intellectuals to provincialize segregation. The work that bears most resemblance to their efforts was Frank Tannenbaum’s 1946 book Slave and Citizen.32 Tannenbaum, a German Jewish historian of Latin America at Columbia University, focused his book entirely on a single question: Why were descendants of enslaved people in the United States segregated, while in Latin America they experienced fewer barriers? Tannenbaum argued that the differences in postemancipation societies, especially the differences between the United States and Brazil, were shaped by different legal and religious traditions. The Iberians inherited the Roman system of slavery and viewed the enslaved person as a contractual partner, Tannenbaum argued, and therefore, “the element of human personality was not lost” when slavery was implemented in Spanish and Portuguese colonies in the Americas.33 In British colonies, however, there was little legal precedent for slavery, and therefore few customs and legal barriers existed against the dehumanization of the enslaved person and their complete exploitation. In the United States, with its British inheritance, the slave was not subject to protection by the state nor targeted as often by Christians for conversion. In postemancipation societies, these differences in treatment carried over from slavery. “The nature of our problem is conditioned by the time it will take for the Negro to have acquired a moral personality equal to his legal one,” Tannenbaum argued. “The ‘solution’ of the Negro problem is essentially a matter of establishing the Negro in the sight of the white community as a human being equal to its own members.”34
Soper took up Tannenbaum’s cause. He emphasized the centrality of human personality, the importance of religion, and an emphasis on just how unusual the United States was in its strict racial segregation. He also spoke with ease about racial boundary crossing, including “miscegenation” and “amalgamation.” Soper shared Tannenbaum’s exaggeration of differences between Brazil and the United States, ignoring what historians now note as enduring racial hierarchies in the Latin American nation.35 Nevertheless, Brazil provided a model for the United States.
Soper noted that Brazil had slavery far later than the United States and only banned the practice in 1888, when the remaining 700,000 enslaved persons were freed by national decree. Before 1888, slavery was becoming incrementally less important to Brazilian society, and manumissions were frequent. The end of slavery in Brazil appeared easy to Soper in comparison with the United States, which fought a civil war over the issue. Although Brazilians shared with the United States a history of slavery, their Catholic faith and preservation of human personality of enslaved peoples created a nonsegregated postemancipation society, he argued.
The lax racial boundaries in Brazilian society were transmitted to the country by the Portuguese, Soper argued. Early in their history, the Portuguese brought enslaved Africans to Portugal, but they did not create strict racial separation. Over time, the enslaved Africans intermarried with the local population. “All the peoples of southern Europe are more liberal than those of northern Europe with respect to intermarriage with other races,” Soper wrote. But “none of them mingle their blood, however, more freely than do the Portuguese. They seem to be ‘color blind.’ This characteristic they naturally carried with them into Brazil.”36
In the 1940s, nothing embarrassed Protestants like an unfavorable comparison with Catholics. Readers of Soper’s book understood that Portugal and Brazil were Catholic nations, whereas the northern Europeans he chastised were predominantly Protestant. To dramatize the point, Soper employed an idea developed by historian Arnold Toynbee that racism was more prevalent in Protestant societies. Toynbee was a popular historian who in the 1940s was half-way through his ten-volume history of the world. Toynbee’s emphasis on religious ideas as central characteristics of civilizations made his work especially popular in the United States, which remained more religious than the United Kingdom, Toynbee’s home country. One of his claims, which ecumenical Protestant intellectuals dubbed the “Toynbee thesis,” attracted the most attention. Toynbee argued in his sixth volume that it was no accident that the nations with the strictest forms of racial segregation (including the United States, South Africa, Australia, and Canada) were predominantly Protestant ones. Protestants, argued Toynbee, interpreted differences between themselves and racial others as divinely ordained and they had a peculiar anxiety about their racial dominance because, as the Bible prophesized, “the last will be first and the first will be last.” The fear of reversals of power and reprisals by nonwhites made white Protestants cling tenaciously to their feelings of superiority, Toynbee argued.37
