Emmanuel McCall, longtime director of black church relations for the Southern Baptist Home Mission Board, dates real progress toward racial reconciliation in the SBC to 1957, when the HMB—since reorganized into the North American Mission Board—hired Victor Glass as liaison with the National Baptist Convention.

One hundred sixty-seven years after forming over the right to appoint slaveholders as missionaries and 17 years after apologizing for the denomination’s racist past, the Southern Baptist Convention elected its first African-American president.

Messengers to the SBC annual meeting elected New Orleans pastor Fred Luter by acclamation to lead the nation’s second-largest faith group behind Roman Catholics. Luter, pastor of Franklin Avenue Baptist Church in New Orleans, was nominated to the office by David Crosby, pastor of First Baptist Church in New Orleans. “He is qualified in every way to hold this office,” Crosby said. “We have an opportunity to make history, to show the watching world the truth about our Savior and ourselves and to affirm again the mission that undergirds everything we do.”

Wiping away tears, Luter came to the platform to thank messengers for his election. “To God be the glory for the things that he has done,” Luter said. “God bless you. I love you.” Luter’s election comes at a time when Southern Baptists are seeking to turn around a numerical decline and to elect leadership more representative of the ethnic diversity that exists in the convention’s 40,000 churches. Ed Stetzer of LifeWay Research says the percent of non-Anglo churches has moved from one in 20 to one in five just during the last two decades. It also adds credibility to efforts by the denomination to shed its past image as defenders of Jim Crow in the South during the Civil Rights Movement championed by black Baptists like Martin Luther King Jr. Emmanuel McCall, longtime director of black church relations for the Southern Baptist Home Mission Board, dates real progress toward racial reconciliation in the SBC to 1957, when the HMB—since reorganized into the North American Mission Board—hired Victor Glass as liaison with the National Baptist Convention. McCall, an adjunct faculty member at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary from 1970 until 1996 and past moderator of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, said in his 2007 memoir of race and Baptists, When All God’s Children Come Together, that the founders of the Southern Baptist Convention found theological justification for white supremacy in the Curse of Ham theory, which came into use in defense against abolitionists between 1800 and 1865. The myth that black people were made dark by a curse that God put upon one of the sons of Noah was largely regarded as the “inspired” word of God until scholarship of the 1960s refuted it, McCall said. Questions around the theme were raised regularly at race relations conferences until the 1970s, and that the notion still exists on the fringes, he noted.

Read More