Stefan Lallinger had just finished teaching a lesson that traced the fight for civil rights and school integration in the U.S. when a student in his New Orleans classroom posed a question: “So, why do no white kids go to our school?”
Decades after Lallinger’s own grandfather had helped argue the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case in front of the Supreme Court, which declared that segregated schools were unconstitutional, he said the boy’s question left him speechless — and still demands an answer today.
“I think as a country, more broadly, we don’t have a satisfactory answer to that,” Lallinger said.
Courtesy photo/The Century Foundation Stefan Lallinger will head The Bridges Collaborative, a new initiative launched by The Century Foundation to spark and support school integration efforts.
Segregation remains rampant in American classrooms, and New York City is home to one of the most segregated school systems in the country. Now Lallinger is heading a new effort to address the country’s unfinished business of integrating its schools. He is heading the Bridges Collaborative, an initiative launched Monday by the Century Foundation, a progressive think tank.
The collaborative seeks to fill the gap between research showing more diverse schools can improve outcomes for all students, and the political will to pursue integration. To do that, Lallinger hopes to bring together advocates and policy makers who rarely work together — from charter and district schools, and housing — to learn from successful integration efforts across the country.
Because of the coronavirus pandemic, the collaborative has delayed plans for meeting in person, but is still laying foundations for the inaugural class of about 50. Applications are expected to open this fall.
Lallinger spent about a decade teaching and leading a New Orleans charter school post-Katrina, in classrooms where virtually every student was black and came from low-income homes. For the last year, he was a Harvard doctoral resident working in the New York City education department on integration issues.
Here’s what Lallinger had to say about what’s still standing in the way of more diverse schools, and what integration should look like in 2020.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How would you describe the status of school integration right now?
We know that integration is good for kids and there’s tons of research that backs this up. Yet most people across the country don’t know about that research. In part, because folks don’t know about this — and also because of many, many historical reasons — the state of our public schools continues to be segregated.
Nationally, about a fifth of schools across the country have almost no white children. That is to say, they are 90% or greater students of color. And then another fifth of our schools nationally have almost no students of color. So their student bodies are about 90% or greater white.
There’s other data that shows that the percentage of American schools that are intensely segregated along both racial and socioeconomic lines has actually increased over the last two decades.
So we’re not headed in the right direction, coming up on the 66th anniversary of Brown vs. Board of Education.
What kinds of bridges does this collaborative seek to build? Who or what needs to be brought together to advance school integration?
Ultimately, the goal is to build bridges across lines of difference in our schools and in our classrooms, creating environments in which children who come from different backgrounds have the opportunity to learn together. I don’t think we need to look any further than the state of our country today to see why that is needed.
If that’s not good enough, then there’s research to demonstrate that students who go to integrated schools are much less likely to harbor bias, they’re much likelier to have higher average test scores, much likelier to enroll in college.
Our collaborative is also looking to build bridges across sectors. We’re bringing together folks from school districts, from charter schools, and from fair housing organizations. We want to provide a space for folks to be able to have the difficult conversations and engage in the type of collaboration that is actually going to move the needle in communities across the country.
What is getting in the way of that collaboration now?
To start with, charter and traditional school districts, the way things have been set up structurally, there’s often either competition or distrust.
Then, to bring in the housing folks — oftentimes folks who work in housing and folks who work in education speak in different languages. Getting them on the same page to truly understand what the barriers are that each set of folks face is a feat.
Your grandfather, Louis Redding, was a civil rights lawyer who played a role in the landmark school desegregation case Brown v. Board of Education. How is your personal history connected to your current work?
I always start with my grandfather, a man who was born in 1901 and whose grandmother was a slave. Despite that, he attended Brown University and was one of few African Americans at the time. He decided to move to the South after graduating and went to teach at a school created by freedmen after the Civil War to serve children of emancipated slaves. Then he went to Harvard Law school, where he was one of the first African American graduates of that institution, and decided that he wanted to move back to his home state of Delaware to practice law.
