Black Baptists and Civil Rights: In Birmingham, the Struggle Continues 40 Years Later

Lisa Merlini

April 20, 2004

In Birmingham, fifty years after Brown vs. Board of Education, almost forty years since the Civil Rights Movement, legal segregation has been replaced by pronounced poverty among blacks; and apathy and a growing frustration have replaced the cause that once united the community towards a common desire: equality.

According to quality of life statistics published by the 2002 U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, 13.2 percent of Birmingham's total population falls below the poverty line, placing it fifty-first out of 164 cities measured. While this number or others like it don't place Birmingham at the bottom of the national pile, economically, many who live and work there don't think that numbers or statistics necessarily represent reality.

Various Baptist churches in the area -- each claiming active memberships of between 300 and 500ódevote themselves to carrying out various ministries in the community, such as prison ministry, literacy training and a safe, open place to go to. Three among them, Bethel Baptist Church, Baptist Church of the Covenant and Sixteenth Street Baptist Church stand out in the community for their dedication to activism and advocacy. But even the most active churches, say there's more to be done; that after decades of struggle for Civil Rights and equality, what remains to be done is staggering.

Bethel Baptist Church
Thomas Wilder came to the phone exhausted. A long exhale preceded every response, as if he were willing himself into a restful state. Sitting for the first time all day, he seemed to relish the opportunity to talk. The tone of his voice, deep and sonorous one you would expect from a Baptist preacher grew lighter even as the conversation turned serious. Eventually, he said he enjoyed being interviewed. He doesn't often get the opportunity to sit and reflect on his work. Heist usually too busy doing it.

Reverend Wilder had missed Bible study to return the call, one of the three Bible studies he leads each week at his church, Bethel Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. He asked one of his staff to take over. He calls it "optioning off" whatever he can't do himself. These days, that list is growing.

Bethel Baptist Church is located in downtown Birmingham, in the center of a predominantly African-American community that has yet to see better days. The church stands around the corner from its original site.

Bethel Baptist was bombed three times during the ten years between 1955 and 1965, when Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth was its pastor.

Reverend Shuttlesworth was one of the Civil Rights Movements "big three,"
alongside Reverend Ralph Abernathy and Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Shuttlesworth, known for his fearlessness in confronting white racists, founded the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights. He remains active in the NAACP and the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, where an award for Human Rights is named in his honor, and heads the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, carrying on the institution's tradition. Today, he pastors a church in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Bethel's current pastor, Reverend Wilder refers to the neighborhood where Bethel re-opened its doors seven years ago as shady Entire blocks of houses are rundown and many storefronts stand empty. Poverty attaches itself to the area "like a curse," he said. Resources are scarce, and even with the money they bring in from their congregants, some 450 strong, there just isn't enough to go around

One solution was to rebuild the sanctuary, a million-dollar construction that gave its members a larger space to worship, its staff more room to maneuver. They were then able to expand their work in the community and, thanks to the new sanctuary, provide the area with an initial, if small, boost in property values. The Wilders the minister, his wife, and their three children decided to move into a house nearby to renovate it in the hopes that their work would encourage others to move in and do the same. There has to be good homes to entice people to come back," he said.

Outside of church, his home has become the neighborhood is second meeting place. Teenagers often come over to spend time with his children and to talk with him and his wife about the issues they face and their fears for the future. While Wilder wouldn't go into any specifics, for fear of breaking a trust, he did say their conversations were "very open, and encompass every issue you think a teenager would be thinking about."

Unfortunately, he said, those conversations rarely include a discussion about the Civil Rights Movement. "I remember being treated as a second-class citizen, and having to stand at the end of lunch counters or get off the sidewalk if a white person stepped onto it," he said. "The Civil Rights Movement is very important because we lived it. Children think it is history. They say we've moved on. Sometimes they don't know the importance of it or the relevance. They need to understand tragedy."

Still, his home has become a sort of haven, one that invariably has provided the teenagers with the positive, encouraging environment to which they might not otherwise have access. And while he was hoping his home would help spur growth in the rest of the community, if not the in homes on his block. But so far, that hasn't happened. The families or individuals who used to live in those homes either left entirely or chose to rent them, rarely coming by to maintain their properties, so they have largely fallen into disrepair.

In Reverend Wilder's opinion, the issue goes well beyond disappearing landlords. The issue, really, is a financial one. "People need to be in a position to take ownership," he said. "They need to be independent, and they need to know how to hold jobs," two things that so far many members of the community have not been able to achieve. One of the reasons is that many of the community's families, at least those families he sees in church, are single-parent households, where mothers are earning just enough to get by.

