Alabama

Drawing Religious and Racial Lines

With its almost 4.7 million inhabitants, Alabama ranks 23rd in population. The majority of the Alabama population is comprised of whites (71 percent), followed by African Americans (26.4 percent), Hispanics and Latinos (2.9 percent), and Asians (1 percent). Alabama residents overwhelmingly define themselves as Christians (80 percent), whose majority is represented by the Alabama Baptist Convention. Catholics amount to 6 percent of the population with a concentration in the Mobile area due to the region's previous French and Spanish rule. Such a strong religious sentiment has helped build Alabama's awareness of the importance of community and has provided relief for poor Alabamians through the humanitarian initiatives of religious organizations.

Yet in the state's history, it also contributed to enforcing racial prejudice, sexism, and resistance to change. The preachers and pastors of Alabama Christian denominations lent their voices both to sanctioning racist and sexist discrimination and fighting it. Because Christians in Alabama had largely supported the secession during the U.S. Civil War, African Americans withdrew from white churches in the years following the war and successfully formed their own institutions. Although Christian teachings reject racism and sexism, religious institutions complied with the segregation that dominated southern states after the failure of Reconstruction. Separate churches and parishes were built. This custom reinforced the separation between the races, but also helped African Americans form a distinct sense of community identity. The establishment of this black distinctiveness was the base for the development of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Although the Catholic Church organized segregated structures and the relationships between white and black Catholics was never an easy one, many of its priests, nuns, and laypeople grew increasingly uncomfortable with this practice and participated actively in the civil rights movement.

Nathan Ashby's Montgomery's Columbus Street Baptist Church became the largest black church in the nation at the beginning of the 20th century and, in 1907, it became the seat of the country's largest black denomination: the National Baptist Convention. Alabama was also the native state of the National Primitive Baptist Convention, and African American pastors became inspirational leaders for their community. Black churches played a decisive role in the birth of Martin Luther King Jr.'s civil rights movement, and King's agenda of racial equality and peace provoked the creation of the Progressive National Baptist Convention, which played an important part in the state religious scene. At the same time, white supremacists tried to organize resistance to the expansion of civil rights (initially to African Americans and, in more recent years, to women and gays) using their own religious networks. The Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) was founded in Alabama in 1973 to counter the excessive liberalism of the denomination, and the Southern Baptist Convention has taken a decidedly more conservative stance since the 1980s. The Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) were two of the most important organizations in the civil rights struggle. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) had an extremely active branch in the state, and Alabamian Robert “Bob” Zellner was the first white to become the SNCC's field secretary.

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