Gathering recalls 1957's 'Ministers' Manifesto'
By JIM AUCHMUTEY
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 10/25/07
Atlanta, Mayor William B. Hartsfield claimed, was a city too busy to hate.
Even as boy in the 1950s, Bob Shands knew it wasn't true. The son of a minister who had spoken out about race relations, he witnessed the wasp nest of passions it provoked.
"There were bomb threats to the church and bomb threats to our home," he remembered. "Whenever a car slowed down in front of the house, my parents made us move away from the picture window."
All because his father, the pastor of West End Baptist Church, signed a 1,379-word statement calling for calm and decrying hatred. Endorsed by 80 local clergymen and dubbed the Ministers' Manifesto, it was one of the first times Atlanta tried to live up to Hartsfield's famous boast.
On Thursday morning at All Saints' Episcopal Church in Midtown, six of the 15 surviving signers attended a breakfast commemorating the 50th anniversary of the manifesto. Now in their 80s and 90s, some of them used hearing aids as they strained to listen to speakers praise their courage for taking a position that most white Southerners opposed.
"Sometimes, the beginning of everything is one true word," actor Tom Key told them, reading from a proposed drama about the manifesto by playwright Lauren Gunderson.
Asked to stand, the signers were applauded heartily ? despite their pleas that they should not be seen as heroes.
"We just felt like we had to say something and say it quickly because of the prevailing hysteria of the time," said Bevel Jones, a retired United Methodist bishop who helped fashion the manifesto as pastor of Audubon Forest Methodist Church in southwest Atlanta. "Our leaders were threatening to close public schools rather than integrate. It was an inflammatory time. "
'Pastoral, not polemical'
The manifesto was a reaction to the first full-scale battle in the war over school desegregation.
In the fall of 1957, three years after the Supreme Court had outlawed segregated schools, federalized troops had to be called out to put down disturbances when black students enrolled at Central High in Little Rock, Ark. In Georgia, where politicians had vowed not to let white and black schoolchildren mingle, the threat of violence hung in the air.
That October, the Rev. Roy McClain of Atlanta's First Baptist Church wrote a column in The Atlanta Constitution asking why pulpits seemed to be paralyzed in the wake of a moral crisis.
The editors invited other ministers to address the issue. Working through the Christian Council of Metropolitan Atlanta, a group of dozen or so clergymen decided to compose a response. They met in secret at Columbia Theological Seminary, whose president, J. McDowell Richards, wrote the first draft.
"We tried to word it in a way that wouldn't be too divisive because we knew we had to go back to our people," Jones recalled. "We wanted to be pastoral, not polemical."
Once they'd agreed on wording, the ministers distributed the statement to 10 churches they knew would be receptive. They asked scores of pastors to visit those churches and read the declaration. Eighty of them ? all white Protestant men ? signed it.
Then a delegation of ministers went to see Constitution editor Ralph McGill to inquire about buying a full-page ad. He told them the paper would write a story and run the full text.
And so it appeared on the front page of the combined Journal-Constitution editions of Sunday, Nov. 3, 1957, along with a college football round-up and news that the Soviets were sending a dog into space aboard a Sputnik satellite.
The story made national headlines. It was one of the first times a mainstream white group in the Deep South had spoken out for racial tolerance. Life magazine congratulated the ministers for their "bold challenge" and gathered the inner circle for a portrait that shows them looking properly serious and thoughtful.
Far enough, or too far?
Most of the ministers who signed the manifesto reported support and only scattered protests from their congregations. But not everyone was so accepting.
Benjamin Mays, president of Morehouse College, said the declaration was so mild a segregationist could have endorsed it. Others wondered whether the language should have been more ecumenical.
"Looking back, I'm a little bit ashamed that we put it in such strictly Christian terms," said one of the signers, the Rev. Milton Wood of Elberta, Ala., who was rector of All Saints' Episcopal. "If we had put it in Judeo-Christian terms, we would have gotten some rabbis involved."
The most serious opposition, predictably, came from white segregationists. Much of it focused on the chairman of the manifesto committee, the Rev. Herman Turner of Covenant Presbyterian Church in Buckhead.
Members generally backed him, recalled his grandson, the Rev. Bill Bryant of Nashville. But he received some racist letters from outside Atlanta and at least one death threat.
"He got an anonymous call saying that if he was in the pulpit that Sunday, it would be his last sermon," Bryant said. "I remember going to church with plainclothes policemen in the pews."
Almost a year later, the threats of violence materialized when a bomb ripped into Atlanta's most prominent synagogue, the Temple. Rabbi Jacob Rothschild had not signed the manifesto ? it was too Christian ? but he had embraced it publicly.
Looking back, forward
As he stood in front of a display of headlines about the manifesto Thursday, Bob Shands considered the changes Atlanta has undergone in 50 years. He didn't have to think any further than his old neighborhood.
His father, the Rev. Norman Shands, now 91 and retired in Missouri, was pastor of West End Baptist Church, in a transitional part of town near the Atlanta University colleges. Some of his members, threatened by the growing number of blacks, were angered by his pronouncements on race. His deacons almost fired him twice.
A few years after Shands left for another pastorate, the dwindling congregation disbanded and the building was purchased by West Hunter Street Baptist Church, a black fellowship whose pastor was the civil rights leader Ralph David Abernathy.
"I find it ironic," Shands said, "that the church I grew up in, which worked so hard to exclude black people, became Ralph Abernathy's church. I believe God has a sense of humor."
The Rev. Toussaint Hill, who occupies Abernathy's pulpit at West Hunter Street, noticed another irony as he left the breakfast.
Hill had never heard of the manifesto until Ethel Ware Carter of the Regional Council of Churches of Atlanta invited him to the commemoration. He said he admired the ministers for their stand and imagined it had caused them turmoil.
"But I saw only four African-American pastors here this morning," he added, as if to say that there was more work to be done.
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