Violent Confrontations

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Segregation protesters Professor John R. Salter, Joan Trumpauer, and Annie Moody remain at a sit-in at a lunch counter in Jackson, Mississippi even after Professor Salter was sprayed with condiments and beaten on the back and head by spectators in the crowd. The Rev. Ed King joined in sit-ins as well as "kneel-ins" in efforts to gain racial integration (see photo below).

Closed Doors: Ed King and the Jackson 'Kneel-in' Campaign for Racial Equality

by

Special to United Methodist Insight

Every student of the civil rights movement has heard of sit-ins. But few are aware of a movement on Sunday mornings in the 1960s in cities across the South when the struggle for integration moved from movie theaters and lunch counters to the front steps of White churches. This summer marks the 60th anniversary of the "kneel-in" campaign.

In the '60s, the Methodist Church was not the international denomination it would become. Centered in the United States, the church was highly segregated, and many White churches in the South had informal policies that excluded Black worshippers. From 1960 to 1965, there were efforts to integrate worship in dozens of churches in Atlanta, Savannah, Birmingham, Tallahassee, and Memphis. Interracial groups of students presented themselves at the sanctuary doors of White churches and were met with a phalanx of ushers who turned them away. Early on, they were dubbed “kneel-ins,” and the name stuck.

The most sustained campaign was in Jackson, Mississippi, from June 1963 to May 1964.

At the center of events

At the organizing center was a young, radical White Methodist pastor, Edwin King. Born and raised in Vicksburg, Mississippi, and a graduate of Millsaps College in Jackson, King was a vital force during the civil rights movement, continually challenging the church to “recover a more authentic Christianity.”

Given his commitment to racial justice and his arrest record resulting from his participation in civil rights protests, King was not encouraged to seek a church appointment in Mississippi following seminary, so he and his wife Jeannette moved north, serving churches in Montana and Massachusetts. He finally returned to Jackson in 1963 to take a position as chaplain and dean of students at Tougaloo College, a Historically Black College in north Jackson. There he was free to rejoin the struggle for racial equality.

For the past two years, I’ve been working on a book on the White American Methodist Church and racial justice. I had the chance to visit with Rev. King, now 86, this Spring. When I asked what influenced him to dedicate his life to the civil rights movement, he was quick to respond: “I would always say, 'the church.'” Even as conservative as the Methodist Church was in Mississippi, the connection to the more progressive U.S. church leadership was never lost. King recalled attending interracial meetings with other Methodist youths, debating integration and Brown v. Board of Education in youth Sunday school classes, and first hearing of Gandhi and nonviolence through the Methodist Church.

King first met Medgar Evers at Millsaps while Evers was the NAACP field secretary in Mississippi. When King returned to Jackson, they worked together on trying to desegregate the downtown businesses in Jackson, which proved to be an exercise in futility. When Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. suggested kneel-ins in other cities, Evers and King jumped on the idea. King said he felt that kneel-ins would “bring the segregation issue to the conscience of white Christians.” At the front doors of the church, it would be hard to ignore.[1]

Interracial church visits were designed not simply to cause "good trouble" but also to push the theological envelope and jump-start conversations and questions, like: Were we reconciled to each other, Black and White, by Jesus or not? Was the Methodist Church genuinely committed to open doors and open communion? Is the church a private social club or the body of Christ?

On Sunday, June 9, 1963, the first interracial church visiting teams, mostly Tougaloo and Millsaps students, headed out to several downtown Jackson churches. After First Baptist turned them away, the group headed to Galloway Memorial Methodist. Galloway, which at that time was the largest Methodist Church in Mississippi, was led by Rev. Ed Selah, whose public support of desegregation led the students to believe that their doors might be open.

The ushers at Galloway also turned them away.

While the worship service was underway, Rev. Jerry Furr, the associate pastor, told Rev. Selah what had happened outside. In a prophetic act of courage, Selah delivered a shortened sermon and then announced his resignation, reading from a statement he had prepared weeks earlier for such a time. While he loved his congregation, Selah said, he could not continue to serve where Black visitors were turned away. Furr also resigned.

The dramatic events of that first day—twelve Black worshipers turned away from four Protestant congregations and the resignation of two White Methodist pastors—garnered heavy press attention. Rev. Selah received accolades from across the country, even from members of his congregation, applauding him for his stand. One member wrote: “you have the support of many, some of whom are afraid to speak out, however.”[2]

In the chaotic days that followed the first kneel-ins, King and Evers met to consider the way forward. Evers told King how moved he was by the actions of Selah and Furr. “But what those ministers said, what they did, refusing to continue preaching in a segregated church," King recalled Evers saying. "Now that has made me feel better than anything in this movement.”[3]

Tragically, the Sunday kneel-in would be Evers’ last civil rights action. Later that evening, Medgar Evers was killed by a sniper in the driveway of his home.

How did Methodists justify closing their doors to these interracial teams? According to King, they fell back on an all-too-familiar excuse: that the church visits were spearheaded by outside agitators and communists who had no interest in worship.

