Trump, Harvard and Bob Jones University: The resurrection of racism

Donald Trump’s threat to revoke the tax-exempt status of Harvard University may be novel, but it is not new. It is, in fact, a resurrection of a previous kind of discrimination.

There’s one other time in American history when a private university lost its tax-exempt status, and that’s the school where I earned an undergraduate degree — Bob Jones University.

Although the effects of that decision — not instigated by a president but by the IRS — lingered during my time on campus, BJU and Harvard are mirror opposites. And the Trump administration’s threat against Harvard is rooted in the very idea that 50 years ago caused BJU to be targeted: The Lost Cause of segregation.

‘Separate but equal’

In the decades after the Civil War — with Abraham Lincoln dead and President Andrew Johnson backtracking on Lincoln’s Reconstruction promises to free slaves — American society began to segregate across racial and ethnic lines. In Louisiana, railcars had “whites-only” cars that prohibited Black passengers. Thus, when Homer Plessy, who had a mixed race heritage, sat in a “whites-only” railcar, the controversy went all the way to the Supreme Court, creating the landmark case Plessy v. Ferguson.

The high court voted 7-1 to affirm the Louisiana law that required separate railcars based on race, creating the “separate but equal” doctrine that justified Jim Crow laws and segregation across the South. The argument was that it wasn’t racist to prohibit Black people from integrating with white people because they were simply given separate spaces while considered equal in value.

And this separate-but-equal doctrine was rooted in wrongheaded biblical interpretation.

“It’s essentially the same argument we find in the modern complementarianism of the Southern Baptist Convention.”

It’s essentially the same argument we find in the modern complementarianism of the Southern Baptist Convention, where men and women are to have separate roles, while supposedly being considered equal in value. Because the Bible says so — even though it doesn’t.

In complementarianism, the separate roles just so happen to prioritize exclusive male authority and privilege, while keeping women in roles of submission and support — just the way Blacks were kept “in their place” before.

Eventually, the U.S. Supreme Court recognized the inequality of the “separate but equal” doctrine and ruled against segregation in public schools in the 1954 case Brown v. Board of Education.

But conservative Christians in the South didn’t change their beliefs just because the law changed.

The rise of segregation academies

Because Brown v. Board of Education was limited to public schools, white parents throughout the South started creating private segregation academies.

According to the Southern Education Foundation: “Private schools in the South were established, expanded and supported to preserve the Southern tradition of racial segregation in the face of the federal courts’ dismantling of ‘separate but equal.’ White students left public schools in droves to both traditional and newly formed private schools. From 1950 to 1965, private school enrollment grew at unprecedented rates all over the nation, with the South having the largest growth.”

From 1950 to 1958, private school enrollment in the South increased by more than 250,000 students over an eight-year period and reached nearly 1 million students by 1965.

According to Thomas V. O’Brien in The Politics of Race and Schooling: Public Education in Georgia, 1900-1961: “This growth was catalyzed by Southern state legislatures, who enacted as many as 450 laws and resolutions between 1954 and 1964 attempting to block, postpone, limit or evade the desegregation of public schools, many of which expressly authorized the systematic transfer of public assets and monies to private schools. …  While none of the new laws specifically mentioned ‘race’ or racial segregation, each had the effect of obstructing Black students from attending all-white public schools.”

The Southern Education Foundation adds: “The 11 Southern states of the old Confederacy enrolled between 675,000 and 750,000 white students in the early 1980s, and it is estimated that 65% to 75% of these students attended schools in which 90% or more of the student body was white.”

There was no U.S. Department of Education at the time, so the fight against segregation happened in part through the IRS. But before the ultimate case challenging the IRS, involving BJU, local tax dollars were diverted to whites-only schools, and schools for Black students got the leftovers.

“Black communities, students and teachers paid a terribly high price to ensure that whites were educated with other whites.”

