Race and the Assemblies of God Church: The Journey from Azusa St ...

The Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education ordered an end to segregation in the public schools. In 1955, Rosa Parks’ refusal to sit at the back of a city bus led to the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott, the formation of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and the elevation of Martin Luther King Jr. as the African American leader of the effort to extend civil liberties to all Americans. The Civil Rights Act of 1957 injected the executive branch of the federal government directly into the struggle with the establishment of a Civil Rights division inside the Justice Department charged with protecting the voting rights of African Americans. Later, that same year, President Eisenhower ordered federal troops to protect African American students seeking to attend Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. In addition, African American activists infiltrated segregated lunch counters and other places of public accommodation in the South. Many protestors were physically beaten and verbally abused.

As late as 1958, Assemblies of God leaders proclaimed that integrated churches could not reach the spiritually lost. They clearly stated integration would be accepted only if it did not interfere with the “progress and expansion of the movement.”²⁵ The church’s national executives did not officially condemn racism and segregation within the Assemblies of God until the televised images of physical oppression against peaceful protestors were broadcast into the homes of American citizens.

The 1960s were particularly violent. Civil rights workers were murdered in Mississippi, peaceful demonstrators were attacked with dogs and fire hoses, King was jailed in Birmingham, Alabama, and eventually killed in Memphis, Tennessee. The state universities of Mississippi and Alabama were desegregated despite the public protests of governors Ross Barnett and George Wallace. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 swept away much of the remaining legally sanctioned areas of segregation in American society.