THE BROTHERHOOD OF SEGREGATED MEN
The ministers to our forefathers had the Bible, but not Socialism; and for them segregation was compatible with Christianity. Our modern ministers have the Bible and Socialism; and for them segregation is incompatible with Christianity. The only difference is Socialism. The Bible hasn’t changed; and, if Socialism is omitted, segregation and Christianity are still compatible.—S. Emory Rogers
During the 1850’s the church provided one of the bulwarks in the Southern defense of slavery. In that decade pro-slavery theologians prepared elaborate treatises “proving” slavery divinely authorized. The 1950’s finds the churches of South Carolina dangerously close to taking a similar position—only this time on segregation. Religious groups of the later period, however, are less unanimous or enthusiastic in support of “traditional race patterns.” In South Carolina, in fact, a small number of ministers and laymen have opened the most important crack in the solid wall of white segregationist sentiment. The importance of their protest should not be overemphasized; in many cases it is little more than academic. Protestant church organizations have given no direct endorsement to the abolition of racial segregation. The Methodist Church’s condemnation of the use of economic coercion against Negroes by the Citizens Council has been to date the outstanding criticism of white supremacy efforts by any Protestant group.
On the national level the church represents perhaps the most segregated of all public institutions as Reinhold Niebuhr has so well pointed out. Only a small fraction of church members, even in the North, is associated with integrated churches. Nonetheless, national church organizations outside the South have been making rapid progress in removing all official barriers to church integration. This is also true of most South-wide church organizations. The Southern Baptist Convention, the Southern Presbyterian Assembly, and the Southeastern Jurisdiction of the Methodist Church, for example, have all gone on record as opposed to segregation based on race. These organizations are much ahead of their South Carolina affiliates. Many leading segregationists, who have always considered themselves staunch church supporters, consequently are caught in a squeeze between church leadership and their own attitudes toward segregation. This patently unhappy situation has led some outspoken “Christian segregationists” to question the church’s taking a stand on the issue. The News and Courier wistfully hoped “that religion could be held above the complicated social, political and economic features of the present debate over race.” It was difficult enough “to fill churches with worshippers and to insure financial support of religious work” even when people were not being “alienated by social conflicts.” The “pressure in the churches” for an end of segregation was “only one of the symptoms of a sick world” which “plain people, guided by their own sure instincts, must resist with all their might.”[183]
In the best tradition of the Social Gospel, the Morning News initially took the opposite view, holding that the church certainly “should become interested in segregation. So long as we limit ministers to talks of home, mother, God and country,” wrote Editor Jack H. O’Dowd, “we won’t have a Christian nation, but a nation that tolerates the seeds of Christian thought and influence.” More churchmen were needed who were willing “to tie the power of Christianity to the problems of living.” Yet in less than three months O’Dowd was criticizing the Reverend Edward L. Byrd of Florence for attacking segregation. He argued that while segregation could not be justified “on the basis of Christianity and absolute morality,” it was “easily defended on the grounds of public good and social expediency.” Religion was of “greatest benefit” only when its application would “enrich the people. An immediate application of the theory of segregation’s immorality would not be a blessing to our Southland.” Disparaging Byrd’s call for “courageous and Christian leadership” in facing the problem, the Morning News stated that leadership was neither “a matter of blowing the bugles of war from the rear” nor “a matter of leading your people into destruction for a cause being fought the wrong way at the wrong time.”[184]
Among the various Protestant religious denominations opponents of integration have been either strong enough to prevent any action from being taken or able to place the church on record as favoring a continuation of racial segregation. The Methodist Church provides perhaps the best example of a division of opinion. In October, 1954, the annual conference of South Carolina Methodism by a vote of 289 to 148 adopted a resolution stating that the question of racial integration in the public schools could “best be resolved on the state or local level.”
It is apparent to us [said the resolution] that an attempt to integrate the races in our public schools without regard to their relative numbers would work grave injustice to many innocent persons, and in the present instance we fear the Negro would suffer most, as he has often when those far removed from his every day problems have undertaken to speak in his name.
Consideration must also be given to the large number of Negro teachers and administrators in our public schools, lest they be denied leadership among their people.
