page_title: Churches of Christ
section_title: Race relations
hierarchical_section_title: Churches of Christ / History in the United States / Race relations
caption_attribution_description: English: Barton W. Stone (1772-1844) Português: Barton Stone, pastor e teólogo estadunidense.
context_page_description: Churches of Christ are autonomous Christian congregations associated with one another through distinct beliefs and practices based on biblical examples. Represented in the United States and one of several branches across the world, they use only biblical precedents for their doctrine and practices citing examples from the early Christian church as described in the New Testament. They typically reject doctrinal writings and religious creeds.
  More broadly, the Restoration Movement was an evangelistic and Bible-based effort launched in various places around the world as several people sought a return to the original teachings and practices of the New Testament. Christian leaders including Robert Sandeman, James O'Kelly, Abner Jones, Elias Smith, Rice Haggard, Thomas Campbell, Alexander Campbell, Walter Scott, and Barton W. Stone were trailblazers of similar movements that impacted the eventual phenomenon known as the American Restoration Movement.
  The Restoration ideal was also similar and somewhat connected to earlier restoration efforts in Europe, as well as Puritan movements in colonial America.
context_section_description: To object to any child of God participating in the service on account of his race, social or civil state, his color or race, is to object to Jesus Christ and to cast him from our association. It is a fearful thing to do. I have never attended a church that negroes did not attend. 
  — David Lipscomb, 1907
  Early Restoration Movement leaders varied in their views of slavery, reflecting the range of positions common in the antebellum U.S.  Barton W. Stone was a strong opponent of slavery, arguing that there was no Biblical justification for the form of slavery then being practiced in the United States and calling for immediate emancipation.  Alexander Campbell represented a more "Jeffersonian" opposition to slavery, writing of it as more of a political problem than as a religious or moral one.  Having seen Methodists and Baptists divide over the issue of slavery, Campbell argued that scripture regulated slavery rather than prohibited it, and that abolition should not be allowed to become an issue over which Christians would break fellowship with each other.  Like the country as a whole, the assumption of white racial superiority was almost universal among those on all sides of the issue, and it was common for congregations to have separate seating for black members.
  After the Civil War, black Christians who had been worshiping in mixed-race Restoration Movement congregations formed their own congregations.  White members of Restoration Movement congregations shared many of the racial prejudices of the times. Among the Churches of Christ, Marshall Keeble became a prominent African-American evangelist. He estimated that by January 1919 he had "traveled 23,052 miles, preached 1,161 sermons, and baptized 457 converts".
  During the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s the Churches of Christ struggled with changing racial attitudes.  Some leaders, such as Foy E. Wallace Jr., and George S. Benson of Harding University railed against racial integration, saying that racial segregation was the Divine Order. Schools and colleges associated with the movement were at the center of the debate. N.B. Hardeman, the president of Freed-Hardeman, was adamant that the black and white races should not mingle, and refused to shake hands with black Christians. Abilene Christian College first admitted black undergraduate students in 1962 (graduate students had been admitted in 1961).  Desegregation of other campuses followed.
  Efforts to address racism continued through the following decades.  A national meeting of prominent leaders from the Churches of Christ was held in June 1968.  Thirty-two participants signed a set of proposals intended to address discrimination in local congregations, church affiliated activities and the lives of individual Christians.  An important symbolic step was taken in 1999 when the president of Abilene Christian University "confessed the sin of racism in the school's past segregationist policies" and asked black Christians for forgiveness during a lectureship at Southwestern Christian College, a historically black school affiliated with the Churches of Christ.
caption: Barton W. Stone
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