Jerome Kurtz, IRS Commissioner Who Opposed Racially Discriminatory Religious Schools, Dies at 83

Jerome Kurtz, IRS Commissioner during Jimmy Carter’s presidency, died last week at age 83. Kurtz led the government’s fight against racial discrimination in religious schools.

During the late 1970s, the South was full of segregated private religious schools created to keep students from the integrated public schools required by Brown v. Board of Education. North Carolina’s Goldsboro Christian Schools [GCS] and South Carolina’s Bob Jones University [BJU] were representative of the segregation academies and universities. Goldsboro, a Bible-based K-12 school, admitted only students with white ancestry. Bob Jones originally admitted no black students, then admitted only black students married to blacks, and then banned interracially married or dating students and students who advocated interracial relations.

President Carter provoked the segregationist churches in two ways. First, in the Supreme Court his Justice Department defended the IRS’s ruling that GCS and BJU were not entitled to tax exemptions and deductions because they discriminated on the basis of race. Second—in an action with unexpected long-term consequences for religion and politics—Kurtz enforced the tax exemption and deduction rule against all racially discriminatory schools, including religious schools. Although that tax rule had been on the books since the early 1970s, it was underenforced until Kurtz took office. Kurtz’s actions made it harder for discriminatory religious schools to keep their tax-exempt status.

The religious reaction was intense. According to the Reverend Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority, “[i]t was the IRS trying to take away our tax exemptions that made us realize that we had to fight for our lives.” The three original organizations of the Christian Right—the Moral Majority, Christian Voice, and Religious Roundtable—were all formed to defend segregated schools. Paul Weyrich of the Heritage Foundation recalled “what galvanized the Christian community was not abortion, school prayer, or the ERA. I am living witness to that because I was trying to get those people interested in those issues and I utterly failed. What changed their minds was Jimmy Carter’s intervention against the Christian schools, trying to deny them tax-exempt status on the basis of so-called de facto segregation.”

After many religious groups complained about the government’s “gross intrusion into the internal affairs of church school systems,” Congress forced the IRS to be more lenient toward the schools’ discrimination. The exemptions became an issue in the 1980 presidential election, when Republicans attacked Democrats for their vendetta against religious schools. Newly-elected President Ronald Reagan’s Justice Department refused to defend the IRS’s conduct in the Supreme Court in Goldsboro and Bob Jones, and the Court had to appoint civil rights lawyer and former Transportation Secretary William Coleman to defend the IRS’s actions.

GCS and BYU insisted that the First Amendment protects their religious freedom to discriminate as they wish. Nonetheless, the Court ruled unanimously that the government’s enforcement of the tax laws did not violate the Free Exercise or Establishment Clauses of the First Amendment. The government’s interest in preventing discrimination outweighed the schools’ free exercise, the Court held, and the neutral taxation policy did not favor or disfavor religion in violation of establishment. According to Bob Jones, religious schools that discriminate on the basis of race do not enjoy a First Amendment right to tax exemptions because the government has a compelling interest in eradicating racial discrimination.

Kurtz later said Reagan’s overturning of the tax regulations was “outrageous and clearly contrary to the law, a reversal of years and years of precedent.” Kurtz’s daughter reported he received death threats for his actions. It is worth celebrating a government official who knew that religious freedom includes no right to discriminate.