In 1952, he brought two lawsuits against local districts in Delaware, which he won, forcing them to admit black students. When those cases were appealed, they became a part of Brown vs. Board.
I often think about my grandfather and wonder, if he were alive, if he came to tour the school where I was a principal and saw all the amazing things, how proud he would be — and then wonder how long it would take him to realize he was walking the halls of a segregated school, and what he would think about that decades after he won this legal battle.
Why do you think integration should remain a goal of American schools, all these years later?
In the divided society that we live in, research also demonstrates that attending a diverse school helps reduce bias and counter stereotypes. For many of us, this is the most divided any of us have seen our country in our living history, and this is one way we can address that for the future.
Thirdly, this is something that will improve outcomes for students.
How can policymakers begin to overcome skepticism of integration — whether due to racism, from more affluent and white families worried about losing access to ‘good’ schools, or from families of color afraid of sending their children into hostile environments?
Folks by and large don’t have the vision for what a truly integrated school is, and therefore don’t truly know why it’s the best option for all of our students. Additionally, I think a lot of people fall prey to old and stale arguments, and fear mongering tactics.
It’s incumbent on folks who really believe in this issue to make clear, through appropriate communication and messaging, how we might do this in 2020 that’s different than 1960 and 1970, why it’s worth doing, what are the benefits that all students get — that it’s not some social justice crusade on behalf of one group of students, but that it’s truly beneficial to all students.
We have gotten to a place where, when we look at segregated schools, we’ve tricked our minds to think that is a natural phenomenon. That is absolutely not a natural phenomenon. There are specific reasons, and specific actions, and choices that have been made throughout the course of history that have made us believe that this is normal.
How are today’s integration efforts any different from the past?
Matthew Delmont has a great book that talks about the history of busing in this country and the use of ‘busing’ as a phrase, just as a fear-mongering tactic — when in fact, students have been bused in this country for decades with few ill effects. Ironically, busing really came into vogue in the era of segregation when white families needed to go to school farther from where they lived.
These are the things that come to people’s mind when, in reality, there are so many innovative ways to think about how we might get a diverse set of bodies into schools.
The things I’m talking about include reexamining district lines that mostly have been drawn specifically for the purpose of segregation, number one. Number two: being more creative about where we place sites for new schools.
Number three: developing innovative programming in schools that might attract different types of populations. Number four: identifying very closely systems of tracking that segregate children within schools. Number five: developing magnet programming and specialized programming that allow students to attend schools away from where they live.
And number six: opening up school choice in the public system, and, in places where choice exists, coming up with innovative enrollment mechanisms that promote diversity.
What will success look like for the Collaborative?
We want districts, and charter schools, and housing folks around the country to see examples of districts and schools advancing the issue in ways that make sense, and in ways that bear fruit, in a way that makes it feel safe for them to try.
To get a little more specific on some of the tangible things that we will be doing, we have engaged with a reputable polling and messaging firm to help us tackle this issue of how do you develop messaging that is compelling and gets across all of the benefits of diverse schools.
In New York City, one of the country’s most segregated school systems, there has been growing local support for integration, but few systemic changes. Why?
One of the things that needs to happen more is a clear articulation of why creating integrated schools in New York City is a strategy for improving our schools. You can’t really define an excellent school without answering the question of how diverse the school is, because a key element of excellence is what kids are learning from one another.
What does integration look like in a system like New York City, where most students are black or Hispanic and come from low-income families?
We have to think of integration more expansively than just black and white, and low income and not low income. New York City is one of the most diverse cities in the world, and it’s not just because you’ve got a lot of white folks and black folks living together. There’s a lot of beautiful and rich diversity within a lot of these blanket categories we use.
There’s a huge difference between a family of four that has a household income of $35,000, and a family of four that relies on public assistance, or a family that has students in temporary housing.
For race, there are schools that are reported as having 95% of their population being black or Latino, and you have Dominican populations, and Puerto Rican populations, and you’ve got Mexican students and you’ve got students from the Caribbean. We need to think more expansively about that.
