The first and oldest institution of the Southern Baptist Convention disclosed in a new report that its four founders together owned more than 50 slaves, part of a reckoning over racism in the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.
The 71-page report released Wednesday by the Southern Baptist Theological
Seminary is a recitation of decades of bigotry, directed first at African slaves and later at black Americans. Beginning with the founding of the seminary in Greenville, S.C., in 1859, the report found that the school, with few exceptions, backed a white supremacist ideology.
“The moral burden of history requires a more direct and far more candid acknowledgment of the legacy of this school in the horrifying realities of American slavery, Jim Crow segregation, racism, and even the avowal of white racial supremacy,” wrote R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the seminary, which is now in Louisville, Ky.
The Southern Baptist Convention has tried before to atone for its past. The denomination began in 1845 when it split from Baptists in the North over slavery. In 1995, on its 150th anniversary, the church issued a formal apology for its support of slavery and segregation. Last year, the convention, which has 15 million members in the United States, condemned white supremacists.