CHAPTER 7

Segregation Is a Sin

In 1948, the Federal Council of Churches announced that segregation was incompatible with human rights. Soon after, prominent voices and influential institutions rededicated themselves to creating a “non-segregated church and a non-segregated society.” By denouncing segregation in light of global moral standards, ecumenical Protestant leaders empowered activists to do more to fight racism.¹ If African Americans were endowed with universal rights, these Protestant activists argued, then the United States should reflect human rights norms in both custom and law. In other words, it was time for Jim Crow to go.

Among the activists empowered by the human rights movement were Dorothy Tilly, Benjamin Mays, J. Oscar Lee, and Eugene Carson Blake. These women and men made important contributions to the movement to end Jim Crow from the 1940s to the 1960s. Tilly’s participation in Harry Truman’s President’s Commission on Civil Rights, for example, transformed theological commitments into a political platform. In such ways, ecumenical Protestants helped shape the very terms of the debate about racism. But it was not only a matter of ideas and platforms. Ecumenical Protestant activists knocked on doors to get signatures on petitions against restrictive housing covenants, filed briefs with the Supreme Court in cases that overturned discriminatory laws, and mobilized to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Although historians have been slow to appreciate their contributions, especially during the 1940s and 1950s, ecumenical Protestants fought segregation in both word and deed.²

Among the important legacies of ecumenical Protestant activism against segregation was the polarization of their religious community. As some ecumenical Protestants sought to end Jim Crow, they encountered massive resistance among their own ranks. Some white ministers and churchgoers did not take kindly to the attacks on segregation, and they resisted in whatever ways they could. Ecumenical Protestants split along the fault lines of race and region, as well as along the clergy-laity gap. Segregationists affiliated with the Federal Council of Churches (after 1950, the National Council of Churches) subtly shifted their defense of Jim Crow over time. By the 1950s the days of evoking the curse of Ham and other biblical stories were largely gone. More and more, they turned to political arguments like states’ rights and constitutional originalism in support of the racial status quo in the South. This subtle but important transformation acted as a bridge for some believers to the modern conservative movement.

The resistance to integration ecumenical Protestants encountered forced them to shift tactics in the mid-1950s. Despite their important political accomplishments, ecumenical activists made virtually no headway in integrating churches themselves. As 11:00 A.M. on Sunday morning remained the most segregated hour of the week, ecumenical Protestant activists turned their attention instead to universities and their students. Ecumenical Protestant college students were exposed to some of the more radical ideas about “revolution” circulating in international Protestant institutions. They emerged in 1960 on the front lines of the fight for racial justice in the United States. On the whole, the ecumenical Protestant mobilization against racism in the 1940s and 1950s made important contributions to desegregation and served as a tributary to the civil rights movement while also dividing America’s religious communities.

From “Social Enlightenment” to “Social Reform”

Ecumenical Protestants’ human rights talk caught the attention of poet and critic Alain Locke in 1946. He believed that “many churchmen are returning to [an antiracist Christianity] after years, almost generations, of temporizing and compromise.” Pronouncements at that time gave Locke “renewed hope” that progress against segregation would be made. He cautioned that “one cannot, of course, expect social enlightenment automatically to convert itself into social reform, but one is a necessary preface to the other, and throughout history they have never been far apart.”³

In fact, ecumenical Protestant activists were making a major push for social reform in the 1940s. The most important sign that Locke was onto something was the ecumenical Protestant participation in Harry Truman’s President’s Committee on Civil Rights. The group’s groundbreaking October 1947 report, To Secure These Rights, would set the civil rights agenda for the next two decades. The President’s Committee was formed when the National Emergency Committee Against Mob Violence approached Truman in 1946. This umbrella group, which included the Federal Council of Churches, was concerned about a wave of lynchings across the country that targeted Black veterans returning home from the war. In December 1946 Truman issued Executive Order 9808, which created the President’s Committee on Civil Rights. It was nicknamed the “Noah’s Ark” for having pairs of representatives from major Democratic Party constituencies—two labor leaders, two businessmen, two southerners, and two African Americans.⁴ The committee also reflected the Judeo-Christian trinity of a rabbi, an ecumenical Protestant minister, and a Catholic layman.

Despite this burgeoning pluralism, most of the committee members belonged to ecumenical Protestant denominations, reflecting the continued power of the religion. Three of the committee’s members had close ties to ecumenical Protestant life. White southerner Dorothy Tilly and African American activist Channing Tobias had been on the Federal Council’s wartime Committee on Church and Minority Peoples and had a long record of anti-racist activism.⁵ Tilly had grown up in rural Georgia, the daughter of a Methodist minister. Throughout her life, she had been active in the Methodist Church, especially in its social action committees and women’s organizations. Exposure to the poverty of African American children led Tilly to a long career of activism against lynching, unequal education, racism in the courtrooms, and ultimately against Jim Crow itself.⁶ Joining Tilly and Tobias on the committee was Episcopal bishop Henry Knox Sherrill, who would later serve as the first president of the National Council of Churches.⁷

To Secure These Rights framed the issue of civil rights in global terms, it emphasized the role of the federal government in dismantling Jim Crow, and it outlined a step-by-step program for carrying out its agenda. The report borrowed the ideas and language of Gunner Myrdal’s pathbreaking book, An American Dilemma, declaring that “the greatest hope for the future is the increasing awareness by more and more Americans of the gulf between our civil rights principles and our practices.”⁸ The American liberal tradition, the report argued, was best articulated in the United Nations’ call for “international cooperation and action” on “human rights.” With international attention focused on human rights, “It would indeed be ironical if in our own country the argument should prevail that safeguarding the rights of the individual is the exclusive, or even the primary concern of local government,” the report’s authors pointed out. Committee members also demonstrated their anti-communist credentials by arguing that lynchings undermined America’s fight against the Soviet Union. Broadening civil rights was the right thing to do in light of America’s commitment to human rights, the committee argued, but it would also aid the country’s foreign policy aims.⁹ Finally, like the Federal Council, To Secure These Rights announced that the segregationist formula of separate but equal “brands the Negro with the mark of inferiority and asserts that he is not fit to associate with white people.”¹⁰ Separate but equal, they declared, was never practiced and never could be. Nothing short of desegregating the country could fulfill America’s liberal principles.

When it was issued, the report outlined specific policy proposals, many of which had already been endorsed by ecumenical Protestant groups. To Secure These Rights included support for a federal anti-lynching law, ending poll taxes, reparations for Japanese American families, removal of Asian exclusion laws, desegregation of the military, a permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission, legislation outlawing restrictive covenants, and integration of public services.¹¹

There were important divisions within the commission. Tilly believed that the strategy of going after segregated schooling in the South was a mistake. When the issue of withholding federal aid to segregated schools came up, Tilly opposed it on the grounds that it would harm southern children, both Black and white, and would undermine progress in the region. “The South will stay ignorant before it will be forced to having non-segregated schools,” Tilly warned. Although Sherill agreed with Tilly, they were outvoted by a majority that included Tobias, who urged the federal government not to fund segregated schools.¹²

Despite these disagreements, Bishop Sherrill’s endorsement of To Secure These Rights was a bellwether of postwar ecumenical Protestantism. Sherrill possessed a conservative temperament, and his Episcopalian denomination tended to be circumspect about controversial topics like race.¹³ And so he was cautious on the President’s Committee: Little that he endorsed in the report had not already been endorsed by several ecumenical bodies. After To Secure These Rights was issued, the Federal Council strongly supported it. “We cannot hope to influence other peoples to accept the Christian way of life or other nations to accept the democratic principles we proclaim, unless we can demonstrate in our own community living that we take them seriously and are striving to translate them into effective practice.”¹⁴ By 1947 ecumenical Protestant activists fighting segregation no longer felt isolated. Powerful leaders like Sherrill supported their work.

Figure 11. J. Oscar Lee speaking about US segregation in Nuremberg, Germany, in the early 1950s. Lee headed the Federal Council of Churches’ (after 1950, the National Council of Churches’) Department of Race Relations. INTERFOTO / Alamy Stock Photo.

