By promoting the rights of communities experiencing discrimination and exploitation, the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s helped rebalance relations along a broad spectrum. Perhaps no community was as affected, in its policy and doctrines, as the Christian community, whom the Civil Rights Movement caused to reevaluate social policy and attitudes concerning race.
Christianity began as a religious revolution of the poor and marginalized. It offered liberation for those denied societal status, and it shared a radical message for the poor, for impoverished fishermen and peasants, for outcasts who were publicans and for those who were shunned. But ironically, after the religion was appropriated by the Roman Empire, Christian theology evolved to cater to the privileged, rulers and economically advantaged. It went from delivering good news to the poor to instead focusing on abstract and pious theologies. The Christian denominations that later developed – despite their vast array of doctrines – consistently refused to adopt social justice as a primary motivator in their mission.
Politically and socially, the Civil Rights Movement helped to rebalance relations along a broad spectrum.
The Presbyterian Church was no exception. In 1861, Presbyterians in America were divided into two groups: the United Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. (UPCUSA) in the North and the Presbyterian Church in the U.S. (PCUS) in the South. These remained separate until 1983. Both groups were overly cautious about racial equality. The Northern church espoused more progressive statements but did little to address segregation and societal injustice.
At the start of the 20th century, the two groups restricted programming to focus on evangelism. For nearly two centuries, the Northern church had upheld a slogan espousing the “spirituality of the church.” This one-sided approach to evangelism offered salvation to individuals and was not a mission to support the well-being of all people. According to the Presbyterian Historical Society, a repurposed 1923 statement read, “Our church has time and again expressed its conviction that our purpose must be a saved soul in a saved body in a saved community.” Between the 1940s and 1950s, Presbyterians made evangelism a systematic, official department in the church. Mission was limited to membership recruitment, allowing little focus on eliminating social evils and transforming society. Presbyterians proclaimed love and equality before God, even as the church segregated national and local meetings.
By the 1960s, however, there arose a challenge to evangelism as the mission priority of the church. The Civil Rights Movement shifted evangelism from its prominent position and subordinated it to the mission of social action. More White Presbyterians were turning away from the barbarity of White supremacy, which subjected Black Americans to racial violence and caste subjugation. Starting with the church’s leadership and national officers, Presbyterians responded by challenging long-standing social mores. They criticized the church for being interested more in the survival of the institution than in human well-being. They criticized, as reflecting false piety, sermons on Christian living that promoted spiritual health but ignored the suffering inflicted by racial hatred and Jim Crow violence. Protestant denominations were confronted with the realization that the church was not the sole purveyor of divine revelation. The world’s crisis owed as much to God’s will as it owed to the teachings of the church. Christians could learn what it meant to be Christian from the world’s social justice movements and from the activists demonstrating in the streets.
But many found it nearly impossible to overcome centuries of ingrained belief that Black people were racially inferior. Too many lessons, instilled by blatant racism, were taught and enforced in American churches. Rather than follow a church being reformed, individual congregations revolted and left the denomination. Others who stayed maintained that segregation was good for society and was an instrument of God’s will.
Too many lessons, instilled by blatant racism, were taught and enforced in American churches.
A 2013 article on the Political Theology website, titled “Presbyterians, Civil Rights, and the Spirituality of the Church: A Brief Historical Survey,” recalled that the Southern Presbyterian Journal criticized desegregation efforts by the National Council of Churches of Christ (NCCC). In the 1940s, founder L. Nelson Bell argued that such efforts confused the true dictates of the Gospel and warned against the damning influence of liberal institutions. Segregation was not anti-biblical, he insisted, but rather maintained societal peace. North Carolina’s William Frazer argued that God endorsed “social separation of the races,” and that a “failure to maintain segregation would cause hatred, bloodshed, lesser offspring, and ultimately the weakening of America.”
Change comes to the North and South
But the winds of change were blowing in both the North and South, as activists in both groups seized the moment. In 1950, the PCUS abolished the segregation of Black and White synods. In 1953, their General Assembly committee reported in “A Statement to Southern Christians” that segregation was not compatible with the Christian faith and must be defined as discrimination. The report called for accepting all races into the church’s educational institutions and for integrating all boards, agencies and committees. Another paper reported that the state was outpacing the church in discerning the will of God toward a just society. It determined that “the church must follow Christ wherever he leads it.”
