just a bunch of agitators’’: kneel-ins and the desegregation of southern churches ·...

‘‘Just a Bunch of Agitators’’: Kneel-Ins and theDesegregation of Southern Churches

Joseph Kip Kosek

African American protests at white churches in the AmericanSouth laid bare the racial logic of Jim Crow Christianity. The so-calledkneel-ins emerged out of the sit-in movement and were sometimesdubbed ‘‘church sit-ins.’’ Typically, an interracial or all-black cohortvisited a white congregation on Sunday morning and attempted toenter the building for worship services. Reactions varied: sometimesthe group was welcomed inside, sometimes ushered into a separateauditorium, sometimes barred entirely, and, occasionally, arrestedand thrown in jail. The visits revealed that many churches, even thosewhose evangelical theology seemed to demand that they welcomeanyone who appeared at their doors, actually prohibited AfricanAmericans from their membership rolls and even from their sanctuar-ies.1 During the civil rights movement, such visitors disturbed whiteChristians across the former Confederacy, from Albany, Georgia, toJackson, Mississippi, to Birmingham, Alabama. In Lynchburg, Virginia,African Americans held a protest on the steps of Jerry Falwell’s ThomasRoad Baptist Church, while, in Georgia, state senator Jimmy Carter casta dissenting vote when Plains Baptist Church, fearing the prospect ofkneel-ins, barred African Americans from attending there.2

One of the earliest kneel-in campaigns to spark a national con-troversy targeted Atlanta’s First Baptist Church in 1963. The congrega-tion gained widespread attention as a symbol of the intransigent racismof white churchgoers. Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote in Ebony that themembers of First Baptist were perfect examples of the ‘‘un-ChristianChristian’’ who was fighting his efforts in the South. ‘‘The callousnessof this congregation and its pastor never ceases to be a problem for me,’’he lamented.3 The events that so perturbed King occurred at the largestchurch in the Southeast, in the largest Protestant denomination in thecountry, in the city that served as the headquarters of the civil rightsmovement, during the movement’s most important year. A close

Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation, Vol. 23, Issue 2, pp. 232–261, ISSN:1052-1151, electronic ISSN: 1533-8568. ! 2013 by The Center for the Study of Religion andAmerican Culture. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopyor reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissionswebsite at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/rac.2013.23.2.232.

analysis of First Baptist’s travails shows how churches became keybattlegrounds in the struggle for racial equality.4

The usual approaches to the question of religion taken byscholars of the civil rights movement do not fully illuminate thekneel-in controversy. Some of those scholars have focused on biblicalinterpretation. King’s reworkings of the Exodus story and other scrip-tural texts have received copious attention. Historians of segregationistreligion have shown how white supremacists drew on the venerable‘‘curse of Ham,’’ in which the patriarch Noah supposedly consigneddark-skinned people to a state of permanent subjugation, and howracial readings of the Bible buttressed antimiscegenation law. Theseexegetical efforts were important, but they played little public role inthe kneel-in controversy.

Nor do the protests fit another common interpretive frame,that which views faith communities as providing organizational oremotional resources for achieving largely secular ends. Scholars writ-ing in this vein emphasize, for instance, the mass meetings held inblack churches or the rise of Christian academies founded, in part, tocircumvent the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Yet religion wasnot only a refuge behind the lines where like-minded people couldorganize for battle somewhere else. During the kneel-ins, churchesthemselves became the actual arenas of conflict.5

In the Atlanta kneel-in controversy, religion was less an intel-lectual edifice or a repository of resources than a contested spacedefined by a set of symbolic actions and performative strategies. Theresponse to the protests turned racial equality into a question of reli-gious sincerity. The hypothetical authentic worshipper, approachingGod untainted by political agendas, emerged as the ideal by whichthe surprise visitors to First Baptist Church were judged. SouthernBaptist notions of the good Christian mixed with racialized expecta-tions of quiescent black subjects, leading many of the church’s mem-bers to dismiss the brash newcomers out of hand as ‘‘just a bunch ofagitators.’’ The kneel-in participants fought against this attack on theirsincerity, but they also turned it to their own ends, suggesting thattheir exclusion from the church revealed members’ own spiritualhypocrisy. Then, too, many whites inside the church agreed with thedemands of the kneel-ins and pushed from within to allow openseating. That profound shift in policy came about after a debatewaged in seemingly conservative terms, a debate over appropriatespeech, bodily comportment, and obedience to authority—in short,over proper behavior in church.6

The First Baptist kneel-ins tell a story of racial progress, aschurch members eventually voted to eliminate the barriers to integrated

‘‘Just a Bunch of Agitators’’ 233

seating. As in other venues throughout the South, segregationistsproved unwilling, or unable, to mount a robust theological defense ofJim Crow Christianity. In the end, though, the legacy is more ambiva-lent, for the use of subtly racialized constructs of respectability andsincerity set the stage for continued division. At first glance, the kneel-ins appear to be a dramatic set-piece pitting fellowship against hatred.Examined more closely, they reveal the ambiguities and evasions thathave left American Christianity desegregated but still divided by faith.7

Religion and Race in Atlanta

In the decades after World War II, First Baptist Church wasa pillar of white Atlanta and the national Southern Baptist denomi-nation, which claimed the allegiance of almost half of white south-erners. Centrally located on Peachtree Street, First Baptist resembled,in many ways, the evangelical megachurches of more recent decades.To serve its 6,000 members, it had a 3,000-seat sanctuary, a separateeducation building, and a gymnasium, among other amenities. Mem-bers included some of Atlanta’s leading citizens, along with hundredsof students from the nearby Georgia Institute of Technology and otherarea colleges. Services were televised weekly, as they were at a fewother big Atlanta churches, and an auxiliary auditorium in the base-ment carried a live video feed to accommodate overflow crowds. Thecongregation was theologically conservative, but members couldpoint to their embrace of mass media and their thriving campus min-istry as signs of an innovative, modern approach to Christianity.8

The pastor at First Baptist was Roy O. McClain, a religiouscelebrity in his day. When Newsweek magazine selected ‘‘Ten of theGreatest American Preachers,’’ it chose McClain alongside such lumi-naries as Billy Graham and Norman Vincent Peale. A chaplain in thePacific during World War II, McClain called on his parishioners tofollow a ‘‘virile, muscular’’ Jesus who ‘‘never ran from a fight.’’ Theminister aptly described himself as a ‘‘liberal conservative,’’ hewing toSouthern Baptists’ biblical literalism but rejecting the rigidity andanti-intellectualism of far-right Christianity.9 He explicated his theol-ogy not only from the pulpit but also in a regular column in the AtlantaConstitution. Sometimes, the Constitution and the Journal, the city’s twodaily papers, covered his sermons as part of the local news.

On the race question, McClain consistently counseled moder-ation. He had signed the two Atlanta ‘‘Ministers’ Manifestoes’’ thaturged the city not to undertake massive resistance in defiance of theBrown ruling. In his 1961 book, If with All Your Heart, McClain had evenwritten that Jesus was ‘‘color-blind.’’ The pastor’s temperate approach

234 Religion and American Culture

was common among Southern Baptist leaders, who generally refusedto support virulent forms of white supremacy. In the 1950s, mostSouthern Baptist seminaries had dropped their whites-only admissionspolicies, and, after Brown, important voices within the denominationurged southern state governments to keep public schools open.10

Black Atlanta took a dimmer view of McClain and his church.Morehouse College president Benjamin Mays, conceding that McClainwas ‘‘an eloquent and convincing speaker,’’ criticized a sermon hepreached on the Brown decision as ‘‘absolutely safe’’ and ‘‘distinctlymore pro-segregation than pro-integration.’’ Martin Luther King, Sr.,hearing of McClain’s prodigious abilities, once decided to visit FirstBaptist in the 1950s. King, Sr., and his companions ‘‘were met at thedoor very cordially,’’ he recalled, but, after they sat down, a churchofficial insisted that they move to the downstairs auditorium. King, Sr.,‘‘told him that we were quite all right where we were,’’ but a secondman came and berated the group some more, finally grabbing theminister by the arm and shoving him. The unwelcome visitors left.11

