Pulpits, boycotts and the church roots of the civil rights movement

Try to imagine the civil rights movement without churches. You can't. There would be no meeting halls, no mailing lists, no volunteers who already trusted one another, no singing, no ready-made moral vocabulary, and no pastors with the independence to defy a hostile local economy. The movement that broke Jim Crow was not assembled in an office. It was assembled in sanctuaries.

That fact should interest every conservative, and not only for the reason people expect. It is an argument that the institutions we defend, churches and families and voluntary associations, are the institutions that free a people when government fails. It is also a reminder that the best American arguments for equal treatment were made in the language of the Declaration of Independence and the Bible, not against them.

Terms and claim

The civil rights movement here means the organized campaign, roughly from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, to end legal segregation and secure the vote for Black Americans in the South.

Natural law means the idea that there is a moral law above the statute books, knowable by reason and conscience, against which human laws can be measured.

The claim: the civil rights movement drew its organization, its courage and its argument from the church, and that history is part of the conservative inheritance, not an exception to it. Four premises follow, and then the strongest objection.

One: the church gave the movement its institutions

Start in Montgomery, Alabama. On December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a city bus and was arrested. Black leaders in the city, many of them ministers and church women, called for a one-day boycott of the buses on Monday, December 5. It was so effective that the organizers formed the Montgomery Improvement Association that same day, and chose a young pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Martin Luther King Jr., as its president.

Then came the part that deserves more attention than it gets. The boycott lasted from December 1955 until December 1956, more than a year. Think about what that required. Tens of thousands of people had to find another way to work every day for a year. The Association organized carpools, and the churches were central to keeping the effort going. The mass meetings held the thing together: hymns were sung, Scripture was read, and a community that had every reason to give up was given every reason to continue.

No political party could have done it, and no government agency would have. A voluntary institution rooted in a shared faith did it.

The movement won in court as well. In Browder v. Gayle, a federal district court held in June of 1956 that bus segregation violated the Constitution, and the Supreme Court affirmed in November of 1956. The boycott formally ended on December 20, 1956. The two tracks, the church and the courthouse, worked together.

In 1957 the lesson was institutionalized. Ministers from across the South, King among them, founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to coordinate nonviolent action across the region. The call for it came from King, C. K. Steele and Fred Shuttlesworth, all pastors. Its name says what it was. It was a conference of Christian leaders, and its first great strength was that every member already had a congregation behind him.

Two: the church gave the movement its argument

Now the intellectual side, because the movement did not run on feeling. It ran on an argument, and the argument was conservative in structure.

In April of 1963, King sat in a Birmingham jail and wrote a long open letter to white clergymen who had urged him to wait. In it he drew on the tradition of Augustine and Thomas Aquinas to answer the obvious question: how can anyone claim a right to disobey an unjust law, while demanding that others obey the just ones? His answer, which I will paraphrase rather than quote, was that a just law is one rooted in the moral law of God and in natural law, and an unjust law is a human law that does not square with them. A law that degrades the human personality, he said, is unjust. He added that the person who breaks such a law openly, lovingly and willing to accept the penalty is expressing the highest respect for law.

Look at what that is. It is the classical natural-law tradition: the source of rights is above the government, and statutes that contradict it have no moral claim. It is the argument the colonial clergy made against George III, and the one the Declaration made in the opening paragraph, that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights. King said, in so many words, that the movement was asking America to live up to the promise written in those documents. In the 1963 speech at the Lincoln Memorial he spoke of the Constitution and the Declaration as a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir, and asked that it be paid.

This is why the movement was so hard for segregationists to answer. They were arguing from custom and from the power of the state. King and his allies were arguing from the founding premises of the republic. Read the second paragraph of the Declaration and then read the Montgomery protesters' demands. One of them is the legal form of the other. You can read the founding texts yourself on the Founders page and in the Constitution.

Three: the church paid for it

Moral seriousness requires remembering what the cost was. Birmingham in 1963 was a city where Black churches were targets, and the worst of it came on Sunday, September 15, 1963, when a bomb went off at the 16th Street Baptist Church, a rallying point for the movement's activities in Birmingham. Four girls, Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Denise McNair, were killed in the church's basement, where they were getting ready for a service after Sunday school.

The bombing was an act of terrorism aimed at a house of worship, and it did what such acts cannot do: it moved the conscience of the country. Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The Civil Rights Act outlawed segregation in public accommodations and discrimination in employment; the Voting Rights Act attacked the literacy tests and other devices that had kept Black citizens off the rolls. The Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in 1870, had promised that the right to vote would not be denied on account of race. It took ninety-five years and a great deal of courage for the promise to be kept.

