J. Russell Hawkins

A detailed analysis of how Baptists and Methodists in South Carolina addressed the significant changes wrought in society by the Civil Rights Movement and the landmark SCOTUS cases of the 1950s and 1960s.

The author powerfully demonstrates how a good percentage of white Baptists and Methodists in the 1950s and early 1960s were firmly convinced that God was a fan of segregation and was against race mixing. The author explains the arguments they would make, especially the one rooted in Acts 17:26: since God established the habitations of different people, and had made delineations between white and black people, to intermix would therefore be contrary to God's purposes.

The author provides plenty of documentation for how this view was held and argued and how it powerfully motivated many white South Carolinians to personally encourage their political leaders to resist attempts at desegregation and also encouraged their congregations to make stands to the same end. He skillfully hearkens back to previous instances of pro-slavery and Jim Crow sentiments pervasive in South Carolina for the century beforehand. He showed how they resisted all forms of desegregation and integration in public schools and in church colleges.

The author then goes on to show how the pro-segregationists shifted once it was clear to them that integration was inevitable: they retreated to a domain in which they felt they could have more control, "focusing on the family," and they advocated for a more colorblind posture of "freedom" for all in order to both facilitate the maintenance of segregation academies and to make sure that Black people would obtain no greater benefit than the pretense of equality in society; there would be no redress for the inequities and discrimination of the past, for that would be "racist."

The author did well at staying in the land of his research, but one should not be fooled: such sentiments were restricted neither to South Carolina nor to the Baptists and Methodists. The author has done us a service in helping to continue to explain how we have reached the point we have in our society and the current rhetoric popular therein. Who are the heirs of the segregationist movement and posture? Who are the heirs of the Civil Rights Movement and all it embodied? The answers to these questions are made harder to deny, and harder to genuflect away from, once this book is properly considered.

Highly recommended.… (más)