A focus on the religious and political creativity of the oppressed links the three books under review here. John M. Giggie's After Redemption analyzes African American political, religious, and cultural life in the Mississippi and Arkansas Delta from the 1870s through the 1910s, a period known as the nadir of black political life, while Mary Rolinson's Grassroots Garveyism studies the same region during the 1920s. Both do a meticulous job of excavating the worldviews of their black Southern subjects. Marie W. Dallam's Daddy Grace is a respectable piece of scholarship but is not in the same league as Giggie's and Rolinson's works. It is limited by Dallam's (false) claim to an insider perspective, which boils down to a refusal to subject Grace or his House of Prayer to critical analysis.

While historians routinely point to religious life as among the most important resources available to twentieth-century African Americans, left unexplored is precisely where and how that religious culture developed. John Giggie's After Redemption answers that question through a close look at the Mississippi and Arkansas Delta during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when white supremacy was arguably at its most vicious. During the very years when Delta blacks were stripped of the “daily hope of living without the threat of being scorned, mocked, raped, beaten, or killed” by white assailants, they created denominational schools, colleges, presses, leadership networks, and material culture that would profoundly influence twentieth-century black life (xvi).

Giggie starts with a beautiful chapter on train travel in the black religious imagination. Trains symbolized both freedom (to travel) and oppression (as whites consigned blacks of all classes to the dirtiest and most dangerous cars on the train). Giggie shows how the thrill of the ride as well as anxiety over potential white acts of brutality were incorporated into the form, structure, and imagery of sermons; into evangelists' accounts of their dreams or visions; and into early blues music, in which the terror of the ride led to prayers for salvation and hence to religious transformation.

The following chapter demonstrates Giggie's contention that the “black church” is too narrow a rubric to capture Delta religious life by detailing the shifting relations between black fraternal lodges and black churches. Delta lodges grew more prominent in the 1880s, as hardening Jim Crow restrictions pushed black men to seek alternative, black-controlled seats of organizational power. Lodges provided life insurance and business loans to their members. The fraternities memorized histories that glorified Africa's role in the development of civilization. At a time when public spaces for Delta blacks were shrinking, lodge members paraded in uniforms bedecked with symbols indicating their dedication to Masonic principles of human equality. By the mid-1880s, however, the lodges came under attack by black church officials, who felt that black men were favoring their lodges over their churches, and by black women, who were upset by their marginalization from what had become a key fixture of black organizational life. By the 1890s, a rapprochement was reached, as lodges agreed to ban Sunday parades and to support churches financially. By the early twentieth century, Giggie shows, Delta blacks had created forms of religious life that incorporated the rituals and material culture of the lodges in new and creative ways.

Giggie next shows how Delta blacks incorporated consumer goods and modern purchasing and advertising techniques into their religious lives. This shift was partially triggered by the pressing economic needs of black churches and their associated women's conventions, religious schools and colleges, associations, newspapers, and printing presses. Desperately in need of cash, the black religious press began advertising and sometimes selling consumer goods. Given that white Southern merchants made shopping a humiliating experience for black customers, Delta blacks often preferred to make purchases through their religious presses. They used carefully selected consumer goods to demonstrate a new ideal, that of the “Black Christian Home.” This was home as extension of the church, housing thrifty, pure, and temperate family members and decorated with uplifting images of black heroes.

The book concludes with the early twentieth-century emergence of the black Holiness movement, which Giggie explains as a reaction to a profound sense of political despair, on one hand, and a desire to purify a Delta religious culture that had come to seem overly invested in material signs of success, on the other. As the innovators of the Holiness movement saw it, the impressive late nineteenth-century “thickening” of the black Delta's denominational culture had brought with it abuses, such as ministers who used their religious authority to pitch consumer goods. Its leaders wondered if their community had displeased God by placing too much emphasis on the fancy uniforms and secret oaths of the lodges. They worried that the emphasis on propping up denominational district organizations might interfere with one's ability to experience sanctification.

Holiness leaders' vision of a church modeled on that of Jesus' day, in which any believer could potentially be sanctified and experience the apostolic powers of healing, testifying, and prophesying, struck a deep chord; it soon became the fastest growing black denomination in the nation. Yet Giggie shows that the Holiness movement's explosive growth was partially a result of its appropriation of trends it claimed to oppose. Its leaders worked with the National Baptist Publishing House to distribute Holiness literature. They adopted methods previously used within Baptist networks, such as women's Bible bands, to their own ends. They embraced many of the values that had characterized the Black Christian Home, such as purity, temperance, and simplicity in dress. While many Holiness leaders opposed lodges, some adopted their practices, from teaching a version of black history similar to that of the lodges to creating networks of sick and burial relief societies.