To Secure These Rights provided a roadmap for ecumenical Protestants working to get rid of Jim Crow. Since George Haynes was now retired and Tobias had moved on from the YMCA, leadership of the Federal Council’s efforts was passed on to the young activist J. Oscar Lee, who became the new head of the Federal Council’s Department of Race Relations. He had grown up in Philadelphia and attended nearby Lincoln University, a historically Black college. He received degrees from Yale, Union Theological Seminary in New York, and Union Seminary in Virginia. Lee had spent World War II organizing migrant workers in Connecticut. At the Federal Council, Lee was the only African American to hold an executive position.¹⁵

Limited by a modest budget, Lee focused on coordinating ecumenical Protestant groups in the late 1940s. He organized annual retreats with social action groups, which allowed him to take the pulse of Protestant anti-racist activism. Some of what Lee heard was not new. The Northern Presbyterians created an institute for local ministers to learn “the techniques of building an integrated church.” They also created a program called “Adventures in Brotherhood,” which encouraged “exchange visits” between Black and white children. Northern Presbyterians were working to integrate some of their youth councils, including several in the South. Galen Weaver, the head of the Congregationalist denomination’s anti-racist activities, led roundtable discussions about race that had involved 2,200 Protestant leaders. Weaver also helped orchestrate the “Vermont Plan,” which sent African American children from New York City to stay with white families.¹⁶

Lee noticed that these well-worn tactics were accompanied by a new emphasis on lawsuits. The Congregational Council for Social Action, for example, had filed two amicus curiae briefs in landmark civil rights cases. The first was the groundbreaking Shelley v. Kraemer (1948) case, which made racial housing covenants—contracts designed to prevent nonwhites from purchasing a house—unenforceable. The second was Takahashi v. Fish and Game (1948), which overturned bans on fishing licenses for Japanese immigrants.¹⁷ The Detroit Council of Churches took on two civil rights cases. One was a police brutality case, stemming from the shooting in the back of fifteen-year-old Leon Mosley in 1948. The other was the “Harrison Street” housing case, pursued on behalf of an African American family trying to purchase a home in a predominantly white neighborhood.¹⁸

Getting more involved in party politics was also becoming the norm in the late 1940s. The Virginia Council of Churches worked with legislators in the Virginia General Assembly in 1947 to introduce a bill to end de jure segregation in the state. The YWCA representative Dorothy Height reported to Lee that she regularly appeared before congressional hearings. Like the Congregationalists, the YWCA filed amicus curiae briefs in several civil rights cases. Height was among a cohort of influential African American women, which included Anna Hedgeman and Pauli Murray, working to expand the political activism of the YWCA. Height had recently outlined a series of planks, based on To Secure These Rights, which she was planning on introducing at the 1948 Democratic and Republican Conventions.¹⁹

As ecumenical Protestants were becoming more involved in legislation and party politics in the late 1940s, housing and employment emerged as the two most important issues. The Los Angeles Council of Churches organized a drive against racially restrictive housing covenants and the San Francisco Council of Churches members passed out leaflets on housing covenants’ harmful effects. San Francisco’s council lobbied the federal government to create nonsegregated veterans housing in the city.²⁰ The Congregationalist denomination pushed the United Packinghouse Workers to desegregate their union.²¹ All of these efforts were aided by the twenty new Protestant lobbying organizations set up in Washington, DC, during the World Order movement.²² As Lee must have noticed, in the late 1940s ecumenical Protestants had created a sophisticated political advocacy infrastructure.

This political mobilization was occurring just as the Supreme Court heard two court cases on the separation of church and state, Everson and McCollum, in 1947 and 1948, respectively. With church-state relations in the news, the old question of the propriety of religious leaders getting involved in politics was raised once again. And the issue was only heightened by the charges of clericalism that ecumenical Protestants directed at the Catholic Church (and because evangelicals regularly accused the Federal Council of acting just like the Vatican). The Catholic Church emerged from World War II with an upwardly mobile laity and an increasing political confidence, partly rooted in a strong commitment to anti-communism. Catholic leaders began asking for greater aid to parochial schools, which became one of the most hotly debated public policy issues in the late 1940s. When the Supreme Court introduced the metaphor of a “wall of separation between church and state” in the 1947 court case Emerson v. Board of Education, Protestants chastised the Catholic Church for failing to meet this standard.²³ Ecumenical Protestant criticism of Catholics sharpened the debates about the proper boundaries of political action. The Supreme Court cases shaped the context in which debates about the ecumenical Protestant political mobilization to end segregation took place.

Lee wanted to find out how far he could push political advocacy without setting off alarm bells about church-state separation. Like other ecumenical Protestant leaders, he did this through trial and error. Lee asked the Federal Council to press Republicans and Democrats to adopt anti-racist planks in their party platforms. Advocacy of this sort had already been done by Height on behalf of the YWCA, a voluntary group. On behalf of another group, the United Council of Church Women, Georgiana Sibley asked both Republicans and Democrats in 1948 to include in their platforms support for the United Nations, lower trade barriers, the UN Covenant and Declaration of Human Rights, and to implement these statements “in the laws of our own country,” to ensure civilian control over policy, and to eliminate “lynching and mob violence,” the poll tax, and “discrimination in employment practices, housing, and education.”²⁴ Could this advocacy also be done by an organization that officially represented America’s Protestant churches? The strategy had some advantages: Party platforms were expressions of general principles rather than proposals for specific legislation.²⁵ Nevertheless, the Federal Council’s leaders balked at Lee’s proposal. They worried about such direct mixing of church and state, especially on issues that were clearly divisive. For similar reasons, the Federal Council rejected giving money to organizations that targeted specific congressional campaigns.²⁶ The council was reluctant to get involved in conventions and campaigns, while other groups, especially women’s groups, were more comfortable with such direct intervention.

Ecumenical Protestants were getting more comfortable in national politics, but they largely avoided civil disobedience in the 1940s and 1950s. In those same years the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a pacifist Protestant group, was developing a less cautious approach. The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), which arose from and remained connected to the fellowship, initiated sit-ins during World War II, and the Fellowship of Reconciliation organized “Journeys of Reconciliation” in 1947, which was a precursor to the Freedom Rides of the civil rights movement.²⁷

George Houser, who worked for both the Fellowship of Reconciliation and CORE, wrote to Lee in June 1947. Houser proposed the Federal Council and the fellowship hold a joint conference “to face up to this whole question of segregation in the church.”²⁸ With Lee absent, his assistant replied to Houser, believing that Houser must not have heard about the Columbus conference of the previous year or the work the Federal Council was now doing.²⁹ Houser, of course, knew about both developments but was unimpressed with the cautious programs and the glacial pace of change. He “had in mind something more complete than has been done to date. I was thinking of a conference which would deal exclusively with what churches can do and ways of implementing decisions made,” giving a “good deal of attention” to the “interracial church.”³⁰

When Lee returned to the office he rejected Houser’s proposal himself. Was it because the fellowship cooperated with sympathetic leftists during a wave of anti-communist agitation or because the ecumenical leadership’s sense of self-importance made Lee dismiss pacifists like Houser?³¹ Both reasons likely played a role, but an adherence to bureaucratic procedures and the confidence in the “Non-Segregated Church” statement as a breakthrough were equally important. Lee said that Houser’s proposal “is an interesting one” but reminded him that the “Non-Segregated Church” statement came about only because of “extensive study.” “The big task,” Lee wrote, was “to implement the statement of policy adopted there.” For Lee, progress came about through exhaustive study of the facts and in placing incontrovertible proof of social problems to responsible Protestant leadership. Lee was doing just that, and he believed progress was being made.³² Now was no time for more conferences.

Lee’s rebuff was final. Houser was not invited in the coming years to Lee’s retreats, and Lee avoided working with the Fellowship of Reconciliation. Houser worked on the margins of Protestantism, finding more willing allies on the secular left than among religious organizations, as he developed tactics of civil disobedience that would later be embraced by many ecumenical Protestants, especially young people, in the 1960s.³³ As Lee and his allies struggled to figure out what human rights advocacy would look like in the context of American politics in the late 1940s, their position-paper liberalism held them back.

Sweatt v. Painter, Brown v. Board, and the Protestant Divide over Segregation

As ecumenical Protestants pushed the boundaries of church and state with their politically active anti-racist agenda, the issue would come to a head when Lee and the Federal Council became involved in the court cases that would lead to the groundbreaking Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Board of Education. Although civil disobedience remained out of bounds for most ecumenical Protestants, the political mobilization against segregation—including legal action—was far more than anything they had done in the past. By 1948 many ecumenical Protestant groups had successfully intervened in lawsuits designed to get rid of racist laws. When the Federal Council would do the same in the Sweatt v. Painter case, it led to a major controversy about the proper relationship of church and state.

