The sea of social justice.
Gourley, Bruce T.
Half a century after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights
Act of 1965 became law, racial injustice has occupied many news
headlines in the United States during the past year.
A series of police shootings of unarmed black men in various cities
by white officers since the summer of 2014 preceded the terroristic
murder, by a white supremacist young man, of nine black members of
Charleston's Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church on June 17.
The racist-driven killings took place in the South Carolina city
that served as the ideological center of the southern slaveocracy of the
antebellum and Civil War eras. The vivid intersection of past and
present immediately led to an intense public conversation regarding the
presence of the Confederate flag at South Carolina's statehouse in
Columbia, as well as other public venues throughout the South.
In the ensuing months the Confederate flag was removed from the
grounds of the South Carolina and Alabama capitols, federal cemeteries,
and other government grounds. In addition, a number of retail businesses
in America stopped selling merchandise imprinted with the Confederate
flag.
These racial incidents and many others during recent years have
taken place against the backdrop of sophisticated political efforts,
from statehouses to U.S. congresspersons to Supreme Court justices, to
effectively dismantle the 1965 Voting Rights Act by restricting the
voting access of minority groups, particularly African Americans. Civil
Rights activists and organizations are hard at work trying to protect
the voting rights of minorities from this newest onslaught, dubbed by
some as "a third Reconstruction" (following the failed
post-Civil War Reconstruction and the successful Civil Rights movement
of the 1950s and 1960s).
The 2015 annual conference of the Baptist History and Heritage
Society took place in the midst of this renewed racial turmoil in
America. The theme was "Seeking Justice: Baptists, Nashville and
Civil Rights." Hosting the Nashville conference were American
Baptist College and First Baptist Church Capitol Hill, two institutions
at the forefront of the Civil Rights movement in Nashville.
The articles in this Journal edition are fuller-length versions of
papers presented at the Nashville conference. Authored by John Gruesser,
Merrill Hawkins Jr., Bill Pitts, Charles Dollar, and Jerry L. Faught,
these articles represent new contributions to the study of Baptists and
justice issues in the twentieth century.
In addition, the Society is making publicly available the audio
recordings from the keynote sessions of the conference, addresses that
were frank and stirring, collectively recounting the nation's
history of injustice and calling upon Baptists and Americans at large to
press forward in seeking equal rights for all.
Keynote addresses (listed below), along with additional conference
audio recordings, are available online at baptisthistory.org/bhhs/
conferences/2015conference.htm.
"Baptists and the Civil Rights Movement in Nashville"
By Rev. Dr. Kelly Miller Smith
Pastor, First Baptist Church Capitol Hill
"Baptists and the Civil Rights Movement in Nashville"
By Dr. Bobby Lovett
Retired Professor of History, Tennessee State University
"Social Justice Today: Nashville and Beyond"
By Dr. Forrest E. Harris
President, American Baptist College
"Social Justice Today: Nashville and Beyond"
By Dr. Robert M. Franklin
Professor of Moral Leadership, Emory University
"Martin Luther King, Jr.: Civil Rights and the Baptist
Faith"
By Dr. Edward R. Crowther
Professor of History and Chair, Department of History, Government
and Philosophy Adams State University, Colorado
Bruce T. Gourley
Executive Director
