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The Working Class in American History
The Gospel of the Working Class: Labor's Southern Prophets in New Deal America
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 People's 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 America's 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.
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 People's 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 America's 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.
248 pages, Hardcover
First published June 28, 2011
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
January 25, 2023
There is a good case to be made here for this work being one of the best works on southern working-class history to ever be written, and it is sure is the best study I've ever come across. Gellman and Roll excellently dissect the intersections of race, religion, race, and class in their biography of the radical reverends Owen Whitfield and Claude C. Williams. Both men, titans of their time and magnificent activists in their own right, have long been ignored by both historians of the Left and historians of labour and the Civil Rights Movement more generally, but have finally gotten a due worthy of their contributions. The authors pull on an immense amount of primary source material housed in various archives—indeed my only complaint is that they were able to access them whilst I can't read them myself. The writings and pamphlets of both Whitfield and Williams could perhaps go a long way in the modern South, where the very same far-right religious fanaticism the two fought against their whole lives still rules.
May 29, 2022
A fascinating look at the labor and civil rights movements in the Great Depression and World War II era. It's a sobering reminder of a world that could have been, a window onto a past where labor and civil rights activists worked together to effect real change in the lives of working class families, Black and White. Unfortunately, anticommunist paranoia after World War II slammed that window shut, but Gellman and Roll's work reminds us that a better way is possible than the one we currently travel.
August 9, 2011
At my job, we explain the cycle of poverty in the following way: When oppression against certain communities is high, opportunities for those communities are low, and ambition within those communities drops. At my job, we are interested in not just breaking this cycle, but creating 1000 community leaders by 2020 to help us reverse it. So, we ask our applicants, what kind of leader do you see yourself as? A civic leader, engaged in ending oppression at the local, state, federal or global level? A business leader working on creating new opportunities for the economic betterment of your own neighborhood? Or a service leader who works on encouraging under-served community members to feed their ambitions for a better life?
The two subjects in Gospel of the Working Class, Owen Whitfield and Claude Williams, spent a good deal of their lives wrestling with that exact question. Both preachers, during the 1930s through the 1950s, they sought to end poverty in the south through ministry, teaching, direct action, unionizing workers, creating cooperatives and working with--and often against--politicians to help working folk realize that the Kingdom of God was here on earth, if only they would fight for their place in the sun.
What they both discovered along the way is that it is incredibly difficult to be a civic, business, and service leader all at the same time. They both found themselves in the middle of internecine wars inside the Church and inside the Left. They both made incredible sacrifices in their private lives to teach the theories of "applied religion," the idea that the brotherhood of man was more important than waiting for a better life in Heaven. They won and lost followers, they won and lost national standing, they won and lost homes, farms, churches, and children in their battle for a better Southern way of life. And yet, they always held to their faith in God and in the people they served.
By telling the stories of Whitfield and Williams, Gellman and Roll really do justice to Tim Tyson's case for biography: "The thing that makes any biography worth writing or worth reading...is the way that a single human life can speak to the transformation of the world and to our battle against determinism and disdain." It might be easy to dismiss these preachers as a black man and a white man who tried but failed to unite working class southerners in a quest for economic and political equality. But using Tyson's words, and thinking about the different kinds of leadership they took on - the lives they touched throughout their ministries cannot be overlooked or forgotten.
The thread of the narrative that I found most interesting was that they both founded or ran small schools that were predicated on changing lives of working people. Now, this may be because it's what I'm currently doing for a living, helping to train under-served communities in new technologies and leadership to help make the world a better place. But I thought it was fascinating that there were all these tiny little schools set up during the Great Depression by right-on Lefties working to create union leaders and service leaders through ministry, through Marxist economic thought, through folk music. They were changing not only lives but also changing the way education can work in different settings: who is it for and why.
Another part of the book I found incredibly compelling was the relationship Whitfield had with the Japanese. He was taken in by a small group working to convince African Americans that the Japanese had their best interests at heart. It turned out to be some what of a scam. When Pearl Harbor was attacked, Whitfield used some of the most racist and hateful language to discuss what the Japanese had wrought in Hawaii. I really thought this would have been an interesting opening to talking about constructions of other races, but I realize that wasn't the main focus of Gellman and Roll's story.