In January 1949, Galen Weaver, the director of Congregationalism’s pioneering desegregation efforts, wrote to Lee to encourage the Federal Council to get involved in a developing court case on segregated higher education. The “McLaurin, Sweatt and Sipuel cases,” Weaver reported, had been discussed at a meeting organized by NAACP lawyer Thurgood Marshall. Weaver urged Lee to join other ecumenical Protestant organizations in filing a joint brief in support of the plaintiffs.³⁴ Lee agreed to get involved.

The plaintiff in the case, Heman Marion Sweatt, was denied admission to the University of Texas Law School and was told to apply instead to the law school the state set up specifically for African Americans. The question before the courts was whether the separate law school was, or could ever become, equal. The NAACP was especially eager to have an organization “charged with the moral leadership of our nation” write an amicus curiae brief, because the McLaurin and Sweatt cases would be judged on the “facts” not on the “law.” These cases, an NAACP assistant special council emphasized, “involve for the first time a direct attack on the separate but equal doctrine,” which the Federal Council had recently denounced.³⁵

Such direct political involvement was new for the Federal Council, and Lee proceeded cautiously. Working with executive secretary Samuel McCrea Cavert, Lee developed a justification for intervening in the court case rooted in the 1946 “Non-Segregated Church” statement, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a 1948 statement on racism by the World Council of Churches, and the Federal Council’s 1948 human rights statement.³⁶ When finished, the amicus brief reiterated the Federal Council’s position that “ ‘Separate but equal facilities’ in the matter of public education tends to maintain a permanent pattern of imposed inferiority and subjection.” Segregation “is a denial of the equal protection of the laws, of the dignity and inherent rights of the individual human being and of the Christian concept of universal brotherhood.” The brief also repeated the argument, so important during the World Order movement, that segregation would hinder “a durable peace throughout the world.” “We do not believe that in the human tempest which has been shaking the world for several decades, our form of government and way of life can permanently endure on the basis of discriminations and segregations,” the Federal Council told the US Supreme Court. Referencing Lincoln and emancipation, the organization wrote that “it is still true that this country cannot exist half slave and half free.”³⁷

Despite Lee’s careful preparation, the brief stalled in the Federal Council’s bureaucracy because of opposition by Southern Presbyterians J. McDowell Richards and John M. Alexander.³⁸ They disagreed on principle with the Federal Council’s commitment to human rights and urged the churches not to get involved in such controversial political matters. They were backed by some moderates, who went to great lengths to placate the Southern Presbyterian denomination, which was the Federal Council’s newest member.³⁹

F. Ernest Johnson, the Federal Council’s research director, was “distressed” that the organization was trying to bury the brief. Even worse, the Executive Committee was about to pass rules making it more difficult for Lee to testify before Congress.⁴⁰ Johnson was not alone in his anger. Lee demanded that the Executive Committee stop equivocating on segregation. He warned that “secularism as well as Catholicism and Communism are making increasing inroads” among African Americans, who are “losing faith in the willingness and the ability of Protestants to deal with the racial problems that deny them worth as persons.” Protestants “do not have unlimited time to convince those with troubled consciences” to match their practices with Christian principles. Appeasing segregationists will not change their minds, Lee wrote, but neglecting racial justice will surely alienate racial minorities and sympathetic whites. The Executive Committee needs to choose whether it will perform a “prophetic” function of blazing “new trails”—as it had in “international relations, segregation, human rights, and economic life”—or whether it will withhold action until “unanimous agreement” is reached. Lee urged the Federal Council not to become hostage to “those groups in it which have the least social conscience.”⁴¹

Lee won the battle. In the wake of Lee’s challenge, the Federal Council’s Executive Committee reintroduced the amicus brief with the condition that denominations disagreeing with the brief could have their dissent recorded.⁴² The brief noted that the Federal Council supports human rights and is unalterably opposed to the “separate but equal” doctrine. A footnote in the amicus brief stated that “the Presbyterian Church in the U.S. Dissociates [sic] itself from this brief.”⁴³ Approved initially in May of 1949, the legal document did not gather much publicity until the end of the year, when the brief was given final approval in December, after the Sweatt case made its way to the Supreme Court. Unusually, the Federal Council’s Executive Committee was meeting in Atlanta, and the southern byline attracted more attention in press reports than Federal Council meetings usually received.⁴⁴

White southern liberals had mixed reactions to the brief. One American Baptist minister from Washington, DC, noted that an influential layman in his church, who was of a “rather liberal view toward the Negro race … seems terribly upset” over the Federal Council’s brief. The minister shared the layman’s concern because, he believed, “legal procedures” undermine “Christian influence.”⁴⁵ The more partisan ecumenical Protestant institutions become, the less seriously people will take their ideas, he argued.

Other southern liberals gave enthusiastic support. South Carolina US District Court judge J. Waties Waring expressed his faith that racial segregation would end “through the churches.” He insisted that opponents of segregation possess the “weakest line of defense … in the religious area. And there really is no semblance of an argument when the approach is made from that standpoint.” Overestimating ecumenical leaders’ authority over churches, Waring urged a trickle-down initiative, encouraging the Federal Council to share its resolutions with its denominations, which would share it all the way down to the pews. By “reaching millions of American citizens,” the Federal Council would force the Senate to “begin to realize there is a great wave of religious backing to the abolition of segregation,” and “they will stop playing petty politics and wipe out the bane of filibustering.”⁴⁶

Waring showed little knowledge of the Federal Council’s publicity efforts amid widespread apathy, and some hostility, in the pews. However, he did identify a rhetorical advantage that ecumenists had over their segregationist opponents with regard to racism. Over the past several decades, theologians had confronted an alternative theology of race that recognized racial differences as God-given and white supremacy as part of the natural order. To those who cited Galatians 3:28 (“There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus”) theological racists retorted with Deuteronomy 32:8 (“When the Most High apportioned the nations, and when he divided humankind, he fixed the boundaries of the peoples”) and Acts 17:26 (“From one ancestor he made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live”). Theological racists told biblical stories about God’s curses and punishments of those who defied his orders to keep the races apart. According to Jane Dailey, “Narratives like these had two key pedagogical aims: to make the case for segregation as divine law, and to warn that transgression of this law would inevitably be followed by divine punishment.”⁴⁷

By 1946 ecumenists had won the battle against theological racism among the leadership of the Federal Council and its denominations. While theological racism persisted at the grassroots, especially in the South and among Southern Baptists, fundamentalists, and evangelicals, it was largely banished from the leadership of ecumenical institutions. That did not mean that every ecumenical Protestant leader supported integration—they did not. But decades of work to lessen prejudice had made it difficult for segregationists in the ecumenical denominations to appeal to racist theology in defense of Jim Crow.

Instead, defenders of segregation moved from theological racism to political arguments, appealing to states’ rights, majoritarianism, and church-state separation. They rooted this politics in the ecclesiology of majoritarianism and individualism, and sometimes realism. Opponents of integration appealed to anti-hierarchical and individualistic forms of church organization, arguing that the Federal Council had no right to speak on behalf of those in the pews or on behalf of individual churches. But they also tacitly accepted some of the theological grounds of the anti-racists. As they moved from theological to political arguments, the fights about ecclesiology that had roiled ecumenical Protestantism in the 1930s merged with debates about church-state separation of the late 1940s.

When Southern Presbyterian representative J. McDowell Richards defended his opposition to the Sweatt brief in the Presbyterian Outlook in 1949, he made a constitutional argument, not a theological one. The role of the courts is to decide what the law is, he wrote, not what it ought to be. He also noted that most churchgoers in the Southern Presbyterian denomination approved of segregation and therefore his vote against the amicus brief represented the will of the majority. Cautioning against the “immediate abolition of segregation,” he counseled his fellow Presbyterians that racial injustices should be undone by “education rather than by legislative fiat.”⁴⁸

When publicly pressed by critics, Richards elaborated his own views. To the question, “Is segregation Christian?” Richards responded, “My answer to that question must necessarily be an unequivocal ‘No’.” Segregation was unchristian, he admitted. But this did not lead him to support desegregation efforts, at least not through anything beyond education. He reiterated the constitutional argument and suggested that “voluntary” segregation is preferable to “enforced” segregation. Richards warned that forcing desegregation on the region might provoke “violence and strife,” which were “far less Christian even than segregation.”⁴⁹ Ceding theological ground, Richards took on more explicitly political arguments against the Federal Council’s attack on Jim Crow.⁵⁰

Amid these public disagreements among ecumenical Protestants, Texas attorney general Price Daniel challenged the Federal Council on its right to file a brief in the Sweatt case. The amicus brief needed the consent of both the plaintiffs and the defendants, and Daniel refused to approve the brief unless it clearly described the actual practices of the Protestant churches. He charged “that the religious denominations represented by the Federal Council maintain separate churches, separate church schools, separate denominational colleges, and separate congregations for white and Negro citizens in Texas and fourteen other Southern states.”⁵¹ What right did these hypocrites have to challenge the racial practices of others when they also practiced segregation? he seemed to be asking. The Federal Council had no reply to this embarrassing criticism and skirted around Daniel’s objection by getting permission directly from the Supreme Court to file the brief. Despite the Federal Council’s best efforts, its hypocrisy became national news.

