Religion and Race: Selma: Parable of the Old South

A mother’s smothering love for a child sometimes builds resentment. It often prevents any real understanding of the child, who seldom is given an opportunity for self-expression. It is a selfish kind of love that makes the well-intentioned mother feel righteous and reluctant to question her motives until too late: when the child has rebelled.

Such a mother may have told her child about God’s love, but in setting an example of Christian love in her own daily life she has chosen an easy way that required little thought and no sacrifice.

The crisis of the rebellion shatters her dream world and momentarily shakes her faith. But after a period of agonizing self-appraisal, while the rebellious child stings her heart with cutting remarks and intemperate acts, she somewhat wistfully accepts the realities of the situation and sets about to re-establish, with God’s help, the bonds of love on a more mature and satisfying basis that recognizes her child as a person in his own right.

That is the story of Selma, Alabama, a quiet, respectable city struggling to emerge from its legendary past as a charming cotton center of the Old South to recognition in a progressive, industrialized society. The story just now is in the agonizing stage.

The mother in this parable is the 16,000-member white community in Dallas County, of which Selma is the county seat. The rebellious child, which has grown to be larger than the mother, is the 40,000-member Negro community, more than a third of which is within the city limits where there are an equal number of whites.

There is no doubt that over the years the well-meaning white people of the Selma area have loved the Negroes. They have cared for them in illness and flood; they have bought clothes for them and given them food; they have willed them houses and contributed to funds to erect their churches.

But, as a student at Selma University (a Baptist junior college for Negroes) declared: “We don’t want their love; we want our rights!” Or as the Rev. M. C. Cleveland, a high school teacher who also is the pastor of a Negro Baptist church, explained: “We would rather be paid enough so that we can do those things for ourselves, so that we could have a little dignity and be regarded as human beings.”

Selma is well churched, far above average for the nation; in fact, its church-to-population ratio is high even for the Bible Belt. There are thirty-six white churches, of which fourteen are Baptist, six Presbyterian, and four Methodist. At least half a dozen of them have 1,000 or more members. There are thirty-two Negro churches in the city proper. Fourteen of them are Baptist, five are Methodist or A.M.E., and three are Presbyterian.

Yet Christian concern has not spurred most white church members to look beyond the fine new Negro high school and realize that many of its graduates cannot read or write.

There are only three Negro doctors in town, two dentists, and no lawyers.

While some white Christians have questioned the sincerity of Negro ministers who pray on the courthouse steps, they have no question about white owners of shacks in the downtown Negro area where there are community outhouses.

On the other hand, Negro churchmen who have questioned the good faith of white political leaders in handling Negro demands for registering to vote have not questioned the good faith of their own leaders who have refused to accept some concessions from the whites that the Negroes had asked for or who have distorted some events for national publicity purposes. And some Negro ministers excuse the low state of morals in the Negro community by blaming what they consider white-imposed economic conditions.

The Rev. Frank Matthew, the football-player-type minister of St. Paul Episcopal Church, where many of the white community’s political and social leaders attend, feels, as do most of the whites, that the Negroes have exploited their children by taking them out of school to participate in marches on the courthouse.

“Nobody ever says anything when just as many kids are out of school to pick cotton,” observes the Rev. F. D. Reese, a Baptist minister who also teaches school and is president of the Dallas County Voters League, which has spearheaded the drive to get Negroes registered.

“I would have protested if I had known that the Negro children were missing school to pick cotton. They need to be in school,” explained Mr. Matthew, whose ten-year tenure makes him the dean of Selma’s clergymen.

That’s how little understanding and communication there has been between the races in Selma, the city selected by Dr. Martin Luther King as the place where national attention should be drawn to Alabama’s discriminatory voter-registration laws. King was invited into the situation by local Negro leaders. He is considered an outsider by white leaders, who are quick to point out that one of his assistants, an Alabaman like many others, has a record of relations with Communist fronts.

White and Negro ministers have never had an arrangement for working together in Selma. Some attempts have been made, like the one in 1954 when the Rev. C. C. Brown, of the Negro Presbyterian church, got half a dozen ministers of each race together. Within two years, all the white ministers involved had left town. They had been harrassed with such things as twice-a-day arrests for speeding. For a brief time in 1957, white and Negro Baptists had a biracial committee directing a community center for Negroes; the center folded when it became known that the woman in whose home it was operated was a member of the NAACP. The Rev. John Newton, of First Presbyterian Church, has recently tried to get the Negro and white ministers together to talk.

