History matters with everything touching upon morality and religion. And so it is with the dramatic racial reckoning in a candid and thorough self-examination released Sept. 14 by Wheaton College in Illinois.
The implications command news media attention because the 163-year-old school is among the most highly influential and respected institutions in U.S. evangelical Protestantism. This is, after all, the alma mater of the Rev. Billy Graham.
By coincidence, the power of history was underscored the very next day at an emotional worship service to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the racist terror bombing at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, which killed four girls ages 11 to 14 as they donned Sunday choir robes. Perhaps more than any other episode of the civil rights era, this eroded white southern churchgoers’ remaining tolerance toward Jim Crow segregation.
History is “our best teacher,” said the service’s keynote speaker, Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman on the U.S. Supreme Court (video here starting at 1:30), who quoted I Corinthians 15:10 and Hebrews 11:1 and said “with God’s grace” ongoing racial justice efforts will succeed. Though “parts of this country’s story can be hard to think about” and “difficult to remember and re-live,” she said, “it is dangerous to forget them.”
Precisely for that reason, Wheaton’s Historical Review Task Force, recommended by President Philip Ryken and approved by its Board of Trustees, began investigating past campus race relations in October, 2021. The result is the 122-page accounting that the trustees endorsed and issued last week (click here for text).
The report is important because, as the student newspaper reported, “Wheaton is one of the first Christian colleges to conduct such a review” of the sort seen at some non-religious campuses. One notable predecessor was the 2018 report (document here) on the racial history of Louisville’s Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, a school that’s one year older than Wheaton.
The task force, made up of trustee, faculty, administration, student and alumni representatives, declared, “We repent of all forms of racism and favoritism in our institutional history, whether conscious or unconscious” and pledged follow-up actions.
The first big example is the trustees’ decision to immediately remove from the library the name that honored J. Oliver Buswell Jr., in response to long-running student protests. Buswell was Wheaton’s president from 1926 till his dismissal in 1940 over staff conflicts and his role in Presbyterian church squabbles. He’s regarded as the man who put Wheaton on the national map, boosting academic rigor and finances, tripling enrollment and preserving what the report calls a “fundamentalist” reputation.
Wheaton had zero Black students from 1929 till 1940. The report laments that during the 1930s Buswell “perniciously” applied a “de facto policy of denying qualified Black applicants admission to Wheaton College based solely on their race.” Buswell would advise Black applicants to instead attend the Lincoln Institute, a now-defunct Kentucky junior college.
Two other presidents loom large in Wheaton’s history with race. The report is proud that school founder Jonathan Blanchard, a Presbyterian minister, was an outspoken traveling lecturer in the early years of America’s abolitionist movement. From the start, his college emphatically upheld “the testimony of God’s Word against Slave-holding.” (It was also the second college in the state to admit women students, a decade ahead of the University of Illinois.)
However, once slavery was outlawed in 1865, the report says, Blanchard lacked any “robust vision” of ongoing work to aid former slaves.
V. Raymond Edman, president from 1940 to 1965, ended Buswell’s Black ban and later coped with the modern Civil Rights Movement. Unlike, say, Bob Jones University, Wheaton never officially barred interracial dating and marriage, but required faculty and parental approval for all marriages. Thus when Raymond Joseph, a Haitian, eloped without permission to marry a white student in 1960, he was suspended. Irate students saw a racial motivation.
Joseph later had a distinguished career as a Bible translator, journalist, political activist and Haiti’s ambassador to the U.S. [Disclosure: The Guy’s late wife Joan was a 1961 Wheaton graduate devoted to that era’s civil rights cause and a friend of Joseph.]
In 1960, Edman took the significant step of commissioning the first-ever faculty study of race relations on campus. The resulting study noted that “minority groups, particularly Negroes, were for a time excluded from admission” and were restricted from “certain social activities” when they were again admitted under Edman. The cautious president never released this report.
The 2023 document focuses largely on Black relations and minimally on Hispanic and other groups, Edman appears favorably during World War II by admitting Japanese-American students held in internment camps when many other schools did not. A further issue is that the main campus and two other installations were built on land once owned by Native Americans, with whom “dialogue” is said to proceed.
Media follow-ups would include whether other predominantly white North American campuses among 150 members of the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities have conducted such racial self-studies, or might in the wake of Wheaton’s example.
Local media could pursue the same matter with their nearby campuses. Reporters can easily cull reactions at the Council’s “Diversity Conference” October 15–17 at John Brown University in Siloam Springs, Arkansas.
FIRST IMAGE: Lead art for the “About Wheaton” page on the Wheaton College website.