The national controversy over the Sweatt case encouraged churches in the South to oppose the Federal Council’s desegregation efforts. The Lynchburg, Virginia, News editorialized that “more and more it becomes evident that the Federal Council of Churches of Christ has outlived, or rather destroyed, its usefulness.” The Federal Council’s Virginia branch had recently become involved in a political campaign to end segregation in that state, the newspaper noted, and now the Federal Council itself was filing a brief in the Sweatt case. The News objected to the amicus brief on democratic and anti-political grounds, calling for “withdrawal from the Council of Churches of Christ of all churches that hold to the doctrine that their members speak for themselves” and believing “that churches are concerned with things religious and not with things political.”⁵²

The Virginia News made two underlying assumptions about religion and politics. The first was based in ecclesiology, or the organization and structure of the Christian church. The authors held to the “congregational” model of church organization, which insisted that there was no higher authority than the individual congregation in theological matters and was deeply suspicious of church hierarchy. In this libertarian model of church life, groups like the Federal Council had no right to speak on behalf of church congregations, especially if the Federal Council’s opinions were not shared by the churchgoers they represented. The second assumption of the Federal Council’s opponents was a clear distinction between religion and politics, which ecumenical Protestant leaders refused to make. They argued that congregations should be concerned with religious life—by which they usually meant emphasizing individual piety—and leave politics to the private judgment of God-fearing Christians. In both their ecclesiology and their views of church-state relations, the views of these objectors had more in common with the views of evangelicals than with the beliefs of the leaders of their own ecumenical denominations.

Only one church followed through on the threat to secede from their denomination, in this case the United Methodist Church, because the denomination was a member of the Federal Council. A newspaper editor and a judge led the board of Stewards of the First Methodist Church in Talladega, Alabama, to repudiate the actions of the Federal Council and leave the Methodist denomination in late 1949.⁵³ In response, Samuel McCrea Cavert insisted that the filing of the brief had been carried out through a “democratic and representative process” and suggested that the issue “is one for the Methodists to handle through their own channels and in their own way.”⁵⁴ Another Methodist Church in South Carolina condemned the Federal Council for “injecting the Church into what would otherwise be exclusively a matter of state” but stopped short of secession. The amicus brief undermined “good will” between the races and went against the wishes of “a large segment of Methodist Laymen,” according to the church. In the future, the church leaders insisted, a poll of the Methodist laity should be taken before such actions are carried out.⁵⁵

Two years later, another secession took place. This time, it was Adam Clayton Powell’s Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York City, which served the African American population of Harlem. Powell, a Black minister who was also a member of Congress, had enough of ecumenical Protestants’ equivocation on racism after the organization attempted to bury a proclamation critical of segregation. Adopting a position that religion and politics can never be separated, Powell wondered, “How can we expect the legislators of America to be more Christlike than their clergymen?” As white southerners rebelled against the Federal Council’s politics, some African American groups criticized the Federal Council for not going far enough.⁵⁶ These protests by African Americans and by southern laymen signaled more trouble ahead for ecumenical Protestantism.

Soon after the Federal Council filed the amicus brief in the case of Sweatt v. Painter, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in 1950 that Heman Sweatt must be admitted to the University of Texas Law School. The ruling noted that the separate Black and white law schools in Texas were grossly unequal. The justices also argued that the mere separation of Black and white students constituted a form of inequality. Four years later, in the 1954 Brown v. Board decision, the Supreme Court extended this line of reasoning to its logical conclusion. “In the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place,” the unanimous ruling read: “Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”⁵⁷

Shortly after the Sweatt ruling in 1950, the Federal Council had merged with several other ecumenical Protestant organizations to create the National Council of Churches. The merger marked a backward step for women’s organizations, which lost some of their independence from their male colleagues.⁵⁸ But the bureaucratic transition did not have a big impact on the ongoing anti-racist initiatives. Lee’s Department of Race Relations was renamed the Department of Racial and Cultural Relations, but not much else changed. Rather, external circumstances drove an increasingly conservative approach to anti-racist initiatives in the first few years of the 1950s. The National Council’s leaders feared repeating the drama of their earlier intervention in the Sweatt case. Amid the high tide of McCarthyism and the Korean War, the National Council largely kept quiet about racism. At least for this organization, the years immediately before Brown meant backsliding on the commitment to human rights made in the 1940s.

Yet when the 1954 Brown v. Board decision announced the beginning of the end of Jim Crow in the United States, ecumenists were ecstatic and saw the court case as a culmination of the responsible work they had been carrying on for a decade. The Christian Century called the case “historic” not only because it brought America’s “democratic professions” in line with “actual social practices” but also because it restored America’s “claim to world democratic leadership.” “Any American missionary can testify—and hundreds have—that no handicap he has encountered has had more damaging effect than the belief, widespread in Asia and Africa, that our national practices on race matters have been immoral and hypocritical,” the editors wrote. The National Council even proposed a national holiday dedicated to celebrating the decision.⁵⁹

Brown v. Board expressed the kind of law ecumenists had been fighting for internationally and domestically—one underwritten by “broad human interests” rather than by “rigid conformity to past legal precedents,” according to the Christian Century. Brown cited “psychological and sociological studies” rather than “law-case citations” in its decision, which demonstrated the “humanitarian construction of our law” as developed by “Brandeis, Holmes and Cardozo.”⁶⁰ Whereas opponents of desegregation backed strict construction of the Constitution, ecumenists celebrated the liberal constructionism that matched their own theological liberalism.

The Christian Century noted that the Supreme Court did not order the immediate desegregation of the South, and it praised the delay in implementation as a “wise decision.” Confident that history was on their side, the editors mistakenly believed the delay would “work against the race demagogues,” giving the “responsible elements in the south time to reassure the frightened [and] to draw up constructive proposals.” The journal assumed a reservoir of goodwill existed in the South, with a “silent public opinion” that believed segregation to be “doomed,” and that racist demagogues were “growing less influential.” Public opinion “will swing behind efforts to give it honest implementation,” the editors wrote.⁶¹ Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr agreed. The delay avoided “undue shock” and lessened “resistance by southern authorities,” he counseled. “No law can be enforced if it is not generally accepted by the people.”⁶²

Adding to the ecumenists’ confidence were widespread endorsements of the Brown ruling, even by those skeptical of federal intervention. John Bennett pointed out that the Southern Presbyterian denomination, which vigorously opposed the Sweatt brief, had endorsed the Brown verdict. It signaled that “there has developed in the south a considerable body of opinion which never took part in the struggle against segregation but which is now ready to support the law.” Bennett argued that for many this was merely “acceptance of the law as law,” but for others it was a sign that they were “ready to change their position” on segregation. Bennett hoped these newly emergent moderates would have time to work things out and that “the Negro leadership, especially in the north, will avoid the kind of pressure which will harden the lines as they are instead of encouraging this new middle group to change the lines which divide people in the south.”⁶³ For Bennett, who was overconfident in the authority of denominational leaders, this Brown decision was yet more evidence that ecumenical strategy on segregation was on the right track.