To compel a parent, whether white or Negro, to send his child to school and at the same time to compel the child to live under conditions which the parents regard to be detrimental to the highest interest would, in our judgment, introduce problems of serious import.[185]
The News and Courier applauded this statement as “a strong and fearless stand,” “a common sense approach,” and “a more truly Christian attitude than the twisting of ‘equality’ to mean forced association.”[186]
The following year, however, the Methodist Church’s annual conference pulled the rug from under its more ardent segregationist friends. On that occasion the conference officially recorded its opposition to the Citizens Councils as organizations “formed for the express purpose of exerting economic pressure.” This statement, introduced by the Reverend A. McKay Brabham, Jr., of Aiken, and the Reverend J. B. Murray of Orangeburg County, drew only scattered negative votes.
Reaction throughout the state was almost unanimously hostile. The Methodists’ resolution, declared the News and Courier, “is not necessarily a full reflection either of the facts or of the sentiments of most churchmen in South Carolina. It is one thing to regard our fellowmen as all God’s creatures. It is quite another thing meekly to submit to pressure against customs and convictions held by our people these many centuries.”[187] L. B. McCord, a former Presbyterian minister, thought it “not unChristian to fire or not hire anyone whose conduct is not wholesome and [does not] contribute to the best interest in the home or wherever that person may work.”[188] The Kingstree Methodist Church, in an especially strong condemnation of its parent body, was still more emphatic. It charged that “too many leaders and ministers in our Methodist Church have been saturated with propaganda and even made to have a guilt complex with reference to the question of integration of the races and have used their high offices as ministers and writers, though innocently we hope, for the purpose of disseminating propaganda which we believe is inspired by Communist or Communist-front organizations.”[189]
The extent of the opposition in some areas to the resolution is well illustrated by the action of the Reverend J. B. Murray’s congregation in forcing his removal from his Orangeburg County charge. In announcing Reverend Murray’s transfer, Dr. Pierce E. Cook, the Orangeburg District Superintendent for the Methodist Church, stated that the Citizens Councils were “not as bad” as the resolution implied. The Councils, he said, were “trying to do something our people in this area are in sympathy with.”[190]
Another example of pressure on supporters of the resolution was the case of the Reverend E. S. Jones of St. Paul’s Methodist Church of Orangeburg. Less than two weeks after adoption of the resolution, Jones, one of its prominent backers, felt constrained to declare publicly: “I have from the beginning felt that it was unwise for the races to be thrown together in the public schools, and I have not changed from that position. It is my conviction that the Church and its ministry must always be positively Christian, not only in its ends but in the ways and means adopted to attain these ends.”[191]
Only the maverick Morning News found any merit in the Methodist stand. The Conference’s action, wrote Editor O’Dowd, “was proper and timely ... [and] to be commended.” Segregation extremists, he thought, would have a hard time labeling this as the action of “communistic and brainwashed” outsiders.[192]
On the local level several Methodist churches, generally in the low-country, have exhibited concern about growing integration support among church elements. The Hemingway Methodist Church adopted a statement condemning the Supreme Court ruling as “groundless and defenseless,” an “improper interpretation of the U. S. Constitution” and an “unholy invasion of State’s Rights.” To place the white and colored children together in churches and schools would be “to guarantee the loss of the sense of biological difference” between the races which would becloud “our fair land with a mongrelized, second-rate people cancelling five or more centuries of progress.” Integration was being accomplished “by propaganda and open advocacy and by the cunning of idea infiltration.” The Methodists of Hemingway graciously conceded “the Negro to be human just as the white man, to be a growing citizen and entitled to equal cultural and economic advantages.” The “mixing” of the races in church and school, however, should be “allowed to die and remain so forever.”[193]
The Women’s Society of Christian Service of the Kingstree Methodist Church insisted that “voluntary separation” of the races was no denial of the “Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man.” The Society desired “the advancement of Colored People, but not through the agency of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.” In the spirit of humility and soul searching, the ladies resolved that “we desire to continue to work out our way of worshipping God and in helping our Colored Brethren to do the same for themselves. All sections of our great country are not the same, and what is best for one section may not be best for another. We believe that in the sight of God we have been working out our problems in a way acceptable to Him, even though that way be not perfect, perhaps.”
