Bounds of Their Habitation

by Paul Harvey

  On conceptions of Asians and Asian religions, see Stephen Prothero, The White Buddhist: The Asian Odyssey of Henry Steel Olcott (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996); and Thomas Tweed, The American Encounter with Buddhism (1844–1912): Victorian Culture and the Limits of Dissent (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992). Jennifer Snow’s Protestant Missionaries, Asian Immigrants, and Ideologies of Race in America, 1850–1924 (New York: Routledge, 2012), points out the important but ultimately ineffective voice of missionaries against the rise of anti-Asian racism during the late nineteenth century. Other key works include Michihiro Ama, Immigrants to the Pure Land: The Modernization, Acculturation, and Globalization of Shin Buddhism, 1898–1941 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2011); Eiichiro Azuma, Between Two Empires: Race, History, and Transnationalism in Japanese America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Anne M Blankenship, Christianity, Social Justice, and the Japanese American Incarceration during World War II (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016); Wakoh Shannon Hickey, “Two Buddhisms, Three Buddhisms, and Racism,” In Buddhism Beyond Borders: New Perspectives on Buddhism in the United States, edited by Scott A. Mitchell and Natalie E. F. Quli (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), 35–56; Michael K Masatsugu, “Beyond This World of Transiency and Impermanence”: Japanese Americans, Dharma Bums, and the Making of American Buddhism during the Early Cold War Years,” Pacific Historical Review 77 (2008): 432–451; Richard H Seager, The World’s Parliament of Religions: The East/West Encounter, Chicago, 1893 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009); Wesley Woo, “Chinese Protestants in the San Francisco Bay Area,” In Entry Denied: Exclusion and the Chinese Community in America, 1882–1943, edited by Sucheng Chan (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991), 213–245; and David K. Yoo, Contentious Spirits: Religion in Korean American History, 1903–1945 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010).

  The racialization of the conception of immigrants and their lives becomes clear in Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), and Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876–1917 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001). See also Peter Schrag, Not Fit for Our Society: Immigration and Nativism in America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).

  Important work on Native American religions for this period include Omer Call Stewart, Peyote Religion: A History (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987); Tisa Wenger, We Have a Religion: The Pueblo Indian Dance Controversy and American Religious Freedom (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009); and Angela Tarango, Choosing the Jesus Way: American Indian Pentecostals and the Fight for the Indigenous Principle (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2014).

