• Latest
  • Trending
kkk cross fire

Lynching Preachers: How Black Pastors Resisted Jim Crow and White Pastors Incited Racial Violence

February 10, 2020
jesus statue Christ the Redeemer

Why Is There Christianity If Jesus Was Jewish?

September 21, 2023
JoAnne Epps

Temple University Acting President JoAnne Epps Dies Suddenly on Campus

September 20, 2023
UMC Bishop Minerva Carcano in a 2008 file photo

UMC Bishop Minerva G. Carcaño Suspended, Faces Church Trial

September 20, 2023
doctors

Just 2 Percent of US Doctors Are Latina. These Women Want That to Change.

September 20, 2023
COGIC Presiding Bishop J. Drew Sheard

Head of Major Black Christian Group Backtracks on Mormon Partnership, Apologizes for Causing ‘Discontent’

September 18, 2023
Slavery memorial at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary

Christian Seminary Founded by Enslavers Thankful for Forced, Unpaid Labor

September 18, 2023
Kirk Franklin and Richard Hubbard

Kirk Franklin Finally Finds His Birth Father After 53 Years

September 18, 2023
Pastor Kevin Smith

Pastor Kevin Smith Is First Black Man in SBC Org’s History to Serve as Chairperson

September 18, 2023
vehicle car

Here’s How to Donate a Car to Charity and Write It Off as a Tax Deduction

September 13, 2023
Tony Evans and Carla Crummie engaged to be married

Dr. Tony Evans Engaged to Former Pastor’s Wife and Widow Four Years After Lois Evans’ Death

September 12, 2023
Haiti

Christians Plea for Prayer, Help Amid Haiti’s Surging Gang Violence

September 12, 2023
Coco Gauff prayer

Coco Gauff Talks Faith After US Open Win: I Don’t Pray for Results; I Pray for Strength.

September 12, 2023
Faithfully Magazine
Cart / $0.00

No products in the cart.

  • About
    • Advertise
    • Submit Content
    • Give Via PayPal
  • Q&As
  • Specials
  • Subscribe
  • Shop
  • Events
    • Community Events
    • FM Live Q&As
  • Black Christian Content
  • Log In
Donate
No Result
View All Result
  • About
    • Advertise
    • Submit Content
    • Give Via PayPal
  • Q&As
  • Specials
  • Subscribe
  • Shop
  • Events
    • Community Events
    • FM Live Q&As
  • Black Christian Content
  • Log In
No Result
View All Result
Faithfully Magazine
Home Features

Lynching Preachers: How Black Pastors Resisted Jim Crow and White Pastors Incited Racial Violence

FM Editors by FM Editors
February 10, 2020
in Features
Reading Time: 6 mins read
0
kkk cross fire

Ku Klux Klan assembles short distance from U.S. Capitol With the American flag as their banner, the Klu [i.e. Ku] Klux Klan assembled in numbers 300 within two miles of the U.S. Capitol last night and received 50 candidates for membership in the mystic order. Photo shows the shrouded members in the background with the candidates kneeling in the foreground. (Photo: Underwood & Underwood, via Library of Congress)

44
SHARES
ShareTweetPin It

By Malcolm Brian Foley, Baylor University

White lynch mobs in America murdered at least 4,467 people between 1883 and 1941, hanging, burning, dismembering, garroting and blowtorching their victims.

Their violence was widespread but not indiscriminate: About 3,300 of the lynched were black, according to the most recent count by sociologists Charles Seguin and David Rigby. The remaining dead were white, Mexican, of Mexican descent, Native American, Chinese or Japanese.

Such numbers, based on verifiable newspaper reports, represent a minimum. The full human toll of racial lynching may remain ever beyond reach.

RelatedArticles

A memorial plaque for the four little girls killed in the 1963 bombing at 16th Street Baptist Church Birmingham in Alabama

Churches Asked to Ring Bells in Remembrance of Little Girls Killed in Birmingham Church Bombing

September 9, 2023
man reading book in front of LED cross

Black Churches Fight Florida’s Whitewashing of US History in Sunday School, Sermons and Bible Study

September 9, 2023

Religion was no barrier for these white murderers, as I’ve discovered in my research on Christianity and lynch mobs in the Reconstruction-era South. White preachers incited racial violence, joined the Ku Klux Klan and lynched black people.

Sometimes, the victim was a pastor.

Buttressing white supremacy

When considering American racial terror, the first question to answer is not how a lynch mob could kill a man of the cloth but why white lynch mobs killed at all.