“In some areas of Brotherhood” Church elements favoring integration were “moving too fast,” continued the Kingstree ladies. “The coming of the kingdom of God is gradual. We should concentrate on some of our sins of greed, selfishness, worldliness, etc., before we attempt too great a change otherwise.”[194]
The Manning Methodist Church adopted a resolution which affirmed belief in the divine origin of man and the principle that all men “stand on a spiritual equality.” But the Manning Methodists asserted that “certain social, economic and cultural factors exist which make it impractical and undesirable that members of the Negro race be received into and made a part of this congregation.” Should the South Carolina Methodist Church adopt a policy of racial integration in its churches, the Manning Methodists would find it “impractical” to continue connection with that body.[195]
The closeness of the division of opinion amongst South Carolina Methodists toward the question of church integration was dramatized at their annual conference in August, 1957, when by a vote of 287-261 it was agreed to permit the denomination’s Negro churches to affiliate with white Methodists where both agreed. Presiding Bishop Nolan B. Harmon of Charlotte, North Carolina, was careful to point out that the new course of policy had nothing to do with integration so far as individuals were concerned and emphasized that no white church was obliged to take in anyone. J. C. Holler of Columbia, conference lay reader and one of the authors of the proposal, declared that “the object of the plan was to take the race issue out of church law.” It solidified local control as represented by States Rights, he asserted. But opponents of the proposal thought differently. A Methodist layman, D. D. Brown of Hemingway, warned that the plan was “a highway to integration—a sedative to keep us quiet while the integration plan is put into force.” Such proposals, he added, played into the hands of “subversives” and would hasten the “mongrelization” of the races. The Reverend B. Rhett Turnipseed, a retired clergyman from Greenville, delivered an impassioned speech against the proposal. At the time of the unification of the Northern and Southern branches of the Methodist Church, said the Reverend Turnipseed, he was assured by two bishops that the question of integration within the church would not arise. “Brethren,” he declared, “I have kept the faith. My position hasn’t changed.... It is unfortunate at this time for a denomination to register itself for a paper like this. This is my swan song.”[196]
The Baptist Church, the state’s largest denomination, faced, or more accurately dodged, the race issue at its annual convention in November, 1954. The convention received a report from its Social Service Commission urging Baptists to “protect the public school system and seek to strengthen it in all possible ways.” Noting that “these are the times that try men’s souls,” the Commission offered several “guideposts” for Baptists to follow “in this crisis.” “God’s will” should be “earnestly and prayerfully” sought. White Carolinians should recognize and “humbly confess” that “in spite of strenuous efforts, and because of inherited traditions ... adequate educational opportunities for all our children” had not been provided in the past. And finally, Baptist action should be based upon the recognition “of every person as an individual, precious in the eyes of God.”[197] The Baptists, by receiving a noncommittal statement of principles rather than in adopting a formal resolution, deftly sidestepped the issue.
Individual Baptist ministers who have spoken out too strongly against racial segregation have not been immune to pressure. The most widely publicized incident involved the Reverend G. Jackson Stafford, pastor of the Batesburg Baptist Church. The Reverend Stafford’s case was particularly notable because Federal District Judge George Bell Timmerman, Sr., and his son, Governor George Bell Timmerman, Jr., were members of his congregation. Judge Timmerman, who has the hard face of a Puritan elder, was chairman of the board of deacons. Stafford’s difficulties arose from his vote in favor of a resolution adopted by the Southern Baptist Convention endorsing the Supreme Court’s desegregation decision. As a result, opposition to the minister rapidly developed within the Batesburg congregation and finally forced his resignation. With rare courage Stafford refused to renounce his convictions “regarding Christian race relations.” He charged that his resignation was made necessary by “several highly placed members of the Batesburg church playing politics” with religion.[198]
One of the most notable and quoted addresses against integration by a minister was delivered before the state Baptist conference on evangelism in 1956 by the Reverend Dr. W. A. Criswell, president of the Southern Baptist Convention and pastor of the First Baptist Church of Dallas, Texas. Dr. Criswell told the Carolina evangelists:
That thing [integration] they are trying to ram down our throats is a thing of idiocy and foolishness. Any man who says he is altogether desegregated is soft in the head.
