Document Type
Newsletter
Publication Year
1957
Excerpt
Long before the Supreme Court had begun to hand down the breath-taking decisions on civil rights such as the one of May 17, 1954, and before many of us had known or even heard of the word "integration," Negroes and whites were attending mass together in Mobile and in New Orleans. In a certain semi-rural community of Texas, a Missouri Synod Lutheran pastor was looking about for guidelines and techniques to help him assimilate Negroes into the full fellowship of his Caucasian congregation. His Negro neighbors, the landowners of the community, were already friendly and some of them had begun to attend his services. The son of a pastor of the Missouri Synod reports that more than thirty years ago his father, then a minister in the State of Texas, had many Negroes in a predominantly Caucasian congregation. They were fully accepted by the congregation and participated in all of the church's activities, including, of course, the most important participation--the Holy Communion. This would be unusual even today--in Detroit, Chicago, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and other points north of the Line.
Recommended Citation
Lutheran Human Relations Association of America, "The Vanguard (Vol. 4, No. 2), Feb 1957" (1957). The Vanguard. 22.
https://scholar.valpo.edu/vanguard/22