In fact, First Baptist’s religious practice was more starkly seg-regated than McClain’s sermons suggested. Jesus may have been‘‘color-blind’’; the church was, nevertheless, for whites only. Whetherthe rule was written policy is unclear, but it was certainly understood.Despite the moderation of Southern Baptist leadership, this exclusion-ary tradition was widespread, with a 1963 survey showing that 90 per-cent of churches in the denomination barred African Americans frommembership.12 The very idea of integrated religion was a joke tomany white southerners, the reductio ad absurdum of African Americandemands for equality. When a prominent black minister asked Atlan-ta’s mayor, decades before the kneel-ins, about the possibility of aninterracial police force, the mayor dismissed the request by quippingthat black police would be about as likely as black deacons at FirstBaptist Church.13

The tension between a racially moderate image and a whitesupremacist practice defined Atlanta as a whole. The city whereHenry Grady once proclaimed the ascendance of a ‘‘New South’’ had,in the year after the Brown decision, dubbed itself ‘‘The City Too Busyto Hate.’’ Atlanta’s civic leaders prided themselves on creating themost vibrant economic center in the region while avoiding the racialstrife that roiled Little Rock and, later, Birmingham. Those locales didnot, however, present a particularly high bar. In fact, until the civilrights movement, Atlanta businesses, schools, churches, and publicspaces were segregated just as in other southern cities. Whites main-tained the color line with violence and threats, just as elsewhere.Whatever tenuous peace Atlanta did achieve was probably due less


to the goodwill of white elites than to the city’s large, well-establishedAfrican American population, which allowed talented advocates suchas Mays and King, Sr., to push for concessions that would have beenimpossible to gain elsewhere.14

Kneel-Ins Begin

Black Christians’ condemnation of religious segregation andtheir attempts to imagine alternatives to it laid the groundwork for thekneel-ins. ‘‘In the area of worship and membership,’’ Benjamin Mayswrote in 1957, ‘‘the criteria of admission to the Christian churchshould never be based on race.’’ The church, he noted, was a ‘‘uniqueinstitution. No other institution in the United States makes the claimfor itself that the church makes,’’ that is, the claim of ‘‘divine origins.’’The church’s identity as the very people of God gave its policies, forbetter or for worse, a transcendent authority.15

Howard Thurman, the eminent African American ministerand educator, came to believe that Christian practice ought to providea model for harmonious race relations. In 1944, Thurman left hisacademic post at Howard University for San Francisco to ‘‘attemptsomething new in American Christianity.’’ Convinced that churcheshad to become experimental ‘‘laboratories’’ of interracial activity, heand a white co-pastor founded the Church for the Fellowship of AllPeoples, apparently the first self-consciously multiracial, nondenom-inational congregation in the country. The experiment was an anom-aly, but Thurman felt that it proved ‘‘the practicability of a churchrelationship in which there would be no cultural and racial barriers.’’Both Thurman, a Morehouse College graduate, and Mays set the stagefor Atlanta’s new generation of African Americans to try to open thedoors of the city’s most prestigious white churches.16

In 1960, the sit-in movement challenged segregated space innovel ways. This wave of protest popularized not only the tacticof the sit-in but also a variety of creative direct action that includedstand-ins, lie-ins, wade-ins, and more. In Atlanta, sit-ins began in thespring, targeting especially lunch counters, department stores, and cafe-terias in public buildings. Emerging out of the city’s African Americancolleges, the new protests strained the longstanding biracial coalitionthat had maintained a precarious civic truce. The young dissidentsgathered in new organizations such as the Committee on Appeal forHuman Rights (COAHR), a local Atlanta group, and the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which had its national head-quarters in the city. Kneel-ins at white churches began as one morevariation on the sit-in theme, but they would take on a life of their own.


On Sunday, August 7, some two dozen black college studentsundertook the nation’s first organized kneel-in. In small groups, theyvisited six of Atlanta’s places of worship, with mixed results. FirstPresbyterian Church and St. Philip’s Episcopal Cathedral seated theguests without incident. The African Americans visiting St. Mark’sMethodist met an initial rebuff from an usher, but a second usheroverruled the first and welcomed the entourage inside. At GraceMethodist, the auditorium was filled to capacity, and the visitors satin an overflow space, along with some whites. Druid Hills Baptist wasalso full, but the group arriving there refused seats in the balcony.First Baptist offered a chilly reception, as ushers barred the way to themain sanctuary and pointed the students to the auxiliary auditoriumwith the video feed. The visitors—Marion Barry, Jr., Ruby DorisSmith, and Henry Thomas—elected, instead, to remain in the churchfoyer for the duration of the service, after which they offered a mimeo-graphed statement to the exiting members.17

As in other forms of direct action, the students’ presence wastheir greatest statement. Smith later recalled that, while she was pre-vented from entering the main sanctuary, she could still see the wor-shippers inside. Some looked at her and quickly averted their eyes,while others glared for a long time. The kneel-ins had begun to makechurchgoing into a more self-conscious practice, as excluded AfricanAmericans were now in sight just beyond the sanctuary doors. Smithdecided on a course that both marked her as a sincere Christian andalso criticized the attitudes of those within the church proper: ‘‘Ipulled up a chair in the lobby and joined in the singing and worshipservices which I enjoyed immensely.’’18

The protesters understood church visits as part of the newavant-garde of direct action against segregation. The SNCC newslet-ter opined that ‘‘the ‘kneel-in’ will be one of the next important phasesof the student movement,’’ and, indeed, the August 7 event includedsome of the movement’s most dedicated young activists. Barry,Smith, and Thomas all became important figures in SNCC. LonnieKing, the key student organizer of the sit-ins, also participated in thechurch visits, while Mays lent support in his Pittsburgh Courier col-umn, averring that ‘‘it is ridiculous and ironical that anyone shouldhave to stage a demonstration in order to worship in a church.’’19

For their part, First Baptist Church spokespeople framed thevisits in terms of political activism, generally refusing to discusswhether the students had exposed a substantive religious problem.‘‘They were just a bunch of agitators,’’ the chairman of the usherscomplained to the Atlanta Constitution, leaving open the question ofwhether more quiescent African Americans would have been seated.


The church visit, in this view, was a sacrilegious incursion of politicsinto a pristine space of worship. The church’s representatives alsoinsisted that religious integration was unnecessary. Directing the visi-tors to the auxiliary auditorium, an usher told them: ‘‘You’ll find Godthere the same as anywhere else.’’20

Despite the front-page newspaper coverage they gained, theinitial Atlanta kneel-ins fizzled out after a few more weeks. Churchvisits happened occasionally in other places, most notably during the1962 Albany Movement, when black visitors were arrested in front ofthe First Baptist Church in Albany, Georgia.21 Meanwhile, congrega-tions across the South began to develop clearer plans to deal with anyunwelcome guests who approached their doors. Yet no plan couldhave entirely prepared First Baptist Church of Atlanta for the unprec-edented events that unfolded between Easter and Christmas of 1963.

Crisis at First Baptist Church

On April 21, 1963, the week after Easter, kneel-ins returned toFirst Baptist with a vengeance when five African American studentsfrom Morehouse College paid a visit. The action happened amidwidespread conflict over segregated space locally and across theSouth. The Atlanta NAACP chapter had just called for a law prohibit-ing discrimination in hotels and restaurants, while in Birmingham,Alabama, 150 miles away, Martin Luther King, Jr., had recently beenreleased from prison.22 In the ‘‘Letter from Birmingham City Jail,’’ heangrily asked of the South’s recalcitrant white churches: ‘‘What kindof people worship there? Who is their God?’’ The Morehouse studentscalled the question.