I’m a segregationist when it comes to whom my daughter is going to associate with. I know some white trash I don’t want my daughter running with.
I’m a segregationist when it comes to the woman I take home at night. I pick out one, and that one is my wife. We are a segregated family. We don’t invite everybody to come home with us. If we did, we would not have a home, and the same thing applies to the church....
Who is stirring up all this stuff? Is it God’s people or is it somebody else? I happen to know it is somebody else....
This [resistance to desegregation] is part of the ordeal by fire. When a true minister stands up and is true to God he will have to face these pressures. But God will not let us down.
They may put your feet to the fire, they can cut off your head, but you can’t quit. You might want to be dead, but you can’t quit. God has called you and you must go on.
God help us to be absolutely honest and absolutely fearless in the things we believe, saying with Martin Luther, “Here I stand, I can do no other.”[199]
The day after delivering this oration, the Reverend Doctor Criswell was invited to address a joint session of the state legislature. In a speech similar in tone and content to that quoted above, he told the solons: “Sometimes you can get broad and liberal and it doesn’t matter ... but there are other things that are precious to you such as whom are you going to marry and who is it that daughter of yours is going to marry.”[200]
South Carolina Baptists, of course, are affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention. The latter was organized in pre-Civil War days in protest against abolitionist activities of Northern Baptists. Now one of the nation’s largest denominational groups, the Southern Baptists have prospered and spread over most of the country. (The Convention’s 1957 annual meeting, for example, was held in Chicago.) In recent years the Convention has wandered further and further away from the “traditional Southern viewpoint” on race relations, especially since the 1954 Supreme Court decision. The Convention’s action in forthrightly condemning racial segregation and approving the Court decision has placed South Carolina Baptists in a quandary. Increasingly local churches and church groups have been prone to criticize the national Convention. Shortly after the 1957 Convention’s condemnation of racial segregation the congregation of the First Baptist Church of Orangeburg, one of the largest in the state, passed a resolution offered by its Laymen’s Class which not only criticized the Convention’s action but declared that “if such practices are continued by the Southern Baptist Convention it will be for the best interest of the Baptist Churches of the South to withdraw from the so-called Southern Baptist Convention and organize an association with churches” which favor racial segregation. Baptist churches in Olar, Denmark, Manning, Sumter, Andrews and Branchville adopted similar resolutions.[201]
South Carolina Episcopalians, who have a central jurisdiction for both white and Negro churches, took a wavering stand on the segregation issue at their 166th annual convention in 1956. By a vote of 94 to 43 they resolved “that there is nothing morally wrong in a voluntary recognition of racial differences and that voluntary alignments can be both natural and Christian.” The resolution continued that it was “the sense of this convention that the integration problem caused by the Supreme Court decision of 1954 as it applies to the Episcopal Church should not be characterized as Christian or un-Christian, by reason of the fact that it is either inter-racial or non-inter-racial. In such choices, Christians may wisely exercise personal preference.”[202] In adopting this resolution, the convention rejected “by a large majority in a voice vote” a substitute resolution that would have urged Episcopalians “to employ at diocesan and parochial levels a strong degree of calmness and mutual toleration and respect for disagreement.”[203]
The endorsement of voluntary segregation by South Carolina Episcopalians was scathingly denounced by The Living Church, official organ of the national Protestant Episcopal Church. Comparing the resolution to the “Aryan Paragraph” which Hitler attempted to force on all German churches, The Living Church declared that “Christians do not have the right to exercise personal preference to keep other people out of the church.... It is one thing to be gentle and understanding about sin; it is another thing to pass resolutions commending sin on a ‘voluntary’ basis ... open church membership is a first principle of Christianity. When the church door is closed to a man because of his race, a sin has been committed. When the church says that it is all right for this to be done a heresy has been enunciated.”[204]
The intensity of opposition of many Episcopalians to integration is illustrated by a resolution adopted by Episcopal women’s groups of Sumter, Kingstree, Summerton, Statesburg, and Hagood. In fulfillment of what they considered to be their duty “to see that those in high offices in our government are not influenced by Communist doctrines,” these women, whose mastery of dialectical materialism might legitimately be questioned, pointed out for all to know that integration was “a plan of the Communist Party,” a party which acknowledged “no God except Communism.”[205]
