After overhearing a tour guide honoring the early leaders of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary buried in Louisville’s Cave Hill Cemetery, Latevia Priddy felt like she had to speak up.
“It’s like you’ve given a one-sided version of the history of Southern,” Priddy, a biblical counseling student, explained later to a staff member at her campus job. “These men did some very awful things and refused to recognize people who looked like me as actual people but viewed them as property—and we’re praising their names. That’s not a fair assessment of history.”
When Priddy was asked to share more about her concerns, it marked a significant moment in her experience as an African American at the flagship seminary of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), where she led a student group promoting racial reconciliation. “What’s fair and good and right is for us [Christians] to be truthful about what happened in the past,” she said.
Last December, Southern Seminary publicly owned the truth of its ugly racial history in a 70-page report chronicling the institution’s ties to slavery and claims of white superiority, including details down to how many slaves its founders owned and quotes from leaders’ theological defenses of inequality.
Though the SBC confessed and condemned the denomination’s early support of slavery in an official resolution in 1995, Southern’s reckoning “goes much further,” said Thomas Kidd, a Baptist historian at Baylor University. “It names names. It gets much more specific about who committed what sins and how.”
Several black students at Southern told CT they already knew about slave ownership among the school’s founders, whose names—Boyce, Broadus, Manly, Williams—appear across campus buildings and programs. The details of the report did not come as a surprise to them. However, after years of discussing racial reconciliation on campus, the report’s release represented a promising move in a new stage of Southern’s history.
“The willingness to research and to expose a dark and egregious, yet overlooked, history of sin toward African Americans was a step in the right direction,” said Joseph Dicks, a former admissions counselor and current master of divinity (MDiv) student at Southern.
“The past history of Southern would only affect my experience on campus if they chose to cover it up, neglect it, and do revisionist work so that the reputations of these men wouldn’t be tainted and the prominence of the seminary could be maintained,” he said.
“But in my time there, they’ve been transparent about it and more.”
Students completing their degrees this spring studied at Southern both as the national conversation about race evolved and intensified—amid the Black Lives Matter movement, police shootings, NFL protests, and the election of President Donald Trump—and as the seminary grew to record enrollment, with 5,500 students across the institution and the largest MDiv program in the country, according to the Association of Theological Schools.
The African American share of the student body is now near 5 percent, and Southern has brought more diversity to its faculty, adding African American professors such as Jarvis Williams and Curtis Woods (who were both part of the six-person team tasked with drafting the recent report).
“I’m starting to see more people who look like me who can give back to people who look like me,” said Dithson Noel, a Florida native who’s finishing up his MDiv in church planting. “We didn’t have that when I first got there.”
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Source: Christianity Today
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