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“Just a Bunch of Agitators”: Kneel-Ins and the Desegregation of Southern Churches

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2018

Joseph Kip Kosek
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Abstract

Civil rights protests at white churches, dubbed “kneel-ins,” laid bare the racial logic that structured Christianity in the American South. Scholars have investigated segregationist religion, but such studies tend to focus on biblical interpretation rather than religious practice. A series of kneel-ins at Atlanta's First Baptist Church, the largest Southern Baptist church in the Southeast, shows how religious activities and religious spaces became sites of intense racial conflict. Beginning in 1960, then more forcefully in 1963, African American students attempted to integrate First Baptist's sanctuary. When they were alternately barred from entering, shown to a basement auditorium, or carried out bodily, their efforts sparked a wide-ranging debate over racial politics and spiritual authenticity, a debate carried on both inside and outside the church. Segregationists tended to avoid a theological defense of Jim Crow, attacking instead the sincerity and comportment of their unwanted visitors. Yet while many church leaders were opposed to open seating, a vibrant student contingent favored it. Meanwhile, mass media—local, national, and international—shaped interpretations of the crisis and possibilities for resolving it. Roy McClain, the congregation's popular minister, attempted to navigate a middle course but faced criticism from all sides. The conflict came to a head when Ashton Jones, a white minister, was arrested, tried, and imprisoned for protesting outside the church. In the wake of the controversy, the members of First Baptist voted to end segregation in the sanctuary. This action brought formal desegregation—but little meaningful integration—to the congregation.

Keywords

Civil Rights MovementReligionAtlanta
Type
Research Article
Information
Religion and American Culture , Volume 23 , Issue 2 , Summer 2013 , pp. 232 - 261
Copyright
Copyright © Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture 2013

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References

Notes

I thank Amos Brown, Walker Knight, Brenda Nave, Rod Nave, Bill Woolf, Sue Woolf, and Warren Woolf for sharing their recollections. Nancy Ammerman, Stephen Haynes, Kevin Kruse, and Melani McAlister offered sources and suggestions, while Joseph Malherek provided valuable research assistance. Early versions of this article were presented at a Peace History Society conference and a meeting of Young Scholars in American Religion; I am grateful to participants in those venues for their thoughtful criticism.

1. The term “kneel-in” was also used, at times, to refer not to a church visit but to a prayer protest convened at a swimming pool, restaurant, or other public space. Here, I discuss only the church visits.

2. Haynes, Stephen, The Last Segregated Hour: The Memphis Kneel- Ins and the Campaign for Southern Church Desegregation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sokol, Jason, There Goes My Everything: White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights, 1945–1975 (New York: Knopf, 2006), 81–82 Google Scholar; Cunningham, W. J., Agony at Galloway: One Church's Struggle with Social Change (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1980)Google Scholar; Marsh, Charles, God's Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997)Google Scholar; Harding, Susan Friend, The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 27. 3 Google Scholar. King, Martin Luther Jr., “The Un-Christian Christian,” Ebony, August 1965, 77 Google Scholar.

4. The most extensive previous account of the First Baptist kneelins is Kruse, Kevin, “White Flight: Resistance to Desegregation of Neighborhoods, Schools and Businesses in Atlanta, 1946–1966” (Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 2000), 414–21Google Scholar. More recently, First Baptist has been known for the prominence of its minister, Charles Stanley, in conservative evangelical politics. Stanley's election as president of the Southern Baptist Convention in 1984 was part of a broader campaign by fundamentalists to move the denomination rightward, both theologically and politically.

5. Recent work on religion in the civil rights era includes: Botham, Fay, Almighty God Created the Races: Christianity, Interracial Marriage, and American Law (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009)Google Scholar; Chappell, David L., A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Crespino, Joseph, In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007)Google Scholar; Dailey, Jane, “Sex, Segregation, and the Sacred after Brown,” Journal of American History 91, no. 1 (June 2004), http://www.jstor.org CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Harvey, Paul, Freedom's Coming: Religious Culture and the Shaping of the South from the Civil War through the Civil Rights Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Manis, Andrew, Southern Civil Religions in Conflict: Civil Rights and the Culture Wars (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2002)Google Scholar; and Marsh, God's Long Summer.

