On May 18, 1946, an anxious and unsettled crowd of about 250 white evangelicals gathered at Knoxville, Tennessee’s Bible Baptist Tabernacle to protest the cancellation of the popular Radio Bible Hour by the local radio station. Bowing to pressure from advertisers, the National Association of Broadcasters, and the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in America (FCC), many radio stations had adopted a code that forbade selling airtime to commercial religious broadcasts, which could at times be infl ammatory and controversial, in favor of free sustaining airtime donated to mainline ministerial associations. Contests over these decisions were both heated and widespread in the World War II-era United States.1 What makes the meet-ing in Knoxville particularly interestmeet-ing were the ways that speakers used the episode to stir racial advancement, organized labor, modernist religion, and communism into a dangerous brew. Rev. A. A. Haggard from nearby Maryville charged that communists had “defi nite plans to take over America this year” using “organized labor and Negroes” and that “all fundamentalist preachers are fi rst on the communist death list.” Haggard was followed by Rev. Clarence Garrett, who praised the Ku Klux Klan for keeping order after blacks had been “stirred up by communists preaching social equality.” To Garrett, the Klan was the one group that could withstand communism, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), racial equality, and the FCC.
Otherwise, religious freedom was at risk.2
The ease with which Haggard and Garrett linked the progress of unions, communism, and liberal Protestantism with fears of racial advancement tells us a great deal about the transforming impact of World War II. The
mood of the South had changed. During the Depression, many working-class whites had embraced Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, joined labor organizations, and prodded their churches to support collective bargaining and federal programs for social welfare. In the mines and mills of cities like Birmingham and Memphis, the cotton fi elds of the Mississippi Delta, and the coal fi elds of Appalachia, unions—many with socialist and commu-nist leaders—challenged entrenched politics and explored interracial social movements.3 A Social Gospel spirit arose that seemed eager to break with the Southern norms on race and class issues. The YWCA and the Fellowship of Southern Churchmen critiqued Jim Crow and anti-unionism, and the socially progressive Southern Conference for Human Welfare announced its arrival in Birmingham in November 1938 with a multiracial gathering that took on the character of a prophetic religious revival determined to tackle economic, political, and racial issues.4 Even normally reticent groups like the Southern Baptist Convention and the Church of God made accom-modations to labor unions and offered assistance to African Americans.5
World War II conditions gave working people, black and white, oppor-tunities to advance their goals despite organized labor’s agreement not to disrupt production to gain advantages. Greater federal government inter-vention and tight labor markets improved job prospects and collective bar-gaining for some four million new members, including 750,000 blacks.6 As the war drew to a close, the CIO, the most progressive labor federation, sensed that the time was right for an aggressive campaign to unionize the South. The American Federation of Labor (AFL) quickly followed suit. Cen-tral to labor’s ability to breach America’s most anti-union citadel was a strat-egy that prevented Southern employers from dividing workers by race. The CIO saw signs that it had an ally in Southern churches. Jack McMichael of the Methodist Church praised unions for a “new social climate in the South” that rejected the “unhuman and unbrotherly” regime of Jim Crow, and a group of Southern Baptists began a new journal, Christian Frontiers, which recognized unions and African Americans as essential to the spiritual and economic basis for democracy in the South.7
This optimism was not to last. The horrors of war and suspicions of growing federal state power alarmed many Southerners, none more than Southern evangelical ministers. Increasingly, Southern churchgoers saw the world refracted through premillennial dispensationalism. The CIO, in this perspective, became a harbinger of the approaching endtimes for its asso-ciation with the political left, an overreaching government, and modern-ist religion. Most abhorrent to Southerners, however, was the fact that the CIO also declared against lynching, voting restrictions, and job discrimina-tion. In the minds of many white evangelicals, the CIO’s pronouncements
on racial justice were proof that they should avoid unions and follow the Bible’s sanction to “not be unequally yoked together with unbelievers”
(2 Corinthians 6:14).8
The problem with the advice propounded by white anti-union evangeli-cals was that black workers were not unbelievers. Indeed, African American churches in the South shared the same evangelical culture as their white counterparts, but interpreted their beliefs to bolster a Social Gospel com-mitment to economic and social justice.9 In the years following World War II, as African Americans made new demands on the political and economic institutions that had denied them full citizenship, the contradictions of white evangelicalism were on full display. Rather than embrace the struggle of black Christians for equality, white evangelicals disparaged black advancement along with unions and communism as threats to their own security. This chapter examines this important episode in resurgent white evangelicalism and the consequences of its role in undermining the possibility for remaking the South and the nation.