"Lots of kids are fatherless," he said. "They're not getting the love and attention they might have gotten had their fathers been around, and that's a problem." But it is a problem that the church is just beginning to address. Reverend Wilder does not think they are doing enough to support women and fatherless children. Even though the new sanctuary is packed each weekend with faithful members, the money and resources fall short.

Ten years from now, Reverend Wilder would love to provide his congregants with a family life center, complete with more staff and more funds, to build a caring, nurturing environment for children and their families. But today, the annual budget of $500,000 won't allow for it. So at the moment, he settles for encouraging men to become what he calls "Childless Fathers," a program of male mentors and role models for children who might not otherwise have one. He'd also like to spearhead community redevelopment by "building a house on every vacant lot and renovating every old one," develop an elder care program and a prison ministry and get the church to the point where it can function debt-free. When and how that's going to happen, even for one of Birmingham's most historic and active churches, Reverend Wilder doesn't know. There is still a very long road ahead. "What we do is so small compared to what needs to be done," he said.

Baptist Church of the Covenant
"I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did it for me."

This Biblical excerpt from Matthew 25:40 adorns the top of the Baptist Church of the Covenant's Web site. On Pastor Sarah Shelton's welcome page, she says, "Baptist Church of the Covenant is a place where ministry is acted upon, not just talked about," to describe what the church's motto, "Faith comes to life," really means. The church is located on Birmingham's south side, across the street from a large housing project, whose residents are mainly working-class African-Americans. The churches membership is predominantly white. But given how the church came into existence, that racial disparity has yet to become an issue.

In 1970, Winifred Bryant and her daughter, Twyla Fortune, wanted to join the First Baptist Church, a predominantly white church downtown. They had first heard of the church through its social ministry, namely its tutoring of African-American children in the projects. As the children came to know the tutors better, they started urging their parents to take them to worship at First Baptist. Winifred Bryant and Twyla Fortune applied for membership. The congregation denied them twice, even though they had completed their membership training. The second time -- the day of their scheduled baptism in 1970 - the church closed its doors and said it was not accepting new members, shutting out even white candidates, who were later allowed to join.

Bern Williamson, then a member of the congregation, found this unacceptable. On that day, he marched to the podium, said as much, and announced that he was leaving to form another church. The choir loft emptied out; 300 people immediately left First Baptist Church to form the Baptist Church of the Covenant. They started from scratch, sharing Temple Emanuel's sanctuary until they saved enough to purchase their own property. They were left without a home, but they did not leave First Baptist empty-handed.

"The focus of our existence is social ministry," Reverend Sarah Shelton said, the first woman who also was not one of their original members called to pastor a Baptist church in Birmingham. The church's work in the community around them, namely the housing projects that are only a block away, remains central. Today they operate with a $500,000 budget, devoting most of their budget to the social services they provide, all under the stewardship of a ministry committee.

"I'm a Baptist minister's daughter, and grew up worshipping in an inner city church, so I know the needs the members of my congregation are facing today," Reverend Shelton said. To answer that need, she has set up Care Teams, groups of individuals who minister to the ill and infirm, working closely with a clinic for individuals with AIDS and HIV. They are members of the Birmingham Hospitality Network that takes turns housing and feeding homeless families for a week at a time. On Monday nights, they hold literacy and English as a Second Language classes for their international members, and others who need a leg-up. With a membership of 375 and an active membership of 220, they have their work cut out for them.

No knows this more that Reverend Shelton, but it hasn't deterred her. This is, she said, "what God wanted me to do with my life. I found I had no peace until I listened."

Sixteenth Street Baptist Church
The caption on the back window is "you do it to me." The window, a stained-glass image of a Black Jesus resurrected against a modernistic blue background, was a gift from the children of Wales to the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in honor of the four little girls murdered there on September 15, 1963. The girls, Denise McNair, Cynthia Wesley, Adie Mae Collins and Carol Robertson, were killed when a member of the Ku Klux Klan set off a bomb beneath the church's back stairs.

The bomb blew out a staircase, the adjacent bathroom, where the girls were, and the surrounding windows. A hole where the face of Jesus should be, in another stained-glass window, remains as a reminder of that day. Otherwise, it looks like nothing happened. The sanctuary, plush with red carpeting and cushions on the pews, is immaculate. Tiffany stained-glass windows light the interior from all sides, including a large square skylight in the ceiling. The church is designed with an Akron-style choir loft, meant to place the central focus on the pastor and the pulpit.