In both groups, a central figure served as a prophet. The PCUS in the South found a moral leader in the person of J. Randolph Taylor, pastor of Church of the Pilgrims in Washington, D.C. He supported the NCCC and the Civil Rights Movement. The Presbyterian Outlook reported on the organizing of “A Fellowship of Concern.” Twenty-four Presbyterians promoted Christian unity and social justice and rejected the “spirituality of the church” doctrine. According to the Presbyterian Historical Society, in September of the same year, PCUS’s Presbytery of Washburn sent a resolution to Arkansas’s Governor Orval E. Faubus that challenged his instructions to close the Arkansas high schools rather than desegregate them. Faubus angrily accused the presbytery of being “left-wingers” and “Communists.” Ministers who signed the resolution included James A. Mahon Jr. (Second Presbyterian Church, Fort Smith, Arkansas), T. B. Hay (president of the Arkansas Council of Churches and pastor of Pulaski Heights Presbyterian Church), and Charles S. Harley of Little Rock, Arkansas (permanent clerk).
The Northern church was also led by a remarkable prophet, Eugene Carson Blake, the stated clerk of the UPCUSA and chairman of the NCCC’s Commission on Religion and Race. He was unrivaled as an American church leader in racial justice and as a supporter of the Civil Rights Movement. On July 4, 1963, Blake was arrested along with 300 other protesters who sought to integrate the segregated Gwynn Oak Amusement Park in Baltimore, Maryland. Those arrested included Protestant, Catholic and Jewish clergy, including David Andrews, assistant chaplain at Morgan State College; William Sloane Coffin, chaplain of Yale University; and Joseph Connolly, a Roman Catholic priest. The Presbyterian Historical Society reported that Blake wore his customary straw hat and was photographed inside a police wagon with a smile on his face. As stated clerk, he prioritized integrating the national church offices. He worked just as actively for civil rights as president of the NCCC and as a member of the World Council of Churches central committee.
The Presbyterian Historical Society reported that, at the August 28, 1963, March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom at the Lincoln Memorial, Blake declared: “We come to the march behind and with those amazingly able leaders of the Negro Americans who, to the shame of almost every white American, have alone and without us mirrored the suffering of the cross of Jesus Christ; they have offered their bodies to arrest and violence, to the hurt and indignity of fire hoses and dogs, of derision and poverty, and some to death for this just cause. We come – late we come – but we come to present ourselves, our souls and our bodies to be ‘a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is our reasonable service.’” The historical society also reported Martin Luther King Jr. sent him an autographed copy of his book Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story, inscribed “To Dr. Eugene Carson Blake — in appreciation for your genuine good will and great humanitarian concern. MLK, Jr.”
In 1958 the UPCUSA invited King to address its 170th General Assembly in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. King modeled his speech on the epistolary style of the Apostle Paul, penning a letter to the American church to call for racial justice. Then, at the United Church of Christ’s 1965 Penn Central Christian Action Conference in Montreat, North Carolina, King was invited to deliver a keynote address on the topic of the church and civil rights. The Civil Rights Movement had less direct engagement with people who were not involved, and the conference’s goals included dialogue on the direction the church should take. At the conference, King’s keynote speech was titled “The Church on the Frontier of Racial Tension.” At one point in the speech, he lamented that future historians would find that “the Christian church in the South was the last bastion of segregated power.”
At one point in the speech, [King] lamented that future historians would find that ‘the Christian church in the South was the last bastion of segregated power.’
