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The End of Days: African American Religion and Politics in the Age of Emancipation

Amazon.com Price:  $28.45 (as of 02/05/2019 06:24 PST- Details)

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Description

For 4 million slaves, emancipation was once a liberation and resurrection story of biblical proportion, both the clearest example of God’s intervention in human history and a sign of the end of days. On this book, Matthew Harper demonstrates how black southerners’ theology, in particular their understanding of the end times, influenced nearly each major economic and political decision they made within the aftermath of emancipation. From taking into account what demands to make in early Reconstruction to deciding whether or to not migrate west, African American Protestants consistently inserted themselves into biblical narratives as a way of seeing the importance of their very own struggle in God’s greater plan for humanity. Phrases like “jubilee,” “Zion,” “valley of dry bones,” and the “New Jerusalem” in black-authored political documents invoked different stories from the Bible to argue for different political strategies.

This study offers new ways of understanding the intersections between black political and spiritual considered this era. Until now, scholarship on black religion has not highlighted how pervasive or contested these beliefs were. This narrative, alternatively, tracks how these ideas governed particular political moments as African Americans sought to define and defend their freedom within the forty years following emancipation.

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