The church can accommodate up to 2000 people, a useful attribute during the civil Rights Movement, when the Civil Rights leaders held their mass-meetings there. Today's active membership is closer to 300, but Pastor Arthur Price claims they remain just as active in the community as they once were, only different.

"We've changed from a neighborhood church to a downtown church," he said. "A lot of people moved to the suburbs, which in a way has forced us to expand our reach, change with the times, if you will. Today, we minister outside our area. We're more of a metro church."

Sixteenth Street Church operates on a yearly budget of $500,000, much of which, Pastor Price said, goes to fund their social ministry programs. Youth ministries, single-parent groups and efforts to promote voter registration in the community are their top priorities, but according to Pastor Price, their most innovative ministerial work happens on Tuesday nights. Through a partnership with the city drug court, every week for the past ten weeks the church has been holding a drug rehab ministry.

"Our goal with this is to help offenders turn from drugs and find the Lord," Pastor Price said. Since the program is so new, assessing its success isn't yet possible, but the response to the program by the community is a positive one. Hannah Staten, a lifelong member of Sixteenth Street, calls it a blessing. "Drugs have run rampant for too long, as a detriment to our youth," she said. "It's time that changed, and this is just the way to do it."

The Most Important Factor
Social outreach, educational programs and community initiatives can often spread a church's name farther and wider than its Sunday worship services.
But keeping people in the seats, keeping the church's membership strong so it is able to contribute to the community and continue its social outreach requires long hours, and some innovative thinking. The congregation needs something to take home, something that will stay with them after the service is over, something that will keep them coming back and wanting to contribute.

For many, the sermon's the key to keeping pews filled. What remains startling, even to the pastors themselves, is just how much work a good sermon takes. Somehow, all three said, you have to find a way to compete with the congregation's television sets.

"You constantly have to reinvent yourself," Pastor Wilder said. "It's how you keep people interested and committed." To satisfy both himself and his congregation, his sermon has to be relevant, meet a specified need, inspire, hold their interest and have some entertainment value. "People learn better when they are at ease, when they are laughing."

When Pastor Shelton preaches, she chooses to focus on a story. She'll read a certain passage of Scripture and then delve into the story within it and in the passages around it to flesh out its context and perhaps even hidden meaning. She brings it to life, she said, by relating it to personal stories and examples from real life, "what I see around me."

Pastor Price keeps his focus narrower. He has, he said, one defined objective: to "proclaim Jesus Christ as the Risen Lord." He explained his preaching style by giving a recent example. On Easter Sunday, he said, he started out by proving the resurrection of Jesus with quotes from Scripture, and then continued to relate the Scripture to their own lives. "Jesus opens our eyes when we are blinded by the truth," he said. "I want each individual to cultivate a personal relationship with the Lord."

"With every Scripture, I sometimes look at rabbit trails," Reverend Wilder said. "I try to let Scripture interpret Scripture. If I can't define Scripture with Scripture, it is an opinion. It's not the truth." He uses a method called transliterating, translating words or phrases, in his case, of scripture, literally from the Bible. But it doesn't stop there.

Wilder loves to study. If giving a sermon on stress, for example, Pastor Wilder might research the medicinal benefits of laughter, finding research to prove his belief that it is better than medicine for health.

"I will hit you from all sides," he said. "I will give it to you from the world of medicine, psychology, physics and scripture. I will hit you from all four angles."
His most recurring themes, he said, are on anger, stress, and body issues the issues he said are most common among his congregants. They are issues echoed in inner cities around the country: The desire to leave the frustrations of poverty behind, to one day enter the workforce or move to a better-paying job. Simply put, they want to experience the same dignity their predecessors sought 40 years ago, when the city of Birmingham was more widely known as Bombingham.

All three of the pastors have said their congregations run the gamut from the unemployed to the struggling single mothers to the working-class laborers, teachers and a few members with white-collar jobs. The members of their congregations each have different reasons for attending week after week. Some, echoing their ancestors, want to be part of something that still holds a place of prominence in the community. Yet, even as close as forty years ago, during the height of the Civil Rights Movement, faith is what kept them together, the connection that kept them going.

Today, that tether is dissipating, especially among the younger generations, individuals who don't fully grasp the link between faith and the strength of a community. It's lessening, they said, but not entirely. There are many in their communities who believe faith is stronger than anger, and much more powerful, too.

That, they said, is something the churches are praying for.

(Updated May 9, 2004)