Fear of Dancing
...and the courage to be serious
On May 2, 1963, more than one thousand students walked out of class in Birmingham, Alabama. They gathered at Sixteenth Street Baptist Church to march downtown as part of the ongoing Southern Freedom Movement, of which Birmingham was the epicenter. Children, organizers thought, would make a powerful public display of the moral and legal cause of the Movement.
But the idea had been controversial even among the organizers of the Movement. On the one hand, children might have lesser legal exposure than their parents. They would not face backlash from white employers, risking a firing and the economic hardship that would follow. And, importantly, many children and teens wanted to participate. Dr. King and other Southern Christian Leadership Conference leaders were reluctant of the strategy at first. They knew too well the danger that would face those young participants. But Rev. James Bevel, a Birmingham minister, convinced them that the strategy was the right one. He took the lead in organizing the Children’s Crusades.
You’ve seen the images. Police mercilessly assaulted those children with dogs and fire hoses and night sticks. They locked more than 1,000 in jail. And children still poured into the streets for a full week of protests. The Children’s Crusades reinvigorated the Southern Freedom Movement that some feared was losing steam in May 1963.1
On the exact same day, May 2, 1963, Rev. Carl Bates of the First Baptist Church of Charlotte, an all-white, Southern Baptist congregation, published his weekly newsletter column, sent out to more than 1,000 member households. In it, he announced a series of sermons on “the Christian home.” For Sunday evening services in that series, he would direct his comments to questions posed by the youth of the church. The first sermon in the series had the title “Let’s Talk about Dancing.”2
Above: A scene of moral terror; chaos and degeneracy; a Baptist preacher’s nightmare.
As I worked at the research and writing and thinking that became Our Trespasses, one of the persistent questions I wanted to understand went something like this: “how did this happen?” By this, I meant Urban Renewal generally, but I also meant more specifically the ways that white Christians and churches were part of every phase of Charlotte’s Urban Renewal projects, from the planning to the profits. With how, I was trying to get specific. The question may seem kind of obvious: it happened because that’s what happens in systems of white supremacy. But under the obvious, I wanted to know what specific components of white American society helped to create and reproduce a massive injustice that was so blatantly abhorrent, and yet seemed natural and uncontroversial as it was happening. In Charlotte, which I suppose to be very much like many other American cities, there were white civil rights ‘leaders’ out in public helping to push for the first Urban Renewal project, and then four more after that!3 Even the most conscious of our local white faith leaders could not understand how that were acting inside the Racial Contract4 in a way that asserted their dominance over space and people, even as they advocated for a more abstract idea of “rights” in the context of the Civil Rights Movement.
My question was not passing curiosity. The scars of Urban Renewal still mark the cityscapes of places around the country. A new version of the same old story is happening as well. I’m watching my neighborhood being hollowed out around me, and there is no small number of white Christians who have been finding advantageous real estate deal on our side of town over the past couple of years. The great Realtor© in the sky keeps directing them over here, in His mysterious ways.5 Maybe they just let the MLS listings fall open and drop their finger into a place, and start writing contracts from there.6 Whatever was operating in Urban Renewal does not seem to have died. It passed on to the next generation. Understanding “it”—some component part or parts of the system of white supremacy—is essential material, political, and spiritual work.
The philosopher Charles Mills asks a similar question: “How were people able consistently to do the wrong thing while thinking they were doing the right thing?"7 The terms of the Racial Contract, Mills’ conception of the unspoken agreement the binds our society together and form the basis of moral and political life, lock those of us who are made white into “moral cognitive dysfunction.”8 Those of us who are white, as a group, Mills says, “will experience genuine cognitive difficulties in recognizing certain behavior patterns”—say, concern about dancing while disregarding Jim Crow— “as racist, so that quite apart from questions of motivation and bad faith they will be morally handicapped simply from the conceptual point of view in seeing and doing the right thing.”9
Mills does not think that this condition is necessarily permanent, nor that it is a trap. The normative culture in white society is built around studied ignorance.10 It is reproduced through “evasion and self-deception.”11 Avoiding the truth, you might say, and building educational and political systems around such chosen ignorance. The obvious examples we see now are the ridiculous Prager University curricula you may have seen on the internet, the state of Florida under Ron DeSantis in general, or the fact that the school libraries at my children’s schools were closed for the first two weeks of school because administrators had to review all the books over some imaginary scare by the Moms for Liberty. But underneath all that clownish stuff are many more insidious examples of how racism has been the water we swim in.
