Black Evangelical Students and the Formation of the Black Evangelical Renaissance
Today we welcome Tim Ballard to the blog! Tim
Ballard is a historian of twentieth-century evangelicalism at the University of
Montana and recently defended his dissertation “The Missionary Enterprise,
Racial Conflict, and the Transformation of American Evangelicalism, 1945-1980.”
In his attempt to historicize the development of multiethnic theology, Tim
continually came across the critical interventions of black evangelicals. He
decided to give this intervention a name: The Black Evangelical Renaissance.
This post introduces the arrival of the Black Evangelical Renaissance through
the lens of the collegiate ministry of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship.
Tim Ballard
Posted by Janine Giordano Drake.
Carl Ellis, Jr., was a veteran of direct
action campaigns by the age of eighteen. When he arrived at Hampton Institute
in the fall of 1965 to begin college, though, he sought out the company of
evangelical Christians rather than activists. Along with his new friends, he
chartered a chapter of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship (IVCF)–the only active
chapter at a historically black institution. Like other chapters, Hampton Institute’s
IVCF operated as a lay missionary society to the campus and hosted bible studies
and lectures to commend evangelical faith to their peers and professors. Despite
some initial successes, the growing racial crisis in the United States put a
damper on their evangelization efforts. During the summer of 1967, residents of
urban neighborhoods across the nation clashed with police and National Guard soldiers
as they vented their frustration at the many manifestations of racial
inequality.[1] In
response, Hampton Institute began to buzz with criticism of America’s
racialized society and a renunciation of Christianity for its use as a tool of
racial subjugation. Hampton IVCF shared in the frustrations expressed by other
students, but they were caught off guard by the formidable challenge to their
faith. At a loss for an answer, Ellis looked forward to the Urbana missionary
convention to be held in December of 1967, a triennial event where collegians,
ministers, and missionaries gathered to promote the missionary enterprise. He
anticipated that someone among the ten thousand attendees could counter the
charge that Christianity was irredeemably racist. Yet, when no reference was
made to the summer uprising or the resurgence of black protest, Ellis was even
more demoralized. On the final day of the convention, he and other black
attendees staged an impromptu disruption–inspired by an all-night prayer
meeting and borrowing from the tactics of the sit-ins–to register their
discontent at the convention’s silence on the urgent topic of racial inequality.[2]
Black
students’ disruption at IVCF’s missionary convention signaled a change in
approach black evangelicals took to address racial inequality in the
evangelical movement and in the nation at large. This post explores the
contrasts between the two approaches, then outlines the intervention that black
students made in IVCF to reshape collegiate ministry in light of America’s
endemic racial order. Taken together, their disruption and sustained
intervention illustrate a dynamic black evangelical faith taking shape in the
late 1960s that fused the language of black cultural identity with evangelical
mission strategy to work for racial equality–a development worthy of its own
name, the Black Evangelical Renaissance.
In
the early 1960s, black evangelicals came to equate the emphasis on foreign
mission in evangelical organizations with the neglect of African Americans.[3] In
1963, a group of black clergy created the National Negro Evangelical
Association (NNEA) to shore up that neglect by taking upon themselves the task
of evangelization in black neighborhoods. Annual gatherings of the NNEA focused
on mobilizing for evangelization, a decision that addressed the consequences of
neglect but did not directly confront white evangelicals for their hand
perpetuating it.[4]
At a 1966 Congress on World Evangelization in Berlin, the plenary sessions and
workshops managed to say nothing about racial equality–despite the theme of the
event being whose theme was “One Race,
One Gospel, One Task.” When a group of African-American attendees confronted
conference organizers about the omission, they were asked to write a statement
expressing the conference’s commitment to racial equality and acknowledging
“the failure of many of us in the recent past to speak with sufficient clarity
and force upon the biblical unity of the human race.”[5] That
statement was published in the official record of the conference, but with no
attribution of authorship readers had no way of knowing that black evangelicals
had penned the words of contrition that effectively applied only to white
evangelicals.
Black
evangelical students had a different response to the evasion of race issues at
the Urbana convention of 1967. Eschewing isolation or
back channel diplomacy, they held an all-night prayer meeting followed by an
impromptu disruption that resembled the disruptions of civil rights
demonstrations. Initially, they were disillusioned and genuinely
entertained the idea that God was active everywhere around the world except for
black communities. Overwhelmed by that prospect, the students
turned from conversation to prayer, calling out their fears to God and seeking
divine insight. Then, sobered by prayer, they spent the very late hours of the
night deciding what to do next. By morning, they had drafted a statement
expressing their disappointment and had convinced IVCF campus ministers to read
it in front of the assembly during the final session.[6] In the span of a long evening, the students had moved
beyond disoriented introspection about their personal faith to confront their
faith community about issues of race using an unprecedented maneuver for
evangelicals. They made their discontent known publicly and used the reading of
their statement to interject the issue of race into the convention program. As
in the sit-ins, the disruption dramatized the existence of America’s entrenched
racial order at play in the evangelical movement and initiated a negotiation with
IVCF for a remedy. Faced with this impromptu disruption, IVCF’s campus
ministers asked for black students’ help to establish more missionary societies
among African-American collegians.
