Religion and the Rise of Jim Crow in New Orleans
Religion and the Rise of Jim Crow in New Orleans

Author: James B. Bennett

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2016-06-28

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 1400880173

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Religion and the Rise of Jim Crow in New Orleans examines a difficult chapter in American religious history: the story of race prejudice in American Christianity. Focusing on the largest city in the late-nineteenth-century South, it explores the relationship between churches--black and white, Protestant and Catholic--and the emergence of the Jim Crow laws, statutes that created a racial caste system in the American South. The book fills a gap in the scholarship on religion and race in the crucial decades between the end of Reconstruction and the eve of the Civil Rights movement. Drawing on a range of local and personal accounts from the post-Reconstruction period, newspapers, and church records, Bennett's analysis challenges the assumption that churches fell into fixed patterns of segregation without a fight. In sacred no less than secular spheres, establishing Jim Crow constituted a long, slow, and complicated journey that extended well into the twentieth century. Churches remained a source of hope and a means of resistance against segregation, rather than a retreat from racial oppression. Especially in the decade after Reconstruction, churches offered the possibility of creating a common identity that privileged religious over racial status, a pattern that black church members hoped would transfer to a national American identity transcending racial differences. Religion thus becomes a lens to reconsider patterns for racial interaction throughout Southern society. By tracing the contours of that hopeful yet ultimately tragic journey, this book reveals the complex and mutually influential relationship between church and society in the American South, placing churches at the center of the nation's racial struggles.

Religion and the Rise of Jim Crow in New Orleans
Religion and the Rise of Jim Crow in New Orleans

Author: James B. Bennett

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 9780691121482

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"Drawing on a range of local and personal accounts from the post-Reconstruction period, newspapers, and church records Bennett's analysis challenges the assumption that churches fell into fixed patterns of segregation without a fight. In sacred no less than secular spheres, establishing Jim Crow constituted a long, slow, and complicated journey that extended well into the twentieth century."--BOOK JACKET.

Desegregating Dixie
Desegregating Dixie

Author: Mark Newman

Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi

Published: 2018-10-04

Total Pages: 539

ISBN-13: 1496818873

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Winner of the 2020 American Studies Network Book Prize from the European Association for American Studies Mark Newman draws on a vast range of archives and many interviews to uncover for the first time the complex response of African American and white Catholics across the South to desegregation. In the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, the southern Catholic Church contributed to segregation by confining African Americans to the back of white churches and to black-only schools and churches. However, in the twentieth century, papal adoption and dissemination of the doctrine of the Mystical Body of Christ, pressure from some black and white Catholics, and secular change brought by the civil rights movement increasingly led the Church to address racial discrimination both inside and outside its walls. Far from monolithic, white Catholics in the South split between a moderate segregationist majority and minorities of hard-line segregationists and progressive racial egalitarians. While some bishops felt no discomfort with segregation, prelates appointed from the late 1940s onward tended to be more supportive of religious and secular change. Some bishops in the peripheral South began desegregation before or in anticipation of secular change while elsewhere, especially in the Deep South, they often tied changes in the Catholic churches to secular desegregation. African American Catholics were diverse and more active in the civil rights movement than has often been assumed. While some black Catholics challenged racism in the Church, many were conflicted about the manner of Catholic desegregation generally imposed by closing valued black institutions. Tracing its impact through the early 1990s, Newman reveals how desegregation shook congregations but seldom brought about genuine integration.

Gin, Jesus, and Jim Crow
Gin, Jesus, and Jim Crow

Author: Brendan J. J. Payne

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2022-04-20

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 0807177709

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In Gin, Jesus, and Jim Crow, Brendan J. J. Payne reveals how prohibition helped realign the racial and religious order in the South by linking restrictions on alcohol with political preaching and the disfranchisement of Black voters. While both sides invoked Christianity, prohibitionists redefined churches’ doctrines, practices, and political engagement. White prohibitionists initially courted Black voters in the 1880s but soon dismissed them as hopelessly wet and sought to disfranchise them, stoking fears of drunken Black men defiling white women in their efforts to reframe alcohol restriction as a means of racial control. Later, as the alcohol industry grew desperate, it turned to Black voters, many of whom joined the brewers to preserve their voting rights and maintain personal liberties. Tracking southern debates about alcohol from the 1880s through the 1930s, Payne shows that prohibition only retreated from the region once the racial and religious order it helped enshrine had been secured.