Days of Hope
The Great Depression opened a window of opportunity for the South’s white and black working-class Christians to address social and economic injus-tices. The poverty of landlessness and low wages brought both them closer to each other in the material conditions of their lives and provided a rationale for cooperation. In fact, among the poor, there emerged a folk Christianity that often crossed racial boundaries. As noted by religious historian John Hayes, this “hard, hard religion” used an array of cultural material—song, story, lore, and proverb—to explore such phenomena as “the value of a single small life, alienation and genuine identity, glimpsing the sacred in a disenchanted world, and fi ghting chaos and a nihilistic spiral of violence.”10 Popular religious beliefs about God’s grace, salvation, and even the worldly presence of Satan bridged a racial divide in the South. While often dismissed as fatalistic or otherworldly, for poor blacks and whites their faith could reas-sure, provide hope, ease resentments, and calm fears.11
For some, religious belief was more than a coping mechanism. The Depression sparked the upswing of a prophetic Social Gospel movement in the South that sought to contest the power of employers, government offi cials, and landowners to sustain the low-wage economy of the region.
One source of this fl owering of social Christianity emerged from a group of young churchpeople who gathered at Monteagle, Tennessee, in 1934 to explore how they might put “the resources of their faith to work for God and man” at this crucial time. Out of that meeting came the Conference of
Younger Churchmen of the South, soon to take the name the Fellowship of Southern Churchmen. Led by an imaginative, interracial group of clergy and lay activists, the Fellowship carried a religious message into the fi ght for social justice. Members showed up in campaigns to organize the unem-ployed in Louisiana and tenant farmers and agricultural laborers in Mis-souri and Arkansas; in cooperative and interracial agricultural communities in Mississippi; and in labor struggles in the coal fi elds of Kentucky and ore mines of Alabama.12
An even more remarkable group of Christian-infused activists emerged from Alva W. Taylor’s circle of students at the Vanderbilt School of Reli-gion. Including such prominent leftists as Howard Kester, Don West, Ward Rodgers, and Claude Williams, this group transformed Taylor’s Social Gospel philosophy into a prophetic radicalism that they carried into labor contests throughout the South over the ensuing decades. These men, and frequently their wives and sometimes their children, were par-ticipants in the Southern Tenant Farmers Union; the United Cannery, Agricultural, Packing, and Allied Workers; the Food, Tobacco, and Allied Workers; the United Mine Workers; the Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers;
and the Socialist and Communist parties.13 They brought with them an uncompromising commitment to both the labor movement and black equality.
In the depths of the Depression, the message of social Christianity reso-nated among workers in unlikely places. In Birmingham, Alabama, coal and ore miners, who frequently sang in gospel quartets, broke the power-ful grip of the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company and the American Cast Iron Pipe Company and built strong unions that won collective bargain-ing agreements. CIO activists in Memphis, Tennessee, drawbargain-ing upon the
“intensely religious culture of the African-American community,” defi ed the brutal strong-arm thugs of the Edward H. Crump political machine to orga-nize workers in the factories and warehouses of the Bluff City. Black gospel songs became union anthems at the hands of talented troubadours.14 CIO unions in coal and steel had numerous contracts; in the tobacco and lum-ber industries organizers had established beachheads in North Carolina and Alabama; garment worker unions were scattered through Virginia, Tennes-see, and Louisiana; the United Rubber Workers made Gadsden, Alabama a union town; and auto and packinghouse unions were in Texas, Georgia, and Alabama.15 While hardly secure, organized labor could view the New Deal years as a time of hope for a new day.
