In the most sweeping integration order ever issued against a big school system outside the South, Los Angeles was ordered to integrate its 622 schools with 674,000 students, starting next September. To achieve full integration, elementary and secondary schools in neighboring Pasadena were lumped into four “corridors,” with busing of students planned up to ten miles within each zone. School officials said the busing could cost $1 million a year.
These actions illustrate a new dimension to the intensifying national school crisis. They reveal problems in the North that school districts in the South have been facing for years.
In a number of cities—notably in the South—a strategy used to subvert integration of public schools is the opening of nonsectarian “private” schools. While few of these schools overtly admit it, most become all-white havens for desegregation dodgers.
In the Jackson, Mississippi, area, for instance, the White Citizens Councils of America, a white-supremacy group, estimates nearly 3,000 new students were enrolled in its private schools during the first six weeks of this year. Similar reports come from Alabama, Florida, and Georgia.
Responsible Christian bodies and associations of Christian schools, though, appear to be heavily opposed to racially segregated private schools.
Dr. John F. Blanchard, Jr., executive director of the National Association of Christian Schools (affiliated with the National Association of Evangelicals), spoke in an interview about the association’s 300 member schools. “We will not accept a school whose literature says it is for white children only,” he said. He estimates that two-thirds to four-fifths of the NACS schools (with a total enrollment of 53,000) have at least token integration. The association itself has grown rapidly in the past several years. But Blanchard does not think the upsurge was caused by the desire of parents to circumvent integration. Rather, they are upset over sex-education courses in public schools and are also alarmed about the general secular tone there.
“Parents suddenly are awakened to the fact that secular education—which is education without God—is undermining the faith of their children,” Blanchard believes.
Writer Joe Bayly of David C. Cook publishers, who is president of the NACS board, said the NACS’s policy is to try to determine whether a school applying for membership is founded on Christian principles or merely on segregation or “super-patriotism.” “We want schools that are Christocentric … rather than those that are trying to escape the Supreme Court ruling on a local level or to protest the lack of patriotism within public schools,” he said.
Apparently private “Christian” schools in Dixie are getting the NACS message: only one in Mississippi has become a NACS member in the past three years, Blanchard said.
The National Union of Christian Schools represents 287 elementary and secondary schools in twenty-six states and Canada. About 85 per cent of the pupils’ parents are members of the Christian Reformed Church. Perhaps twenty-five to thirty of the schools are integrated, according to John A. Vander Ark, NUCS director and editor of its magazine, Christian Home and School. Vander Ark said the NUCS urges that “there be no discrimination on the basis of race.” A revamped policy “advising open admissions” is in the works, Vander Ark added. It is in line with the strong stand against discrimination taken by the Christian Reformed Church in 1968.
Speaking about 1,236 elementary (with 154,000 students) and twenty-five community secondary schools related to the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, Dr. Arthur Miller of the denomination’s Board of Parish Education said: “We would offer no encouragement at all to congregations that would want to start a school to escape integration.… That would do violence to the Christian school concept.”
The denomination adopted a statement at its convention last July stating that the Lutheran school “is not to provide parents an escape from sending their children to racially or culturally integrated schools.” About 640 of the Missouri Synod-related elementary schools are integrated, according to Dr. Martin F. Wessler, the synod’s associate secretary of schools.
In addition to these three major affiliations of Christian schools, there are a number of regional associations and quasi-associations of private schools. One is the Association for Christian Schools, run in Houston by T. Robert Ingram.
Some persons acquainted with the association say it is strongly committed to segregation. Ingram simply says his organization (it has no member schools) has no statement on race: “We don’t concern ourselves with this.… The compulsory school attendance system is unlawful.… Confusion across the country has stimulated interest in the Christian school movement. Those setting up a school should run it as they see fit.”
Ingram expects about one hundred school administrators, teachers, board members, and parents to attend a three-day ACS annual conference in Houston next month. The major concern will be Creation and the public schools.
Most denominations officially oppose school segregation. At the local level, however, makeshift, hastily formed “Christian academies” are springing up. Few if any of these schools bother to affiliate with national organizations like the NACS or the NUCS.
Last January, thirty-six representatives of a black Catholic parish in Indianola, Mississippi, picketed a white sister church that had sold its old building to be used for a new, presumably all-white private school. Asked if the private school was being established to avoid integration, the white minister of the black church replied, “That’s right.” The pastor of the white parish declined to reply.
