Author: Erik S. Gellman File Type: pdf In this exceptional dual biography and cultural history, Erik S. Gellman and Jarod Roll trace the influence of two southern activist preachers, one black and one white, who used their ministry to organize the working class in the 1930s and 1940s across lines of gender, race, and geography. Owen Whitfield and Claude Williams, along with their wives Zella Whitfield and Joyce Williams, drew on their bedrock religious beliefs to stir ordinary men and women to demand social and economic justice in the eras of the Great Depression, New Deal, and Second World War. Williams and Whitfield preached a working-class gospel rooted in the American creed that hard, productive work entitled people to a decent standard of living. Gellman and Roll detail how the two preachers galvanized thousands of farm and industrial workers for the Southern Tenant Farmers Union and the Congress of Industrial Organizations. They also link the activism of the 1930s and 1940s to that of the 1960s and emphasize the central role of the ministers wives, with whom they established the Peoples Institute for Applied Religion. This detailed narrative illuminates a cast of characters who became the two couples closest allies in coordinating a complex network of activists that transcended Jim Crow racial divisions, blurring conventional categories and boundaries to help black and white workers make better lives. In chronicling the shifting contexts of the actions of Whitfield and Williams, The Gospel of the Working Class situates Christian theology within the struggles of some of Americas most downtrodden workers, transforming the dominant narratives of the era and offering a fresh view of the promise and instability of religion and civil rights unionism. **Review In this fast-paced, highly readable book, Erik Gellman and Jarod Roll tell the fascinating, interwoven stories of two southern preacherslabor activists. . . . Their crisply written, carefully researched volume raises intriguing questions for the fields of labor history, southern religion, and the twentieth-century South. . . . Gellman and Roll skillfully avoid the all-too-familiar trap of reducing religion to mere function or window-dressing.--West Virginia History A rare and extraordinary view of how the word of God has been used to champion profane as well as spiritual causes. . . . Gellman and Roll ... offer the reader a convincing, well researched and detailed account of what many who study religion and working-class life feel strongly is an unacknowledged, uplifting and muscular nexus of class and faith.--Working-Class Notes Essential, even urgent, reading for scholars of modern United States history. . . . This is a remarkable book.--Arkansas Historical Quarterly Those seeking to understand the Deltas place in the nation need to read this book.--Arkansas Review * * Grassroots labor movements, illustrated by the careers of Claude and Joyce Williams and Owen and Zella Whitfield ... are crucial to understanding southern history. Recommended.--*Choice The subfields of religious and labor history in the United States rarely intersect. Thanks to Erik S. Gellman and Jarod Roll, help is on the way. . . . The many ways this slim volume challenges boundaries are what make it so compelling. . . . The book not only explores overlooked combinations, such as interracial cooperation, progressive religion in the South, and the confluence of union and religious activism, but also complicates binaries that too often dominate historical analysis, including sacred and secular, black and white, rural and urban, and North and South. It is hard to imagine anyone who would not find much to learn from this story, and from the way that Gellman and Roll have told it.--American Historical Review* About the Author Erik S. Gellman is an assistant professor of history at Roosevelt University in Chicago. He is the author of Death Blow to Jim Crow The National Negro Congress and Militant Civil Rights. Jarod Roll teaches American history at the University of Sussex, England, where he directs the Marcus Cunliffe Centre for the Study of the American South. He is the author of the award-winning Spirit of Rebellion Labor and Religion in the New Cotton South.

Author: George Fischer File Type: pdf span orphans 2 widows 2Did a Western-type free society have a chance in Russia? How did pre-Communist Russia and its liberals differ from the West? And how does liberalism, as the non-revolutionary opposition in autocratic Russia, compare to the present-day moderates in the new nations of Asia and Africa? What role is played by the intelligentsia, and particularly by the lower intelligentsia? In general, what light does Russian liberalism throw on the evolution of the West, of underdeveloped societies, of Russia yesterday and Russia today? These are the questions explored byspanspan orphans 2 widows 2George Fischerspanspan orphans 2 widows 2through an analysis of a decisive period and a neglected aspect of Russias past.span