Segregation and violence pushed the black church toward collective self-help

Evidence

During the closing decades of the nineteenth century, the church became the most influential force for collective self-help and self-determination in the black community. Since the time of slavery, the church had provided an emotional and spiritual bulwark against individual demoralization and defeat. In the 1880s and 1890s—at a time of disfranchisement, segregation, and rampant racial violence—the church came increasingly to represent an ideological and social space for articulating group needs and implementing programs for their fulfillment. The black church constituted an arena in which poor, racially oppressed men and women assembled, freely voiced their opinions, and exhibited a sense of national community. — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 241

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Higginbotham’s later idea that the church is a veiled public space — Douglass’ ‘nation within a nation’ and debates over the Black public sphere; plausible link to black political thought histories on the church as counterpublic. — connects to: Racial self-help thrived amid disfranchisement, segregation, and pervasive violence. — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 422; Black self-help movements actively inculcated mainstream bourgeois values into the poor — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 454; Spiritual salvation and political racial advancement were fused in black church tradition — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 565 (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Black churches served as the organizing infrastructure for political resistance #expands (0.78) — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 1031
• Terror and poverty turned the Black community inward and stabilized its internal stratification #qualifies (0.74) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 975