6. Stephen Haynes finds a similar dynamic in the Memphis kneel-in campaign: see Haynes, Last Segregated Hour. I focus more specifically than does Haynes on power struggles in the spaces in and around the church. On the general concept of authenticity in the 1960s, see Rossinow, Doug, The Politics of Authenticity: Liberalism, Christianity, and the New Left in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998)Google Scholar. On white images of black Christians, see Evans, Curtis J., The Burden of Black Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Williams, Linda, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O. J. Simpson (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001)Google Scholar.

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8. First Baptist Church, Atlanta, Georgia (n.p., 1960); Brenda Nave, Rod Nave, Sue Woolf, Warren Woolf, Bill Woolf, interview by author, July 10, 2009 [hereafter Nave/Woolf interview).

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14. On the history of Atlanta in the civil rights era, see Bayor, Ronald H., Race and the Shaping of Twentieth-Century Atlanta (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brown-Nagin, Tomiko, Courage to Dissent: Atlanta and the Long History of the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Grady-Willis, Winston, Challenging U.S. Apartheid: Atlanta and Black Struggles for Human Rights, 1960–1977 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006)Google Scholar; Harmon, David Andrew, Beneath the Image of the Civil Rights Movement and Race Relations: Atlanta, Georgia, 1946–1981 (New York: Garland, 1996)Google Scholar; and Kruse, White Flight.

15. Mays, Benjamin E., Seeking To Be Christian in Race Relations (New York: Friendship Press, 1957), 42–43 Google Scholar; Haynes, Last Segregated Hour, 6–7.

16. Thurman, Howard, Footprints of a Dream: The Story of the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples (New York: Harper and Bros., 1959), 32, 59Google Scholar; Thurman, Howard, “Foreword,” in The First Footprints: The Dawn of the Idea of the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples: Letters between Alfred Fisk and Howard Thurman, 1943–1944 (San Francisco: Lawton and Alfred Kennedy, 1975)Google Scholar.

17. My account of the 1960 kneel-ins is based on Bentley, Jim, “Negro Students Attend 6 White Churches Here,” Atlanta Constitution, August 8, 1960 Google Scholar; and “Negro Leader Hails Churches for Courtesy during Visits,” Atlanta Journal, August 8, 1960.

18. Fleming, Cynthia Griggs, Soon We Will Not Cry: The Liberation of Ruby Doris Smith Robinson (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998), 56 Google Scholar.

19. “Kneel-Ins,” Student Voice 1, no. 2 (August 1960), in The Student Voice, 1960–1965, ed. Clayborne Carson (Westport, Conn.: Meckler, 1990), 7; Mays, Benjamin, “The Kneel-Ins,” My View, Pittsburgh Courier, September 10, 1960 Google Scholar, Proquest Historical Newspapers.

20. Bentley, “Negro Students Attend 6 White Churches Here”; “Negro Leader Hails Churches for Courtesy during Visits.”

21. Haynes, , Last Segregated Hour, 9–52 Google Scholar; Sokol, , There Goes My Everything, 81–82 Google Scholar.

22. Kruse, , White Flight, 180–204 Google Scholar.

23. My account of the April 21 events is based on Hal Gulliver, “3 Negroes Taken Out Bodily after Pushing into Church,” Atlanta Constitution, April 23, 1963; Sally Rugaber, “3 Negroes Ejected at First Baptist,” Atlanta Journal, April 23, 1963; and Rod Nave, Report to Church Study and Reference Committee, September 22, 1963, copy in author's possession.

24. On the politics of respectability, see Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks, Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 185–229 Google Scholar.

25. Mrs.Hayslip, H. C., letter to the editor, Atlanta Constitution, May 13, 1963 Google Scholar; Woodall, W. C., letter to the editor, Atlanta Constitution, May 11, 1963 Google Scholar; Jim Bentley, “First Baptist Votes to Let Negroes Sit in Sanctuary,” Atlanta Constitution, December 23, 1963; Cotter, William C., “Race Bars Dropped at First Baptist,” Atlanta Journal, December 23, 1963 Google Scholar.

26. “Denied Membership,” Christian Index, June 20, 1963, 8; Nave/Woolf interview.

27. Bond, Horace Julian, letter to the editor, Atlanta Journal, May 20, 1963 Google Scholar; McGill, Ralph, “The Agony Continues,” Atlanta Constitution, April 30, 1963 Google Scholar. For a parallel debate over sincerity in Memphis, see Haynes, Last Segregated Hour, 162–63.

