“11 o’clock on Sunday Morning Is the Most Segregated Hour in America.” How did we get here, and what are we called to do about it?

A quick glance around the sanctuary on Sunday morning confirms that Glenn is an overwhelmingly white congregation. Why is that? We may think it is because Glenn is located in an overwhelmingly white neighborhood. But how did it get to be that way? And what are we called to do about it?

On March 20, the Racial Justice Caucus hosted the first in a series of conversations to grapple with these questions. That first session explored how we got to be so segregated. We might want to think white people choose to do white church, and Black people choose to do Black church, but it’s more complicated than that. The separation of white people from Black people did happen by choice, but only white people got to choose, and that choice was supported and to a great extent engineered by the federal government and the church.

Pre-Civil War

Prior to the Civil War, enslaved persons were rarely allowed to live where they chose or worship on their own, for fear they would run away or plot rebellion. Enslaved persons either had to worship in white spaces, with white people governing where they could sit or whether they could speak, or meet in hush arbors where they could gather secretly for worship.

When slaveowners organized worship for enslaved persons, they twisted scripture to fit a white supremacist narrative. Christianity was often forced on enslaved persons, who were told to focus on a heaven they would experience after death in order to distract them from the hell they were experiencing on earth.

Restrictions on how Black people could participate in worship in white churches led to the first of what would be many splits in the Methodist Church over race. Richard Allen, a free Black man and a preacher in the Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia, and Absalom Jones left the church and eventually started the African Methodist Episcopal Church because they were physically removed from the church while praying as they sat in seats reserved for white people.

Disagreement over the position the Methodist Church should take on slavery led to the church splitting in 1844, when the General Conference censured Bishop James Andrew of Georgia, a trustee at Oxford College (now Emory at Oxford). Andrew refused to give up his slaves or his role as Bishop, and he and his followers split off to form the Methodist Episcopal Church South, which allowed its clergy to participate in chattel slavery. Andrew College in Cuthbert, a Methodist school, was named in honor of Bishop Andrew.

Emancipation and Reconstruction

After Emancipation, many formerly enslaved people left their enslavers’ white churches and started their own churches where they could worship as they wished, rejecting the submissive status taught by the white church and focusing on the spiritual, secular, and political issues facing the Black community.

After twelve years of expanded civil rights, Reconstruction ended in 1877, and the Jim Crow era began (or Redemption, as it was called in the South). White people did not want to live physically near Black people and designated areas where Black people were permitted to live, like the other side of the tracks, or not live, like sundown towns. As a result, “[r]esidential integration declined steadily from 1880 to the mid-twentieth century and it has mostly stalled since then.”

Jim Crow

By the early 1900s:

Public officials were adopting segregation laws and zoning ordinances in urban areas to protect white communities from “infiltration” and “invasion” by Black families.
Landowners and developers inserted racial covenants in deeds, prohibiting Black people from owning or occupying property.
Many cities, including Atlanta, adopted zoning maps that divided residents by “economics” rather than skin color. “Economics” simply meant single-family dwellings or apartments, the assumption being that white people generally live in single-family homes, and non-white people usually live in apartments. This “economic” approach, together with racial covenants, became the backbone of government policy on segregation.

The New Deal

One of the cornerstones of FDR’s New Deal was home ownership – for white people.

Redlining is the practice developed by the FHA to assess the “financial risk” of guaranteeing mortgages in urban areas. The neighborhoods where the poorest people, and most people of color, lived were outlined in red, indicating that those neighborhoods were “high risk,” making it almost impossible for a homebuyer in that area (Black people) to get a conventional loan to buy a home.

The federal government aggressively marketed suburban homeownership to white families, while requiring developers and homeowners to include racial covenants in their deeds. Local governments followed Atlanta’s practice of designating areas for single (white) family homes and multi-family apartments (everyone else). Because of racial covenants and zoning laws, Black families were prevented from moving to most white neighborhoods.