Ecumenical Protestant intellectuals used the Toynbee thesis to criticize ministers and churchgoers, particularly those who held fundamentalist views and affirmed the biblical literalism that Toynbee seemed to blame for racism. Galen Fisher, the former missionary and activist against Japanese internment, was the strongest proponent of the thesis. It was at the heart of a position paper he delivered to the Commission on Church and Minority Peoples in April 1945.38 Fisher thought that the contrast Toynbee made between Protestant and Catholic civilizations was too clearly cut, but he was equally insistent that “racism today is most acute where Whites of Protestant antecedents dominate.” With the Boers of South Africa in particular, their explicit use of Old Testament metaphors to justify their oppression of native Africans and their rebellion against the British confirmed the thesis for Fisher. Aside from its explanatory power, the Toynbee thesis affirmed the theological liberalism of ecumenical Protestant intellectuals and bolstered their confidence about leading the more conservative laity and clergy away from their outdated beliefs.39
Soper was no radical, but by contrasting the United States with Brazil he occasionally celebrated ideas that in the 1940s were more often associated with the Communist Party than with Protestant ministers. For example, he praised the Catholic acceptance of interracial marriage. He argued that, in the Brazilian context, it was good for the “serious” Europeans to mix with the “gay” Africans. There was already a lot of intermixture by 1890, when the last census that included race as a category was taken in Brazil. Soper relativized the American conventions of racial classifications by attacking the “one-drop rule.” In the United States, “ ‘a drop of black blood’ in a person makes him a Negro,” he wrote, but “in Brazil a slight amount of white blood in a person makes him a white.”40 Political leaders of Brazil also applauded the creation of a distinctly Brazilian race, according to Soper, and celebrated each of the racial heritages of this new people. In contrasting the two societies, Soper exaggerated the racial inclusion of Brazil. He did not ignore the social differences between light- and dark-skinned people in Brazil, but he did minimize them. “The problem is clearly one of caste, or social and economic standing, and not of race, but it is just as evident that it has racial roots,” wrote Soper.41 He believed Brazil was in the process of overcoming the racial divide. Nonetheless, his point about the differences between the two countries was startling. In the 1940s it was quite a thing to be celebrating the racial mixing of Brazilians and promoting the country’s racial practices as a model for Americans to follow.
Soper used Brazil’s example to argue that the social conventions of the United States are not only provincial but also that they could be rapidly transformed. The racial fluidity in Brazil pointed to the malleability of human nature. “Brazilians are a part of our humanity, but with a different background, exposed to a different social attitude, and definitely educated to think of races as equal, not innately inferior or superior,” Soper wrote. “These people have shown that human nature can react very differently to the fundamental problem of racial intermingling. Increasingly we must study the problem from their angle and learn the values which they find in practices far different from our own.”42 Soper was instructing his fellow Americans that alternatives to segregation existed. They only had to look beyond America’s borders.
Gallagher and Soper looked to the Soviet Union, along with Brazil, for an example of state policy and social practices that offered an alternative to American segregation. They were buoyed by the American wartime alliance with the USSR and sought to promote Soviet nationality policy while muting their criticism of communism and holding out hope for incremental reform in the communist country. Gallagher and Soper did so at a perilous time following World War II, when politicians like Harry Truman and Winston Churchill were sounding the alarm about communist aggression. Yet Soper and Gallagher found much to like in Soviet practices, and they believed, however naively, that a shared respect for the rights of ethnic and racial minorities could become a basis for cooperation between the two nations.
The Soviet Union’s rapidly transformed attitude toward Jews stood out to Gallagher and Soper. “At no point can the Russian change in attitude toward alien groups be studied more advantageously” than in the case of the Jews, wrote Soper.43 In the early twentieth century, the Russian Empire sponsored violent pogroms against Jews. But only a few decades later, the USSR celebrated national differences and incorporated all peoples into the state and society, and welcomed Jews into public life, Soper believed. The scale of the migration from the Pale of Settlement to Moscow, Saint Petersburg, and other Soviet cities dwarfed the immigration of Jews to the United States and Palestine prior to World War II.44 Like other observers, Soper missed the rising antisemitism in the postwar USSR. And he said little about the forced expulsion of Germans, Tatars, and other nationalities during the war, which were matters of public knowledge. Despite these omissions, he got a lot right about the socialist country. Soper lauded the Soviet policy of promoting indigenous languages, barring discrimination by law, promoting a respect of national cultures and traditions, and involving peripheral peoples in all aspects of social and political life.
