Use of the economic boycott at Orangeburg and elsewhere has generally been approved by the press of the state. Its dangers are realized but the end is considered worth the risk. The Record has compared the white boycott to Gandhi’s policy of “non-cooperation” (passive resistance) against the British![180] Not surprisingly the policy receives its most enthusiastic support from the News and Courier:
We would not encourage unfair retaliation against any citizen, whatever his race, for free expression of opinion. This is a truly free country and people can say or write whatever they wish.
In exercising this freedom, people must be ready to bear the consequences. If those consequences include unpopularity, public dislike or refusal to do business with them, they need not be surprised.[181]
On another occasion the News and Courier declared that “Negroes wishing to engage in activities repugnant to white people are also free to earn a living elsewhere.” To secure employment in the South, Negroes should be willing “to observe community customs.”[182]
The policies of the Citizens Council at least temporarily have been successful inasmuch as they have postponed an immediate showdown on the school segregation issue. Just how long such unofficial measures will continue to be successful is problematical.
CHAPTER V
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]