When Heaven and Earth Collide: Racism, Southern Evangelicals, and the Better Way of Jesus

By Alan Cross and William Dwight McKissic Sr.

When Heaven and Earth Collide is an investigation into what went wrong in the American South in regard to race and religion—and how things can be and are being made right. Why, in a land filled with Christian churches, was there such racial oppression and division? Why didn’t white evangelicals do more to bring racial reconciliation to the South during the 19th and 20th centuries? These questions are asked and answered through an exploration of history, politics, economics, philosophy, and social and theological studies that uncovers the hidden impetus behind racism and demonstrates how we can still make many of the same errors today—just perhaps in different ways. The investigation finally leads us in hopeful directions involving how to live out the better way of Jesus with an eye on heaven in a world still burdened and broken under the sins of the past.

• Language: English
• Publisher: NewSouth Books
• Release date: Nov 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781603063562

Alan Cross

ALAN CROSS is pastor of Gateway Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, where he has served on staff since 2000. A Southern native, he was born in New Orleans and grew up in Picayune, Mississippi. He earned an education degree at Mississippi State University and a master’s of divinity from Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary in Mill Valley, California, where he focused on intercultural studies and urban ministry.

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NewSouth Books

105 S. Court Street

Montgomery, AL 36104

Copyright © 2014 by Alan Cross. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by NewSouth Books, a division of NewSouth, Inc., Montgomery, Alabama.

ISBN: 978-1-60306-350-0

eBook ISBN: 978-1-60306-356-2

Library of Congress Control Number: 2014004624

Visit www.newsouthbooks.com

Scripture quotations taken from the New American Standard Bible, Copyright 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation (www.Lockman.org). Used by permission.

Front cover background image, Randy Hines/istockphoto; inset photo of Montgomery’s black First Baptist Church, by the author.

Publisher’s Statement

The mission of NewSouth Books includes the publication of books that examine history and culture, particularly Southern history and culture. We believe in a progressive, democratic society with equal treatment for all with protection of the human and civil rights and liberties of all its people. We endorse the author’s call for Southern whites to acknowledge and repent for slavery and segregation. However, the opinions and theological views expressed in the book do not necessarily represent those of the Publisher.

To Freedom Riders of All Kinds

Who Live To Tell a Better Story

Contents

Foreword

Preface - What Went Wrong?

Part 1 - Earth: The Story

Chapter 1 - Freedom Riders

Chapter 2 - Evangelicals and Southern Civil Religion

Chapter 3 - The Subversion of Christianity

Chapter 4 - Southern Religion: Greek Philosophy or Christianity?

Chapter 5 - Civil Rights, Broken Trust, and Missed Opportunity

Chapter 6 - What If the Church Had Been Different?

Chapter 7 - Five Cultural Platforms

Part 2 - Heaven & Hope: The Kingdom of God

Chapter 8 - What Would Jesus Have Done?

Chapter 9 - The Better Way of Jesus

Chapter 10 - The Church

Epilogue - Freedom Riders and Praying Christians, Fifty Years Later

About the Author

Foreword

William Dwight McKissic Sr.

Alan Cross dares to go where most white Christian evangelical pastors and their churches have refused to venture. I commend his thorough investigation into the church in the segregated South before, during, and after the civil rights era. Cross has debunked the biblical defense used by white Christians that justified racism and hatred toward blacks and that continued to allow oppression because of the color of an individual’s skin.

Cross has done an excellent job revealing how the hatred, racism, prejudice, and self-preservation of white self-professed Christians in the Bible Belt/Deep South continues to affect the church today. Although the cruelty that plagued the South was originally economically driven, Cross revealed how it was possibly covered and co-opted through the silence and cooperation of high-profile white pastors, Christian leaders, and the church.

From the beginning of this book to its conclusion, Cross provides powerful insight into the hearts of Southern white evangelicals, the oppression of blacks—including evangelical Christian brothers of their oppressors—and biblical insights concerning the heart of Jesus on these issues. He has eloquently provided a biblical solution to an ongoing problem . . . as we see Heaven and Earth collide. His account of what happened is the best I have read from a son of the South and a white Baptist/evangelical pastor and author.

