Separate and Free

THE QUESTION OF integration has proven to be a considerably more complex matter than many of its advocates initially suspected when the United States Supreme Court handed down its opinion in the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka on May 17, 1954. At that time the court of Chief Justice Earl Warren held that "in the field of public education the doctrine of 'separate but equal' had no place."

The day after the decision was handed down The New York Times ran a quite revealing story. It quoted Thurgood Marshall, who was then one of the principal legal strategists in the Brown case, predicting that as a result of this decision school segregation would be stamped out in no more than five years. He also informed The Times that by 1961 all forms of segregation in the United States would be eliminated.

Marshall's comments, which were not unrepresentative of much of middle-class leadership of the period, were based on two assumptions. The first assumption was that the American system was a racially democratic polity. This view also held that the United States under its current economic arrangements was committed to guaranteeing the civil rights of all its subjects, regardless of race, creed, or color. This belief, however, was maintained in the face of considerable historical and empirical evidence to the contrary.

The second assumption was somewhat more complex. The pro-integrationist legal strategy, which Marshall helped organize, was predicated upon a very particular philosophic understanding of the nature of equality. This view assumed that integration was the most desirable form of social equality, that social rights were indivisible from civil rights or political rights, and that absolute integration was to be preferred over political and institutional autonomy.

It should be noted and stressed here that the devastation now being visited upon millions of black lives among the growing underclass in our domestic colonies is in part a logical consequence of a previous generation's philosophical and political leadership failures. And those philosophical and leadership failures persist.

The black elites who were responsible for framing the policy rationales and legal strategy for the Brown decision sacrificed philosophical consistency as well as a prudent consideration of its long-term policy outcomes. Had the leadership of the NAACP permitted a wide-ranging debate at the time, the black community might have come up with a broader range of strategic options.

In purely constitutional terms, the heart of the matter in the Brown decision revolved around the ambiguity in the language of the provisions concerning equal protection under the law in the 14th Amendment of the Constitution. But what is fascinating with the benefit of historiographic hindsight is how deeply these black elites believed in the political system that had so victimized their community since their arrival on the shores of the empire.

With the Brown decision, the battleground shifted from the judicial to the legislative, from issues of education to questions of public accommodation and voting rights. The debate moved from the secular into the sacred, from the courtroom to the pulpit. It was two years after Brown in Montgomery that the black churches assumed center stage in the movement for integration.

THE INTEGRATIONS THRUST of the civil rights movement was the product of a unique regional experience—the Southern historical experience—which underwent a massive agricultural and industrial transformation during the first half of the century. The economic modernization of the South laid, in part, the material basis for the emergence of black defiance and its white reaction. These developments in turn precipitated the electoral instability that provided the political opportunities for the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The mobilization of black church leadership to push for the passage of these bills was also part of this regional transformation. The rising expectations of an essentially middle-class leadership stratum converged with the concurrently shifting political requirements for the effective management of the region. What should be noted is the class-specific orientation of these Protestant church-based protest elites.

Black churches have never been monolithic institutions. They are complex class- and status-stratified organisms, reflecting the contradictory impulses that characterize the life of their adherents. They are a vast and far-reaching constellation of faith communities.

Among these communities are included such independent bodies as the National Baptist Convention USA, Inc., which estimates its membership at 6,820,000 people, with 30,221 churches and 29,864 ministers. The National Baptist Convention ranks as the largest black organization in the world. And the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church, formerly known as the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, has 800,000 members, 2,380 churches, and 2,400 ministers. Among the remaining eight largest black denominations are the National Primitive Baptist Convention with its 450,000 members and 388 churches, as well as the 1.3 million black Roman Catholics.

Beyond the borders of these major denominations are countless other denominations, independent movements, and parachurch bureaucracies that make up the estimated 18 to 20 million African-American Christians in the United States. In addition to the rank-and-file membership is a broad variety of organizations and associations that have emerged. Most notable are the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the National Committee of Black Churches, Black Methodists for Church Renewal, the National Black Evangelical Association, and the National Office of Black Catholics—all of which have dealt to one degree or another with the question of integration at some point in their organizational evolution.

THERE ARE THREE basic categories of leadership that can provide us with some sense of how the black church has responded to the question of integration. One group is the intelligentsia: theologians, religious educators, seminarians and self-taught scholars, parachurch bureaucrats, administrative elites, SCLC, the National Conference of Black Churchmen, and Black Methodists for Church Renewal. Of the activist clergy of such organizations as SCLC and the National Conference of Black Churchmen, several intellectual figures emerged: Howard Thurman, George Edmund Haynes, Benjamin Mays, Nathan C. Scott, and Martin Luther King Jr. For purposes of the present discussion, it is appropriate to focus briefly upon King.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a figure whose views underwent considerable evolution. A product of the clerical sector of the educated Southern middle class, he initially subscribed to a liberal reformist vision characteristic of the Northeastern academic milieu in which he received his latter academic training. Thus, to appreciate his view of integration, as well as those he profoundly influenced, one must understand that there was a material basis for his worldview. His perspective was rooted in part in his privileged class experience and in the more generalized liberal optimism of the late 1950s and early 1960s.

There is of course more to the matter. To address properly the question of the black churches' positions on integration, one must consider theological factors: What is the moral and political meaning of African experience in the United States? One's response is likely to be shaped by whatever biblical or theological metaphor one employs as a hermeneutic lens through which to interpret the collective experience of one's group.

