Religion and the Rise of Jim Crow in New Orleans (review)

In the years before Hurricane Katrina laid bare the Gulf Coast, the image of New Orleans as a unique, multicultural, easy-going, and fun-loving city seemed secure. A melting pot of ethnicities, New Orleans was world-renowned for being, among other things, the birthplace of jazz, the North American home of Mardi Gras, and the host of the Bayou Classic football game in the famous Superdome. The general attitude of the city’s half million inhabitants and their tourist and conference-attending guests could best be summed up in the Cajun rally cry, “Laissez les bons temps rouler!” “Let the good times roll!”

But after Katrina, the world was confronted with a shockingly different image of the Crescent City. For months, the major news networks purveyed pictures of destroyed neighborhoods and reported on the appalling conditions endured by storm refugees in the newly infamous Superdome. More recent newsflashes have emanated from hastily established trailer parks where a predominantly non-white population awaits in squalor the long-promised relief assistance from slow-to-act government agencies. The prevailing conditions of the devastated city raise fundamental questions about the earlier image of New Orleans, particularly with reference to race.

Fortuitously, James B. Bennett’s book Religion and the Rise of Jim Crow in New Orleans appears as if in response to some of these questions. Bennett offers a view of the role religion played both to resist and eventually to further racial separation in New Orleans during the period following the Civil War. He counters the prevailing notion that the Jim Crow condition, or segregation, arose almost immediately after that war and was, in any case, firmly in place by the time Reconstruction ended in 1877. This dominant historical narrative, intimately linked to the Black Church in America, was developed in recognition of the numerous separated Black Baptist and African Methodist congregations that were formed when former slaves chose to leave the churches of their former masters. Although that story is significant, Bennett argues, it is not the only significant story.

Bennett focuses on the South’s two largest racially mixed denominations between the years of 1877 and 1920. He points out that within the Methodist Episcopal and the Roman Catholic churches in New Orleans, “fixed patterns of segregation did not emerge until the second decade of the twentieth century” (3). This is a story, then, about a neglected period of negotiation during which time black and white church leaders struggled against the segregationist ideology of the increasingly dominant white supremacists in favor of an integration ideal for New Orleans and, by implication, for the United States.

In addition to an introduction and an epilogue, the book consists of seven extremely well-documented chapters: four devoted to the Methodist Episcopal Church and three devoted to the Roman Catholic Church. The sequence of chapters in each case constitutes a pattern reminiscent of the rite of passage as configured by Belgian anthropologist Arnold van Gennep. For both the Methodists and the Catholics, Bennett begins with the fact of an interracial church. Then, the will to maintain integration is challenged by a variety of forces and personalities inside and outside of the particular religious community—resulting in a decline from the interracial ideal. Finally, the interracial institutional identity is “renegotiated” and a separated, black identity emerges within the confines of a white-dominated institution. Along the way, Bennett signals heroes in the lost cause to resist segregation and crucial moments in the history of integration’s demise.

Although his accounts of both churches are equally rich and nuanced, this review focuses mainly on the Methodist case. At its conception in 1784, the Methodist Episcopal Church affirmed the position of its leader, John Wesley, and opposed the institution of slavery. However, attitudes toward slavery in different regions of the country changed along with changes in the nation’s social and economic condition. Thus, like many Protestant denominations with substantial...