Noliwe Rooks of Brown University observed, “As the financial drain of taxpayer dollars from whites attending segregation academies decimated school systems educating Black children, Black communities, students and teachers paid a terribly high price to ensure that whites were educated with other whites.”

Segregation as ‘Christian education’

According to a report in 1972 titled “It’s Not Over in the South: School Desegregation in Forty-three Southern Cities Eighteen Years after Brown”: “One could usually identify a segregation academy by the world ‘Christian’ or ‘Church’ in the name.’”

Camile Lewis, who taught at Bob Jones University for 15 years, uncovered an Easter Sunday sermon from 1960 where Bob Jones Sr. gave the Christian theological defense of segregation as a response to Billy Graham organizing integrated evangelistic events.

Like the Southern Baptist complementarians of today, Jones argued that “God set up the order of Paradise” with the gender distinctions of Adam and Eve. Then he applied gender distinctions to racial segregation, claiming: “White people have helped the colored people build their churches, and we have gotten along together harmoniously and peacefully; and everything has come along fine. Sometimes we have a little trouble, but then we adjust everything sensibly and get back to the established order. … There is an effort today to disturb the established order. … God never meant to have one race. … God has a purpose for each race. … Wherever we have the races mixed up in large numbers, we have trouble. If we would just listen to the word of God and not try to overthrow God’s established order, we would not have any trouble. When someone goes to overthrowing his established order … that makes me sick — for a man to stand up … and talk about rubbing out the line between the races — I say it makes me sick.”

Again, that speech was given in 1960.

But with these white Christian schools growing in popularity, the IRS decided in July 1970 to prohibit segregation academies from being tax-exempt. And because so many of them were using religious reasons to justify their segregation, the white Christian segregationists claimed they were facing religious persecution from the government.

Many of these schools sent their graduates to Bob Jones University, which prohibited Black students from attending until 1971, and only allowed Black students who were married to enroll from 1971 to 1975. But once BJU started allowing Black students who were unmarried, they suddenly had to figure out how to respond to students who wanted to date across these racial lines.

During an appearance on Larry King Live in 2000 — just 25 years ago — Bob Jones III explained, “We don’t let them date because … we stand against the one-world government, against the coming world of anti-Christ, which is a one world system of blending of all differences.”

In other words, when it comes to dating, students of different racial and ethnic backgrounds had to remain “separate but equal.”

Bob Jones University v. United States

Because BJU continued to prohibit interracial dating in the 1970s, the IRS informed them on April 16, 1975, they would lose their tax-exempt status. Then in 1983, the Supreme Court ruled 8-1 against BJU, concluding: “The government’s fundamental, overriding interest in eradicating racial discrimination in education substantially outweighs whatever burden denial of tax benefits places on petitioners’ exercise of their religious beliefs.”

Notably, the case was decided during the first Reagan administration, which angered white conservatives. In Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, Kristin Du Mez wrote, “When Reagan failed to back Bob Jones University in the IRS’s civil rights case against them, Bob Jones III denounced him as a ‘traitor to God’s people.’”

Du Mez added that Liberty University founder Jerry Falwell also “was disenchanted. A year in, he griped that he had expected more ‘with one of our “own” in the White House.’” Falwell had founded the Moral Majority in 1979 — just four years earlier and the same year the “conservative resurgence” was launched in the SBC.

In the years that followed, BJU stubbornly held onto its ban on interracial dating until one night in 2000 when Bob Jones III appeared on Larry King Live and made a surprise announcement: BJU would drop its ban on interracial dating.

Why? Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush spoke on campus, and his appearance at BJU threatened his election chances. Remember the 2000 election between Bush and Vice President Al Gore was so close it was decided by “hanging chads” on ballots in Florida.

But Jones III did not back down on his core segregationist beliefs: “The principle upon which (the ban on interracial dating) is based is very, very important.”

It was during this time that I was a student at BJU.

