Interracial cooperation in the post-Civil War social activist landscape can best be characterized as
parallel work of white and black (largely) groups of women and laborers. By the early twentieth century,
however, interracial cooperation became the method of the liberal elite to enact moderate processes to
manage segregation rather than eradicate it. Religious communities were, perhaps, the only spaces after
the Civil War in which black and white people worked collaboratively, albeit with lingering unequal
power dynamics established under slavery. Thus, religious communities of the post-Civil War era offer a
new vantage point from which to consider the development of interracial cooperation during
Reconstruction and its implications for the formation of racial identity and race relations during the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Our panel will examine the ways that Reconstruction era black churches, fostered a cohesive black
communal identity after the Civil War. Complicating this unity were the tenuous interactions of black
leaders with their white counterparts in the religious traditions from which they were emerging. As
black church leaders and their congregations addressed the political, social, and economic realities of
the post-emancipation South, they held fast to the distinctiveness of their churches, schools, and
communities. Our panel will present new scholarship on how the interracial work of black Methodists,
Baptists, and Episcopalians shaped the new ideas of religious and racial identity in the years following
the Civil War.