Speaking personally as an African American Southern Baptist pastor, I believe the silence of the white evangelical churches prolonged the agony and pain of the Jim Crow era. The residual effect of their silence manifests itself today in the controversial distance and distrust that, for the most part, black churches and black Christians have toward the white evangelical church. The white evangelical church keeping silent on these issues was just as sinful as Saul, later renamed Paul, holding the cloak for those who stoned Stephen. It would have been impossible for Jim Crow segregation to have been birthed and maintained without the approval of the white evangelical church. But not only were white evangelicals silent, they provided the theological underpinning of segregation with the doctrine of the curse of Ham, which was prominently taught and practiced in that era. Up until this very moment, no predominantly white evangelical denomination has officially repented for teaching, preaching, and publishing that wrongful, hurtful doctrine.

The voice of Alan Cross represents today the voice, courage and character of those brave white and Jewish advocates and allies of Martin Luther King Jr. during the civil rights movement. May his tribe increase!

The division which began with black slavery continues through the identity of the majority of our churches continuing to fall into the category of white or black. The division continues through secular voting patterns falling along the lines of social economic justice for blacks and moral issues for whites. The division continues through our inability to cooperate and work together and has resulted in secular forces being able to make major headway toward legalizing same-sex marriage throughout America. Black and white evangelical churches are in agreement that same-sex marriage is sinful. Yet, because of the division and our distinct voting patterns, the church is politically impotent to effectively address and redress this issue.

To bridge this historic divide and grow together according to the unity we have in Christ: we need to unify around Christ and His Kingdom as opposed to any denomination or doctrine; and we need to unify around justice issues and righteousness issues as opposed to highlighting one without the other. The bottom line is: our unity should be based on one Lord, one faith, and one baptism, as opposed to one political party, one denomination, or one way of thinking.

Beyond the issue of race, the sins of secularism, culture-centeredness, comfort, convenience, and being lovers of pleasure more than lovers of God have become our common pursuits across all color lines. The church as a whole is becoming more secular-driven than scripture-driven. The continued existence of segregated churches speaks loudly and clearly to the fact that we value our cultural approaches to worship as much as we value the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ. If our churches were more cross-centered, they would be more culturally integrated.

I would love to see less attention and focus placed on the racial divide and more attention given to our common roots and heritage in Christ. I would like to see black and white churches engage in mission projects together where interracial relationship is a byproduct while the main goal is to advance the Kingdom of God. I would also love to see all churches planted by evangelicals in the twenty-first century be intentional interracial church plants. The day of segregated church plants should be over. We should not continue the sins of our fathers.

Should Sundays remain the most segregated day in America? Billy Graham originated the statement and Martin Luther King Jr. popularized it. Nevertheless, it is still an indisputable fact that Sunday Morning at 11:00 is the most segregated hour in America. Regrettably, the quote is as true today as it was the day Graham first uttered it. However, I must hasten to raise the question: Should Sundays remain the most segregated day in America? Are there justifiable reasons for segregated churches and church plants in the twenty-first century? The first Gentile congregation did not start out segregated. It was begun by a multi-ethnic team in a multi-ethnic city, resulting in a multi-ethnic congregation with a multi-ethnic leadership team from Africa, Asia, and Europe (Acts 13:1).

There are those who believe churches should remain segregated. They cite historical and cultural development and differences as reasons why interracial congregations won’t work. The problem with this position is that we are really saying that tradition and culture are stronger than the gospel. I believe that the Word of God has the power to break racial strongholds on the church.

There are those who believe in the homogeneous principles of church growth epitomized by the expression, Birds of a feather flock together. They believe that people are comfortable and happy in churches with the same racial and socioeconomic make-up. That God is blessing racially segregated churches. Let’s not rock the boat. Get over it. That homogeneous, which is another word for segregated, churches grow faster.

The problem with this position is that it is not biblical. At Antioch, the hand of the Lord was with them (Acts 11:21), and Barnabas saw the grace of God on them (Acts 11:23), I believe, because they were multi-ethnic.

There are extremists on both sides of the racial divide who want the church to remain segregated because they feel that each group will lose its culture if we integrate. And they are right. What we need above all else is a Christian culture. At Antioch they were not called Asians, Africans, or Anglos. They were called Christians. In the end, only one name is going to matter and that name is Jesus Christ (Acts 4:12).