It made sense for Soper to see the Soviet Union as a model society in the 1940s. He looked to a country that, according to Yuri Slezkine, “was the world’s first state to institutionalize ethnoterritorial federalism, classify all citizens according to their biological nationalities and formally prescribe preferential treatment of certain ethnically defined populations.”45 While Karl Marx wrote about imperialism as a force that would thrust the backward peoples of Asia into the modern world, Vladimir Lenin, the Soviet Union’s first leader, used anti-imperialism as a weapon in his revolutionary struggle. During World War I and the Russian civil war that followed, he renounced territorial concessions, called for national independence for colonial nations, and granted cultural autonomy to many nationalities in the former Russian Empire. According to Francine Hirsch, Soviet experts pursued a policy of “double assimilation” within the USSR, which encouraged people to become Soviet by becoming members of an ethnonationality.46 Lenin created new republics, like the Belarussian and Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republics, which would have some linguistic and cultural autonomy, while remaining part of the Soviet Union’s political community.47
The Soviet Union provided a model for how to deal with a plurality of racial minorities in one nation, according to Soper. The differences between the USSR and United States resulted from the differing legal regimes, he explained. The United States practiced the “melting pot theory,” in which immigrants were expected to “merge, lose their former distinctive features, and become completely amalgamated,” whereas the USSR had a policy of “local and racial autonomy,” with a stated purpose of retaining “distinctiveness, language, traditions, and customs.” The USSR also incorporated anti-racist language into its constitution. Soper tied together the problem of racial bias with enumerated rights, arguing that we are “beginning to realize that the racial problem is not a problem by itself but one which is a part of another, that of basic human rights.”48
Gallagher also applauded the USSR, praising the country’s legislation “against any expression, oral or written, of any kind of antipathy or prejudice between national and racial groups within the Soviet Union.”49 Gallagher was especially appreciative of the active recognition bestowed on minorities in the USSR: “The Soviets have made a thoroughgoing effort to recognize the values of each minority and its culture, however small in numbers. It is not merely that the negative job has been done in making sure that ‘race’ constitutes no disadvantage to any person within the Union. It is much more than that. The positive values of each distinctive culture—in language, customs, costumes, dietary habits and tastes, art, literature, drama, education, religion, and the like—are openly encouraged and carefully nurtured.”50 It was not enough to get rid of racism, Gallagher argued. The United States needed to do more to actively include racial minorities in the cultural, social, and political life of the country. Gallagher and Soper both praised ethnic pluralism and celebrated the USSR as a model multicultural society.
In 1947, Soper’s celebration of Soviet policy was surprising and unusual. The Cold War had begun, and ministers across the country were warning about the dangers of Soviet atheism. Just a few years later, evangelist Billy Graham would be catapulted to fame, in part, for attacking the USSR. Despite this hostility, or perhaps because of it, Soper continued to insist that there was plenty to praise in the communist country. He was hoping to bridge the Cold War divide by finding common goals for the two countries to work on. Soper argued that the Soviet Union’s casting away of barriers to fundamental freedoms was “one of the greatest steps forward in human progress,” which placed “man, the common man, equal and free … in the center of the entire program.”51 According to Soper, this was the misleading part about the USSR: Stalin might seem like “virtually a dictator,” but at the bottom of society, at the level of the soviet, “there is real democracy.”52 And he argued that this ought to give Americans hope for the future of the USSR and for Soviet-American relations.
Soper defined democracy in ethnoracial terms, arguing that true democracy is constituted by people working together to run their society while celebrating their ethnic differences. Again, Soper returned to language, saying that the Soviet policy was a good one, requiring everyone to learn a single language while also cultivating regional ones. There was much to be done in the USSR, particularly in improving the treatment of religious minorities, he wrote. However, “With all this the Soviet Union stands before the world as the only land, with the exception of Brazil, where racism is completely repudiated; where no assumption of inherent superiority of any group over any other is allowed; where the minority groups are possessed of a new self-respect; where youth can allow their ambitions to soar, knowing that there is no extraneous, arbitrary barrier to fulfillment, except the limits of their own abilities and perseverance.”53 Resisting the emerging logic of the Cold War, Soper insisted that the Soviet Union was a model of racial pluralism and urged Americans to take it seriously.