Since a critical purpose of the campaign was to connect with White church members, King remembered how students often had a few minutes of conversation with the ushers guarding the doors before they were shooed off the church steps. Some of their responses bordered on the absurd, King said. A Black student asked if Jesus would lock the church doors, and the usher replied, “Leave Christ out of this!” Another student was told, “Don’t appeal to my conscience!” Yet another usher said, “This is a Christian Church and we intend to keep it that way.”[4]

One of the more peculiar confrontations in the campaign came that Fall on World Communion Sunday when churches typically focus on their unity with churches worldwide. King noted that as families came to church that morning, they passed a much more substantial police presence replete with heavily armed officers, attack dogs, and police wagons. King also  learned that police might arrest Black visitors.

King recalled how three Tougaloo students—two Black and one White—approached Capital Street Methodist Church. An usher met them on the sidewalk and asked what they wanted. When they answered that they had come for worship, the usher told them, “You are not welcome.” They pointed out the irony—it was World Communion Sunday. Posters and offering envelopes showing different colored hands reaching for the communion chalice were inside the church.

The usher was unmoved, King said. The women students continued to try to engage the usher in a theological conversation. Apparently, they pushed the envelope just a bit too far. When they finally turned to leave the church grounds, they were arrested by police on charges of “disturbing worship services” and “refusal to leave church property.”

The three were sentenced to a year in jail, and bail was set at $1,000, which was quickly furnished by two Methodist agencies, the Women’s Division and the General Board of Christian Social Concerns, King said. To put these arrests in context—the White men accused of bombing a Black church three weeks earlier had been fined $100 each and received three months in jail.

The arrest of the three young women caught the public eye. It also proved to be a huge recruiting tool for the kneel-in campaign. As word spread across the country, support for the campaign grew, and waves of integrated groups descended on Jackson, prepared to go to church or jail, King said.

On March 29, 1964, Easter dawned warm and bright in Jackson. Charles Golden and James Mathews arrived early at the front door of Galloway Memorial Methodist Church to attend the 11 a.m. worship service. Golden and Mathews were Methodist bishops, Golden (Black) in the Central Jurisdiction and Mathews (White) in the Northeastern Jurisdiction. Golden had grown up in Mississippi and knew well that integrated groups had previously been barred from worship at Galloway. But it was Easter. King said the two bishops thought that surely the doors of a Methodist Church would be open to all.

As they approached the church, King continued, the bishops saw that ushers were closely guarding all the entrances. Nat Rogers, chair of Galloway’s official board, met the bishops on the front steps. He explained, almost apologetically, that their current church policy did not allow them to admit Black worshippers. After a brief visit with the ushers and a few church members, Golden and Matthews left to worship at Central Methodist Church, a Black Methodist church welcoming everyone that day, Black and White, King said.

But Golden and Mathews didn’t leave quietly. They handed Rogers an open letter to the congregation, gently reminding them that “there cannot, in fact, be any true Christian worship at all which is not intercession in behalf of all mankind, for Jesus Christ died and rose for all.”

I asked King how we assess the overall impact of the church kneel-in campaign. The Methodist leadership clearly felt pushed to speak to the issue, according to church records. In November 1963, the Methodist Council of Bishops affirmed that “the Methodist Church is an inclusive church … to arrest any persons attempting to worship is to us an outrage.”

The campaign also pushed the 1964 General Conference to pass a controversial resolution supporting civil disobedience, King added. The resolution read that when facing laws that are “neither just nor valid as law,” when all legal means have been exhausted, “the Christian conscience will obey God rather than man.” Most importantly for King, the campaign also forced White churchgoers to face what had remained hidden for many—the racial exclusion at the doors of their own churches.

King recalled that church doors slowly opened in Jackson. While the campaign basically ended in spring 1964 in preparation for Freedom Summer, several churches had opened to Black worshippers. In early 1966, Galloway finally opened its doors to all, and Capital Street followed a few months later. As church doors opened, however, many families who remained bitterly opposed to integration left for other churches. The campaign was divisive and painful but clearly necessary if White supremacy were ever to be driven from the Methodist Church, he added.

As we approach the 60th anniversary of the kneel-in campaign, it’s important to recall that the White Methodist Church did not lead southern communities toward integration. Methodists must face the reality that our compromised racial history is not an aberration but runs long and deep. It’s crucial as well to lift up White Methodist laity and clergy who somehow found the courage to stand up alongside their Black brothers and sisters against the torrent of racism.

I close with words from Ed King that resonate with our struggles with racism today. Many White church members had condemned the church visits as demonstrations and not as sincere desires to worship. King turned the argument around: “We saw the church-visits as ‘demonstrations’ of our belief that people, black and white, who could pray and praise God together could also talk and reason together and begin some process, without violence, of ending segregation and building an integrated society, on the journey to the beloved community.”[5]

[1] Lyon, Carter Dalton. Sanctuaries of Segregation: The Story of the Jackson Church Visit Campaign. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2017, 60.

[2] Dupont, Carolyn Renée. Mississippi Praying: Southern White Evangelicals and the Civil Rights Movement, 1945-1975. New York: New York University Press, 2013, 153.

[3] From the personal papers of Ed King.

[4] From King’s papers.

[5] From King’s papers.

John Elford is a retired United Methodist pastor and the author of "Our Hearts Were Strangely Lukewarm: The American Methodist Church and the Struggle with White Supremacy" which is coming out this summer.