The most overtly pro-segregation religious group in South Carolina is the Southern Methodist Church, made up of those Methodists who had refused to agree to the union of the Northern and Southern branches of Methodism in the 1930’s. Headed in 1955 by the Reverend Lynn Corbit of Bowman, it is relatively small numerically, comprising but three conferences in the entire state. In 1955 the Southern Methodists stated their position in the following terms: “The Southern Methodist Church stands for continued racial segregation in the schools, state and federal installations of all kinds, churches, and all ways of life where it has always been practiced. We wish further to go on record approving any law-abiding organization that has as its aims the upholding of segregation in a peaceful manner.”[206]
In the News and Courier, a member of the Southern Methodists, S. J. Summers, Jr., of Cameron, described his church as being composed of “a dauntless group of congregations” which believed “ardently in the rightness of the Southern Way of Life” and “in the kinship of mankind under God but with the separations and differences He Himself instituted and established.” He noted Southern Methodism’s belief that “the Bible teaches of the decay and ultimate destruction of nations as the inevitable outcome of decadent faith and mongrelized bloods.”[207]
Other denominations have been less outspoken in their views. Presbyterians simply have continued their policy of segregation in churches and educational institutions.[208] In Summerton, the late Reverend Henry Rankin, Northern-born and Princeton-educated, was one of the most active members of the Citizens Council. He sought to impress Negroes “about the fallacy of trying to get their rights by going to court.” Other Presbyterian ministers, as will be noted later, have upheld the Court’s decision as being in line with the basic concepts of Christianity. An unofficial Lutheran position was presented by H. Odelle Harman, Lexington School Superintendent and delegate to the 1956 biennial convention of the national Lutheran church. In opposing a resolution commending integration, Harman told the convention:
The Lutheran Church in South Carolina will not integrate. Resolutions of the kind before us, then, can only serve to hinder the progress and mission of our great church and undo much of that which has been done in the South to promote good will and better relations between the two races.... The Christian church has done much to bring about the confusion and bitterness that we are experiencing in our racial relations in America today.... I do not believe that segregation is basically a religious question.[209]
Among religious groups only the Catholics have given endorsement to the Court decision and to the integration efforts of Negroes. The missionary South Carolina Catholic Church has held that there is no segregation before God; therefore, there should be none in the church. The attitude was given tangible expression by the enrollment of five Negro and 29 white pupils in St. Anne’s parochial school in Rock Hill in the 1954-55 term, the only example of school integration in South Carolina.[210] The Catholics, however, did not desegregate their other schools or hospitals. The number of Catholics in the state is small and only a tiny percentage of their membership is Negro.
Individual ministers frequently address themselves to the race issue. Several condemn segregation as contrary to Christian teachings concerning the brotherhood of man, though a much larger number holds the continuation of segregation desirable. The Reverend Gaston Boyle, a Presbyterian minister from John’s Island, declared that segregation was “totally dependent upon the theory of a ‘superior race,’” a concept which could not “be supported by science, Scripture, or any other fact” and hence had to be upheld “by half-truths, misquotes and unjust insinuations.” Dr. Carl Pritchett, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Anderson, considered desegregation “not a troublesome problem but a period of painful democratic growth.”[211] The Reverend Edward L. Byrd, pastor of the First Baptist Church of Florence, was especially outspoken. The decision of the Supreme Court, he said, was “fundamentally right” and “doubtless legally correct.” Answering those who used the Bible as authority for perpetuation of segregation, he declared that “anyone who seeks shelter in the Bible for his racial prejudice or his defense of segregation is walking on thin ice and takes a position that cannot be soundly defended.” According to the Reverend Byrd “no honest scholar and no honest minister can find grounds for racial segregation in the Bible.” The Reverend Fred V. Poag, pastor of the Shandon Presbyterian Church in Columbia, expressed a similar view: “There is but one position for a Christian. I believe the Church must be open to all regardless of color.”[212]
Clergymen endorsing segregation find it perfectly compatible with the fundamental teachings of Christianity. The Reverend J. M. Lane, pastor of the Tabernacle Baptist Church of Orangeburg, declared, “I think the Bible teaches segregation and I believe it is the best for both races. I feel that the work of the Citizens Councils, without violence and force, is the Christian method of dealing with the move by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to force integration in the public schools.”[213] The Reverend L. B. McCord of Clarendon feared “mongrelization.” “Some people feel that segregation is a sin,” he declared. “That isn’t true. Integration of the races would definitely be sinful.” The Reverend J. J. Patrick, a retired Methodist minister of Ruffin, stated that the South desired segregation “because the best white and colored people believe in God and the Bible.” Writing in the News and Courier, he declared,
We were all living in peace and contentment until that old serpent, the devil, that beguiled Adam and Eve to disobey God and eat the forbidden fruit, led the NAACP to scatter propaganda down here and a few (big heads) were beguiled to follow their teachings....