In Tunica, Mississippi, Protestants have established private schools “to circumvent federal court integration orders,” reports Evangelical Press. Some 350 white children and half of Tunica’s thirty white teachers took their public-school textbooks and crowded into the small rooms of the church schools. (Mississippi law permits the use of public-school books in private schools.)
In the wake of court desegregation orders, Religious News Service noted, sixteen Baptist churches in Mississippi’s Adams County banded to open a private school. The announcement was greeted with more than 2,400 “good faith” applications (each with a $20 deposit) from students who had previously attended public schools.
Nobody seems to know how many “segregation academies” there are, or how fast the movement is expanding. Persons familiar with the situation, like Joe Bayly, say it is a fairly serious problem. But Bayly adds quickly that some all-white Christian schools are “quietly moving toward integration.”
Although he recognizes that havens of segregation exist, Dr. William L. Pressley, headmaster of Atlanta’s prestigious Westminster Schools, advises new schools to start out with an open admission policy. The Westminster Schools—six units for kindergartners through high schoolers—were among the first private schools in the Southeast to take the integration leap. The move, made six years ago, cost them no students, Pressley reports, though a few parents recorded their displeasure. Now black students, who get equal consideration when scholarships are distributed1Many independent “prep” schools have willingly opened their doors and scholarship funds to Negroes. Notable among such Chirstian schools is the Stony Brook School on Long Island., are considered “constructive” additions to the schools.
One private school due to start in September, 1971, with an open admission policy is Linfield School in southern California. The expensive ($3,100-a-year), non-denominational boarding school for grades seven through twelve will open the doors of its 100-acre campus to blacks, says president and founder Donn C. Odell, “if they qualify.”
Official denominational pressure has been mounting lately to support unified public-school systems and to oppose private schools based on segregation.
In Mississippi, arms of the Episcopal and United Methodist churches have gone on record declaring these principles. So have the editors of two dozen Baptist state papers throughout the nation. And a similiar stand will be proposed for adoption by the national conference of the United Methodists at a meeting in St. Louis next month.
The Mecklenburg Presbytery of the Southern Presbyterian Church has gone a step farther: it instructed member churches in the Charlotte, North Carolina, area “that no private school (grades 1 through 12) in competition with the public school system should be operated by, or housed in, church facilities.”
Segregation in Roman Catholic parochial schools presents problems not unlike those in the Protestant milieu. Opponents of federal aid to education, notably Americans United for Separation of Church and State, fear that government funding of parochial schools will produce a mass exodus from the public education system. This, foes declare, not only will cost taxpayers more; it also will make public schools a dumping ground for minority students while white students transfer to “racist parochial schools.”
In an apparent effort to calm such fears, some Catholic educators have taken recent action to halt the segregation influx in parochial schools. Several Southern dioceses have barred public-school transfer students from entering Catholic schools. In St. Paul, pupils in six Catholic elementary schools have been regrouped by age and bused among four schools in an attempt to end de facto segregation and improve inner-city education.
Nevertheless, many Christian schools will continue to have segregation or only token integration as long as neighborhoods are segregated. And tuition costs of private schools—Christian and otherwise—tend to make them accessible mainly to the economically advantaged. The doors of Christian schools are closed to many minority and lower-class children simply because their parents can’t afford to send them.
Pastoral Pilgrimage
Into the furor of the school desegregation hassle rode seventeen Alabama ministers recently, their jaunt taking them to the Washington offices of a special counsel to President Nixon (Harry Dent) and a Supreme Court justice (Hugo Black), among others.
The ministers’ purpose was: to reflect concern over the growing number of private schools popping up in the South in the wake of federal orders to intensify integration; to reflect feelings of many of their parishioners favoring freedom of choice in the public schools; and to oppose busing of school children.
One of the group’s organizers was Dr. R. B. Culbreth, pastor of Birmingham’s Huffman Baptist Church and former pastor of Metropolitan Baptist Church in Washington, D. C. Culbreth once counted among his members South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond, who helped arrange the appointments for the ministers.
All the ministers making the trip were Southern Baptist except for the Reverend Pete Clifford, a Birmingham United Methodist pastor. The group included the president of the Alabama Baptist Convention.
Ralph Feild, chief organizer of the trip, said: “This administration is in sympathy with the South. It is against forced busing and it is determined to save neighborhood schools.”
The ministers emphasized that they had not gone to Washington as segregationists. And, they insisted, most are convinced that private schools for the masses—such as many Southern churches are being pressed to organize—would be “economically discriminatory.”