In a brief conclusion, Giggie shows that Delta blacks' religious world incubated many of the benchmarks of early twentieth-century black culture, from musical styles to groups such as the 1930s Southern Tenant Farmers Union, which built on Delta blacks' decades of organizing in churches and lodges. In sum, the image of a black culture crushed under the weight of post-Reconstruction white violence is profoundly misleading. Instead, those were years of organization and innovation within black religious life, whose repercussions enabled Delta blacks to minimize the evils of segregation and, ultimately, to help overturn it.

Mary G. Rolinson's Grassroots Garveyism shows that although scholars have largely studied Marcus Garvey's impact in the urban North, the overwhelming majority of his United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) divisions were in the rural South, with particular strength in the Arkansas and Mississippi Delta and in Southwest Georgia. Her “evidence-driven discussion” uses painstaking analysis of UNIA and governmental records, recently available census records, Garvey's Negro World newspaper, and interviews with Garveyites and their offspring to recover the “elusive intellectual history” of rural black Southerners while also presenting a brilliant, compelling, and completely convincing revision of the meaning of Garveyism as a whole (9, 13).

According to Rolinson, Garvey was popular because he articulated what Southern rural African Americans already believed—that blacks were best off organizing along lines of race rather than class, that racial purity (understood as black men's right to protect black women from harassment by white men who “won't leave our girls alone”) was essential, that self-defense was honorable, and that Africa should be redeemed from white colonization and made the seat of a new, black-directed capitalist nation that would fight for the rights of black people everywhere (54). Like Booker T. Washington, Garvey promoted self-sufficiency and the virtues of rural life, values that appealed to black tenant farmers. Garvey's promotion of a black-controlled Africa echoed the agenda of African Methodist Episcopal Bishop Henry McNeal Turner, who had pushed the idea of a black homeland in Africa in the widely distributed Christian Recorder. As Negro World letters show, the “redemption” of Africa under black control was particularly appealing to African American farmers who craved not Northern wages, but land of their own.

Rolinson next deals with what many scholars have described as Garvey's 1922 “conservative turn,” when he berated blacks for their laziness and publicly agreed to the color line. She argues that, if Garvey were to reach rural Southern blacks, he needed to make his rhetoric “palatable” to Southern whites while still speaking to the concerns of Southern blacks (62). This Garvey achieved from 1922 onward, when he emphasized separatism and race purity—goals embraced by many rural Southern blacks. In short, Garvey's seemingly accommodationist posture allowed the UNIA to thrive in the rural South.

Rolinson points out that the UNIA grew because of the dedication of hundreds of “unselfish and determined” organizers. She presents gripping portraits of the unsung organizers who worked to keep up with the “ravenous demand” for UNIA divisions in the rural South (95). Rolinson finds that circuit-riding ministers were among the UNIA's best organizers. She pinpoints the locations of all UNIA divisions in the rural South and finds that the Arkansas and Yazoo-Mississippi Delta was “the most purely pro-Garvey region in the U.S.” (98). She also finds strong concentrations of Garveyites in the Albany, Georgia, region, which, like the Mississippi Delta, would later be a hotbed of civil rights activism.

Pulling together a range of scattered evidence, Rolinson compiles a portrait of the average Southern Garveyite, who was a literate, married, middle-aged tenant farmer with children that he sent to school. Many Garveyite households included daughters who stayed at home rather than working for whites. The typical Garveyite lived in a majority-black area, which likely made the UNIA idea of a “separate black sphere” both realistic and attractive (112). These were communities where decades of struggle against white oppression had left many thoroughly disenchanted with interracial approaches and hence ready for a movement that favored race separatism, race pride, and self-defense as an immediate strategy, with the redemption of Africa as a Christianized, modernized continent free of white control as the long-range solution.

Rolinson also examines the UNIA's “politics of protection,” or its emphasis on black men's duty both to protect and to patrol the activities of black women. The context, Rolinson reminds us, was a world in which black women worked as maids or farmers, often under the supervision of white men, and, unfortunately, often vulnerable to harassment or rape by white men. Rural blacks were therefore far more likely to prefer the “strictly enforced social separatism” championed by Garvey. The UNIA called for black men to police interracial liaisons, and cast such policing as the maintenance of race purity; it thereby made the defense of black womanhood something that whites were forced to support as well. Rolinson does not deny the patriarchal nature of this strategy, but she points out that the insistence on race purity, black women for black men only, and black male patriarchal control echoed what white men claimed to want in regards to white womanhood.