They [the politicians] with the communists and the NAACP, with some of the socialist preachers, influenced the U. S. Supreme Court Judges to try to nullify the Constitution and force us to consolidate the schools and place our little children in classes with Negro children, contrary to God’s law.
God created the different races and set their bounds and habitation. God commanded, demanded and taught segregation from the Flood right on down until the Bible was written....[214]
The aged and gravel-voiced Dr. Bob Jones, fundamentalist par excellence, founder of the Bob Jones University in Greenville, and one of the state’s best known Baptist clergymen, objected to making segregation a Christian issue when Christianity was not involved. Like Patrick, he said that any plan for “the intermingling of the races” was the work “of the devil.” The Christian educator criticized “agitators from outside the South and demagogue politicians” who were “only interested in the colored vote.” Christians of both races should “tell the folks who come in with all this foreign influence to get back where they came from.”[215] In like manner, the Reverend Edward B. Guerry, Rector of the lowcountry St. James’ and St. John’s Episcopal Parishes, denounced the Supreme Court desegregation decision as “unrealistic,” “unfortunate,” and conducive to “discord, confusion, and ... sharp conflict” among the American people. Integration would simply “deepen” any “sense of inferiority” the Negro might have. The rector did not believe it was “in keeping with the mind of our Lord Jesus Christ to force the Kingdom of God on people either by judicial edict, or legislative action, or ecclesiastical pressure.”[216] Still another proponent of segregation, the Reverend E. R. Mason, a retired Columbia Methodist cleric, decried integrationist assaults on “those institutions that we must have or we perish,” e.g., “God, your church, home and schools.” Integration’s “true motive,” he declared, was “infiltrating the Black race into the White race.”[217] The Reverend M. A. Woodson of the Bethel Baptist Church of Olanta told the Lake City Citizens Council that the connection between the Communists and the NAACP had been “conclusively established.” The Citizens Councils, he said, were the right hands in the fight for constitutional government and states rights. “We must strive to leave our children a constitutional form of government and a segregated society that works in harmony.”[218]
Pro-segregation clergymen have not evolved a systematic theological basis for defense of their position. Rather each minister has developed his own. Sermons and statements upholding traditional Southern race patterns abound with quotations of Biblical authority. In a sermon that might well have been delivered in the 1850’s in defense of slavery, Dr. E. E. Colvin, pastor of the Immanuel Baptist Church of Orangeburg, asserted that
... the Old Testament scriptures recognize the existence of things as they are. We find that also in the New Testament. Jesus did not attempt to change or reform society in his day by the use of force. There was slavery in his day. There were many other civil and social ills in his day but never did Jesus attempt to use force or advocate force. In the centuries that have passed since then the teachings of Jesus have brought to pass tremendous changes.
Paul sent Onesimus, the slave, back to his former owner, Philemon. Paul didn’t write to Philemon and say, “You have no right to own this man.” Not at all. Paul respected the law and the right to private property back in that day.
In the New Testament we find instructions given to slaves and to masters telling them what to do. “Servants, be obedient unto them that according to the flesh are your Masters, and ye masters do the same things unto them, and forbear threatening; knowing that He who is both their Master and yours is in heaven, and there is no respect of persons with Him.” Ephesians 6:5,9.
