Religion: The Eyes of the World

The eyes of Texas were upon the Most Rev. Henry Knox Sherrill, Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church. In fact, they were all but burning a hole through his black coat. For the bishop had decided that the eyes of the world were more important, and last week canceled plans to hold the church’s 1955 triennial convention in Houston. The city’s racial segregation (though he made no specific reference to it in his announcement) was responsible for the decision, which Sherrill called “the most painful and difficult … I have ever been called upon to make.”

Segregation was a problem that Texas’ Bishop Clinton S. Quin was sure could be taken care of when Houston was picked at the church’s 1952 General Convention. He laid plans to serve nonsegregated meals three times a day at the Houston Coliseum and to build a nonsegregated motel that, together with the University of Houston dormitories, would house the convention’s sprinkling of Negro delegates (about 2%) together with their white brethren. A car pool would provide non-Jim Crow transportation. But the Negroes would still have been barred from most hotels and restaurants in Houston, would have to use separate toilet facilities, and would have to occupy special seats in public vehicles.

But last month two powerful diocesan conventions, New York and Washington, D.C., voted unanimously to ask Bishop Sherrill to move the 1955 triennial to a completely nonsegregated city. Other church members put the case to Bishop Sherrill: this summer the Anglican Congress and the World Council of Churches, meeting in the U.S., would subject the Episcopal Church to especially searching scrutiny by critical Christians from other lands. The slightest appearance of condoning racial segregation would cast a blight on Episcopalianism in their eyes. Without quite calling an international spade a spade, Bishop Sherrill did his best to explain: “I am convinced that on both the international and the national level the scene has altered radically . . . We live in a time of crisis … I am certain that the witness of our church must be so clear that it need not be explained …” But hearty, Kentucky-born Bishop Quin, whose 35 years as bishop of Texas make him the Episcopal bishop oldest in service, replied bitterly: “I’m the goat … I do not like the decision. I do not think it was warranted . . . But I thank God for the kind of religion I have … which gives me the stuff to take it and to keep on plugging for the whole church.”