‘‘There was,’’ the Atlanta Journal reported, ‘‘apparently somedifference of opinion on just what happened at the 11 A.M. service.’’The competing narratives of the kneel-ins would become one of theirmost persistent features, but what was clear was that the five studentsevaded the ushers and entered the main sanctuary. When confronted,one visitor left voluntarily, but the other four refused to move fromtheir pews. Eventually, ushers managed to escort two students fromthe building, but a third had to be physically dragged out. Mostsurprising of all, one of the students, Amos Brown, managed toremain in place for the entire service.23

Because of the students’ audacity and the newspaper coveragethey received, this morning in 1963 would mark the recognized begin-ning of the church’s crisis over integration. Like most beginnings, itwas not clear-cut. Martin Luther King, Sr., had tried to visit First Baptistyears earlier, as had the students in 1960. Furthermore, Amos Brown


had been allowed to sit in the main sanctuary on Palm Sunday andEaster Sunday, though he was sternly reprimanded each time bychurch officials. Somehow, Brown failed to attract the notice of themedia or even many of the church members during these earlier forays.In short, what looked like an unprecedented upheaval was part ofa longer, if sporadic, struggle.

As in 1960, the church visit combined the radicalism of the newdirect action with an older politics of respectability that took AfricanAmericans’ exemplary personal conduct as an argument for racialequality. ‘‘Morehouse Men’’ understood themselves as aspiring publicleaders distinguished by their incorruptible integrity. First Baptist’swhites-only policy was not simply a generic racial insult; it was alsoa specific assertion that even the most decent college-educated blackChristian could never achieve religious equality. Though church offi-cials’ peculiar attention to etiquette was a way of avoiding the subject ofrace, this focus was also an effort to show that African Americans didhave the respectable bodily discipline that whites had mastered.24

First Baptist leaders insisted that the hostile reception of thevisitors on April 21 was a question of decorum, not Christian fellow-ship. An associate minister objected that the students had used ‘‘com-mando tactics’’ and ‘‘forced their way past ushers,’’ despite being‘‘asked in a courteous and genteel manner’’ to move to the auxiliaryauditorium. In contrast, Amos Brown claimed that everyone but himhad escaped the ushers’ notice until they were seated. Brown him-self had ducked through a swinging door just as a man ‘‘grabbed forme,’’ he said. One way or another, the visitors had entered the sanc-tuary against the wishes of the ushers.

In public, First Baptist’s supporters tended to argue not thatchurches should be firmly segregated on principle but that themotives of the black visitors were tainted by civil rights politics. Tobe sure, some white Christians explicitly defended spiritual segrega-tion. ‘‘Each race can best serve their race and God in their own churchand among their own people,’’ one letter to the Atlanta Constitutionasserted. More often, though, critics of the kneel-ins refused toacknowledge that the actions had a religious dimension at all.Another Constitution letter mocked the notion that ‘‘these organizedteams go to white churches for the purpose of worshiping God,’’stressing that the visits were instead ‘‘planned invasions’’ and ‘‘partof a deliberate campaign.’’ At some point, a rumor circulated that thekneel-ins were fomented by African American ministers who hopedto obtain First Baptist’s valuable real estate for themselves.25

Similar assumptions guided responses to black incursions intowhite churches elsewhere. That same spring, a young African American


man applied for membership at the First Baptist Church in Houston, thehome congregation of Southern Baptist Convention president K. OwenWhite. The church declined to accept the man on the grounds that heonly ‘‘wanted to see if he could join the church where the president ofthe Southern Baptist Convention is pastor,’’ as White put it. As in 1960,opponents of the kneel-ins sought to cast the fight not as one betweensegregation and integration but between authentic Christians and polit-ical agitators. ‘‘They’re not here to worship,’’ church members repeat-edly explained, ‘‘they’re here to disrupt.’’ The sacred space of the churchwas for sincere worshippers, so African Americans, in their veryattempt to enter a church that they knew was for whites only, couldnot be motivated by purely ‘‘religious’’ concerns.26

At one level, Southern Baptist segregationists were largely cor-rect about the motives of the visitors. Few, if any, African Americancollege students had an interest in becoming members of Roy McClain’schurch, and kneel-ins were inextricably connected to contemporaneousforms of direct action on behalf of racial justice. Still, hostile churchmembers missed, or refused to admit, the reality that the kneel-insexposed, which was that the routine religious practices of white south-erners were built on foundations of racial exclusion. No sphere of purereligion existed outside of the discriminatory logic of Jim Crow.

Those sympathetic to the church visits contended that theinsistence on religious sincerity was simply a cover for white suprem-acy. ‘‘I wonder,’’ wrote SNCC leader Julian Bond to the Atlanta Journal,‘‘if Dr. Roy McClain . . . applies the same standards to the white peoplewho flock to First Baptist once a week. Does he stop them at the doorand ask them if they came to worship?’’ Ralph McGill, the liberal editorof the Constitution, mused that ‘‘a key’’ for members or ‘‘actual mem-bership cards’’ might be the next steps for churches that wanted tomonitor sincerity. More seriously, McGill insisted that ‘‘to bar the doorsof churches may not be explained away as anything except an affront toChristian principles.’’27

Though the black church visitors and their supporters claimedto see through the appeals to sincerity, they, too, sometimes idealizedan innocent, purely religious black subject. McGill insisted that ‘‘thosewho came did so quietly and with no visible evidence of wishing to testor cause trouble.’’ Amos Brown, who was a theology student, said thathe had watched First Baptist services on television and enjoyedMcClain’s preaching. While Brown also decried segregation moredirectly, noting that McClain ought to ‘‘put into action some of thethings he preaches about,’’ his appeal to colorblind spiritual reasonsput segregationists in a difficult position. Who could object to a youngBaptist minister-in-training who wished to learn firsthand from


a recognized master of the trade? On both sides, racial conflicts werefought in the language of respectability and religious authenticity.28

The clashes took the form that they did not only because ofthe actions of ushers and black visitors but also because the sanctuaryitself was a media stage, as Brown’s television viewing habits attest.The cameras that broadcast on Sunday morning did not merelyrecord what happened during worship; they also shaped the religiousexperience itself, turning McClain into a director who guided theproceedings to fit precisely into the assigned sixty-minute time slot.The sincere worship that integrationists and segregationists cham-pioned was simultaneously a media performance.29

On April 21, television had supported integration verydirectly. Amos Brown remained in the sanctuary that day becausehe had entered through a different door from his fellow students andfound a seat close to the front of the church. He recalled that theushers could not remove him without risking a scene that might havebeen visible on television. The fear of negative media coverage con-strained church officials throughout the long kneel-in crisis, albeitseldom in such a concrete way.30

The influence of television was not all on the side of theAfrican American visitors, though. On the contrary, the video feedto the auxiliary auditorium made possible a new kind of segregatedspace. Originally, the room had been simply an overflow area for thelarge crowds that often attended First Baptist, but, in 1963, it pre-sented a technological solution to the problem of seating AfricanAmericans. Segregation at First Baptist was not the residual prejudiceof a backward-looking people but a thoroughly modern arrangementthat made creative use of the latest communication technology. Theauxiliary auditorium laid the groundwork for a kind of colorblindracism by allowing church leaders to disavow any antiblack senti-ment, even to claim a certain enlightened tolerance. The downstairshall, they insisted, was ‘‘not segregated.’’31

Mass media did more than order the sacred spaces of thechurch itself. News of the kneel-ins spread across the city, nation, andworld. Civil rights scholars have usually argued that global mediacoverage of American racial discrimination was important for its rolein the Cold War. Anticommunist politicians took notice of civil rights,this argument suggests, when they realized that domestic racial vio-lence handed the Soviet Union powerful anti-American propagandafor use in Africa and elsewhere.32

