Episcopalians: Faith & Prejudice in Georgia

What role should the church play in the bitter fight for Negro equality in schools? In Atlanta last week, the question was very much in the public eye as pickets bearing anti-segregation placards marched outside the fashionable, privately run Lovett School. It was a kind of civil rights protest that the South has grown used to — except that this time the pickets included Episcopal priests, and their protests were aimed at a school with Episcopal ties.

The pickets were objecting to Lovett’s whites-only admission policy, which pits the practice of some wealthy supporters of the church squarely against the desegregationist preaching of their bishops. Atlanta’s crusading Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., a Baptist, raised the issue last February, when he asked the school to admit his son. The school said no to him, and later to two Negro children from Episcopal families. The ground for rejection was purely racial, and the arguments have been echoing across Atlanta ever since.

Communion Every Wednesday. Lovett’s trustees obviously felt that their church connection was not involved, since the school is, technically, an autonomous corporation without church affiliation. But in fact, 14 of Lovett’s 21 trustees are required to be Episcopal communicants; their chairman is the dean of St. Philip’s Cathedral; and, in keeping with the school’s chartered purpose of furthering religion in accordance with “the Episcopal faith as contained in the Book of Common Prayer,” Holy Communion is celebrated by the dean each Wednesday morning for the student body.

This was connection enough for Lovett’s headmaster, the Rev. James McDowell. He promptly resigned, saying, “The church has spoken on the matter of segregation, and it is my duty, so long as I am a priest, to adhere to its teachings.” At the same time, the Rt. Rev. Randolph Claiborne, Jr., Bishop of Atlanta, declared that the trustees’ actions “have forfeited the right of implied or official support for the Lovett School by the Episcopal Church.” But to many, the bishop’s words seemed hollow, since he had hardly exhausted opportunities for bringing pressure on the school. He presumably could ask St. Philip’s dean to resign as head of the trustees, or even forbid the holding of Episcopal services at Lovett.

He did none of these things, causing the Atlanta Constitution’s Publisher Ralph McGill, himself an Episcopalian, to resign from the cathedral, snorting “Utter hypocrisy” to an interviewer from the Atlanta church’s monthly newspaper The Diocese. McGill’s words never got into print, for a right-hand man of the bishop rushed to The Diocese’s print shop after the press run was over, gave orders that the entire issue be destroyed and a new one distributed without the interview.

Pillars of the Church. Behind the bishop’s reluctance to take tougher action, no doubt, was the fact that among Lovett’s staunchest supporters is a group of Atlanta’s richest and most influential people who also happen to be pillars of the Episcopal Church. An example is wealthy Lawyer Philip Alston Jr., a senior warden of St. Luke’s parish. Since 1959 he has personally been responsible for raising more than $350,000 for Lovett’s building program—including one gift of $100,000 that was contingent upon the school’s remaining closed to Negroes.

Whether or not Lovett ever caves in to the pickets and desegregates, the diocese has already been bitterly divided by the situation, and it may take years for the ill will to dissolve. To one priest in the diocese, the Lovett School has become “the Little Rock of the Episcopal Church.” It is in fact a small-scale but authentic Christian tragedy.

As their years of service and support for the diocese indicate, the supporters of the Lovett School are in many respects dutiful and loyal members of the church who simply cannot accept this one summons to obedience on the question of desegregation. Yet the Episcopal bishops have made it unmistakably clear that in 1963 the real test of Christian service is whether a man lives up to this specific application of Jesus’ command, “Love thy neighbor.”