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Southern Baptists Slow to Embrace Rosa Parks
Baptist Press on Tuesday devoted a 1,770-word tribute to Rosa Parks, a black Christian woman credited with starting the civil rights movement in 1955.

Commenting on her death at age 92, several Southern Baptist leaders praised Parks as a courageous woman who changed a nation.

But history records a different reaction from white Southern Baptists at the time. A 1999 essay by Andrew Manis, then at Mercer University, described Southern Baptist resistance to the civil rights movement.

The title, “Dying From the Neck Up,” was from a 1956 quote by W.A. Criswell denouncing liberals who sought the end of Jim Crow. "Let them sit up there in their dirty shirts and make all their fine speeches. But they are all a bunch of infidels, dying from the neck up," said the Dallas pastor, who went on to become SBC president and spiritual father of the “conservative resurgence.”

Manis said that while current Southern Baptists are far from liberal on issues related to race, virtually no one still holds the hard-line stance that compelled many to oppose desegregation in the 1950s. The SBC adopted a resolution on racial reconciliation confessing past racism in 1995....

...By refusing to give up her seat on a bus in 1955, Parks sparked the Montgomery bus boycott that propelled Martin Luther King to national prominence. At first, Manis said, most Southern Baptist spokespersons kept their criticism of King private, at least until after his death, when criticism began to emerge more regularly in Baptist media.

One exception was Henry Lyons, pastor of Highland Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Ala., who used a weekly radio broadcast to defend segregation with the Bible. Significantly, Manis observed, Lyons was elected president of the Alabama Baptist Convention in 1955 and 1956.

After the Montgomery bus boycott’s successful close and founding of the mostly black Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1957, Manis said most SBC agency heads, with the exception of Foy Valentine at the Christian Life Commission, tried to remain neutral on race issues.

After helping to negotiate a solution to the impasse over desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock in 1957, U.S. Congressman and SBC president Brooks Hays called on Southern Baptists to embrace the cause of integration. The following year, convention messengers sought to pass a resolution commending Hays for his stand on integration, but segregationist sentiment was strong enough to force deletion of that part of the statement....

...That fall, when desegregation of Birmingham’s public schools began, the county sheriff asked ministers to use their pulpits to call for order and peace. Many white ministers did, but others called on parents to keep their children out of integrated schools. After one minister’s speech, high school students stormed the mayor’s office waving Confederate flags, dropping lighted cigarettes on the carpet and standing on the mayor’s desk.

The next morning a bomb exploded at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, which had been the center of demonstrations, killing four young girls as they studied a Sunday school lesson.

The following week a member of the SBC Executive Committee proposed a resolution of support to the pastor and membership of the Sixteenth Street Church. The Executive Committee not only defeated the resolution, Manis said, but instructed Baptist state newspaper editors to remain silent on debate about the resolution.

Most Southern Baptist newspapers avoided specific mention of King, Manis said, until his assassination on April 4, 1968.

While some ministers and editors lamented King's death, others leveled harsh criticism. Responses from laypersons were even more vitriolic. One wondered why King did not go preach the gospel in Africa, "the home of his ancestors, where they still live like savages."

Even theological moderates like Oklahoma City pastor Herschel Hobbs, known to many as "Mr. Southern Baptist," were critical of King. In a letter to Alabama editor Leon Macon, Hobbs expressed the private opinion that King was a "rabble rouser" and a "troublemaker."

In 1968 the Southern Baptist Convention made an official response to the racial crisis in America, in effect a response to the King assassination, without mentioning him by name.

By November 1968 a survey by the Home Mission Board revealed that only 11 percent of Southern Baptist churches would admit African-Americans. Later that month the SBC Crisis Statement was reaffirmed by only eight state Baptist conventions, none of them in the Deep South....