28. Rugaber, “Three Negroes Ejected”; Nave, Report. On stereotypes of black religiosity, see Evans, Burden of Black Religion.

29. On media and civil rights, see Kasher, Steven, The Civil Rights Movement: A Photographic History, 1954–1968 (New York: Abbeville, 2000)Google Scholar; Raiford, Leigh, Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011)Google Scholar; Torres, Sasha, Black, White, and in Color: Television and Black Civil Rights (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003)Google Scholar; and Walker, Jenny, “A Media-Made Movement? Black Violence and Nonviolence in the Historiography of the Civil Rights Movement,” in Media, Culture, and the Modern African American Freedom Struggle, ed. Ward, Brian (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001)Google Scholar.

30. Nave/Woolf interview; Amos Brown, telephone interview by author, May 25, 2010.

31. On colorblind racism, see Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo, Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America, 3d ed. (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009)Google Scholar.

32. On civil rights and anticommunism, see Borstelmann, Thomas, The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001)Google Scholar; and Dudziak, Mary, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000)Google Scholar.

33. McGill, Ralph, “Christianity on Trial,” Atlanta Constitution, August 20, 1960 Google Scholar; Virginia Cobb, letter to the editor, Christian Index, September 1, 1960, 7. On the politics of foreign missions, see Chappell, Stone of Hope, 147–50; and McAlister, Melani, “What Is Your Heart For? Affect and Internationalism in the Evangelical Public Sphere,” American Literary History 20, no. 4 (Winter 2008): 870–95, Project MUSE, http://muse.jhu.edu; and Willis, All According to God's PlanCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34. Thurman, , Footprints, 22–24 Google Scholar; Thurman, , “Foreword”; Mays, Seeking To Be Christian, 43–44, 77Google Scholar.

35. Nave, Report; Nave/Woolf interview.

36. Cohen, Robert, “‘Two, Four, Six, Eight, We Don't Want to Integrate’: White Student Attitudes toward the University of Georgia’s Desegregation,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 80, no. 3 (Fall 1996): 616–45Google Scholar; Sokol, , There Goes My Everything, 148–63Google Scholar; Michel, Gregg L., Struggle for a Better South: The Southern Student Organizing Committee, 1964–1969 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Newman, Getting Right with God, 162–66; Nave/Woolf interview.

37. “Nave is President,” Christian Index, April 14, 1960, 5; Nave/ Woolf interview.

38. Rod Nave, Interview with Mr. R. N. Landers on April 23, 1963, copy in author's possession.

39. Ibid.

40. Rod Nave, Meeting with Atlanta University System Students on April 25, 1963, copy in author's possession.

41. Ibid.

42. Nave, Report; Nave/Woolf interview.

43. “Students Integrate First Baptist,” Atlanta Journal, June 24, 1963; Nave, Report; Nave/Woolf interview; see also “Mixed Reaction Greets Worshippers at First Baptist,” Atlanta Daily World, June 25, 1963; and Kruse, “White Flight,” 418. For analogous Catholic defenses of religious space, see McGreevy, John, Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounter with Race in the Twentieth-Century Urban North (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996)Google Scholar.

44. Buchanan, Tom, “‘The Truth Will Set You Free’: The Making of Amnesty International,” Journal of Contemporary History 37, no. 4 (October 2002): 575–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brown, Charles, “The Epic of Ashton Jones,” Ebony, October 1965, 45–54 Google Scholar; “Pastor, 66, Sentenced in Sit-In,” Atlanta Constitution, May 31, 1963.

45. My account, in this and subsequent paragraphs, is based on the following sources: “Minister Held as 2 Sit-Ins Fail at First Baptist Church,” Atlanta Constitution, July 1, 1963; Fred Powledge, “White Pastor Arrested at Baptist Church,” Atlanta Journal, July 1, 1963; Jack Strong, “Dragged by Usher, Says Sit-In Pastor,” Atlanta Constitution, August 28, 1963; Jack Strong, “Sit-In Pastor Fined $1,000, Is Given Maximum 18 Months,” Atlanta Constitution, August 29, 1963; John Pennington, “Disturbance at Church Stirs Contradictory Stories at Trial,” Atlanta Journal, August 28, 1963; John Pennington, “Maximun [sic] Penalty Meted Minister,” Atlanta Journal, August 29, 1963; Ashton Bryan Jones, Petitioner, v. Georgia, 379 U.S. 935 (1964). Petition; Ashton Bryan Jones, Petitioner, v. Georgia, 379 U.S. 935 (1964). Brief in Opposition (on Petition); Nave, Report; and Brown, “Epic of Ashton Jones.”