Even the Southern Baptist Convention, which was not a member of the National Council, endorsed Brown. The Christian Century reported that while a few Southern Baptists spoke at the denomination’s national convention about the biblical curse of Ham as justification for segregation, and others raised the specter of white women marrying Black men, the overwhelming majority (nine thousand to fifty, according to the journal) voted to comply with the Brown ruling. There was deep resistance to integration among Southern Baptist churchgoers, but the Christian Century, which subscribed to a highly hierarchical understanding of social change, thought that Southern Baptist leaders would convert their flocks to integration in due time. Since most of the seven million members of the denomination lived in the South, the Southern Baptist move would make a “decisive difference,” the journal argued.⁶⁴

The ecumenical Protestant condemnation of segregation gained a global dimension in the months following the Brown decision. Ecumenists from across the world gathered for the second meeting of the World Council of Churches in Evanston, Illinois, in 1954. The World Council brought together 1,674 delegates from 163 Protestant and Orthodox denominations in 48 countries to the campus of Northwestern University. The “saffron and white robes of the Church of South India” and the “turbans” of the African Gold Coast captured the attention of audiences that reached as many as 150,000 people.⁶⁵ The timing of the meeting and its location in the United States meant that segregation would receive a lot of attention. Benjamin Mays, who had been so involved in the anti-racist debates of the World War II years, would not let the opportunity go to waste. He pushed the global body to strongly condemn segregation.

Mays laid out his challenge to the World Council in 1954. In an article that appeared shortly before the organization met in Evanston, Mays argued that both science and Scripture give no basis for segregation. The logic of segregation had been undermined in the last fifty years by biologists, who showed there to be no physiological differences between people of different races, and church historians, who showed that until modern times Christians paid little regard to racial differences, according to Mays. The task for the World Council in 1954 was to move beyond the equality of races, which scientists and theologians widely accepted, onto the concrete task of how to “make new creatures of men and women in the area of race.” Calling for a new “Pentecost”—a miraculous event described in the Book of Acts, when people from different nations could suddenly understand one another—Mays demanded that the “American Church open its doors to all peoples, irrespective of race.”⁶⁶ Mays repeated these demands at the World Council meeting. Standing before thousands gathered at Northwestern’s McGaw Memorial Hall, Mays received a standing ovation when he declared that “segregation remains the great scandal in the church.”⁶⁷

Swayed by Mays, the World Council of Churches declared segregation to be incompatible with Christianity. Christians “cannot approve of any law which discriminates on grounds of race, which restricts the opportunity of any person to acquire education to prepare himself for his vocation, to procure or to practice employment in his vocation, or in any other way curtails his exercise of the full rights and responsibilities of citizenship.”⁶⁸ Christians should “renounce all forms of segregation or discrimination and … work for their abolition within their own life and within society,” the World Council went onto say. “If Christian obedience leads to suffering, that is part of the price.”⁶⁹ The World Council also announced it opposed laws banning interracial marriage. Ecumenical Protestants had not been willing to go this far at the 1946 Columbus conference. Now, a global body of Protestant and Orthodox churches appeared unflinching in their call to dismantle Jim Crow, as well as apartheid, in all of its forms.⁷⁰

Figure 12. Benjamin Mays in the audience of the World Council of Churches meeting in Evanston, Illinois, 1954. Photo by Larry Burrows / The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images.

The meeting also revealed divisions within the global body about segregation. The main defender of segregation was Ben J. Marias, a South African and a member of the Dutch Reformed Church, who urged Protestants to “take account of long established social patterns” without losing track of the ultimate goal of nonsegregation. “Different churches based on language or race may be useful and even preferable in some extreme cases,” Marais cautioned. To “force integration,” he advised, “would only lead to a rich harvest of chaos and disaster.”⁷¹ The disagreement between Mays and Marais mirrored some of the conflicts between Lee and the Southern Presbyterians over the amicus curiae brief a few years earlier, especially in the way that Marias tacitly accepted the theological anti-racism of the ecumenical movement while finding other ways to defend apartheid.

But Marias was no match for a well-organized group of African American leaders who demanded integration of the churches from top to bottom. Leaders of the all-Black denominations not only pushed for an open-door policy for local churches but also criticized white Protestant leaders for excluding African Americans from participation in the church bureaucracy. The Reverend J. Clinton Hoggard challenged his colleagues, asking them to “take a look at the leaders of the assembly. Do you see any Negroes among them? In fact, the only full-fledged Negro delegates here are from Negro denominations, not integrated denominations.” The World Council leaders responded to the criticism by electing two African Americans to the governing body of the organization, a symbolic move that was hailed as a “forward step” by the Chicago Defender.⁷² The World Council, like some of the national bodies of ecumenical Protestants, proved themselves to be responsive to pressure to change their segregationist practices. In 1954 the largest Protestant and Orthodox body in the world, swayed largely by American ecumenical Protestants, had condemned segregation.

The Civil Rights Movement

Because ecumenical Protestants publicly supported desegregation but called for slow-paced change and devoted few resources to the cause, it largely fell to African Americans to see through the promise of Brown v. Board in the South. Benjamin Mays’s former student, the twenty-six-year-old Martin Luther King Jr., suddenly became a national leader of the Black freedom struggle as he led the boycott of the segregated bus system in Montgomery, Alabama. King had grown up in the Black church, where he first heard the anti-racist theology for which he would later become famous. At sixteen, he enrolled in Morehouse College and became close with its president, Benjamin Mays, who was then publicly denouncing Jim Crow as a violation of human rights. After graduating from Morehouse in 1948, King enrolled at the predominantly white Crozier Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania. The seminary was run by Edwin E. Aubrey, a member of the Dulles Commission and one of the organizers of the World Order movement. It was in the ecumenical context at Crozier that King first encountered the works of Mohandas Gandhi and his call for nonviolent civil disobedience. After Crozier, King received his PhD from the Methodist-run Boston University, where he worked under the supervision of theologian Edgar Brightman, a philosopher committed to the personalist tradition that promoted the dignity and worth of human personality. King, already attuned to the Black vernacular tradition of dignity, elaborated and systematized his thought into a formal philosophical position. He brought these experiences with him to Montgomery, where the boycott he led would end segregation on city buses in 1956. He would soon help organize the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and attack Jim Crow under the banner of civil and human rights.⁷³

As King inaugurated the civil rights movement in the South, white supremacists tried to stop him. The Ku Klux Klan, steeped in a history of Christian nationalism, revived and grew to a size not seen since the 1920s.⁷⁴ While the Klan used terror to enforce the status quo, the more respectable White Citizens Councils sprung up across the South, keeping pressure on politicians not to relent to federal courts and Black activism. What became known as “Massive Resistance” was later summarized by one southern governor’s inaugural address: “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!”⁷⁵

Ecumenical Protestants believed that the Brown ruling proved their strategy was the right path. But Massive Resistance was the first indication that they were wrong in predicting a triumph of moderation in the South. In March 1956, Brethren official Ralph Smeltzer urged the National Council to recognize the “racial revolution” taking place and for ecumenical Protestants to organize a “bolder and broader program toward racial integration.”⁷⁶ The National Council did something far short of recognizing the racial revolution. But it did depart from past practices by hiring a white southerner, Will Campbell, to travel through the southern states and organize the white moderate and progressive pastors that the National Council believed predominated in the South. The project was poorly funded and poorly staffed but nonetheless represented a policy of more direct involvement by the National Council in the civil rights movement.⁷⁷

Campbell’s first test was in Little Rock, Arkansas, where a clash over segregated schools was taking place in 1957. The collegiate gothic facade of Little Rock Central High School became a symbol of white intransigence across the world. The governor of Arkansas, Orval Faubus, disobeyed federal court orders to integrate the school and went so far as to mobilize the National Guard to prevent Black students from entering Central High. Because of the international attention the crisis received, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles wrote urgently to Dwight Eisenhower in 1955 about the Little Rock school desegregation crisis. “We are portrayed as a violator of the standard of conduct which the peoples of the world united to proclaim in the Charter of the United Nations,” Dulles wrote, “whereby the peoples reaffirmed ‘faith in the fundamental human rights and the dignity and worth of the human person.’ ”⁷⁸

Eisenhower reluctantly intervened on the side of the federal courts. He nationalized the Guard and sent in the Army’s 101st Airborne division, allowing the first nine African American students—dubbed the “Little Rock Nine”—to attend the school. In a televised address to the nation, written by Dulles, Eisenhower told Americans that “at a time when we face grave situations abroad because of the hatred that Communism bears toward a system of government based on human rights, it would be difficult to exaggerate the harm that is being done to the prestige and influence, and indeed to the safety, of our nation and the world.”⁷⁹

Faubus was unmoved. All public schools in Little Rock were closed for the 1958–59 school year.⁸⁰ Worried about the events, the National Council sent Campbell to investigate. Campbell organized a statewide committee of ministers, leading a group to meet with the governor to press him to integrate schools. With Faubus steadfast in his support for segregation, Campbell organized a public condemnation of the governor by local ministers.⁸¹ At the end of 1959, the Supreme Court weighed in and ordered Faubus to reopen the schools in 1960. Despite his efforts to organize moderate ministers, Campbell appeared to be a bystander as the larger drama of the civil rights movement played out.