In the years
immediately following their disruption, black evangelical students attempted to
reshape IVCF’s collegiate ministry to speak directly to the experiences of
African Americans and to make racial equality a top priority for IVCF’s
missionary societies on college campuses. As more students at black institutions
joined IVCF, they created venues for exploring a distinctive black evangelical
identity–a remarkable contrast to the colorblind orientation that erased racial
identity in order to undermined segregationists’ claims of racial superiority. Black
IVCF students partnered with a black evangelist named Tom Skinner to present an
evangelistic message to black collegians that matched the intensity of the
Black Power movement. A provocative gang-member-turned evangelist from Harlem,
Skinner preached salvation as the divine means of liberating black people from
oppression. Black students and black clergy also devised constructive ways for
IVCF to discuss racial inequality and promoted racial harmony between
evangelicals as a means to authenticate the gospel to potential converts. While
in the initial stages of implementing these changes, America’s racial crisis
crescendoed. In March of 1968, President’s Johnson’s Commission on Civil
Disorders declared that the nation had “two societies, separate and unequal;”
barely a month later, the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., evoked more
public demonstrations of grief and discontent among African Americans. As the association
of Christianity with white hegemony continued to hinder evangelization, Skinner
attempted to distance himself from white-led IVCF and laid plans for an
independent evangelical collegiate ministry just for black students.[7]
Although
it achieved only modest success, the intervention of black students and clergy
in IVCF is an example of the Black Evangelical Renaissance that emerged in the
late 1960s. Rhetorically, the Black Evangelical Renaissance articulated an
evangelical faith that was disentangled from its complicity in maintaining
white hegemony. Practically, the assertion of new ideas about racial identity
and the push for independence challenged a regime of white authority, wherein colorblindness
masked white evangelicals’ implicit claimed to be the stewards of evangelical
institutions and the final arbiters of evangelical disputes. In IVCF, the initial
challenge would trigger a greater conflict as it provoked the fears of the
organization’s white leaders. During the 1970s, IVCF would engage in a
contentious dispute among its students and ministers about the importance of
racial equality vis-Ã -vis the priority for eliciting conversions. In the
process, black participants looked for new ways to expose and disrupt the
exercise of white hegemony that undergirded the dispute.
Of
interest to scholars and other observers of American evangelicalism, the
arrival of a Black Evangelical Renaissance that coincided with the escalation
of Black Power is one component of a reappraisal of the movement’s postwar
developments of my recently completed dissertation “The Missionary Enterprise,
Racial Conflict, and the Transformation of American Evangelicalism, 1945-1980.”
The project seeks to more fully describe how black evangelicals participated in
the movement and argues that racial conflict was a critical agent in the
transformation of the movement in the postwar decades. Outside the field of
evangelical history, the Black Evangelical Renaissance reinforces the fact that
the racial order was an essential and pervasive feature of twentieth-century
American society. Likewise, Americans challenged the racial order in a
multiplicity of ways across the century. Although parochial in tone and focus,
the Black Evangelical Renaissance was one effort among many in the black
freedom struggle that challenged and partially displaced the regime of white
hegemony and established more equitable terms of participation in civil society
and in religious communities.
[1]
Steven M. Gillon, Separate and Unequal:
The Kerner Commission and the Unraveling of American Liberalism, (New York:
Basic Books, 2018), ix-xvi.
[2]
Carl Ellis, Jr., spoke about his civil rights activism on “What Changed for
Evangelicals When MLK Was Killed,” Quick
To Listen, Podcast Audio, April 4, 2018.
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2018/april-web-only/evangelicals-martin-luther-king-mlk-assassination.html.
Accessed November 12, 2018. Information on the Hampton Institute IVCF chapter
found in the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association Archive, Collection 300, Box
187, Folder 9
[3]
Fred A. Alexander, “You Have Neglected My People,” Freedom Now, Vol. 1 No. 1, August 1965, 6-7. Alexander wrote that
he had reprinted it from an article he had saved by Rev. B. M. Nottage with the
same name from Eternity magazine in
1957.
[4]
William Bentley, “Factors in the Origin and Focus of The National Black
Evangelical Association,” Black Theology:
A Documentary History, Gayraud Wilmore and James Cone, eds., (Maryknoll,
NY: Orbis, 1979), 310-321.
[5]
Carl F. H. Henry and W Stanley Mooneyham, One
Race, One Gospel, One Task, (Minneapolis: World Wide Publications, 1967),
6; Robert Harrison, When God Was Black, (Grand
Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1971), 144-146.
[6]
Carl Ellis, Jr., interviewed by the author, September 4, 2017.
[7]
The features of black students’ intervention in InterVarsity are compiled from
archival material at the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association Archive,
Collection 300, Box 187, Folders 9 and12 and Box 193, Folder 8.
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