The last thing I would say is that, what I think a lot of folks who bring up that argument are getting at is that, if we think of integration as necessarily involving a critical mass of white students, that integration of the entire city is then mathematically impossible. Well, that doesn’t mean that any action is futile. It means we need to start by integrating the spaces where we can and those spaces will become richer and better environments because of it.
How has COVID-19 changed or shaped this effort?
I definitely think that COVID-19 has shone a light on the rampant inequities that exist in our system. Some folks have adapted really easily to digital learning, mainly due to their environmental circumstances, and other folks have had a really, really hard time. At a time when these inequities are laid bare and there’s an opportunity to rethink the way we do things, I think the collaborative becomes even more important.
One of the things that we do want to make sure folks think about is that, during this time of social distancing, numerous parents and children have talked about how important the social aspect of schooling is, and how much they get from the interactions they have day to day with folks. Even when folks are not socially distant, where kids are in close proximity in the classroom, there’s so much that they are missing out from when they attend schools that are homogenous. Everybody’s experience would be so much richer if they attended schools with a vast array of beautiful diversity of students.
Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.
Stefan Lallinger had just finished teaching a lesson that traced the fight for civil rights and school integration in the U.S. when a student in his New Orleans classroom posed a question: “So, why do no white kids go to our school?”
Decades after Lallinger’s own grandfather had helped argue the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case in front of the Supreme Court, which declared that segregated schools were unconstitutional, he said the boy’s question left him speechless — and still demands an answer today.
“I think as a country, more broadly, we don’t have a satisfactory answer to that,” Lallinger said.
Courtesy photo/The Century Foundation Stefan Lallinger will head The Bridges Collaborative, a new initiative launched by The Century Foundation to spark and support school integration efforts.
Segregation remains rampant in American classrooms, and New York City is home to one of the most segregated school systems in the country. Now Lallinger is heading a new effort to address the country’s unfinished business of integrating its schools. He is heading the Bridges Collaborative, an initiative launched Monday by the Century Foundation, a progressive think tank.
The collaborative seeks to fill the gap between research showing more diverse schools can improve outcomes for all students, and the political will to pursue integration. To do that, Lallinger hopes to bring together advocates and policy makers who rarely work together — from charter and district schools, and housing — to learn from successful integration efforts across the country.
Because of the coronavirus pandemic, the collaborative has delayed plans for meeting in person, but is still laying foundations for the inaugural class of about 50. Applications are expected to open this fall.
Lallinger spent about a decade teaching and leading a New Orleans charter school post-Katrina, in classrooms where virtually every student was black and came from low-income homes. For the last year, he was a Harvard doctoral resident working in the New York City education department on integration issues.
Here’s what Lallinger had to say about what’s still standing in the way of more diverse schools, and what integration should look like in 2020.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How would you describe the status of school integration right now?
We know that integration is good for kids and there’s tons of research that backs this up. Yet most people across the country don’t know about that research. In part, because folks don’t know about this — and also because of many, many historical reasons — the state of our public schools continues to be segregated.
Nationally, about a fifth of schools across the country have almost no white children. That is to say, they are 90% or greater students of color. And then another fifth of our schools nationally have almost no students of color. So their student bodies are about 90% or greater white.
There’s other data that shows that the percentage of American schools that are intensely segregated along both racial and socioeconomic lines has actually increased over the last two decades.
So we’re not headed in the right direction, coming up on the 66th anniversary of Brown vs. Board of Education.
What kinds of bridges does this collaborative seek to build? Who or what needs to be brought together to advance school integration?
Ultimately, the goal is to build bridges across lines of difference in our schools and in our classrooms, creating environments in which children who come from different backgrounds have the opportunity to learn together. I don’t think we need to look any further than the state of our country today to see why that is needed.
If that’s not good enough, then there’s research to demonstrate that students who go to integrated schools are much less likely to harbor bias, they’re much likelier to have higher average test scores, much likelier to enroll in college.