Political historians’ focus on anticommunism neglects a morecentral transnational concern of American Christians, namely, theirmassive foreign missionary enterprise. Southern Baptists were


concerned about the communist threat, sometimes obsessively so, buttheir primary interest as Christians was the conversion of the world, anundertaking not unrelated to anticommunism but nonetheless distinctfrom it. Back in 1960, Ralph McGill warned that white churches’ exclu-sivity provided ‘‘grist in the mills of Communist and Moslem propa-ganda,’’ not least ‘‘in Africa where the Moslem church is making greatgains in competition with Christianity.’’ A missionary to Muslims inLebanon wrote to a Baptist journal that the 1960 kneel-ins received widecoverage in newspapers there. ‘‘You have sent us out to proclaimChrist,’’ she scolded, ‘‘and then you tie our hands and our witness byyour actions on the homefront.’’ The evangelistic imperative, as much asanticommunism, gave Southern Baptist integrationists a moral advan-tage when they put forth a vision of an interracial Christian future.33

Black Christians had pressed that advantage even before thekneel-ins, stressing the anti-Christian animus that segregation gener-ated overseas. Howard Thurman’s concern with the integration ofChristianity was heightened during a tour of India that he made in1935–36. ‘‘In almost every city we visited,’’ Thurman recounted, ‘‘invaried ways the same question was raised—why is the church pow-erless before the color bar?’’ Benjamin Mays recounted a similar expe-rience during a visit to the Middle East around the same time. He wasriding a train with a ‘‘devout Muslim’’ who asked ‘‘if there weresegregated churches in the United States based on race and color.’’When Mays affirmed that this was true, the man was perplexed: ‘‘I donot comprehend. When one accepts the Muslim faith, race and nation-ality do not count against him.’’ Like Ralph McGill, Mays linkedMuslim and communist threats. ‘‘If Islam can admit all races to themosque and if atheistic communism can embrace all races in its fel-lowship without segregation, certainly the Christian can do the samein his church.’’ These critics, white and black, reproached segregatedchurches for their effect not only on the nation’s global political imagebut also on the world’s opinion of Christianity as well.34

The Conflict within the Church

From overseas, and even from the perspective of local news-papers, the racism of First Baptist could look monolithic. The clashbetween young black protesters and stolid white ushers made a dra-matic story, yet the public show of toughness hid deep divisions. Manymembers thought that worship services should, in fact, be open toblacks and whites equally. Aware of the opposing viewpoints, AmosBrown and his friends had taken pains to elude the church ushersbecause they believed that if they could only get into the sanctuary,


the people in the pews would treat them cordially. The notion was toooptimistic, but not entirely mistaken.35

The large student ministry at First Baptist was one importantsource of racial heterodoxy. White southern students often appear incivil rights history as violent mobs waving Confederate flags, not leastat the University of Georgia, where a judge’s 1961 order to admit twoAfrican Americans sparked a riot. However, southern collegians haddiverse responses to the civil rights movement. A few even agitatedfor civil rights in left-wing groups such as the Southern Student Orga-nizing Committee. Within religious organizations, students oftenadvocated for an end to racial discrimination more vociferously thandid their elders. Baptist Student Unions, which operated on collegeand seminary campuses, were hardly hubs of radical action, but someof them held interracial meetings and pushed for the desegregation ofseminaries. At Georgia Tech, the thriving Baptist Student Union(BSU) was closely tied to First Baptist Church, which provided muchof its funding. Nevertheless, Georgia Tech student members of thechurch led the internal push for open seating.36

One leader of this contingent was Carl Rodney Nave, a Geor-gia Tech graduate student in physics. Rod Nave was an exemplarySouthern Baptist. As an undergraduate at Tech, he had been presidentnot only of the university’s Baptist Student Union but also of Geor-gia’s state BSU as well. Despite Nave’s deep involvement in SouthernBaptist culture, though, he had never noticed the depth of that cul-ture’s racism until, from his vantage point in the church choir, he hadwatched in astonishment as ushers removed First Baptist’s AfricanAmerican visitors. ‘‘That was an outrageous thing there,’’ he remem-bered, ‘‘to see people who had come into a sanctuary getting pickedup and carried out. That was just ridiculous.’’ Nave was no activist,but he became determined to do something about the church’s prac-tice of exclusion.37

Two days after the kneel-ins, Nave and another student vis-ited R. N. Landers. As chair of First Baptist’s board of deacons, Land-ers held the highest-ranking post in the church, though he stilloperated within Southern Baptists’ resolutely antihierarchical polity.According to Nave’s report, Landers ‘‘expressed deep regret’’ aboutthe forcible removal of the black visitors and insisted that he did notauthorize the action. Nevertheless, he refused to consider altering thepolicy of seating black visitors in the auxiliary auditorium. A changeto open seating would divide the church, he told Nave, even thoughhe claimed personally to have no objection to sitting next to a wor-shipper of another race. Landers also described in detail his harmo-nious relationship with several African Americans employed in his


laundry business, one of whom had expressly voiced his disapprovalof the kneel-ins. According to Landers, racial politics, not Christianpiety, motivated the visits. The black students, he suggested, ‘‘wereadmittedly under the direction of the NAACP.’’38

Nave had mixed feelings after his conversation with Landers.‘‘I came away with much greater admiration for the man,’’ he wrote,‘‘and a much greater appreciation of the responsibility which lies onhis shoulders.’’ Landers’s ‘‘attitude toward the negro race in generalseemed above reproach as far as love was concerned.’’ Nonetheless,the church leader ‘‘seemed to not have much understanding of thenegro college student’’ or of the ‘‘future consequences’’ of harboringracism in the congregation. Nave saw that a new generation of Afri-can Americans would no longer accept the patronizing racial hierar-chy that Landers nurtured in his laundry.39

The limits of Landers’s outlook became clear when Nave leda delegation of his fellow Georgia Tech Baptists to meet the More-house College visitors and some other black students. The AfricanAmericans explained the reasons behind the kneel-in, with AmosBrown insisting that ‘‘for segregation to exist in our churches thereis no justification.’’ Being ordered to the basement auditorium, headded, was inherently demeaning. A Nigerian at the meeting sug-gested that, given racial attitudes in the United States, foreign mis-sionaries ought to stay home and witness to Americans instead ofgoing abroad. The white students, for their part, expressed sympathywith the goal of integration but warned of the depth of hostility in thecongregation as a whole.40

The interracial group of collegians hit upon a plan intended toturn the innocuous decision of where to sit in church into a self-conscious show of solidarity. When black students were deniedentrance to the main sanctuary, white students would voluntarily jointhem in the auxiliary auditorium, leaving the student section conspic-uously empty. The deacons had created a ‘‘not segregated’’ space asan improvised response to black demands; the students would makeit intentionally integrated.41

For a few Sundays in April and May, black guests sat togetherwith a few dozen white students in the basement auditorium andwatched the service on television. In less volatile times, this mod-erate action may have had an effect, but events overtook the effort.Another group of black students, unrelated to the first, began to visitthe church on May 8 after reading about the kneel-ins in the news-papers. Upon being refused admittance to the main sanctuary, thisnew cohort knelt in prayer on the front steps. During the month ofMay, one group or the other visited First Baptist nearly every Sunday,


as well as many Wednesday evenings during midweek prayermeetings.

The church’s segregationists rebuffed the visitors with phys-ical intimidation, not with a carefully reasoned theology. ‘‘I neverheard a theological argument’’ for excluding African Americans,Nave later said, but opponents of open seating still held their groundwith fervor. Groups of men stood guard at each entrance, insultingand cursing the visitors. When a boy from the church went out togreet some of them, a man yelled at him: ‘‘Now you’re getting downto your level, aren’t you! We’d rather have them than you!’’ On oneoccasion, members attacked a photographer documenting the scene.For all the early concern about black students’ comportment, FirstBaptist’s whites had become more unruly.42

Tempers boiled over on June 23, after some two months ofprotests. Following another contentious Sunday morning, an interra-cial group of eight students arrived very early for the evening serviceand made it into the main sanctuary before the ushers had taken theirstations. When the students were confronted, they refused to leave ormove to the auxiliary space. One usher wanted to eject them, butanother dissuaded him, perhaps fearing escalation of an alreadyfraught situation.

