LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (ABP) — When Jefferson Thomas enrolled at the formerly all-white Little Rock Central High School in 1957, he said only one white student treated him “in a Christianly manner.”
When Thomas, who was raised Baptist, asked his friend why he had never seen him in the before-school chapel services, his friend replied that he was agnostic.
“That hurt me so bad to my heart, that the only decent person to me in that school was a non-believer,” Thomas recalled Sept. 23. “That's what I've got to say about Christianity; you've got to practice what you preach.”
Thomas appeared at a press conference along with fellow members of the “Little Rock Nine,” the nine African-American students who integrated the school Sept. 25, 1957. The event was part of the 50th anniversary celebration of the school's desegregation. The Central High integration served as the first major test of the nation's commitment to abiding by the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision ordering an end to segregation in public schools.
The Little Rock crisis also was one of the first tastes of the ugliness yet to come in the civil-rights movement, with segregationist state governments squaring off against federal officials in attempts to avoid integration at all costs.
Often, the nine students from Little Rock remembered, the segregationists' strongest allies were white Christian leaders.
“The leadership of the white citizens' council were local ministers and attorneys,” noted Elizabeth Eckford, another of the nine. She referred to the Capital Citizens' Council, Little Rock's chapter of a network of segregationist civic groups that sprang up across the South in response to the Brown decision.
“Well, we know that the symbol of the KKK was a cross, so we don't need to ask the question [about how white Christians responded to the crisis], because we know an answer,” said Minnijean Brown Trickey, another of the nine.
Trickey said that, during the crisis, “so much of the hateful rhetoric came from the pulpits” of white churches. Noting that many of those preachers believed and taught that segregation was clearly required by Scripture, she added that she hears echoes of that kind of rhetoric today on other controversial social issues.
“The language used was some I've heard lately — that integration was an abomination against God and that if we allow it, it will break down our society as we know it,” she said. “And we know how the churches behave right now when we have conflict issues.”
Counteracting hateful religious rhetoric was the theme of an ecumenical prayer service that honored the Central High anniversary later that afternoon. Several hundred citizens met at Little Rock's symphony hall to hear a mass choir drawn from white and black churches and the city's high schools and to listen to clergy from three faith traditions read from the Torah, the New Testament and the Quran.
Vic Nixon, pastor of Pulaski Heights United Methodist Church in Little Rock, was one of the service's organizers. He said he was 17 years old in 1957 and living in an all-white Arkansas hamlet — seemingly far removed from the crisis. But the news ended up affecting everyone in his town.
“We were forced to look deeply within ourselves, inside our hearts, and decide where we stood on racial justice individually as well as corporately,” he said. “The results, I remember, were very revealing, though not surprising, because we were divided.”
But, Nixon added, the struggle for racial justice and equality did not end on Sept. 25, 1957 — or in the civil-rights struggle of the following decade. “It's so important for people of faith to join hearts and hands not only to commemorate the historic event that brings us together but to cooperate in the days ahead, in our continuing journey toward peace and justice and reconciliation.”
Steven Arnold, another co-organizer of the service and pastor of the historically black St. Mark Baptist Church, said Little Rock and America have progressed significantly since 1957. “God has brought us a mightily long way,” he said. “All we have to do is look at this stage, look at this choir stand and to be honest, all you have to do is look around you.”
But, Arnold added, contemporary events reveal that America's original sin of racism still has consequences. “When there is injustice in the world, when there is yet discrimination in the world, we still have some real problems,” he said. “When we still have the problems that are going on in Louisiana with the Jena Six, we still have some real problems.”
Arnold referred to the ongoing racial strife in Jena, La., where six African-American teens were charged with attempted murder for beating a white student during an ongoing spat spurred by white high school students who hung nooses from a campus tree.
Ironically, the building that now houses Arnold's congregation originally belonged to the all-white Central Baptist Church. In 1957, Central Baptist's pastor, M.L. Moser, was one of the most outspoken segregationist pastors.
But they weren't the only ones representing Christians or other religious communities in Little Rock, Melba Pattillo Beals, another of the Little Rock Nine, recalled. “There were some rabbis and some priests who marched with us,” she said. “So, there were a few people who stepped forward…. There were a few soldiers of the cross.”
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Read more:
Baptists active on both sides of historic Ark. integration battle (9/4)