Prophet Without Honor
The story of Bethel University's first Black graduate
One sunny morning in September 1943, a young Minnesotan named LeRoy Gardner got off a St. Paul streetcar and walked into Bethel College and Seminary. “My spirit was high as I anticipated a new adventure,” recalled Gardner, who had overcome the death of both parents and an unjust jail sentence to graduate from high school. After being paroled, Gardner worked long hours at a meatpacking plant in South St. Paul to earn the money to enroll at Bethel, crying “tears of joy” as his foreman handed him his last paycheck.
“But I can’t register you,” said the woman in the Registrar’s Office, whom he remembered being “visibly shaken” to find herself talking to a nineteen-year old African American.
So began the Bethel experience of the first Black person to graduate from a school founded by Swedish Baptist immigrants and, more than seven decades into its existence, still patronized almost exclusively by members of that ethnic-religious enclave. Gardner earned his associate’s degree in 1946, one year before Bethel began its four-year program. He founded St. Paul’s North Central Baptist Church in 1957, pastoring it for over thirty years. LeRoy Gardner Sr. died in 2011, at age 86.
I briefly alluded to Gardner’s time at Bethel in my 2015 digital history project with Fletcher Warren, Bethel at War. But until Bethel archivist Rebekah Bain brought to my attention Gardner’s 1991 memoir, Prophet Without Honor, I didn’t realize just how much he had struggled against racist attitudes on the Bethel campus — then later, as one of the first Black pastors to affiliate with Bethel’s denomination, the Baptist General Conference.
Since I’m about to start work on another digital history of Bethel, on the lives of the women in its community, I thought sharing Gardner’s experience here on Substack might let me practice the inevitably complicated storytelling that comes with being an institutional historian.
On the one hand, Gardner cherished aspects of his Bethel experience that would sound familiar to generations of alumni. Converted to evangelical Christianity through an evangelistic team that visited his detention center, Gardner came to Bethel on the recommendation of Peter McFarlane, superintendent of the Union Gospel Mission, where he had worked as a summer camp lifeguard. He found Bethel chapel services “inspirational and needed at that stage in my spiritual development,” as was the “kindness and consideration” he received from Bethel president Henry Wingblade, political science professor C. Emanuel Carlson and several other faculty, and basketball/baseball coach Paul Edwards. “At that time in my Christian journey I needed the invaluable influence of these blessed persons.”
While at Bethel, he first discerned a calling to ministry. “God called me,” he remembered convincing a skeptical local pastor, “anointed me by His precious Holy Spirit, and sent me to preach the unsearchable riches of the Gospel of Christ. The Bible [s]tates: ‘How can they know without a preacher, and how can he preach if he be not sent’ [Rom 10:15].” Invited to deliver a sermon at a fellow student’s rural home church, her father called him “a mighty good preacher.”
But only after first calling Gardner “the first N***** that ever ate at our table. And by Golly, you’re a darn good one.”
Life at Bethel reaffirmed for Gardner a hard lesson he had already learned. After moving from Wichita to St. Paul, his family “quickly discovered there was no difference between ‘southern’ and ‘Minnesota’ brands of discrimination.” Indeed, his stint in juvenile detention stemmed from an incident when he fought off five white attackers, then found himself convicted of aggravated assault by an all-white jury. At Bethel, fellow students “attempted to make me the brunt of racial jokes.” At a yearbook photo shoot, one classmate told Gardner, “You look just like a fly in a barrel of milk.” Biology professor and college dean Emery Johnson1 gave Gardner a C during his first semester, accusing the freshman of “getting test answers from the other students…. You just couldn’t be that intelligent.”
The conduct of Johnson (also a state senator during the war) “was certainly not necessarily the consensus of the whole staff.” But that wasn’t the episode that upset him most. Let’s return to where we started, with Gardner’s first day on campus.
An unidentified male administrator confirmed Gardner’s admission, instructed the registrar to register him for class, then invited Bethel’s newest student into his office for a chat. Gardner admitted not remembering the man’s comments verbatim, but wrote that the speech went something like this:
I hope you realize that we are departing from our guidelines in admitting you at this time. Against our better judgment we admitted a Negro student a few years ago which proved to be an embarrassment for all parties involved.2 You appear to be the type of Negro who can successfully relate to our academic and spiritual standards. You can be an example for Negroes who come after you. I personally have confidence that you will prove to be a credit to your race and to this institution.