The group stayed for the service, but church ushers took nochances. Though they had seldom publicly defended segregation,their treatment of the visitors displayed a practical theology of racialseparation. An usher stood on each end of the group’s pew, forbid-ding anyone else from sitting there or in the pews immediately aheador behind. When the service ended, the ushers quickly escorted theintruders from the church, keeping First Baptist’s regulars at a dis-tance. One Georgia Tech student, though, extended his hand and meta brutal response. Some men pushed him out the front door, sur-rounded him, and began to beat him until a minister finally managedto pull him from the fracas. ‘‘Students Integrate First Baptist,’’ theAtlanta Journal headline read, but this was not the integration thatanyone wanted. ‘‘There was real danger,’’ Nave wrote in a report,‘‘of serious physical violence within the House of God!’’43

Kneel-ins almost never provoked bodily assaults. Despite theirprevalence, they did not produce images of activists attacked by dogsor burned with lit cigarettes. Conventions of propriety were usually toostrong, on all sides, to permit such altercations to erupt. That summerin Atlanta, the conventions broke down to expose the violence implicitin the church’s practice of racial exclusion. Tellingly, the worst incidentwas directed at a white church member who, by trying to shake handswith the ‘‘agitators,’’ had threatened the segregationist story of political


demonstrators invading sacred spaces. That threat from inside, an offerto accept African Americans as fellow Christians, elicited fury from thechurch’s self-styled defenders.

The low-key solution that the students had attempted was nolonger possible, for, in the wake of the June 23 ‘‘integration,’’ thechurch’s segregationists were hostile to African Americans even inthe auxiliary auditorium. Sympathetic whites now faced attack bytheir fellow parishioners. The kneel-ins were about to move intoanother, even more difficult phase, one improbably dominated byan elderly white minister named Ashton Jones.

The Trials of Ashton Jones

Ashton Jones was not the ideal person to bring about recon-ciliation at this tense moment. Unconnected to any civil rights organi-zation, he had, for decades, been a provocative crusader for worldpeace and racial equality. He was also, as even admirers admitted,a ‘‘screwball.’’ Jones, who turned sixty-seven in the summer of the FirstBaptist controversy, was born in Georgia and originally ordained asa Methodist minister, though he later identified himself as a Quaker. In1932, he left his pulpit and began a traveling ministry in his ‘‘WorldPeace Car,’’ a large van covered in antiwar slogans, images, and bib-lical quotations. After World War II, he began to emphasize racialequality alongside his pacifism, as shown by his new van depictinga white hand clasping a black hand and the slogan ‘‘World Brother-hood . . . Or No World.’’ His civil rights activities, not to mention hisinflammatory vehicle, had provoked numerous arrests across theSouth. Jones remained undaunted, often quoting ‘‘Sermons We See,’’Edgar Guest’s quaint poem about the superiority of practice to doc-trine: ‘‘I’d rather see a sermon / Than hear one any day; / I’d ratherone should walk with me / Than merely tell the way.’’ When he cameto First Baptist Church on June 30, Jones was temporarily free on bondafter being sentenced to jail for joining the Atlanta restaurant sit-ins.44

Jones arrived in the morning with two teenagers, one whiteand one black. Ushers told him that he could sit in the main sanc-tuary, but his African American companion would have to go down-stairs. The group refused this offer and stood in the front of thechurch. Like so much else in the kneel-in saga, what happened nextwas disputed. Church representatives stated in court that Jonesbegan to shout like a ‘‘circus barker’’ to those arriving, inviting themto ‘‘come right in, folks, worship a segregated God in a segregatedchurch.’’ His ‘‘coarse and raucous voice’’ carried all the way insidethe sanctuary, according to testimony. First Baptist’s segregationists


experienced racial integration as an assault on pious comportment,but, in this case, the incursion was not only physical but also aural.Jones countered from the witness stand that he had spoken ‘‘smil-ingly’’ at a volume ‘‘about the same as I am testifying now, I don’tthink it was any louder.’’45

The diverging accounts also revealed a dispute over whichside was willing to resort to violence. After his ‘‘segregated God’’welcome, Jones and his entourage prayed outside the building. TaylorWashington, the African American member of Jones’s party, testifiedthat an usher dragged the elderly minister down the steps, tearing hispants. The head of First Baptist’s hospitality committee denied anyassault, insisting that ‘‘one of the ushers just touched him on theelbow, just very deftly as you might touch an old lady helping heracross the street,’’ whereupon Jones ‘‘immediately dropped down onthe steps and sprawled out there and yelled, help, help.’’ Jones allegeda second assault that morning, which First Baptist witnesses alsodenied.

Ashton Jones was not finished that Sunday. The three visitorsreturned to the church in the evening with another African Americanstudent, Barbara Ann Smith. As the group again attempted to gainentrance to the church, a verbal dispute escalated in the vestibule.According to the visitors’ court testimony, Roy McClain himselfpushed Smith out the door; McClain sharply denied this ‘‘crasslyfalse’’ charge. Finally, police arrested Jones on the charge of disturb-ing public worship, but even the arrest had two different stories. Thepolice officers stated that Jones had kicked, scratched, and bit them asthey carried him off. Jones denied it: he was a believer in nonviolence,he said, and, anyway, ‘‘my dentures won’t allow me to bite.’’

The two stories that developed about the Jones visit, eachbased on the sworn testimony of professed Christians, fit the previousinterpretations of the kneel-ins. In one view, Ashton Jones was a harm-less old man brutally abused by hypocritical racist religionists. Theother depiction painted him as combative, hopelessly melodramatic,and possibly insane. Integrationists needed the first story to empha-size the purity of their religious motives. Segregationists needed thesecond story to show that the kneel-ins raised no substantial religiousissue but were motivated either by personal eccentricities or by orga-nized political pressure.

The editorial cartoon that the Constitution ran on July 9, 1963,showed clearly how white liberal support for the kneel-ins dependedupon the construction of a pious black subject. In this depiction, AshtonJones and the black students were merged into a doddering Uncle Tomfigure arriving, literally hat in hand, to seek admission to a worship


service. The artist, esteemed local cartoonist Clifford ‘‘Baldy’’ Bal-dowski, supported the students but represented their militant actionas a humble entreaty. Even at the time, audiences recognized the dis-tortion. One defender of First Baptist wrote to the Constitution to pointout that the protesters at the church had ‘‘not been old or middle-agedgentlemen . . . as Baldy’s cartoon seems to indicate.’’ The criticism wasaccurate, with the notable exception of Ashton Jones, who was white,not black.46

The atmosphere at First Baptist turned more and more circuslike in the weeks after Jones’s arrest. Rod Nave, still hoping for anend to the whites-only policy, grew frustrated that this latest contro-versy had overwhelmed his efforts at reasonable negotiation. Jonescame back to lead interracial groups from the Committee on Appealfor Human Rights in picketing outside the church. On July 14, aninterracial group once again got into the sanctuary for the Sundaynight service, and, once again, ushers cordoned off the area aroundthem. Radio, television, and newspaper reporters now regularly sta-tioned themselves at the church, ready to document any incidents.Church members, who had seen television as an innovative part ofmodern evangelism, now felt themselves to be under a mediaassault. In fact, some of them had forcibly restrained a camera oper-ator attempting to take pictures of the Jones arrest on June 30.Though Roy McClain later fumed that ‘‘the demonstrators broughttheir own publicity agents with them (often accompanied by moviecameras, TV lights, etc.),’’ it did not take a ‘‘publicity agent’’ to seethat, in the summer of 1963, the events at First Baptist were bignews.47