What keeps our churches segregated is not a skin problem but a sin problem. The late evangelist Tom Skinner stated, There is something profoundly wrong with our nation today. Men are separated from each other because they are separated from God, and as long as this separation exists, we won’t find answers to the problems that are perplexing us. Races in America are separated from each other because churches and Christians of all races are separated from each other.

There has never been and in the twenty-first century there certainly is no justifiable reason for racially and culturally segregated Christian churches. Alan Cross has challenged us and given biblical and historical insight in his awesome book: When Heaven And Earth Collide; Racism, Southern Evangelicals, and the Better Way of Jesus. I would love to see local churches reach outside of their present socio-economic-ethnic identities and develop ministries that can reach people across cultural lines and seek the Better Way of Jesus. With God’s help we can do it. We must do it!

Reverend McKissic is the senior pastor of Cornerstone Baptist Church in Arlington, Texas.

Preface

What Went Wrong?

Some stories are meant to be told again and again. They are rich with meaning and symbolism. They illuminate the best and worst in all of us, both the courage and cowardice that runs through the human experience. They point us to something beyond ourselves and ultimately, we are shaped by them. The impetus for this book is rooted in such a story.

I am a son of the South and a white Baptist/evangelical pastor living and ministering in the Heart of Dixie—Montgomery, Alabama. This story is about a people claiming the name of Christ, but who failed to love their neighbors sacrificially or see their neighbor’s worth and dignity before God. It is about heroism and higher ideals and fear and division and a way of life that was more like death in many regards. It is about the past and things that happened that we don’t like to talk about because such things cause us to feel uncomfortable. But it is also about the present and the future and a way forward that embraces a new way of living found only in Jesus.

I ask a lot of questions here. I explore a lot of context. This book travels a path of asking questions one at a time with the answers that I discover leading to more questions until we find the root of our problem and our only possible solution. The book builds upon itself chapter after chapter. Many books lay out a thesis in the first chapter, then use the succeeding chapters to defend it, and end with a conclusion. I do not do that here. We begin with one question, and then find that trying to answer it leads to other questions. The way that I have written hopefully leads the reader into the process of discovery instead of just a bombardment with prepackaged conclusions. The last three chapters and the epilogue provide the takeaway that I hope will lead us forward into a better future.

William Shakespeare wrote in The Tempest, What’s past is prologue. He was saying that what has happened in the past lingers and affects us even today, and it gives us the context for all that we are experiencing. William Faulkner wrote in Requiem for a Nun that the past wasn’t even past. I think both writers were right. Our history informs who we are today. To understand the present and to chart a course for the future, we have to go back into the past that is prologue because it gives shape to who we are. For this story, we will go back to a moment when the influence of the church in America was clearly lost, dig through the attic of history, and blow off the dust as we look at what happened with fresh eyes and ask why and how?

How could something so horrific happen in this place, with self-professed Christians everywhere? How could this evil happen in a city full of churches in the American South? In the Bible Belt? What went wrong? What were the underlying causes beneath the symptoms of racism and self-preservation and how are those causes still affecting us today?

I had to find out.

I was pretty sure that uncovering the past would yield clues for the future. What unfolded was a theological, historical mystery investigation through the Old South, racial conflict, red-hot religion, ice-cold hatred, a growing, diversifying America, and a white evangelical church on the wrong side of history and God’s truth regarding racism and how to treat the other. But there was good news, too. Through my study, I stumbled upon how wrongs could be and are being made right, and how God is still making all things new. Even though we often fail, I am more convinced than ever that God is still at work through his church.

This investigation changed me.

In June 1995, while I was still in college and working as a youth minister at a Baptist church in rural Mississippi, my denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, issued an official apology for being a convention of churches that supported slavery before the Civil War and continued to support racism and segregation for the next hundred-plus years. The official apology was entitled Resolution on Racial Reconciliation on the 150th Anniversary of the Southern Baptist Convention. This striking and profound document decisively declared the utter sinfulness of Southern Baptists—for the majority of our history—on race, slavery, and segregation. If words could change things, this was a pretty good attempt. When I heard about the resolution, I was not sure of its future effect, but I was hopeful.