Our collaborative is also looking to build bridges across sectors. We’re bringing together folks from school districts, from charter schools, and from fair housing organizations. We want to provide a space for folks to be able to have the difficult conversations and engage in the type of collaboration that is actually going to move the needle in communities across the country.
What is getting in the way of that collaboration now?
To start with, charter and traditional school districts, the way things have been set up structurally, there’s often either competition or distrust.
Then, to bring in the housing folks — oftentimes folks who work in housing and folks who work in education speak in different languages. Getting them on the same page to truly understand what the barriers are that each set of folks face is a feat.
Your grandfather, Louis Redding, was a civil rights lawyer who played a role in the landmark school desegregation case Brown v. Board of Education. How is your personal history connected to your current work?
I always start with my grandfather, a man who was born in 1901 and whose grandmother was a slave. Despite that, he attended Brown University and was one of few African Americans at the time. He decided to move to the South after graduating and went to teach at a school created by freedmen after the Civil War to serve children of emancipated slaves. Then he went to Harvard Law school, where he was one of the first African American graduates of that institution, and decided that he wanted to move back to his home state of Delaware to practice law.
In 1952, he brought two lawsuits against local districts in Delaware, which he won, forcing them to admit black students. When those cases were appealed, they became a part of Brown vs. Board.
I often think about my grandfather and wonder, if he were alive, if he came to tour the school where I was a principal and saw all the amazing things, how proud he would be — and then wonder how long it would take him to realize he was walking the halls of a segregated school, and what he would think about that decades after he won this legal battle.
Why do you think integration should remain a goal of American schools, all these years later?
In the divided society that we live in, research also demonstrates that attending a diverse school helps reduce bias and counter stereotypes. For many of us, this is the most divided any of us have seen our country in our living history, and this is one way we can address that for the future.
Thirdly, this is something that will improve outcomes for students.
How can policymakers begin to overcome skepticism of integration — whether due to racism, from more affluent and white families worried about losing access to ‘good’ schools, or from families of color afraid of sending their children into hostile environments?
Folks by and large don’t have the vision for what a truly integrated school is, and therefore don’t truly know why it’s the best option for all of our students. Additionally, I think a lot of people fall prey to old and stale arguments, and fear mongering tactics.
It’s incumbent on folks who really believe in this issue to make clear, through appropriate communication and messaging, how we might do this in 2020 that’s different than 1960 and 1970, why it’s worth doing, what are the benefits that all students get — that it’s not some social justice crusade on behalf of one group of students, but that it’s truly beneficial to all students.
We have gotten to a place where, when we look at segregated schools, we’ve tricked our minds to think that is a natural phenomenon. That is absolutely not a natural phenomenon. There are specific reasons, and specific actions, and choices that have been made throughout the course of history that have made us believe that this is normal.
How are today’s integration efforts any different from the past?
Matthew Delmont has a great book that talks about the history of busing in this country and the use of ‘busing’ as a phrase, just as a fear-mongering tactic — when in fact, students have been bused in this country for decades with few ill effects. Ironically, busing really came into vogue in the era of segregation when white families needed to go to school farther from where they lived.
These are the things that come to people’s mind when, in reality, there are so many innovative ways to think about how we might get a diverse set of bodies into schools.
The things I’m talking about include reexamining district lines that mostly have been drawn specifically for the purpose of segregation, number one. Number two: being more creative about where we place sites for new schools.
Number three: developing innovative programming in schools that might attract different types of populations. Number four: identifying very closely systems of tracking that segregate children within schools. Number five: developing magnet programming and specialized programming that allow students to attend schools away from where they live.
And number six: opening up school choice in the public system, and, in places where choice exists, coming up with innovative enrollment mechanisms that promote diversity.
What will success look like for the Collaborative?
We want districts, and charter schools, and housing folks around the country to see examples of districts and schools advancing the issue in ways that make sense, and in ways that bear fruit, in a way that makes it feel safe for them to try.
