LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (ABP) — The story of Lakeshore Drive Baptist Church in Little Rock, Ark., encapsulates the little-recounted role that white Baptists played in many episodes of the civil-rights movement — both for good and for ill.
The church owes its existence to the infamous 1957-59 struggle to integrate Little Rock Central High School, when pro-integration members were kicked out of another congregation pastored by an outspoken segregationist. Dignitaries will gather in Little Rock on Sept. 25 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Central High's desegregation.
“It's a unique church,” said Doyne Elder, Lakeshore Drive's church historian. The kicked-out members founded University Baptist Church, named because the congregation is located across the street from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. The church changed its name to Lakeshore Drive years later.
The pastor of the congregation from which University Baptist's founding members were ejected — Broadmoor Baptist — was Wesley Pruden. He became one of the most vocal segregationist leaders in Little Rock during the month-long integration crisis in 1957. Pruden remained in the news through the ensuing turmoil of the 1958-59 school year when Gov. Orval Faubus, himself a Baptist, ordered the city's high schools closed in order to prevent them from operating on an integrated basis.
Ironically, Pruden's church eventually folded as members became disgusted with their pastor and left. “Not only was he a staunch segregationist, but there was a lot of other pretty bad publicity about him,” Elder said. The University Baptist congregation then took over the old Broadmoor Baptist building. It continues to use the same property today.
Unlike many other desegregation battles of the era, the Little Rock crisis didn't prominently feature African-American Baptist ministers. Instead, its driving personalities were school board officials, a segregationist governor and a local NAACP official. But white Baptists are found throughout the history of the event.
The pastors of Little Rock's wealthiest and most prominent churches and synagogues — including two of the city's three largest Southern Baptist congregations — spoke in favor of obeying federal court orders and maintaining law and order. But many pastors of smaller, more blue-collar Southern Baptist churches and independent, fundamentalist Baptist congregations were far more outspoken in defense of segregation.
One example was Pruden himself. In an October 1957 advertisement he bought in the Arkansas Democrat — the more conservative of the city's two daily newspapers — Pruden said Jesus never spoke up against segregation even though he “was born into the most segrated [sic] race the world has ever known.” On the basis of that and other biblical evidence, he concluded, “segregation has Christian sanction, integration is communistic.”
The segregationists' rhetoric was suffused with evangelical jargon. In archival news photos from a pro-segregation demonstration on the steps of the Arkansas State Capitol, protesters hold signs that say, “Stop the race-mixing march of the Anti-Christ!”
The Berean Baptist Church, a congregation in North Little Rock, took out an advertisement in the Sept. 27, 1957, edition of the Democrat that reprinted the text of a telegram from the congregation to President Dwight Eisenhower. Eisenhower's order to send troops from the 101st Airborne into Little Rock days before had enabled the integration to proceed, breaking the stalemate he had with Faubus.
“If we have the privilege of freedom of speech left, we wish to lift our voice in strong protest against the unholy invasion of the customs, rights and privileges of the citizens of Arkansas by federal troops,” the church's telegram read. “It is our sincere conviction that if you had been spending as much time on your knees in prayer as spent on the golf course, you never would have sent troops into Arkansas.”
It continued: “May God have mercy on you for it. A great many Baptist churches in Arkansas feel as we do.”
According to historians and Baptists who were in Little Rock at the time, courage in the face of committed segregationists was hard to find among many white leaders, including Christian ministers.
“There were segregationist preachers, and they were very outspoken and in the press, and in the news often. Unfortunately, on the other side, I don't think I could point to that many examples of strong, courageous white pastoral leadership, at least in Baptist circles,” said Larry Taylor, who recently retired after serving for two decades as pastor of Emmanuel Baptist Church in Alexandria, La.
Taylor was a junior at Central during the 1957-58 school year. He was there when nine African-American students, shepherded by local civil-rights activist Daisy Bates, successfully integrated the campus on Sept. 25, 1957.
“I have immense respect for the 'Little Rock nine' and for Daisy Bates. I think they were courageous, courageous people made of cactus and steel, otherwise they couldn't have gotten through that,” Taylor said. “I wish I could have pointed to equally courageous people in the white community.”
