Over three days in January 1963, clergy and laity representing Jewish, Protestant, and Catholic communities from across the United States gathered at the Edgewater Beach Hotel. The property often attracted Hollywood stars and professional athletes visiting Chicago, who enjoyed tennis courts, private beaches, and a seasonal ice skating rink on the hotel’s grounds. These religious leaders and activists, however, were focused on weightier matters as they convened the inaugural National Conference on Religion and Race. The event looked backward, honoring the hundredth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, and spoke to contemporary concerns, with sessions that discussed issues like “the role of Church and Synagogue in a racially changing community.”
Nationally renowned speakers and leaders traveled to be a part of the proceedings. Religious leaders within the Civil Rights movement, notably the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rabbi Abraham Heschel, addressed the crowd. President John F. Kennedy sent a statement. Mahalia Jackson sang.
But Chicagoans, in particular, moved the project forward. Administrative support for the Conference came from the Catholic Conference on Interracial Justice, an organization founded and based in Chicago, which had held its own, smaller conference on racial justice and the Catholic Church five years earlier.
For the 1963 interfaith gathering, Catholic authorities, including the Archbishop of Chicago, appeared alongside Protestant leaders, like Congregationalist minister Edgar Chandler, who presided over the ecumenical Church Federation of Chicago, and prominent rabbis, including Irving Rosenbaum, the executive director of the Chicago Board of Rabbis.
Civic leaders joined Chicago’s clergy in planning and supporting the event. Mayor Richard J. Daley and Illinois governor Otto Kerner both delivered opening remarks. Judge James Parsons headed the host committee. Parsons, a graduate of the University of Chicago law school, had become the first African American United States District judge after President Kennedy nominated him to the bench in 1961.
The overlapping efforts of religious and political leaders illustrated how the conference’s organizers understood their work for racial justice to have intertwined social and spiritual dimensions. The minutes of a planning meeting indicate that the Conference’s organizers felt that “emphasis should be given to the fact that the conference is being convened to commemorate the centennial of the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation; but the Conference is to do this in such a way as concentrates on the religious significance of the event. The churches and synagogues did play a role in creating the climate in which the Civil War took place.” This historical attention to religion and social change carried through to the present. “The Conference,” its organizers wrote, “hopes to make its distinct contribution by a fruitful examination of the role of religious institutions in race relations, a review with serious recommendations for the future.”
The questions participants wrestled with at the Edgewater Beach Hotel only grew more urgent as the decade unfolded. During the conference, working groups discussed religious institutions’ roles in urban neighborhoods and their relationships with political entities, conversations that continued throughout the 1960s, as Chicago's religious communities confronted school segregation, housing discrimination, urban renewal, and growing demands for political and economic equality.
Many clergy and congregations played prominent roles in the Chicago Freedom Movement, neighborhood organizing campaigns, anti-war activism, and emerging movements for women's and Latino rights, while debates within churches, synagogues, and mosques reflected broader disagreements about the pace and meaning of social change. The 1963 conference did not resolve these questions, but it helped establish a framework for understanding racial justice as a religious concern and demonstrated the central role faith communities would continue to play in shaping Chicago's public life throughout the 1960s.
Further Reading
More information about the 1963 National Conference on Religion and Race can be found on the Jewish Theological Seminary’s Heschel Center website and the Stanford University King Institute website. The Newberry has digitized materials from the 1958 National Catholic Conference for Interracial Justtice and holds the papers of Judge Augustine Howe, an early leader of the Catholic Interracial Justice Council who maintained relationships with many of the Civil Rights and interfaith organizations who made possible the Conference at the Edgewater Hotel.
Grace Holleman is a a doctoral student in American Religions at Northwestern University and a Chabraja Center Summer Intern for the Beyond Belief initiative.