Gin, Jesus, and Jim Crow

Gin, Jesus, and Jim Crow
Author: Brendan J. J. Payne
Publisher: LSU Press
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2022-04-20
Genre: History
ISBN: 0807177709

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.

Bishop Charles H. Mason in the Age of Jim Crow

Bishop Charles H. Mason in the Age of Jim Crow
Author: Elton H. Weaver
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 317
Release: 2020-11-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 1498595170

Bishop Charles H. Mason in the Age of Jim Crow profiles the life and career of Charles Harrison Mason. Mason was the founder of the Church of God in Christ (COGIC), which from its Memphis roots, grew into the most significant black Pentecostal denomination in the United States, with profound theological and political ramifications for poor and working-class black Memphians. Bishop Charles H. Mason in the Age of Jim Crow is grounded in the history of the Jim Crow era. The book traces the origins of COGIC in Memphis; it reveals just how Mason’s new black Pentecostal denomination grew, gained social and political power, and earned a permanent place in Memphis’s black religious pantheon. This book tells how a son of slaves transformed a rural migrant movement into an urban phenomenon, how unusual religious demonstrations exemplified infrapolitical religious protests, and how these rituals of resistance changed black lives and helped strengthen and sustain blacks fighting for freedom in segregated Memphis. The author reveals why Charles H. Mason was an important pre-civil rights religious leader who laid the groundwork for integrated churches.

Christian Imperial Feminism

Christian Imperial Feminism
Author: Gale L. Kenny
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2024-02-06
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1479825514

Illuminates how white American Protestant women embraced a racially specific version of social inclusiveness that centered themselves as the norm Amidst the global instability of the early twentieth century, white Christian American women embraced the idea of an “empire of Christ” that was racially diverse, but which they believed they were uniquely qualified to manage. America’s burgeoning power, combined with women’s rising roles within the church, led to white Protestant women adopting a feminism rooted in religion and imperialism. Gale L. Kenny examines this Christian imperial feminism from the women’s missionary movement to create a Christian world order. She shows that this Christian imperial feminism marked a break from an earlier Protestant world view that focused on moral and racial purity and in which interactions among races were inconceivable. This new approach actually prioritized issues like civil rights and racial integration, as well as the uplift of women, though the racially diverse world Christianity it aspired to was still to be rigidly hierarchically ordered, with white women retaining a privileged place as guardians. In exposing these dynamics, this book departs from recent scholarship on white evangelical nationalism to focus on the racial politics of white religious liberalism. Christian Imperial Feminism adds a necessary layer to our understanding of religion, gender, and empire.

Follow Me Down

Follow Me Down
Author: Shelby Foote
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2011-05-25
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0307779289

A mesmerizing novel of faith, passion, and murder by the author of The Civil War: A Narrative. Drawing on themes as old as the Bible, Foote's novel compels us to inhabit lives obsessed with sin and starving for redemption. A work reminiscent of both Faulkner and O'Connor, yet utterly original.

Hubert Harrison

Hubert Harrison
Author: Jeffrey B. Perry
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 642
Release: 2020-12-22
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0231552424

The St. Croix–born, Harlem-based Hubert Harrison (1883–1927) was a brilliant writer, orator, educator, critic, and activist who combined class consciousness and anti-white-supremacist race consciousness into a potent political radicalism. Harrison’s ideas profoundly influenced “New Negro” militants, including A. Philip Randolph and Marcus Garvey, and his work is a key link in the two great strands of the Civil Rights/Black Liberation struggle: the labor- and civil-rights movement associated with Randolph and Martin Luther King Jr. and the race and nationalist movement associated with Garvey and Malcolm X. In this second volume of his acclaimed biography, Jeffrey B. Perry traces the final decade of Harrison’s life, from 1918 to 1927. Perry details Harrison’s literary and political activities, foregrounding his efforts against white supremacy and for racial consciousness and unity in struggles for equality and radical social change. The book explores Harrison’s role in the militant New Negro Movement and the International Colored Unity League, as well as his prolific work as a writer, educator, and editor of the New Negro and the Negro World. Perry examines Harrison’s interactions with major figures such as Garvey, Randolph, J. A. Rogers, Arthur Schomburg, and other prominent individuals and organizations as he agitated, educated, and organized for democracy and equality from a race-conscious, radical internationalist perspective. This magisterial biography demonstrates how Harrison’s life and work continue to offer profound insights on race, class, religion, immigration, war, democracy, and social change in America.

'We Hold These Truths to Be Self-Evident...'

'We Hold These Truths to Be Self-Evident...'
Author: Kenneth N. Addison
Publisher: University Press of America
Total Pages: 529
Release: 2009-02-16
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0761843310

'We hold these truths to be self evident_' An Interdisciplinary Analysis of the Roots of Racism and Slavery in America delves into the philosophical, historical, socio/cultural and political evolution of racism and slavery in America. The premise of this work is that racism and slavery in America are the result of an unintentional historical intertwining of various Western philosophical, religious, cultural, social, economic, and political strands of thought that date back to the Classical Era. These strands have become tangled in a Gordian knot, which can only be unraveled through the bold application of a variety of multidisciplinary tools. By doing so, this book is intended help the reader understand how the United States, a nation that claims 'all men are created equal,' could be responsible for slavery and the intractable threads of racism and inequality that have become woven into its cultural the fabric.

Blues Power

Blues Power
Author: Mike Wayne Hester
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Total Pages: 379
Release: 2010-10-26
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1452084564

In the early 1900's Rufus Epps, a son of an ex-slave, acquires land in the Deep South from a dying man. On the land he builds a gigantic barn, which every year on his wedding anniversary becomes the site for a celebration called the night of the blues. Bluesmen come from across the south to compete for the prize money. After Rufus Epps' death, the barn becomes deserted and the night of the blues is forgotten. Years after Rufus Epps' death, two bluesmen return to the barn. Cyril Dutty, who is dying, comes to search for his soul, which was taken from him by his father, a voodoo priest. John Leaks, an heroin addict, comes to find redemption from a life of hate and violence. Blues Power is a fast paced novel that chronicles the power and magic of the blues.