Other groups joined the National Council in becoming more active in the southern states. Congregationalists, who had few southern churches but ran many colleges in the region, took action. As early as 1952 their denomination began envisioning a post–Jim Crow South. They predicted that “considerable” repercussions would flow from the Sweatt and Brown cases unless “southern white leaders of prestige” would sway public opinion behind the Supreme Court. “We can do little,” a Congregationalist race relations group declared, “except perhaps help discover a few key persons in the South” to take the lead in ushering in a nonsegregated society.⁸²

Mrs. Albright, a representative of the Southeast convention of the Congregationalists, which encompassed Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and a part of northern Florida, reported that the “staff … definitely desire integration” but said “our churches are not ready.” In the wake of the 1954 Brown decision, even fraternal activities, like inviting Black visitors to a convention, were now opposed by many white southern ministers. Albright reported that an integrated student meeting, which had previously aroused little suspicion, had only half of the previous number of participants at its latest gathering. Not sure what to do, Albright maintained that “if we of the staff move too fast, we will be defeated or replaced.” “We would lose half of our white churches,” she worried, if Congregationalists desegregated their bureaucracy. Trying to convey some of the hopelessness of the situation, Albright stated, “We do not even have freedom of discussion on this issue. Emotion aroused by the school decision has set us back.”⁸³

Church leaders were faced with unwavering opposition from the laity in the South. Robert G. Geoffroy, the manager of the Vicksburg, Mississippi, Chamber of Commerce, wrote to the Congregationalist leadership, “I violently oppose integrated schools in the South at the present time.” Geoffroy recited many of the common arguments of the day against racial equality. “The Negro should first prove his responsibility … is consistent with our American heritage which has resulted in certain prerequisites being placed on the privilege of voting, of serving on juries, of holding office, etc.” Geoffroy insisted he was no bigot, relaying a story of his time in Korea during the recent war. “I adopted and cared for a homeless Korean lad of 12. I loved him like a brother. I ministered to his needs. I respected his dignity. But I didn’t for a minute think that with his combination of environment and heredity that he could participate in or compete in the same social structure as my daughter of the same age,” he wrote. “To me it is only a matter of degree to substitute Southern Negro for Korean,” Geoffroy concluded.⁸⁴

It was not only churchgoers who objected to integration. Congregational churches were understood to be some of the more liberal ones in the South, and more supportive of ending Jim Crow than the Baptist and Methodist churches that predominated in the region. Yet a report detailing the views of southern pastors in the Congregational churches pointed out that they—not just their congregations—were extremely hostile to integration. White ministers in metropolitan areas tended to be the most accepting of integration, but those working in small towns and rural areas, who were the least likely to have a seminary education, responded to questions about desegregation “in violent terms.” One pastor, asked about whether his church would send a delegation to an interracial meeting, replied “Yes, but to run the Negroes off; and I will be leading my delegates!”⁸⁵

Large majorities of Congregationalist ministers in the South reported that, in their own opinion, their denominational conventions should remain segregated. In one survey, more than 60 percent of southern ministers reported that integrating the Congregationalist bureaucracy (not the churches themselves, which was never brought up) would “kill the church or drive it from the denomination.”⁸⁶ The National Council’s filing of the amicus curiae brief in 1950 had set off a couple of defections and a lot of derision. Now, in 1955, there was open rebellion. That year Congregationalists discovered just how widespread and deep-seated racism was among their own ranks. In the wake of Brown, any attempt to desegregate would seriously jeopardize the position of ecumenical Protestants in the South.

Worst of all, ministers who spoke out on behalf of integration found themselves under fire. The National Council offered help to ministers who were out of a job. They had identified eight individuals who were “under pressure due to their stand on desegregation” and aided four of them, while Church World Service funds were used to help three others.⁸⁷ Ecumenists working to dismantle segregation felt themselves besieged in the mid-1950s and did not know how to move forward with plans that suddenly seemed unworkable in the post-Brown world.

Denominational leaders were perplexed by the vitriol from southern churches and were unsure how to respond. The Congregationalists did briefly consider taking punitive action against constituencies that practiced racial segregation. The Council for Social Action inquired in 1955 whether representatives from segregated churches could be barred from its national meetings. The denomination’s leadership replied that it was “theoretically conceivable” but “not practically likely because of the strong decentralizing tendency in Congregationalism.” In part because of this laissez-faire ecclesiology, the “general tendency [is] to let this question die” because few people “wanted to apply punitive measures” against fellow Congregationalists.

As ecumenical Protestants debated what to do next, southern state governments exacerbated tensions between southern churches and the “outsider” religious leaders calling for desegregation. State legislatures targeted the United Methodist Church, passing laws designed to help churches break free from the denomination. The United Methodist Church was the legal owner of the buildings used by their churches. If congregations would break away, as they had been urged to do over the National Council’s Sweatt brief a few years earlier, they would lose access to expensive property or, at the very least, suffer through protracted and costly legal battles. Southern states stepped in to encourage rebellion. Mississippi, for example, passed the Church Property Bill in 1960, which protected individual churches from lawsuits by the denomination. This was an attempt to “widen the breaches within our churches,” complained Mississippi Methodist leader J. P. Stafford. Southern states entered the ecclesiological battles about religious structure and authority just as ecumenical Protestants were reevaluating their response to the civil rights movement.⁸⁸

From Churches to Universities

When the Congregationalists (who were in the process of merging with the Evangelical and Reformed Church) finally outlined their post-Brown plan in 1955 and submitted it for financial backing from the Fund for the Republic, they chose universities and schools rather than churches as the institutional center of their program.⁸⁹ Placing their hope on students came after a long process of eliminating alternatives, especially the churches, which showed outright resistance to desegregation. The Congregationalists put together “The North Carolina-Virginia Project” and hoped it would “avoid fanfare” in this tense atmosphere of 1955 and 1956. The plan created an interracial team of two southern women, Pauline Puryear and Dorothy Hampton, who were appointed to be liaisons with Christian schools and get them to integrate their staffs and student bodies.⁹⁰ Their work with the churches was frustrating. “I would have to say that if I had known one year ago what the first nine months of this job would be I probably would not have accepted it,” Hampton complained. But she saw promise in the students she worked with. “The youngsters will respond to me and perhaps add to my acceptance.”⁹¹

With most Protestant churches resistant to interracial gatherings, much of the actual contact that took place between Black and white Protestants was among youths and college students. “The student Christian movement was biracial,” writes Doug Rossinow. “In the 1950s, it facilitated an extraordinary degree of interaction between black and white youth.”⁹² Baby boomers in the ecumenical denominations became the first generation to regularly meet, face-to-face, across the color line. Although interracial contact harkened back to older strategies of dealing with “racial prejudice” rather than segregation, it now occurred in the tense, post-Brown atmosphere and with students being exposed to the searing anti-racist human rights rhetoric of ecumenical Protestantism. Simply meeting interracially became a controversial and politicized act in the South during the mid-1950s.

Increased interracial student contact occurred as the discourse of worldwide “revolution” was becoming popular among ecumenical Protestants. The November 1955 issue of motive, the official journal of the Methodist Student Movement, picked up on this new rhetoric. The student magazine ran a special issue on “Revolution and Reconciliation” that sought to dramatize the global dissatisfaction with Euro-American economic and racial imperialism. Coverage included a detailed report of the Bandung conference and decolonization movements across the world.⁹³ The Methodists, who were one of the few predominantly white ecumenical Protestant denominations with a large African American membership and a large white southern membership, began educating their students on the interconnection of Jim Crow, decolonization, and white supremacy.

M. Richard Shaull’s Encounter with Revolution added to the deepening interest in decolonization, and the book made “revolution” a keyword in ecumenical students’ understanding of world events.⁹⁴ Like motive, Shaull’s book foregrounded global movements for social justice as the most important development of the era. Shaull was one of the authors who contributed to what Jeremi Suri calls “the language of dissent” of the youth movements of the 1960s.⁹⁵ Shaull warned that peoples across the world were rebelling against the spread of Western capitalism and modernization and demanded control over their lives. “The common man today wants to feel a new sense of dignity and responsibility that comes from the possession of power,” Shaull instructed Americans. “He demands the privilege of helping to control the economic and political forces which dominate his life, and will give his support to that political movement which offers to satisfy this ambition.”⁹⁶ Encounter with Revolution is an illustration of how earlier attacks on global white supremacy in the 1940s by critics like Edmund Soper and Buell Gallagher had become widespread by the 1950s.

