White Protestants and the Civil Rights Movement in Kentucky
A mere two weeks after the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision declared racially segregated schools unconstitutional, Southern Baptists flocked to St. Louis for their annual convention. Attendees at that June 1954 meeting heard a stirring report that lauded the High Court’s action as “in harmony with the constitutional guarantee of equal freedom to all citizens and the Christian principles of equal justice and love to all men.” Although the ten thousand Baptists who gathered in St. Louis represented every state in the nation, two Kentuckians dominated the debate that followed. W. M. Nevins of Lexington warned that the Brown decision put the nation on a dangerous path toward racial amalgamation: “If we are going to eat with [blacks], and go to school with them, and go to church with them, the time is going to come . . . when some of you that sit in this audience today will have grandchildren with Negro blood.” Another Kentuckian, J. B. Weatherspoon, sprang to the report’s defense. The Southern Seminary professor urged that rejecting the progressive statement would send the message that America could “count Baptists out in the matter of equal justice.” “I don’t think we want to do that,” he concluded, to enthusiastic applause. The report sailed to victory on the wings of Weatherspoon’s oratory, his hearers approving it by an overwhelming voice vote. As if to acknowledge this commitment to a perilous but worthy path,
Mississippi Praying: Southern White Evangelicals and the Civil Rights Movement, 1945-1970
ContentsList of Illustrations ixAcknowledgments xiIntroduction: History, White Religion, and 1the Civil Rights Movement1 Segregation and the Religious Worlds of White Mississippians 152 Conversations about Race in the Post-War World 393 Responding to Brown: The Recalcitrant Parish 634 "A Strange and Serious Christian Heresy": Massive Resistance and the Religious Defense of Segregation 795 "Ask for the Old Paths": Mississippi's Southern Baptists and Segregation 1056 "Born of Conviction": The Travail of Mississippi Methodism 1277 The Jackson Church Visits: "A Good Quarter-Time Church with a Bird Dog and Shotgun" 1558 "Warped and Distorted Reflections": 181Mississippi and the North9 Race and the Restructuring of American Religion 199Conclusion: A Theology on the Wrong Side of History 231Notes 241Index 285About the Author 290
Urban Identities and Catastrophe: Izmir and Salonica at the End of the Ottoman Empire*
Two huge fires dramatically influenced the urban development of Salonica and Izmir, in 1917 and in 1922, respectively. These catastrophes occurred after the Ottoman Empire fell, and Salonica and Izmir had shifted into new national contexts. The fires mainly destroyed the districts that were transformed during the late‐Ottoman period. These districts became the cosmopolitan façades of modern Izmir and Salonica. The post‐fires' tabula rasa provided an opportunity for Greek and Turkish politicians and European planners to change the urban identity of both cities. Moreover, the Lausanne Treaty of 1923 transformed their multicultural societies also. Reconstruction plans had been thought to de‐Ottomanize and remove the previous idea of the towns and their multiplicity, interpreting new cultural and nationalist feeling. Here, I emphasize how modernity was interpreted before and after the fires, and point out contradictions between ideological aspects of planning and how the first urban districts were built during the 1920s.