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. 

The Worst Aspect of Racial Segregation

Vital Conversations is a monthly discussion group that meets in the Northland of Kansas City. June and I have been regular members of that group for more than twelve years now, and we have enjoyed many profitable discussions there.

Some of My Best Friends are Black

At the March 13 Vital Conversations meeting, the 25 or so who attended discussed Tanner Colby’s book Some of My Best Friends are Black: The Strange Story of Integration in America (2012).  

The meeting was a very helpful one, especially since there were four African-Americans present—including the venerable Alvin Brooks (b. 1932), a civil rights leader who is a former police officer and former city councilman of Kansas City.

The second part of Colby’s book is about racial segregation in housing—and in getting loans for purchasing a home. The situation in Kansas City is a prime example of segregation having been actively enforced by housing planning—and restrictions.

In particular, Colby writes about J.C. Nichols, whom Colby (no doubt rightfully) calls “the most influential real estate developer” in the U.S. during the first half of the twentieth century. Colby adds, “One could make the argument that he still holds that title today, despite being dead for sixty years.” (p. 82).

(Specifically, Nichols died in February 1950, several months before his 70th birthday.)

Nichols was the developer of Kansas City’s Country Club Plaza, regarded as the nation’s first shopping center. After his death, he was memorialized with the impressive J.C. Nichols Memorial Fountain, just east of the Plaza, and the nearby street renamed the J.C. Nichols Parkway in 1952.

The King of Kings County

In addition to the County Club district and Plaza in Kansas City, Missouri, a lasting legacy of J.C. Nichols is the development of Johnson County, Kansas, whose eastern border is just a mile west of the Plaza.

That story, which is told to some extent in Colby’s book, is the theme of the novel The King of Kings County (2005) by Whitney Terrell, a nephew by marriage to J.C. Nichols’ son Miller.

As Colby writes, the novel “tells the story of Kansas City’s blockbusting and suburbanization in a way that only a novel can: fictionalized, but brutally truthful” (p. 291).

(In the book, Nichols is called Bowen, the Plaza is Campanile, and Johnson County is Kings County, but for those who know the history of Kansas City, the identification is obvious.)

“Troost Avenue”

Adam Hamilton is the best-known Christian pastor in Johnson County, Kansas. He is pastor of the 20,000-member Church of the Resurrection, said to be the largest United Methodist Church in the U.S.

“Troost Avenue” is the title of the fifth chapter of Hamilton’s 2018 book Unafraid: Living with Courage and Hope in Uncertain Times.

As also explained in the books mentioned above, Hamilton writes, “The street in Kansas City that serves as the dividing line between predominantly white and black communities is Troost Avenue” (p. 57).

As some blacks sought to move west, Nichols and Bob Wood, an unscrupulous realtor, found ways to profit greatly by the development of Johnson County. They developed “restrictive covenants” that prevented African Americans from buying homes in many of the new, and white, communities.

Black homeowners and communities were also greatly disadvantaged by redlining and other means that meant financial loss.

I used to think that racial segregation was bad because of the deprivation resulting from being separate—and certainly repressive restrictions and lack of freedom are major problems.

But I have come to see that maybe the worst aspect of segregation has been the financial inequity entwined with forced separation.

Perhaps now the major goal is not integration (or equality) but rather thoroughgoing equity.

Honoring Harry

The Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum in Independence, Missouri, is a major tourist attraction in the Kansas City metropolitan area. This article was spawned partly because of June’s and my visit there on Monday, May 8.

REMEMBERING HARRY

Harry S. Truman was born on May 8 (in 1884), and that date is now celebrated as Truman Day, a state holiday. On Monday morning that special Missouri holiday was celebrated with ceremonies in the courtyard of the Truman Library where both Harry and his wife Bess are buried.

Truman Library Institute photo taken on 5/8/17 (June and I are next to the last people on the right.)

Harry was born in Lamar, Mo., and although he lived there for less than a year, the house in which he was born is still maintained as the Harry S Truman Birthplace State Historic Site. It is a modest house, indicative of the middle-class roots of the man who became the 33^rd POTUS.

The small town of Lamar is a little over 100 miles due south of Grandview (on the south side of Kansas City), the town nearest to where the Truman family moved in 1887 and where Harry lived from 1906 to 1917.

Harry was baptized in the Little Blue River in Kansas City in 1902 and in 1916 he joined the Grandview Baptist Church (as it was known then) and remained a member there the rest of his life—although for most of his life he attended very infrequently.

