Las tres principales formas de una operación de buy-out son:

Seminarians and the Call to Join the Southern Struggle

A primary task of the church in the modern world is to smash the barriers of racial segregation and prejudice everywhere. – New York Times, 195528

And it shall be, when thou shalt hear a stirring in the tops of the mulberry trees, that then thou shalt go forth to battle, for God is gone forth before thee.

– Chronicles I, 14:15

The sun was just coming up on May 31, 1960, as John Collins, a gangly thirty-one year-old white seminarian and former naval officer from Chicago, pulled his car to the side of the road outside Anniston, Alabama. He had been driving for several days from his parents’ home in Illinois, bound for a summer of ministry among black “church folk.” Collins had been inspired to take personal action by a recent series of non-violent sit-ins against southern segregation practices. Now here he was, traveling for the first time into the Deep South, where he would be working hand in hand with a young black minister in Talladega, Alabama, reputed home of the Grand Imperial Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan.

Alabama had just recently expelled student demonstrators from its state university and was one of two southern states that reacted to the student-led sit-ins during the winter of

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1960 by passing new laws expressly prohibiting integrated dining facilities.29 Collins was suddenly conscious of the license plates on his car that proudly declared he had just arrived from “The Land of Lincoln.”

Collins tried to calm himself by recalling the advice that Ella Baker, the Executive Director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, had recently given him when he admitted his fear over his impending journey. “Don’t be afraid,” Baker had told him. “You can go into a strange country. Abraham did.”30 Now as he sat in his parents’ car parked in the dust by the side of a rural Alabama road, Collins cracked open the cover of his new journal and began to write: “I am not as frightened as I have been at times the past couple of days. I know that handling hostility will be my biggest problem and that if I can do that I can stick it out. Even with the apprehension, there is the thrill of being here and going into the midst of this situation. It is certainly being alive – I hope my fears will not blot out the vital sparks. I am determined to stay, not heroically, but just to stay. Grant unto me, O Lord, faith to know, when I need to know, that thy grace is sufficient.”31

Collins had wanted to go south for about four months, ever since February 1, 1960, when four students from all-black North Carolina A&T University in Greensboro sat down at the segregated lunch counter of a downtown Woolworth’s Store and asked for service. That demonstration, while not the first of its kind in the South, garnered unprecedented publicity and launched a wave of nonviolent demonstrations throughout the region, ushering in one of the most visible campaigns of the early 1960s phase of the civil rights movement. By March

29 _{the Grain of Salt, March 31, 1960, 2.}

30 _{John Collins, “Statement on the Student Interracial Ministry, 1960,” SIM, UTS, H1:1:f7.}

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16, 1960, the National Student Christian Federation was reporting to seminarians that more than 935 black and white students had been arrested in non-violent protests.32 In the North, John Collins and his fellow students observed these events with intense interest. The Congress of Racial Equality, CORE, a nearly twenty year-old interracial organization that promoted non-violence and racial equality, had organized pickets of a number of

Woolworth’s branches in New York City. Collins and some of his seminary colleagues showed their sympathy with the Southern demonstrators by joining these pickets.

Collins was in his second year at Union Theological Seminary, located just north of the Columbia University campus and not far from Harlem, at 121st Street and Broadway in Manhattan’s Morningside Heights neighborhood. The racial crisis in the South had sparked a movement of re-examination and self-reflection at both the institutional and student levels at many seminaries. It had special resonance for students studying a theology that stressed the importance of human beings’ reconciliation to God and Jesus Christ and of human beings to one another. The sit-ins were cause for much self-reflection at Union Seminary, which was known for its liberal theology, its pioneering teaching on Christian ethics, and where, according to one student, “the whole seminary was faced with the realization that the church itself confronted a serious race problem within the fold.”33 For many students who had studied religion and philosophy only in the classroom, the Southern situation brought biblical ethics to life and demanded an active response. “The sit-ins knocked us out of our arm chair theology,” wrote another student in the seminary’s newspaper. “Now we have to make a

32 _{the Grain of Salt, Vol. 13, No. 12, March 31, 1960, 2.}

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decision.”34 For some that decision was to stay safely in the academy but for others, like Collins, it was to get personally involved, to head into the fray and join the battle, even though doing so was uncomfortable, personally challenging, and potentially dangerous.

A group of seventeen Union Theological Seminary students traveled from New York City to Raleigh, North Carolina, in April 1960 to attend the Southwide Student Leadership Conference on Nonviolent Resistance, a national conference organized by Ella Baker and Martin Luther King, Jr. of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. One hundred and fifty students, including the leaders of the recent sit-ins, were invited to a several day conference on the campus of Shaw University to discuss the impact of the sit-ins and to strategize about capitalizing on the momentum they had created to change racially restrictive laws and practice. The students at that Easter Weekend conference created the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), as a leadership organization. However, the seeds of another organization, one that would arise from the seminaries and work through church and religious structures, were also planted at the same conference.