“They’ve got voting rights and others coming to them, and they’re going to get them,” another minister said of the Negroes. “Our cafes and hotels now are accepting them. We’re complying with the law. We’re going to have to integrate the schools. It will be accepted if done gradually.” Alabama Negroes, he feels, are not ready to shoulder the responsibility that goes with all the freedoms they are seeking.

Little has been done by the white churches, though, to prepare the Negroes. The most extensive work by white churchmen among the Negroes of Selma is being carried on by the Edmund Fathers and Sisters of St. Joseph, who operate a twenty-seven-year-old, eight-grade Catholic school, a seventy-bed hospital, and a forty-bed nursing home. The fathers ran a full-page ad in the local newspaper calling for recognition of the dignity of all men.

But the three priests and eleven nuns are considered “outsiders” by Selmans because they are Northerners. And when a group of Negroes recently attempted to worship in the white Catholic church, they were taken outside and beaten.

A year and a half ago First Presbyterian Church opened its doors to Negroes. But resentment was so intense after four Negro girls were seated in the church balcony that the session—over the objections of Mr. Newton—reversed the policy.

Some of the younger Negro leaders are demanding that churches step up their involvement in the civil rights struggle. They also feel they need “outside help” to rouse Selma’s older Negroes to take part. The older Negro leaders tend to be satisfied with the progress of recent years. They look upon Selma’s public safety director, Wilson Baker, as a man who has saved them from bloodshed. Baker, a former Lutheran ministerial student who now is an active Baptist layman, enforces the law impartially, they feel, and has maintained order despite disruptive attempts by both Negro and white extremists.

“Outside help” is a special sore spot for some whites. The minister of a large Methodist church, who like many other people in Selma today does not want to be quoted on anything because he feels the press has twisted what has already been said, reported this incident: A Negro representative of the National Council of Churches was stopped by a segregationist usher at the Methodist church. The visitor then went to talk with the pastor, who at least three times invited the Negro to come into the worship service with him. The visitor declined, went back north, and declared in print that he had been refused entrance to the church.

Some white leaders—like Roswell Falken-berry, editor of the Selma Times-Journal and an active Episcopal layman, and Mr. Newton—think that the outside “agitators” probably were necessary to stir the conscience of Selma’s white citizens. But many whites (including reform mayor Joseph Smitherman, an active Baptist layman) feel that the outsiders now must get out and the demonstrations cease before the two races can get together to settle their problems in accord with Christian principles, which hold the only answer.

ADON TAFT

Greenwich Time

The place was Greenwich, and it was time for a change. The Episcopal Church’s Executive Council was in Connecticut, not England, and the meantime was not soon enough. Elements of a full-blown civil rights controversy within the church had been present since last December when the 42-member council—the church’s governing body between sessions of the triennial General Convention—passed a resolution which declared that no Episcopal clergyman could engage in race work supported by the denomination’s Church and Race fund without the approval of the bishop of the diocese or missionary district where the work was to be performed.

Introduced by some Southern members of the Executive Council, the requirement was interpreted as an attack on the National Council of Churches’ civil rights programs, particularly in Mississippi. The Episcopal Church and Race fund, a special $100,000 congregational appeal which was renewed for a second year, has given strong support to the NCC’s Commission on Religion and Race—a unit that has come under fire from some Southern churches and communities.

Since the December meeting, protests had come in from a number of Episcopal organizations, and the new Presiding Bishop, the Right Rev. John E. Hines, called for a special order of business to reconsider or clarify the resolution. Last month in Greenwich the council lost little time in rescinding the previous action and reaffirming support for the NCC programs. Grants for the latter were voted which totaled $65,000. The council included a proviso that whenever possible diocesan officials “be consulted with and advised” when Episcopal clergymen or lay members participate in ecumenical or interdenominational programs in their dioceses or missionary districts.

The result was regarded as a victory for Bishop Hines as well as other civil rights workers.

In other action, the council without discussion readily adopted a statement generally supporting President Johnson’s pending aid-to-education bill, which includes assistance to non-public school students. The council said it welcomes the “inclusion of all non-profit schools in proposals for assistance in the purchase of books for school libraries and for student use.” The statement also supported the proposal that “supplementary educational services, including, but not limited to, special public school courses in science, foreign languages, and other fields, be made available to students who also attend church-related or other independent schools.”

FRANK FARRELL

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