For seven years, the steel frame of a new sanctuary stood unfinished at Fellowship Missionary Baptist Church in Chicago. City leaders had warned its pastor, Rev. Clay Evans, that hosting Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would bring consequences. He hosted King anyway, and the building stopped. That is what doing the right thing cost one pastor in 1966. It also answers the harder half of the question. Evans knew the price before he paid it, and so did the pastors who stayed away. Knowledge did not separate them. Willingness did.
The account comes from Dr. Zach Mills, a communication scholar and preacher who wrote Evans’s biography, The Last Blues Preacher. Followed in order, the story corrects a comfortable memory of the civil rights era and shows where silence usually comes from.
From Brownsville to the ship
Evans was born in Brownsville, Tennessee, the son of sharecroppers. He described the field work to Mills as slavery. Nobody counted the day in hours. Work started before sunrise and ended at sundown.
In 1945 he moved to Chicago to escape that racism and find a better life. He became a well-known gospel singer, and from 1950 to 2000 he served as senior pastor of Fellowship, which he affectionately called the ship: a group of people moving somewhere better together.
Chicago brought its own disillusionment. Southern racism was overt and physical. Chicago’s was, as Mills puts it, “more artful and savvy,” built into city structures and the political machine of the older Mayor Daley. Mills recalls King saying he had never met in the South the kind of racial hostility he met in Chicago. That matters for what followed. Evans was not facing a crude enemy he could easily name. He was facing a system that rewarded people for looking away.
The warning, then the frame
Jesse Jackson began attending Fellowship around 1965, and Mills believes Jackson introduced Evans to King. He is careful to add that nobody knows exactly when or how the two men first met. A good biographer marks where the record runs out, and Mills does.
In 1966 King moved to Chicago to launch the Chicago Freedom Movement. The strategy was to build a movement in the North that would prove America’s racial problem was national, not regional. The targets were segregated and poorly funded schools, poverty, and slum conditions.
Resistance came from city hall and from many Black pulpits. Evans was one of only a few pastors who opened his church for the movement’s weekly meetings. He was also in the middle of building a new sanctuary. City leaders told him to stay away from King or face consequences. He kept hosting, and the city shut down the project.
What remained was steel beams and concrete, a skeleton that appears in well-known photographs. Looking back, Mills said, “it just stood as this monument of what his courage cost him.”
The cost was more than money. Evans felt humiliated that he could not finish. Other pastors would stand outside his church and laugh, waiting for him to come out so they could point at the frame and tell him what his commitment had bought. He did eventually complete the building. In 1966, though, no one could promise him that ending.
A later echo survives secondhand. A Chicago minister told Mills that Coretta Scott King once said how much her husband admired Evans for standing with him. That remark has passed through two mouths before reaching the page, so it shows how the stand was remembered, not what King privately thought.
The pastors who stayed away
Popular memory treats the movement as the church’s finest hour, with congregations marching as one. Mills says people react with surprise when he tells them how many Chicago Black pastors opposed King, and he takes that surprise as evidence of how romanticized the memory has become. King, he said, “was hated by a lot of people and was hated by a lot of good meaning, faithful black Christian folk.”
Mills refuses to turn those pastors into cartoons, and their side deserves a real hearing. The Great Migration was bringing Black Southerners north in large numbers, and churches had to house, feed, and find work for them. City connections brought resources. “Part of it was necessity and practicality. They needed resources,” Mills said. A pastor who broke with the machine could lose the help his congregation depended on. Seen that way, keeping distance from King looks less like cowardice and more like protecting the vulnerable people in your care. Some of those pastors may have reasoned exactly that way, sincerely, and history does not let us audit each one’s conscience.
The argument has a weakness, and Mills’s account exposes it. By his description, the backroom benefits came with a condition: support the city’s agenda and turn a blind eye to injustices in Black neighborhoods. The schools and slums King was fighting were harming the same migrants those pastors were trying to serve. The resources were real, but they were bought with silence about the conditions crushing the people receiving them. Evans also had a congregation and a building at stake. He did not pretend his people would lose nothing. He judged the silence would cost them more.
