Rabbit trails of Furman's Tainted Legacy

      A version of this blog condensed and edited is in the hopper to be published  late January 2024 in the Baptist progressive quarterly Christian Ethics Today. Pat Anderson FU 65 is the editor

 In March of 2000 Furman Political science Proff Jim Guth had piece in the Christian Century coming to the defense of Bob Jones University, five miles across the north side of town, in Greenville SC. Bush 43 was running for President and made national news that spotlighted BJU history as racially exclusive.  Now his daughter Karen (FU 2001) who first came to national attention with her essay in the Century Claims on Bonhoeffer, is gaining further notoriety with her book The Ethics of Tainted Legacies. Both were active in FBC Greenville a key congregation in the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship where Mr Guth and wife remain active. 

    For purposes of this review I want to double down on the pages in Tainted Legacy dealing with Guth's spotlight on Furman's past with Slavery and its time with the SC SBC.

    In mid 20th Century Furman was fifty percent Southern Baptist student population and existed in the Textile Culture of the Piedmont Carolinas and North Georgia. Roger Milliken was deep in the politics of Goldwater, Nixon and Strom Thurmond. It was Mr Charles Daniel for whom the Chapel and Dining Hall at Furman are named who introduced Milliken to Strom Thurmond in 1956.

   Nixon slept in the Daniel Home in 1962. The mansion is now the home of Furman Presidents and has been for some forty years now.

.    Mr Daniel died in 1965. Early in the Nixon Presidency he nominated Furman Alumnus Judge Haynsworth for a seat on the Supreme Court. In a bitter ordeal the nomination failed and some Furman folks of that era most likely among others Herman Lay of the potato chip and Pepsi fortune among them. A dorm remains named in Haynsworth honor at Furman

     Haynsworth ruled in favor of Milliken textiles in one of the most famous labor cases in 20th Century. The Darlington SC plant voted to go Union and Haynsworth was in the negative. Mr. Milliken stretched the case out over a couple decades never paying a cent.

    Rocky Purvis in the 80s became a trustee and one of fundamentalist thorns in the side of the Furman presidency of John Johns. Rocky was raised in Darlington where his father was long time pastor. His brother Paul was Furman SGA President early nineties.

    It is almost a for certain a coincidence but would make a good novel if the Purvis assault on Furman was stoked by lasting resentment of the Haynsworth ruling. Furman Chaplain Pitts rode with Trustee Hartness of Pepsi Cola to Union SC in the heart of the Furman SC SBC tumult to beg Rocky to call off the dogs.

   About 25 years ago Dr. Jim Guth confided in me his second year at Furman 1973, Milliken tried to place Gary North, the right wing Christian reconstructionist and key member of the Paul Pressler and Paige Patterson Council for National Policy on the Furman faculty . He was to teach economics and Politics. North came to campus and given a hearing with several faculty and shown the door. To my knowledge Millken was satisfied and continued to make donations to Furman in scholarships and other ways.

    Milliken son Roger Jr and I were good friends the summer of 1970 working in a Gaffney Peach Shed. Public reports are Roger Jr donated a quarter million dollars to Obama in 2012.

     Recently deceased Furman Chaplain Jim Pitts was engaged for a half century with Furman. He shared reservations with me about the focus on Joseph Vaughn, Seeking Abraham initiative  and the statue of two years ago erected on campus in his honor as the first person of color to enroll and graduate from Furman. Pitts knew Vaughn and said Joe would not have sought this attention. 

    Furman religion department Helen Lee Turner and Sam Britt joined to contribute a tribute to Pitts in the collection Walk With Me in honor of his passing in late 2021 . It is a chapter I challenge all folks of influence in the Furman community to read , especially administration, folks in communication and Trustees. 

     Conceding Furman long ago became no longer  an institution whose main purpose was to train future Baptist preachers, but protests since then have rewritten our history. Quoting:  "We have picked over our predecessors in a manner that is not only impious, but also hypocritical. we have reimagined an origin story that has emphasized the failures of Furman's founders and overlooked even their meager virtues. But the Longevity of any community requires learning how to live with the dead, which includes those flawed souls who erred, but who, by the grace of God still fashioned a place of learning, a place wherein we all remain both saints and sinners". End quote 

    Furman's Seeking Abraham initiative that looks at the slave holding of Furman's founders says nothing about the climate Furman lived in during the latter part of Jim Crow. In 1956 WA Criswell spoke to the Pastor's conference in Columbia SC and said such things as I wouldnt let my daughter within two city blocks of a big black buck; and you wouldn't call a chigger a chiggerow now would ya. The next day Strom Thurmond had him speak to a joint session of the SC legislature. Just ten years later Gordon Blackwell became the President of Furman on the condition it integrate. It did so with Joe Vaughn against the wishes of the SC SBC.