In the 1995 resolution, Southern Baptists admitted to, among other things: of being founded (at least in part) with a theological and missiological defense of slavery; of participating in the inhumanity of slavery; of opposing legitimate initiatives to secure civil rights for African Americans; of dividing the body of Christ and excluding blacks from membership, worship, and leadership; and of allowing racism to distort their theology and understanding of the Gospel.

They then repented of all such acts and attitudes, apologized to African Americans and asked for forgiveness for these positions that they admitted continued to have a significant effect. They committed themselves to become agents of racial reconciliation, to repudiate every bit of racism from their actions and from their hearts, and to work together with other black Christians to be ministers of salt and light in the world so that their good deeds and love would shine before men.

Much has changed since that document was affirmed, and in 2012, Southern Baptists elected their first African American president, the Reverend Fred Luter Jr. of Franklin Avenue Baptist Church in New Orleans. I was there to cast my vote for him along with thousands of others, and I can attest to the tears being shed by many in that room as we experienced and affirmed the washing away of the sins built up over centuries.

In many ways, this book is an agreement with that document from 1995 and how it characterizes our history as Southern Baptists and also as evangelicals. This book takes seriously the denunciation of our past in regard to race, as it explores how a people shaped and formed by scripture could be so wrong in how we treat others.

I write as a follower of Jesus who believes that the Bible is true. Because of that, I also believe that it shows us how we are to treat other people so that we can see Heaven and Earth collide as we learn to love God and love people to the ends of the earth.

As I said, this investigation changed me. I pray that it will change you, too.

Acknowledgments

I would first of all like to thank my wife, Erika, and my children, who have supported, loved, and encouraged me. I am also appreciative of my church, Gateway Baptist, as they have truly been a colony of heaven in a broken world. I am so thankful for my father and mother and grandparents who taught me to love God and love people and I remain thankful to my late uncle Fred Zwiefel who taught me to love history and to always keep learning and asking questions. In addition, it was Dr. Thom Wolf, my seminary professor from San Francisco years ago who perhaps shaped my mind more than any other when it came to how I see the world and how the gospel of Jesus Christ is to go to the ends of the earth.

I am indebted to the Reverend Carmen Falcione who gave me a tour of Montgomery years ago and gave me great insights into the spiritual history of the city. He continues to bring people together in unity through Christ in his monthly John 17 prayer meetings. I am also thankful for Tom and Jan Kotouc who have modeled sacrificial love and what it means to live as reconcilers and who have encouraged me greatly to live out the ministry of reconciliation in my own life and for Bill Hurley who has encouraged me to pursue the truths of Isaiah 58 all around the world.

I am additionally grateful for E. Baxter Morris, pastor of First Baptist Church on Ripley Street in Montgomery. He spent hours with me on multiple occasions telling me stories about what the church experienced, giving me tours of the building where the Freedom Riders found refuge, and providing additional insight into the struggles that we still face. He was also instrumental in hosting our prayer event at the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Freedom Rides in May 2011 that I talk about in the epilogue. In the same vein, I would also like to thank Dr. Michael Thurman, former pastor of Dexter Avenue King Memorial Church, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s church in Montgomery, for his encouragement and insight over the years into many of the matters that I address here.

I would like to acknowledge all of the Starbucks Coffee shops in Montgomery and Cafe Louisa in Old Cloverdale! They always allowed me to grab a quiet table in a corner so I could write and they kept the coffee flowing. This book was largely written in those places over the course of a couple of years and it might not have ever been completed without them.

Part 1

Earth: The Story

Chapter 1

Freedom Riders

Montgomery, Alabama. May 20–21, 1961.

