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By Diane Singer|Published Date: February 08, 2010
I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me.
John 17:23
A Tragic Event
On September 15, 1963, a bomb exploded at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. Four young girls – Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley – were killed in the blast, and 22 others were injured. The church was targeted by those who opposed desegregation because it was a training center for participants in the 1963 Birmingham Children’s Campaign, the Civil Rights demonstrations famously defended by Dr. Martin Luther King in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” [1]
Artists have honored the lives lost that day in a variety of ways – from a stained-glass window of a black Jesus given to the church by the people of Wales [2], to Spike Lee’s 1997 documentary Four Little Girls. Six years after the bombing, poet Dudley Randall penned a particularly poignant tribute in “The Ballad of Birmingham.” [3] The poem records a conversation between a mother and her daughter who wants to “march the streets of Birmingham / To make our country free” (ll. 11-12). The mother fears that her daughter will be harmed if she participates in the demonstrations, saying “No, baby, no, you may not go, / For the dogs are fierce and wild, / And clubs and hoses, guns and jails / Aren’t good for a little child” (ll. 5-8). The mother, of course, wins the argument, and instead allows her child to go to church where she will be safe “in the sacred place” (l. 22). When the blast rips apart the church, the mother’s worst fears are realized: clawing “through bits of glass and brick,” she finds only one familiar item, her daughter’s shoe (ll. 30-33).
The Church’s Failure
Randall ably captures the mother’s pain, and conjures up those “what if” moments which haunt parents who have unwittingly sent their children into harm’s way. More importantly, he highlights the tragedy of such violence taking place in a church, and he indirectly reminds readers that while the black church was deeply involved in working toward racial equality in America, the white church was not.
King was highly critical of the white Southern church in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” and with good reason: it largely upheld the status quo (segregation) while urging blacks to “wait” – as if 100 years of waiting for the freedom they had been promised by the Emancipation Proclamation weren’t long enough. Even worse, the white church did little to teach its members to put into practice the equality that all people share as those made in God’s image – especially the freedom and equality shared by those united by faith in Jesus Christ (Galatians 3:28).
One white Christian who understood the inherent hypocrisy of Southern life was Lillian Smith (1897-1966), who once described her upbringing this way:
I do not remember how or when, but by the time I had learned that God is love, that Jesus is His Son and came to give us more abundant life, that all men are brothers with a common Father, I also knew that I was better than a Negro, that all black folks have their place and must be kept in it … [and] that a terrifying disaster would befall the South if ever I treated a Negro as my social equal…. I had learned that God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son so that we might have segregated churches in which it was my duty to worship each Sunday and on Wednesday at evening prayers. I had learned that white southerners are a hospitable, courteous, tactful people who treat those of their own group with consideration and who as carefully segregate from all the richness of life “for their own good and welfare” thirteen million people whose skin is colored a little differently than my own. [4]
A Long Way to Go
Though Smith penned her words many years ago, and though I’d like to believe that the type of racism silently preached in those old Southern churches (and elsewhere) is no longer a reality, I know better. True, the “Whites Only” drinking fountains of my youth are gone; and our neighborhoods, workspaces, and classrooms have been fully integrated for decades. Yet only the willfully blind would claim that racism is not alive and well in America. While a recent Pew poll claims that many black Americans feel real progress toward racial equality has been made (especially in light of President Obama’s election), both blacks and whites acknowledge that we still have a long way to go. [5]
The sad truth is that 147 years after Lincoln freed the slaves, our nation’s self-inflicted racial wounds – slavery and segregation – have not fully healed; and the 46 years since the 1964 Civil Rights Act have shown us that there’s no quick-and-easy cure. Nevertheless, one fact is certain where Christians are concerned: the well-spring of that racial healing should be our churches.
A Call to Practice What We Preach
Randall teaches us that the church should not be a violent place; Smith teaches us that it should not be a hypocritical one. Jesus and Paul teach us what the church should be: a place where we are “perfectly one” (John 17:23) and a place where the commands to love God, to love one another, and to see each other as equals in Christ Jesus are faithfully preached and practiced. Only then will Christians go out into the world and live up to their calling to be “salt and light” (Matthew 5:13-16). Only then will the Church – in Dr. King’s words – once again be a “thermostat” which changes the surrounding culture in ways which glorify the Lord. Only then will Christians demonstrate to a fragmented society what true disciples look like: we’re people defined not by the color of our skin, the shape of our eyes, or our nation of origin, but by the depth of our love for one another (John 13:34-35).
The apostle John writes about a future day when believers from “every tribe and language and people and nation” will stand before Christ, worshipping together and singing a new song (Rev. 5:9). So my question is this: Why put off until heaven what you can do today? If you are looking for a new church, consider one which is racially and culturally diverse. If you are a member of a predominately white church, look for ways to join with a predominately black church for times of worship, fellowship, and service (and vice versa). Then, beyond church walls, cultivate friendships with people from all walks of life. Jesus did, and so should His disciples.
For more information on racial healing, get the book, The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience, by Ronald Sider at our online store. Or read the article, “Elect from Every Nation” by Paul Kjoss Helseth.
[1] You can read a recent ChangePoint article about Dr. King’s letter and its connection to the Manhattan Declaration at http://www.colsoncenter.org/the-center/columns/changepoint/13946-letter-from-a-birmingham-jail. The article also links to Dr. King’s original letter.
[2] You can view a photo of the church’s stained glass window at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Stained_glass_window_at_the_16th_Street_Baptist_Church_in_Birmingham.jpg
[3] The poem can be found at http://webinstituteforteachers.org/~vfjohnson/ballbham.html.
[4] Smith, Lillian. “When I Was a Child.” Wayne C. Booth and Marshall W. Gregory, eds. The Harper and Row Reader. New York: Harper & Row, 1984. p 373.
[5] You can read the results of the poll at http://pewsocialtrends.org/pubs/749/blacks-upbeat-about-black-progress-obama-election.
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