Bob Jones Jr.
Chancellor of Bob Jones University whose institution's decade-long resistance to IRS enforcement of non-discrimination requirements became a catalytic event for the organized Religious Right.
View in the interactive map →Bob Jones Jr. (1911–1997) served as president and later chancellor of Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina, having succeeded his father, the university's founder. He led the institution through its most consequential years of conflict with the federal government over racial discrimination. Under Jones Jr.'s leadership, Bob Jones University maintained its explicitly discriminatory policies: the university did not admit Black students until 1971, and after admitting them continued to prohibit interracial dating and marriage, grounded in the institution's interpretation of biblical teaching about racial separation. When the IRS notified the university in 1971 that this policy put its tax-exempt status at risk — following the Green v. Connally ruling — Jones Jr. oversaw the decision to fight rather than comply. The university's tax exemption was formally revoked in 1976. Rather than change its policies, Bob Jones University pursued litigation that ultimately reached the Supreme Court. In Bob Jones University v. United States (1983), the Court ruled 8-1 against the university, definitively establishing that the IRS could deny tax-exempt status to racially discriminatory institutions regardless of religious justification. Jones Jr. was a significant figure in fundamentalist circles, known for his strident theological positions and his willingness to denounce other evangelicals and Catholics as insufficiently orthodox. His combative personality and the university's institutional stubbornness made it an unlikely but effective symbol for the Religious Right's grievances against federal overreach — a framing that allowed the movement's political organizers to present the IRS conflict as a religious liberty issue rather than a racial one. His son, Bob Jones III, succeeded him and led the university through the eventual (partial) resolution of the controversy, announcing the removal of the interracial dating ban in 2000 under political pressure generated by George W. Bush's campaign visit to the campus.
Documented themes
Connections from Bob Jones Jr.
- founded → Bob Jones University (1947) — Bob Jones Jr. served as president and later chancellor of Bob Jones University, having succeeded his father. Under his leadership the university made its most consequential institutional decisions: refusing to admit Black students until 1971, maintaining the interracial dating ban after integration, and choosing to fight — rather than comply with — IRS enforcement of its non-discrimination requirements. Jones Jr.'s combativeness and his willingness to litigate to the Supreme Court made BJU the institutional symbol that Religious Right organizers, particularly Paul Weyrich, used to frame the movement's foundational grievance as religious liberty rather than racial discrimination.
Sources
- Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right — Randall Balmer (2021), pp. 31-80
- Roads to Dominion: Right-Wing Movements and Political Power in the United States — Sara Diamond (1995), pp. 168-175