In 1963, the UPCUSA Presbytery of West Tennessee in Greenfield approved Overture 22, seeking to resolve the role of the church in secular matters. Overture 22 prohibited inviting anyone who had broken the laws of the country, even out of the desire to bring about justice and reform segregation laws. The church would not financially support anti-segregation efforts in the form of marches, protests, sit-ins or programs. The ire was largely directed at Blake: to “remind the Reverend Eugene Carson Blake that by virtue of his office, his actions reflect on the United Presbyterian Church as a whole and request and require him to cease and desist from all violations of duly enacted laws of this land, and from any action that would bring disrepute or lower the dignity of the [UPCUSA] during such time as he is known as the ‘chief executive officer of the General Assembly.’” But when the UPCUSA General Assembly convened in May 1964, it strongly rejected the overture. Instead, it commended Blake for his prophetic witness and affirmed his right and his duty as stated clerk to speak and act in consonance with the pronouncements and actions of the General Assembly. After the passage of the commendation, Blake received a thunderous applause.
The UPCUSA’s 175th General Assembly of 1963 had responded to the call for reparations by creating the Commission on Religion and Race (CORAR) as the church’s “focal point for race relations and liaison with interfaith and ecumenical efforts,” as noted by the historical society. Gayraud S. Wilmore was appointed executive director for the design, coordination and implementation of a comprehensive race-relations strategy for northern Presbyterians. Wilmore wrote a letter to UPCUSA members encouraging their participation in the March on Washington. CORAR supplied voter registration leaflets for Presbyterian ministers to use in church mailings and house-to-house distribution. On January 22, 1964, CORAR sent 52 clergymen to Hattiesburg, Mississippi, to participate in Freedom Day to increase voter registration. It also initiated the Hattiesburg Ministers Project to recruit clergy to walk in picket lines and canvass for new voters.
Voter registration drives, a major civil rights strategy employed throughout the South, met great resistance. On March 9, 1964, in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, nine Presbyterian ministers from Presbyterian churches in Missouri, New Jersey, New York, and Illinois were arrested. They stood trial after working on voter registration rights for Forrest County’s 7,000 voting-age Black citizens. The judge found them guilty and issued a $200 fine and four months in jail.
In 1964 the UPCUSA issued its first policy statement on a specific social justice issue, namely race. “Evangelism and Race” stated that evangelism must be geared toward the promotion of equal rights. The 1967 “Statement of Faith” focused on social justice and confirmed the priority of actions over words. Focusing on actions, not words, would allow cooperation across theological and ideological boundaries and empower ecumenism.
On September 21, 1966, invited by the UPCUSA’s Commission on Religion and Race and the Synod of Catawba, King delivered a speech at Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte, North Carolina, where 3,000 people packed the Hartley-Woods Gymnasium to hear it. King spoke of the spiritual poverty left in the wake of America’s great material progress and described a nation riven by racial injustice into two halves: the prosperous and the dispossessed.
The galvanizing fortitude of Black Americans’ faith
Within the Black Presbyterian community, civil rights advocacy was a constant. Clergy preached for voting rights, and members marched in the streets. Every community with a Black Presbyterian congregation saw local activism through participation in the NAACP. Presbyterian clergy were among the most educated and brought a wide range of organizing abilities. As important was the fact that clergy were not obligated to local businesses to supply their livelihoods and could therefore withstand economic and political pressure to remain silent. Congregations normally supported their community involvement. Wilmore, in his 1983 book Black and Presbyterian: The Heritage and the Hope, recalled, “So it was that Blacks within the Presbyterian Church came of age in the 1960s after more than 150 years of an uphill and downhill struggle within a church that continually had difficulty matching good intentions with performance and overcoming the natural conservatism of wealth and respectability.”
Within the Black Presbyterian community, civil rights advocacy was a constant.
In the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)’s 1993 report, All Black Governing Bodies: The History and Contributions of All-Black Governing Bodies, the General Assembly explained:
“The civil rights movement, beginning with the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, projected the essentially conservative Black churches into an unaccustomed activist struggle. It brought to the fore and thrust into leadership the Black ministers who always served in the past as community leaders and who more often than not could be appealed to by the power structure to dampen down Black anger and violence. [Black] Presbyterian clergy were ironically in a better position than many of their counterparts in other denominations because of their historical involvement in the struggle for self-expression both within and without their own church structures … Names such as Elo Henderson, Bob Shirley, Raymond Worsley, James Reese, Metz Rollins, Cecil Ivory, J. Herbert Nelson, Ezekiel Bell, Reginald Hawkins, Gayraud S. Wilmore, and many others come to mind. Their effectiveness can be attributed in large measure to the moral support they received from their judicatories and their financial independence — at least those connected with the United Presbyterian Church.”