While discussing race and ethnicity in the Soviet Union, Soper challenged the conventions of the United States and of Protestant Christianity. He argued that when Soviet policy is “reviewed against the background of the Russian past it fills one with hope” for countries like the United States. It should remind us that “no fundamental change can be expected … without some powerful motivation” like communism.54 It went without saying that Soper believed Christianity would be that “powerful motivation” in the United States.
In order to shame American Christians, Gallagher turned to the work communists in the United States had been doing to help African Americans. Calling Christian activities on behalf of minorities “meager, halting, and largely ineffective,” he chastised “the Christian Church, which includes well over half the adult population of these United States,” for not producing “an ethical attack on color caste which approaches the vigor and virility of the attack launched by the American Communists.”55 Gallagher was no fan of communism, but he also recognized the shortcomings of American Protestants in light of the energy the Communist Party devoted to fighting racism.56
Both Gallagher and Soper called for a Christian crusade against racism, which would aid America’s domestic minorities and the country’s foreign relations. The Cold War was just beginning, and, Gallagher pointed out in 1946, the Soviet Union would not cooperate with the United States so long as segregation continued. And the nonwhite peoples of the world would not come to America’s aid if tensions with the USSR worsened. Whether American Protestants wanted friendly relations with the USSR or saw communism as Christianity’s main competitor, they needed to jettison racism quickly. Gallagher and Soper were providing models for their country to do just that.
What gave these authors such confidence in Christianity’s ability to overcome racism? For Gallagher the sources of his hope were in the historical precedents of abolitionism and the wave of missionaries to the American South in the wake of Reconstruction. He was also encouraged by the World Order movement. Others, like Galen Fisher, saw hope in the work of missionaries around the world. Fisher credited ecumenical Protestant missionaries working in India, China, and other nations for stoking a racial and national self-respect among colonial peoples. He took pride in the overrepresentation of Christians in the Korean independence movement and in the professional classes of China. He also noted the contribution of the YMCA to Indian autonomy. The organization appointed an Indian to run its national bureaucracy, and he became the first Indian to head a nationwide organization in the colony. Fisher believed that Christianity abroad was promoting modernization and decolonization.57
The faith that Gallagher, Soper, and Fisher placed in the missionary movement is hard to square with the long history of Christian imperialism.58 Yet their generous assessment was shared by many others in the 1940s, including the elder statesman of Pan-Africanism, W. E. B. Du Bois. In his 1945 book, Color and Democracy: Colonies and Peace, Du Bois began a chapter on “Missions and Mandates” with a call for the creation of “a new mandates commission implemented by that unselfish devotion to the well-being of mankind which has often, if not always, inspired the missionary crusade.”59 Like Gallagher, Du Bois drew inspiration “especially in the Christian missions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; in the suppression of slavery and the slave trade; and in the various attempts to alleviate, if not abolish, poverty and to do away with ignorance.”60
Du Bois, who was Gallagher’s longtime acquaintance, also noted Christianity’s history of imperialism and chauvinism, but quickly moved past it. According to Du Bois, “It is all too clear today that if we are to have a sufficient motive for the uplift of backward peoples, for the redemption and progress of colonials, such a motive can be found only in the faith and ideals of organized religion.”61 As it happened, Du Bois and the NAACP were cooperating with the Reverend Michael Scott, a white missionary in South West Africa. At the United Nations, Scott publicized the devastating effects of South Africa’s policies in the trusteeship of South West Africa and successfully prevented South Africa from annexing this former German colony.62 Du Bois disavowed personal faith, but he believed in the ability of the Christian missionary project to undermine colonialism.