But Taylor and others have pointed to a handful of Baptist leaders as prominent exceptions. One was Dale Cowling, pastor of Little Rock's Second Baptist Church.
“The three largest Southern Baptist churches were within a couple of miles of the Central High area,” said Fred Williams, a University of Arkansas at Little Rock professor and one of the most prominent chroniclers of Arkansas history. Williams is also a longtime member of Calvary Baptist Church in Little Rock.
“But of those three churches, only Second made an effort … to get the congregation to go along with the idea” of integration, Williams said.
One of the most prominent members of Second Baptist at the time was Rep. Brooks Hays, who had represented Little Rock for eight terms in the House of Representatives. In the early days of the crisis, he worked as a mediator to end the standoff between Faubus and Eisenhower. After Faubus closed the schools, he continued to work to re-open them on an integrated basis.
Hays' support for integration eventually cost him his job. In the 1958 election, a segregationist write-in candidate, Dale Alford, barely beat Hays in his bid for a ninth term in Congress. Although Democratic Party officials pushed Hays to contest the results, he chose not to.
During the crisis, Hays also served as president of the Southern Baptist Convention.
In his address at the SBC annual meeting in 1959, Hays noted his recently unemployed status and asked his fellow Southern Baptists to consider living up to the denomination's commitment to support integration. He said it was especially important for SBC missionaries to demonstrate that they represent a denomination that believes all people are created equal by God.
“We must continue to examine, with keen sensitivity, the aspirations of our minority people for a status free from all discrimination and injustice,” Hays said. “This is a part of the Christian gospel, and we must demonstrate that we believe it. We cannot export what we do not have, and if our Christian devotions here are not adequate, our missionaries cannot transmit the Christian message to unsaved masses abroad.”
Other Baptists played minor but crucial roles in the crisis. Margaret Kolb, a longtime member of Pulaski Heights Baptist Church in Little Rock, served with the Women's Emergency Committee to Open Our Schools. In 1958, the women's group stepped in when many white male business leaders would not, working fearlessly to re-open Little Rock's high schools on an integrated basis after the Faubus-ordered shutdown.
“We were building a future for what we considered New Testament thinking. Although it was never mentioned and never taught as such, it was obvious to me that's what we were doing,” said Kolb, who was a young mother at the time.
One of the places the Women's Emergency Committee met was in the Baptist Student Center at the University of Arkansas Medical School. It was a safe meeting place for the controversial organization because Tom Logue, the Arkansas Baptist State Convention's campus-ministry director, was an ardent integrationist.
In the fall of 1957, Logue led the students who came to the state's Baptist Student Union annual convention to pass a resolution favoring integration — a subject the ABSC had conspicuously avoided during its annual meeting a few weeks prior.
“At the convention the kids made these wonderful statements, and it passed with one student objecting,” said Logue, who served as the coordinator of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship of Arkansas after retiring from state convention work. He is a longtime member of Lakeshore Drive Baptist Church.
The church continued to be a pacesetting congregation after the crisis. It disbanded as University Baptist and reorganized as Lakeshore Drive in 1970 in a bid to regain membership in the Arkansas Baptist State Convention. The state group had previously voted to unseat University Baptist's messengers at convention meetings because the church practiced open communion. In 1990, Lakeshore Drive became the first church in Arkansas to vote to support what is now the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship.
But congregations like Lakeshore and leaders like Hays and Cowling were the exceptions in white Baptist life during the civil-rights era, even in a surprisingly moderate Southern city like Little Rock.
“I have found myself for 50 years wishing that Baptists could get in on the front end of something significant instead of the back end,” said Taylor, the retired pastor and Central High graduate. “I'm still hoping and wishing for it. But my impression is that Baptists have come from such a culturally conservative background, historically, that it's very hard for them to do anything but catch up after the issues are already decided in the broader society. And that seems to be, for the most part, what happened with most of the white Baptist churches in Little Rock in the 50s. They caught up later.”
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