To get a little more specific on some of the tangible things that we will be doing, we have engaged with a reputable polling and messaging firm to help us tackle this issue of how do you develop messaging that is compelling and gets across all of the benefits of diverse schools.
In New York City, one of the country’s most segregated school systems, there has been growing local support for integration, but few systemic changes. Why?
One of the things that needs to happen more is a clear articulation of why creating integrated schools in New York City is a strategy for improving our schools. You can’t really define an excellent school without answering the question of how diverse the school is, because a key element of excellence is what kids are learning from one another.
What does integration look like in a system like New York City, where most students are black or Hispanic and come from low-income families?
We have to think of integration more expansively than just black and white, and low income and not low income. New York City is one of the most diverse cities in the world, and it’s not just because you’ve got a lot of white folks and black folks living together. There’s a lot of beautiful and rich diversity within a lot of these blanket categories we use.
There’s a huge difference between a family of four that has a household income of $35,000, and a family of four that relies on public assistance, or a family that has students in temporary housing.
For race, there are schools that are reported as having 95% of their population being black or Latino, and you have Dominican populations, and Puerto Rican populations, and you’ve got Mexican students and you’ve got students from the Caribbean. We need to think more expansively about that.
The last thing I would say is that, what I think a lot of folks who bring up that argument are getting at is that, if we think of integration as necessarily involving a critical mass of white students, that integration of the entire city is then mathematically impossible. Well, that doesn’t mean that any action is futile. It means we need to start by integrating the spaces where we can and those spaces will become richer and better environments because of it.
How has COVID-19 changed or shaped this effort?
I definitely think that COVID-19 has shone a light on the rampant inequities that exist in our system. Some folks have adapted really easily to digital learning, mainly due to their environmental circumstances, and other folks have had a really, really hard time. At a time when these inequities are laid bare and there’s an opportunity to rethink the way we do things, I think the collaborative becomes even more important.
One of the things that we do want to make sure folks think about is that, during this time of social distancing, numerous parents and children have talked about how important the social aspect of schooling is, and how much they get from the interactions they have day to day with folks. Even when folks are not socially distant, where kids are in close proximity in the classroom, there’s so much that they are missing out from when they attend schools that are homogenous. Everybody’s experience would be so much richer if they attended schools with a vast array of beautiful diversity of students.
Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.
The Supreme Court of Iowa issued that court order when it made its historic ruling in a school desegregation case brought by Susan’s father, Alexander Clark. This was 86 years before the U.S. Supreme Court issued the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, which ordered the desegregation of the nation’s public schools.
In the Iowa case, a judge named Chester Cole ruled that the Muscatine School Board’s racial segregation policy was illegal. The Iowa Supreme Court was the first court in the nation to say that segregation was unlawful.
Up from slavery
Susan Clark’s parents were Alexander Clark and Catherine Griffin Clark. Alexander’s father, John – this would be Susan’s grandfather – was born to a slave owner and an enslaved woman. Both John and his mother were freed after John’s birth. Alexander’s mother, Rebecca Darnes, was the daughter of emancipated slaves, George and Leticie Darnes. Alexander was born free in Pennsylvania in 1826. Catherine Griffin was born a slave in Virginia in 1829, and was freed at the age of three and taken to Ohio.
Alexander and Catherine married in 1848, and set up their home in Muscatine, a small, prosperous town on the Mississippi River. Alexander was a barber and a successful businessman. He was an outstanding speaker and was so active in the Underground Railroad – a secret network that helped slaves escape to freedom – and other civil rights causes that he has been recognized as “one of the greatest civil rights leaders of the 19th century.”
School board wanted segregation
The Muscatine School Board didn’t try to hide the reason it rejected Susan’s application to attend Grammar School No. 2, which was the school closest to where she lived. The school said its decision to keep black and white students segregated was in line with “public sentiment that is opposed to the intermingling of white and colored children in the same schools.” The school board argued that its schools were “separate but equal.” This argument worked in a lot of other courts at the time, including the highest courts in Massachusetts, New York and California. But the argument didn’t work in the Supreme Court of Iowa.
