To Do Justice: The Civil Rights Ministry of Reverend Robert E. Hughes

By Randall C. Jimerson

Biography of a civil rights activist who worked tirelessly at the heart of two social and political revolutions

A native Alabamian, Reverend Robert E. Hughes worked full-time in the civil rights movement as executive director of the Alabama Council of Human Relations, where he developed a close relationship with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. After facing backlash from the Ku Klux Klan, spending four days in jail for refusing to disclose ACHR membership lists, and ultimately being forced to leave the state of Alabama, he served as a Methodist missionary in Southern Rhodesia (now part of Zimbabwe). After two years of organizing Black liberation groups, he was banned as a “prohibited immigrant” by the Ian Smith government. His lifelong commitment to social justice, racial equality, and peaceful resolution of conflicts marks a fascinating career richly documented in this comprehensive biography.

To Do Justice: The Civil Rights Ministry of Reverend Robert E. Hughes traces the life and career of an admirable and lesser-known civil rights figure who fought injustice on two continents. This account presents valuable new evidence about the civil rights movement in the United States as well as human rights and liberation issues in colonial Southern Rhodesia in the years leading up to independence and self-rule. It provides an intimate portrait of a courageous individual who worked outside of the public spotlight but provided essential support and informational resources to public activists and news reporters
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Randall C. Jimerson explores the interwoven threads of race relations and religious beliefs on two continents, focusing on the dual themes of the American civil rights movement and the African struggles for decolonization and majority rule. The life and career of Robert Hughes provide insight into the international dimensions of racial prejudice and discrimination that can be viewed in comparative context to similar oppressions in other colonial lands.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Jul 13, 2022
• ISBN: 9780817393991

Book preview

TO DO JUSTICE

RELIGION AND AMERICAN CULTURE

Series Editors

John M. Giggie

Charles A. Israel

Editorial Advisory Board

Catherine A. Brekus

Paul Harvey

Sylvester A. Johnson

Joel W. Martin

Ronald L. Numbers

Beth Schweiger

Grant Wacker

Judith Weisenfeld

TO DO JUSTICE

THE CIVIL RIGHTS MINISTRY OF REVEREND ROBERT E. HUGHES

RANDALL C. JIMERSON

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

Tuscaloosa

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

uapress.ua.edu

Copyright © 2022 by the University of Alabama Press

All rights reserved.

Inquiries about reproducing material from this work should be addressed to the University of Alabama Press.

Typeface: Adobe Text Pro

Interior photographs courtesy of Dorothy S. Hughes

Cover image: Zimbabwe Day of Prayer, August 1963: view of the crowd. Courtesy of Dorothy S. Hughes

Cover design: Lori Lynch

Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN: 978-0-8173-2123-9

E-ISBN: 978-0-8173-9399-1

He has showed you, O man, what is good;

        and what does the LORD require of you

but to do justice, and to love kindness,

        and to walk humbly with your God?

                                    MICAH 6:8

CONTENTS

Preface

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Introduction

1. A Roaring Fire within My Heart

2. Preaching about Race Relations

3. Plan Your Work

4. Work Your Plan

5. Interpreting the Bus Boycott

6. Intimidation and Violence

7. Bombingham

8. The Methodist Layman’s Union

9. Sign of the Cross

10. Fear and Hatred Grip Birmingham

11. Ain’t Scared of Your Jail

12. Ousted by the Methodist Church

13. Preparing for Southern Rhodesia

14. In the Mission Field

15. Social Evangelism in Salisbury

16. Christian Principles and Social Problems

17. Race Relations in Rhodesia and Alabama

18. Confronting the Rhodesian Government

19. Prohibited Immigrants

20. Sidelined in Zambia

21. Community Relations

22. Legacy

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Photographs

PREFACE

American history cannot be fully understood without reference to race relations, the genocidal displacement of Indigenous peoples, the enslavement of Black Africans, and the impact of these actions on the nation’s development. These themes have shaped the country, from the early colonization of North America to the subsequent creation of the United States of America, the Civil War, Reconstruction, Ku Klux Klan (KKK) violence, Jim Crow segregation, the civil rights movement, and Black Lives Matter protests against white supremacy and white privilege. Each of these developments has been influenced by various forms of religious belief and expression. Race and religion have long been intertwined. In debating these issues, Americans have often reflected on the heritage passed on by African Americans and on the similarities and contrasts between racial concerns in Africa and the United States.