Several noted they returned from Washington decidedly anti-(George) Wallace. One observed: “It’s almost impossible for the South to get a wide hearing in Washington because of the antics of Wallace and (Georgia governor Lester) Maddox.”
WALLACE HENLEY
Division = Lutheran Unity?
In a February 11 letter to the pastors and teachers of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, President Jacob A. O. Preus warned of a liberal group within the church disrupting its conservative stand on doctrine. Ten days later, some 850 conservative Lutherans heard a call to divide the church along liberal and evangelical lines.
In his “brother-to-brother” letter, Preus scored “prominent and responsible professors and synodical officials” who have circulated a document, “A Call to Openness and Trust.” The St. Louis-based group asks for greater freedom of belief relating to matters they say are not specifically considered in the Scriptures, including biblical inerrancy and the manner of creation.
“Make no mistake about this, brothers,” Preus admonished. “What is at stake is not only inerrancy but the Gospel of Jesus Christ itself, the authority of Holy Scripture, the ‘quia’ subscription to the Lutheran confessions, and perhaps the very continued existence of Lutheranism as a confessional and confessing movement in the Christian world.”
He concluded: “It would be far better for such people to leave our fellowship than to work from within to torment and ultimately to destroy it.” His message didn’t escape the notice of the keynote speaker at a Chicago testimonial for the Reverend Herman Otten, editor of the Christian News.2The 24,000-circulation, independent tabloid weekly was itself repudiated by the Missouri Synod’s Council of Presidents last year for its alleged divisive influence.
Lutheran layman Roy Guess of Casper, Wyoming, told the 850 guests that the Missouri Synod should (1) recognize and define its evident theological division, (2) outlaw liberal theology in the church, and (3) “amicably and fairly” lay the groundwork so liberals can carry on “as they see fit and we, as conservative Bible-believing Missouri Synod Lutherans, may continue in the traditional and historical faith.… This eventually means organizational realignment. I see no other Christian solution.”
Examining Black Theology
What is the meaning of “blackness” for American life in general, and theological formulation in particular? This was the question posed at the Conference on the Black Religious Experience and Theological Education, held February 20–22 at Howard University, in Washington, D. C.
The assembly had the kind of initial advantage that accrues to black-and-white dialogue when blacks outnumber whites—in this case by three to one. It was assumed that there is a typically black theological lifestyle whose justification is found, not in blackness, but in the relative nearness of its formulators to the Judeo-Christian tradition.
At this point the conference became bifocal. One pole was represented by history professor Vincent Harding of Atlanta’s Spelman College, the other by Professor James H. Cone of Union Seminary, New York. Harding proposed that to articulate a valid “black religious experience” one must bypass the formulations of historic Christianity and return to the “faith of the fathers” in pre-slavery Africa. The basic insights that make this primeval “faith” identifiable shine through the poetry and other non-rational elements of the black Christian community. But the major qualities that belong to a valid black religious experience are those of animism. Black Christianity was held to have been superimposed upon this fundament.
The more traditional posture was that Christianity can be made valid for black experience if we can go behind the tradition of Euro-American (read white) Christendom to the Christ who identified with the poor and was “friend of sinners” rather than “patron of the privileged.” Thus a typically black theology was held to be a necessary ingredient in theological education and, as well, an essential corrective to the distortions of American Christendom.
Blackness was seen as less a genetic matter than a psychological one—namely, an increasing self-consciousness of difference from the Euro-American style in life and religion. At times also blackness was equated with economic disadvantage. This led to a strong implicit element of criticism of all forms of middle-class and upper-class American life. American society was branded as being racist and oppressive to visible minorities.
It was a consensus among whites in attendance that they were on the taking end of “sock it to ‘em”—and the experience was probably salutary. It is always good to be compelled to ask, “Is it I?” Probably some forms of rhetoric and hyperbole are essential to shaking established patterns. Certainly the conference held Robert Burns’s mirror to the eyes of members of the privileged majority. Whether it will merely increase the guilt level or lead to constructive results is for the future to decide.
HAROLD B. KUHN
Money For All-Black Groups: Granting The Separatists?
In a controversy similar to the furor over Episcopal money transmitted indirectly to the Black Economic Development Conference (see September 26, 1969, issue, page 42), a new logomachy has surfaced about United Presbyterian involvement with the militant black agency. The question is whether $50,000 received by the BEDC late last year was “United Presbyterian money” by the time the BEDC got it.
Here’s the background, according to Religious News Service reporter Elliot Wright: The United Presbyterian Board of National Missions and the Commission on Ecumenical Mission and Relations were each directed to give $50,000 to the Interreligious Foundation for Community Organization at last May’s UP General Assembly. This money was to be released to IFCO when it had “approved the manner in which the money would be held and administered.”