The belief that the ecumenical Protestant churches would rise up against segregation was a faith that the Protestant establishment maintained through the 1940s and well after. But for those who investigated the history of American churches, the real tenuousness of this faith became clear. As the Commission on Church and Minority Peoples had already shown, segregation ran deep in the country’s churches. It was not surprising that Gallagher had to reach back one hundred years to the abolition movement or that Soper had to reach beyond America’s shores to find models for fighting racism.
Two observations haunted Gallagher and Soper. The first was that the officially atheistic USSR and Catholic Brazil, along with the Communist Party in the United States, were taking the lead in fighting racial segregation and white supremacy. The second shock was the widespread acceptance of segregation among white Protestants in the United States. Soper and Gallagher hoped that the World Order movement would change the hearts and minds of American Christians. Since little in Protestantism’s recent history had been effective in overcoming segregation, a departure was needed from the recent past. Like advocates of the social gospel, who reached back to a distant past to justify their theological departures, so too did white anti-racist intellectuals reach back to earlier traditions like abolitionism and outward to the missionary movement to justify their attack on racism and segregation. They also linked their worldwide explorations of racism to the new language of human rights.
Soper and Gallagher encouraged ecumenical Protestants to see human rights as a condemnation of structural racism and a call for political solutions. Like the Commission on Church and Minority Peoples before them, Soper and Gallagher viewed racism as a structural problem. The first step Soper and Gallagher took toward a structural view of racism was in separating out prejudice and segregation. Soper pointed out that “ill will” toward African Americans was often not present in segregated churches. Segregation maintains itself not in fear or hatred of other races, but through “racism, the assumption of inherent superiority of white over black.” Racism can be expressed in “benevolent pity” or charity, but it always presumes a racial hierarchy, Soper wrote.63 This solidification of racial attitudes into social conventions occurred all over the world, with India’s caste system standing as a prominent example. In India, Soper argued, early feelings of racial superiority had created the caste system, but the early motivations had faded away. He felt that in the United States, as in India, racism could not be overcome without dismantling segregation.64
As an expression of this structural understanding of racism, Gallagher enumerated a series of rights that the Federal Council had been promoting in the 1940s. These included color-blind hiring and the right to join a union; the “opportunity and encouragement to register, vote, run for office, and serve when elected”; and access to housing and public facilities, including “restaurants, hotels, trains, and buses.”65 These social and economic rights had been explored by the wartime Committee on Church and Minority Peoples, affirmed by the Federal Council in 1946, and prefigured the social and economic human rights expressed by the Federal Council and the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.
Following through on this understanding of racism, Gallagher went further than Soper in seeking a political solution to Jim Crow. He ran for Congress in 1948 on a platform that emphasized “strengthening the United Nations and correcting the immoralities of racism, narrow nationalism, and kindred evils which endanger permanent world peace.”66 He had been recruited by unions in Berkeley and Oakland to run for office, and, although he ran as a Democrat, Gallagher aligned his platform with Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party, the left-wing alternative to Harry Truman’s Democrats.67 Although Gallagher found broad support in the Bay Area, he could not overcome the Red-baiting attacks waged against him by his anti-communist opponent. He lost by a very narrow margin of 49 to 51 percent.68
Few ecumenical Protestant intellectuals became so directly involved in electoral politics as Gallagher had. But the ideas that drove him to run for Congress were becoming more widespread among ecumenical Protestant clergy. The global frame of reference promoted by the World Order movement and the politically oriented anti-racism developed by the Commission on Church and Minority Peoples merged together in the postwar writings of Gallagher and Soper. The global understanding of racism they promoted fit neatly with the universal character of 1940s-era human rights talk. Although neither Gallagher nor Soper were directly involved in the Federal Council’s deliberations about human rights, their work influenced the organization’s pathbreaking declaration of human rights in 1948.
Human Rights and the Attack on Global Racism
The leaders of the Federal Council of Churches believed that a distinctly Protestant statement on human rights was needed in 1948, just as the United Nations was completing its work on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Unlike the vast majority of human rights declarations that came out in the late 1940s, the Federal Council was virtually alone among predominantly white American groups in focusing attention on racism. And, as it turned out, the Federal Council’s 1948 human rights statement would announce the organization’s stand against segregation to American churchgoers, to the US public, and to the world.