    And as late as 1972 Gone with the Wind was shown to a packed house of students and Greenvillians  at Furman's McCallister Auditorium. I may talk about this at some length later in a sequel to this blog re Tim Alberta's new book on Evangelical Extremism and how the super Trumper Robert Jeffress now carries on in the Criswell tradition at FBC Dallas Texas.

   I have come to disagree  in part with Pitts re the statue and its annual commemoration.  I participated in the annual march from the Chapel to the Library in honor of Vaughn and the statue. Seeing for the first time the report of Seeking Abraham, Furman's concerted effort to deal with the slaveholder founder and apologist Richard Furman, and others, alongside Furman historian Courtney Tollison Hartness 20 page piece on Furman and SC Baptists I now see the whole matter in bigger picture. Tollison piece from her U South Carolina dissertation titled Seeking Excellence, makes it clear without Vaughn pivotal sixties President Gordon Blackwell would've never become the President. As key moment against the wishes of the SC SBC with the national fundamentalist takeover of the SBC to follow soon, it was too much for Furman to be bothered with and ties were severed in 1992.

    The fall 2023 edition of the Furman alumni magazine gives Guth and her book a short promotional saying this: "Constructing a typology of responses to compromised thinkers, traditions and institutions, she demonstrates the relevance of of age old debates in Christian theology for those who confront legacies tarnished by the traumas of slavery, racism and sexual violence. 

Scotty Bryan had some interesting remarks in her final opinion piece as editor of the Furman Paladin as she graduated the spring of 2023

Scotty Bryan :  Looking at past editions of The Paladin, I understand why student journalism matters in the long run. These articles are a record of campus life at Furman, and in some cases, the only existing record of certain information. Articles from decades ago, like the “Furman Vows to Fight Baptists” front page framed in the newsroom, preserve the voices of students who have long since graduated and provide a snapshot of a campus that looked and felt drastically different. This history is engrained in the framework of our institution and is worthy of being documented. Revisiting these articles makes us invested.

    While Guth  mentions her alma mater Furman in passing re institutional tainted legacies, her focus is on Georgetown and its history with slavery. Her individual explorations focus on Bill Cosby and Howard Yoder. In a footnote she compares Yoder to King about whom she says she is often asked. Guth's response: " the sexual violations of over 100 women (Yoder) and consensual sex outside marriage are different types of violation. Some legacies are more tainted than others"

   Of King I think the best answer is that of Marshall Frady (FU 63, a Baptist preacher's son) in his magnificent short bio of King in the Penguin series of a couple decades ago:   "while evil can wear the most civil and civil and rectitudinous certitude , good can seem blunderbous and uncertain shockingly wayward , woefully flawed like one of Graham Greene's dissolute shabby, God haunted saints.  And the ful dodied reality of King should finally tell us, beyond all the awe and celebration of him, is how mysteriously mixed, in what torturously complicated forms, our moral heroes--our prophets--actually come to us.  

What follows are notes to be explored in a sequel or two for this post. 

 Jill Lepore and Gus Niebuhr spotlight the role of religion in America s political twist and turns.

    Marty Cohen's book Moral Congress takes a thirty page spotlight on SC's fourth US Congressional district. It follows the influence of fundamentalism of Bob Jones and North Greenville college that Helped Trey Gowdy primary a a conservative Republican in 2010 Tea Party surge

   Current Congressman William Timmons is a product of Christ Church Episcopal school in Greenville and George Washington University. His name is on a plaque in the Furman basketball arena that is named for his extended family.

   With Lee Atwater's memo as prextext he is as venal as the slave holding network Furman now shames and regrets as its founding culture. Timmons could not flourish without the complicity of the network of developers, attorneys and financiers of the Destination City and its Big Steeple churches.

   At a hundred dollars Karen Guth's Cambridge book is a little pricey for individual acquistion. But it should be in every Church Library that leans forward for its stoke of valuable and timely conversation.  Look for at least one possibly two sequels to this blog