My study examines black political protests in Memphis, initiated by women, preceding the 1968 Sanitation Strike where Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., lost his life. Earlier studies consider the Civil Rights Movement’s charismatic male clerical leadership; this project analyzes religious beliefs among women activists who shifted from a perspective of survivalism to one of liberation. Women’s identification with moral agents in a struggle for freedom was embedded in black Christian sacred values emphasizing equality. Paradoxically, this perspective collided with white Christian practices and conservative black preachers who eschewed protest while advocating self-reliance and support for Crump’s political machine. I link this shift in religious views and practices to black migration from Delta plantations in response to structural transitions of the postwar era. If this journey symbolized passage from oppression, Memphis’s racial discrimination recalled the old “plantation mentality.” My chapters analyze movements such as protests against police sexual assaults; organizing among women workers; and efforts to integrate religious assemblies. Using oral histories, I show how historical memories of the Delta were viewed through a prism of religious understandings. When these views coalesced with the postwar “Freedom Movement,” they galvanized women to take enormous risks they believed were directly sanctioned by God.