The Federal Council had already gone on record in 1946 in opposition to segregation but did its best to keep its political implications from everyday churchgoers and from the American public. The human rights statement, on the other hand, could not be kept under wraps. For one thing, Harry Truman’s President’s Commission on Civil Rights had delivered in 1947 its report, To Secure These Rights, which asked Congress and the president to implement reforms that would diminish segregation in the United States. Congress demurred, but Truman acted to slowly desegregate the military and the federal workforce on his own authority. He also incorporated many of the commission’s recommendations into his reelection planks in 1948 as he faced Republican nominee Thomas Dewey, the Progressive Henry Wallace, and the segregationist candidate, Strom Thurmond. In this tense political atmosphere, any statement on segregation by the Federal Council was bound to attract attention. Human rights became the means through which ecumenical Protestants publicly announced their attack on segregation.
The Federal Council’s human rights statement came out of their regular biennial meeting, which took place at the end of 1948 in Cincinnati, Ohio, yet another city from a state whose convention industry proved so hospitable to interracial assemblies.69 The sixteen-member commission drafting the human rights declaration was composed largely of veterans of the Federal Council, representing four of its departments, and many were old hands of the Commission on Church and Minority Peoples and the Department of Race Relations, including Channing Tobias, Will W. Alexander, Liston Pope, and Dorothy Height. The group drafting the human rights statement also included University of Texas president Homer P. Rainey and Methodist minister Nelson Cruikshank, who was then working for the American Federation of Labor and would later write the 1956 Social Security Act. They were joined by Frederick Nolde, the head of a church commission that had been working on human rights and religious liberty for several years.70
The drafting committee began its work on November 6, 1948, which left its members less than a month to outline a human rights statement. The quick pace meant that the authors had to rely on precedent. The document’s global viewpoint, its emphasis on social, economic, and political rights, and its singling out of racism as the biggest threat to world order all pointed to the influence of the works produced by ecumenical Protestant intellectuals in the 1940s. Whereas the World Council of Churches, dominated in large part by European theologians, made a statement in 1948 that emphasized the human right of religious liberty, the Federal Council’s emphasis on desegregation was unmistakable.
The Federal Council’s 1948 statement on human rights began by observing that human beings “are God’s creatures and have infinite worth in His sight.” People had a responsibility to obey God’s moral law, but they also had God-given rights, which are meant “for the state to embody … in its own legal system and to ensure their observance in practice.” The first rights listed were “Personal Rights,” including freedom of religion and conscience; freedom of speech, press, and inquiry; freedom of association and assembly; and freedom from arbitrary arrest, police brutality, and mob violence. The Federal Council argued that the rights “have been for long generally recognized in our society” but were “in jeopardy at present.” The ecumenical Protestant leaders added an anti-racist emphasis that had been previously missing in discussions of personal freedoms. The Federal Council announced that these rights “cannot be obtained under a system of racial segregation,” and it reaffirmed its earlier “renunciation of the pattern of segregation as … a violation of the gospel of love and human brotherhood. As proof of their sincerity, the churches must work for a non-segregated church and a non-segregated society.”71
Economic and social rights were newer to Americans. Among the economic human rights the council enumerated were an adequate standard of living and a family wage, the right to employment with fair compensation, and the right to join a labor union. And all Americans were entitled to the social right to adequate living space, the right to education and professional training, the right to recreational facilities, to use communal social services, to adequate health services, to transportation on the basis of equality, and “to receive equal service from businesses and persons serving the public, such as stores, theaters, hotels and restaurants.” The political rights included the right to vote secretly for alternative choices, equality before the law, the right to run for public office, the right to participate fully in all branches of government, including the military, and the right to organize peaceful political activity.72 As with personal rights, the ecumenical leaders stressed that the social, economic, and political rights were incompatible with Jim Crow. The Federal Council’s list of human rights encompassed virtually every demand of the African American political struggle of the era.
