Contested Meanings: Afro-American Religion and Culture in the Delta, 1865-1914

Team Members/Contributors

John M. Giggie Princeton University Contact Me

About this dissertation fellowship

This study examines how former slaves and their offspring confronted the meaning of freedom won and lost in the half century after the Civil War. It focuses on the historical epicenter of the South, the Delta: the rich alluvial plain divided by the lower Mississippi River and composed of parts of Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Tennessee. Here, in this heartland of cotton and sugar production, blacks developed political doctrines and religious organizations that mediated racial subordination in the postbellum era. These ideas and institutions could not fully preserve the civil liberties gained on the battlefield -- but they did restructure the ways in which both blacks and whites lived in the New South and did underpin the Great Migration of the 1910s.

In showing how blacks influenced the shape of the New South, this study asks new questions about old historiography. In contrast to earlier views that describe this era as the nadir of Afro-American civil rights and accomplishment, I consider the subtle means through which blacks established a vision and practice of democratic citizenship. Rather than seeing a simple reign of white supremacy, I detail a fitful evolution of southern culture, a culture significantly contingent on black efforts to define themselves as Americans. Tracing these efforts through successive challenges and transformations, I illuminate how all southerners learned about themselves and fashioned a setting that undergirded the black exodus northward in the early twentieth century.

Image Title Year Type Contributor(s) Other Info
  God's Long Journey: African Americans, Religion, and History in the Mississippi Delta, 1875-1915 1997 Dissertation John M. Giggie