Profile in black and white

by Howard H. Quint

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]