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.


The South's Tolerable Alien

The South's Tolerable Alien

Author: Andrew S. Moore

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 2007-03

Total Pages: 225

ISBN-13: 0807135739

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In The South's Tolerable Alien, Andrew S. Moore probes the role of Catholics in the post--World War II South and argues persuasively that, until the 1960s, religion rivaled race as a boundary separating residents of the Bible Belt. Delving deep into underutilized diocesan archives, he explores the ways in which southern Catholics worked to be both good Catholics and good southerners in a region largely defined by Protestant denominations, and explains how the burgeoning civil rights movement ultimately breached these religious barriers. With religious intolerance integral to southern Protestant identity, anti-Catholicism persisted longer in the South than in any other part of the country. Yet despite the prejudices against them, southern Catholics refused to shrink from public view, creating a separate subculture to sustain their religious identity as they marked out public sacred space from which they could engage their critics. Moore describes in detail the Catholics' civic displays and public rituals -- including the diocese of Mobile-Birmingham's annual Christ the King celebrations, which featured downtown parades of over 25,000 people. More than mere assertions of their presence, these pageants provided Catholics with opportunities to craft a secular identity within the American mainstream. As Moore maintains, the rise of the civil rights movement slowly diminished religious tension among white southerners as violent confrontations in Selma and Birmingham forced Catholics, as well as others, to take a stand. Once the civil rights movement was in full swing, either support for or opposition to racial desegregation became paramount and contributed to social and political realignments along racial lines instead of religious ones. Comparing the responses to the struggle to end Jim Crow among dioceses, Moore finds that, among Catholics, there was no simple liberal/conservative dichotomy. Instead, he argues that, in the South, the civil rights movement was more important than the Second Vatican Council in reshaping the social and political stances of the Catholic Church. By describing the relationship between Catholics and Protestants in the South from a Catholic perspective, Moore demonstrates that, despite the persistence of anti-Catholicism throughout this period, white Protestants were gradually coming to terms with the modern South's religious pluralism. With The South's Tolerable Alien, Moore offers the first serious analysis of southern Catholicism outside of Louisiana and makes an enormous contribution to the study of southern religion.


Catholic Confederates

Catholic Confederates

Author: Gracjan Anthony Kraszewski

Publisher: Civil War Era in the South

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781606353950

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How did Southern Catholics, under international religious authority and grounding unlike Southern Protestants, act with regard to political commitments in the recently formed Confederacy? How did they balance being both Catholic and Confederate? How is the Southern Catholic Civil War experience similar or dissimilar to the Southern Protestant Civil War experience? What new insights might this experience provide regarding Civil War religious history, the history of Catholicism in America, 19th-century America, and Southern history in general? For the majority of Southern Catholics, religion and politics were not a point of tension. Devout Catholics were also devoted Confederates, including nuns who served as nurses; their deep involvement in the Confederate cause as medics confirms the all-encompassing nature of Catholic involvement in the Confederacy, a fact greatly underplayed by scholars of Civil war religion and American Catholicism. Kraszewski argues against an "Americanization" of Catholics in the South and instead coins the term "Confederatization" to describe the process by which Catholics made themselves virtually indistinguishable from their Protestant neighbors. The religious history of the South has been primarily Protestant. Catholic Confederates simultaneously fills a gap in Civil War religious scholarship and in American Catholic literature by bringing to light the deep impact Catholicism has had on Southern society even in the very heart of the Bible Belt.


Christianity and Race in the American South

Christianity and Race in the American South

Author: Paul Harvey

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2016-11-21

Total Pages: 269

ISBN-13: 022641549X

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The history of race and religion in the American South is infused with tragedy, survival, and water—from St. Augustine on the shores of Florida’s Atlantic Coast to the swampy mire of Jamestown to the floodwaters that nearly destroyed New Orleans. Determination, resistance, survival, even transcendence, shape the story of race and southern Christianities. In Christianity and Race in the American South, Paul Harvey gives us a narrative history of the South as it integrates into the story of religious history, fundamentally transforming our understanding of the importance of American Christianity and religious identity. Harvey chronicles the diversity and complexity in the intertwined histories of race and religion in the South, dating back to the first days of European settlement. He presents a history rife with strange alliances, unlikely parallels, and far too many tragedies, along the way illustrating that ideas about the role of churches in the South were critically shaped by conflicts over slavery and race that defined southern life more broadly. Race, violence, religion, and southern identity remain a volatile brew, and this book is the persuasive historical examination that is essential to making sense of it.


How Latin America Saved the Soul of the Catholic Church

How Latin America Saved the Soul of the Catholic Church

Author: Edward L. Cleary

Publisher: Paulist Press

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 283

ISBN-13: 158768148X

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Tells the remarkable story of the transformation of the Latin American church on every level, from professional theologians to the individual in the remotest Latin American village.


Deep South

Deep South

Author: Allison Davis

Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 604

ISBN-13: 9781570038150

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First published in 1941, Deep South is the cooperative effort of a team of social anthropologists to document the economic, racial, and cultural character of the Jim Crow South through a study of a representative rural Mississippi community. Researchers Allison Davis, Burleigh B. Gardner, and Mary R. Gardner lived among the people of Natchez, Mississippi, as they investigated how class and caste informed daily life in a typical southern community. This Southern Classics edition of their study offers contemporary students of history a provocative collection of primary material gathered by conscientious and well-trained participant-observers, who found then, as now, intertwined social and economic inequalities at the root of racial tensions. Expanding on earlier studies of community stratification by social class, researchers in the Deep South Project introduced the additional concept of caste, which parsed a community through rigid social ranks assigned at birth and unalterable through life, a concept readily identifiable in the racial divisions of the Jim Crow South. As African American researchers, Davis and his wife, Elizabeth, along with his assistant St. Clair Drake, were able to gain unrivaled access to the black community in rural Mississippi, unavailable to their white counterparts. Through their interviews and experiences, the authors vividly capture the nuances in caste-enforcing systems of tenant-landlord relations, local government, and law enforcement. But the chief achievement of Deep South is its rich analysis of how the southern economic system, and sharecropping in particular, functioned to maintain rigid caste divisions along racial lines. In the new introduction to this edition, Jennifer Jensen Wallach situates this germinal study within the field of social anthropology and against the backdrop of similar community studies of the era. She also details the subsequent careers of this distinguished team of researchers.


The Popes and Slavery

The Popes and Slavery

Author: Joel S. Panzer

Publisher: Saint Pauls/Alba House

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780818907647

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This book reveals how the Church has in the past and still does speak up decisively to halt the infamous trade in human flesh.


A History of the Catholic Church in the American South

A History of the Catholic Church in the American South

Author: James M. Woods

Publisher:

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 528

ISBN-13:

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No Christian denomination has had a longer or more varied existence in the American South than the Catholic Church. The Spanish missions established in Florida and Texas promoted Catholicism. Catholicism was the dominant religion among the French who settled in Louisiana. Prior to the influx of Irish immigrants in the 1840s, most American Catholics lived south of the Mason-Dixon line. Anti-Catholic prejudice was never as strong in the South as in the North or Midwest and was rare in the region before the twentieth century.James Woods's sweeping history stretches from the first European settlement of the continent through the end of the Spanish-American War. The book is divided into three distinct sections: the colonial era, the early Republic through the annexation of Texas in 1845, and the stormy latter half of the nineteenth century.


Black, White, and Catholic

Black, White, and Catholic

Author: R. Bentley Anderson

Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 9780826514837

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New Orleans Catholics and the early years of desegregation.