Liberal Arts Faculty Books
Title
Spirit of Rebellion: Labor and Religion in the New Cotton South
Files
Description
Crossing the color line with revivalism among working-class Southerners In Spirit of Rebellion, Jarod Roll documents an alternative tradition of American protest by linking working-class political movements to grassroots religious revivals. He reveals how ordinary rural citizens in the South used available resources and their shared faith to defend their agrarian livelihoods amid the political and economic upheaval of the first half of the twentieth century. On the frontier of the New Cotton South in Missouri's Bootheel, the relationships between black and white farmers were complicated by racial tensions and bitter competition. Despite these divisions, workers found common ground as dissidents fighting for economic security, decent housing, and basic health, ultimately drawing on the democratic potential of evangelical religion to wage working-class revolts against commodity agriculture and the political forces that buoyed it. Roll convincingly shows how the moral clarity and spiritual vigor these working people found in Pentecostal revivals gave them the courage and fortitude to develop an expansive agenda of workers' rights by tapping into existing organizations such as the Socialist Party, the Universal Negro Improvement Association, the NAACP, and the interracial Southern Tenant Farmers' Union.
ISBN
9780252035197
Publication Date
1-1-2010
Relational Format
book
Department
Arch Dalrymple III Department of History
Publisher
University of Illinois Press
Disciplines
American Studies | Labor History | United States History
Recommended Citation
Roll, Jarod, "Spirit of Rebellion: Labor and Religion in the New Cotton South" (2010). Liberal Arts Faculty Books. 125.
https://egrove.olemiss.edu/libarts_book/125