We find no attempt whatever to overthrow slavery suddenly and by force. “Let each man abide in that calling wherein he was called. Wast thou called being a bondservant? Care not for it: nay, even if thou canst become free, use it rather. For he that was called in the Lord being a bondservant, is the Lord’s freeman: likewise, he that was called being free, is Christ’s bondservant. Ye were brought with a price; abide with God.” I Corinthians 7:20-24. The light of the Scriptures shows that we know by experience, that social changes take time.
The solution offered by the Doctor was for “our Negro friends” to “listen to reason and continue the practice of segregation on a voluntary basis” so that “peace and harmony” might prevail. Should “the spirit of hatred” induce them to seek integration, they would create a condition which would “do as much damage in the long run as the War Between the States did a hundred years ago.”[219]
Similar opinions are frequently expressed by others—from both the clergy and laity. In a letter to the editor of the Independent, James B. Davis of Anderson found scriptural sanction for opposition to integration in Leviticus 19:19: “Ye shall keep my statutes, Thou shalt not let thy cattle gender with a diverse kind, thou shalt not sow thy field with a mingled seed.” Citing this authority he wrote: “Oh yes, we are careful about our pure cattle, poultry, dogs, etc., but we have advocates in our government who would crossbreed the people, whom God has put definite marks of color, build and features into, for their own glory. I have seen a few half breed Negro and white, that is mingled seed, and God pity an unfortunate child that must face the world a bastard, with a mingled color in his skin and hair. And he is a bastard because God has designated nations and languages, and directed us to go to our father’s people for a husband or wife.” Davis felt that the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution was a “malignant growth on a righteous document.” The Constitution should never have been amended. “Like our Holy Bible, it was good enough” in its original form.[220]
Another letter writer, Margaret L. Bostwick of Charleston, believed that a cardinal message of the Bible was “that Israel—ALL Israel, not just Judah” had been punished and was still being punished “for having disobeyed the many severe injunctions against the mixing of races.”[221] Similarly Lawrence Neff of Atlanta noted in the Morning News that “even the very elect may sometimes be deceived, or deceive themselves.” According to Neff, “Jesus was the most consistent and the most inflexible segregationist the world has ever known.” As “proof” he asserted that Jesus, “in commissioning the 12,” had said to them, “Go not to the Gentiles and into any city of the Samaritans enter not....”[222]
Similar statements, indeed, have been legion. An unsigned article in the News and Courier editorial page reminded readers that Jesus “advised all Christians to seek contentment, rather than advancement, no matter where Providence had placed them.” Such advice, intimated the article, might well be followed by Negroes seeking integration.[223] Echoing these sentiments and adding a few twists of his own, E. Robert Rowell, a “Lay Reader” of the Trio Methodist Church, declared that it was “against God’s divine will for the races to be destroyed by intermarriage and the bearing of offspring by such marriages.” In the segregation fight, thought Rowell, the end justified the means because God’s will was at issue. For this reason he gave unqualified endorsement to such practices as economic boycotts and pressures not only “against the Negroes who sign desegregation petitions or who are members of the NAACP,” but also against “those who are in sympathy with such people.” He favored refusal by his church “to receive or support any minister who believes in the false doctrine of mixing the races.”[224]
Others, too, were concerned with showing God’s approval of segregation. A close study of the Bible, declared the Right Reverend A. S. Thomas, a retired Episcopal Bishop of Wadmalaw, revealed a “plain implication” that segregation was not only consistent with brotherly love but had been ordained by the “appointment of God.” Anyone who attempted to “facilitate and expedite the amalgamation of the Negro race with other races” might well be “frustrating a great purpose of God.” Racial segregation per se was in no wise unChristian. Its unChristian aspects were due to “man’s fallen nature, not to segregation itself.” Integration would please only unnamed leaders of the nation who wished “to appease atheistic Communism.”[225]
If God approved segregation, then logically integration was the work of the devil. Mrs. Edna M. Smith of Charleston blamed the integration drive with its “fear, confusion and despair” on “Satan” who was “using all these weapons to gain more power, because he knows his power is coming to an end and he wants to take all that he can with him when he goes down into destruction and death.” The Reverend Paul M. Pridgen, pastor of the First Baptist Church of North Charleston, announced that “there is no room in Heaven for the NAACP or any other organization that stirs up race hatred.” The News and Courier took issue with Dr. Norman Vincent Peale’s statement that heaven was “completely unsegregated.” No one knew “for sure” what heaven would be like, declared the News and Courier, since “no eye-witness” had returned “to give us the direct word.” However whites were reassured: “Surely in Heaven there will be no compulsory sharing by incompatible elements.”[226] Apparently someone had returned and had imparted this information to the News and Courier.