I do have a small issue with the book. Gellman and Roll claim that these life stories raise "new questions about the assumptions scholars have made about race, respectability, politics and even gender in the Depression and World War II era." (2) I'm not convinced about the gender. The fact that these men had good women in their lives, partners in their lives' work and great women friends, does not question any assumptions about gender. The wives of the ministers did preach, but they were told to preach about "women's work" for the most part, told that their own work lay in reaching out to other women. To question assumptions about gender is to look at how people understood the roles of both men and women, to ask if these people did things that changed understandings or reinforced those understandings; or if what they did (how they performed gender) pointed out the cultural constructions of gender. The fact that women were a part of their lives is not a study of gender, it's just part of their narrative.
But overall, I definitely enjoyed learning about the lives of Whitfield and Williams. I found some (OK, most) of the fights between CP members, union members, and clergy members a wee-bit dry. But there's a whole lot of juicy stuff in there as well. It's an important look at civil rights leaders that came before the storied Civil Rights Movement. And it asks the question, one that is central to my work right now - can you be a leader of all kinds to all kinds of followers?
The two subjects in Gospel of the Working Class, Owen Whitfield and Claude Williams, spent a good deal of their lives wrestling with that exact question. Both preachers, during the 1930s through the 1950s, they sought to end poverty in the south through ministry, teaching, direct action, unionizing workers, creating cooperatives and working with--and often against--politicians to help working folk realize that the Kingdom of God was here on earth, if only they would fight for their place in the sun.
What they both discovered along the way is that it is incredibly difficult to be a civic, business, and service leader all at the same time. They both found themselves in the middle of internecine wars inside the Church and inside the Left. They both made incredible sacrifices in their private lives to teach the theories of "applied religion," the idea that the brotherhood of man was more important than waiting for a better life in Heaven. They won and lost followers, they won and lost national standing, they won and lost homes, farms, churches, and children in their battle for a better Southern way of life. And yet, they always held to their faith in God and in the people they served.
By telling the stories of Whitfield and Williams, Gellman and Roll really do justice to Tim Tyson's case for biography: "The thing that makes any biography worth writing or worth reading...is the way that a single human life can speak to the transformation of the world and to our battle against determinism and disdain." It might be easy to dismiss these preachers as a black man and a white man who tried but failed to unite working class southerners in a quest for economic and political equality. But using Tyson's words, and thinking about the different kinds of leadership they took on - the lives they touched throughout their ministries cannot be overlooked or forgotten.
The thread of the narrative that I found most interesting was that they both founded or ran small schools that were predicated on changing lives of working people. Now, this may be because it's what I'm currently doing for a living, helping to train under-served communities in new technologies and leadership to help make the world a better place. But I thought it was fascinating that there were all these tiny little schools set up during the Great Depression by right-on Lefties working to create union leaders and service leaders through ministry, through Marxist economic thought, through folk music. They were changing not only lives but also changing the way education can work in different settings: who is it for and why.
Another part of the book I found incredibly compelling was the relationship Whitfield had with the Japanese. He was taken in by a small group working to convince African Americans that the Japanese had their best interests at heart. It turned out to be some what of a scam. When Pearl Harbor was attacked, Whitfield used some of the most racist and hateful language to discuss what the Japanese had wrought in Hawaii. I really thought this would have been an interesting opening to talking about constructions of other races, but I realize that wasn't the main focus of Gellman and Roll's story.
I do have a small issue with the book. Gellman and Roll claim that these life stories raise "new questions about the assumptions scholars have made about race, respectability, politics and even gender in the Depression and World War II era." (2) I'm not convinced about the gender. The fact that these men had good women in their lives, partners in their lives' work and great women friends, does not question any assumptions about gender. The wives of the ministers did preach, but they were told to preach about "women's work" for the most part, told that their own work lay in reaching out to other women. To question assumptions about gender is to look at how people understood the roles of both men and women, to ask if these people did things that changed understandings or reinforced those understandings; or if what they did (how they performed gender) pointed out the cultural constructions of gender. The fact that women were a part of their lives is not a study of gender, it's just part of their narrative.
But overall, I definitely enjoyed learning about the lives of Whitfield and Williams. I found some (OK, most) of the fights between CP members, union members, and clergy members a wee-bit dry. But there's a whole lot of juicy stuff in there as well. It's an important look at civil rights leaders that came before the storied Civil Rights Movement. And it asks the question, one that is central to my work right now - can you be a leader of all kinds to all kinds of followers?
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews