Race Relations Department of the United Church Board for Homeland Ministries

Historical Note

The Race Relations Department of the United Church Board for Homeland Ministries was created by the American Missionary Association Division in 1942 and was based at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. The formal program of the department began in 1943 as a forum to engage in a national discussion with social scientists, religious leaders, educators, government officials, and other notable figures offering an arena for research studies and discussions on relationships between ethnic groups and racial stereotypes as they relate to economics, education, government policy, housing and employment. Notable figures who participated in the institute throughout its life include: Arna Bontemps, Sterling Brown, Countee Cullen, Rachel DuBois, William Faulkner, John Hope Franklin, Martin Luther King Jr., and Thurgood Marshall.

The first director was sociologist Charles Spurgeon Johnson (1942-1950), who published To Stem This Tide: A Survey of Racial Tension Areas in the United States, and for five years published The Monthly Summary of Events and Trends in Race Relations. Herman Hodge Long was employed as a field representative before becoming the Associate Director of the department and succeeded Johnson as the director (1950-1964). In 1964, Long relinquished his position as director to become the president of his alma mater, Talladega College in Alabama. In 1944, the first Race Relations Institute was held at Fisk University, and the institute continued to be an annual event until 1969. San Francisco became the first city to employ the staff required to provide technical assistance for one of its surveys, which resulted in the publication, The Negro War Worker in San Francisco: A Local Self-Survey.

In 1947, Charles S. Johnson was named president of Fisk University but continued to direct the department. That same year, the Minneapolis self-survey was conducted with technical assistance from the department and People vs. Property: Race Restrictive Covenants in Housing was a published. In 1949, People vs. Property served as the basis for the United States Supreme Court decision that outlawed enforcement of racially restrictive covenants.  The department circulated Current, an information bulletin to the constituency of the department. Other publications completed in 1951 with the assistance of the department included: Segregation, a Challenge to Democracy by Margaret C. McCulloch, If Your Next Neighbors are Negroes by Roger G. Mastrude, and the article “How Minneapolis Beat the Bigots from the Woman's Home Companion” by Clive Howard. In 1952, McCulloch also wrote Integration: Promise, Process, Problem and Long wrote Segregation in Interstate Railway Coach Travel. In 1955, An American City in Transition: the Baltimore Community Self-Survey of Intergroup Relations and This is the Task: Findings of the Trenton, New Jersey, Human Relations Self-Survey were published. Additional publications included: Fellowship for Whom? A Study of Inclusiveness in the Congregational Christian Churches (1958) and The Negotiation of Desegregation in Ten Southern Cities (1965) by Lewis W. Jones and Long.

In 1966, Clifton H. Johnson became director of the department, and the Amistad Research Center (a branch of the department) was established as the repository of the American Missionary Association’s archives, which included the records of the Race Relations Department. The Center was incorporated in 1969 as a non-profit archival repository, and following the dissolution of the Race Relations Department moved to Dillard University in New Orleans, Louisiana.

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Abstract:

The records of the Race Relations Department of the United Church Board for Homeland Ministries.

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