This biography of a white Methodist minister who served as a full-time civil rights activist in Alabama (1954–1961) and as a missionary engaged in human rights in Southern Rhodesia and Zambia (1961–1966) focuses attention on the fraught relationship between organized religion and racial justice efforts, on the interracial nature of civil rights and liberation movements, and on the global connections between these initiatives. Reverend Robert E. Hughes bridged the geographical, political, and social distances between the American civil rights movement and the African struggles for decolonization and self-determination. His career exemplifies the contributions of white ministers and missionaries who at times worked side by side with the world’s peoples of color in their international initiatives to secure freedom and respect.

I first heard about Bob Hughes and his civil rights work in late 1960, when I was eleven years old. At that time my father, Reverend Norman C. Jim Jimerson, was considering applying for the position of executive director of the Alabama Council on Human Relations (an affiliate of the Southern Regional Council), the position Hughes had been forced recently to vacate. My father told our family about Hughes’s work in Alabama, about a cross burned by the Klan in his yard, and other stories of brutality and discrimination against Black people. In August 1961, my father became the second director of ACHR, eight months after Hughes’s departure. He served in that capacity until August 1964.

Although I knew stories about Hughes, I first met him in person during the dedication ceremonies for the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute in November 1992. He and my father spoke on one of several panels during the multiday celebration. Then, in September 2010, the Whatcom Peace and Justice Center in my hometown awarded Hughes its Lifetime Peacemaker Award. During the ceremony, I had the honor of introducing him and meeting his wife, Dorothy S. Dottie Hughes. In speaking of his civil rights work at this event, Bob Hughes held up a fire-charred two-by-four board—a vivid remnant of the cross burned by the Klan on his lawn in 1959.

In January 2012 I drove to Issaquah, Washington, to conduct more than four hours of interviews with Reverend Hughes on behalf of the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, which now make up part of an extensive archival collection of oral history interviews held by that institution. I had hoped to conduct more interviews with Hughes as a means of helping him write his own autobiography, but put off that project to complete writing a book about my family’s experiences in Birmingham. Before I could finish it, Hughes passed away, in December 2012.

Following Bob Hughes’s death, his family asked me to write an accurate and impartial account of his career. I conducted extensive interviews with Dottie Hughes and several of her husband’s colleagues from Montgomery, Birmingham, and Southern Rhodesia. I also completed extensive archival research, principally relying on Hughes’s papers housed as part of the Southern Regional Council (SRC) Papers at Atlanta University Center and on his personal papers, which have now been donated to the Birmingham Public Library. His papers documenting his years with the Community Relations Service of the Department of Justice (CRS) in the Pacific Northwest have been donated to the Center for Pacific Northwest History at Western Washington University (WWU). These materials will be a rich resource for anyone interested in this important part of his career.

In the historical literature on the civil rights movement, Hughes has played primarily a minor supporting role. The extent of his career, unfortunately, has not been fully represented. Some of his colleagues in the American civil rights movement—including Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Jo Ann Gibson Robinson, Reverend Robert S. Graetz Jr., attorney Charles Morgan Jr., and journalist Harrison E. Salisbury—have written about parts of Hughes’s story. Several historians have recounted episodes of his career in Alabama, including Diane McWhorter, J. Mills Thornton III, Glenn T. Eskew, David J. Garrow, and William Nicholas. However, Hughes’s social justice work in Southern Rhodesia and Zambia has not received the attention it deserves.

My research for this book began during the presidency of Barack Obama. I had just finished writing a family memoir about my father’s civil rights work as Hughes’s successor in leading the ACHR. I completed the first five drafts of this work during the Black Lives Matter movement, amid heightened public awareness of racial profiling, police brutality against people of color, and white privilege. Knowing the long history of racial injustice and the often-conflicting roles played by religious people, I can only hope that peoples around the world can learn from our shared histories and secure what Dr. King referred to as the beloved community.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book could not have been completed without advice, encouragement, and support from many people, whom I humbly thank for their contributions. First and foremost, I thank the family of Bob Hughes for helping me understand his remarkable legacy. Dottie Hughes recounted numerous stories about their life together and their experiences from separate childhoods in Alabama and North Carolina through their time together in Alabama, Southern Rhodesia, Zambia, Georgia, and Washington State. She patiently corrected my errors of fact and interpretation. The Hughes daughters—Forrest, Cindy, Beth, and Ginny—joined us on several occasions to offer their own perspectives on a beloved father and mother. Paul Hughes, son of Bob’s brother Preston, provided family letters and transcriptions of interviews he conducted with his uncle Bob.

