Religion, Segregation, and Voting Rights: Unforgetting the Legacies of Bishops George Foster Pierce and Lucius Henry Holsey in Hancock County, Georgia, USA

In this essay, I explore the history and public memory of two important bishops in the Methodist churches in Georgia. Through an examination of the lives of my ancestor, Bishop George Foster Pierce, and his Black contemporary, Bishop Lucius Holsey, I seek to illustrate how the forces of settler colonialism, White supremacy, and emergent American capitalism converged with religious paternalism to shape their material lives and moral perspectives. Through family documents, letters, sermons, memorials, newspaper articles, and in-depth interviews, I situate their histories in the ongoing struggle for racial justice in Hancock County.

DESIGN AND CONSTRUCTION OF A LIVING SHORELINE PROJECT ALONG THE GULF COAST

The Hancock County Marsh Living Shoreline Project (project) was developed as an NRDA Early Restoration project. NRDA Early Restoration projects are intended to accelerate meaningful restoration of injured natural resources, and their services, resulting from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (the federal and co-implementing trustee) worked cooperatively to develop a project along the Hancock County, Mississippi, shoreline. This project would partially offset injuries by preserving and protecting existing marsh and providing for increased secondary productivity. Currently, it is the largest restoration project to be designed and constructed in Mississippi.

Conclusion

This concluding chapter examines how the rural-industrial working-class culture that emerged in Hancock County gradually disappeared in the late twentieth century. The ethic of making do traveled well from the farm to the factory town, but it began its decline in the late 1960s and 1970s as buying power increased and industrial workers focused more on vacations or socializing and less on making do. While many people in Hancock County still tend gardens, work on their houses, hunt, and fish, these activities no longer supplement family income the way they did in the 1950s. Moreover, the localism of their culture may have persisted in some ways to the present, but a localized system of negotiation that local manufacturers helped create disappeared along with many of those companies.

Rise of the Rural-Industrial Workers

This chapter looks at the rise of the rural-industrial workers. In the early 1900s, industrialists had believed that building new potteries and tinplate mills in rural Hancock County would result in more disciplined and loyal workforces, but they soon discovered that many of the conflicts they had had with craftsmen in urban centers followed them to the countryside. In the 1920s, owners in both industries began another round of technological innovation that reduced the power of skilled craftsmen and allowed managers to hire more unskilled laborers and semiskilled operatives, mostly from a large pool of rural migrants. In contrast to the skilled jiggermen and rollers, few of these rural migrants had any factory experience, but local employers were grateful for a steady stream of new workers that would accept low wages and harsh working conditions.