Mississippi Praying

Paul Harvey

This is just a quick post to recommend this new book by Carolyn Dupont: Mississippi Praying: Southern White Evangelicals and the Civil Rights Movement, 1945-1975, just out with NYU Press. I had the pleasure of reading this in manuscript form a few years ago, and since then the author has gone through a lot of revisions to make an excellent manuscript even better!

This is, for my money, right at the top of the heap for works dealing with southern white churches and the civil rights movement (another one is Stephen Haynes’s new book The Last Segregated Hour, which I have just reviewed at length in the new Reviews in American History and previously blogged about here; it focuses specifically on the story of kneel-ins in Memphis, and their aftermath in one particular Presbyterian Church there).

Here’s a bit about the work from the NYU Press website; I’ll post about the book more extensively in the near future when I’m not filling out departmental “assessment reports” and performing other critical and vital tasks like that. But suffice to say for here, this is a crisply written, strongly argued book that takes a decided stand on an issue (the degree of support that white southern churches gave to segregationism) that has been the subject of a most interesting and productive recent scholarly dispute.

A Group Blog on American Religious History and Culture