Americans took notice of ecumenical Protestants’ denunciation of segregation. Front-page headlines across the country pronounced, “End of Racial Segregation Asked by Churches’ Council,” according to the New York Times, and “Protestant Council Indorses Complete End of Segregation,” according to the Washington Post. The Chicago Defender noted that a Federal Council delegation brought the human rights statement to a White House meeting with President Truman. An array of religious institutions—radio programs, the religious press, schools, and local churches—spread this message from coast to coast. The Federal Council took a public stance in 1948 that racism within the United States was a human rights issue.73
While the press spread the Federal Council’s message that racial equality was a human right, others resisted it. Defenders of segregation understood that human rights were a challenge to Jim Crow. John M. Alexander of the Southern Presbyterians was on the drafting committee for this document. The Southern Presbyterian denomination had joined the Federal Council in 1944 and proved to be the organization’s most devoted supporter of segregation. It was typical for commissions like the human rights working group to include one or two conservative white southerners in order to represent what was often called the “Southern viewpoint,” and Alexander served his role by delivering a sharp criticism of the human rights document. Clashing with the new perspective of ecumenical Protestants swayed by the ideas of Gallagher and Soper, Alexander chastised his fellow Protestants for failing to recognize that “social attitudes change slowly.” Contrary to Soper’s belief that the law could change attitudes, as it had in the USSR, Alexander argued that when laws move ahead of public opinion they do more harm than good. Instead of social engineering through the law, it is better to cultivate “patience and good will,” he argued. Furthermore, “constitutions should not be ignored” when discussing laws, Alexander said. It was a gesture to the states’ rights argument that so many white Southern Protestants found persuasive.74
Alexander reminded the human rights drafting committee in 1948 that the South had a lot of peculiarities—slavery, war, reconstruction, and “conquered territory attitudes”—that would make change slower in that region than others. Referring to northern hypocrisy on the issue of segregation, he urged the Federal Council to take up the fight “in regions that do not have our inherent complexes.” Changes in the North or West “would speak louder than statements and pronouncements.” As for mob violence, Alexander argued to his colleagues, the South had done quite a bit of good on its own, without federal interference. He ended his comments with statistics that he believed showed that whites were rarely violent toward African Americans.75
Alexander’s comments were received respectfully, but he was outvoted. At Cincinnati in 1948, the human rights statement was approved without dissent but with numerous abstentions. Even in defeat, Alexander did not want to air his grievances and create discord with his fellow Protestants despite the high stakes of the human rights document. But others did. J. McDowell Richards, also a Southern Presbyterian representative to the Federal Council, spoke out against the human rights statement and abstained from voting because, he said, “We are trying to achieve in a moment what will take many years to achieve,” and that he believed a “measure of voluntary segregation is expedient.” Then a Methodist bishop from Pennsylvania tried to bury the human rights statement by having it referred to the Executive Committee of the Federal Council so that it could be revised and perhaps gotten rid of.76
But they were both met with opposition. The last speaker on the issue, the Reverend L. K. Jackson, an African American minister from Gary, Indiana, gave a moving address. “Most of you do not know the horror of having money in your pocket and not being able to buy food or being sleepy and not being able to find a place to sleep,” he told his mostly white colleagues. Jackson’s speech was “roundly cheered.”77 The motion to refer the document to the Federal Council’s Executive Committee was withdrawn, and the human rights statement became the official position of the Federal Council of Churches.
