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In the wake of Brown v. Board ending legal segregation, and contending with the decades-long flight of white families from city centers, Presbyterians undertook efforts to merge city congregations, both as a practical and a moral matter. Second Presbyterian Church in Maryville Tennessee was merged into New Providence. Berea in St. Louis ministered to new white congregants as its Black...

Newspapers advertised the sermon to be delivered June 21, 1903, a Sunday evening. Crowds gathered outside Olivet Presbyterian Church in Wilmington, Delaware, to hear Robert A. Elwood warm to his theme, "Should the murderer of Helen Bishop be lynched?"

On June 16, seventeen year old Bishop had been assaulted on a rural roadside near Price's Corner; she died of a neck wound the next day. Late on the 17th a local Black farm worker, George White, was arrested for the murder. Police allegedly found a bloody knife in his possession. There were no eyewitnesses to the attack....