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  • The Gospel of the Working Class: Labor’s Southern Prophets in New Deal America
  • Tom Mitchell
Erik S. Gellman and Jarod Roll, The Gospel of the Working Class: Labor’s Southern Prophets in New Deal America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press 2011)

SouthernProphets begins with an account of the early lives, and the social, intellectual, and religious formation of its two protagonists, framed in a sweeping narrative of the post-bellum Southern United States. The emergence and contours of Jim Crow society – caste, distress, exploitation, transience, and poverty – that kept men like Whitfield and Williams apart is built up through these separate biographical narratives. Both were born into poverty; both eventually found a religious calling. Mississippi born, Owen Whitfield became a Black sharecropper and itinerant Baptist preacher. Early on, Whitfield had been a Garveyite distrustful of whites. Whitfield’s Depression-era introduction to the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union convinced him that racial division was a bar to economic and social justice.

Claude Williams, a white native of Tennessee, began life as a conventional Cumberland Presbyterian. He was taught to view Blacks with disdain. After military service during World War I (he did no fighting), he became an innovative and unorthodox Presby terian minister. A turn to social Christianity began with Harry Fosdick’s Modern Use of the Bible that led Williams away from the white supremacist milieu in which he had been raised. At a summer institute at Vanderbilt University under Alva Taylor in 1929, Williams began the cultivation of an idiom of radical social Christianity. He developed an association with Lucien Koch and others at Commonwealth College located at Mena, Arkansas. He began studying Marx and sought out collaborations with organized labour and the Arkansas Socialist Party. All of this, [End Page 312] almost predictably, culminated in his departure from the Presbyterian Church in the spring of 1934. Relocated to Little Rock, Arkansas, Williams created The New Era School of Social Action and Prophetic Religion in 1935 “to train prospective leaders in social and economic thought and action.” (65) Funds for the project came from Williams’ network of Popular Front associates.

Williams became deeply involved with the fledgling Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union (stfu), founded in 1934. Here the biographies of Whitfield and Williams intersect. E. B. McKinny, a Black Baptist preacher and tenant farmer organizer who was associated with Williams in the stfu, brought Williams and Whitfield together. Williams reordered Whitfield’s religiosity: he embraced Williams’ radical social Christianity; he stopped “whoopin and hollerin at God and started preaching the gospel of … economic and spiritual renewal through collective action.” (74) An account of the declining arc of the lives of Whitfield and Williams as activists in the Williams’ inspired Peoples’ Institute of Applied Religion, the declension of radicalism with the advent of the Cold War, and the resurgence of the civil rights movement in the 1960s completes the text.

The title of Southern Prophets suggests a broad focus on southern radicals during the New Deal Era, but, while the cast of characters here is diverse – Lucien Koch, Alva Taylor, Myles Horton, Norman Thomas, Howard Kester, Harry Ward, James Dombrowski, Lee Hays, among others, all make appearances – Gellman and Roll place Claude Williams and Owen Whitfield centre stage with others only in supporting roles. They have built on the work of Cedric Belfrage, Anthony Dunbar, Donald Grubbs, Robert Craig and others by extending the foundation of their study through extensive research in a wide range of manuscript collections (including fbi records), oral histories, and personal interviews.

The central premise of this meticulously researched and compelling book is that a joint biographical account of the interrelated lives of Whitfield and Williams would illuminate “an unstable world of social protest that entangles and blurs neat conventional historical categories: white, black, rural, urban, secular, religious, North, South.” (4) The story of Williams and Whitfield – Joyce Williams and Zella Whitfield suffered and sacrificed with their families for the work of their husbands – should, they assert, challenge historians “to rethink the dominant narratives of American history in the 1930s and 1940s.” (4) In particular, Gellman and Roll challenge historians of the “southern working class to take seriously the dynamic power...

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