Ecumenical youth seized on the diagnosis of world revolution offered by Shaull and pushed it in more self-critical directions. After all, they were living at a moment when books like C. Wright Mills’s White Collar (1950), David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd (1951), and William H. Whyte’s The Organization Man (1956) encouraged criticism of mind-numbing bureaucracy and the pettiness of middle-class life.⁹⁷ The same revolt against soulless technological modernity that was happening abroad was also happening at home, many students came to believe. Shaull’s Encounter with Revolution had correctly diagnosed world events, a motive reviewer noted, but wrongly excluded America from the global revolution. The “grave error” Shaull made in his book was “presuming no Revolution in the United States [and] ignoring the Court decision on racial integration.”⁹⁸

The “Revolution and Reconciliation” issue of motive and Shaull’s Encounter with Revolution both served as primers for Methodists students who were attending the Seventeenth Ecumenical Student Conference in Athens, Ohio, in 1955. The ecumenical student conferences were a traditional recruiting ground for young missionaries, and the revolutionary rhetoric among them signaled just how much the missionary movement had changed over the twentieth century. The location of the meeting was also significant. At a previous gathering in Lawrence, Kansas, in 1951, students had experienced Jim Crow firsthand when they left the University of Kansas campus and were denied accommodations at a local hotel and were refused service at a café. Bayard Rustin, one of the 1951 conference participants, organized a small group that included two visitors from India, a Canadian, and three Americans to press the conference leaders to do “all within our power to maintain human dignity and prevent further incidents of this nature from occurring.” “As members of this international body of delegates,” Rustin reminded the organizers, “we cannot continue to talk about the principles of Christian living and missionary service and at the same time allow such anti-Christian acts to go unnoticed.”⁹⁹ Students at the conference discussed the event in small groups, and the organizers decried the incident. They decided to move the 1955 conference to the more hospitable location of Athens, Ohio.

At the 1955 Athens conference students came from more than eighty countries and included some Catholics, Hindus, and Muslims. The crowds were so large they quickly “overtaxed the facilities of Ohio University” and “many were accommodated in the gymnasium stadium cars and broom closets,” the New York Times reported. Local residents “threw open the doors of their homes to white and colored alike.”¹⁰⁰ Crowding into seminar rooms and lecture halls, students from across the world passionately discussed apartheid in South Africa and segregation in the United States. Speaking at the conference, Shaull warned that “violent revolt against our economic and political imperialism, as well as against our racial pride” is taking place across the world. “The great majority of the peoples of the world, who happen to be non-white, will not tolerate our attitude of racial superiority,” and America will face “judgement.”¹⁰¹

Southern students leaving Athens pledged to return home and continue meeting interracially. One white student from the University of Mississippi commented that the future meetings will “have to be at a Negro college—if we tried them at ours the state would come down on us like a ton of brick.”¹⁰² Students at the Athens conference, like students in ecumenical denominations more generally, came to see themselves as political actors in the mid-1950s and imagined themselves as one part of a global movement for social justice. For example, when a student delegation returned to Austin, Texas, from a meeting of the YMCA in 1959, they organized sit-ins across the city.¹⁰³

The Eighteenth Ecumenical Student Conference, which took place over the winter break of the 1959–60 academic year, made an even bigger impression on the participating students. Billed as the West’s answer to communist youth meetings, the 1959 conference in Athens, Ohio, had a decidedly political edge.¹⁰⁴ The nearly 3,600 students, half of whom were foreigners studying in the United States, heard yet again about the link between decolonization abroad and desegregation at home, and about the ongoing revolution across the globe. This time it was from Martin Luther King Jr., who told the students that “an old order is passing away, and a new order is coming into being.” He added, “We have seen the old order in Asia and Africa, in the form of colonialism and imperialism” and “we have seen it in our own nation in the form of segregation and discrimination.” He urged that we now replace the old order with a new one “in which all men respect the dignity and the worth of human persons.”¹⁰⁵

As students returned home from Athens, they continued meeting in “Study-Involvement” groups through the spring of 1960. They drew severe criticism in the segregated American South. White students at a Texas university who wanted to gather with African Americans were denied permission to meet on campus and were threatened with suspension when they decided to meet interracially off campus. They met despite the threats. Students from Atlanta and Memphis reported similar incidents, as did a group of students from Tuskegee, Stillman, and Alabama Tech.¹⁰⁶

When four African American students in Greensboro, North Carolina, began sit-ins at a segregated Woolworth’s lunch counter on February 1, 1960, launching a movement across the United States, attendees of the Athens conference were in the perfect position to participate. And they did so in disproportionate numbers. According to Ruth Harris, one of the conference organizers, “Between February 1 and June 1, 1960, more than two thousand students were arrested [at lunch counter protests], mostly African Americans. A study done later revealed that every lunch counter demonstration included at least one student who had attended the 1959 conference in Athens, Ohio.”¹⁰⁷

The National Council applauded the sit-ins, calling them “expressions of just and righteous indignation against laws, customs, and traditions which violate human personality.”¹⁰⁸ The YWCA praised the protesters for seeking to eliminate “those practices which deny recognition of the common humanity of all as children of God.”¹⁰⁹ The Episcopalians, Methodists, and Presbyterians followed suit.¹¹⁰ Truman B. Douglass, the vice president of the Congregationalists’ Board of Home Missions, addressed the graduation ceremony of the historically Black Dillard College in the spring of 1960, urging students to fight “white man’s law imposed upon a multi-racial society.”¹¹¹

The National Student Christian Federation explained the students’ new understanding of revolution. The student demonstrators were acting out of “our responsibility in a world of revolution” and the “particular burden and opportunity resting upon us as students in the USA in view of the world position of our nation.” Breaking with the earlier attempts of religious leaders to maintain a plausible distance between church and state, the students now declared the “impossibility of neutrality as to political engagement.” They insisted that “there is no true evangelism that is at the same time not a political event.”¹¹² Ecumenical youths were casting off the debates about ecclesiology and church-state separation that had embroiled their elders, partly because they were working outside of denominational boundaries. More and more, they expressed their solidarity with nonwhite peoples across the world and viewed as their community the transnational student movement, not the segregated churches of their hometowns.

The affective identification between college students and third-world revolutionaries was remarkable. Needless to say, there were important differences between the activism of US college students, especially white college students, and the Marxist rebels in Mozambique and indigenous activists in Brazil with whom they identified. But looking abroad for solidarity was a common practice among many religious groups. According to Melani McAlister, American evangelicals began in the 1970s to identify closely with victims of anti-Christian persecution abroad and to view themselves as victims of oppression in the United States.¹¹³ Evangelicals’ “victim identification” had some parallels with ecumenical youths’ solidarity with the victims of Western imperialism. But these two outlooks encouraged very different political behavior in the United States. The theology of revolution encouraged ecumenical students to work with nonreligious groups, to engage in civil disobedience, and to move politically to the left.

Ecumenical youths declared that God was speaking and acting in the world through revolutionary movements: “His actions are on the world scene in the struggle between powerful socio-economic and military blocs, in the far reaching movement of liberation of Asian and African peoples from imperialist and colonial status to independence with dignity, and in the United States in the student non-violent movement which is working for economic opportunity, racial freedom and dignity, and democratic equality and justice for all men.”¹¹⁴ This fiery rhetoric was new for many ecumenical leaders, but by the end of 1960 most ecumenical institutions and denominations were reorienting themselves to a more confrontational form of activism against segregation pioneered by young ecumenical Protestants. Even though they did not intend their youth to take part in sit-ins, ecumenical leaders nonetheless embraced the new activism and, in retrospect, saw it as a logical outgrowth of the ideas they had been espousing since the 1940s.¹¹⁵ In doing so, they abandoned their search for a middle ground on Jim Crow and clashed with a laity that remained hostile to integration.