  CHAPTER 6

  The single most important compilation of primary sources for specifically religious speeches and sermons on the civil rights movement may be found in the magnificent two-volume collection of Davis Houck and David Dixon, eds., Rhetoric, Religion, and the Civil Rights Movement (Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press, Vol. I, 2007; Vol. II, 2014). The literature on religion and the civil rights movement is vast. One great place to start in terms of a strongly argued and highly opinionated work is David Chappell, A Stone of Hope: Religion and the Death of Jim Crow (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). For studies of the impact of civil rights on two important denominations, see Joel L. Alvis, Religion and Race: Southern Presbyterians, 1946–1983 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993), and Gardiner H. Shattuck, Episcopalians and Race: Civil War to Civil Rights (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1994). Charles Marsh, God’s Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), remains an outstanding theological study of the ideas both of the civil rights movement as well as figures from the radical segregationist right. An essential theological text, written by one of Martin Luther King’s most important influences, is Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited (Boston: Beacon Press, 1948). On Fannie Lou Hamer, there are several good biographies and analyses, but the most effective analysis of the effect of her rhetoric is Meagan Parker Brooks, A Voice that Could Stir An Army: Fannie Lou Hamer and the Rhetoric of the Freedom Movement (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2014), and an accompanying volume of essays titled The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer: To Tell It Like It Is (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2011). Clayborne Carson has headed the team that is annotating and publishing the papers of Martin Luther King; see Carson et al., eds., The Papers of Martin Luther King, 4 vols and continuing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992–). A useful collection of King’s writings and speeches may be found in James Melvin Washington, ed., A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Harper & Row, 1994). James Cone and Gayraud Wilmore, eds., Black Theology: A Documentary History (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, Vol. I 1979; Vol. II 1993), remains the central primary source anthology for the subject and shows how much growth and change happened as a result of the entrance of black female theologians into a conversation formerly dominated by men. On the music of the movement, particularly the freedom songs, see Guy Carawan and Candie Carawan, We Shall Overcome: Songs of the Southern Freedom Movement (New York: Oak Press, 1963); Guy Carawan and Candie Carawan, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Songs of the Freedom Movement (New York: Oak Press, 1968); and Pat Watters, Down to Now: Reflections on the Southern Civil Rights Movement (New York Pantheon, 1971). The classic CD compilation of freedom songs is Voices of the Civil Rights Movement: Black American Freedom Songs, 1960–1966 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian institution Folkways Recording, 1980). Women in this era receive particular attention in Vicki Crawford, et al., eds., Women in the Civil Rights Movement: Trailblazers and Torchbearers, 1941–1965 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), and Charles Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). Two excellent primary source compilations are Clayborne Carson, et al., eds., The Eyes on the Prize Civil Rights Reader: Documents, Speeches, and Firsthand Accounts from the Black Freedom Struggle (New York: Penguin, repr. Ed., 2001); and David Howard-Pitney, ed., Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and the Civil Rights Struggle of the 1950s and 1960s: A Brief History With Documents (Boston: Bedford St. Martin’s, 2004). The movement produced some excellent memoir literature, including these three notable titles: James Farmer, Lay Bare the Heart (New York: Arbor House, 1985); John Lewis, Walking With the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement (New York: Mariner Books, 1999); and Andrew Young, An Easy Burden: The Civil Rights Movement and the Transformation of America (rev. ed. Waco: Baylor University Press, 2008).

  Aldon D. Morris, The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change (New York: Free Press, 1984), is a still-vital study of black communities in the 1950s. For examinations of white southern religious reactions to the civil rights movement, see Jane Dailey, “Sex, Segregation, and the Sacred After Brown,” Journal of American History 91 (June 2014): 119–144, and Carolyn Dupont, Mississippi Praying: White Southern Evangelicals and the Civil Rights Movement, 1945–1975 (New York: New York University Press, 2014). Mark Newman, Divine Agitators: The Delta Ministry and Civil Rights in Mississippi, 1945–1995 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004), is a solid study of the ministry that came out of Freedom Summer. On Methodist women’s civil rights activism, see Alice G. Knotts, Fellowship of Love: Methodist Women Changing American Racial Attitudes, 1920–1968 (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996). An excellent compilation of primary documents related to the Montgomery Bus Boycott, demonstrating memorably how key churchwomen were in organizing it, is Stewart Burns, ed., Daybreak of Freedom: The Montgomery Bus Boycott (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). Stephen Haynes, The Memphis Kneel-Ins and the Campaign for Southern Church Desegregation (New York: Oxford Univer
sity Press, 2012), is a memorable account of the church pray-ins and kneel-ins in Memphis and their long range effect on the Presbyterian churches (and Rhodes College) there.

  Other important studies of religion and the movement include the following: Jay MacLeod, ed., Minds Stayed on Freedom: The Civil Rights Struggle in the Rural South, An Oral History (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1991); Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “The Long History of the Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” Journal of American History 91 (March 2005): 1233–1263; Quinton Dixie and Peter Eisenstadt, Visions of a Better World: Howard Thurman’s Pilgrimage to India and the Origins of African American Nonviolence (Boston: Beacon Press, 2011); James F. Findlay, Church People in the Struggle: The National Council of Churches and the Black Freedom Movement, 1950–1970 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); and Jonathan Rieder, The Word of the Lord is Upon Me: The Righteous Performance of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).

