The federal government tried last month to lure four Protestant colleges from their segregationist ways. It moved to cut off National Defense Education Act student loans, which have totaled $1,491,832 at the four schools.
It was the government’s first move on higher education under the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which forbids racial discrimination in federally assisted programs.1Section 601 reads: “No person in the United States shall, on the ground of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.” The colleges that refused to sign compliance with the act were, in order of size: Bob Jones University, Greenville, South Carolina; Mississippi College, Clinton, Mississippi; Sweet Briar (Virginia) College; and Free Will Baptist Bible College, Nashville, Tennessee. Also challenged was a non-church junior college for men, Marion (Alabama) Institute.
Several other schools also have refused to pledge non-discrimination, but the four initial test cases were believed to be the most intransigent. The four situations vary:
Sweet Briar, a fashionable women’s college, is not church-related. But it belongs to the Council of Protestant Colleges and Universities, and its charter specifies Christian purpose. The founder’s will limits admission to “white girls and young women.” Last year a state judge rejected the college’s request to have the will thrown out. Sweet Briar then signed a compliance form, but the government considers it unacceptable.
Mississippi College, the state’s oldest, is owned and governed by the Mississippi Baptist Convention of the Southern Baptist Convention. College President Richard A. McLemore said, “I’ve been trying to persuade the board of trustees and the convention to remove the restrictions, but this is a slow process.” The state convention will discuss a study report on race policy this November, and the college trustees meet the next month. Change is considered possible.
Free Will Baptist, official school for the denomination of 170,000 members, has no plans to continue federal student loans. President L. C. Johnson said the basic issue is not civil rights but “the government using funds to exercise a degree of control.” Civil rights, he said, “was the basic thing they were using.”
Johnson denied that the school has a segregationist policy, but when asked whether a qualified Negro would be accepted, he said the board of trustees would have to decide that when the time came. There are few, if any, Negro Free Will Baptists, he explained, and no Negro has ever applied for admission.
The most militantly segregationist school is Bob Jones, an independent fundamentalist college (see April 1 issue, page 45). School administrators also have often criticized federal aid and other national policies as socialistic. In last December’s alumni magazine, President Bob Jones, Jr., stated:
“The right kind of graduate wants Bob Jones University to maintain the same high standards which the University taught him to respect and maintain, and it is his wish that Bob Jones University be kept free from entangling alliances of every kind. It is in order to be able to preserve our standards that we refused to sign the Statement of Compliance with the Civil Rights Act and turn over the policies of this institution to the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. Our alumni are going to have to give sacrificially to offset the fact that our students can no longer participate in the so-called National Defense Student Loan Fund which should be rightly known as the ‘Fund for the Socialization of American Colleges and Universities.’ ”
But Jones said the school may challenge the federal decision and seek to continue U. S. loans. As the biggest school challenged by HEW, it stands to lose $135,900 per year in student aid. Also, it would have to return the bulk of the $774,442 previously granted by the U. S. to the revolving NDEA loan fund administered by the university.
Jones was blunt on his racial policies during a Charlotte newspaper interview: “The university does not admit Negroes. This is against the stated policy of the founder [Bob Jones Sr.], and the full board would have to reverse that policy. And I assure you the board has no intention of integrating.… College is the time of romance. That’s why Oriental students at Bob Jones University are not permitted to date white students.”
Of Interchurch Interest
Eugene Carson Blake, new head of the World Council of Churches, said that in theory “any Christian church is eligible for membership,” including the Roman Catholic Church.
The California-Nevada district of Missouri Synod Lutherans will cooperate in campus ministries with the other two major Lutheran denominations. Missouri Synod was rebuffed in a new attempt at reconciliation with the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod.
The National Holiness Association, which represents eleven conservative Wesleyan-Arminian denominations, called a study conference for leaders of its constituency later this year to discuss greater cooperation or a structured holiness church federation.
The Baptist Unity Movement, which hopes to pull together various Baptist groups in America, decided at its annual meeting to incorporate, adopt by-laws, and apply for tax-exempt status.