Faith in God was at the heart of all I did. — John Lewis[1]

If, however, you are fulfilling the royal law according to the Scripture, You shall love your neighbor as yourself, you are doing well. But if you show partiality, you are committing sin and are convicted by the law as transgressors." — James 2:8–9

The historical marker in front of the Romanesque-style edifice on Montgomery’s North Ripley Street calls it the Brick-a-Day church. After the original structure burned in 1910, the Reverend Andrew Stokes called upon his congregants—former slaves and the children of slaves—to bring a brick each day from wherever they could find it to rebuild their place of worship, the First Baptist Church. The church had existed on the northeast side of downtown Montgomery since 1866 when the black members of the white First Baptist Church (on South Perry Street) formed their own church. This was after Alabama’s slaves were emancipated following the end of the Civil War. The black Baptists were tired of being restricted to the balcony of the white church, never allowed to step onto the sanctuary floor unless they were sweeping or mopping it. They wanted to stand before God as his children and not as the inferiors of white Christians, who should have lived as their brothers and sisters. As I stood reading this history lesson on the bronze marker placed by the Alabama Historical Commission, I had just arrived in Montgomery in January 2000 as a young pastor fresh out of seminary. The vision the marker created in my mind, aided by the stories that I had recently read and heard, was hot and loud and horrific.

I could picture that warm, muggy, late spring night—May 21, 1961, to be precise—in the Deep South and the scene that unfolded . . .

Tensions high, the smell and sounds of oppression in the streets. A mob forming, pushing, grabbing, and yelling chants of hatred and anger laced with violent rhetoric and calls for death. U.S. Marshals barely hanging on as they work desperately to keep the rioters at bay. Fists still bloody and sore from the day before, the growing mob—some say more than 2,000—surrounds the church on Ripley Street with the goal of stopping a movement. Drunk on white supremacy, they feel it is time to end this foolishness and send those troublemakers back where they belong, out of state or to Hell if need be.

Shouting, screaming, yelling fill the night with hate. A car left in the street becomes a show of the mob’s force and defiance. Turn it over! Set it on fire! The mob rocks the car back and forth until it flips over. They set it ablaze and it burns while the riot rages on. A Molotov cocktail is thrown onto the roof of the church, almost setting the whole structure on fire.

Rocks hurtling out of the mob begin to break the church’s windows; inside the church, shards of glass shower the people within. The sanctuary of the Brick-a-Day church is packed with 1,500 elderly women, little children, seamstresses, teachers, day laborers, and other common people who had gathered in a traditional mass meeting to give courage to the Freedom Riders who rolled into town the day before. Those 22 white and black Freedom Riders had been greeted at the Greyhound Bus Station on South Court Street, a dozen blocks away, with a vicious beating at the hands of an earlier wild and demonic mob, also led by the Ku Klux Klan. Two of the Freedom Riders are still hospitalized, and the rest are nursing wounds. The hymns and spirituals being sung by those assembled inside the Brick-a-Day church are intended to bring healing and strength to the Freedom Riders’ souls, but the escalating danger outside cannot be ignored.

The crowd is nervous, scared even, and rightly so. They can hear the yelling outside and they understand the situation. They are children of the still-segregated South, and just by being there they are stepping out of their assigned place—anywhere but on an equal footing with whites. This night, they are stepping up, and in this church, in song and prayer, they are declaring that they have had enough. They are waiting on their God to answer. Three hundred years of slavery, subjugation, and segregation are coming to a head this night in Montgomery, Alabama, in a black Baptist church. Perhaps they sense Martin Luther King’s long arc of the moral universe bending toward justice.

As I stood in front of that church almost 40 years later, I could visualize the people packed in, the women in their hats and gloves fanning themselves, the children squirming around. The old men holding their heads high. I could see and hear the crowd jerk and yell and take cover when another rock came through a window. I could see the fear and I could feel the hope and determination that this was not the end, but a gathering of defiance that would lead to something new. I think they knew that things were changing, that a new world was being birthed, that a new order was arising through their prayers and their faith even while they were under siege.

Dr. King was there. He had moved to Atlanta the year before, but when he learned of the attack at the Greyhound bus station, he canceled a trip to Chicago and came to Montgomery. Ralph Abernathy was there, as were Diane Nash, John Lewis, James Farmer, Solomon Seay, Fred Gray, and Fred Shuttlesworth. These names adorn the pantheon of the American civil rights movement. All were there that night in solidarity with the Freedom Riders and the hundreds of others in a church under siege. The luminaries called for calm and courage. The assembled sang again. They prayed again. They waited. They could not leave, though. They were surrounded by hate and fear. But light was breaking through the darkness.