Justice Cole pointed out that the very first words in the Iowa Constitution say “equal rights to all.”
First black graduate
Susan Clark didn’t experience threats and taunts like black children did when they integrated schools in the 1960s. There were only 35 black children in Muscatine at the time.
Susan Clark went on to become the first black graduate of a public school in Iowa – Muscatine High School – in 1871 and served as commencement speaker.
The Muscatine Journal praised Susan’s commencement address, “Nothing But Leaves,” for its “originality,” observing it was “unpretending in style” and had “many excellent thoughts.”
Susan married the Rev. Richard Holley, an African Methodist Episcopalian minister, and their ministry took them to Cedar Rapids and Davenport, Iowa, and Champaign, Illinois. Susan lived a long life, passing in 1925 at age 70, and was buried in Muscatine’s Greenwood Cemetery.
Iowa led the nation
You might wonder why and how the Iowa Supreme Court ruled against segregation at a time when other courts were not doing so.
Each of the four justices on the Iowa Supreme Court was a Republican – the party of Abraham Lincoln – and each had been a strong supporter of the Union cause. Chester Cole was an early advocate for giving black men the right to vote because of their service in the Union Army during the Civil War.
It is important to note that the Iowa Supreme Court never overturned the Clark v. Board of School Directors decision, even after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1896 that segregation was legal under the U.S. Constitution.
Fifty-eight years after ruling that segregation was legal, the U.S. Supreme Court issued the 1954 Brown v. Board decision that desegregated the nation’s public schools. The Brown decision showed how far ahead the Iowa Supreme Court was when it said segregation was illegal nearly a century earlier.
Chadwick Boseman portrays Jackie Robinson in Brian Hegeland’s new film about the baseball legend, 42. (Photo credit: ABCnews.com)
Athletics unifies Americans in a way that few activities do. With the exceptions of church attendance, shopping, and voting, it is perhaps the most visible thread of a shared culture within our country. At the same time, athletics is occasionally a forum that settles events whose origins arise elsewhere. Brian Helgeland’s42 narrates the story of how Jackie and Rachel Robinson, Wendell Smith, and Branch Rickey – to name a few prominent characters in a larger story – confronted racism in the United States by addressing segregation within America’s favorite pastime, baseball. The biopic, which grossed $27.4 million during the weekend, opening in the number slot. Moreover, the cast delivers earnest performances: Chadwick Boseman portrays Jackie Robinson; Nicole Beharie, Rachel Robinson; and Harrison Ford, Branch Rickey. Given its emotional resonance and the intrinsic pull of its story, 42 delivers an adequate but underwhelming version of Robinson’s story.
The film’s primary territory extends from 1945 to 1947, covering Robinson’s stint with the Montreal Royals in 1946 and the 1947 Brooklyn Dodgers season, which commenced with his Major League Baseball debut on April 15th, 1947. Of particular note, 42 highlights the story of Wendell Smith, the Pittsburgh Courier journalist who chronicles the pioneering Major League Baseball debut of Robinson. The film’s accent on the Robinson-Smith relationships highlights the fact that the emergence of Jackie Robinson is coterminous with the ascent of black sports journalists. The legend of Hank Aaron, for instance, is connected to the work of the black sports journalists. The movie, moreover, rightly implies that Robinson’s pioneering career cleared the pathway for future African-American players.
The film deserves credit for painting a relatively nuanced picture of racism in the 1940’s. The most effective scenes cover the polarities of racial anxiety and racial acceptance: one of the Robinson’s teammates refuses to continue his shower when Robinson enters the locker room; another teammate is initially afraid to be seen with Robinson, but eventually embraces the opportunity to play alongside him as a show of support for integration within baseball.