Mills adds a harder layer. Some pastors had internalized what an oppressive culture told them about themselves, and power fed that sickness. Leaders who suddenly gained benefits they had never had before had strong reasons to protect them. He is clear that this did not describe every opponent. The picture is a mix of need, fear, compromise, and seduction, and that mix is why the story sits so close to ours. These were mostly decent people who understood what King was saying. They were not short on information.
Fluency without cost
Mills names fear as the barrier, and he starts with his own circle: “we progressive Christian leaders have mastered the rhetoric of social justice. Many of them are still struggling with fear of what living that rhetoric out will actually cost.”
His argument is that fluency can stand in for cost. A leader who speaks well about justice can feel, and look, committed without risking anything. Mills counts himself in this. He is, in his words, “trained in communication and rhetoric,” and he knows how to make a congregation holler. The Evans story unsettled him because it showed what those words look like when someone lives them: a stalled project and colleagues laughing on the sidewalk. He wonders aloud whether some problems in our communities stay unfixed because leaders can articulate justice without exposing themselves to it. Fear, he said, is “something that is preventing a lot of really courageous ministry work from happening.” He also suspects that habits of curating a safe image online carry into how people lead, though he offers that as a question rather than a finding.
Scripture records this same failure. John 12:42-43 says, “Nevertheless among the chief rulers also many believed on him; but because of the Pharisees they did not confess him, lest they should be put out of the synagogue: For they loved the praise of men more than the praise of God.” John is narrating what happened, and his diagnosis is precise. These rulers believed. Their problem was what confessing would cost them in their community, and John names the motive as a love of human approval over God’s.
The Chicago pastors who mocked Evans fit that pattern closely. Their standing was intact. His was the one on display in steel.
Courage that kept the bridges standing
The wrong lesson from Evans would be that courage means picking the loudest fight. What struck Mills most was that Evans built bridges with people he had every reason to treat as enemies. He treated them with respect, listened, and came to the table to reason with them. Mills contrasts that with the present: “There’s this obsession with blowing bridges up and the spectacle of it.” Spectacle tends to pay in followers, so it rarely costs much. Staying in the room with opponents is slower and wins fewer allies.
Evans’s risks were also calculated, made after prayer, thought, conversation, and collaboration. Careful thought was how he decided to act, not a reason to delay. In the 1980s he applied the same instinct to his own colleagues, helping unite South Side and West Side pastors, long divided, as the Concerned Clergy for a Better Chicago. They moved past naming the division and took on the city’s social issues one at a time.
Counting the cost
The frozen sanctuary changes how one of Jesus’s parables reads. Luke 14:28-30 says, “For which of you, intending to build a tower, sitteth not down first, and counteth the cost, whether he have sufficient to finish it? Lest haply, after he hath laid the foundation, and is not able to finish it, all that behold it begin to mock him, Saying, This man began to build, and was not able to finish.”
Jesus is speaking to the crowds following him, and in Luke 14:33 he applies the image to discipleship: whoever does not forsake all that he has cannot be his disciple. The parable warns people to reckon with the price of following him before they start.
Evans’s building is no neat fulfillment of the parable. In Jesus’s story the builder is mocked because he failed to plan. Evans was mocked because he refused to back down. He had already counted. The warning from city hall was the bill, presented in advance, and he paid it.
Someone might object that Evans was an extreme case, a famous pastor in a famous movement, with little to say about a hard conversation at work. Yet counting the cost is the ordinary part of his story. Most people count. The difference is that we often let the size of the bill decide for us and call that wisdom. The parable expects counting to lead somewhere, and so did Evans.
What the record can and cannot show
This account rests on a biographer’s work, and its limits should be stated. The warning from city leaders, the city’s role in halting construction, the seven-year stall, and the mocking pastors all come from Mills’s interviews with Evans and people around him. This conversation offers no permit files, city records, or contemporary reporting that confirm why the project stopped. The photographs Mills mentions could show a frame standing unfinished. They cannot show who stopped it or why. The Coretta Scott King remark is thirdhand. A scholar checking the story would want those documents.
What Mills does supply is a specific account that marks its own uncertainties, such as how Evans and King first met, and an account of the opposing pastors that is fair to them. In his telling, the sequence carries the meaning. The warning came first. The meetings continued. Then the building stopped, and for seven years the frame stood where the whole neighborhood, including the pastors who laughed, could see it. Evans finished the sanctuary in the end, but he opened his doors to King before he had any reason to expect he would.