As we celebrate 90 years of faithful work for justice and equity this year, we’re sharing stories of 90 Years Rooted in Faith that reflect the heart of the North Carolina Council of Churches. Each month, you’ll hear from staff and long-time friends of the Council as they highlight the transformative impacts we’ve had on our community and our vision for the future. Stay tuned for these inspiring reflections throughout the year!
In 1935 church leaders from across N.C. gathered to address “interchurch relations.”1 They were Associate Reformed Presbyterian, Congregational-Christian, Disciples of Christ, Friends, Methodist Episcopal, Methodist Episcopal-South, Methodist Protestant, Moravian, Presbyterian-U.S., Protestant Episcopalian, Reformed Evangelical, and United Lutheran. Their original aims included confronting the “collective ills of society,” working to “purge the motion picture [industry] of its moral filth,” grappling with how the “economic disaster of the last five years . . . now threatens physical, social, and moral [order],” and addressing a world whose “practice points all too ominously toward war.” But preeminent among their concerns was the “problem of race relations.” Informal conversations with black church leaders soon led them to issue formal invitations for those denominations to join the Council and so it grew to include the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the African Methodist Episcopal Church-Zion, the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church, and the General Baptists. Thus, the Council was likely among the first places in the southeast where white leaders and black leaders sat down together as equals.
Shelton Smith, founder and first president of the Council, acknowledged the Church’s complicity in slavery, but he recognized that conditions still remained deleterious 70 years later. Both overtly, in sermons and educational material, and inadvertently, through benign neglect, the white church participated in the systemic exclusion of black people from the economic and education platforms benefitting whites. A student and then a teacher of the history of Christianity in America, Smith painstakingly documented this trend in his book, In His Image, But . . . . 2 In his work with the Council, Smith challenged church leaders to do more than remain neutral on the question of race, prefiguring the argument Martin Luther King, Jr., would make from a jail cell in Birmingham. In “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” King named what Smith knew: To say and do nothing in the face of evil is to be on the wrong side of righteousness.3
From the minutes of the first meeting, February 5, 1935, in the category, Types of Cooperation, the early leaders agreed: “Throughout the modern world Christianity is confronted with the problem of race-relations. How to make the spirit of Christ effective in this temper-upsetting area is one of the most perplexing questions of contemporary civilization. Here in the South the churches are met by this problem in one of its most crucial forms. What the way out is no one sees clearly, but that ultimately a way must be found is steadily dawning upon an increasing number of Christians.”4
The early leaders of the Council brought a progressive lens to biblical interpretation and theological explanation, drawing heavily on themes from the Social Gospel movement to address real suffering in their midst with a clear emphasis on the need for the churches to use “their insight, their devotion, their courage” to address “the vast sickness of our social order.”5 No doubt the progressive social and economic policies ushered in through The New Deal helped further their theological quest for righteousness lived out through love of neighbor, though it must be admitted that the New Deal did not deal equitably with black and brown neighbors.
Indeed, this was North Carolina, and many a historian has documented the inventive ways state politicians built a wedge between blacks and poor whites, becoming so successful in their efforts that South African Afrikaners looked to North Carolina as a model for building the system of Apartheid that subjugated 85% of the population under the rule of the remaining 15%.6
The Council’s leaders did not rest. Uniting officially in 1941 with Black church leaders, the Council, as previously stated, was likely the first place in the Southeast where black and white leaders gathered as equals to address matters mutually important to both. Together they tackled migrant labor conditions, prison reform, abolition of the death penalty, and textile mill working conditions, just to name a few that claimed the Council’s early attention. To state the obvious, each of these issues impacted Blacks at higher percentages than whites. Even migrant labor on the east coast in the earliest days of the Council was primarily Black labor, only becoming Latino/a labor in the 1970s.
As “the sickness of our social order” has morphed to include women’s rights, LGBTQ+ rights, gun violence prevention, environmental justice, wage inequality, and access to healthcare, just to name a few, the Council has adapted as well. Our purpose, however, never waivers. We seek justice, God’s justice that includes every person created in the image of God, with no “buts.” We seek justice, God’s justice as refracted through the lens of the Old Testament Prophets and the New Testament Gospels. We seek justice so that all may live in a world that allows individuals to flourish to the full extent of their potential.
- Open Forum on Interchurch Cooperation, held at Greensboro, N.C., January 22, 1935. Meeting called to order by the Chairman, Dr. H Shelton Smith at 3 PM in the first Presbyterian Church.
- H. Shelton Smith, In His Image, But . . .: Racism in Southern Religion, 1780-1910, Durham, N.C., Duke University Press, 1972.
- Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” in Why We Can’t Wait, Boston: Beacon Press, 2010.
- Prospectus of the North Carolina Council of Churches as recorded in the minutes from February 5, 1935. Meeting called to order at 10 AM in the West Market Street Methodist Church, South, Greensboro, N.C.
- Ibid.
- For a very recent analysis of this history, see James L. Leloudis and Robert R. Korstad, Fragile Democracy: The Struggle Over Race and Voting Rights in North Carolina, The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, NC, 2020.
Join us in continuing this legacy of justice and courage. Your gift supports the Council’s work for equity and compassion across North Carolina. Donate today.
