The Tulsa Race Massacre and the Southern Baptists

"If the treatment of the Negro by the Christian Church is called 'divine,' this is an attack on the conception of God more blasphemous than any which the church has always been so ready and eager to punish." W.E.B. Du Bois

HBO Television Show "Watchmen" Recreating the Tulsa Riot

It saddens me to report that archaeologists announced yesterday that they believe they've found a mass grave in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Actually, they may have found two mass graves; one in Oaklawn Cemetery and one at The Canes, a stretch of land by the 11th Street Bridge.

On Memorial Day, May 31, 1921, and on Tuesday, June 1, 1921, whites massacred between 37 and 300 blacks in the Greenwood District, Tulsa, Oklahoma, (see the 2001 official government report), with 35 city blocks of Greenwood, America's "Black Wall Street," leveled to the ground.

Familiarize yourself with the Tulsa Race Massacre with this superb timeline from the Tulsa World. The massacre has been called "the single worst incident of racial violence in American history."

The Greenwood District, Tulsa, Oklahoma after the massacre

There's no way of knowing how many blacks lost their lives. In addition to white men and women walking the streets with weapons, killing blacks in cold blood, private planes piloted by whites flew overhead and dropped nitro-glycerin bombs, indiscriminately killing men, women, and children.

Authorities gathered bodies in the clean-up and buried them in mass graves.

Some white southern Baptist leaders were involved in the riot, the massacre, the cover-up, and the
burials. So were white southern Methodists. So were white southern Presbyterians.

I feel like a piece of me is buried in those mass graves.

I was pastor of a white southern Baptist congregation in Holdenville, Oklahoma (1982-1987).
I was pastor of a white southern Baptist congregation in Tulsa, Oklahoma (1987-1992).
I was President of the mostly white southern Baptist Convention of Oklahoma (2002-2004).

Site of a Mass Grave (Tulsa World photograph)

I no longer live in Tulsa, but I have vivid memories of walking the streets of Greenwood District in downtown Tulsa. Several times I've gone to Oaklawn to officiate funerals.

I've been in the Brady Theater in the Greenwood District for concerts, one of the only surviving buildings of the riot. I've walked on the grassy piece of land near the 11th Street Bridge in Tulsa.

And the bodies of those unnamed murder victims were under my feet.

And white "Christians" massacred them.

Until the last few years, I was mostly ignorant of the Tulsa Race Massacre. Oh sure, members of the church I served in Tulsa would periodically mention it, but it was mostly in hushed tones. I don't fault them for not talking; I fault myself for not asking.

Robert Moats Miller, in his superb paper entitled The Attitudes of American Protestantism Toward the Negro (1919-1939), reminds us:

"There is in truth a vast gulf between ancient Christian creeds and actual Protestant deeds."

During the next 18 months, I will be writing about some and their Southern Baptists' involvement in the Tulsa Race Riot and its aftermath.

W.J. McGlothlin

W.J. McGlothlin, became President of the Southern Baptist Convention in June 1930, less than a decade after the Tulsa Race Riot.

Dr. McGlothlin was appointed chair of the Department of Church History at Southern Seminary in 1906. Greek scholar A.T. Robertson called Dr. McGlothlin "the finest communicator on the faculty."  He wrote several well-received books, including one entitled Baptist Confessions of Faith.

A champion of doctrinal orthodoxy, Dr. McGlothlin believed in the segregation of the races.

As President of the Southern Baptist Convention, Dr. McGlothlin refused to attend a banquet given in his honor by the Rochester, New York, Baptist Association. The chairman of the banquet, Dr. James E. Rose, was the moderator of the Rochester Baptist Association.

Dr. Rose was black.

The President of the Southern Baptist Convention refused to attend the banquet because Dr. Rose was in a position of leadership, and he was a black man.

Apparently a Rose by any other color is no brother.

There may be some who say it's unfair to point out the past sins of the Southern Baptist Convention. But I do so because there are modern parallels.

A 2019 SBC pastor mocking women teachers with a GIF

Today's treatment of women by certain Southern Baptist leaders carry many similarities to Southern Baptists' treatment of blacks during the 1920s:

1. The exclusion, segregation, and domination of women is justified by misinterpretation of the Scriptures, similar to the manner in which Southern Baptists of the 1920s justified their treatment of blacks by pointing to the Old Testament Jewish exclusion of, segregation from, and domination over other races. 

2. Self-professed Southern Baptist leaders, or those desiring SBC leadership, write doctrinal tomes on why their position of male spiritual superiority is biblical, similar to the Southern Baptist predominate teaching of the 1920s that white superiority is biblical. 

3. Not all Southern Baptists in the 2020s believe in the exclusion of gifted Christian women from leadership, nor did all Southern Baptists believe in the exclusion of and segregation from minority ethnic groups in the 1920s.  

Leading up to the 2021 Centennial of the Tulsa Race Massacre, I will be writing about the danger of Southern Baptist silence on important issues of our Christian faith.

One  hundred years from now, if the Lord tarries, I do not wish anyone to accuse all Southern Baptists of placing our Christian women in spiritual mass graves during the 2020s.

Start asking questions.

More to come...