Truman helped finance a new building for the Grandview church, and he spoke at its dedication service in 1950. One Sunday morning many years ago, coincidentally on Pearl Harbor Day, I had the privilege of preaching in that church. Truman’s Bible, which he regularly read in the Oval Office, was on display in the foyer.

MIXED FEELINGS ABOUT HARRY

While I can understand the pressure Truman felt to use the atomic bombs he first learned about only after he became President in April 1945, and while I realize it is much easier to second-guess hard decisions in retrospect than to make those decisions looking forward, still I have serious doubts about the morality of his authorizing the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan. The bombing of Nagasaki only three days after Hiroshima was bombed on August 6 is especially problematic.

Still, Truman is to be commended for firing General MacArthur and for refusing to escalate the Korean conflict even to the use of atomic weapons there. Truman did threaten to use atomic bombs in Korea, but he didn’t use them as MacArthur possibly would have.

Of many other things that might be said about Truman’s presidency, two are worthy of special note.

In November 1945, Truman proposed a national health insurance plan. Although it was never enacted, it did lead to Medicare. When President Johnson signed the Medicare bill into law at the Truman Library in July 1965, he said that it “all started really with the man from Independence.”

Truman also significantly furthered greater racial equality in the U.S. by issuing an executive order in July 1948 that desegregated the armed forces.

APPRECIATING HARRY

There is an enormous difference between Harry Truman and the current POTUS. While the latter campaigned as a populist candidate, it was Truman who was truly a “man of the people,” to use the title of the lengthy 1995 tome on Truman by Alonzo L. Hamby.

And after watching the HBO movie “Truman” (1995) on Sunday evening, I was also struck by the marked contrast between the honesty and integrity of the man from Missouri compared to the current POTUS.

It was an honor to be among the people who gathered on Monday to honor Harry on Truman Day.

Brown v. Board of Education

Last month June and I had Japanese house guests, and as they had visited us before (three years ago), we wanted to find some different places to take them. So we made a day trip to Topeka.

One main reason for going to Topeka was to see the tulips. That city is well known for its “Tulip Time” every year in April. Because of the cool spring, many of the tulips were not in full bloom, but we still enjoyed the beauty of those that were blooming, as well as the daffodils, at the 2.5-acre Botanical Garden in Old Prairie Town at the Ward-Meade Historic Site.

Then we visited the state Capitol building, which is so impressive that June and I wondered why we had not gone there before since it is so close to Kansas City. We enjoyed the old-fashioned (employee-operated) “cage elevator,” and when we stepped off on the second floor we were face to face with the huge John S. Curry mural depicting the wild-eyed abolitionist John Brown.

Later, although we did not have time to go through it, we drove by the Brown v. Board of Education National Historic Site, which is in the old Monroe School, where Linda Brown and other African-American children had to attend because they could not go to white schools. That segregation was challenged by Oliver Brown, Linda’s father, and 12 other plaintiffs.

I did go inside briefly, and picked up a leaflet titled “From Brown to Brown: Topeka’s Civil Rights Story.”

In 1856, John Brown (1800-59) commanded forces in battles at Black Jack and at Osawatomie against the Border Ruffians, the pro-slavery activists from Missouri who crossed the state border into Kansas Territory to force the acceptance of slavery there. The leaflet explains that “Brown’s involvement in Bleeding Kansas set the spark that ignited the Civil War that freed millions of enslaved human beings.”

Then on May 17, 1954, in ruling on the case known as “Brown v. Board of Education” the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously declared that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” As a result, racial segregation in public schools was ruled a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Even though that historic Supreme Court decision was made the month I finished my junior year in high school, I don’t have any memories of it from that time. Separate but equal schools was not an issue where I grew up in north Missouri, for there were no African-American school-age children in the county.

But it made quite a difference in Liberty, where June and I were students at William Jewell College from 1957 to 1959. June was an elementary education major, and she did her practice teaching in the recently-integrated Garrison School, which was founded as a school for African-Americans in 1877.

Garrison School, however, had only provided education for its students through the 10th grade, and the “separate but equal” laws barred them from attending Liberty’s white high school. During the 1953-54 school year, Garrison students rode buses into Kansas City to attend the all-black Lincoln High School. Then, as a result of the Supreme Court decision in May 1954, that fall the Liberty School District began to integrate its African American students.