Religion and the Rise of Jim Crow in New Orleans

Description

Religion and the Rise of Jim Crow in New Orleans examines a difficult chapter in American religious history: the story of race prejudice in American Christianity. Focusing on the largest city in the late-nineteenth-century South, it explores the relationship between churches--black and white, Protestant and Catholic--and the emergence of the Jim Cr

James B. Bennett is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Santa Clara University.

"James Bennett has written a superb study of the tensions between religion and race among black Methodists and Catholics in New Orleans between 1880 and 1920... [He] provides important comparisons of Methodist and Roman Catholic leaders and church members who either resisted or supported racial separatism and the effects of this growing separatism on their identity."--Choice "Religion and the Rise of Jim Crow in New Orleans is a remarkable analysis of the complex and competing forces that shaped the south at the turn of the century. Bennett is certainly right in asserting that an examination of these moments of possibility, these opportunities for a social world that did not arise, intensify our awareness of the social order that did."--Justin D. Poche, American Catholic Studies "This is an enormously intelligent book about the confrontations and negotiations within Methodist and Catholic churches over issues of race, focusing on the period between 1877 and 1920... This book sets a high standard for analysis of the nineteenth-century evolution of religion and race, and scholars of American religion and history will find it an indispensable resource."--Stephen W. Angell, Journal of Southern History