In many cases, workers adhered to religious faith as a guiding principle in their commitment to unions. Debbie Spicer, daughter and wife of Kentucky coal miners, believed that the Lord ensured the success of the United Mine
Workers (UMW). Even when anti-union thugs dynamited the church of one preacher and union man, it was impossible to harm him, according to Spicer:
“You can’t destroy a child of God as long as the Lord’s got something for him to do,” she testifi ed.16 Frank Bonds believed that the miners of Docena, Ala-bama, “had a very strong faith” that contributed to the sense of community that brought the union to local mines.17 Eula McGill, whose “very religious”
father helped build the labor movement in Gadsden, Alabama, recalled that his faith taught that “if a person lives in this world without trying to make it a better place to live in, [then] he’s not living, he’s just taking up space.”18 Henry Wade, who sang in the choir at his Baptist church in Dalton, Georgia, became a lifelong Democrat and union supporter because of the New Deal’s intervention in the economy on behalf of workers. He recalled the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act as the “greatest day in my life.”19
Black workers, however, faced barriers to their participation in the campaign to transform the South. Much New Deal legislation specifi cally ignored sectors of the economy where blacks were heavily concentrated.
Employers and many unions continued to bar African Americans or rel-egate them to the dirtiest, most dangerous, and lowest-paying jobs. When the New Deal’s National Industrial Recovery Act established standards for wages, Southern industries either argued for lower rates based on racial and regional differences or used the codes as a rationale to replace black work-ers with white ones. In many areas where black workwork-ers had earlier gained a toehold in industrial employment, they cynically claimed that NRA (the initials of the National Recovery Act, the agency responsible for adminis-trating the New Deal’s industrial codes) stood for “Negro Removal Act.”20
Nevertheless, in places where African Americans made up such a sig-nifi cant portion of the workforce that unions could not ignore them, black workers brought their strong religious beliefs to union membership. To Morris Benson, a black steelworker in Birmingham, the union was “like a church,” it created unity, strength, and “togetherness.”21 CIO unions that pursued interracial organizing recognized black Christianity as an asset and allowed African Americans to play a major role in building the union. The UMW, for instance, recruited Earl Brown to be an organizer because the union realized he was “a religious person” who knew “how to treat peo-ple.”22 CIO organizer Lucy Mason wrote glowingly of black workers bring-ing their Christianity into the union hall when given the chance. She had hopes that this “natural expression of religion” would be the means “by which prejudice and misunderstanding are replaced by appreciation and good-will.”23
Churches responded to the social messages that their congregants took from their religious beliefs. In white churches, working people at times
received encouragement from ministers who urged their congregations to link religious belief to expectations of a more just society. Even the normally conservative Southern Baptist Convention felt obliged to support social action. One rural Alabama Baptist minister resented that “the poor or land-less man, wage earners and sharecroppers . . . are nothing but slaves for the big land holders.”24 Rev. Charles R. Bell of Anniston, Alabama, voted for the Socialist Party in the 1930s and supported strikers in the local mills. Revs.