The typical answer from Southern apologists was that only black men who raped white women were targeted. In this view, lynching was “popular justice” – the response of an aggrieved community to a heinous crime.

Journalists like Ida B. Wells and early sociologists like Monroe Work saw through that smokescreen, finding that only about 20% to 25% of lynching victims were alleged rapists. About 3% were women. Some were children.

Black people were lynched for murder or assault, or on suspicion that they committed those crimes. They could also be lynched for looking at a white woman or for bumping the shoulder of a white woman. Some were killed for being near or related to someone accused of the aforementioned offenses.

Identifying the dead is supremely difficult work. As sociologists Amy Kate Bailey and Stewart Tolnay argue persuasively in their 2015 book “Lynched,” very little is known about lynching victims beyond their gender and race.

But by cross-referencing news reports with census data, scholars and civil rights organizations are uncovering more details.

One might expect that mobs seeking to destabilize the black community would focus on the successful and the influential – people like preachers or prominent business owners.

Instead, lynching disproportionately targeted lower-status black people – individuals society would not protect, like the agricultural worker Sam Hose of Georgia and men like Henry Smith, a Texas handyman accused of raping and killing a three-year-old girl.

The rope and the pyre snuffed out primarily the socially marginal: the unemployed, the unmarried, the precarious – often not the prominent – who expressed any discontentment with racial caste.

That’s because lynching was a form of social control. By killing workers with few connections who could be economically replaced – and doing so in brutal, public ways that struck terror into black communities – lynching kept white supremacy on track.

Fight from the front lines

So black ministers weren’t often lynching victims, but they could be targeted if they got in the way.

I.T. Burgess, a preacher in Putnam County, Florida, was hanged in 1894 after being accused of planning to instigate a revolt, according to a May 30, 1894, story in the Atlanta Constitution newspaper. Later that year, in December, the Constitution also reported, Lucius Turner, a preacher near West Point, Georgia, was shot by two brothers for apparently writing an insulting note to their sister.

Ida B. Wells wrote in her 1895 editorial “A Red Record” about Reverend King, a minister in Paris, Texas, who was beaten with a Winchester Rifle and placed on a train out of town. His offense, he said, was being the only person in Lamar County to speak against the horrific 1893 lynching of the handyman Henry Smith.

In each of these cases, the victim’s profession was ancillary to their lynching. But preaching was not incidental to black pastors’ resistance to lynching.

My dissertation research shows black pastors across the U.S. spoke out against racial violence during its worst period, despite the clear danger that it put them in.

Many, like the Washington, D.C., Presbyterian pastor Francis Grimke, preached to their congregations about racial violence. Grimke argued for comprehensive anti-racist education as a way to undermine the narratives that led to lynching.

Other pastors wrote furiously about anti-black violence.

Charles Price Jones, the founder of the Church of God (Holiness) in Mississippi, for example, wrote poetry affirming the African heritage of black Americans. Sutton Griggs, a black Baptist pastor from Texas, wrote novels that were, in reality, thinly veiled political treatises. Pastors wrote articles against lynching in their own denominational newspapers.

By any means necessary

Some white pastors decried racial terror, too. But others used the pulpit to instigate violence.

On June 21, 1903, the white pastor of Olivet Presbyterian church in Delaware used his religious leadership to incite a lynching.

Preaching to a crowd of 3,000 gathered in downtown Wilmington, Reverend Robert A. Elwood urged the jury in the trial of George White – a black farm laborer accused of raping and killing a 17-year-old white girl, Helen Bishop – to pronounce White guilty speedily.

Otherwise, Elwood continued, according to a June 23, 1903 New York Times article, White should be lynched. He cited the Biblical text 1 Corinthians 5:13, which orders Christians to “expel the wicked person from among you.”

“The responsibility for lynching would be yours for delaying the execution of the law,” Elwood thundered, exhorting the jury.

George White was dragged out of jail the next day, bound and burned alive in front of 2,000 people.

The following Sunday, a black pastor named Montrose W. Thornton discussed the week’s barbarities with his own congregation in Wilmington. He urged self-defense.

“There is but one part left for the persecuted negro when charged with crime and when innocent. Be a law unto yourself,” he told his parishioners. “Die in your tracks, perhaps drinking the blood of your pursuer.”

Newspapers around the country denounced both sermons. An editorial in the Washington Star said both pastors had “contributed to the worst passions of the mob.”