The fight was not over. Alexander waited until after the 1948 conference to publicly air his misgivings about the document. Reiterating the go-slow argument, he donned the mantle of Niebuhrian realism, arguing that “the realistic approach” was to “start where we are, that is to say, within the framework of social segregation” and to use the formula of “equal but separate” to ensure “progress for the Negro in the South.” Quoting a “prominent theologian”—probably Niebuhr himself—Alexander warned against the dangers of the “perfectionists” whose utopian goals cannot be reached right away.78
It is not surprising that the Southern Presbyterians dissented from the human rights statement, given the then recent developments in their denomination. In 1946, in the midst of a coordinated renunciation of segregation by a number of Christian organizations, the Southern Presbyterians formed a study commission to consider whether Black Presbyterian churches should be expelled from the denomination and placed into a new segregated denomination. Even though they did not follow through, the Southern Presbyterians were the only denomination affiliated with the Federal Council to become more supportive of segregation in the mid-1940s. Even the Southern Baptists, who were not members of the Federal Council, passed several resolutions calling for better race relations and improved conditions for African Americans during this period.79
Southern Presbyterians like Alexander and Richards, and others from different denominations and regions who shared their views, were segregationists of a particular kind. They were what Martin Luther King Jr. would describe in “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” as white moderates who were “more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice” and “paternalistically” believed they could “set the timetable for another man’s freedom.”80 To the right of these white moderates, in the 1940s (and in the 1960s) were theological racists. Theological racists argued that God ordained the races to live apart from one another and cited stories like the curse of Ham in the book of Genesis to support their cause. Theological racism was especially widespread among the grassroots of southern denominations.81
White moderates abetted the political goals of theological racists, but they refused to do so on the grounds of biblical curses and God’s commandments. By the end of 1948 very few ecumenical Protestant leaders were willing to publicly support white supremacy, and fewer still were willing to root it in Christian teachings. Even Alexander and Richards acknowledged desegregation as an ultimate goal. Sensing the ground shifting beneath their feet, Alexander and Richards were merely proclaiming what had been common sense among white ecumenical Protestant leaders a few years earlier. They spoke about race in the same way that ecumenical leaders had in the 1930s: that Christianity was committed to better race relations but improvement would be slow, would occur largely through education, and changes would only happen in some indefinite future. Many ecumenical Protestants, now committed to human rights, were leaving Alexander and Richards behind.
The Federal Council’s 1948 commitment to human rights showed that ecumenical Protestants leaped beyond their past moderation on civil rights. They did so in contrast to white moderates like Alexander and Richards, as well as organizations like the National Council of Christians and Jews, which was committed to combatting “prejudice” while remaining politically neutral toward legal discrimination and segregation.82 That human rights were widely seen in opposition to segregation demonstrates that ecumenical Protestants believed, along with Soper and Gallagher, that racism was a serious threat to world order. Moreover, it is clear from both the Federal Council’s support and from the strong reaction of Alexander and Richards that calls for human rights were reshaping America’s religious politics.83
Whereas the 1946 “Non-Segregated Church” statement provoked only a few minor quarrels, two years later the Federal Council’s statement on human rights led to a public fight between anti-racist activists and white moderate Protestants. The 1948 human rights statement caused open controversy, exposing a widening fault line between a faction of ecumenical Protestants moving quickly to the left on the issue of segregation and white moderates who defended the status quo on Jim Crow. Human rights marked the culmination of the international and structural thinking on race by ecumenical Protestants like Gallagher and Soper. Human rights also signaled decades of bitter battles to come between anti-racist activists and defenders of segregation that would leave American Protestants deeply divided.
From One World to Two
Ecumenical Protestant intellectuals’ concerns about Jim Crow at home led them beyond America’s shores in search of an unsegregated future for the United States. They found it in the racial cosmopolitanism of Brazil and in the nationalities policy of the Soviet Union. When ecumenical Protestant intellectuals thought about human rights, they were imagining a future for the United States in which the country’s racial conventions would be overcome and the examples of foreign models would be followed.
As human rights became the vehicle through which the new structural and global understanding of racism was delivered to the American public, race became one of the first fault lines to emerge among ecumenical Protestants in the postwar era. As some ecumenical Protestant leaders moved from a personal to a structural and global understanding of racism, which they codified in the form of human rights in 1948, others resisted. Alexander and Richards defended the racial status quo and publicly sparred with their fellow Protestants. In the process, both the criticism of segregation by Soper and Gallagher, as well as the defense of Jim Crow by Alexander and Richards, contributed to the polarization of their religious community.
The belief that racism ought to be seen in a global context, linking together domestic and foreign concerns, would be reframed easily enough as the Cold War took hold of American politics. Ecumenical Protestants would join other liberals in arguing that segregation in the United States undermined America’s role in the world and its Cold War against the Soviet Union.84 But the Cold War would pose a broader challenge for ecumenical Protestants, threatening to undermine the very foundation of the universalism they had so carefully crafted during the war years. As their “one world” outlook was confronted with the bipolar framework of the Cold War, Protestantism itself would become increasingly divided into two worlds.