Backwater: Religion, Race, and Justice in a Jim Crow Swamp

“Backwater: Religion, Community, and Justice in a Jim Crow Swamp is a narrative history of religion and the environment in a rural eastern North Carolina community where a Black farmers’ cooperative and a multiracial Christian work camp together tried to enact an alternative to agricultural capitalism in the summer of 1947. ”

Team Members/Contributors

Alison Collis Greene Candler School of Theology Contact Me

About this sabbatical grant for researchers

“This place is full of rattlesnakes,” warned the police chief, “you’d better come on out.” Their stomachs pressed to the wet earth, the five young people hiding on the marshy fringes of an eastern North Carolina cornfield doubted whether they could trust the law in Tyrrell County. But it seemed that the armed mob had cleared out, and soon so did the young people. Backwater tells the stories of a multiracial group of college and divinity students whose participation in an integrated summer work camp in 1947 nearly cost their lives. The students were in Tyrrell County to build a cooperative store for The Light of Tyrrell, a Black farmers’ credit union that worked to preserve Black farmland and economic independence in a majority-white community. While this story contains elements of a conventional civil rights narrative, it is also the story of those marshes-turned-farmland, a place “full of rattlesnakes.” It the story of a backwater, a place where rivers run stagnant and the world seems distant. Backwater argues that the environmental history of that place—of any place—is integral to its religious history, and it thus aims to model a form of ecologically-engaged religious history, in which human and nonhuman actors overlap, and in which the landscape is as much character as backdrop. The rattlesnakes—alongside Tyrrell’s rarer glossy crayfish snake—and the wet earth, the cornfields, the drained marshes all shaped the humans who made their lives in Tyrrell County and those who tried to help remake them. Backwater examines the intersections of those experiences in a single summer and their broad implications for American religion, race, and ecology.