When the Church Bell Rang Racist: The Methodist Church and the Civil Rights Movement in Alabama (review)

During the Civil Rights Movement, many white churches in the South issued closed-door policies that prevented black people from entering their sanctuaries. Many white ministers who attempted to admit African Americans lost their churches. This chapter relates crisis incidents in three Alabama churches, First Presbyterian, Tuscaloosa, First Presbyterian, Tuskegee, and First Baptist, Birmingham; two Baptist churches in Georgia, Tattnell Square in Macon, and Plains Baptist in Plains, three churches in Jackson, Mississippi, Galloway Memorial Methodist, First Christian, and Capitol Street Church of Christ The chapter also includes an account of the sustained campaign in Jackson by black students from Tougaloo University who suffered pain and rejection. William Cunningham, one of the ministers forced to leave Galloway Memorial Methodist Church, commented, “There was agony for the churches outside and agony within…. The church could not change the culture; but the culture changed and carried the church along with it.”

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“If the March Cannot Be Here, Then Where?”

An Unseen Light ◽

10.5810/kentucky/9780813175515.003.0012 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Aram Goudsouzian

Keyword(s):

Civil Rights ◽

Civil Rights Movement ◽

Methodist Church ◽

Black Freedom Struggle ◽

Freedom Struggle ◽

National Office ◽

Black Freedom ◽

The City

This essay examines the role of Memphis in the Meredith March against Fear, a demonstration for black freedom that moved through Mississippi in June 1966. James Meredith began his journey from Memphis and was shot by Aubrey Norvell, who hailed from a suburb of the city. In the aftermath of the shooting, Memphis hosted important events that not only determined the character and success of the march but also influenced the course of the black freedom struggle. The titans of the civil rights movement orated from the pulpits of Memphis churches and engaged in contentious debates in the rooms of the Lorraine Motel. Even as the march continued south through Mississippi, its headquarters remained at Centenary Methodist Church in Memphis, which achieved James Lawson’s vision of an activist church driven by grassroots pressure and militant nonviolence. The city’s whites exhibited both hostility and accommodation toward black protesters, demonstrating both connections to and distinctions from the racial patterns of Mississippi. For the Memphis branch of the NAACP, the demonstration presented an opportunity to assert its historic strength, even as the march highlighted the complicated dynamics between local branches and the national office.

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Trends in Black-White Church Integration

Ethnic Studies Review ◽

10.1525/esr.2009.32.1.1 ◽

2009 ◽

Vol 32 (1) ◽

pp. 1-29 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Philip Q. Yang ◽

Starlita Smith

Keyword(s):

Black Women ◽

Civil Rights ◽

Civil Rights Movement ◽

White Americans ◽

White People ◽

Civil Rights Act ◽

Black And White ◽

Blacks And Whites ◽

Martin Luther King ◽

The Church

Historically, the separation of blacks and whites in churches was well known (Gilbreath 1995; Schaefer 2005). Even in 1968, about four years after the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. still said that “eleven o'clock on Sunday is the most segregated hour of the week” (Gilbreath 1995:1). His reference was to the entrenched practice of black and white Americans who worshiped separately in segregated congregations even though as Christians, their faith was supposed to bring them together to love each other as brothers and sisters. King's statement was not just a casual observation. One of the few places that civil rights workers failed to integrate was churches. Black ministers and their allies were at the forefront of the church integration movement, but their stiffest opposition often came from white ministers. The irony is that belonging to the same denomination could not prevent the racial separation of their congregations. In 1964, when a group of black women civil rights activists went to a white church in St. Augustine, Florida to attend a Sunday service, the women were met by a phalanx of white people with their arms linked to keep the activists out (Bryce 2004). King's classic “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” was a response to white ministers who criticized him and the civil rights movement after a major civil rights demonstration (King [2002]).

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A Philadelphia (Mississippi) Story

Between Remembrance and Repair ◽

10.5149/northcarolina/9781469656335.003.0002 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 16-35

Author(s):

Claire Whitlinger

Keyword(s):

African American ◽

Civil Rights ◽

Public Sphere ◽

Civil Rights Movement ◽

Historical Context ◽

African American Community ◽

United Methodist Church ◽

Methodist Church ◽

Martin Luther King ◽

Insight Into

Previous research on Philadelphia, Mississippi and Neshoba County focuses overwhelmingly on the 1964 murders and subsequent legal trials (in 1967 and 2005), providing relatively little insight into the area’s commemorative practices. Furthermore, such research often depicts the twenty-five years following the murders as “the long silence,” a description that is not entirely accurate. It overlooks the annual commemoration services hosted by Mt. Zion United Methodist Church, the African American church that the three civil rights movement workers visited just before their deaths. This chapter recognizes and reconstructs the commemorative activities of Philadelphia’s African American community, including Martin Luther King Jr.’s visit to Neshoba County in 1966 and other resistance to the local Ku Klux Klan. Doing so uncovers two distinct communities of memory: one characterized by Philadelphia’s dominant white public sphere, the official, government-sanctioned memory; the other representing a powerful and persistent countermemory embedded in Philadelphia’s African American community. In doing so, this chapter positions the twenty-fifth and fortieth anniversary commemorations within historical context, uncovering the mnemonic landscape that preceded the emergence of these two community-wide commemoration services.

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