42 avoids exploring what Robinson’s legacy means for diversity within the MLB (particularly at the executive level) and the role of contemporary black athletes within our society. Additionally, by portraying wholly idealized versions of Robinson and Rickey, the film misses an opportunity to help audiences see how the aforementioned men are lauded for generally choosing virtue over vice – rather than being construed as transcendent racial heroes. Nevertheless, 42 is a feel good movie that performs the essential role of a biopic – its honors the life of its subject. It’s also family-friendly entertainment that displays an intact black marriage in a cinematic landscape that is largely devoid of those elements. Take your friends and loved ones to see the film and let us know what you think.
The American Protestant tradition is one with a mixed history on race relations without question. The Presbyterian tradition, in particular, is one that has had to face its own failure of being on the wrong side of racial justice for much of American history. Even with that history, we are encouraged that the gospel really does change people and has the power drive racial healing and build racial solidarity. In The Last Segregated Hour: The Memphis Kneel-Ins and the Campaign For Southern Church Desegregation, by Rhodes College religious studies professor Stephen R. Haynes, readers get an example of gospel transformation in the powerful story of the “kneel-in” desegregation in Memphis in the 1960s. Like most histories, we find the good, the bad, and the ugly.
Resisting Racial Integration
The book opens recounting the story of a series of nonviolent church desegregation protests across the South to test the limits of white Christian denial of their baptism by prohibiting African Americans from joining in corporate Sunday worship. Haynes explains that kneel-ins became the official name of the protests “not because kneeling was a regular feature of the visits (which it wasn’t), but because attempts to break the ecclesiastical color line were viewed as part of a larger campaign of ‘sit-ins,’ ‘sleep-ins’ and ‘wade-ins’ that was sweeping the South at the time.” The denominations barring African Americans in the South ranged from Assemblies of God to Methodist to Presbyterian churches and beyond.
The bulk of the book focuses on the events of 1964 at Second Presbyterian Church (SPC) in Memphis, Tennessee, and the Southern Presbyterian struggle with racial integration during the mid-1960s in general. What is additionally helpful in the narrative is the observation that for these white churches, the only thing feared more than racial integration was interracial marriage. Miscegenation was to be avoided at all cost and would serve as the catalyst for racial tension decades later.
What readers will find startling are the events leading to the formation of Independent Presbyterian Church (IPC) in Memphis. According to Haynes, IPC was planted as a protest against racial integration and in resistance to what was considered unbiblical involvement of the Presbyterian Church in social issues in ways that weakened the church’s core calling to evangelism and discipleship. In March 1965, right after SPC voted to embrace racial integration, over 300 people left SPC to form IPC. Because of this history, IPC has had challenges building unity with the black community in Memphis. However, after a number of painful years, IPC has publicly confessed the sins of their fathers, sought forgiveness, and is actively working toward racial reconciliation and racial solidarity.
A Model of Confession and Repentance
Several years ago SPC initiated the challenging process of confession and repentance as it dealt with its own history in Memphis, and it has successfully pursued several racial reconciliation initiatives with the black community in the city today. It is now IPC’s turn. Under the leadership of its current pastor, the Rev. Richie Sessions, IPC is putting the gospel on display before a watching world. On Sunday May 13, 2012, one of the elders of the IPC read this statement of repentance and confession before the congregation:
We profess, acknowledge and confess before God, before one another, and before the watching world, that tolerance of forced or institutional segregation based on race, and declarations of the inferiority of certain races, such as once were practiced and supported by our church and many other voices in the Presbyterian tradition, were wrong and cannot and will not be accepted within our church today or ever again. The Lord calls us to repent of the sin of prejudice; to turn from it and to treat all persons with justice, mercy, and love. As a church, we will strive to be more intentional and proactive with ministry opportunities for the congregation to serve the city of Memphis as redemptive, Gospel-driven agents seeking the peace and prosperity of ALL of Memphis.
On that same day, Sessions preached a powerful sermon on the gospel and race. Haynes tells the story of how IPC arrived at this day of confession over several years of discussions building on the work of previous pastors in this direction. It is a wonderful story of church struggling through the implications of what it means to love God and neighbor while taking both baptism and the Lord’s Supper seriously. Sessions has emerged as one of America’s most dynamic pastors as a result.