On occasion, a voice of protest has been raised against the use of religion as a justification for segregation. The Morning News attacked the statement by a candidate for the State House of Representatives who had said that if God had intended for the races to be mixed he would have made all people the same color. “Using the same syllogism,” said the paper, “it could be argued that if God had intended for people to wear clothes, people would be born clothed; or if God intended for people to ride, they would be born with wheels rather than feet.”[227] A similar protest came from a Charleston non-conformist. How long, asked H. B. Clark, would the South fail to see “that any denial of a fellow human’s rights” constituted “a violation of Christ’s supreme commandment that we love our neighbor as ourselves?”[228]
The News and Courier has leveled some of its most bitter editorial blasts at those church leaders and groups who have taken a stand against segregation.[229] The attitude of this paper is a clear indication that leading segregation spokesmen recognize in the church a potential and powerful defaulter from the solid front against desegregation. In seeking to counteract clerical criticism of segregation, the News and Courier editorials constantly have advised church leaders to steer clear of such a controversial issue as race segregation. According to these strictures, segregation is right and desirable, and something for which no Southerner has to be apologetic. “To upset time-honored balances that keep the peace” would be both wrong and scandalous. Attempting to dispose of the moral and psychological implications of racism, the News and Courier insists that Southern whites should entertain no sense of guilt in connection with segregation policies. “It was God who created people with different physical characteristics. Who is to say that the races He created separate and distinct should now be scrambled?” If separation on the basis of race were sinful, so was separation by faiths and creeds. The trouble was that “well-meaning reformers” were confusing “religious principles with individual social customs.” “Just as morals are not meant to be observed only on Sunday, social customs also operate seven days a week.”
The mounting criticism of segregation from non-Southern religious sources, particularly from the National Council of Churches, is especially resented in South Carolina. Such ill based criticism, asserted the News and Courier, constituted a part of the general assault on “the three bulwarks of American decency ... the church, the school and the home.” Those who engaged in such criticism might themselves be guilty of religious bigotry. “No church” had “sole possession of the last word either in religious faith or moral rectitude.” God had not yet revealed His “precise purpose” in creating people with different racial characteristics. In more ominous tones, the News and Courier declared “well-meaning” but “misguided” religious leaders were treading “on dangerous ground in pointing critical fingers at an entire region’s social structure.” Southerners would “fight and die” for the freedom “to pick their own associates.”
The News and Courier has suggesed a complete renunciation by the church of all interest in the race issue. “Those of the white clergy who have been busily promoting the mixture of the races,” it asserted, could better serve their congregations by returning “to the religious and moral aspects of their high calling and leave sociological and psychological politics to the politicians.” Concurrently, if the Negro clergy “would devote more time to inspiring their flocks to improve their morals, and less to inciting them to get in with the white folks, they would be performing a better service for their people.”
That these attitudes are popular among South Carolinians of all stations is illustrated by the fact that on frequent occasions they have been heartily endorsed in letters to the editor. As a case in point Archibald Rutledge, poet laureate of South Carolina, viewed “with misgiving the church’s stupid attitude toward segregation.” He regarded the News and Courier’s policy as “so fair, so calm, so profound,” a policy notable for its “clarity” and “justice.” Rutledge was especially happy with the paper’s “distinction between religion and ancient and salutary social customs.” “I KNOW you are right,” he concluded, “and it is high time that religious leaders realize how wrong, even how wicked, they are.”[230]
Concerning the race issue then, South Carolina churches generally give at least indirect endorsement to a continuation of segregation. In large part both church organizations and individual ministers attempt to steer clear of the issue, preferring to concentrate on less controversial sins.