Personalia
Richard C. Raines of Indianapolis was elected president of the Council of Bishops of The Methodist Church. A year from now San Francisco’s Donald H. Tippett assumes the post.
Robert S. Bilheimer, a Rochester Presbyterian minister, will head the new world peace committee and International Affairs Commission of the National Council of Churches. A peace official and agency were ordered by the NCC board in February.
W. C. Fields, public relations secretary of the Southern Baptist Convention, was named president of the Religious Public Relations Council.
Norman R. DePuy, American Baptist pastor in Moorestown, New Jersey, will be the new editor of the denominational magazine Missions, which claims to be the world’s oldest continuous Protestant periodical.
Anne Morrow Graham, daughter of evangelist Billy Graham who will be 18 this month, plans to marry September 2 in Montreat, North Carolina. The groom is Dr. Daniel Milton Lotz, a Chapel Hill, North Carolina, dentist, who was captain of the University of North Carolina basketball team voted the nation’s best in 1959.
Marge Saint, widow of martyred missionary pilot Nate Saint, plans this fall to marry longtime family friend Abe Van Der Puy, president of World Radio Missionary Fellowship, Quito, Ecuador.
Grady C. Cothen, an official in the Southern Baptist General Convention of California, was elected president of Oklahoma Baptist University by its trustees.
Eugene Stowe, superintendent of the Church of the Nazarene in central California, was appointed president of Nazarene Theological Seminary in Kansas City, Missouri.
Billy R. Lord, Southern Baptist chaplain in Viet Nam, was awarded the Silver Star for making a dozen trips under fire to carry wounded soldiers to an evacuation point.
Burton W. Marvin, Methodist layman and former journalism dean at the University of Kansas, is the new associate general secretary for communications of the National Council of Churches.
Hans Rohrbach, head of the mathematics department at the University of Mainz, Germany, and a participant in this fall’s World Congress on Evangelism, was named university president.
Miscellany
Evangelist Billy Graham plans to visit Poland in late September to participate in celebration of the 1,000th anniversary of Christianity in that country. Graham’s trip is in response to an invitation from Polish Baptist churches. Other Polish Protestant churches subsequently indicated they would support the meetings, tentatively scheduled for Warsaw and Cracow.
A nationwide poll by NBC-TV for use on a program testing political attitudes shows 76 per cent of Americans disagree that “prayer and Bible reading should not be allowed in public schools”; 17 per cent agree, and 7 per cent said they agree or disagree in part.
New York State’s divorce law was revised last month for the first time in 179 years. Grounds for divorce now include abandonment, separation, and imprisonment. Previously a marriage could be dissolved legally only on grounds of a narrow definition of adultery. That definition is now expanded to include sodomy and homosexuality.
Deaths
FRED HOSKINS, 60, head of the Congregational Christian Churches who led them into the United Church of Christ merger; of a heart attack at a church staff meeting in Garden City, Long Island.
ERLING OLSEN, 70, New York City investment executive and active evangelical layman and radio speaker; in Rye, New York.
FERENC KISS, director emeritus of the anatomy department at Medical University, Budapest, Hungary, who was president of the Free Churches in Hungary from 1945 to 1960.
The governor of East Pakistan has ordered compulsory religious education for all high schools, presumably in Islam. The status of Christians in the new program is unclear.
A civic association in Britain wants churches to turn over their old and neglected cemeteries to provide more parking lots for the nation’s burgeoning army of automobiles.
The director of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. James Shannon, said doctors should persuade carriers of genetic defects either not to marry or to have no children if they do.
Campus Crusade tried its first “saturation” campaign at Ohio State University last month in “Operation Other Side,” designed to describe Christianity to students who reject the faith without investigating it. During meetings ranging from 125 discussion groups to a campus-wide rally, nearly 500 students indicated first decisions for Christ.
The Latin America Mission concluded a year of evangelistic work with a rally and march of 10,000 in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. Churches report 11,500 new professions of faith.