I gratefully acknowledge the time and generous advice given by others who had known Bob Hughes closely. During a research trip to Alabama, I was able to interview Reverend Jim Short, Reverend Robert Graetz, Jeannie Graetz, and Paul Rilling, all of whom provided detailed stories about their close interactions with Hughes. During telephone interviews, both Reverends Jim Berry and Norman Thomas spoke glowingly about Hughes, while filling gaps in my knowledge of his activities. Sadly, the Graetzes and Paul Rilling passed away before seeing the book to which they contributed so much.

The numerous archivists and librarians who assisted my research deserve my praise and gratitude. They include professional staff at: the Archives Research Center, Robert W. Woodruff Library, Atlanta University Center, Atlanta; the archives department of the Birmingham Public Library; the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute; the Alabama Department of Archives and History in Montgomery; the archives at Birmingham-Southern College; and the Center for Pacific Northwest Studies at WWU. The WWU Libraries staff also assisted me in borrowing microfilm of the Alabama Council on Human Relations papers, in the SRC papers held at the Atlanta University Center.

At the Alabama Department of Archives and History, I received exceptional service from state archivist Ed Bridges (since retired) and Haley Aaron. Jim Baggett, head archivist at Birmingham Public Library, once again demonstrated why he is one of the country’s leading experts on civil rights archives. Birmingham Civil Rights Institute archivists Wayne Coleman and Laura Caldwell Anderson (the latter now at the Alabama Humanities Foundation) shared their vast knowledge and experience with me during my research visits. Birmingham-Southern College archivist Guy Hubbs expedited my all-too-brief foray into the North Alabama (Methodist) Conference archives.

At WWU, Elizabeth Joffrion and Ruth Steele enabled me to research the private papers of Bob Hughes, which Dottie Hughes had donated to WWU. (Hughes’s papers relating to his work in Alabama, Southern Rhodesia, Zambia, and Georgia have since been transferred to the Birmingham Public Library.) I am also grateful to my former colleagues at the WWU Department of History, particularly to chair Johann Neem and to Sarah Zimmerman, who guided me to historical scholarship on Southern Rhodesia and Africa.

At the University of Alabama Press, I have been fortunate to have support, encouragement, and sage advice from Editor-in-Chief Dan Waterman. I also want to thank the two anonymous peer reviewers—affectionately known as Reviewer A and Reviewer B—for prodding me to shorten a much longer original manuscript and pushing me to interpret and explain the career of Bob Hughes within a framework of religious history.

Above all, I am grateful to my family for their support and love throughout the process of research, writing, revision, and more revisions. Sister Ann, founder of the organization Kids in Birmingham 1963, has walked together with me through our memories and the inspiration of our own experiences in Birmingham from 1961 to 1964. Our brother Mark provided some valuable advice both regarding my writing and my explanation of Christian beliefs. Sister Sue also offered support and encouragement during my years of focus on Bob Hughes. Brother-in-law Reverend Doctor Peter Moon helped me understand the inner workings of the Methodist Church in the southern states.

One of the greatest benefits of retirement has been spending more time with Joyce, the love of my life. The 2020–2021 pandemic has given us even more time together. It has also led us to daily video calls with daughter Laura, son-in-law Frédéric, and grandson Gregory, who live in England, as well as our daughter Beth, who has had to adapt her ELL teaching for remote learning here in Washington. I offer my deepest appreciation to everyone mentioned here, and my apologies to anyone I failed to include.

RANDALL C. JIMERSON

Bellingham, Washington

ABBREVIATIONS

INTRODUCTION

First one loud horn blast, then another, then a steady cacophony of car and pickup truck horns shattered the calm summer evening. Bob Hughes heard the commotion from his dining room.

I bet that’s the Klan, he told his wife, Dottie.

For several months, the Ku Klux Klan had been making weekly appearances, always on Saturday evenings, throughout the Birmingham area. They drove to a different neighborhood each time. At one or more places they would stop to burn a cross, drawing attention to the targets of their wrath, trying to instill fear and intimidate people.

It’s our turn, Hughes thought. The Klan has finally found us.¹

As the director of the interracial Alabama Council on Human Relations since 1954, Reverend Robert Epperson Hughes had weathered storms of public and private criticism and harassment before, but now, in July 1959, the KKK made a special house call.

Hughes went to the living room. Through the picture window he saw a line of idling cars with headlights lighting up the twilight scene. A pickup truck parked directly in front, no more than thirty feet from the living room window. In the bed of the truck he saw a tall cross outlined in glowing light bulbs. Several men in white robes and tall pointed hoods carried another wooden cross. Put it there, he heard one of them say, pointing to the ground three feet from the curb.

