Biblical Defenses of Segregation
Date: Fri, 10 May 1996
From: Robert Van Dyk
Subject: sources on biblical defense of segregation
Can anyone suggest good primary or secondary sources on biblical defenses of segregation?
Thanks in advance.
Robert Van Dyk
Pacific University
Forest Grove, Oregon 97116
Date: Sat, 11 May 1996
From: David Herr
Subject: Biblical justifications for segregation - 2 responses
As for primary sources on biblical justifications for segregation, the best I can think of is the oft-repeated Mosaic law ban on the Israelites mixing with the Canaanites during the conquest described in the book of Joshua. This particular source comes from the memory of having such balderdash repeated around me by older relatives when I was a kid in the 1970s.
Ricky Dobbs, Texas A&M
------------------------------------------------------------------
This isn't quite what you asked for, but the May 10 New York Times reports that Alabama State Senator Charles Davidson recently distributed copies of a speech claiming biblical support of slavery. Davidson prepared the speech for a Senate debate on whether to fly the Confederate flag over the state capitol, and cited Leviticus 25:44 and I Timothy 6:1 as his scriptural foundation.
Davidson also claimed that "nowhere on the face of the earth, in all of time, were servants better treated" than enslaved African Americans, and he's currently seeking the Republican nomination to represent Alabama's Fourth Congressional district.
City University of New York
Date: Mon, 13 May 1996
From: Adele Oltman
Subject: Biblical justification for slavery - 1 side note
<<-- This isn't quite what you asked for, but the May 10 New York Times reports that Alabama State Senator Charles Davidson recently distributed copies of a speech claiming biblical support of slavery. Davidson prepared the speech for a Senate debate on whether to fly the Confederate flag over the state capitol, and cited Leviticus 25:44 and I Timothy 6:1 as his scriptural foundation.
Davidson also claimed that "nowhere on the face of the earth, in all of time, were servants better treated" than enslaved African Americans, and he's currently seeking the Republican nomination to represent Alabama's Fourth Congressional district.
Angus Johnston
City University of New York-->>
Re: the New York Times, May 10, 1996 article about State Senator Charles Davidson, who is seeking a first term in the U.S. Senate. After reading Davidson's speech, which did provide Biblical justification for slavery, Martha Foy, the state Republican National Committeewoman said, "I just find it shocking he could have spent so much time on this." However, she did not seem to disagree with the content of his speech.
Adele Oltman
Columbia University
AO9.Columbia.edu
Date: Tue, 14 May 1996
From: David L. Carlton
Subject: Re: Biblical justification for slavery
Re. Alabama State Senator Charles Davidson, running for the U.S. House from Alabama--An AP story of May 11 reports that he's dropped out of the race amid criticism of his defense of slavery. BTW, he denies any "racial motivation." Re the biblical justification for segregation, the most striking use of scripture to such ends that I can recall from my youth was Acts 17:26 (KJV): "And [God] hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, and hath determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation." This verse is extracted from Paul's Sermon on Mars Hill, and is normally interpreted as a declaration of Christian universalism; indeed, it was commonly used in the nineteenth century to refute racist theories of polygenesis. But the phrase "bounds of their habitation" was used to claim that segregation, as an existing "bound," must ipso facto be divinely ordained.
Date: Tue, 14 May 1996
From: Jessica Slavin
Subject: segregation justification
Angus Johnston noted in his Saturday post that Davidson was running for the Senate. I think he's already pulled out of the race, due to the uproar over his remarks in favor of slavery. The local newspaper here, the _Tallahassee Democrat_, had a blurb on his pulling out of the race. I think it ran late last week, but I can't find it now.
Jessica Slavin
Ph.D. candidate
Florida State University
jslavin@mailer.fsu.edu
Date: Wed, 15 May 1996
From: Henry Kamerling
Subject: Re: sources on biblical defense of segregation (2 posts)
>From James Miller, Emory University
This may be a bit earlier than you are looking for, but journals like the southern Presbyterian Review, Southern Review, and Presbyterian Quarterly have quite a lot of discussion of the movement of black and white christians into separate churches in the years after the Civil War. These contain quite a lot of discussion of how race and religious relations should be ordered in te absence of slavery.
Separation of the races seems to have presented a dilemma for many whose defense of slavery had been premised on the benefits for both slaves and society of the proximity of black and white people. A further problem was that while one could make a case that the Bible did show that slavery (although not necessarily race-based slavery) was "ordained of God" it required the most inventive exegesis to discover support for racial segregation (as Prof. Carlton's post suggests). The biblical defense of slavery included references to such things as the divine blessings often bestowed upon slaveholding patriarchs, the inclusion of "manservants and maidservants" as property in Mosaic Law, and advice to the fugitive slave Onesimus to return to his master. Implict support was infered from Jesus's and the Apostle's lack of condemnation for the widespread slavery of the Roman Empire.
After the war, without specific chapter and verse to bolster their arguments, one-time paternalists were reduced to reliance on the kind of vague "spirit of the Bible, God would have wanted it that way" interpretation that they had once roasted infidel abolitionists for employing as a substitute for specific references to the Word of God. For example, the Rev Benjamin Palmer, leading proslavery advocate before the war, in 1887: "The color line is distinctly drawn by Jehovah himself; it is drawn in nature and in history in such a form as to make it a sin and a crime to undertake to obliterate it. Pointing to the confusion of tongues at Babel as a divine measure to "restrain sin within tolerable bounds," Palmer suggested that "race distinctions were probably developed at the same time, and for the same purpose." Quoted in C.R. Vaughan, "The Southern General Assembly," Presbyterian Quarterly 1 (1887-88).