Edler G. Hawkins was the first Black moderator of UPCUSA and, indeed of any, Presbyterian denomination. He spoke before the 1963 General Assembly on the issue of racial justice and challenged the church to put tremendous effort behind its statements and policies, as recounted in the 1987 book, Edler G. Hawkins: Racial Justice and the Church:
“Some of us are not asking the church to fight this battle that is within the racial community for us. We know that the church has not risen to this present moment but we hope that we can help people to see the difference between an institution that has lacked the courage of its true witness — the difference between this and a great faith that sits in judgment upon the institution and calls upon it to discover that courage that is the real measure of its faith. For the church to do this(and this is our hope), it will require such things as these: to go behind every pronouncement on race that we have made and put the whole machinery of the church behind it. It must go beyond everything we have done in church and society and make it really the conscience of the church, rather than something into which we have siphoned our resolutions with neither the money nor the staff to get them off the paper.”
African American Presbyterians were a force for racial justice in their local communities and were equally active on the national scene. In North Carolina, Black Presbyterians were visible and active in the Civil Rights Movement, as Presbyterians had invested heavily in tapping the resources of the Black community. The result was a concentration of educated, competent and energetic Christians who assumed mantles of leadership and communal uplift — often to the dismay of local White Presbyterians, unsettled by demands for equality and the disruption of their peaceful society (with the peace being enforced by racist domination). In Henderson North Carolina, within a span of a few miles, the Black community was served by a Black hospital (Jubilee), a parochial school (Henderson Industrial Institute, founded 1891), and a church (Cotton Memorial Presbyterian Church, founded 1888). These institutions were pivotal in the educational advancement of the African American population and their increased political involvement in civil rights.
African American Presbyterians were a force for racial justice in their local communities and were equally active on the national scene.
At the nursing history website of Appalachian State University, Phoebe Pollitt describes the impact these institutions made upon the community of Vance County, where Henderson was located:
“Although the county built and maintained public schools for its white children after the Civil War, no schools for African American children existed until the Freedmen’s Mission Board of the UPCUSA opened the Henderson Industrial Institute in 1891. The school remained the only high school African Americans could attend in Vance County until 1970. Vance County African Americans also faced exclusionary policies in local hospitals. Both the Sarah Elizabeth Hospital, founded in 1912, and the Maria Parham Hospital, established in 1926, refused to admit African Americans until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was enforced in 1966. Once again, the UPCUSA, this time under the guise of the Women’s General Missionary Society (WGMS), stepped up to provide basic human services for African Americans in Vance County by opening and supporting Jubilee Hospital from 1911 until 1966.”
John Adam Cotton, the pastor of Cotton Memorial Presbyterian Church, donated the land for Jubilee and later served as its chaplain. In 1962, the superintendent of nurses, R.H. Adams, organized voter registration efforts throughout Vance County. Historian Tim Tyson, in his 2004 book Blood Done Sign My Name, mentioned James Hampton and the Oxford, North Carolina, insurrection regarding Hampton’s friendship with Tyson’s father and their mutual activism in the NAACP.
The denomination’s only Black seminary, Johnston C. Smith Theological Seminary, was located in Charlotte, North Carolina, which (perhaps as a result) had the largest percentage of Black Presbyterians in the nation, served by more than 20 congregations. The activism of Charlotte Presbyterians cannot be discounted; they advocated for economic, political, and educational equality. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Reginald Hawkins was a prominent civil rights activist in the local NAACP chapter. In 1968 he became the first African American to run for North Carolina governor since Reconstruction. He worked tirelessly to integrate Charlotte’s schools, Charlotte Memorial Hospital, and other public places infected by Jim Crow segregation. He partnered with former Presbyterian missionaries Vera and Darius Swann in the 1971 landmark Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education case. The couple had enrolled their daughter in a local White school and then sued the Mecklenburg school system for racial discrimination after she was rejected. They won a favorable decision before the U.S. Supreme Court, which led to the integration of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg public school system.