46. Editorial cartoon, Atlanta Constitution, July 9, 1963; quote from Jim Peagler, letter to the editor, Atlanta Constitution, July 16, 1963.

47. “First Baptist Attended by 2 Negroes,” Atlanta Constitution, July 16, 1963; Nave/Woolf interview; Nave, Report; McClain, Roy O., “Another View of Justice,” Christian Century, February 26, 1964, 270–72Google Scholar.

48. “McClain Plans Panel on Problems,” Atlanta Constitution, July 22, 1963; “Pastor Plans Study on Race Issue,” Atlanta Journal, July 22, 1963; Peagler, letter to the editor.

49. On individual freedom as an anti-civil rights ideology, see Crespino, In Search of Another Country; Kruse, White Flight; and Lassiter, Matthew, Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006)Google Scholar.

50. On Pye's courtroom conflicts with Moore and Hollowell, see Brown-Nagin, Courage to Dissent, 234–51.

51. Gillies, John, “Justice, Southern Style,” Christian Century, January 22, 1964, 112–14Google Scholar.

52. Strong, “Sit-In Pastor Fined”; Pennington, “Maximun [sic] Penalty Meted Minister.”

53. I am grateful to Warren Woolf for providing me with a photocopy of the ballot.

54. Bentley, “First Baptist Votes”; Cotter, “Race Bars Dropped”; McClain quote found at Roy O. McClain, “Some Didn't Want the ‘Good News,”’ Atlanta Constitution, December 23, 1963; Allen quote found at “Church Race Vote Praised by Allen,” Atlanta Journal, December 23, 1963. Stephen Haynes also finds that the general membership was more amenable to open seating than were church leaders. Haynes, Last Segregated Hour.

55. Bentley, “First Baptist Votes”; Cotter, “Race Bars Dropped.” Quotes are in both sources.

56. Nave/Woolf interview (on the members who left); “Lesson in Good Will by First Baptist,” Atlanta Constitution, December 24, 1963; John Bell, letter to the editor, Atlanta Constitution, January 3, 1964.

57. Ashton B. Jones to Howard Moore, April 6, 1965, box 4, Harry Steinmetz Papers, Special Collections and University Archives, San Diego State University; Brown, “Epic of Ashton Jones”; Ashton B. Jones to Carl Sanders, October 29, 1963, box 3, series I, Eliza K. Paschall Papers, Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Emory University (source of quote).

58. Gillies, “Justice, Southern Style”; Russell, Bertrand, letter to the editor, Times (London), November 1, 1963, in Yours Faithfully, Russell, Bertrand, ed. Perkins, Ray Jr. (Chicago: Open Court, 2002), 316 Google Scholar. Material concerning the fund is in box 4, Steinmetz Papers, SDSU.

59. “First Baptists Admit Jailed White Pastor,” Atlanta Constitution, March 16, 1964; “Church Visit Was ‘Cordial,’ Cleric Says,” Atlanta Journal, March 17, 1964; Brown, “Epic of Ashton Jones.”

60. Holmes, Thomas J., Ashes for Breakfast (Valley Forge, Pa.: Judson Press, 1969)Google Scholar.

61. Wayne King, “Carter's Church Upholds Its Policy by Refusing to Admit Four Blacks,” New York Times, November 1, 1976, Proquest Historical Newspapers; Wayne King, “Plains Church Again Bars Pastor after 15 Minutes in Sunday School,” New York Times, November 8, 1976, Proquest Historical Newspapers; Wayne King, “Carter's Church to Admit Blacks and Keep Minister,” New York Times, November 15, 1976, Proquest Historical Newspapers.

62. Bentley, “First Baptist Votes”; Curtis W. Freeman, “‘Never Had I Been So Blind’: W. A. Criswell's ‘Change’ on Racial Segregation,” Journal of Southern Religion 10 (2007), http://jsr.fsu.edu/; Newman, Getting Right with God.

63. Nave/Woolf interview. On the limits of desegregation more generally, see Crespino, In Search of Another Country; Kruse, White Flight; and Lassiter, Silent Majority.

64. Woodall, letter to the editor.