Word had come by phone that a group of men, led by black cab drivers, were arming themselves to break through the white mob to rescue the congregants. Those trapped in the church were their wives and mothers and children and their neighbors. They weren’t going to let them be attacked and beaten as the Freedom Riders had been the day before. But Dr. King would not have it. The movement must remain nonviolent. He asked for volunteers to try with him to get to the cab drivers and reason with them to put their weapons away. Who would put their lives on the line? Slowly, 10–12 men stood up and said they would go. Fear and wonder swept through the congregation. Would they ever come back? Would the mob outside do their worst to them?

In my mind, I could see Dr. King leading the men out of the church and into the mob. Strangely, the mob, still seething and violent, parted and let them pass. A miracle. Dr. King made his way to the gas station where the cabdrivers were gathering and persuaded them to let the nonviolent way of resistance do its work. They listened to his plea and a bloody disaster was averted. As Dr. King and the men returned, relief swept through the crowd.[2]

What would happen next? Phone calls to Washington. Warnings of a human disaster about to take place. Arguing and pleading with U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy, to do something, anything to get this mob to back down. Finally, tear gas from the U.S. Marshals wafting back into the sanctuary and affecting the people trapped inside. More calls for prayer. More songs, songs that had sustained and given hope and brought a beleaguered but proud people together into a movement that was changing America. They weren’t backing down now. They were going on. The Freedom Riders would continue on to Jackson, Mississippi, and finally to New Orleans, forever desegregating the interstate bus system. Jim Crow was dying and the prayers of the people in the Brick-a-Day church were helping to send him to his grave. This was not just a social movement. It was a religious revival, a Jesus uprising that was conceived on another bus in Montgomery when Rosa Parks would not be moved, but was birthed at the first mass meeting to mobilize the people a few days after her arrest at this very church in December of 1955. And now it was continuing and it would not stop until a people had overcome. Some day was now.

Cultures and peoples and history and pride collided on May 21, 1961. The past and the future, hate and love, violence and nonviolence, white and black, collided as well. But as I stood on that street in front of that old church and thought about the events of that night, I realized that it was not just a people or ideas or a movement for freedom that emerged. Heaven and Earth collided that night at that church and forty years later as I kicked at the dirt and stared up at the bricks brought day by day by poor people who only had God and each other, I realized that I was standing on sacred ground.

I had to understand better what happened that night and why. As I carried out my quest through history and theology and source documents and interviews, I was surprised by the answers I found and where they led me and their implications for today and for the future.

What surprised me the most was that the larger problem wasn’t really about race. Not at the core, anyway.

The context for what happened that night in May 1961 is important, as context always is. The civil rights movement was in full swing. The landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1954 had given the legal precedent to begin the dismantling of segregation, the system of social and legal separation of the races primarily found in the South. Almost six years had passed since Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery city bus on December 1, 1955. Central High School in Little Rock had been integrated in 1957. In 1960, students began engaging in sit-ins at segregated lunch counters throughout the South. Another Supreme Court ruling that year, Boynton v. Virginia, outlawed segregated interstate bus travel. Victories were being won in the courts and in public opinion throughout America. It was a hard battle, but little by little, what had once seemed impossible was happening: the Segregated South was beginning to crumble.

Everything was changing. Observers believed that they were witnessing the death of one world and the birth of another.[3] This did not come without resistance, of course. Still, looking back, it all seems so inevitable. Reporter Jimmy Breslin, watching from the lobby of the Jefferson Davis Hotel in Montgomery during the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery march spoke of how things were changing and the effect of seeing

an old black woman with mud on her shoes stand on the street of a Southern city and sing . . . we are not afraid . . . and then turn and look at the face of a cop near her and see the puzzlement, and the terrible fear in his eyes. Because he knows, and everybody who has ever seen it knows, that it is over. The South as it stood since 1865 is gone. Shattered by these people in muddy shoes standing in the street and swaying and singing We Shall Overcome.[4]

Fear can do crazy things to people. It causes some to fight and claw for what they perceive to be their rights. It causes others to run away and hide. Fear of what might be lost gripped the white South during those days, and many whites fought back violently against the advancements toward freedom and equality that blacks were making. Others sat quietly by while the push for equality was being opposed by their more strident and vocal neighbors.