The men used a cigarette lighter to ignite the five-foot-high cross, wrapped in burlap bags soaked with kerosene. Orange and yellow flames shot up into the evening sky, illuminating the entire front yard. The men clambered back into their vehicles. They leaned on their horns again and the shrill blasts echoed down the line of cars.

As Dottie joined Bob in the living room, the cars slowly began driving down the narrow street past the house, horns still blaring. The Klan caravan included family sedans, pickup trucks, even sports cars, filled with old men, young men, women, teenage boys, even elementary age children. All wore distinctive white robes and many also sported tall, peaked hoods.

They can’t intimidate me, Bob said. Instead of rushing for safety to the back of the house, he walked out the front door, down a few steps and toward the blazing cross. He began to wave to the passing parade, defying the Klansmen. Soon Dottie joined him. Bob walked back to the front of the house, picked up the garden hose, turned the spigot, and began spraying the flaming cross.

While watching the cavalcade of cars and pickups, Hughes realized that putting the fire out completely would end his show of defiance. This is our opportunity to witness to them, he told his wife.

He turned the hose aside, watering the grass. When the flames surged upward again, he turned the hose back, alternating its direction. Occasionally he inadvertently sprayed water into the windows of some of the passing cars. He counted fifty cars in the caravan before losing track. There must have been about two hundred Klansmen in this parade.

Dottie returned to the house to make sure their two young daughters were still asleep.

The loud honking of car horns and the sight of a burning cross had attracted a small crowd of neighbors and friends. As the Klan caravan moved on, they stood around looking at the big black smoking cross lying on the ground, still steaming from the heat.

Johnny Wilcox, a four-year-old boy from up the street, stood behind his father, holding on to his legs. He looked at the black cross lying on the ground. Turning to Hughes, he asked, Was Jesus on that cross?

Hughes answered, Well, Johnny, in a way I guess he was.

The vivid symbolism of a burning cross represents contrasting interpretations of Christian religion, used both to support white supremacy and to oppose racial disparities. Christians consider the crucifixion of Jesus to be central to their faith, as it was a crucial instrument in the sacrifice and resurrection of their Lord and Savior. Most African American Christians—and many white believers—regard the cross as a promise to fulfill Jesus’s admonitions to regard all people as brothers and sisters and to practice faith, love, and charity toward all.

The KKK’s appropriation of this symbol, however, reflects the belief of many that the Bible sanctioned exclusion, discrimination, and alienation of people of color and those of different faiths. For generations, many white Christians had labored mightily against Black equality, defending slavery and segregation by using scriptural arguments such as the story of Noah’s curse on the descendants of his son Ham.² In the biblical story, Ham discovered Noah intoxicated and naked in his tent. When Noah found out what Ham had done, he cursed Ham’s son Canaan, saying, Cursed be Canaan! The lowest of slaves will he be to his brothers. This passage would eventually be used to condemn the dark-skinned descendants of Ham and to justify enslavement and violence against Africans.³

The belief that the Bible sanctioned racial separation and discrimination had strengthened the defense of slavery since the American colonial era. The idea of race emerged as a means of reconciling chattel slavery—as well as the extermination of American Indians—with the ideals of freedom preached by whites, declares Michelle Alexander. This led naturally to a belief in white supremacy, which rationalized the enslavement of Africans, even as whites endeavored to form a new nation based on the ideals of equality, liberty, and justice for all.⁴ These beliefs later encouraged white southerners to secede from the Union, to resist Reconstruction, to enact Black Code laws to suppress African Americans, and to enshrine segregation as a means of reestablishing white supremacy after the Civil War. Founded in the 1870s to resist Reconstruction and civil rights for Black people, the KKK served as a vigilante organization using violence to intimidate anyone who spoke out against racial discrimination.