The Deep Roots of White Supremacy
Within the context of the IPC repentance story, Haynes also covers a troubling story from just a few years ago. In 2005, IPC hired the Rev. John Hardie to serve as pastor. Hardie had done graduate work at Yale University and was completing a Ph.D. at Princeton Theological Seminary. In November 2006, Hardie made a tangential comment that the Bible does not speak against interracial marriage while giving an illustration about a close friend of his. What Hardie did not realize is that while many conservative Presbyterians in the South were open to different races occupying the same public space, interracial marriage is still considered unbiblical and impermissible by many Southerners to this day. It turns out that in our era if you want to get a sense of where a person stands on race issues, do not ask about integration or racial reconciliation; ask whether or not God smiles upon interracial marriage.
TRACKING A PAINFUL HISTORY: Author Stephen R. Haynes.
Several members of IPC found the sermon comment offensive. According to Haynes, the Rev. Tom Elkin, a former adjunct pastor at IPC and now on pastoral staff at The First Presbyterian Church in Jackson, Mississippi, taught a Sunday school class two weeks later at IPC where Elkin “misleadingly implied that Hardie was not only defending interracial marriage” but “encouraging its practice.” Elkin objected, in part, because Hardie’s view appeared to condemn Southern Presbyterians’ spiritual ancestors. In his admonishment of Hardie, Elkin even went so far as to defend pro-slavery Presbyterians like R. L. Dabney and James Henley Thornwell and their acceptance of American slavery on what Elkin interpreted as non-racists grounds. After a few months of questions and turmoil, Hardie found himself “resigning” by May of 2007. Haynes concludes that however Hardie’s abrupt departure is officially described “there is no question that his decision to invoke interracial marriage as an acid test for white racism was a fateful turn in his brief tenure at the church.”
The Hard Road of Reconciliation
Independent Presbyterian Church and is a member church of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) denomination. In recent years several, other books and articles have raised troubling questions about individual churches and the resistance to desegregation. Books such as Joel Alvis’ Race and Southern Presbyterians, 1946-1983, Peter Slades’ Open Friendship in a Closed Society, and an article by R. Milton Winter titled “Division & Reunion in the Presbyterian Church, U.S.” stand out as prime examples. The PCA has taken important steps toward acknowledging its past as a denomination through repentance and racial reconciliation statements (2002) and statements condemning the sin of racism (2004). However, consistent with its Southern Presbyterian roots, those statements are non-binding and only make a difference in congregation life if individual churches take action in response. As a result, according to Haynes, IPC is the only church in the PCA that has ever taken the courageous step to confess and repent of the sins of their own local church fathers.
Given the number of Presbyterian congregations in the Southeast with histories dating back to slavery, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow, it might seem amazing to some that, although the denomination embraced a repentance statement over a decade ago, only one of the nearly 1,800 churches has publicly confessed and repented of the past locally. Some argue that this has much to with a Southern cultural norm that discourages people from discussing the failures of previous generations. This perspective can only be called idolatry. Richie Sessions and IPC reject this idolatry. IPC understands the biblical model of confessing the sins of our fathers and instead of turning a blind eye, to honor them in their death for the good they did (Ezra 9:6-15, Neh. 1:6-7, 9:2).
To date, IPC remains a model of what true racial reconciliation looks like. Without confession and repentance in Southern cities by individual churches, reconciliation will be cheap and ineffective. What cities in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina need are pastors with the vision and fortitude of men in leadership at IPC. Confessing and repenting of their father’s sins puts the gospel on display to a watching world and reminds members of their need of the grace of God, lest they return to beliefs and practices that deny their baptism. As I noted in my official endorsement for this book, Haynes presents a story based in Memphis that is paradigmatic for the entire South.
The American Protestant tradition is one with a mixed history on race relations without question. The Presbyterian tradition, in particular, is one that has had to face its own failure of being on the wrong side of racial justice for much of American history. Even with that history, we are encouraged that the gospel really does change people and has the power drive racial healing and build racial solidarity. In 