WOW! What a powerful and loving story by Daniel Porter of the The Baptist New Mexican! I subscribe to the the newspaper, I would suggest you do also, as it is always filled with excellent information!

The Quiet Desegregation of Glorieta Baptist Assembly

SANTA FE (BNM) – Many Southern Baptists are familiar with Annie Armstrong. She is the founder of the Woman’s Missionary Union and the namesake of the North American Mission Board’s annual Easter offering. Fewer know of Annie Filmore, a twentieth century pioneer of Baptist missions, who was initially denied fellowship with Armstrong’s WMU because of the color of her skin.

Between 1920 and 1960, WMU held varying and sometimes conflicting positions on race relations in the United States. As early as 1927, WMU leaders took a public stand against lynching. In 1940, WMU trained black women for ministry within their respective churches. However, in a 1946 issue of the WMU’s Royal Service magazine, the organization rejected the desegregation as “unreasonable.” Three years later, in the same magazine, WMU promoted desegregation, and in the early 1950s supported the desegregation of public schools. Filmore became intimately familiar with WMU’s conflicting views on race relations in 1953, when she attempted to attend two different WMU conferences, on two sides of the country.

Early in the morning on June 29, 1953, 23-year-old Dale Danielson felt the Holy Spirit prodding him to leave his family’s cabin at Glorieta Baptist Assembly and drive out past the camp’s gates to the old transcontinental highway. What happened next stuck with him for the rest of his life.