That statement by itself weighed heavily on the freshman: “The burden of the acceptability of persons of African descent who came after me was my responsibility. If I failed, they would be given no chance to succeed.”3 He didn’t fail, and African Americans now make up about 5% of the undergraduate student body at Bethel. But I fear that many of today’s students of color would still resonate with Gardner’s frustration at being expected to represent an entire people: “Are all caucasians who excel, produce, create, succeed, a credit to their ‘race’ and conversely, all who fail are a discredit?… We must be paragons of perfection. We are required to be without sin, truthful, honest, reliable, trustworthy.”
But it’s reading what came next in that September 1943 conversation that’s most shocking to contemporary eyes. “In order to ensure” that Gardner would “be a credit to [his] race,” the administrator required him to read and sign a form. Its “prohibition against the use of alcohol and tobacco” would be familiar to Bethel students to this day, but not so the behavioral expectation that Bethel’s WWII-era administration applied to Gardner and Gardner alone. He recalled it this way:
“You are prohibited from fraternizing with the co-eds. Any infractions will result in immediate expulsion.'“ Loosely translated, it clearly meant, ‘N*****, don’t mess with the white girls, or out the door you go.”
Gardner signed the form, but later fell in love with a female student named Kay Darling. Planning to marry after they graduated in 1946, the couple were invited to the home of Union Gospel Mission leader Peter MacFarlane. According to Gardner, the same man who had originally recommended his admission to Bethel now berated him: “You’ll be making the mistake of your life if you marry this woman… She’s not good enough for you. Any white [w]oman that consorts with Negroes is the scum of the earth.”
They did wed that summer and raised three children together. Five years after Gardner founded his own church, a former Bethel friend-turned-church planter named John Bergeson encouraged Gardner and North Central Baptist to apply for membership in the Minnesota Baptist Conference. But after the conference’s leadership grilled him about his lack of seminary credentials and his views on interracial marriage, Gardner reports that they declined North Central’s application. It took another seven years for him and his congregation to be accepted into Bethel’s denomination.
Until some Bethel historian has the time to do more intensive archival research, we have to rely on one man’s account for most of the details in this story. But it’s all too plausible.
What Gardner describes is hardly unusual in mid-20th century evangelical and fundamentalist schools of Bethel’s type.4 Just last month, I praised the 2023 report by a Wheaton College task force charged with investigating that college’s own complicated history of race relations. They note the virtual absence of Black students at Wheaton during the presidency of J. Oliver Buswell (1927-1940), who privately argued that, “for a small Christian school where the social contacts are so close, it would be better to avoid coeducation of the races.” Even more strikingly, the authors concluded “that what concerned Buswell most was the possibility of interracial dating, an issue that would continue to cause College administrators unease for several more decades.”5
Nor did the problem of racism disappear from Bethel’s own history after Gardner’s time. In 1967, the year that the Supreme Court ruled in favor of interracial marriage, a Clarion editorial noted the general absence of Black students on a campus too detached from the movement for civil rights, and the particular absence of one such student who chose to attend the University of Minnesota: LeRoy Gardner Jr.6 Twenty-five years later, a white supremacist’s death threat against social work professor Nicholas Cooper-Lewter prompted that same student paper to publish a special issue on racism and anti-racism at Bethel. In an article entitled, “Campus Racism Is Nothing New,” assistant editor Josh Freed reported an abridged version of the same story that LeRoy Gardner had just published in his memoir, the same story that I’ve recounted at greater length today.
Gardner doesn’t name Johnson, but the dean’s identity is clear from the context. A biologist by training, he left Bethel in 1945, to be replaced by C.E. Carlson, the architect of Bethel’s development into a four-year college.
I’ve tried to find a record of this earlier student, whom I haven’t seen mentioned before in Bethel histories. I couldn’t find him photographed in pre-1943 yearbooks, though that’s obviously an imperfect method of research — especially since Bethel didn’t publish such an annual for four years during the Great Depression.
Knowing that context may add a layer of complexity to a comment of Gardner’s that I quoted in the Bethel at War essay. Three months into his first year, he told a student reporter at the Clarion that he hoped “to champion the cause of a misunderstood and oppressed race; to better the condition and status of my people, the Negro, mentally, spiritually and socially.”
See Adam Laats, Fundamentalist U: Keeping the Faith in American Higher Education (Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 226-29.
Wheaton College Historical Review Task Force report, September 14, 2023, pp. 13-14. (See also pp. 45-52 for more detail on the Buswell era.)
Coincidentally, Gardner’s eldest son attended St. Paul Central High School with my dad, where they shared a graduating class and played basketball together.