Under tremendous pressure from within and without thecongregation, McClain finally announced the formation of a commit-tee to address the question of open seating. Despite his charisma, hehad limited power to change policy on a subject as controversial asthis one. Baptists, lacking a strong central authority, put great empha-sis on the power of each congregation’s members to govern them-selves. ‘‘A Baptist Church is a democratic organization,’’ one letterto the Constitution explained in defense of McClain, ‘‘thus being dif-ferent from the Roman Catholic and various other sects.’’48 Suppor-ters of First Baptist’s current policy often considered their democraticfreedom to be under attack, a common complaint among the oppo-nents of civil rights. Restaurant owners such as Atlanta’s own LesterMaddox, for instance, demanded to be ‘‘free’’ to refuse service toblacks. Yet ‘‘freedom’’ was not only a political notion grounded in thenation’s founding documents. It was also a religious tenet, one thatwould arise again in the trial of Ashton Jones in August.49


Following McClain’s announcement of the committee toexplore open seating, Nave and some other students convinceddemonstrators to cease picketing for a while. Jones’s trial in FultonSuperior Court, however, put the church back in the news. The judgein the case was Durwood Pye, an ardent segregationist who wasalready dealing harshly with the Atlanta sit-ins. Jones was defendedby the African American civil rights attorneys Howard Moore, Jr., andDonald Hollowell.50

If the kneel-ins had brought ostensibly secular media andpolitics into the sacred space of the church, the trial turned thesecular space of the courtroom into an arena for religious conjecture.The two sides debated the spiritual purity of the church visits, mostoutrageously in an exchange between Judge Pye and defense attorneyMoore. It began when Pye suggested that Jones ought to promoteintegration through ‘‘persuasion and argument and exhortation andprayer’’ rather than by ‘‘force and violence’’:

Moore: That’s what he has attempted to do by presentinghimself, his body, in the presence of Negroes at the FirstBaptist Church, seeking to worship.

Pye: As a living sacrifice?Moore: I suppose that rightly it is a sacrifice.Pye: The martyrs presented themselves at the stake, but not

by loud talking, shouting, and sitting on the floor.Moore: Your Honor, I’d hate to say that the Baptist Church

is the stake . . .

This discussion did little to clarify the legality of Jones’sactions, but it said much about how the debate over racial integrationbecame an investigation into the religious sincerity of integrationistpractice. Pye suggested that the defendant’s actions were only justifiedif he adopted the selfless outlook of ‘‘the martyrs,’’ while Moore con-tended that Jones’s disturbance amounted to ‘‘a sacrifice.’’ For bothsides, religious support for integration was legitimate only if it deniedits own engagement with questions of political power.51

The verdict in the case was unsurprising. On August 28, 1963,as Martin Luther King, Jr., proclaimed at the Lincoln Memorial hisChristian vision of an interracial future, a jury convicted Jones, andPye sentenced him to eighteen months in prison and a $1,000 fine, themaximum for his misdemeanor offenses. The March on Washingtonand the Jones conviction shared the front pages of Atlanta’s news-papers. During sentencing, Pye told Jones that he had violated theAmerican principle of religious freedom. Throwing the minister’s ownwords back at him, the judge explained that people could ‘‘worship


a segregated God in a segregated church if they please. Men have diedon a thousand fields of battle for that precious right.’’ The protest atFirst Baptist, then, had been a threat to the religious liberty of thechurch’s members. Jones responded with a final defense of his ownspiritual authenticity. Receiving permission to speak, the ministerturned his back on the judge and, as if preaching a sermon, began toaddress the assembled spectators. A courtroom official turned himtoward Pye, whereupon the defendant described his religious convic-tions and insisted that ‘‘everything I’ve preached for 32 years is sin-cere.’’ The judge was unmoved and set bond at the exorbitant sum of$20,000. When the defense attorneys balked, Pye sneered: ‘‘He hasunlimited money behind him, doesn’t he?’’ Jones went off to jail.52

At First Baptist, the work of the open-seating committeeground on slowly through the fall. McClain supported open seatingprivately but said little from the pulpit. Finally, on December 5, bal-lots were mailed to each member to vote on a new, nondiscriminatorypolicy. The ballot asked: ‘‘After prayerful communion with God,under the divine leadership of the Holy Spirit, and without persua-sion from any person, are you in favor of seating in the main sanctu-ary all who come to attend our services, irrespective of race, color, orcreed?’’ In positing that members had adopted their racial attitudes‘‘without persuasion from any person,’’ the proposition on the ballotsshowed the felt need to separate a sphere of religious authenticityfrom the political goals of the civil rights movement.53

The congregation heard the results of the vote on Sunday,December 22. Ironically, the kneel-in crisis had been bookended bythe high points of the Christian calendar. Amos Brown had made hisfirst forays into the First Baptist sanctuary during the Easter season;now, just before Christmas, the church voted decisively in favor ofopen seating. In his Constitution column the next day, McClain statedthat Jesus ‘‘would stand and forthrightly condemn every vestige ofhate, prejudice, stinginess and racism.’’ Mayor Ivan Allen took theresults as a shining example for the rest of the city, stating that ‘‘thisdecision by this great church should further bring to the attention ofthe hotel and restaurant people in the city the need for taking definiteaction in the area of public accommodations.’’54

McClain’s Sunday sermon was more tepid. He still insistedthat the visitors ‘‘did not come to worship,’’ though he also concededthat ‘‘if our doors had been open there would have been no pickets.’’He tried to appeal to segregationists by assuring his flock that sittingin a pew with someone ‘‘does not mean you have to marry them.’’ Thecomplexion of the congregation, he predicted, ‘‘next year will lookabout the same as it does now.’’ Despite his disavowal of racism in


the abstract, he suggested that desegregation would bring no realchanges to the religious practices of First Baptist Church.55

As these defensive remarks indicated, the vote to integratethe sanctuary did not please everyone. Hundreds left the church,amounting to a small percentage of First Baptist’s enormous member-ship but still a substantial number. At the same time, some observersthought that voting on conditions of fellowship was not exactly whatJesus would do. When the Constitution printed an editorial praisingthe vote as exemplifying ‘‘the spirit of the Christmas season,’’ anangry reader fired back: ‘‘It’s downright shameful when a group ofChristians feel it necessary to decide by ballot whether or not to admitcertain other Christians to their house of worship.’’ Baptists pridedthemselves on their democratic governance, but critics felt that racialequality before God was a divine imperative that ought to supersedethe vagaries of majoritarian rule.56

Through it all, Ashton Jones remained in Fulton County jail,where guards treated him as a common criminal and fellow prisonersattacked him. He tried unsuccessfully to obtain a transfer to the Afri-can American section of the segregated facility, where he imaginedthat he would receive better treatment. He also went on a hungerstrike, forcing jailers to feed him intravenously. In a letter to Georgiagovernor Carl Sanders, Jones pleaded for his release but also tookcomfort that his suffering was ‘‘for Christ’s sake.’’57

During the fall, as the church committee deliberated the issueof open seating and Jones languished in jail, a broad campaign hadcoalesced to free him. The Committee on Appeal for Human Rightspublicized his plight in Atlanta venues, while SNCC provided regularupdates in its newsletter. Supporters contributed to an ‘‘Ashton JonesDefense Fund’’ under the direction of Harry Steinmetz, a white psy-chology professor at Morehouse. The liberal Protestant Christian Cen-tury printed an investigative story that compared Jones to the prophetAmos, Jesus, the apostle Paul, and Martin Luther, leading McClain topen a lengthy rebuttal. Across the ocean, Bertrand Russell wrote to theLondon Times that Jones’s sentence was ‘‘a monstrous injustice whichought to be universally condemned.’’ Even McClain, increasinglyembarrassed by the Jones publicity, eventually asked Pye to let himgo free.58

After the vote to integrate, Jones’s luck finally turned around.The Georgia Supreme Court reduced the bond amount to $5,000. InMarch 1964, a wealthy white Atlanta resident, unconnected with theprotests but ashamed of all the bad press, put up the funds to spring theminister from jail. A few weeks later, Jones attended First Baptist withtwo African American women, including Barbara Smith, who had been


part of the initial visit leading to his arrest. The group sat in the mainsanctuary without incident. After a complicated series of appeals andanother short stint in prison, the State of Georgia reduced his sentenceto time served on May 25, 1965, leaving Ashton Jones free at last.59

