Seeking a Raceless Gospel and a Desegregated Church

Recently I have been thinking about race and racial segregation. Last month I finished reading Starlette Thomas’s impressive book Take Me to the Water: The Raceless Gospel as Baptismal Pedagogy for a Desegregated Church. Then on June 2, I learned about the end of segregated schools in Kansas. 

Starlette Thomas, according to her website, “is an author, activist, visual artist and race abolitionist.” She has a Doctor of Ministry degree from Wesley Theological Seminary. Her book was published last year under the same title as her doctoral thesis.

Dr. Thomas is currently an associate editor at Good Faith Media (GFM) and the director of The Raceless Gospel Initiative. That program is

a didactic, multifaceted ministry of communication that decenters the sociopolitical construct of race and its progeny for the sake of Jesus’ gospel and in hopes of practicing an inclusive hospitality for a raceless ‘kin-dom’ of God to come.

In the fifth and final chapter of her book, and just before one of the many times she cites Galatians 3:28, Starlette writes, “The raceless gospel, rooted in baptismal identity, is an embodied ecclesiology that aims to drown out all competing identities” (p. 90).

On the following page, she asserts her belief that “human beings were not created to be color-coded”; rather, “all bodies are created equal” and “our allegiance to a racial group directly conflicts with our baptismal identity.”

Because she embraced that decisive identity, Starlette has been on a spiritual journey “of decentering whiteness, decolonizing identity and deconstructing race.”*¹

The Madam C. J. Walker School was built about 1860 to house the Black students of the South Park area in what is now the city of Merriam in Johnson County, Kansas. A new building was constructed in 1888 after Johnson County organized School District No. 90. 

Black and White children went to the school until around 1900 when the school district began separating the students based on race, and the South Park Grade School was built for White students.

In 1947, the school district built a new South Park Grade School for White students using taxpayer funds. Black students had to continue attending the two-room, markedly inferior Walker schoolhouse even though their parents had to pay taxes for the construction of the new South Park School.

The following year, Alfonso Webb filed a lawsuit with the Kansas Supreme Court in the name of his sons who were second and first grade students at Walker School. That case was won in 1949 and Black children were allowed to attend the South Park School.*²

That decision in Kansas was a precursor of the Brown v. Board of Education lawsuit. In May 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court settled that case by ruling unanimously that racial segregation in public schools violated the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.*³

Why are there still so many segregated churches since segregated public schools have been ruled unconstitutional for seventy years now?

At the end of the first chapter of her book, Dr. Thomas cites the well-known words of MLK, Jr.: “It is appalling that the most segregated hour of Christian America is 11 o’clock on Sunday morning” (p. 29, citing an address King delivered in 1957).

In that seminal talk, King stated, “Racial segregation is a blatant denial of the unity which we have in Christ. Segregation is a tragic evil which is utterly un-Christian.” Starlette’s advocacy of the raceless gospel is her endeavor to continue doing what King was urging Christians to do 67 years ago.

Fortunately, most church segregation now is not because of opposition to integration so much as it is because of the importance of the Black church for its members. (In this regard, consider ”The Downside of Integration for Black Christians, Jemar Tisby’s 2017 essay.)

King declared that the church “cannot rest until segregation and discrimination are banished from every area of American life. It has always been the responsibility of the Church to broaden horizons, challenge the status quo, and break the mores when necessary.”

Starlette Thomas is currently endeavoring to do that admirably—but in a way that doesn’t bypass “the beauty of particularity” seen in the Black church.*⁴

What can we who have benefited from White privilege do to promote the raceless Gospel and to combat the vestiges of racial segregation?

_____

*¹ These words are from Starlette’s column titled “The Raceless Gospel as a Proclamation of Somebodiness,” which was first posted (here) on Good Faith Media’s website in April. Also, please consider reading this June 5 “conversation with Starlette Thomas” about her book.  

*² On June 2, two of Alfonso Webb’s five daughters (and he also had five sons) were honored guests at Rainbow Mennonite Church, and I was able to chat briefly with one of them. The former Walker schoolhouse, enlarged and completely remodeled, is now the Philadelphia Missionary Baptist Church, and June and I much enjoyed attending their Sunday morning worship service yesterday.

*³ My blog post on May 10, 2013, was titled “Brown v. the Board of Education.” Here is a link to that post, if you would like to read it (again).

*⁴ The quoted words are from Felicia Murrell’s book, And: The Restorative Power of Love in an Either/Or World (2024). This link will take you to an article with the author being interviewed about that insightful book. 

Faith-Based Discrimination

Saturday afternoon the Missouri University basketball team won their second close game in three days. June and I are Mizzou basketball fans, so we really enjoyed watching those two games as well as most of their other 16 wins this season. Watching their 7 losses is another story.

Although we did not see the halftime activities, the MU football team was honored for their stellar season, culminating with their winning the Cotton Bowl last month. (I am a big Mizzou football fan also, but, unfortunately, June won’t watch football with me.)

MU football team’s “most valuable player” this past season was their 255-pound defensive end, Michael Sam. As most of you know, Sam has been much in the news this month, for he openly announced that he is gay.