Rolinson's concluding chapter shows that the 1930s National Association for the Advancement of Colored People benefited from the groundwork laid by the 1920s UNIA—this despite the hostile relations between the two organizations. The Southern Tenant Farmers Union benefited as well; its organizational structure drew from the UNIA and subsequently influenced the modern civil rights movement. Garvey's vision of race pride and armed self-defense remained strong in Southern rural areas well into the 1960s, when the Deacons for Defense demanded black leadership for black people. In sum, Rolinson argues, we have misunderstood Garveyism by casting it as a “back-to-Africa” scheme. Instead, “grassroots Garveyism” acted as a “seedbed” of black thought that bridged the 1920s and the 1960s. Scholars have ignored the “prevalence of grassroots Garveyism in almost every African-American cultural, political, and intellectual movement since the 1930s,” Rolinson points out (195). Thanks to Rolinson's wonderful book, we will do so no longer.

Marie W. Dallam's Daddy Grace offers a serviceable biography of Marcelino Manuel da Graca, the founder of the House of Prayer, a largely African American religious sect. Da Graca was born in Cape Verde in about 1881 and immigrated to the United States with his family in 1900. By 1922, he had changed his name to Charles M. Grace and opened his first House of Prayer in a racially mixed neighborhood of New Bedford, Massachusetts. Grace initially attracted followers through claiming powers of divine healing, though he soon admitted that he healed few of those who sought his help because of “flaws in their faith” (68). His House of Prayer offered a religious “product” that combined Holiness and pentecostal traditions (39). It also offered an extremely busy seasonal cycle of ceremonial celebrations, incorporating pageantry similar to that of Cape Verdean Catholicism.

Grace spent the 1920s and 1930s founding Houses of Prayer in black communities throughout the United States. By the 1940s, Grace had turned his attention to real estate. His properties were for his private use, though his followers, Dallam argues, “felt personal prestige” through their association with Grace, a man who owned “a vast empire of real estate” (86). He died in 1960, leaving behind chaotic financial records that gave rise to numerous lawsuits. After some skirmishes over succession, Walter McCollough (or “Sweet Daddy McCollough”) emerged to lead the House of Prayer. More interested in social justice issues than Daddy Grace had been, McCollough invested not in “trophy properties” but in housing for low-income African Americans (175). By the time of McCollough's death in 1991, the House of Prayer had moved from a cult to an “established sect” and an accepted part of the American religious spectrum (179).

Dallam's book is the most thorough biography of Daddy Grace to date. One can see in it, as well, the continuation of several themes of black religious life identified by Giggie and Rolinson, from the allure of Holiness religious expressions to the importance of lodges. (Sweet Daddy McCollough had been a Prince Hall Mason, and Daddy Grace made parades and uniforms central to House of Prayer ritual life.) Yet the book is flawed in several respects. First, Dallam claims that she will present a “view from the inside” (11). This is a fundamentally false approach, however, since Dallam is an academic and not a House of Prayer member. Instead, her “inside” approach simply means that she reads her material as “sympathetic[ally]”—or non-critically—as possible (11). For example, Dallam tells us that House of Prayer members were required to participate in “auxiliaries” that met seven days a week. Members provided their own uniforms and paid weekly dues as well as fines for “unexcused” absences. Yet Dallam offers no interpretation of the auxiliaries' activities or cultural style. Instead, she sums up the House of Prayer's allure in terms so bland that they could apply to virtually any religious body. People joined the House of Prayer, she writes, because of the “fun” and “vibrant social life of the church, the honor of being associated with a powerful organization, a life-altering spiritual experience within the church, and the appeal of Daddy Grace himself” (83).

Dallam also downplays race as a category of analysis. Instead, she seems to side with Daddy Grace, who denied that he was black and stated that he had never experienced racial discrimination (though Grace was on the “lighter end” of the Cape Verdean racial spectrum, Dallam notes, his complexion marked him as “black” in the United States) (52). As Dallam summarizes, “Grace did not want race to be part of how he, as a man trying to improve the religious lives of Americans, was evaluated, and he resented the suggestion that race had any significant impact on his work” (54). She makes this position her own, refusing to investigate why House of Prayer members are overwhelmingly African American.

Finally, Dallam's biography is marred by the fact that its subject, Daddy Grace, is simply not a very interesting person—at least as Dallam describes him. She claims that Grace had an “indescribable charm,” but none of that charm comes through here (68). Instead, we learn that Grace had a “lack of dynamism in speaking” (66). He enjoyed talking about his properties. He was not particularly charitable. He wore flamboyant clothing, grew his hair and fingernails long, enjoyed being “fanned by maids in attendance,” and was not, Dallam insists, a homosexual (67). And that is about all we learn about Daddy Grace's character from this well-meaning but determinedly non-analytic biography.