(Opinion)—Tom Skinner, the Black evangelical and evangelist who in his early days had been dubbed the “Billy Graham of Harlem,” died 30 years ago this summer.

During his too-short 52 years, Skinner made an indelible, if under-appreciated, mark on the landscape of evangelicalism in the United States, and on me.

I first learned about Tom Skinner around 2015 from a friend who told me about this Black evangelical whose message and story resembled mine.

He was a Black Chistian who closely interacted with white evangelicals. Their acceptance of him depended on him “sticking to the gospel” and not talking about so-called social issues.

When he did, he faced their anger and ostracism. Yet he remained faithful to Jesus and to his calling to preach the gospel in all its heavenly and earthly implications.

Skinner was a remarkable preacher and evangelist. Early in his ministry, some referred to him as “the Black Billy Graham” and white evangelicals celebrated him.

He preached to crowds of inner-city Black people and connected with his audiences in a way white evangelicals never could, if they tried at all.

But he soon fell out of favor with many white evangelicals because, in the tumult of the late 1960s and 1970s, Skinner insisted that the gospel spoke not only to issues of spirituality but racism and material justice.

A powerful rebuke—and vision of freedom

In December 1970, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship brought its triennial Urbana conference to the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana in Champaign, Illinois.

Urbana ‘70 brought together more than 12,000 college students from across the nation to gin them up for overseas mission trips and evangelism projects. They heard about the urgent mandate to “bring the gospel to the nations” and commit their lives to telling people about Jesus.

But Skinner, in a talk titled “The U.S. Racial Crisis and World Evangelism,” brought a message to the conference designed to give his nearly all-white audience pause.

Before they sailed across an ocean to talk to Black and brown people worldwide about Jesus, they had better check their own racial biases.

According to Skinner, most of the white Christians he knew taught only a Euro-centric version of Jesus.

He talked about growing up in Harlem in the 1950s and 1960s, where nearly all of the residents were Black, but the images of Christianity were white.

All the pictures of Christ were pictures of an Anglo-Saxon, middle-class, Protestant Republican. There is no way that I can relate to that kind of Christ.

Skinner urged his listeners to focus on the domestic sphere of evangelism rather than solely its international dimensions. He invited them to ponder the racism of their own communities and country so they wouldn’t spread the same poison to far-off nations.

To a great extent, the evangelical church in America supported the status quo…. (I)t preached against any attempt of the black man to stand on his own two feet.

Huddled in their suburban enclaves, white evangelicals looked at Black communities with a combination of apathy and fear that kept most of them from proclaiming the good news in inner-city Black neighborhoods.

Unlike white evangelicalism, Skinner presented a race-conscious version of evangelicalism that did not wave away issues of racial injustice by assuming that change would automatically happen after enough people converted to Christianity.

Instead, Black evangelicals such as Skinner recognized the material concerns of Black people and insisted that comprehensive change had to occur at both the social and the spiritual level.

The crescendo of that well-known speech spoke directly to these concerns.

Proclaim liberation to the captives, preach sight to the blind, set at liberty them that are bruised, go into the world and tell men who are bound mentally, spiritually and physically, ‘The liberator has come!’

In regard to missions both domestically and internationally, Skinner’s expression of evangelicalism disrupted ideas of white centrality and a Eurocentric version of Christianity that sought to convert people not only to a religion but to a white way of life.

Challenging the evangelical status quo

Skinner stood in a long line of Black Christians who denounced the white supremacy often present in missions activity.

His race-conscious approach to Christianity inherently threatened an ideology of missions based explicitly on colorblindness and implicitly on the superiority of white theology, culture, and conceptions of Christ.

The very realities of which Skinner made his audiences aware had the potential to undermine white evangelical power structures and patterns of ministry.

Four months after Skinner delivered his message at Urbana ’70, he made some of the same points on his weekly radio program, broadcast on WMBI, the flagship radio station operated by Moody Bible Institute (MBI) in Chicago.

On April 14, 1971, Skinner received a letter from MBI’s Broadcasting Department, announcing the cancellation of his weekly radio program on Moody’s station.

“We note that the broadcast has been becoming increasingly political with less emphasis on God’s message to all men,” the letter stated.

It is an old and frequent tactic of white evangelicals to label any conversation about racism or social justice as “political.”

In subsequent decades, MBI would become an even larger evangelical institution, recently facing multiple scandals and, in line with much of Christian higher education, enrollment declines.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Skinner continued his ministry in various forms. he became chaplain for the football team in Washington, D.C., and committed himself to leadership training and equipping Christians to “infiltrate” the culture with the gospel.

In his work, he was joined by fellow Black evangelicals such as Bill Pannell and his second wife, Barbara William Skinner.

After a short bout with leukemia, Tom Skinner passed away on June 17, 1994, at age 52.

His life and ministry presented an alternate, more inclusive Christianity that sought to make people imitators of Christ rather than whiteness.

This article has been adapted with permission from posts originally published at “Footnotes.”

Jemar Tisby, PhD, a professor of history at Simmons College of Kentucky, wrote “The Color of Compromise” and “How to Fight Racism.” He frequently writes about race, religion, and politics in his newsletter, “Footnotes.”