Jim Crow on Christian Campuses

Chapter 3 highlights the continued influence of segregationist theology in evangelical circles even as explicit segregationist rhetoric began losing purchase outside that sphere in the mid-1960s. The centerpieces of this chapter are parallel narratives detailing the desegregation of Wofford College and Furman University, the respective flagship institutions of the Methodist and Baptist denominations in South Carolina. In describing the battles between school administrators who sought to desegregate their institutions and the laity of the state’s two largest denominations who resisted such measures, this chapter emphasizes white evangelicals’ continued opposition to black civil rights even as the broader southern culture was forced by the federal government to acquiesce on integration in institutions of higher education. Segregationist theology remained influential for a majority of white Baptists and Methodists who voted against desegregating the church schools in the mid-1960s and who withdrew their support when the colleges integrated against these Christians’ desires.

Unbinding Gentility

This book is a history of women in the US South told through the medium of music, focusing on music’s social and cultural uses, and mapping the cultural geography across space and time. The subjects represent a wide range of circumstances: enslaved women of color, white plantation daughters, both black and white daughters of middle-class families, women born on small farms, the daughters of mechanics. By recasting southern musical practices from the point of view of women’s history, it recovers silent voices and positions them within the social world of which they were so much a part. Significantly, it also introduces the existence and influence of professional women. The concentration here is music read from notation. Spending the time and money to learn to read music implies a tangible appreciation for its undertaking, and it indicates that those who paid for the education saw a benefit in doing so. It conferred value, in this case cultural capital, on those musicking in all its facets. This value, in turn, served in the performance of gentility in the mid-nineteenth century. The source materials include binder’s volumes (bound volumes of sheet music or manuscripts), letters, diaries, the contents of newspapers, images, and other types of documentation. As an ethnographic reading of archival sources, this study crafts new and vital interpretations of music in southern culture.

7. Hybrid sounds

‘Hybrid sounds’ highlights southern music. The first association of music with the American South came from the presence of African American slaves. The pre-Civil War blackface minstrel shows displayed southern connections in its imagery of the plantation. After emancipation, African Americans gained employment in such groups as the Georgia Minstrels, as they moved to New Orleans, Memphis, and St. Louis, where they adopted the trumpet, the piano, and other instruments that soon became familiar in the music of black southerners. Sacred music, blues music, jazz, and folk music were all important musical genres which shaped Southern culture and the importance of the commercialization of African American music played a role.

Y’alternative

In the shadow of alternative rock, another generation went back to country music with a punk edge. In the 1990s it was called alternative country, and North Carolina had the highest and best concentration of such bands in America -- from old-timers like Red Clay Ramblers and Southern Culture on the Skids to newcomers like Backsliders and 6 String Drag. That has persisted into the present-day Americana age with bands including Hiss Golden Messenger, American Aquarium and Mandolin Orange.

A Probe into the Fate of Women in the Evolution of Society—A Brief Analysis of Amanda in Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie

Tennessee Williams is the most famous southern American playwright in twentieth century (Adler, 1994). He is known for his strong southern cultural background, especially southern women educated in a traditional gentlewoman style. The southern women of Tennessee believed that their traditional culture was the essence of human civilization and therefore of considerable value. However, such values could not be recognized in the modern industrial society. Most of these women were sensitive and tender, suffering from industrialized society, full of all sorts of evils, and they had turned to traditional culture to seek mental peace and shelter for the moment, so they again became a lonely and frustrated. While they refused to change their cultural identity, they had to live in a modern, industrialized society that did not belong to them. Therefore, they were regarded as people living in the cultural gap, and eventually became the victims of the confrontation between traditional southern culture and modern industrial culture. As one of the most contradictory and dramatic characters in the play, Amanda is also one of the unique images of women in American drama. As Tennessee said when introducing the characters in the play, “the portrayal of Amanda is by no means derived from a specific archetype”.

Oliver Hart and the Rise of Baptist America

Oliver Hart was arguably the most important evangelical leader of the pre-Revolutionary South. For thirty years the pastor of the Charleston Baptist Church, Hart’s energetic ministry breathed new life into that congregation and the struggling Baptist cause in the region. As the founder of the Charleston Baptist Association, Hart did more than any single person to lay the foundations for the institutional life of the Baptist South, while also working extensively with evangelicals of all denominations to spread the revivalism of the Great Awakening across the lower South. One reason for Hart’s extensive influence is the uneasy compromise he made with white Southern culture, most apparent in his willingness to sanctify rather than challenge the institution of slavery, as his more radical evangelical predecessors had done. While this capitulation gained Hart and his fellow Baptists access to Southern culture, it would also sow the seeds of disunion in the larger American denomination Hart worked so hard to construct. Oliver Hart and the Rise of Baptist America is the first modern biography of Oliver Hart, at the same time interweaving the story of the remarkable transformation of America’s Baptists across the long eighteenth century. It provides perhaps the most complete narrative of the early development of one of America’s largest, most influential, and most understudied religious groups.

Southern Realism

Friday Night Lights (NBC, 2006–2011) and Rectify (SundanceTV, 2013–2016) exemplified containing Christianity’s middlebrow appeal through displacement onto the cultural specificity of a realistically portrayed American South within a quality television drama. These two shows represent Christianity as both the dominant faith of their characters and as a characteristic part of Southern culture. Creatives used the milieu of an “authentic” American South to shift religion away from themselves and their quality-audience expectations, maintaining acceptability within the dominant non-Christian culture of television production. This displacement safely contained religion within the creatives’ production culture, allowing them to acknowledge Christianity’s religious content, but only within the peculiar particularity of the American South.