A Table Prepared by Our Enemies

This chapter explains how black southerners interpreted early Jim Crow politics in light of the theological expectations they held from emancipation. Despite new forms of segregation, intensified racial violence, and disfranchisment efforts, black Protestants in North Carolina were encouraged by Fusion, a successful biracial political movement, and black autonomy in that state’s black regiment for the Spanish American War. Then, a devastating white supremacy campaign in 1898 left African Americans in mourning. Black Protestant leaders turned to the crucifixion narrative to make sense of the loss. Just as Jesus faced abandoned by God on the cross only days before his glorious resurrection, black southerners still had reason to hope. Their theological expectations forced them to see their own struggle for freedom as uninterrupted by the politics of Jim Crow.

Redemption and Exile

This chapter offers a in-depth case study to describe how black southerners reconciled their hopes forged at emancipation with the collapse of Reconstruction. After a brief moment of political power and progress, black leaders in North Carolina watched as their political enemies regained control of state legislatures and used organized violence to suppress black voting and education. Across the South, black Protestants turned to different biblical narratives to make sense of these setbacks while still maintaining a belief that emancipation foreshadowed God’s plans for a coming era of racial justice. In 1870, North Carolina’s black state legislators used Queen Esther’s story of Jewish persecution in exile to interpret their setbacks as temporary and to suggest specific strategies, including armed self-defense, for living as a minority in a hostile land. Without paying attention to the particulars of these exile stories, historians misinterpret the political aims of black leaders.

Introduction

This chapter introduces the book’s main arguments: that black southerners interpreted political events by discerning God’s purposes in emancipation and that they understood the entire late nineteenth century as an age of emancipation, notwithstanding political setbacks. Although most black Protestants agreed that God had intervened dramatically to free four million slaves, they disagreed in the decades that followed about what exactly God planned for their emancipated race. They placed their own experience within biblical narratives in order to predict a hopeful future. Black Protestants’ end times theology, or eschatology, defied categories of white Protestant theology and mattered in both black political decisions and black self understanding. The book brings state and local politics to the scholarship of black religion by focusing on North Carolina. The introduction argues that historians cannot understand black politics without understanding how black Protestants read different biblical stories and interpreted prophecies of the end times.

A Jeremiad

By abstaining from alcohol, black reformers believed they could rise above negative racial stereotypers and gain the respect of their white neighbors, as scholars have explained. This chapter, however, shifts focus away from the white gaze and places black temperance activism within the religious narratives that African Americans told about themselves and for themselves. Black reformers issued jeremiads, sermons mean to rebuke black Christians for profligate living even as they affirmed black Christians as God’s chosen people. The chapter explains how temperance activism reinforced black southerners’ sense of race destiny by describing their involvement in both the temperance movement and state and local prohibition politics. In North Carolina’s failed prohibition referendum in 1881, black Protestants differed in their political choices and theological interpretations, but many discerned both God’s chastisement of the race and God’s divine favor.

A Nation Born in a Day

This chapter describes black southerners’ experience of emancipation and the theological meanings they gave the event. Emancipation was the key moment in black Protestants’ understanding of God’s plan for history. The chapter follows closely one Methodist congregation in Wilmington, North Carolina, as Union troops occupied the city. Black worshippers sought religious independence and flouted rules of racial submission. The chapter argues that antebellum black southerners prophesied the coming of emancipation. Some saw emancipation as the beginning of a millenial age of church growth. They interpreted freedom in different ways, using different biblical narratives. Those differences appeared as political divisions in North Carolina’s 1865 Freedmen’s Convention. Every year thereafter, black southerners commemorated the anniversary of emancipation, ensuring that its theological importance waxed rather than waned over time.

Epilogue

By the 1910s, even as some cities held major parades for the semincentennial anniversary of emancipation, annual emancipation day celebrations were already ending in some places. Some black leaders, especially the generation that could not remember the emancipation of southern slaves, wanted “a new emancipation,” not the memory of an old one. This epilogue argues that even though emancipation gradually lost its place in black thought as the fulcrum of divine and human history, many features of African Americans’ hopeful eschatology, or the understand of the end times, remained the same in the twentieth century. Black political decisions in the Great Migration, Garveyism, the Civil Rights Movement, and the Nation of Islam depended upon a particular retelling of the past and a claim to God-ordained race destiny that had their roots in the theological meaning black southerners gave emancipation.

Exodus and Jubilee

Black southerners expected land ownership to accompany emancipation. This chapter argues that two biblical stories, Exodus and Jubilee, shaped their expectations for land in different ways. Exodus described a large migration after emancipation to a land set aside for the newly freed people. Jubilee, in contrast, restored land to the landless where they lived. Some black southerners employed Jubilee as they argued for and anticipated large-scale property confiscation and redistrubition in 1865-66 and as they sought land reform in the decades following. Others turned to Exodus as they fled North Carolina in a migrations to Indiana and Liberia in 1877-80 and in massive migrations to Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas in 1889-90. With each migration, black leaders and black workers argued over the meaning of God’s plan for the race.