Desegregation and Integration

Church visits continued to disrupt religious practice throughthe 1960s and beyond. Down the road from Atlanta in Macon, Geor-gia, a Ghanaian Southern Baptist convert named Sam Jerri Onisparked a firestorm when he sought to worship at Tatnall SquareBaptist Church in 1966. The church’s rebuff exploded into an inter-national scandal, bringing the condemnation of overseas missionariesand Christians from developing countries and making ‘‘TatnallSquare’’ a bitter symbol for Southern Baptists of the persistence ofracial strife.60

The last civil rights kneel-in to gain national attentionoccurred a few days before the 1976 presidential election, when blackminister Clennon King was turned away from Jimmy Carter’s homechurch in southern Georgia. The old rule forbidding African Amer-icans in Plains Baptist Church was still in place, though apparentlyonly selectively enforced. Carter won the election, but King’s visit wasan embarrassment to him and a source of sudden controversy for thechurch, which agreed a few weeks later to rescind the racial ban.Clennon King was not alone in his protests. For at least one demon-stration on the church steps, he was joined by the indefatigable Ash-ton Jones.61

In the face of the kneel-ins and the broader trends that theyexemplified, segregationist religion went down to defeat. In his ser-mon after the vote on open seating, McClain had challenged foes ofthe new policy to think twice before leaving the church. ‘‘Where,’’ heasked, ‘‘would you go?’’ No congregation would be able to maintaina strict whites-only policy amid the cresting civil rights movement.The kneel-ins helped bring an end, albeit a protracted one, to theexplicit racism that had permeated white southern Christianity. In1968, Southern Baptist Convention president W. A. Criswell preachedan antisegregation sermon entitled ‘‘The Church of the Open Door.’’The acquiescence of Criswell, long an ardent foe of civil rights, signaleda major shift in the racial ideology of conservative evangelicals. Slowly,Southern Baptists accepted racial equality. In 1995, the Southern BaptistConvention passed a resolution apologizing for the denomination’ssupport of slavery and racism, and, in 2012, the SBC elected its firstAfrican American president.62 Today, in a new suburban location near


Atlanta’s perimeter highway, First Baptist Church has a substantialAfrican American membership, an interracial choir, and even someblack ushers.

Still, the Atlanta kneel-ins represented a partial victory, atbest. In the end, most First Baptist members were interested in defus-ing a crisis, not in facilitating racial harmony. The formal desegrega-tion of the church allowed de facto segregation to continue for a longtime. ‘‘After we passed the resolution,’’ Rod Nave remembered, ‘‘itjust died, the whole thing just died.’’ A few black members joined FirstBaptist during the rest of the 1960s, but the church remained virtuallyall white. It took no role in addressing the issues raised by the civilrights movement. In the years when racial change was most hotlycontested, a pattern of desegregation without integration prevailed.63

Needless to say, the kneel-ins do not resolve the disputedquestion of whether the civil rights movement succeeded or failed.Rather, these protests demonstrate one of the underappreciated waysin which success and failure were understood, that is, in terms ofreligious practice. Black and white Christians saw not only theolog-ical tenets but also the configuration of sacred spaces and the per-formance of pious sensibilities as key shapers of the nation’s racialorder. Those things were worth fighting over. What one segregation-ist wrote to the Atlanta Constitution about the kneel-in participantssurely applies more broadly, that is, they were ‘‘in no sense justcasually going to church.’’64

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 McAlisteroffered sources and suggestions, while Joseph Malherek provided valu-able research assistance. Early versions of this article were presented ata Peace History Society conference and a meeting of Young Scholars inAmerican Religion; I am grateful to participants in those venues for theirthoughtful criticism.

1. The term ‘‘kneel-in’’ was also used, at times, to refer not toa 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. Stephen Haynes, The Last Segregated Hour: The Memphis Kneel-Ins and the Campaign for Southern Church Desegregation (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 2012); Jason Sokol, There Goes My Everything: WhiteSoutherners in the Age of Civil Rights, 1945–1975 (New York: Knopf,


2006), 81–82; W. J. Cunningham, Agony at Galloway: One Church’s Strugglewith Social Change (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1980);Charles Marsh, God’s Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997); Susan FriendHarding, The Book of Jerry Falwell: Fundamentalist Language and Politics(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000), 27.

3. Martin Luther King, Jr., ‘‘The Un-Christian Christian,’’ Ebony,August 1965, 77.

4. The most extensive previous account of the First Baptist kneel-ins is Kevin Kruse, ‘‘White Flight: Resistance to Desegregation ofNeighborhoods, Schools and Businesses in Atlanta, 1946–1966’’ (Ph.D.diss., Cornell University, 2000), 414–21. More recently, First Baptist hasbeen known for the prominence of its minister, Charles Stanley, in con-servative evangelical politics. Stanley’s election as president of theSouthern Baptist Convention in 1984 was part of a broader campaignby fundamentalists to move the denomination rightward, both theolog-ically and politically.

5. Recent work on religion in the civil rights era includes: FayBotham, Almighty God Created the Races: Christianity, Interracial Marriage,and American Law (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009);David L. Chappell, A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of JimCrow (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); JosephCrespino, In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the ConservativeCounterrevolution (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007);Jane Dailey, ‘‘Sex, Segregation, and the Sacred after Brown,’’ Journal ofAmerican History 91, no. 1 (June 2004), http://www.jstor.org; PaulHarvey, Freedom’s Coming: Religious Culture and the Shaping of the Southfrom the Civil War through the Civil Rights Era (Chapel Hill: University ofNorth Carolina Press, 2005); Andrew Manis, Southern Civil Religions inConflict: Civil Rights and the Culture Wars (Macon, Ga.: Mercer UniversityPress, 2002); and Marsh, God’s Long Summer.

6. Stephen Haynes finds a similar dynamic in the Memphiskneel-in campaign: see Haynes, Last Segregated Hour. I focus more specif-ically than does Haynes on power struggles in the spaces in and aroundthe church. On the general concept of authenticity in the 1960s, see DougRossinow, The Politics of Authenticity: Liberalism, Christianity, and the NewLeft in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998). On whiteimages of black Christians, see Curtis J. Evans, The Burden of Black Religion(New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); and Linda Williams, Playingthe Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O. J. Simpson(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001).


7. On race and evangelicals, see Michael O. Emerson andChristian Smith, Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem ofRace in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).

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).

9. ‘‘‘Faith Comes by Hearing’ . . . Ten of the Greatest AmericanPreachers,’’ Newsweek, March 28, 1955, 56–57; Roy McClain, If with AllYour Heart (Westwood, N.J.: Fleming H. Revell, 1961), 142, 35; ‘‘PastorsRebuked and Challenged,’’ Christian Index, June 14, 1962, 4.

10. McClain, If with All Your Heart, 42. On Southern Baptist viewsof race, see Mark Newman, Getting Right with God: Southern Baptists andDesegregation, 1945–1995 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2001);and Alan Scot Willis, All According to God’s Plan: Southern Baptist Missionsand Race, 1945–1970 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2005).

11. Benjamin Mays, Born to Rebel: An Autobiography (1971; repr.,Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987), 244–47.

12. Newman, Getting Right with God, 154.

13. Kevin Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of ModernConservatism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005), 34. Thisbook is based on Kruse’s dissertation, cited in note 4. When the title isitalicized, I am referencing the book; when the title is in quotation marks,the dissertation is being cited.

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

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

16. Howard Thurman, Footprints of a Dream: The Story of theChurch for the Fellowship of All Peoples (New York: Harper and Bros.,


1959), 32, 59; Howard Thurman, ‘‘Foreword,’’ in The First Footprints: TheDawn of the Idea of the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples: Letters betweenAlfred Fisk and Howard Thurman, 1943–1944 (San Francisco: Lawton andAlfred Kennedy, 1975).