  Important works on Cesar Chavez and la causa include Jacqueline Levy, Cesar Chavez: Autobiography of La Causa (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), and Susan Ferriss and Richard Sandoval, The Fight in the Fields: Cesar Chavez and the Farmworkers Movement (New York: Mariner Books, 1998). Both are largely admiring accounts of the rise of the United Farm Workers. More recently, Miriam Pawel, The Union of Their Dreams: Power, Hope and Struggle in Cesar Chavez’s Farmworker Movement (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010), and The Crusades of Cesar Chavez (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2015), both provide empathetic, but also critical and at times myth-busting, accounts emphasizing Chavez’s foibles and late-life attraction to the Esalen movement and difficulties maintaining relations with those he had worked with for so long. One of those was longtime activist Dolores Huerta, who was as instrumental to the movement as was Chavez; there is no standard biography of her, but a good primary source compilation is Mario Garcia, ed., A Dolores Huerta Reader (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008). For broader studies of Latino activism and its relationship to religion, see Gastón Espinosa et al., eds., Latino Religions and Civic Activism in the United States (Oxford, 2005); and Gaston Espinosa, Mexican American Religions: Spirituality, Activism, and Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008).

  CHAPTER 7 AND EPILOGUE

  Michael Emerson and Christian Smith, Divided by Faith: Evangelical Religion and the Problem of Race in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), is perhaps the single most discussed and debated text in contemporary studies of race, religion, and evangelicalism. The thesis presented by Smith and Emerson is explored and tested in J. Russell Hawkins and Philip Sinitiere, eds., Christians and the Color Line: Race and Religion after Divided by Faith (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). James Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Boston: Orbis Books, 2013), is a recent updating of key themes in black liberation theology. The impact of religion in the black power movement is detailed for one locale in Kerry Pimblott, Between the Bible and The Gun in Little Egypt: Black Power and Black Theology in Cairo, Illinois, 1969–74 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2016). On religion, African Americans, and popular culture, see Kathryn Lofton, Oprah: The Gospel of an Icon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009).

  Important contemporary works on Latinos and Catholicism include, Peter Casarella, ed., The Hispanic Presence in the American Catholic Church (New York: Crossroad Publishers, 1998); Allan Figueroa Deck, Frontiers of Hispanic Theology in the U.S (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1992); Ada Maria Isasi-Díaz and Yolanda Tarango, Hispanic Women: Prophetic Voice in the Church (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992); Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz, Mujerista Theology: A Theology for the Twenty-First Century (Boston: Orbis Books, 1996); and Isidro Lucas, The Browning of America: The Hispanic Revolution in the American Church (Chicago: Fides/Claretian, 1981). A critical and groundbreaking collection of primary documents may be found in Antonio Stevens–Arroyo, ed., Prophets Denied Honor: An Anthology on the Hispano Church of the United States (New York: Orbis Books, 1997), and a good bibliography in Antonio Stevens-Arroyo, ed., Discovering Latino Religion: A Comprehensive Social Science Bibliography (New York: Bildner Center for Western Hemisphere Studies, 1995). A good general history is Moises Sandoval, On the Move: A History of the Hispanic Church in the United States (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1990).