The mission board was also instructed to “support possibilities recommended to it by IFCO, including those … of the National Black Economic Development Conference.” When IFCO’s board met last September, it agreed to accept the Presbyterian money and channel part of it to the BEDC. In early December, IFCO received the $100,000 and the BEDC got half of that sum the same month.
Ministers’ Social Security
April 15 isn’t only the deadline for clergymen to file their 1969 federal income-tax forms (many will enclose a check); it’s also the last day most of them can request exemption from social security coverage of their earnings from professional services.
Since 1968, earnings of ministers from services in their ministry automatically have been covered for social security purposes. Exemption from this requirement can be obtained only on grounds of conscience or religious principle and a minister who once gets such an exemption cannot later revoke it.
Clergymen electing this exemption must file a completed Internal Revenue Service form 4361 with the IRS by April 15. But the deadline applies only to ministers who had annual earnings in any two years before 1970 of $400 or more from ministerial services. The exemption can’t be applied to wages and self-employment earnings from other sources.
United Presbyterian spokesmen generally say that it was IFCO’s decision—not the denomination’s—to pipe the money to the BEDC, which is closely associated with James Forman’s Black Manifesto. But they add that there was no designation or restriction by the General Assembly that prohibited such action.
The whole involvement came to public light only last month, after a wire story quoted BEDC chairman Calvin Marshall as saying $50,000 had come from United Presbyterians. That money, plus $29,858 from other sources, will be used for the BEDC’s administrative development.
In another funding controversy, officials of the Massachusetts Conference of the United Church of Christ insisted last month that its $1 million grant to black churchmen did not encourage racial separation. But leaders of the NAACP disagreed in a lengthy standoff debate in Boston.
The UCC voted last November to give the $1 million to the state’s Black Ecumenical Commission (BEC) by 1971; $250,000 was paid to the BEC in January. John Morsell, second in command to NAACP executive director Roy Wilkins, echoed an earlier statement by Wilkins that the church’s decision to fund the black commission was “feeding on despair and misguided guilt” and moving toward “the apostleship of black racism.” Other opponents of the grant included AME Zion bishop Stephen Gill Spottswood.
Morsell told the consultation (boycotted by BEC members) that many national religious bodies have now chosen to abandon efforts toward integration and the goals of a single society.
Among those defending the funding was United Methodist bishop James K. Mathews of New England. He called the grant “an investment in justice and human dignity, preeminent concerns of our day.”
Meanwhile, UCC and NAACP agencies entered a joint operation to break down barriers to fair employment in broadcasting industries and to help minority groups “get access to the airwaves.” The UCC’s director of communications, Dr. Everett C. Parker, was joined by NAACP official Jean Fairfax in a statement announcing the program. It asserted that the Federal Communications Commission was guilty of “a shameful, almost incredible delay” in enforcing its own fair-employment rule for the broadcast media.
A primary effort of the venture will be to get stations to hire and train blacks and other minority persons right away, especially for top management levels. Parker’s office already is participating in citizen-group negotiations with management of twenty-four Atlanta, Georgia, stations.
Tracking Down A Killer
A new killer virus discovered in Nigeria, West Africa, claimed the life of Sudan Interior Mission (SIM) missionary doctor Jeanette M. Troup, 46, of Akron, Ohio, on February 18. Her death came just one year after she had treated and diagnosed the first recorded victims of the virus. Dr. Troup, a Wheaton College alumna who served with the SIM for eighteen years, had been treating African patients suffering from Lassa fever at the SIM hospital in Jos.
The lethal virus first appeared in a missionary from Lassa, Nigeria; hence its name. Both she and the nurse attending her at Evangel Hospital died. Another missionary nurse, Lily Pinneo, came down with the fever and was rushed to the United States. After battling for life—with temperatures as high as 107—she recovered miraculously.
So far no effective vaccine has been found to combat Lassa fever. A number of Africans have died of the disease through the years, but no exact figures are available. Research was being conducted at Yale University, but two investigators there were infected with the virus. One died. The university then abandoned research on the disease, and the investigation has now been shifted to the National Communicable Disease Center at Atlanta.
Late last month Miss Pinneo was well enough (after nine weeks in a New York hospital) to return to Jos. She took with her a small supply of plasma from her blood containing antibodies that doctors in Nigeria hope will counteract this otherwise untreatable infection.
W. HAROLD FULLER
