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Report on slavery is only a start for Southern Baptists' reckoning with racism [View all]
From the article:
Just over 100 years ago, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary was on the brink of financial collapse.
The school’s trustees were thinking about closing the doors.
Then a man named Joseph E. Brown made a $50,000 donation to save the school.
The seminary’s leaders hailed the gift as an answer to prayer. They eventually honored Brown, who also served as governor of Georgia and a member of the seminary’s Board of Trustees, with a professorship in his name.
They never had a second thought about where the money came from.
Joseph E. Brown, the secessionist governor of Georgia during the Civil War. Photo courtesy of LOC/Creative Commons
Brown gained his wealth on the backs of incarcerated black men through the heinous practice of convict leasing. His business, Dade Coal Company, paid the state a fee for the work of incarcerated men and, in turn, worked these laborers under draconian conditions.....
But there’s more to the story.
Evangelicals — including Southern Baptists — have continued to demonstrate complicity with racism since the civil rights era and to the present day. From slavery to Jim Crow segregation, and now in the post-civil rights era, the narrative of white racial superiority persists, particularly among white evangelicals.
The school’s trustees were thinking about closing the doors.
Then a man named Joseph E. Brown made a $50,000 donation to save the school.
The seminary’s leaders hailed the gift as an answer to prayer. They eventually honored Brown, who also served as governor of Georgia and a member of the seminary’s Board of Trustees, with a professorship in his name.
They never had a second thought about where the money came from.
Joseph E. Brown, the secessionist governor of Georgia during the Civil War. Photo courtesy of LOC/Creative Commons
Brown gained his wealth on the backs of incarcerated black men through the heinous practice of convict leasing. His business, Dade Coal Company, paid the state a fee for the work of incarcerated men and, in turn, worked these laborers under draconian conditions.....
But there’s more to the story.
Evangelicals — including Southern Baptists — have continued to demonstrate complicity with racism since the civil rights era and to the present day. From slavery to Jim Crow segregation, and now in the post-civil rights era, the narrative of white racial superiority persists, particularly among white evangelicals.
To read more:
https://religionnews.com/2018/12/14/report-on-slavery-is-only-a-start-for-southern-baptists-reckoning-with-racism/
One can argue that the US was built on a foundation that required racism to make the system work.
And it was not simply Southerners who benefitted. The Northern capitalists also depended on a steady supply of relatively low cost material that owed its low cost to the slave labor that produced it.
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Report on slavery is only a start for Southern Baptists' reckoning with racism [View all]
guillaumeb
Dec 2018
OP
Yet while the Catholic Church continues to struggle with systemic sexual abuse...
Act_of_Reparation
Dec 2018
#6
How much time must pass between two arbitrary points before one may realistically expect change?
Act_of_Reparation
Dec 2018
#10
IIRC the 2017 SBC annual meeting fought over taking down Confederate monuments
bobbieinok
Dec 2018
#3