Students from Union and other seminaries created the Student Interracial Ministry, or SIM, a small ecumenical project that sought to cross the lines of comfort and race in order to bring about the reconciliation that their religious studies encouraged. Just a month or so after the conference in North Carolina, seven students, including John Collins, teamed up in creative interracial efforts in the Deep South. As Collins sat in his car near the Alabama border that cold morning in 1960 with both state and racial boundary lines looming in front of him, he prayed for the strength to cross them.

But how did John Collins get to the side of that road in June 1960? What in his life and in the country had set him on a path to that place where race and religion met? What

made a liberal theological seminary like Union a site for racial change in 1960, and a

gathering place for folks like John Collins? In order to answer these questions, we must look back to the turn of the century, to the continuum of liberal Protestant theology and activism that progressed from there to the mid-century, and to some of the networks, organizations, and individuals whose engagement with race and religion and social change had laid down a path that Collins and his colleagues followed in 1960. In this chapter, I explore the ideas and the progenitor organizations that, united by the catalyst of racial issues, combined to draw progressive Christians into the civil rights struggle and motivated them to challenge their own religious institutions at the same time.

Drawing from Different Wells: The Fertilizing Ideas behind Progressive Christianity Seminarians and religious students were attracted to the civil rights movement in a wide variety of ways, but at Union Seminary in particular, a tradition of liberal Protestant theology, activist professors, and outreach ministry combined with current events to draw students into the action. The CORE-led pickets at the Woolworth’s 109th Street branch in Manhattan and at the 125th Street branch in Harlem connected students not only with their fellows in the South but with a seventy-year legacy of progressive Christianity within the liberal Protestant fold. Progressive Christians since the turn of the century had sponsored a myriad of interracial pacifist and social justice projects that had created organizations like CORE. But the sources of inspiration were many and the progressive Christians of the 1960s drew from different wells.

Liberal Protestantism developed beginning in religiously plural colonial America as the religious expression of new political and social developments, and grew into its full form following the Civil War and into the early twentieth century. Liberal Protestants emphasized the goodness of human nature, belief in progress, the worldly presence of divinity, and the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven on earth. The term itself can be confusing because Liberal Protestantism can refer to a particular worldview or to a theological movement within larger Protestant thought, and be used to describe those denominations that most clearly embody both that worldview and that theology. Liberal Protestants argue that the bible should be interpreted in the light of modern conditions, and its message translated into an injunction to serve “the least of these” while trying to correct injustices of all kinds.

Liberal Protestantism fully developed within the following American churches: the American Baptist, Episcopal, United Methodist, the Presbyterian Church USA,

Congregationalist, Evangelical Lutheran, the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), the United Church of Christ, and the Disciples of Christ, known collectively as the mainstream or mainline Protestant denominations.35 In the middle of the nineteenth century, the Baptist and Presbyterian denominations split over slavery, creating two new groups, the Southern Baptists and the Presbyterian Church in America. As modern theology developed and was adopted by the Northern churches later in the century, the division between Liberal

35 _{The mainline churches are organized according to three distinct kinds of church polity. The Episcopal and}

Methodist churches adhere to the Episcopal structure whereby bishops have authority over the priests and congregations in a given region. Presbyterian and Lutheran churches are organized into a synodal system in which an overall church board shares power with local church officials. In the American Baptist Church and the United Church of Christ, each congregation elects its own minister. (Michael Friedland, “To Proclaim the

Acceptable Year of the Lord”: Social Activism and Ecumenical Cooperation Among White Clergy in the Civil Rights and Antiwar Movements of the 1950’s and 1960’s. Ph.D. dissertation, Boston College, 1993, 10-11.) A

democratic spirit that gives the laity a strong voice, though, governs all three systems, and each system considers the laity to be part of a “priesthood of all Believers.” Thus the minister and laity of a given congregation are often able to determine its particular direction and, more importantly, congregations

themselves are often strong enough to push the church in a direction other than that selected by their particular minister.

Protestants located largely in the North and fundamentalists located largely in the South became so distinct that it came to define America culturally as well as religiously through the remainder of the century and into the next.36 Liberal Protestants can be viewed in contrast to Christian Fundamentalists who accept the bible as literal truth and believe in the imminent return of Jesus Christ to redeem the world. However, a word of caution is in order.

Theological and denominational boundary lines and definitions were often in flux and there has always been a certain fluidity among liberal and fundamentalist Protestants, and

especially among groups that cross the border or exist within the border space – the evangelical movement for one example. Thus it is impossible to make blanket statements about left or right, or completely differentiate between “liberal” and “conservative” religion.

For our purposes then, I use the terms progressive Christianity and progressive Christians to refer to that subgroup, within the larger category of Liberal Protestantism, to which the protagonists in this story belong. Although progressive Christians emerged from different backgrounds and embraced a range of beliefs, from the Social Gospel and to Neo- orthodoxy, and appeared north and south and in both black and whites churches, they found common cause at multiple points throughout the century, and none more importantly than that of the cause of racial justice.