The Klan incorporated Christian symbols into its repertoire of action, in addition to the tactics of lynchings, beatings, and house burnings. Specifically, it employed the burning cross as a means to terrify opponents and interpreted the Bible to defend white supremacy. One Klansman later reported that when he was sworn into the White Knights of the KKK, Klansmen placed a sword and pistol on top of a Bible, calling themselves Christian soldiers.⁵ Klan leaders told another inductee that the KKK was a very patriotic, political organization and it was a Christian organization, with members including respected businessmen, lawyers, and peace officers.⁶

In 1959 the Klan targeted Bob Hughes with a burning cross because of his activism as a white advocate for racial equality and integration. Like Hughes, many white southerners who supported civil rights for African Americans in the 1950s faced intimidation, ostracism, and denunciation from neighbors, friends, and strangers. Hughes’s story represents the role of one white, Christian minister confronting and challenging the white supremacist orthodoxy in the Deep South and later in Southern Rhodesia (which subsequently gained independence under the indigenous name Zimbabwe). His career reveals the noted contradictions within Christianity, which could be employed either to undermine white supremacy or to defend and perpetuate it. His civil rights ministry in both Alabama and Rhodesia explicitly connects the significant contemporaneous international efforts to either suppress Black people or to liberate them. Hughes’s career also links together the combined efforts of Black and white people to secure racial equality in the United States and in Africa. In both Alabama and Rhodesia, Christian religion was deployed both as a weapon to overthrow white supremacy and as a justification for preserving racial divisions and disparities.

In following his calling as a Methodist minister, Reverend Robert E. Hughes played an important role in two of the most compelling liberation movements of the mid-twentieth century, the American civil rights struggle and the African decolonization efforts leading to majority rule. He faced intimidation and violence for taking a public stance against racial discrimination in both Alabama and Rhodesia, two locations where church and state conspired to maintain the racial status quo and to silence dissent. Hughes gained the dubious distinction of first being forced by the Methodist Church to leave his native Alabama, due to segregationists’ opposition to his civil rights work, and later being declared a prohibited immigrant and deported from Southern Rhodesia by the Ian Smith government because of his leadership role in the campaign for African majority rule.

A native Alabamian, Hughes grew up in a small town where people seldom questioned the southern traditions of racial segregation and white supremacy. Yet he interpreted literally the Bible and Christian teachings about protecting the weak, comforting the afflicted, and treating all people as equals in the sight of God. One year after entering the Methodist clergy, he accepted a ministerial appointment as the first executive director of the Alabama Council on Human Relations. Setting up a modest headquarters office in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1954, he soon recruited a young Baptist minister, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., as vice president of the ACHR Montgomery chapter. Civil rights activists Rosa Parks and Reverend Ralph Abernathy also became active members. When the Montgomery bus boycott began, Hughes tried to mediate between local white officials and the African American leadership. He soon faced virulent opposition on three fronts: the segregationist Methodist Layman’s Union (MLU) in his own religious denomination, the KKK, and local and state government officials. In 1960 he spent four days in jail for refusing to disclose the sources of information he had supplied to a New York Times reporter exposing Birmingham’s racial climate of fear. Under pressure from the MLU, the North Alabama Conference (NAC) of the Methodist Church forced him to leave Alabama.

In 1961 Hughes accepted assignment as a missionary in Southern Rhodesia, focused on social evangelism (coded language for efforts to secure majority rule and racial equality). He soon led American Methodist missionaries in opposition to the racist apartheid government of the country. In July 1964 the Rhodesian government declared both Hughes and Rhodesian Methodist bishop Ralph E. Dodge to be prohibited immigrants and forced them to leave the country within two weeks. Hughes completed his five-year missionary service in Zambia before returning to the United States in 1966. He spent the remainder of his career as a mediator and negotiator for the Community Relations Service, a Department of Justice agency created to monitor and enforce the 1964 Civil Rights Act. This story focuses primarily on the ten-year period from Hughes’s appointment as director of the ACHR through his deportation from Southern Rhodesia.

Historians of the civil rights movement have correctly emphasized the important roles played by Christian ministers and laymen in the struggle for racial equality and social justice. African American religious leaders, supported by many white clergymen, depicted civil rights as a moral issue founded on Christian values. However, particularly in the southern states, significant numbers of white ministers either pronounced racial separation and white supremacy to be biblically ordained or remained silent in the face of such beliefs among their congregations. Many ministers who spoke out in favor of racial justice faced opposition by the laity or dismissal from their pulpits.