17. My account of the 1960 kneel-ins is based on Jim Bentley,‘‘Negro Students Attend 6 White Churches Here,’’ Atlanta Constitution,August 8, 1960; and ‘‘Negro Leader Hails Churches for Courtesy duringVisits,’’ Atlanta Journal, August 8, 1960.

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

19. ‘‘Kneel-Ins,’’ Student Voice 1, no. 2 (August 1960), in The StudentVoice, 1960–1965, ed. Clayborne Carson (Westport, Conn.: Meckler, 1990),7; Benjamin Mays, ‘‘The Kneel-Ins,’’ My View, Pittsburgh Courier,September 10, 1960, 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; Sokol, There Goes MyEverything, 81–82.

22. Kruse, White Flight, 180–204.

23. My account of the April 21 events is based on Hal Gulliver, ‘‘3Negroes Taken Out Bodily after Pushing into Church,’’ AtlantaConstitution, April 23, 1963; Sally Rugaber, ‘‘3 Negroes Ejected at FirstBaptist,’’ Atlanta Journal, April 23, 1963; and Rod Nave, Report toChurch Study and Reference Committee, September 22, 1963, copy inauthor’s possession.

24. On the politics of respectability, see Evelyn BrooksHigginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the BlackBaptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993),185–229.

25. Mrs. H. C. Hayslip, letter to the editor, Atlanta Constitution,May 13, 1963; W. C. Woodall, letter to the editor, Atlanta Constitution, May11, 1963; Jim Bentley, ‘‘First Baptist Votes to Let Negroes Sit in Sanctuary,’’Atlanta Constitution, December 23, 1963; William C. Cotter, ‘‘Race BarsDropped at First Baptist,’’ Atlanta Journal, December 23, 1963.

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


27. Horace Julian Bond, letter to the editor, Atlanta Journal, May20, 1963; Ralph McGill, ‘‘The Agony Continues,’’ Atlanta Constitution,April 30, 1963. For a parallel debate over sincerity in Memphis, seeHaynes, Last Segregated Hour, 162–63.

28. Rugaber, ‘‘Three Negroes Ejected’’; Nave, Report. On stereo-types of black religiosity, see Evans, Burden of Black Religion.

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

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

31. On colorblind racism, see Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism with-out Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality inAmerica, 3d ed. (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009).

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

33. Ralph McGill, ‘‘Christianity on Trial,’’ Atlanta Constitution,August 20, 1960; 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 Melani McAlister, ‘‘What Is Your HeartFor? 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 Plan.

34. Thurman, Footprints, 22–24; Thurman, ‘‘Foreword’’; Mays,Seeking To Be Christian, 43–44, 77.

35. Nave, Report; Nave/Woolf interview.

36. Robert Cohen, ‘‘‘Two, Four, Six, Eight, We Don’t Want toIntegrate’: White Student Attitudes toward the University of Georgia’s


http://muse.jhu.edu

Desegregation,’’ Georgia Historical Quarterly 80, no. 3 (Fall 1996): 616–45;Sokol, There Goes My Everything, 148–63; Gregg L. Michel, Struggle fora Better South: The Southern Student Organizing Committee, 1964–1969(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); Newman, Getting Right withGod, 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 Studentson 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 ReactionGreets Worshippers at First Baptist,’’ Atlanta Daily World, June 25, 1963;and Kruse, ‘‘White Flight,’’ 418. For analogous Catholic defenses of reli-gious space, see John McGreevy, Parish Boundaries: The Catholic Encounterwith Race in the Twentieth-Century Urban North (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1996).

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

45. My account, in this and subsequent paragraphs, is based onthe following sources: ‘‘Minister Held as 2 Sit-Ins Fail at First BaptistChurch,’’ Atlanta Constitution, July 1, 1963; Fred Powledge, ‘‘WhitePastor Arrested at Baptist Church,’’ Atlanta Journal, July 1, 1963; JackStrong, ‘‘Dragged by Usher, Says Sit-In Pastor,’’ Atlanta Constitution,August 28, 1963; Jack Strong, ‘‘Sit-In Pastor Fined $1,000, Is GivenMaximum 18 Months,’’ Atlanta Constitution, August 29, 1963; JohnPennington, ‘‘Disturbance at Church Stirs Contradictory Stories atTrial,’’ Atlanta Journal, August 28, 1963; John Pennington, ‘‘Maximun [sic]Penalty Meted Minister,’’ Atlanta Journal, August 29, 1963; Ashton BryanJones, 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; quotefrom 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; Roy O. McClain,‘‘Another View of Justice,’’ Christian Century, February 26, 1964, 270–72.

48. ‘‘McClain Plans Panel on Problems,’’ Atlanta Constitution, July22, 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, seeCrespino, In Search of Another Country; Kruse, White Flight; and MatthewLassiter, Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton,N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2006).

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

51. John Gillies, ‘‘Justice, Southern Style,’’ Christian Century,January 22, 1964, 112–14.

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

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

54. Bentley, ‘‘First Baptist Votes’’; Cotter, ‘‘Race Bars Dropped’’;McClain quote found at Roy O. McClain, ‘‘Some Didn’t Want the ‘GoodNews,’’’ 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 moreamenable to open seating than were church leaders. Haynes, LastSegregated 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 inGood Will by First Baptist,’’ Atlanta Constitution, December 24, 1963; JohnBell, letter to the editor, Atlanta Constitution, January 3, 1964.

57. Ashton B. Jones to Howard Moore, April 6, 1965, box 4, HarrySteinmetz Papers, Special Collections and University Archives, San DiegoState 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 (sourceof quote).

58. Gillies, ‘‘Justice, Southern Style’’; Bertrand Russell, letter tothe editor, Times (London), November 1, 1963, in Yours Faithfully, BertrandRussell, ed. Ray Perkins, Jr. (Chicago: Open Court, 2002), 316. Materialconcerning the fund is in box 4, Steinmetz Papers, SDSU.

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

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

61. Wayne King, ‘‘Carter’s Church Upholds Its Policy byRefusing to Admit Four Blacks,’’ New York Times, November 1, 1976,Proquest Historical Newspapers; Wayne King, ‘‘Plains Church AgainBars 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, ‘‘‘NeverHad 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 moregenerally, see Crespino, In Search of Another Country; Kruse, White Flight;and Lassiter, Silent Majority.

64. Woodall, letter to the editor.

A B S T R A C T Civil rights protests at white churches, dubbed ‘‘kneel-ins,’’laid bare the racial logic that structured Christianity in the AmericanSouth. Scholars have investigated segregationist religion, but such stud-ies tend to focus on biblical interpretation rather than religious practice.A series of kneel-ins at Atlanta’s First Baptist Church, the largest SouthernBaptist church in the Southeast, shows how religious activities and reli-gious spaces became sites of intense racial conflict. Beginning in 1960, thenmore forcefully in 1963, African American students attempted to integrateFirst Baptist’s sanctuary. When they were alternately barred from enter-ing, shown to a basement auditorium, or carried out bodily, their effortssparked a wide-ranging debate over racial politics and spiritual


authenticity, a debate carried on both inside and outside the church. Seg-regationists tended to avoid a theological defense of Jim Crow, attackinginstead the sincerity and comportment of their unwanted visitors. Yetwhile many church leaders were opposed to open seating, a vibrant stu-dent contingent favored it. Meanwhile, mass media—local, national, andinternational—shaped interpretations of the crisis and possibilities forresolving it. Roy McClain, the congregation’s popular minister, attemptedto navigate a middle course but faced criticism from all sides. The conflictcame to a head when Ashton Jones, a white minister, was arrested, tried,and imprisoned for protesting outside the church. In the wake of the con-troversy, the members of First Baptist voted to end segregation in thesanctuary. This action brought formal desegregation—but little meaning-ful integration—to the congregation.

Keywords: Civil Rights Movement, Religion, Atlanta


just a bunch of agitators’’: kneel-ins and the desegregation of southern churches ·...

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