Mills’ antidote to moral cognitive dysfunction is the courage to resist studied ignorance and evasion and self-deception. He quotes the Swedish writer Sven Lindqvist: “It is not knowledge we lack. What is missing is the courage to understand what we know and draw conclusions.”12
White folks have a choice, that is, to become morally serious. To celebrate dancing, and to dance while we undo oppression. There have always been those who have shown us an alternative to ‘moral cognitive dysfunction’—abolitionists and Freedom Riders and renegades and race traitors, John Brown and Anne Braden and Lillian Smith and Clarence Jordan and Joan Trumpauer and so on. What most of us have lacked, though, is the sense to be scared of the right thing: not dancing, but our silent consent to the horrors of white supremacy.
Have You Heard about My Book? Our Trespasses: White Churches and the Taking of American Neighborhoods is now available for pre-order. Thanks to my friends at Park Road Books, you can pre-order using the button below and include a personalized inscription. I’ll sign it as you want (with the limits of good taste) before we mail it out to you.
One Last Note: The bassist Richard Davis died last week. Ethan Iverson (fellow Substack writer and incredible pianist and composer) published some reflections on Davis and included a bunch of tracks as part of his survey of Davis’s career. This one, a duo with Eric Dolphy, blew me away.
For more on the Children’s Crusade and this period of the Civil Rights Movement, see Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-63 (New York: Touchstone, 1988), 754-773. There are excellent introductory resources at https://www.zinnedproject.org/materials/childrens-march; https://www.history.com/news/childrens-crusade-birmingham-civil-rights; https://www.blackpast.org/childrens-page/the-birmingham-childrens-crusade-may-1963-2/. That last link is aimed at children.
The newsletter of First Baptist Church of Charlotte was called The Church Voice. The article I am citing is on the front page of the May 2, 1963 edition. I’m grateful to FBC for granting me access to their archives during the research for the book.
If you want to know much more detail about that, have I got a book for you! You pre-order it now anywhere you buy books, especially by following this link: https://www.parkroadbooks.com/preorder-our-trespasses-white-churches-and-taking-american-neighborhoods-greg-jarrell
Charles Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1997). I’ll dig deeper into Mills below.
You’re supposed to capitalize and note the copyright of Realtor©. Realtors© get irritated if you don’t.
For those who grew up outside white evangelicalism, you should know that youth groups and Sunday Schools sometimes encouraged members to read the Bible by letting it fall open and just starting on whatever page was in front of you. This turns out not to be very good advice for a bunch of reasons, including that the Bible is not magic.
Mills, The Racial Contract, 94.
Mills, The Racial Contract, 95.
Mills, The Racial Contract, 93.
Mills uses the phrase “epistemology of ignorance.” His compelling thoughts on this are in 17-19 of The Racial Contract.
Mills, The Racial Contract, 97-8.
Mills, The Racial Contract, 105.
Greg, thanks for helping me think through this. I sensed how great the moral cognitive dysfunction was when I read how easily and obsequiously the newspaper allowed the folks at the City define the success of the Brooklyn renewal project in terms of the increased tax return in value to the city on the land in Brooklyn. The focus on that as the "success" seems so pointless, but they cast that rationale to forget 200 businesses, over 1000 families and the homes of a dozen congregations. The immense value of all the community's webs of relationships, its schools, daycare centers and college - its pipelines to the middle class - none of that was in the accounting, nor the 5-min walkable distances between these residents and their means to life (to be replaced by miles and the ache of that severance in terms of sheer hours of time and costs of daily commutes to replicate them) totally absent even from their cognition, not just moral cognition.