Race and Restoration by Barclay Key

Author:Barclay Key
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: LSU Press
Published: 2020-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

5

JUDGMENT DAYS

No year has produced as many iconic images as 1968. The Tet offensive, political assassinations, Olympic games, and a presidential campaign provided numerous dramatic moments. One standard history textbook even claims that the “Sixties reached their climax in 1968, a year when momentous events succeeded each other so rapidly that the foundations of society seemed to be dissolving.” Many Americans witnessed such events unfold on their television screens, as breaking and live coverage lent an immediacy to drama that might have otherwise seemed distant. Amid these headlines, Churches of Christ wrestled with racial problems in new ways that suggested both the hopes and limitations of interracial dialogue in 1968. Long before media pundits and politicos spoke of a “national conversation on race” in the 1990s, several churches and individuals experimented with venues of open and honest communication among blacks and whites.1

These exchanges were inspired by a variety of events, including churches’ general tardiness in confronting racial animosities, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., the death of Marshall Keeble, and a provocative sermon series on race that was broadcast across the nation by the Herald of Truth, a syndicated radio program financed by Churches of Christ. Responses to these events provide compelling materials for assessing black and white racial attitudes in 1968. They show how churches and individual members proposed to address escalating racial tensions and past injustices. But in many respects, these dialogues became the last of their kind, as black and white churches ironically became more estranged after the demise of legal segregation. While black and white churches continued to agree that racial prejudice was wrong, they maintained profound differences over what such prejudice actually entailed, even as more and more whites came to see racial segregation as sinful. Blacks and whites also differed over the legacies of racial injustice and desirable solutions to racial inequalities. These were judgment days for the faithful, and many people wondered what repentance should look like.

The first such conversation in 1968 occurred during the first week of March at Nashville’s historically black Schrader Lane Church of Christ. The church’s young minister, David Jones Jr., organized what was billed as a “race relations workshop” for area churches and any interested citizens. Known as the Jefferson Street Church of Christ until it fell victim to urban renewal and Interstate Highway 40, the Schrader Lane church hosted the workshop, a week-long series of nightly meetings, in their new building across from Tennessee State University, a historically black public university. Both the building and the workshop were turning points in the church’s history. While the Jefferson Street church had often relied on the beneficence of whites, the new building “was the culmination of a plan to change the image of the church,” their self-published history explains. “No Church of Christ had taken such a bold step” in hosting such a workshop that was also “designed to launch the church into its new role as leader in self-government.” These comments illustrated the competing motives that existed

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