It also bears repeating that the lawless side of this story was the side that bombed churches, not the side that held mass meetings in them.

Four: the argument for what conservatives should honor

Here is the part where I want to speak directly to people on my side of the aisle, because this history gets handled badly in both directions.

Some on the left treat the civil rights movement as a possession of the political left, a story that begins and ends with the expansion of federal power. Some on the right respond by ignoring the whole subject, as if the movement were somebody else's story. Both are mistakes.

What does a conservative honor in this history?

1. The moral clarity. A Black pastor in Montgomery in 1955 had to answer a hard question: do you obey a law that treats you as less than a citizen? His answer, that human law is judged by a higher law, is the claim a conservative makes about every overreaching government.
2. The method. Nonviolent, lawful, open protest, with people willing to accept the consequences, is a model of citizenship. It does not tear down institutions. It appeals to them.
3. The institutions that carried it. Churches, mutual-aid societies, schools and local businesses did what no federal program could do. The people who organized the boycott did not wait for Washington, and they did not need a grant.
4. The appeal to the founding. The movement's best argument was that America should keep its word. That is a restorationist argument. It asks for fidelity to a text.
5. The courage. It is the same quality conservatives admire in the Founders: willingness to put your name, your job and your safety on a principle.

Honoring that does not require agreeing with every policy that came after. It requires agreeing that Jim Crow was an offense against the Constitution's promise of equal citizenship, and that the people who ended it deserve our gratitude.

The steelman: a constitutional objection

Here is the most serious conservative objection, and it deserves to be stated fairly. Some conservatives in 1964 opposed parts of the Civil Rights Act on constitutional grounds. Barry Goldwater, who had supported earlier civil rights bills and opposed segregation personally, voted against the 1964 act because he believed that its provisions on private businesses stretched the Commerce Clause and endangered the rights of property and association. The objection was not that equality does not matter, but that the means of the federal government must still be limited by the enumerated powers.

That is a serious question, and the right answer is to take it seriously. Three points.

First, the debate over federal power in 1964 was a debate about means, and conservatives should not shy from having that argument, then or now. Federalism is a real principle.

Second, the objection must be weighed against the facts it faced. The Southern states had spent decades using the power of the state itself to enforce segregation and to deny the vote. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, ratified after the Civil War, gave Congress express power to enforce equal protection and the right to vote by "appropriate legislation." The Constitution's text anticipates federal action precisely where states violate those guarantees. When the states are the ones depriving citizens of their rights, federalism is not a defense. It is the problem.

Third, the lesson that endures is the lesson about the right order. The movement started in the churches and the courts, and legislation followed. That is how a healthy republic should work: civil society moves first, the state follows, and the people hold both accountable.

The church today and what it still teaches

If you want to see the continuing relevance, look at what the churches in this story did that governments could not. They built schools when public schools refused. They ran credit unions and burial societies when banks and insurers shut people out. They trained leaders when no university would. The same institutions today are the ones running food pantries, tutoring programs, recovery ministries and pregnancy centers, and the pattern is the same. Government at its best amplifies what civil society has proved. At its worst it replaces it.

There is a tension here worth naming. The movement's churches were speaking directly about law and politics from the pulpit, and the left has often honored that tradition while objecting when other churches do the same. If the pulpit was right to speak about segregation, the principle that churches may speak about public questions is established, and it applies to every church on every side. That matters when someone proposes to restrict what religious institutions may say. For more on that, see Should pastors endorse candidates? The Johnson Amendment fight, argued fairly, and for the founding-era roots of the same tradition read The Boston sermon of 1750 that taught colonists when to resist a king and The 1688 Germantown protest and the believers who started abolition.

The older roots of the same principle show up in To bigotry no sanction, Washington's 1790 letter to the Jews of Newport, which promised a government that gives bigotry no sanction, and in the flag-salute case behind two schoolgirls, a flag salute and the 1943 ruling that protected conscience that protected conscience.

The case in brief

1. The civil rights movement was built in churches: the Montgomery Improvement Association of December 1955 and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference of 1957 were led by pastors and sustained by congregations.
2. Its argument was natural law and the Declaration: unjust laws contradict the moral law above the state, and America had promised equality in its founding documents.
3. The cost was real: on September 15, 1963, a bomb at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham killed four girls, and the national conscience moved.
4. Conservatives should honor the movement's moral clarity, its lawful method, its institutions, and its fidelity to the founding, while still debating the proper means of federal power.
5. The movement's history settles that churches may speak to public questions, and that principle protects every congregation.

What you can do: read the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments in the Constitution, including their enforcement clauses, then visit a local church or civic group that serves your neighbors and ask how you can help.