When I asked administration officials at the time about reinstating their nonprofit status, they said they had businessmen handling their accounting who told them it would be better for the university to remain for-profit than to become nonprofit. And when I asked if they would seek accreditation, they said they wouldn’t because that would mean the government could force them to hire LGBTQ professors.

Their response to every question was essentially that BJU knew better than anyone else, the government was threatening to control them, and students who asked questions were troublemakers.

It wasn’t until 2014, a decade after I graduated, that Steve Pettit, the school’s first president who wasn’t from the Jones family, decided to work toward regaining the tax-exempt status. Pettit said, “Organizing as a tax-exempt entity is something BJU has needed to do for quite some time.”

Three years later, they regained their nonprofit status and gained regional accreditation. And as of today, the government hasn’t forced them to hire LGBTQ people.

How their discontent leads to Trump

As Jones told Larry King in 2000, the principle of separation and opposition to any hint of globalism remained. To this day, the university continues holding to this ideology, as evidenced this month by their invitation of young earth creationist Ken Ham and former president of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood Owen Strachan to speak. They still use a creation narrative to promote a “separate but equal” hierarchy of gender that sacralizes male power.

They’re still paranoid that the government might persecute them by forcing them to hire LGBTQ professors someday.

And like Jones III and Falwell in the 1980s, they’re part of a movement that has spent decades discriminating against nonwhite people and women, while longing for a U.S. president who would demonstrate themselves to be one of their own by making them great again and getting back to the “established order.”

It’s no wonder, then, that conservatives have found their hero president in Donald Trump. They finally have an administration comfortable reinstating the established orders of the past that were taken away from them.

And while they were held accountable by losing their tax-exempt status for discrimination, they’re now resurrecting their cause by threatening the tax-exempt status of educational institutions such as Harvard.

Trump’s case against Harvard

In today’s resurrected embodiment of their principles that Jones said remained despite the rule change about interracial dating, white conservatives know they can’t argue explicitly for segregation. So instead, they argue that anyone who promotes diversity, equity and inclusion is being discriminatory based on race. And the net result, just like the “separate but equal” arguments of the past, is that white men are afforded more opportunities, while Black people, women and LGBTQ people who succeed are looked at suspiciously and potentially are fired for being “DEI hires.”

As Brad Onishi pointed out on the “Straight White American Jesus” podcast, Paul Weyrich, who co-founded the Heritage Foundation that created Project 2025, recruited the likes of Jerry Falwell, Tim LaHaye and other white evangelical pastors during the 1970s and ’80s with the threat: “The IRS is going to revoke your tax-exempt status. Why? Because you are running schools at your churches that have a segregationist policy.”

While conservatives and BJU lost their tax-exempt status decades ago for discriminating against Black people, the resurrected segregationist movement today wants to take away Harvard’s tax-exempt status for being too inclusive.

Onishi says according to modern conservatives, Harvard is “too open to inclusion. They’re inviting too many foreign-born students to be part of their world-class educational community. They’re not censoring free speech. They’re not telling students or faculty, (or) those on student visas from other countries that they’re not allowed to speak about politics or their beliefs. They’re allowing a flow of ideas throughout their campus.”

Thus, Onishi explains the resurrected right’s argument against Harvard as this: “You won’t let us segregate our churches and schools? You won’t let us tell Black people they’re not allowed here in our school? Fine, we’re going to work for 70 years and we will elect a narcissistic monster that will finally tell schools like Harvard, ‘You’re being too diverse. If you don’t stop with your anti-segregation, we’ll take away your tax-exempt status.’”

In this season of resurrection, what once lived and died politically has come back to life with a vengeance.

 

Rick Pidcock is a 2004 graduate of Bob Jones University, with a bachelor of arts degree in Bible. He’s a freelance writer based in South Carolina and a former Clemons Fellow with BNG. He completed a master of arts degree in worship from Northern Seminary. He is a stay-at-home father of five children and produces music under the artist name Provoke Wonder. Follow his blog at www.rickpidcock.com.

 

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