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"The Colored Problem:" Milwaukee's White Protestant Churches Respond to the Second Great Migration

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Marquette University e-Publications@Marquette Dissertations, Theses, and Professional Dissertations (1934 -) Projects "The Colored Problem:" Milwaukee's White Protestant Churches Respond to the Second Great Migration Peter Borg Marquette University Follow this and additional works at: https://epublications.marquette.edu/dissertations_mu Part of the History Commons Recommended Citation Borg, Peter, ""The Colored Problem:" Milwaukee's White Protestant Churches Respond to the Second Great Migration" (2020). Dissertations (1934 -). 927. https://epublications.marquette.edu/dissertations_mu/927 “THE COLORED PROBLEM:” MILWAUKEE’S WHITE PROTESTANT CHURCHES RESPOND TO THE SECOND GREAT MIGRATION by Peter Borg A Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School, Marquette University, In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for The Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Milwaukee, Wisconsin May 2020 ABSTRACT “THE COLORED PROBLEM:” MILWAUKEE’S WHITE PROTESTANT CHURCHES RESPOND TO THE SECOND GREAT MIGRATION Peter Borg Marquette University, 2020 In 1963 Dr. King observed that America was most segregated on Sunday mornings when its churches were filled with worshippers. My dissertation investigates the response of Milwaukee’s white urban Protestant churches to the Second Great Migration, which led to tremendous growth in the city’s African American population. The difficulty caused by many white members living in the suburbs while still attending church in racially transitioning city neighborhoods was compounded in some cases by the negative influence exerted by denominational history and polity. While those realities were often far more significant than theology in determining how individual congregations reacted to the first instances of racial diversity in their midst, churches that viewed demographic transition solely as a spiritual opportunity were the ones able to successfully become integrated congregations. My project is a case study of three churches; each represents one of three responses by white Protestant congregations in the city. Some relocated to the suburbs. Others primarily studied the problem academically and consequently developed and hosted programs to meet tangible physical needs but did not see African Americans as worthy equals in church membership. These congregations eventually closed. A few churches, however, motivated by their belief that all humans were in need of the salvation only Jesus could provide, sought to build relationships with their new neighbors. Those churches became racially integrated and remain so today. i TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………. 1 II. “THE COLORED PROBLEM”………………………………………... 29 III. THE COMPROMISE PROBLEM……………………………………. 101 IV. AN INTEGRATED SOLUTION……………………………………... 191 V. CONCLUSION……………………………………………………….. 251 VI. BIBLIOGRAPHY…………………………………………………….. 263 1 INTRODUCTION I think it is one of the tragedies of our nation, one of the shameful tragedies, that eleven o’clock on Sunday morning is one of the most segregated hours, if not the most segregated hour, in Christian America. I definitely think the Christian church should be integrated, and any church that stands against integration and that has a segregated body is standing against the spirit and the teachings of Jesus Christ, and it fails to be a true witness. - Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. On April 17, 1960 the Dr. King was a guest on the National Broadcasting Company (NBC) television program Meet the Press. It was the first of his five appearances on the show. He was interviewed by four distinguished journalists that episode: Frank Van Der Linden of the Nashville Banner , May Craig from the Portland (Maine) Press Herald , Anthony Lewis of the New York Times , and Lawrence E. Spivak, a “regular member” of the show’s panel. Van Der Linden served as a White House correspondent for major newspapers, as had Craig for the Gannett newspaper syndicate. Lewis was a Pulitzer Prize winner who typically covered the Supreme Court and Spivak started the radio version of Meet the Press in 1945 and joined the television broadcast when it began two years later. As would be expected from a group of battle-tested reporters, the four pulled no punches when interviewing King. Their exchanges covered the appropriateness of sit-in strikes, the responsibility of the federal government to protect all citizens, the morality of breaking laws, and the propriety of intermarriage. King’s quote above was in response to the following question from Mr. Van Der Linden: “Well sir, you said integration is the law of the land, and it’s morally right, whereas segregation is morally wrong, and the president should do something about it. Do you mean the president should issue an order that the schools and churches and the stores 2 should all be integrated?” Though likely asked without much consideration of the issue at the local level, it was a query that resonated with one journalist in Milwaukee. 1 In February 1963 James M. Johnston, religion editor for the Milwaukee Sentinel , began a Lenten series titled “Churches in Transition.” The front-page advertisement for the series began with a simple question, “Are Milwaukee churches deserting the inner cities for residential suburban areas?” Regarding the congregations about which he was planning to write, Johnston noted that many had undertaken property improvements in order to best “bolster the spiritual, moral and mental health of those living in the inner city.” At the outset, Johnston intended to write about no less than 20 congregations, with the first article scheduled to be published on February 27, Ash Wednesday. The project must have been viewed a success as Johnston ended up telling the stories of 34 churches and extending the series end date from August 13 all the way to October 19. The articles provide valuable insight into the challenges facing churches who chose to stay – not all had or would – as well as their beliefs for why doing so was the correct response to the city’s rapidly changing neighborhoods. 2 The churches included in the series were anything but uniform. They included five Catholic churches and congregations from eight different Protestant denominations: Presbyterian, Episcopal, Congregational, Methodist, Baptist, Evangelical and United Brethren, Church of Christ, and three Lutheran Synods – the Wisconsin, the Missouri, 1 Meet the Press on NBC; Martin E. Marty, Modern American Religion, Volume 3: Under God, Indivisible, 1940-1960 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 387. Although popularized by King, the notion that Americans were most separate from one another when attending Sunday morning services at one of the nation’s churches was originally made by another astute observer of life in the United States, Liston Pope, who served as the Dean of Yale Divinity School from 1949 to 1962; On Pope’s career see C. Sylvester Greene, “Liston Pope,” Dictionary of North Carolina Biography, Volume 5, ed. William S. Powell, (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1994), pp 124-5. 2 James M. Johnston, “Churches in Core,” Milwaukee Sentinel , February 26, 1963, 1. 3 and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). Furthermore, though all were located in areas of the city Johnston rightly identified as undergoing change, the types of change and the challenges brought by it were not the same. Rather, while not identified by Johnston as an organizing principle, the churches were from four different areas in the city. Eight churches were in Downtown Milwaukee, having been built early enough in the nineteenth century when many people still lived in single-family homes in that section of the city. Those eight congregations now faced the reality that those houses and their residents had been replaced by multistory buildings filled with commercial and business tenants. Six congregations were on the “lower Eastside,” a formerly high-end residential area once filled with mansions. Located to the east and north of downtown, the area’s residential dwellings now included many apartment buildings with younger and less wealthy residents than had lived in the area in previous generations. Two southside congregations were having to navigate a new language barrier as the neighborhood just south of downtown was becoming home to the Milwaukee’s Spanish-speaking population. Fully one half of the churches in Johnston’s series were located in what was then known as “the inner core” and all faced the same challenge. Namely, how to respond as the neighborhoods around their churches, which had previously only included white people, were now home to a growing contingent of black residents. Some of the areas had already “turned over” into majority African American, while with the others it seemed only a matter of time until the racial transition occurred. With the slight modification of only considering Protestant congregations, this query became the question that drove the research for this project. 3 3 James M. Johnston, “Churches in Core,” Milwaukee Sentinel , February 26, 1963 – October 19, 1963. 4 The inner core Protestant congregations from Johnston’s series shared a number of characteristics and challenges. Over the previous ten years membership at many of the churches had decreased. Johnston noted, and historians have suggested, that this was almost always the result of young white families moving out of the neighborhood as black residents moved in. Friedens United Church of Christ, 1234 W. Juneau Avenue, had lost thirty percent of its members since
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