(Sam’s teammates had known that, and accepted him without a problem, already.)

Also, as many us of might have guessed, the Westboro Baptist Church (WBC) was not happy with Sam’s announcement—or with the University of Missouri. Thus, last Saturday WBC called for a demonstration against “fag football player shameless Michael Sam” and his supporters.

On the church’s website (GodHatesFags.com), the 2/11 announcement of the picketing plans at Columbia on 2/15 ends with the words, “God hates fag football players and their enablers.”

Admirably, some 2,000 students and townspeople rallied to form a peaceful “human wall” to separate the basketball arena (and the football team) from the hateful protest of WBC.

Westboro Baptist Church members, however, were not the only ones practicing what can be called “faith-based discrimination.”

While most members of the Kansas House of Representatives probably do not approve of the extreme measures of the Topeka church, on February 12 they passed a bill which would allow discrimination based on religious beliefs.

Though the short title of Kansas House Bill 2453 is “Protecting religious freedom regarding marriage,” the language of the bill would broadly give commercial establishments the right to discriminate against gay couples on the basis of the religious beliefs of those who own and/or operate those establishments.

(This issue is closely related to opposition to the health insurance mandate on the basis of religious beliefs, a matter about which I recently wrote.)

Even though HB 2453 was passed by a 72-49 (60%) vote, it seems to have little chance of being approved by the Kansas Senate. Still, it is troublesome when a legislative body will “use religion as a vehicle for bigotry.”

The above quote is from a Feb. 14 editorial in The Kansas City Star, which says that HB 2453 “would make it possible for Kansans to cite religious belief as an excuse to deny services to gay and lesbian persons.”

The Star followed up their editorial by printing Lee Judge’s cartoon in the Sunday paper:

Whether it is the misguided actions of a church or of a state House of Representatives, faith-based discrimination is not only wrong, it also tends to blight the reputation of Christianity as a whole and of church groups and individual Christians who seek to accept, and to treat, all persons as equals, regardless of racial, ethnic, gender, or sexual orientation differences.

Border Wars

In celebration of my birthday last week, June and I made an overnight trip to Lawrence, Kansas. It was largely because of recently watching the 1999 Ang Lee movie “Ride with the Devil” that we decided to make the short trip to Lawrence and to do some sight-seeing there.

Part of the movie was about the infamous “Lawrence Massacre,” which occurred 150 years ago tomorrow, on August 21, 1863. That event, also known as “Quantrill’s Raid,” was a guerrilla attack led by William Quantrill. Between 150 and 200 men and boys were killed in that atrocious raid.

We re-traced the path of the guerrillas’ rampage, which began around 5 a.m. on that fateful August morning. We also visited the Watkins Community Museum of History, just a block from South Park that was part of the original layout of Lawrence when it was platted in 1854.

Watkins Museum houses exhibits from Lawrence and Douglas County—and a new permanent exhibition featuring the events of 1863 officially opened last Saturday. Fortunately, we were able to get a “peek preview” of that fine new $300,000 exhibition.

At noon on the fifteenth we dined in the historic Eldridge hotel. On that site, the Free State Hotel, a well-fortified structure built by the staunch anti-slavery Massachusetts Emigrant Aid Society to receive anti-slavery settlers as they arrived from the east, was completed in May 1856--and burned down the same day by the avid pro-slavery sheriff as well as ruffians" from Missouri!

Colonel Shalor Eldridge rebuilt the hotel, naming it Eldridge House. That building, completed in December 1858, was then destroyed less than five years later during Quantrill’s Raid. But Eldridge and others built it back in 1866.

The new Eldridge House was torn down in 1925 and then rebuilt as The Eldridge. In 1970, though, it was turned into an apartment house. But in 1985 it became a hotel again after the top four floors were completely rebuilt and the lobby restored to its original elegance.

Before the Civil War started, the guerrilla free-state fighters were known as “Jayhawkers,” and they often clashed with pro-slavery groups from Missouri known at the time as “Border Ruffians” or “Bushwhackers.” After the Civil War, the word “Jayhawker” became synonymous with the people of Kansas.

In 1890 when the University of Kansas, located in Lawrence, fielded their first football team they were called the Jayhawkers. Now the KU sports teams are known as simply the Jayhawks.

After June and I moved to Liberty in 2005, we became fans of the University of Missouri Tigers basketball team, and we especially enjoyed the exciting games with the KU Jayhawks. Those games were sometimes called “border wars,” though.

The more we learned about the real border wars of the 1850s and ’60s, the more uncomfortable we felt. We were not particularly happy when MU transferred to the SEC, bringing the MU v. KU rivalry to an end. But at least we are no longer regularly reminded of those horrendous days when the deadly border wars were being fought.

Somehow we went through the Missouri school system not learning much about the appalling conflict between the Bushwhackers and the Jayhawkers. I don’t know if that wasn’t mentioned much back then or whether we just weren’t paying attention.

At any rate, although there has in the past been intense rivalry between the MU and KU sports teams, and while there is now some economic rivalry between the states especially in the Kansas City area, at least there is no longer actual fighting with lethal weapons.

Some things, thankfully, have improved over the last 150 years!