The Most Segregated Hour
In 1963, after delivering a speech to the student body at Western Michigan University, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. sat with WMU president, Dr. James W. Miller, for a question-and-answer session. It was in response to one of the questions from Dr. Miller that Dr. King said these words: "At eleven o'clock on Sunday morning when we stand and sing and Christ has no east or west, we stand at the most segregated hour in this nation. This is tragic. Nobody of honesty can overlook this." Just two years later, Dr. Clarence Jordan and an interracial group from Koinonia Farms were thrown out of a meeting in a "white" Southern Baptist church in Americus, Georgia. As they were leaving the church, Jordan was heard to say, "Well, everything in Americus is integrated now except the churches and the jails...And I have hope for the jails." Things seem to have come a long way in almost fifty years. This summer at the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) in New Orleans th