  Works on contemporary immigration and religion are exploding. For the immigration statistics cited in the epilogue, see “Modern Immigration Wave Brings 59 Million to U.S., Driving Population Growth and Change Through 1965,” at http://www.pewhispanic.org/2015/09/28/modern-immigration-wave-brings-59-million-to-u-s-driving-population-growth-and-change-through-2065. On immigration and religion, see, for example, Ihsan Bagby, The American Mosque 2011: Activities, Administration, and Vitality of the American Mosque (Islamic Society of North America, 2012); Wendy Cadge and Elaine Howard Ecklund, “Immigration and Religion,” Annual Review of Sociology 33 (2003): 359–79; Carolyn Chen, Getting Saved in America: Taiwanese Immigration and Religious Experience (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014); Korrie L. Edwards, The Elusive Dream: The Power of Race in Interracial Churches (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); Prema Kurien, A Place at the Multicultural Table: The Development of an American Hinduism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007); Peggy Levitt, God Needs No Passport: Immigrants and the Changing American Religious Landscape (New York: New Press, 2007); Gerardo Marti, A Mosaic of Believers: Diversity and Innovation in a Multiethnic Church (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005); Pyong Gap Min and Sou Hyun Jang, “The Diversity of Asian Immigrants’ Participation in Religious Institutions in the United States,” Sociology of Religion 76 (2015): 253–74; and Robert Wuthnow, Boundless Faith: The Global Outreach of American Churches (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). Two excellent compilations of essays on religion, immigration, and pluralism in contemporary America are Stephen Prothero, ed., A Nation of Religions: The Politics of Pluralism in Multireligious America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), and Karen I. Leonard, et al., eds., Immigrant Faiths: Transforming Religious Life in America (New York: AltaMira Press, 2005). See also Diana Eck, A New Religious America: How a ‘Christian Country’ Has become the World’s Most Religiously Diverse Nation (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001); Yvonne Haddad et al., eds., Religion and Immigration: Christian, Jewish, and Muslim Experiences in the United States (Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira, 2003); and Bruce B. Lawrence, New Faiths, Old Fears: Muslims and Other Asian Immigrants in American Religious Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). Other outstanding recent works in Asian American religion include Khyati Joshi and Jigna Desai, Asian Americans in Dixie: Race and Migration in the South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013); Khyati Joshi, New Roots in America’s Sacred Ground: Religion, Race, and Ethnicity in Indian America (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2006); and David Yoo, ed., New Spiritual Homes: Religion and Asian Americans (Honolulu: University of Hawai’I Press, 1999).

  Vine Deloria, God is Red: A Native View of Religion (Rev. ed., Golden, CO: Fulcrum Press, 1994), is the seminal text from a contemporary Native American scholar of religion. Other important works on Native Americans and religion in contemporary America include James Treat, ed., Native and Christian: Indigenous Voices on Religious Identity in the United States and Canada (New York: Routledge, 1996); Clara Sue Kidwell, A Native American Theology (Boston: Orbis Books, 2001); George Tinker, Spirit and Resistance: Political Theology and American Indian Liberation (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2004); and Andrea Smith, Native Americans and the Christian Right: The Gendered Politics of Unlikely Alliances (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).

  Index

  A.M.E. Church Review, 61

  abolitionists, 6, 62, 66–70, 75, 77–78, 82–85, 116, 148, 211–12

  Adams, Hannah, 73, 85–87

  Adams, John, 85

  Africa: civil rights movement’s impact in, 182; colonization of African Americans to, 59, 63
, 78, 105–6; enslaved people from, 5–6, 26, 210; immigration from, 205, 210; missions to, 59; Pentecostalism in, 146; white perceptions of, 26–28

  African Americans: and black churches, 43, 45, 58–61; and Christianity, 33, 35–36, 57–63, 65, 79–82; and civil rights movement, 159–75; and the Great Awakening, 35–36, 41; and Islam, 12, 174–75, 210–11; racialization of, 28–33; during Reconstruction, 100–110; and slave rebellion, 33–35, 44, 63, 74–75, 77, 103, 207; and slavery, 28, 43–45, 79–82. See also African Methodist Episcopal Church; race; slavery

  African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME), 43, 45, 58–61, 80, 103, 105, 207

  African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church (AMEZ), 58, 61

  Ahimsa, 163

  Alabama, 50, 165, 172, 174

  Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights (ACMHR), 165

  Algonquian (language), 23

  Allen, Richard, 43, 45, 58, 60, 61, 80

  An Alphabetical Compendium of the Various Sects Which Have Appeared from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Present Day (1784), 85

  Altman, Mike, 87

  Amat y Brusi, Thaddeus, 122, 125

  American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM), 52, 88

  American Christian Student Movement, 163

  American Colonization Society (ACS), 59, 63, 105

  American Home Missionary Society, 113

  American Indian Movement (AIM), 152, 197