Based on my limited research in this area I have the impression that biblical arguments for black subjugation declined after the war, and were superceded by, or blended with, many of the kinds of arguments - based on "science," "nature," etc - that in some ways the biblical defense of slavery had once kept in check. For example, Nashville publisher Buckner Payne, writing under the name of Ariel, argued that The Flood was divine punishment for human amalgamation with "beasts" and claimed that black people were not descended from Adam and Eve and were therefore not human. Instead they were part of pre-Adamic creation and, "like all beasts and cattle, they have no souls." See Ariel, "The Negro: What is his Ethnological Status? Is he the progeny of Ham? Is he a descendant of Adam and Eve? Has he a soul? Or is he a beast in God's nomenclature? What is his status as fixed by God in creation? What is his relation to the white race?" (Cincinnati, 1867) Ariel was probably a bit ahead of his time. Such views were still pretty much anathema to religious whites who nevertheless considered black people inferior. Robert A. Young, "The Negro A Reply to Ariel (Nashville, 1867) is one rebuttal.
You might also look at Hinton Rowan Helper, enemy of slavery and slaves and friend to the working white man, who wrote "Nojoque: A question for a Continent" (New York, 1867) which contained a chapter on "A score of bible lessons in the arts of annihilating effete races" which Helper claimed presented the biblical case for that sincerest of all forms of segregation, genocide. Prompted by such attitudes and increasing talk of race war, some one-time paternalists turned to presenting segregation as being for black southerners' own good and safety, some even going so far as to argue for colonization in Africa - another extreme form of segregationist thinking. Methodist Albert Bledsoe, for example, claimed that the slave had been but a "sojourner" in the South for "educational purposes only." It was "the mission of the African in the United States ... to civilize a continent and to redeem an entire race from heathenism to Christianity, a work for which he, and he alone, is the fittest agent." "The African in the United States," Southern Review 14 (1874.) That once-coherent religious defenders of slavery ended up sounding like born-again Harriet Beecher Stowes suggests, perhaps, the confusion of those who could not find the biblical support for racial segregation that they had found for slavery.
As I say, this is based on limited research in a limited time period, so it may be that more sustained attempts to provide scriptural support for segregation were out there or emerged later. Charles Carroll's "The Negro a Beast or In the Image of God," written in 1900 and republished in 1968, is one later polemic that might be worth a look. The works of George Fredrickson and Joel Williamson, among others, would presumably be good starting points in search of further primary and secondary material covering a wider timeframe, while Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene Genovese have written several articles on the religous basis of the proslavery defense, and argue the point that I have repeated here, namely that the Bible provided far better support for slavery than for segregation. I hope this is of some help.
James Miller
-----------------------------------------------------------------
From: Will Glass
I have frequently come across Acts 17:26 as justifying segregation used in precisely the way David Carlton suggested in my research on fundamentalists in the South. What is interesting is the way some men of northern roots (e.g., Robert McQuilkin, founder of Columbia Bible College) accomodated themselves to southern ways in adopting the segregationist interpretation of this verse.
Will Glass
Mississippi University for Women
Date: Thu, 16 May 1996
From: Jeff Roche
Subject: Biblical support of segregation
Robert,
I would examine issues of _Southern School News_ from the 1950s through the early 1960s. The magazine was dedicated to distributing information on the desegregation of southern schools. It covers every state and includes segments of speeches from most southern politicians and newspaper editors. Another good source would be Numan Bartley's _The Rise of Massive Resistance_. It is important to remember that the most heated defenses of segregation came when it was under attack after the _Brown decision.
Jeff Roche
The University of New Mexico
Date: Fri, 17 May 1996
From: Jeanette Keith
Subject: The Biblical Defense of Segregation--personal story
I have no sources to add to this discussion, but a bit of personal history. I was raised in the fundamentalist Church of Christ. My father was a Sunday school teacher, and like many Southern Christians in the early 1960s struggled with the contradictions between his faith and the region's social customs. I'll never forget his face when a man asked him during Bible class if "niggers had souls." One of the very old men in the congregation piped up in a cracked voice from the amen corner, "They darkies have souls. They have souls just like us."
Is that a Southern story, or what?
Jeanette Keith
Bloomsburg U. of PA
keith@planetx.bloomu.edu
Date: Fri, 17 May 1996
From: Michael Foret
Subject: Biblical justifications for slavery--Query
Does anyone know where we might be able to pull the speech in question off the net or the web? I cover this in my U.S. survey and a one-semester survey in racial and ethnic groups in the U.S. I'm doing racial and ethnic groups this summer, and I think this could be a great discussion generator.
I'm sure other listers would like to read the entire text as well. Isn't that what we're supposed to do with our sources?
Michael James Foret
University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point
mforet@uwspmail.uwsp.edu
Date: Mon, 20 May 1996
From: Mike Casey
Subject: Churches of Christ and race (was Biblical defense of....)
Jeanette Keith's post reminds me that some new sources are available on the Churches of Christ and race and might have some relevance to the postings on the biblical defense of segregation.
My colleague at Pepperdine, Richard Hughes, has published a history of the Churches of Christ: <
I have a recent book on the history of preaching in same tradition: <
http://www.mun.ca/rels/restmov/restmov.html
Michael Casey
Communication Division
Pepperdine University
Malibu, CA 90263
mcasey@pepperdine.edu
[an error occurred while processing this directive]
| ||||