By inciting lynching and advocating for self defense, the editors judged, Elwood and Thornton had “brought the pulpit into disrepute.”

Editor’s note: This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.


Malcolm Brian Foley, PhD Candidate in Religion – Historical Studies, Baylor University


Share This Post

Share via

Share This Post

  • Digg
  • Tumblr
  • Flipboard
  • SMS
More
  • Report
Advertisement
Ancestry US
44
SHARES
ShareTweetPin It
FM Editors

FM Editors

Faithfully Magazine is a fresh, bold and exciting news and culture publication that covers issues, conversations and events impacting Christian communities of color.

More Features

doctors
Wellness

Just 2 Percent of US Doctors Are Latina. These Women Want That to Change.

September 20, 2023
Tulsa massacre survivor Viola Fletcher shares her story in the memoir Don't Let Them Bury My Story
Features

Tulsa Massacre Survivor, 109, Is Oldest Woman in the World to Release a Memoir

August 19, 2023
install solar panels
New Jersey

What New Jersey’s Community Solar Program Means for Renters and Low-Income Residents

July 31, 2023

Discussion about this post

Most Shared Articles

  • Can Money-Making Microgrids Empower Black Churches to Close the Clean Energy Gap?...
  • Kirk Franklin Finally Finds His Birth Father After 53 Years...
  • Dr. Tony Evans Engaged to Former Pastor’s Wife and Widow Four Years After Lois Evans’ Death...
  • Coco Gauff Talks Faith After US Open Win: I Don’t Pray for Results; I Pray for Strength....
  • Newark Pastor Timothy Huff Left in Critical Condition After Being Shot in Home...
  • Churches Asked to Ring Bells in Remembrance of Little Girls Killed in Birmingham Church Bombing...

From The Archive

parent and child
Uncategorized

Nearly 1,000 Children Taken From Parents Despite Order Barring Family Separations at Border

by FM Editors
August 1, 2019
Twitter Demien R Faithfully Magazine
Internet

‘Man of God’ Rejects ‘Thirst Trap’ Claims After Attractive Post-Preaching Photos Go Viral

by Nicola A. Menzie
September 7, 2020
A flag of the United States flies above a Christian flag
Videos

Christian Nationalism ‘Only Makes Sense If You’re a White Christian’ — ‘Jesus and John Wayne’ Author Says (Video)

by FM Editors
September 24, 2022
coronavirus vaccine africa
Wellness

Why Testing a Coronavirus Vaccine in Africa Is Immoral

by FM Editors
April 24, 2020
These Race-Related Films Will Make You Laugh, Cry, and Think Differently
Movies

These Race-Related Films Will Make You Laugh, Cry, and Think Differently

by FM Editors
February 27, 2019
Facebook Twitter Youtube Instagram
Faithfully Magazine

Faithfully Magazine is a news and culture publication centered on Christian communities of color.

Recent News

  • Why Is There Christianity If Jesus Was Jewish?

Category

© 2023 Faithfully Media, LLC (Owner and Operator)

  • News
  • Opinion & Analysis
  • Inspiration
  • Web Exclusives
  • Specials
  • Shop
  • Events
    • FM Live Events
    • Community Events
  • Black Christian Content Links
  • About Us
    • Advertise With Us
    • Submit Content
    • Give Via PayPal
  • Log In to Your Faithfully Magazine Partner Account
No Result
View All Result

© 2023 Faithfully Media, LLC (Owner and Operator)

Welcome Back!

Login to your account below

Forgotten Password? Sign Up

Create New Account!

Fill the forms bellow to register

*By registering on our website, you agree to the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy.
All fields are required. Log In

Retrieve your password

Please enter your username or email address to reset your password.

Log In
Share via

Share This Post

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Reddit
  • Email
  • WhatsApp
  • Copy Link
  • Tumblr
  • Digg
  • Flipboard
  • SMS

Add New Playlist

Log In

Sign In

Login with Facebook
Login with Twitter
Forgot password?

Don't have an account? Register

Forgot password?

Enter your account data and we will send you a link to reset your password.

Back to Login

Your password reset link appears to be invalid or expired.

Log in

Privacy Policy

Accept

Add to Collection

  • Public collection title

  • Private collection title

No Collections

Here you'll find all collections you've created before.

This website uses cookies. By continuing to use this website you are giving consent to cookies being used. Visit our Privacy and Cookie Policy.
Are you sure want to unlock this post?
Unlock left : 0
Are you sure want to cancel subscription?
Send this to a friend