University of Mississippi historian James W. Silver declared in 1964 that the United States had been slowly, painfully, and self-consciously changing from a white society to a multi-racial society. He argued that this had occurred not because Christianity has been suddenly overwhelmed with success but because the imperatives of the American dream have been demanded by a growing and sizeable number of American Negroes who refuse to accept their traditional place at the bottom of American society. Silver observed numerous parallels between the 1850s and the 1950s, which showed that the Deep South had been on the defensive against inexorable change for more than a century. Political and social orthodoxy sought to exclude Black people from the body politic. The all-pervading doctrine, then and now, has been white supremacy, whether achieved through slavery or segregation, rationalized by a professed belief in state rights and bolstered by religious fundamentalism, Silver concluded.⁷

Supporters of Jim Crow segregation fiercely defended their interpretation of scripture in support of white supremacy, as S. Jonathan Bass observed. Are those gentlemen of the Cloth so ignorant of the teachings of the Holy Writ that they want us to peacefully submit to integration contrary to God’s instructions? one segregationist wrote in 1963 to the Montgomery Advertiser. Do they ask that we obey man rather than God?⁸ Opponents of racial equality frequently cited the curse of Ham and the biblical injunction for servants to obey their masters to justify their opinions. We believe in segregation, one person declared, and I mean believe it, like we believe in God. One Alabama segregationist stated, The day I have to go in church and have to smell stinking niggers . . . that’s the day I’ll stay away and take a chance on my hopes of Heaven.⁹ Declarations such as these reveal the intensity with which many white southerners employed religious beliefs to bolster their opposition to social change and racial equality.

The apparent discrepancy between African American religious leaders’ advocacy for civil rights and the southern white clergy’s comparative reticence in defense of segregation led David L. Chappell to conclude that this represented one factor in the success of the civil rights movement. He argues that the prophetic tradition of the Old Testament, as espoused by Black clergymen, inspired African American activists to undertake remarkable solidarity and self-sacrifice. Their passionate efforts to stamp out the sin of segregation amounted to a renewed spirit of religious revivalism. Segregationists, by comparison, found little support from their white religious denominations. White supremacists in the South failed to get their churches to give their cause active support. That was their Achilles’ heel, Chappell argues. He concludes that one of the many factors for the successes achieved by the civil rights movement comes from this vital difference: Black southern activists got strength from old-time religion, and white supremacists failed, at the same moment, to muster the cultural strength that conservatives traditionally get from religion.¹⁰ Chappell concludes that white churches were unwilling to make sacrifices to preserve segregation and that they splintered into hopeless disarray and confusion over racial matters.¹¹

Chappell’s argument about the differences between Black and white religion during the civil rights era of the 1950s and 1960s spawned a series of rebuttals from historians. One of the first critiques came from Jane Dailey, who demonstrated that southern white evangelicals deeply embraced and defended the racial hierarchy. Her 2004 article "Sex, Segregation, and the Sacred after Brown," challenged and disputed Chappell’s argument that southern white clergy did not provide energetic support for the opponents of integration.¹² Dailey cites evidence of a titanic struggle waged by participants on both sides of the conflict to harness the immense power of the divine to their cause.¹³

Carolyn Renée Dupont supports and develops Dailey’s critique of Chappell’s thesis. In Mississippi Praying: Southern White Evangelicals and the Civil Rights Movement, 1945–1975, she argues that "not only did white Christians fail to fight for black equality, they often labored mightily against it. In probing the links between theology and white supremacy, she states her own thesis, namely, that theology shaped evangelicals’ responses to the demand for black equality. The literalist view of the Bible helped construe segregation as outside the purview of Christian concerns. White evangelicals did not regard racial discrimination as a social or political concern, she explains. Focusing on racism as an individual sin for which practitioners must repent keeps the problem in exactly the place segregationists located it during the Jim Crow era, while it also continues to pin responsibility for all their sufferings on blacks themselves."¹⁴

Religion helped make and maintain a racially divided world in Mississippi, Dupont concludes. The same was true in Alabama and other Deep South states. White southern Christians had bolstered white supremacy for generations. For much of the South’s history since the Civil War, religious faith tied white evangelicals to their regional past as champions of slavery, the Confederacy, and white supremacy, Dupont explains.¹⁵ Segregationist folk theology drew on biblical texts such as the curse of Ham and the tower of Babel and functioned as an orthodoxy that wove together biblical literalism, political conservatism, and racial segregation, elevating all three to equally revered status. Southern evangelicals fought mightily against black equality, proclaiming that God himself ordained segregation, she argues. This led them to protect segregation in their churches. In their religious world, racial integration represented a heinous moral evil—and they fought it as if against the devil himself.¹⁶

Southern religion did not simply accept segregation as an ugly business but served actively in the phalanx of institutions by which white domination perpetuated itself, Dupont argues. Thus, the church played an active role in creating and sustaining the system of oppression. By focusing on matters of the individual heart, rather than the economic and political structures of white supremacy, many white Christians espoused the myth that blacks’ difficulties arose from their own failings. White people thus believed thoroughly in their own innocence, even as they practiced an extravagantly wicked racial system,