The South/religion: A Church That Belongs

Nashville is a church town. It is the South’s Protestant Vatican, a center of denominational agencies and bureaucracies, and the home of more than 700 churches, including two that call themselves First Baptist. The one in the modernistic new building near the Tennessee state capitol is formally named First Baptist Church, Capitol Hill. Organized in 1844, its first pastor was an ex-slave who had been a janitor in the other First Baptist Church and had been instructed in theology by its pastor. Most of the 565 members of the Capitol Hill Church are black, though its doors are “open to all people of all races at all times.”

So declares its current pastor, the Rev. Kelly Miller Smith, 55, who has headed the congregation since 1951. No Nashville minister has played a more central role in the city’s racial situation.

Black Pride. Raised in the all-black town of Mound Bayou, Miss., Smith had little experience with whites until a gun-toting lynch mob roared into town when he was twelve. The mob threatened to shoot a black doctor whom they suspected of treating the man they were chasing. As young Smith watched, the doctor defied them: “Well, shoot.” The would-be lynchers drifted away. Other lessons in black pride were taught Smith by his father, a devout Baptist deacon who was chief grand mentor of the Knights and Daughters of Tabor, a secret society akin to the Masons. The society emphasized black self-help and founded the Taborian Hospital in Mound Bayou in 1941. Smith went to Morehouse College in Atlanta and took his divinity degree from Howard University. Nashville’s First Baptist was his second pulpit, and it proved to be an important one.

Most of Smith’s congregation have college degrees, and many are relatively wealthy, making First Baptist something of an anomaly among black churches. In the civil rights storms of the ’50s and ’60s, Smith’s congregation was constantly in the forefront. As local N.A.A.C.P. president in the ’50s, Smith spearheaded the campaign to integrate Nashville’s schools. The church itself was a staging area for the sit-ins that ultimately integrated Nashville’s hotels and restaurants. Smith became one of the chief spokesmen during talks between black activists and white businessmen. “It was the local businessmen who agreed first,” Smith recalls with a certain Southern pride, “but they said for competitive reasons they would have to wait until they could get the national chains to integrate too.”

An affable diplomat, Smith stays on good terms with white church leaders and allows that “the white church is doing significant things helping individuals to cope with the problems of life.” But he sees a basic difference between the black and white church in the South. “The black church responds to oppression in the way we sing, preach, strategize and organize. The church is the one place where many blacks experience liberation. The white church accommodates the oppressors. Its work is carried on so as not to offend them.”

Young Converts. Smith is concerned that racial inequities are now being overlooked because the more blatant signs of discrimination are past. “Whites simply don’t pay much attention to blacks,” he observes. He himself is assistant dean of Vanderbilt Divinity School (the first black in the seminary’s administration), but he notes that “it is difficult to get seminaries to take into account that black Christians existed and do exist.” Smith is disappointed that some young blacks have become converts to other religions—the Black Muslims, for instance. Still, he believes that in the South the number of black youths in the Christian churches is about the same as it was ten years ago.

Smith sums up: “The church is still the dominant agency for black interests. You can be sure that in a crisis the phone will ring. All members of the black community do not belong to the church, but the church belongs to all the community. And everybody knows it.”