Liberal Protestant Theology and the Social Gospel

Liberal Protestants, from the Gilded Age forward, attempted to reconcile their faith with the modern world, including the theory of evolution. Liberal theology encouraged

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Robert S. Michaelsen and Wade Clark Roof, eds., “Introduction,” Liberal Protestantism: Realities &

biblical criticism, treated the bible as only one part of God’s ongoing revelations, favored a focus on human goodness and potential over the stain of original sin, and emphasized the lived experience of religion rather than devotion to doctrine. Liberal Protestants stressed God’s immanence but believed in the ability of mankind to interpret and live out God’s instructions in the world. But Liberal Protestantism was also elastic, and as it interacted with American political and cultural realties, it had enough room for those who acted in concert with the dominant paradigm, modernists, those who withdrew from the worldly character of modern Protestantism, and those who tried to use their religion as the basis for transforming the national character.37 This latter group found mature expression in the Social Gospel movement of the turn of the century, and in even more radical variants that followed.

Growing out of the Populist movement in the 1890s, and responding to the social unrest they perceived as brought on, in part, by the Industrial Revolution, Protestant clergy in the Social Gospel movement developed strategies for regulating behavior to conform to their image of a civilized society. Combining Christian tenets with liberal reform tendencies, adherents to the Social Gospel believed that if companies and social institutions could be persuaded to operate according to Christian ethics, “righteousness and justice would appear on earth.”38 For these believers, personal salvation through a relationship with Jesus Christ was only part of the equation; in order to realize the Kingdom of Heaven, Americans needed to address political and economic social inequalities. The practitioners of the Social Gospel criticized large-scale corporate organization, trusts, and the concentration of wealth in the

37 _{Catherine L. Albanese, America: Religions and Religion (Belmont, CA: Thomason Wadsworth, 1999, 4}th

edition 2007), 94-101.

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Michael B. Friedland, Lift Up Your Voice Like a Trumpet: White Clergy and the Civil Rights and Antiwar

hands of a few. The Social Gospel movement underlay many of the Progressive reform movements in the early 20th century.39 Believing people to be basically rational and moral, proponents of the Social Gospel stressed Christian love and cooperation and the belief that good deeds, moral conviction, and individual sacrifice could create a new social order. Whereas the Liberal Protestantism that first developed in America contained a strongly prophetic critique of the old world churches, the Social Gospel was now a prophetic voice directed at the worldly structures of society.40

Proponents of the Social Gospel reached out especially to urban working and poor people, many of them recent immigrants. The Baptist minister Walter Rauschenbusch, who once served a parish in Hell’s Kitchen and was the best known of the Social Gospel

theologians, endorsed a brand of democratic socialism that challenged the hegemony of the “possessing classes.” For most practitioners of the Social Gospel, race relations and racial equity were not their primary concerns. However, Social Gospelers did not all together ignore race and the few steps they made in addressing racial reform laid down a clear track that others would follow. Union Theological Seminary’s president Charles Cuthbert Hall preached on the necessity for integration and racial equality during lectures to white Southern audiences throughout the late 1890s and early 1900s.

Social Gospelers were also instrumental in the establishment of the National

Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Federal Council of Churches, and the National Urban League, organizations that would serve as midwives to the civil rights

39

Maurice C. Latta, “The Background for the Social Gospel in American Protestantism,” Church History, Vol. 5, No. 3, September 1936, 269; Warren Goldstein, “A Liberal Dose of Religious Fervor,” The Chronicle of

Higher Education, July 8, 2005, 6.

40

Robert H. Craig, Religion and Radical Politics: An Alternative Christian Tradition in the United States (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), 12-14; Albanese, 102.

movement.41 Still, the Social Gospel movement was essentially middle class, tended to be moralistic and paternalistic in its attitude toward immigrants and the poor, and, with some notable exceptions, reaffirmed the basic political and class structure of the country, including southern segregation. A small cadre of clergy and lay people, both North and South,

however, defied the restraints of the Social Gospel, pushing the definition of reform to include revolution and a radical restructuring of society that embraced changes in both the class and the racial order.

Christian Realism and Prophetic Christianity

Unlike some of his fellow faculty members at Union, the theologian Reinhold

Niebuhr was not always a proponent of the Social Gospel Movement. Originally a devotee of the Social Gospel, Reinhold Niebuhr gradually changed his beliefs based on the World War, the dominance of corporate capitalism, and the rise of fascism in Europe. In 1939 Niebuhr renounced liberal theology as naively optimistic, based on “simple little homilies” which ignored “the brutal facts of life,” which indicated that mankind was at essence sinful, and thus incapable of realizing utopia.42 Niebuhr came to be seen as the leader of a new school of thought known varyingly in America as neo-orthodoxy, crisis theology, or Christian Realism.

Other religious forces with deep roots were also at work in the country, and many of the black churches in the South supported social change based on religious tenets. This could