Religious Education and Interracial Cooperation

This chapter examines the early history of the American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville, Tennessee, which illustrates how fundamentalist convictions spanned the color line while also being circumscribed by racial context. Jointly founded and funded by the black National Baptist Convention and the white Southern Baptist Convention, this black Baptist seminary provides a compelling example of interracial cooperation and the power of shared religious identity. Yet at the same time, it also highlights the entrenched limitations of interracial unity in light of the segregationist realities of the culture, as Southern Baptist supporters were unable to fully cast off the assumption of white superiority and National Baptist participants were often necessarily preoccupied by racial considerations that would not have manifested in a white context.