Contact Information
Biography Information
Stephen Tuck is university lecturer in American history at the University of Oxford. His research interests include modern race equality struggles in Britain and America, religion and Jim Crow, and historiography. He received his PhD. in history from Cambridge University, and was on the faculty at Cambridge before moving to Oxford. He has written two prize-winning books: Beyond Atlanta: the struggle for civil rights in Georgia, 1940-80 (Athens, 2003) and We Ain't What We Ought To Be: the black freedom strugge from emancipation to Obama (Cambridge, Mass, 2010) (a companion website with audiovisual materials is weaintwhatweoughttobe.com). Forthcoming books include The Fog of War: World War II and the origins of the civil rights movement (ed. with Kevin Kruse) and The other special relationship: race and rights in Britain and America (ed. with Robin Kelley).
Project Description
It is something of a truism that African Americans have been the exception to secularization trends in modern American society, and that black civil rights protest has tended to take the form of a Christian social movement. Yet a closer look at the pivotal Jim Crow era of racial segregation reveals a strikingly different picture of religious scepticism among prominent black protest leaders, one that reflected a broader disenchantment with mainstream Christianity among many educated black Americans.
This project will explore the relationship between JIm Crow and secularization, and the impact of this religious scepticism on civil rights organizations during this formative stage of the struggle for racial equality.