Overview

To Know the Soul of a People is a history of religion and race in the agricultural South before the Civil Rights era. Jamil W. Drake chronicles a cadre of social scientists who studied the living conditions of black rural communities, revealing the abject poverty of the Jim Crow south. These university-affiliated social scientists documented shotgun houses, unsanitary privies and contaminated water, scaly hands, enlarged stomachs, and malnourished bodies. However, they also turned their attention to the spiritual possessions, chanted sermons, ecstatic singing, conjuration, dreams and visions, fortune-telling, taboos, and other religious cultures of these communities. These scholars aimed to illuminate the impoverished conditions of their subjects for philanthropic and governmental organizations, as well as the broader American public, in the first half of the 20th century, especially during the Great Depression. Religion was integral to their efforts to chart the long economic depression across the South.From 1924 to 1941, Charles Johnson, Guy Johnson, Allison Davis, Lewis Jones, and other social scientists framed the religious and cultural practices of the black communities as

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9780190082680

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Drake's well-written, important, timely examination of these pioneering studies is excellent.... Highly recommended. * CHOICE * Drake outlines with precision social scientific constructions of the category of 'folk religion' and demonstrates the significance of ideas about religion to liberal reformers' analyses of Black cultures, family, labor, and health. He shows how their analyses contributed to moralizing discourses about race and poverty and supported government policies aimed at 'modernizing' Black culture. The book provides new tools to understand the connections among religion, race, and class in African American history. * Judith Weisenfeld, Author of New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration * Jamil Drake follows Depression-era social scientists who spread across the rural U.S. South-particularly the Black rural South-in search of an explanation for its entrenched poverty and resistance to modernization. They found 'folk religion,' a category that challenged biological racism but entrenched a cultural critique of poor black southerners that remains with us. This is a timely, sobering, and important book * Alison Greene, Associate Professor of American Religious History, Emory University *

Drake outlines with precision social scientific constructions of the category of 'folk religion' and demonstrates the significance of ideas about religion to liberal reformers' analyses of Black cultures, family, labor, and health. He shows how their analyses contributed to moralizing discourses about race and poverty and supported government policies aimed at 'modernizing' Black culture. The book provides new tools to understand the connections among religion, race, and class in African American history. * Judith Weisenfeld, Author of New World A-Coming: Black Religion and Racial Identity during the Great Migration * Jamil Drake follows Depression-era social scientists who spread across the rural U.S. South-particularly the Black rural South-in search of an explanation for its entrenched poverty and resistance to modernization. They found 'folk religion,' a category that challenged biological racism but entrenched a cultural critique of poor black southerners that remains with us. This is a timely, sobering, and important book * Alison Greene, Associate Professor of American Religious History, Emory University *

Author Information

Jamil W. Drake is Assistant Professor of Religion at Florida State University. He teaches and researches in the area of American Religious History, with a specific concentration in African-American religion and politics. His work explores the relationship between race, science, and state governance.

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