POWER POLITICS IN NASHVILLE
By NORMAN L. PARKS

Is power—as St. Augustine and Jesus Christ both insisted—antithetical to religion? Or is religion, like politics, one of the manifestations of power?

Is it possible to carry on any group religious activity apart from a power structure? Can effective interpersonal relationships exist on a religious foundation devoid of power referrents?

The testimony of the religious world from the first Pope to and including the present Church of Christ is that Christ was wrong, and that the same kind of power which is “the essence of politics” is also the essence of religion.

As a student and professor of political science, the author has deeply believed that religion should be different in its essence and its manifestations from the world of politics. He does not find this to be the case as religion is presented in the day-to-day record of the Church of Christ. Indeed, it seems that this religious group is even more addicted to the instruments of power than the democratic state. The latter holds its ordinary citizen in higher respect and is more concerned with activating and responding to the will of the majority.

Recently there was acted out in the Federal district court in Nashville a tableau of Church of Christ power in all of its raw starkness and vividly described by the local press in the words of its actors. The participants in this religion race drama were the leading defendants, the officials of David Lipscomb College, and the plaintiffs, the Negro alumni of Nashville Christian Institute. The implications unfolded by this drama are of such profound significance that to ignore them may well prove disastrous for that religious group which denominates itself “Church of Christ.”

The suit developed from the decision of the Lipscomb-dominated Board of Trustees to close the Nashville negro institution and transfer its assets, including $500,000 in endowment, to David Lipscomb College, where the fund would be administered by an all-white board. The extent of that domination was revealed in the queries put to Mack Craig, Lipscomb dean and NCI board member:

Q. Who is president of the board?

A. Pullias (A. C. Pullias, president of David Lipscomb College).

Q. Who is secretary of the board?

A. Pullias.

Q. Who is treasurer of the board?

A. Pullias.

One of the minority Negro members of the NCI board was asked if in his ten years as a member he had ever disagreed with Pullias on any question. He replied that no such situation had ever arisen. The implication of the question and answer was, of course, that one does not disagree with that kind of boiled-down, concentrated power and stay healthy.

The Nashville Christian Institute grew out of the burning need of Negro members of the Church of Christ for better prepared and more numerous preachers. The author attended several of their rallies more than 30 years ago to discuss the starting of a school. Certainly if ever a people gave out of their want, these poor people did—dimes and quarters from washer-women, janitors, and tenant farmers. He rejected an invitation to serve on their board and warned them against surrendering control of their enterprise to the white race. They have had to learn the hard way that, in a power-oriented environment, control goes with help.

NCI established itself in an old school building acquired from the city. Like Nashville Bible School in its origin, its educational program was not heavily structured and it was adult-education oriented. High school-educated preachers fitted the need and culture of Church of Christ Negroes. As one of the NCI alumni testified in the trial, “If I were to preach to a white Church of Christ like I preach to my people, the white church would throw me out. If one of their preachers was to preach to my church, everybody would go to sleep.”

That the massive revolution that is shaking the Negro world has not left the colored Church of Christ untouched was revealed in the testimony of alumnus after alumnus. Pullias was characterized as a racist by one alumnus, who told that when he and another NCI student were working as janitors at a church where Pullias was minister, he heard him refer to the two as “two Nigger students from Keeble’s (Marshall Keeble, Negro evangelist) school.”

White Church of Christ leadership was charged with viewing race relations within the “master-servant” context. Lipscomb College was described as practicing “token integration” to obtain federal funds, and its campus environment was such that very few Negroes would elect to attend the college, assuming they could be admitted, if it was possible to go elsewhere.

Testimony brought out that Lipscomb High School was all-white, and that boarding Negroes who had attended NCI could not be admitted since high school students had to live with their parents to attend Lipscomb. Starkly evident was the fact that the remaining NCI students would be barred by the higher tuition rates and the lack of assistance and work programs which had made NCI attendance possible. Moreover, by board decision the NCI endowment would not be used to assist Negro high school students.

Why was NCI closed? Ostensibly because of declining enrollment and its unaccredited status. It is not possible to compete with public schools, Craig testified, though for a number of years he served as principal of Lipscomb High School, which has a flourishing enrollment and draws heavily from a vigorous elementary school program also maintained by Lipscomb. Testimony also revealed that NCI was inspected by the State Department of Education in 1963 and an invitation was extended to apply for accreditation. This invitation was not followed up by the NCI board, either in 1963 or later. Nor, apparently, was any effort made to exploit the opportunities opened up by the Economic Opportunity program.

Without question, Lipscomb has led every private college in the state in exploiting available federal grants and loans, whether for dormitories, science buildings, library resources, laboratory equipment, or teaching devices—a sum which now probably approaches $5,000,000. It is remarkable that none of this zeal was extended to NCI, which is located in a Negro ghetto and which in its own limited way has been trying to do something about kindergartens for the underprivileged, dropouts, and adult education.

NCI could well have been a major demonstration in modern race relations in the crisis of the Negro ghetto: “to preach good tidings to the poor, to proclaim release for captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are oppressed, to proclaim the Lord’s year of favor.”

If it is no violation of religious scruple to tap the federal treasury for a half million to fancy up a middle-class “church-related” college, where everybody takes baths and where tuition is high enough to make students of yesteryears dizzy, then what scruple stands in the way of seeking Economic Opportunity funds for the backward and unwashed?

The NCI alumni had a hard lesson to learn. Mere ghetto needs cannot stand in the way of beefing up a “clean” white college endowment by another half million. (Speaking of half millions and power plays, it might be mentioned that an effort was also made to absorb the $500,000 Fanning Orphan School Fund. While it did not succeed, it did not fail either, for the fund has lost most of its public character and its proceeds are used for scholarships at David Lipscomb College.) The Negroe's poor little lamb enriches the white man’s board. And it is all legal!

Whatever the alumni’s moral claim (it was a suit charging violation of their civil rights), they lacked the claims of power (in this instance law)—It has been enacted over and over again in law suits over instrumental music, premillennialism, institutionalism, anti-organizations, creed-in-the deed, test oaths for teachers, songbooks, Sunday School literature, and a multitude of other power-rooted phenomena.

The Negroes have lost their school, partly from calculated neglect, it would appear. NCI’s empty windows will look out over a bleak ghetto landscape this fall. Their $500,000 will lift a little higher the educational towers of Lipscomb’s lush acres, where will wander 2,700 white youths and 15 part-time and full-time “token integration” students and their kindred who will cook the meals and sweep the halls of their “betters.”

Yes, they have lost their school, but found their independence. The trial said so in no uncertain terms that the day of patronizing is over. And having been spoken to in terms of power, they may well speak back in the years ahead in the same language.—Middle Tennessee State University, Murfreesboro, Tenn.

(Prof. Parks was dean as David Lipscomb College for eight years. He also taught at Freed-Hardeman and Oklahoma Christian, both Church of Christ related, as is David Lipscomb. He was eleven years at Peabody and Vanderbilt before going to his present position.)

Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely—LORD ACTON