Defying Jim Crow
Defying Jim Crow

Author: Donald E. DeVore

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2015-02-18

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 0807160385

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From the earliest days of Jim Crow, African Americans in New Orleans rallied around the belief that the new system of racially biased laws, designed to relegate them to second-class citizenship, was neither legitimate nor permanent. Drawing on shared memories of fluid race relations and post-Civil War political participation, they remained committed to a disciplined and sustained pursuit of equality. Defying Jim Crow tells the story of this community's decades-long struggle against segregation, disenfranchisement, and racial violence. Amid mounting violence and increasing exclusion, black New Orleanians believed their best defense depended upon maintaining a close-knit and politically engaged community. Donald E. DeVore's peerless research shows how African Americans sought to reverse the trends of oppression by prioritizing the kind of capacity building-investment in education, participation in national organizations, and a spirit of entrepreneurship in markets not dominated by white businessmen-that would ensure the community's ability to keep fighting for their rights in the face of setbacks and hostility from the city's white leaders. As some black activists worked to attain equity within the "separate but equal" framework, they provided a firm foundation and crucial support for more overt challenges to the racist government structures. The result of over a decade's research into the history of civil rights and community building in New Orleans, Defying Jim Crow provides a thorough and insightful analysis of race relations in one of America's most diverse cities and offers a vital contribution to the complex history of the African American struggle for freedom.

Becoming American in Creole New Orleans, 1896–1949
Becoming American in Creole New Orleans, 1896–1949

Author: Darryl Barthé, Jr.

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2021-07-14

Total Pages: 230

ISBN-13: 0807175528

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Extensive scholarship has emerged within the last twenty-five years on the role of Louisiana Creoles in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, yet academic work on the history of Creoles in New Orleans after the Civil War and into the twentieth century remains sparse. Darryl Barthé Jr.’s Becoming American in Creole New Orleans moves the history of New Orleans’ Creole community forward, documenting the process of “becoming American” through Creoles’ encounters with Anglo-American modernism. Barthé tracks this ethnic transformation through an interrogation of New Orleans’s voluntary associations and social sodalities, as well as its public and parochial schools, where Creole linguistic distinctiveness faded over the twentieth century because of English-only education and the establishment of Anglo-American economic hegemony. Barthé argues that despite the existence of ethnic repression, the transition from Creole to American identity was largely voluntary as Creoles embraced the economic opportunities afforded to them through learning English. “Becoming American” entailed the adoption of a distinctly American language and a distinctly American racialized caste system. Navigating that caste system was always tricky for Creoles, who had existed in between French and Spanish color lines that recognized them as a group separate from Europeans, Africans, and Amerindians even though they often shared kinship ties with all of these groups. Creoles responded to the pressures associated with the demands of the American caste system by passing as white people (completely or situationally) or, more often, redefining themselves as Blacks. Becoming American in Creole New Orleans offers a critical comparative analysis of “Creolization” and “Americanization,” social processes that often worked in opposition to each another during the nineteenth century and that would continue to frame the limits of Creole identity and cultural expression in New Orleans until the mid-twentieth century. As such, it offers intersectional engagement with subjects that have historically fallen under the purview of sociology, anthropology, and critical theory, including discourses on whiteness, métissage/métisajé, and critical mixed-race theory.

Spiritual and Social Transformation in African American Spiritual Churches
Spiritual and Social Transformation in African American Spiritual Churches

Author: Margarita Simon Guillory

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-12-22

Total Pages: 285

ISBN-13: 1351392255

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At the core of African American religion’s response to social inequalities has been a symbiotic relationship between socio-political activism and spiritual restoration. Drawing on archival material and ethnographic fieldwork with African American Spiritual Churches in the USA, this book examines how their spiritual and social work can shed light on the interplay between corporate activism and individual spirituality. This book traces the development of this "politico-spiritual" approach to injustice from the beginning of the twentieth century through the opening decade of the twenty-first century, using the work of African American Spiritual Churches as a lens through which to observe its progression. Addressing subjects such as spiritual healing, support of the homeless, gender equality and the aftermath of hurricane Katrina, it demonstrates that these communities are clearly motivated by the dual concerns of the soul and the community. This study diversifies our understanding of the African American religious landscape, highlighting an approach to social injustice that conjoins both political and spiritual transformations. As such, it will be of significant interest to scholars of religious studies, African American studies and politics.