The Methodist Church

While all levels of government were cooperating to segregate white and Black neighborhoods, the various branches of the Methodist Church cooperated to simultaneously merge and create separate white and Black churches. In 1939 the Methodist Episcopal Church, Methodist Episcopal Church South, and Methodist Protestant Church merged to create The Methodist Church. But the Southern church agreed to the merger only after a compromise created a jurisdiction based solely on race – not geography.

The Central Jurisdiction, formed for all African American Methodists, was one of six jurisdictions of the church, but the only jurisdiction defined by race, explicitly organizing the Methodist Church to keep white and Black Methodists apart (a “humiliating disappointment”). The Central Jurisdiction was also underfunded and stretched to administer such a large geographic area.

Black Christianity

When Black Christians were voluntarily and involuntarily separated from white Christians, they developed a Christianity that was different from the white evangelical one that arose in the 19th and 20th centuries. While both maintained a focus on personal salvation, Black theology was drawn to themes of liberation and justice in scripture.

Part of this difference has to do with how each group saw themselves in the Biblical texts. White America tended to identify with Israel as a dominator and conqueror, a nation blessed by God to rule. Black America identified with Israel as an oppressed nation brought out of slavery, a nation that had suffered but was never forgotten. Even in their identification with Jesus we see a difference. Black theologians such as Howard Thurman, James Cone, and Martin Luther King, Jr. saw in Jesus someone who identified with the poor and the oppressed, a suffering savior who had a “preferential option for the poor.”

Glenn and Civil Rights

During the 1950s and 1960s Glenn occasionally had to ask itself what place Black people should have at Glenn. In 1951, while discussing Sunday School materials, Glenn’s Board of Education stated that “while a great deal of progress has been made in the last few years [around race relations], it was wise not to have a head-on collision over the issue.”

In 1952, a group of Morehouse students, who had been participating with Emory students in a Wesley Fellowship program in the Church School Building, joined the Emory students to attend evening worship in the sanctuary. Some members of Glenn’s leadership board objected to the presence of the Morehouse students at that service. A few years later, a member of the leadership board proposed that Glenn adopt a policy of segregation and that an area in the balcony be set aside for Black people wishing to worship at Glenn. In both cases, the leadership at Glenn refused to act in ways to limit full participation in worship at Glenn, but, interestingly, there is no record of the conversations or votes in either of these instances.

Black Churches and Civil Rights

While federal, state, and local governments were still separating white communities from Black communities and the white church was working to protect itself from integration, the Black church was leading the way in the fight for civil rights. But while Black Methodists were at the forefront of the fight for justice, white Methodists were among the pastors in Birmingham who wrote the letter to Dr. King that prompted his famous April 1963 "Letter From a Birmingham Jail." The moderate white pastors criticized the nonviolent protests for civil rights and urged patience and the use of litigation instead of protests. They feared the violence that peaceful demonstrations might lead to, but were doing nothing to stop the violence African Americans were already experiencing.

1968

The Central Jurisdiction was finally abolished as a part of the merger that created the United Methodist Church that we know today. But even today many concerns remain for Black and other Methodists of color, including equity in compensation, equity in leadership roles at the church and conference levels, quality of appointments, quality of parsonages, and discrimination in the appointment process.

The Fair Housing Act outlawed redlining and racial covenants, clearly making residential segregation and discrimination illegal going forward. But the law did nothing to address the decades of intentional housing segregation that continue even today to exclude Black homebuyers from white neighborhoods.

Where do we go from here?

So we circle back to our initial observation: Glenn is an overwhelmingly white church in an overwhelmingly white neighborhood. And to our initial question: How did we get here?

The short answer is that Glenn is a white church in a white neighborhood because the Methodist Church and the federal, state, and local governments all imposed the separation of white people from Black people on everyone, and we are all living with the legacy of that segregation today. This is what we mean by systemic racism.

And so on to our next question: What are we called to do about it? We closed our first conversation with the quote below and asked everyone to think about how we should respond to it before our next conversation on May 1:

“If you are not willing to step into the spaces outside the church with me to see the impact of systemic racism on me, why would I want to worship with you?”

Additional reading:

The Color of Compromise by Jemar Tisby

The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein

- Racial Justice Caucus of Glenn