L. L. Gwaltney, editor of the Alabama Baptist, and Acker C. Miller, head of the Texas Baptist Social Service Commission, pushed the Southern Baptist Convention in 1938 to adopt a resolution recognizing “the right of labor to organize and to engage in collective bargaining to the end that labor may have a fair and living wage.”25 Some Methodist ministers were equally enthusiastic about the New Deal’s possibilities. One Southern Methodist editor declared: “The Blue Eagle is now perched on my door. I have signed up for the war against the depression.” Another saw the Roosevelt admin-istration’s programs “as putting into practice many ideas given by Jesus in his Parables.”26
Other ministers adopted a decidedly more activist approach to poverty and inequality. South Carolina–born Witherspoon Dodge was an uncon-ventional but popular Presbyterian minister in Atlanta when the Depres-sion hit. Already an advocate for the Social Gospel in the South, Dodge believed that the “righteous and loving will of God” should be “a powerful spiritual and social dynamic.” Frustrated by the timidity of mainstream churches, he left the church in 1937 to work on the staff of the Textile Workers Organizing Committee throughout the South. Once severely beaten by anti-union thugs, Dodge nevertheless began a long career help-ing build the labor movement and speakhelp-ing out for black civil rights.27 Likewise, Methodist minister Charles C. Webber left his work with the church to become an organizer for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers in Richmond, Virginia, eventually serving as president of the Virginia CIO.28
Black churches, recalling the long history of exclusion by AFL unions, were more skeptical about the New Deal and the CIO’s promise. The National Baptist Union Review, the organ of the smaller of the two major Baptist churches, was an inveterate foe of the New Deal and unions. The National Baptist Convention, Inc. (NBC), the largest African American church, only slowly became more favorable. In 1934, Rev. L. K. Williams, president of the NBC, said of the NRA: “None of us who have taken the time to study the results as affecting our race, can fail to see that it has been detrimental to us as a group.” He criticized the New Deal program for trying to pay black workers lower wages and for the NRA’s tendency to replace black with white workers.29 On unions, Williams was equally skeptical at fi rst, but the CIO
gradually won his guarded support; in 1937, he noted that while labor agita-tion “has been a costly experiment,” black workers “should join any or all Unions that will grant [them] justice and equal rights.” However, he also asserted that blacks should be prepared to form their own unions and that the church should support the right to strike but also the right to cross picket lines when unions acted to exclude workers from industrial jobs.30
Church women also were of mixed minds. One of the more interest-ing disagreements over the hope for change in the South occurred at the National Baptist Women’s Convention in 1936. The president, Mrs. S. W.
Layten, asserted that Republican leadership had brought the nation to its
“highest peak in civilization.” To her, the New Deal meant “reckless spend-ing, heavy taxation, millions unemployed and demoralized by living on the dole.” Vice-President Nannie Burroughs, after a tour of the region, dis-agreed: “What we saw, heard and felt on this swing into the deep South assured us that a new day is dawning in Dixie.” But even Burroughs still withheld full support. “The subtle scheme of giving white people jobs and giving Negroes relief is simply making bad matters worse,” she argued.31
Despite such reservations, black churches increasingly found hope in the CIO’s new attitude toward African Americans. This hope grew from seeds planted by some of the leading black Baptists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, men and women, like Burroughs, who “espoused a social gospel in the broad sense of the category,” according to religious historian Gary Dorrien.32 In Southern communities, black ministers found it more dangerous to express such thoughts openly. In Birmingham, for instance, where black workers built a fairly strong union culture, few remember getting help from ministers. In the iron ore mines of Muscoda, Alabama, the local minister refused to take sides when the union arrived.
Instead, he felt that “the devil” was in the camp due to the rising labor tensions.33 But on occasion, particularly among those part-time ministers who also worked in the mines and mills, there was more support. Samuel Andrews, a preacher-miner in Ensley, Alabama, was a strong union man who hosted meetings in his church.34 Organizer Lucy Mason witnessed the growing confi dence that African American churchgoers had in the CIO. In April 1941, she visited meetings of predominately black unions around the Memphis area. She noted that the meetings opened with a spiritual or hymn, prayer, “quotations from the Bible, [and] references to God and Jesus.” Union representatives used “religious metaphors in appealing to people” who were devoted and had “faith in CIO.”35
Attempts to link Christianity with labor and the New Deal gener-ated strong opposition, particularly among white fundamentalists. In fact, even among clergy with working-class congregations who at first
welcomed government assistance, there were concerns about an over-reaching federal government that would destroy the work ethic and the central place of the church in community welfare. Dallas’s J. Frank Norris and Louisiana’s Gerald L. K. Smith, two of the nation’s most prominent fundamentalists who initially embraced the New Deal, soon turned against Roosevelt and kept up a steady drumbeat of dire predic-tions about the consequences of liberalism. They were joined by such
welcomed government assistance, there were concerns about an over-reaching federal government that would destroy the work ethic and the central place of the church in community welfare. Dallas’s J. Frank Norris and Louisiana’s Gerald L. K. Smith, two of the nation’s most prominent fundamentalists who initially embraced the New Deal, soon turned against Roosevelt and kept up a steady drumbeat of dire predic-tions about the consequences of liberalism. They were joined by such