Emblematic of this new activist style was former National Council president and head of the United Presbyterian denomination, Eugene Carson Blake. A month and a half before the 1963 March on Washington, where he would deliver an address, Blake entered a segregated amusement park in Baltimore with a group organized by CORE. He was arrested soon after walking in. The event made headlines across the world because of his public stature. After a short stint in jail, Blake emerged as a hero to many anti-racist activists.¹¹⁶ Blake’s arrest dramatized a major development in American Protestantism. After rebuffing the Fellowship of Reconciliation in 1947, the National Council began actively cooperating with its offshoot, CORE, and other anti-racist groups by the 1960s. That Blake would willingly subject himself to arrest shows how much ecumenical institutions had changed by the 1960s.

Figure 13. Eugene Carson Blake being led into a police van following his arrest at a segregated amusement park near Baltimore, Maryland, in 1963. Because he was the first white clergyperson of his stature to be arrested for civil disobedience, the event garnered international headlines. Image courtesy of the Presbyterian Historical Society.

Ecumenical youths helped bring about that change. Although Blake was in his fifties, the Chicago Defender pointed out that the protesters at the Baltimore amusement park were “predominately white and of college age.”¹¹⁷ Young ecumenical Protestants were the first generation to be exposed to an officially integrationist philosophy and to interracial meetings while still attending segregated churches and living in segregated neighborhoods. Of course, it was not only youth who protested segregation. Ministers throughout the country joined marches and freedom rides. As they took leave from their pulpits, they often encountered resistance from churchgoers, who could not understand why ministers of the gospel were getting involved with a political movement. The gap in values between laity and clergy had long been present in American Protestantism, but it widened and became more public during the civil rights movement.¹¹⁸

Ecumenical activism against Jim Crow contrasted with evangelical views on segregation. As ecumenical Protestants discarded their earlier moderation by embracing protest movements and anti-colonial rhetoric, some evangelical leaders were discarding their commitment to segregation and becoming racial liberals. Evangelicals started reading Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict in the 1950s and listening to their missionaries about the harmful effects of American racism on overseas evangelism.¹¹⁹ Billy Graham began desegregating his crusades in the mid-1950s but shied away from structural criticism and treated racism as an individual problem best tackled through education and persuasion.¹²⁰ L. Nelson Bell, editor of Christianity Today and Graham’s father-in-law, echoed the feeling among many of his fellow Southern Presbyterians in 1956, when he stated that although the Bible does not mandate segregation, “voluntary segregation” was preferable.¹²¹ By the 1960s evangelicals’ loud demand for law and order—a slogan that was racially coded in obvious ways—often drowned out their calls for racial equality.¹²² As some evangelical leaders became moderates on civil rights, they were attacked from the right by figures like Bob Jones and Carl McIntire. Churchgoers in their congregations also resisted calls for racial equality. But because ecumenical Protestants had blazed the trail of racial liberalism decades earlier and had moved on to more expansive attacks on racism, evangelicals were able to occupy the middle ground vacated by their religious rivals and defend their newfound racial liberalism by contrasting it with the wrongheaded approach taken by Blake and ecumenical youths.¹²³

The National Council and its allies became important players in the civil rights movement. Among the organization’s biggest achievements was an enormous pressure campaign on midwestern senators and members of Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act in 1964. The effort was led by African American activist Anna Hedgeman, a longtime figure in Democratic Party politics. Hedgeman grew up in a Methodist household in a small town in Minnesota, where hers was the only African American family. She was the first Black graduate of Hamline University, a Methodist school in St. Paul. She settled in New York City, and, from the 1930s through the 1950s, she worked primarily in the realms of local, state, and national politics but was also a prominent member of the YWCA and Church Women United. She began working for the National Council in 1963, helping organize the March on Washington and mobilizing the vast majority of white attendees at the march. Hedgeman brought skill, experience, and political connections to the National Council, all of which were rooted in a long history of African American women’s organizing against segregation.¹²⁴

To promote the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Hedgeman organized letter-writing campaigns, spoke out publicly, and lobbied members of Congress and senators. According to James F. Findlay, ecumenical Protestants “exerted pressure on Congress not only in Washington and on Capitol Hill, but also from parishes a thousand miles westward in small places like Rochester, Indiana; Farley, Iowa; and Waseca, Minnesota.”¹²⁵ About 40 percent of the letters received by Iowa senator James E. Bromwell, Illinois senator Everett Dirksen, and House minority leader Charles Halleck on the Civil Rights bill came from church groups.¹²⁶ Ecumenical Protestants became an important constituency lobbying for the passage of the pathbreaking Civil Rights Act.

The human rights advocacy of the 1940s shaped the anti-racist activism of the National Council and their allies into the 1960s, but also revealed its limits. Eugene Carson Blake lamented the failures of religious activism in front of hundreds of thousands at the 1963 March on Washington, announcing that “as of Aug. 28, 1963, we have achieved neither a nonsegregated church nor a nonsegregated society. And it is partially because the churches of America have failed to put their own houses in order.”¹²⁷ The integrationist philosophy long held by ecumenical leaders was resisted in the pews but also increasingly challenged by the emerging Black power movement. The long-standing focus on white prejudice and reforming white men and women was increasingly overshadowed by calls to empower African Americans—including calls made by Hedgeman.¹²⁸ The goal of getting more African Americans employed at Protestant universities, hospitals, and seminaries finally received greater attention in the 1960s.

Most dramatically, African American activist James Foreman burst into Riverside Church—the cathedral of liberal Protestantism—during a service in 1969 and presented the “Black Manifesto,” which demanded $500 million in reparations from white Christians. Soon, activists staged sit-ins at Union Theological Seminary and several sit-ins in the National Council’s “God Box” in support of Foreman’s manifesto. Similar protests had struck meetings of the World Council, including one chaired by George McGovern.¹²⁹ The Black and white students who made up the majority of these activists were mobilizing the ideology of “revolution” and the tactics they had learned in ecumenical Protestant institutions. They now used them against the National Council and World Council.

In response to these protests, there was “broad agreement” among ecumenical leaders that more had to be done about racism and colonialism, writes Findlay, but they were “fearful of constituent reaction back home.” Churchgoers across the country were aghast at the events in New York City and wrote to National Council leaders pleading not to give into Foreman’s demands. “The acceptance of this manifesto in any form will constitute an endorsement of its spirit, its methods, its forms of deciding culprits, and is totally foreign to the Christian Church,” one churchgoer wrote. Other letter writers were openly racist. If African Americans were seeking reparations, why shouldn’t whites “seek the same type of consideration for all of the senseless killing and riots promulgated by the black race?” A May 1969 Gallup poll showed that 92 percent of churchgoers opposed reparations, while only 2 percent approved of them. A slight majority of African Americans also opposed reparations but a much larger number, 21 percent, approved. Despite the deep unpopularity of reparations among their constituency, several ecumenical Protestant denominations agreed to some of Foreman’s demands and raised about a million dollars for the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization by 1970.¹³⁰ Needless to say, most white churchgoers did not take kindly to the demands of Black power activists and grew increasingly frustrated with ecumenical Protestant leaders for working with these radicals. The clergy-laity gap widened dramatically during the civil rights and Black power movements of the 1960s.

The activism of some ecumenical Protestants against segregation that began in the 1940s and reached new heights in the 1960s helped polarize this religious community along political lines. The differences between the clergy, especially those who served in leadership positions, and the laity became remarkably wide. The divide between Protestants in the South and the rest of the country only sharpened differences. The anti-racist activism of ecumenical leaders and youths encouraged members of this religious community to adopt political identities, whether they were on the side of the civil rights movement or stood against it. The political mobilization against segregation partly accounted for the divergence between “conservative” and “liberal” religious groups and the increased salience of these two identities.¹³¹

Those more sympathetic to segregation challenged the right of ecumenical institutions to do more than change hearts and minds. Supporters of segregation relied increasingly on the political ideas of the conservative movement, including restrictions on the reach of the government and a strict constructionist view of the Constitution. Unable to deploy theologically racist arguments, ecumenical Protestant defenders of segregation turned to political and ecclesiological arguments instead. At the same time, evangelicals mobilized politically on behalf of the grievance politics becoming popular among white Americans in the wake of the civil rights movement.¹³² Groups like the Southern Presbyterians found themselves on a trajectory toward ideas more common among evangelicals and the newly emergent conservative movement than with the leadership of the National Council.

More and more, America’s Protestants were split over racism, especially structural racism. Segregation, however, was not the only reason for the emergence of fault lines among Protestants. Divisions also emerged through fights over economic policy.