I don't know if you have seen this or not. This was by Gregory Doudna and was posted on the AC Alumni site. Doudna was the author of Showdown at Big Sandy: Youthful Creativity Confronts Bureaucratic Inertia at an Unconventional Bible College in East Texas.
I came to Ambassador soon after African-Americans were admitted to the student body. The racist comments were still being thrown around by many administrators and ministers as to why the college had to admit those people.
Anon
We came from a white-entitlement church ideology yet saw ourselves as loving and benign not hateful to all races. All here from AC Pasadena before 1970 were part of a college which by explicit policy excluded unmarried African-American applicants, including from tithe-paying church member families, from admission. That practice ended in 1970 when an IRS threat of loss of charitable-organization tax exempt status forced an end to the whites-preferential admissions policies at the two AC campuses in the US. Members were not told this true reason for the change. As an entering student at Big Sandy in 1972, I did not know that that was the reason Big Sandy had begun admitting for the first time unmarried black students only one year earlier in 1971. HWA never explained to the members and coworkers: “I, as chancellor of the three Ambassador Colleges, foretaste of the World Tomorrow, with the advice of counsel at headquarters, hereby decree that it is now time to admit some of our unmarried black brethren applicants to the two campuses of God’s colleges in the United States, not applicable to the campus in England, in repudiation of my longstanding teaching of God’s strictures against racial intermixing, because a higher power, namely the IRS/federal government, has threatened our income and for the good of the Work I am obeying man instead of God.”
The wcg ideology was white identity politics with an entitlement mentality: that white Europeans were Israelites and as such, entitled to the best land and natural resources in North America and worldwide. We believed in a church which broadcast booklets about a World Tomorrow which spoke of the glories of Assyrian-scale forced deportations in the millennium in which African Americans, who have been in America for generations and this is their home, would be forcibly sent to Africa en masse, leaving America all white. HWA, who authored this literature whose circulation we supported, was aware that some people might object to being forcibly removed from the only home they have ever known, but that was no impediment as he explained it; God assisted by Noah and HWA and members of the true church would force those people to go and "no defiance will be tolerated". In this ideology these soon-coming Wonderful World Tomorrow Assyrian-scale ethnic cleansings and mass deportations would be good not bad because they were in the forcibly deported peoples’ best interests, even if the first reaction of some of the ethnically cleansed in this administration in the millennium might be to cry tears not understanding immediately. (Footnote here: that is exactly what the ancient Assyrians told their conquered peoples anciently.)
Yet few of us thought of ourselves as racist. HWA and all of us at the time--probably without exception here-- professed love for all races. There was no hate speech from HWA or in church literature. The racism was institutional, not in most cases on a personal level. It was not hate-speech kind of racism.