Inherited calls to social justice
The first African American stated clerk, J. Herbert Nelson II, who was elected in 2016, inherited a legacy of prophetic activity from his grandfather, father and four uncles. In an article on its website, the Presbyterian Historical Society noted:
“Nelson’s work is also an extension of his family’s generational commitment to the Presbyterian Church. His grandfather, Warren Julius Nelson, was born in the Reconstruction-era South, 132 years before J. Herbert Nelson, II, was elected as Stated Clerk of the PC(USA). The elder Nelson served as pastor at Goodwill Presbyterian Church in Mayesville, South Carolina, for 36 years. Rev. J. Herbert Nelson and Johnalee Nelson, J. Herbert Nelson II’s, parents, advocated for the civil rights of African Americans in the 1960s and ministered to the Orangeburg, South Carolina, community after the tragic Orangeburg massacre.”
The first African American stated clerk, J. Herbert Nelson II, who was elected in 2016, inherited a legacy of prophetic activity from his grandfather, father and four uncles.
Frank T. Wilson referred to the clerk’s grandfather as an “ecclesiastical politician.” In a book he co-edited with Vera Swann, Biographical Sketches of African American Presbyterians, Wilson wrote of him,
“Warren Julius Nelson, were he alive today, would feel at home with the growing sense of Black consciousness and Black identity. Indeed, he was among the precursors of this movement. As an advocate of black manliness, he implored the male members of his church and community to assume responsibility for their household, maintain family, pride, become homeowners so that they could pay taxes and by being taxpayers, register to vote, and thereby influence their own destiny.”
Three of Warren Julius Nelson’s sons (Otis Jerome, James Herbert, and Grover Dwight) became ordained as Presbyterian clergy. The clerk’s father, also named James Herbert, was “known for his advocacy of full civil rights for African Americans, and of the necessity of the church’s social witness,” the historical society notes. Preaching at the start of the Civil Rights Movement, the elder said in a 1955 sermon, “When the whole globe is a big neighborhood, no individual, group, or institution can isolate itself from crime, disease, and social blight.” He defined the Presbyterian church’s social witness work as necessary for the health of the church itself:
“The church is playing catch up with secular organizations; the church will certainly be in a bad state of affairs if she does not take longer strides and run a little faster.”
The elder J. Herbert Nelson became the pastor of St. Luke Presbyterian Church in Orangeburg, South Carolina, in 1960. He was actively leading NAACP protest marches and was called to the campus of South Carolina State University the night three students – Samuel Ephesians Hammond Jr., Delano Herman Middleton, and Henry Ezekial Smith – were murdered by police while protesting segregation at a local bowling alley.
His son, J. Herbert II, while serving as pastor of St. James Presbyterian Church in Greensboro, North Carolina, was arrested for civil disobedience while protesting for fair wages for warehouse employees. He led the denomination to call for eliminating cash bail and promoted the Hands and Feet initiative to promote social change. Before ascending to the call as stated clerk, the younger J. Herbert Nelson served for six years as the director of the Washington Office of Public Witness, the church’s advocacy office. From his father, he inherited the call to ministry; and from his mother, Johnalee, he received his fiery determination to stand for justice. Johnalee had served as an advocate to and on behalf of the denomination for her entire life.
After his time serving as stated clerk, J. Herbert II, left a challenge to the church and to the world the duty to continue the call for justice initiated by the Civil Rights Movement. In a 2016 interview published in Presbyterian Heritage, he explained,
“The Civil Rights Movement is not over, as we are seeing emerging movements – Occupy, Black Lives Matter, and even recent movements in this country such as in the LGBTQ+ community – that are engaging the front lines of poverty and failed education systems that are creating wastelands for the human spirit. … We are in need of another Reformation. However, there are emerging movements that need the assistance of the church in an effort to broaden and strengthen the core of their work. One of the great challenges for the PC(USA) and other mainline Protestant denominations is to link the work of local congregations with these emerging movements that are oftentimes more fluid and without institutional restraints in both their actions and approaches to seeking liberation for oppressed communities of people.”
