March 15, 2000
Historians study Maston's
& McCall's influence on ethics
___By Ken Camp
___Texas Baptist Communications
___AUSTIN--Members of the Texas Baptist Historical Society examined their denomination's uneasy relationship with the civil rights movement of the mid-20th century by looking at a seminary ethics professor who prodded the conscience of Baptists and a
T.B. MASTON
pragmatic university president who worked behind the scenes to integrate his institution.
ABNER V. MCCALL
___At the society's March 3 meeting in Austin, Bill Tillman from the Logsdon School of Theology at Hardin-Simmons University discussed T.B. Maston, longtime professor of Christian ethics at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth.
___Vince Clark from McLennan County Community College presented a paper detailing how Judge Abner McCall, then president of Baylor University, negotiated his school's integration.
___James Dunn, who teaches at Wake Forest University Divinity School and recently retired as executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs, responded to both presentations.
___"T.B. Maston was the conscience of Texas Baptists," Tillman said. "Maston could be called a one-man task force on all facets of Christian ethics. Through classroom work, writing and speaking, he put the challenges of living the Christian life before thousands of people."
___While some of Maston's students and his colleagues in other schools marched for civil rights and social justice, Maston's style was to influence Baptist decision-makers primarily through his classroom lectures and prolific writings, Tillman said. Maston wrote about racial justice as early as 1927 in a pamphlet and in 1932 in curriculum materials for the Baptist Sunday School Board. He wrote books on race that were published in 1946 and in the 1950s, and he authored numerous articles for Baptist magazines and state papers.
___"For an ethicist like Maston, there was little choice but to address the social patterns and sentiments in Texas and beyond with regard to race," he said.
___"Maston did nothing short of indicting social and denominational attitudes with regard particularly to black-white race relations," Tillman said. "His position was to declare his conscience before God; hear objections and criticisms but evaluate them objectively; then do or say what he thought was right. He was not one to allow criticism to blunt his attempts to do right."
___While noting the far-ranging impact Maston had on Southern Baptist and Texas Baptist life, Tillman acknowledged his influence has waned in recent years.
___"An ethical balkanization continues through the economic, social and theological dimensions of our culture. The times plead for another Maston or those like him," he said.
___Unlike Maston, whom Dunn characterized as having a "touching and beautiful naivete about people" and who spoke with "prophetic insight," McCall was a political pragmatist who understood equally the Christian ideal of racial justice, the necessity of institutional survival and the cultural reality of the South, Clark said.
___"Abner McCall never confused principles, which are not negotiable, with issues, which are the trading pieces of every negotiation," he said.
___"For example, the equality and brotherhood of all people was an uncompromisable Christian principle that mandated integration, while the timing or best means to bring it about were issues shaped, negotiated and, if necessary, even swapped.
___"Ideally, Judge McCall's pragmatic leadership style was to assume a position in the political center of a dispute and then quietly negotiate the outcome from behind the scenes by listening to and trading with both sides, gradually moving the outcome. In a civil rights context, McCall neither led massive resistance against integration nor stood idly by."
___After James Meredith in 1962 became the first black student to attend the University of Mississippi, McCall seized that moment to orchestrate the integration of Baylor--without alienating his conservative Baptist constituency and other segregationist Baylor supporters.
___"Although other motives are also possible, he definitely wanted to keep the peace on his campus and, like a seasoned fox night-trekking between a roost of hens and a pack of sleeping dogs, McCall's trail was quiet and careful--even duplicitous," Clark said.
___"Technically, his responses to both sides were true. But if those in favor of integration read his letters to segregationists, or if the segregationists saw his correspondence to the integrationists, both sides would have felt deceived."
___In November 1962, McCall and Hilton Howell, chairman of the Baylor board of trustees, appointed a special trustee committee to study the integration issue. The carefully crafted committee included representation from key Baylor constituencies, including a few members who openly opposed integration.
___"The majority of the committee, however, was loaded with men who favored integration--or at least recognized it as inevitable," Clark said.
___McCall then launched a stealth campaign to sway the committee by appealing both to fiscal reality and theological commitment. He argued that within five years, the federal government would force the integration of private schools in the South by cutting off grants, loans and federal programs. He also cited the testimony of foreign missionaries that racism in the United States was an obstacle to international evangelism.
___After delays, debate and dissension, Baylor's trustees voted Nov. 1, 1963, to integrate the university. At the semester break the next January, Baylor quietly admitted five black students into night classes.
___"McCall's timing, his use of events such as the Ole Miss riot and his political and brokerage skills in orchestrating the trustees' vote exhibited a little luck and a masterful understanding of Baylor, Baptists and the South," Clark said.
___That skill was evidenced by McCall's re-election by acclamation to a second term as president of the Baptist General Convention of Texas in 1964, nearly one year after the first black students were admitted at Baylor, Clark said. He used his presidential message to challenge segregation and the traditional views of Christians in the South.
___"Maligning those Baptists stuck in the past, McCall expressed disappointment in people who ignored the country's racial problems, and he called for a recommitment to a 'social gospel' that did not signal a welfare state, but personal commitment, personal action and personal sacrifice to eliminate unnecessary injustice," Clark said.
___Clark acknowledged the "inconsistency" of McCall's words and actions.
___"McCall was not a racist, but avoiding a split in his constituency was essential to him. Timing was his excuse for tolerating segregation and prudence his reason for the finesse others would have called duplicity," he said.
___Beyond political shrewdness, the inconsistency represented two irreconcilable convictions to which McCall held--his Christian belief in the worth of all people versus his Texas commitment to the fierce independence of the individual and aversion to governmental mandates, Clark observed.
___"The Christian McCall recognized the equality of others and persuaded the board to integrate, but the southern McCall could not mandate others to accept the change ... . McCall's Christian principles and political skills made possible integration, a remarkable and significant accomplishment, clouded by the fact that his Southern philosophy required its tentative and glacial acceptance--one individual conversion at a time."
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