Our Trespasses:
White Churches and the Taking of American Neighborhoods
By Greg Jarrell
A Review by Dwight A. Moody
Nothing negative can be written about this book, unless you are a current leader at First Baptist Church in Charlotte, North Carolina, and don’t know what to make of your own institutional history. Which is what this book is about: their decisions in 1963 and following to reject a recommendation to relocate from the city center to the growing white suburbs to the south and instead embrace a second recommendation to relocate into a formerly black residential and business district known as Brooklyn. Both options were fraught with racial overtones although, according to Jarrell’s telling, that dynamic was not foremost in the minds of the voting people.
The whole story is a snapshot of the often unstated, even unrecognized power, of whiteness to shape things in ways that come out bad for anything but whiteness. As he writes near the end of the book: “Whiteness names the joining of political, economic and theological projects of domination for the supposed benefit [of] people who declare themselves to be “white.” I have offered a detailed story of how whiteness works in one specific place…. The story, I believe, is generalizable…. We now turn to the strategies and stories that work to maintain the veneer of innocence and in so doing stifle the construction of a new world” (172).
There is no smooth and easy end to this fascinating tale. Jarrell begins and ends this study in social history by telling the story of Abram North, a black man who took up residence in the town in 1878 with his new wife. Eventually, his descendants were forced to sell out, to the city government, in Charlotte’s version of the urban renewal fever that swept the country a hundred years later. How the federal laws pushing Urban Renewal were passed and implemented is part of this story, and how such legislation and action reflect deep seated racial dynamics in American life is also part of this story, the bigger part. The biggest part is the wealth lost by those displaced and the wealth gained by those who took their place in the region called Brooklyn, including First Baptist Church.
I don’t want to tell you how the story ends. I could quote the last two paragraphs of the book, and it might move you to tears as it did me, but that is because I read every word of this magisterial work and understand how the stories of specific families and individuals were shaped and reshaped by the racial dynamics of these civic and congregational decisions. Jarrell is a terrific storyteller, and how he structures this narrative, rotating between public and private dynamics, is impressive indeed. He ends up watching the shadows of church towers roll over the graves of church people, but that is all I want to reveal.
This story is well researched. There are 44 pages of scholarly notes, and some institution would be justified in awarding Jarrell a doctoral degree based solely on this manuscript. The bibliograph is impressive and includes a few books I have read. I’m still reeling from the opening pages of The Half Has Never Been Told by Edward Baptist (2014); and I got converted to reparations after reading From Here to Equality by William Darity and Kirsten Mullen (2020). We have all read God’s Last and Only Hope by Bill Leonard (1990), and The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race by Willie James Jennings (2010) sits on my shelf waiting its turn. It is impossible to read all the high-quality stuff being researched and written about race in America (and especially in the American church)—Glory to God!
But this book by Jarrell is as good as any book in his bibliography. Part of that goodness is that it does not try to eradicate First Baptist Church from its racial trap. It was a “damned if they do, damned if they don’t” situation they faced: either move out to the suburbs with all the other rich white people or move into the urban space forcibly vacated by poor black folk. The church people assisted Jarrell with his long-running inquiry … until they didn’t; but Jarrell doesn’t tell us much about that, nor enough about the current status of the church, at least not enough to satisfy me. I wonder if there is a printed rebuttal to this book, something that articulates how the church today feels about their history as described by Jarrell.
And I don’t recall their pastor at the time, Carl Bates, talking about any of this when he took a brief leave of absence, shortly after their relocation, to teach a course in “The Life and Work of the Pastor” at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville. It must have been about 1975, and I was a student in that class, working toward my degree in divinity. We all remember him talking about socks but not about race and relocation and architecture and impact.
But Jarrell writes about all that, and you would do well to read it and think about it and talk about it, as I am going to do next month when I am the designated presenter to a distinguished group of ministers, in Greenville, South Carolina, two hours southwest of Charlotte, hoping that some of them will have their own stories to tell and lessons to learn at the intersection of race, religion, and urban renewal.
