One of the best friendships I made when I moved to North Carolina was with Bob Seymour, founding pastor of Olin T. Binkley Memorial Baptist Church in Chapel Hill. We shared the same birthday and often celebrated together at one…
‘I remember repeating to myself: “I have the right to be here.”’
Participating in the racial integration of Mercer University was not for the faint of heart when the process began in the 1960s, said Pearlie Toliver, one of the first Black women to attend the Macon, Ga., institution. Toliver, who also…
Secular revolutions and religious counterrevolutions
In 2015, highly esteemed Princeton political philosopher Michael Walzer published The Paradox of Liberation: Secular Revolutions and Religious Counterrevolutions. The title itself immediately arrested me, as it crystallized a current intuition of mine. I believe the United States and several…
Remembering the struggle to integrate even ‘progressive’ Baptist churches in the 1960s
Writing from a Birmingham jail cell in 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. expressed his profound disappointment with “white moderates” who “constantly advise the Negro to wait for a ‘more convenient season.’” We easily assume that, had we belonged to a…
This progressive church reviewed its history and discovered it hadn’t ‘shown up’ very often on racial issues
Anyone entering the sanctuary of Highland Baptist Church in Louisville, Ky., for the first time will inevitably leave talking one thing above all — the beauty of the stained-glass windows on all sides of the English Gothic-style worship space. Look…
Reflecting on a Baylor commencement 60 years later
“Oh, what a beautiful morning.” Those words obviously were made famous in the song by that title in the Broadway Musical Oklahoma!, which is my home state. I gladly loaned them to Texas on the morning of May 6 and…
In 90-page report, Baylor commission documents the university’s racist history and recommends changes
Baylor University will retain the name of its slave-holding founder along with the prominent statue dedicated to its namesake, the Baptist-affiliated institution said March 23 in releasing a much-anticipated report detailing with its historic ties to slavery and the Confederacy….
Racism and the evolution of Protestant support for private education
Earlier this summer, the United States Supreme Court ruled in a 5-to-4 decision that private religious schools should have the same access to public funds as private “nonsectarian” schools. Chief Justice Roberts’ majority opinion cited the Constitution’s protection of the…
Pastor, judge, activist, agitator: As he strives for justice, Wendell Griffen stretches the lexicon of adjectives
Wendell Griffen, 66, is all of these things. But his persona is so large, his reputation so loud, his “rightness” so locked in and eagerly defended, that the man’s depth can be lost in the shallows in which he must wade.