Driven by fear and a desire to regain control over their lives and their culture after their defeat in the Civil War, southern whites had constructed a society that would keep blacks from entering into their social, political, economic, and religious world. Sure, they lived side by side, but Jim Crow was established both officially through the law and unofficially through society—including religion—to keep the races separate and decidedly unequal. The belief that whites were superior to blacks and must live separately from them according to accepted social/cultural order and even Divine Sanction, affected all of life in the South and throughout America. Christianity was subverted to buttress this belief as churches throughout the South supported segregation and racism. Christian theological support of racism was needed and used to support the institution of slavery before the Civil War, and it was also needed to support the institution of segregation after the war. Like the doctrine of Original Sin, the specter of the racial superiority of whites over blacks clouded every aspect of life for the next 100 years. Harrison Salisbury of the New York Times had written about Birmingham in April 1960, Every channel of communication, every medium of mutual interest, every reasoned approach, every inch of middle ground, has been fragmented by the emotional dynamite of racism, reinforced by the whip, the gun, the bomb, the torch, the club, the knife, the mob, the police and many branches of the state’s apparatus.[5] Were these claims true or overblown? Southern whites claimed that this was another example of Yankees making too much of things and trying to stir up trouble. Southern blacks found themselves in agreement with the assessment.

Freedom Riders

It was in this world and during this time that a group of people, both white and black, buoyed by the Boynton v. Virginia decision that called for interstate bus desegregation and other movements toward integration and equality of the races, decided to push for the actualization of this ideal in the South. On May 4, 1961, a coordinated group of black and white passengers left Washington, D.C., on Trailways and Greyhound buses bound for New Orleans, Louisiana. They called themselves Freedom Riders. The group was led by James Farmer, the director of the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE) and John Lewis, a Nashville theology student originally from Troy, Alabama. Other Freedom Riders joined the group along the way. The goal was for black and white riders to sit together on the buses, thus effectively desegregating the interstate busing system in the South through an integrated ride to New Orleans. Apart from some minor trouble in the Carolinas, things went relatively smoothly for them.

Until they reached Alabama.

The Ku Klux Klan, in collusion with white politicians in Alabama, was waiting for them. It was Sunday, May 14–Mother’s Day. The Trailways bus made it to Birmingham, but not before several of the Freedom Riders had been beaten unconscious by Klansmen who boarded the bus with them in Atlanta and physically forced the black riders to the back of the bus to preserve the color line. The Greyhound bus full of Freedom Riders was also attacked when they arrived in Anniston, Alabama. A mob of around 50 people, brandishing brass knuckles, pipes, chains, and clubs, attacked the bus, slashing the tires.[6] The police finally arrived, made no arrests, and escorted the wounded bus just outside the city. The growing mob followed behind. Much of the mob was made up of Klan members, some of whom had just left church and were still dressed in their Sunday best. Some of them had their children with them.[7]

Six miles outside of Anniston, the Greyhound bus driver had to pull over because of flat tires. He left the bus and ran into a grocery store to try and call any garages that would help with replacement tires. With the bus sitting still, the hostile mob descended upon it. Windows were broken and the bus was rocked violently back and forth. They called on the riders to come out to take what was coming to them. Finally, a fire bomb thrown through a broken window engulfed the inside of the bus in flame. A few Freedom Riders were able to climb out of windows, but the rest were trapped as the mob held the door shut yelling, Burn them alive and Fry the g-damn niggers.[8] An exploding fuel tank caused some of the white mob to pull back and the riders were finally able to get out of the bus, aided by two plainclothes state troopers who had been assigned by Public Safety Director Floyd Mann to board the bus as it entered Alabama in order to monitor the ride. When the assault began, these officers prevented the mob from boarding the bus, and then when the fire broke out, they forced mob members to allow the bus door to be opened. Dazed and confused, the riders collapsed on the ground nearby, suffering from smoke inhalation and some burns. The mob was finally dispersed by highway patrolmen who did not bother to make any arrests or identify any of the assailants. Apparently, a white mob could viciously attack and try to kill black and white bus passengers in Alabama in 1961 without it being considered a punishable crime.

The Freedom Riders were taken