If, for example, one has lived a life in which there has been a material and emotional basis for viewing the larger society favorably, it is not likely that one uses Babylonian captivity as the political metaphor to describe the larger society. Therefore, what value the black churches placed upon the social goal of integration was to a considerable extent contingent upon their theological assessments of the American experience.

In turn their theological assessments were based upon the quality of the churches' critical analysis of the rules of the political game. The churches' assessments changed as did their political fortunes. But there had always been a contradiction within the souls of the elite. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. embodied the contradiction.

For King's pastoral vision did not speak to the experience of intense alienation of the colonized in the urban metropolitan centers in the country. And his images, symbols, and metaphors did not emanate from a dispassionate understanding of the cold political logic of an imperial power. This failure of the integrationists produced a leadership vacuum into which a new church movement would step; it would be called the Nation of Islam, and its bishop was the Honorable Elijah Muhammed.

Unlike the Baptist preachers, the Muslim ministers, symbols, and metaphors spoke to the political experiences of those in the bars, cell blocks, and back alleys of blackness. The theological language was the language of prophetic judgment. The hermeneutic lens through which they interpreted the American experience drew upon powerful biblical metaphors.

For them the black experience in the United States was akin to the Babylonian or Egyptian captivity. In this theological critique, they then raised a powerful theological question to the black churches. The Muslim asked: If the God of the Bible allowed the people of God to sanctify themselves from those nations of idolaters who worshiped wealth, power, and things, why was there an exception made in the case of a nation whose founding was based upon genocide, slavery, and imperialism?

ASIDE FROM THIS QUESTION, King and the civil rights movement were being confronted by other difficulties. Integration produced problems at a practical level for the black church, which is the most racial institution in African-American society. Historian Carter G. Woodson observed in 1921 in his history of the black church that it was the only institution in which the black "was free to exercise authority." He further commented that in the South there were white men who regretted "that immediately after the Civil War they permitted the Negroes to establish their own churches."

All historical and cultural research indicates that the black church as a separate and autonomous institution has been the organizational basis upon which our national identity as a nation within a nation is founded. African-Americans have apparently concluded in matters of faith and spirituality that their institutions were better suited to meet their own needs. Some reasoned, quite correctly, that since whites fought so hard to keep God out of their churches there was no reason for them to fight to get in. In other words, self-segregation had its benefits.

Ironically, the black churches' own rank and file understood this better than their own elites. Had the black churches been desegregated, King might not have learned how to preach; Aretha Franklin might not have learned to sing; David Walker's famous appeal might have been sabotaged by some white liberal.

There is no survey data that I am aware of which suggests that the rank and file of the black denominations ever felt that for their spiritual well-being they needed to experience a "mutual sharing of power" or "integration in both ethical and political" terms with the white churches. Andrew M. Morris' study Southern Civil Rights in Conflict confirms this view. In a historical analysis of black and white Baptists on civil rights from 1947 to 1957, Morris discusses how in the late 1940s, as the larger society turned toward the problem of race relations, blacks and whites in the South began to articulate two entirely separate civil religions. These two profoundly different visions of the meaning of America would clash as the civil rights movement collided with the psychocultural reality of white power.

Thus, the matter may be simply stated. On questions of faith, religion, and worship, African Americans have chosen, with minor exceptions, spiritual autonomy over integration. For them God has lived in the black house moving among "those of low-esteem. " From the documented institutional preferences of black people, the majority, we may reasonably conclude, have known "ole massa" too well to trust him with anything as important as their God.

Therefore, in some cases self-segregation was spiritually, culturally, and economically beneficial. In their affirmation of a historically and culturally unique Christian experience, blacks have the catholic dimensions of the gospel message; and in their institutional affirmation of the validity of their otherness, they have in fact confirmed more than any other group in this country the universality of human experience. In their heroic and unavoidable struggle for equal access to public accommodations, education, and democratic rights, the black churches—with all of their obvious imperfections—have never confused spiritual freedom with integration.

IT IS NOW FAIRLY clear that the preoccupation with integration beyond the pursuit of access to public accommodations and democratic rights by church-based protest elites proved to be detrimental to advancing the policy interest of the black poor. 36 years after Brown some blacks are worse off.

Much of the best advocacy work on behalf of the poor emanates from the black leadership of such predominantly white bodies as the Episcopal and United Methodist Churches and the United Church of Christ. Presently there is not much public discussion on the questions of economic power, inequality, and justice within the black church (with the exception of the Shrine of the Black Madonna, which still has connections to the UCC). Thus, as we confront the 21st century we confront the matter of the role the black churches play in the class oppression of the black poor.

The current crisis in the U.S. black community demands a concrete model of a radical black church that moves beyond academic rhetoric of liberation theology safely removed from the actual suffering of the black poor. We now need a radical reformation movement that challenges the black church leadership to live and theologize in spiritual and material solidarity with the black poor.

Our present crisis demands that these black elites should, following the examples of Dorothy Day, Elijah Muhammed, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, take their liberation and womanist theologies into the prisons, hospitals, bars, and back alleys of the black poor. Moving beyond the intellectual ghettoes of the elite academic institutions, we must now construct real programs and real churches for the poor.