Duke University Press Bound For the Promised Land: African American Religion and the Great Migration (The C. Eric Lincoln Series on the Black Experience)

Bound for the Promised Land is the first extensive examination of the impact on the American religious landscape of the Great Migrationthe movement from South to North and from country to city by hundreds of thousands of African Americans following World War I. In focusing on this phenomenons religious and cultural implications, Milton C. Sernett breaks with traditional patterns of historiography that analyze the migration in terms of socioeconomic considerations. Drawing on a range of sourcesinterviews, government documents, church periodicals, books, pamphlets, and articlesSernett shows how the mass migration created an institutional crisis for black religious leaders. He describes the creative tensions that resulted when the southern migrants who saw their exodus as the Second Emancipation brought their religious beliefs and practices into northern cities such as Chicago, and traces the resulting emergence of the belief that black churches ought to be more than places for \x22\x22praying and preaching.\x22\x22 Explaining how this social gospel perspective came to dominate many of the classic studies of African American religion, Bound for the Promised Land sheds new light on various components of the development of black religion, including philanthropic endeavors to \x22\x22modernize\x22\x22 the southern black rural church. In providing a balanced and holistic understanding of black religion in postWorld War I America, Bound for the Promised Land serves to reveal the challenges presently confronting this vital component of Americas religious mosaic. Review Sernett makes a persuasive argument for moving beyond an understanding of the Great Migration as a subfield of urban studies, concerned exclusively with issues of race and class, ghetto formation, and labor issues. The reader is reminded of the significant but often ignored impact of the Great Migration on culture and cultural institutions in the African --American context.Lewis V. Baldwin, Vanderbilt University From the Back Cover "This work. . . synthesizes important material that scholars of African American religious studies need in book form."--Dennis C. Dickerson About the Author Milton C. Sernett is Professor of African American studies at Syracuse University. He is the author of African-American Religious History: A Documentary Witness, also published by Duke University Press.