New Orleans Sports
New Orleans Sports

Author: Thomas Aiello

Publisher: University of Arkansas Press

Published: 2019-08-01

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 1610756703

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New Orleans has long been a city fixated on its own history and culture. Founded in 1718 by the French, transferred to the Spanish in the 1763 Treaty of Paris, and sold to the United States in 1803, the city’s culture, law, architecture, food, music, and language share the influence of all three countries. This cultural mélange also manifests in the city’s approach to sport, where each game is steeped in the city’s history. Tracing that history from the early nineteenth century to the present, while also surveying the state of the city’s sports historiography, New Orleans Sports places sport in the context of race relations, politics, and civic and business development to expand that historiography—currently dominated by a text that stops at 1900—into the twentieth century, offering a modern examination of sports in the city.

The Making of American Catholicism
The Making of American Catholicism

Author: Michael J. Pfeifer

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2021-01-12

Total Pages: 245

ISBN-13: 1479829455

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Traces the development of Catholic cultures in the South, the Midwest, the West, and the Northeast, and their contribution to larger patterns of Catholicism in the United States Most histories of American Catholicism take a national focus, leading to a homogenization of American Catholicism that misses much of the local complexity that has marked how Catholicism developed differently in different parts of the country. Such histories often treat northeastern Catholicism, such as the Irish Catholicism of Boston, as if it reflects the full history and experience of Catholicism across the United States. The Making of American Catholicism argues that regional and transnational relationships have been central to the development of American Catholicism. The American Catholic experience has diverged significantly among regions; if we do not examine how it has taken shape in local cultures, we miss a lot. Exploring the history of Catholic cultures in New Orleans, Iowa, Wisconsin, Los Angeles, and New York City, the volume assesses the role of region in American Catholic history, carefully exploring the development of American Catholic cultures across the continental United States. Drawing on extensive archival research, The Making of American Catholicism argues that American Catholicism developed as transnational Catholics creatively adapted their devotional and ideological practices in particular American regional contexts. They emphasized notions of republicanism, individualistic capitalism, race, ethnicity, and gender, resulting in a unique form of Catholicism that dominates the United States today. The book offers close attention to race and racism in American Catholicism, including the historical experiences of African American and Latinx Catholics as well as Catholics of European descent.

A Long Reconstruction
A Long Reconstruction

Author: Paul William Harris

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022-04-15

Total Pages: 345

ISBN-13: 0197571824

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After slavery was abolished, how far would white America go toward including African Americans as full participants in the country's institutions? Conventional historical timelines mark the end of Reconstruction in the year 1877, but the Methodist Episcopal Church continued to wrestle with issues of racial inclusion for decades after political support for racial reform had receded. An 1844 schism over slavery split Methodism into northern and southern branches, but Union victory in the Civil War provided the northern Methodists with the opportunity to send missionaries and teachers into the territory that had been occupied by the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. To a remarkable degree, the M.E. Church succeeded in appealing to freed slaves and white Unionists and thereby built up a biracial membership far surpassing that of any other Protestant denomination. A Long Reconstruction details the denomination's journey with unification and justice. African Americans who joined did so in a spirit of hope that through religious fellowship and cooperation they could gain respect and acceptance and ultimately assume a position of equality and brotherhood with whites. However, as segregation gradually took hold in the South, many northern Methodists evinced the same skepticism as white southerners about the fitness of African Americans for positions of authority and responsibility in an interracial setting. The African American membership was never without strong white allies who helped to sustain the Church's official stance against racial caste but, like the nation as a whole, the M.E. Church placed a growing priority on putting their broken union back together.