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The Religious and Racial Meanings of The Green Pastures

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 June 2018

Curtis J. Evans
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Abstract

Marc Connelly's The Green Pastures play was one of the longest running dramas in Broadway history. Responses to the play by blacks and whites demonstrate its contested nature. Whites generally lauded the drama for its simplicity and its childlike depiction of black religion in the rural South. African Americans, though hopeful that its allblack cast would lead to more opportunities for blacks on stage, were divided between a general appreciation of the extraordinary display of talent by its actors and worries about the implications of a play that seemed to idealize the rural South as the natural environment of carefree overly religious blacks. Connelly's widely popular drama became a site of cultural debates about the significance of black migration to the urban North, the nature and importance of religion in black communities, and the place of blacks in the nation. Precisely when black social scientists were urging rural black Christians to abandon an otherworldly and emotional religion, white dramatists and literary artists were making more widely available what they saw as a picturesque and deeply rooted aspect of black folk culture.

Type
Research Article
Information
Religion and American Culture , Volume 18 , Issue 1 , Winter 2008 , pp. 59 - 93
Copyright
Copyright © Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture 2008

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References

Notes

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4. See Weisenfeld, Judith, Hollywood Be Thy Name: African American Religion in American Film, 1929–1949 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007 Google Scholar). Weisenfeld devotes an entire chapter to Connelly's work, focusing particularly on the film version of the play. The first draft of this essay was written long before her book was published, and my conclusions were formed independently of her book, though I find nothing in her work that contradicts the arguments that I make. Weisenfeld's more general arguments about the reproduction and representation of images of blacks in films complements and confirms many of my own contentions, though she has a different focus than my work. She claims that demographic shifts in the African American population “from rural to urban captured artistic imaginations, as did the potential consequences of this transformation for African American claims to modernity and to citizenship” (5). This is a central emphasis of my essay in my attention to white and black interpretations of Connelly's play. I am also interested in Weisenfeld's analysis of Connelly's and other white artists’ claims to represent the “natural qualities” of blacks or black culture authentically. I look at the implications of these assertions for black interpreters.

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61. Ibid.

62. “Leaving the Southern Phase,” New York Times, January 1, 1934, in TINC.

63. Columbia Record, March 1, 1930, in TINC.

64. Augusta Herald, October 24, 1933, in TINC.

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75. Huggins, , Harlem Renaissance, 299–300 Google Scholar; and “Last Days for ‘Uncle Tom,’” New York Times, July 13, 1931, in TINC.

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81. See “The Great Migration,” in Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African American Experience, ed. Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New York: Perseus Books, 1999), 869–71.

82. Connelly made two separate trips to the South, both totaling no more than two or three months.

83. Woodson, Carter G., The Rural Negro (Washington, D.C.: Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, 1930), xv–xvi Google Scholar; Mays, Benjamin E. and Nicholson, Joseph William, The Negro's Church (Salem, N.H.: Ayer Company Publishers, 1988 [1933]), v–vii, 295–313Google Scholar; and Mays, Benjamin E., The Negro's God, vii–viii Google Scholar. See also Sernett, Milton, Bound for the Promised Land: African American Religion and the Great Migration (Durham, N. Car.: Duke University Press, 1997), 225–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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85. Ibid., 149–79, 227–41. For specific criticisms of rural churches, black and white, and the context of the debates, I have found the following helpful: Sernett, Bound for the Promised Land, chap. 8; and James. H. Madison, “Reformers and the Rural Church, 1900–1950,” Journal of American History 73 (December 1986): 645–68. See also the following two important primary sources of black rural churches: C. Horace Hamilton and John M. Ellison, The Negro Church in Rural Virginia, bulletin 273 (Blacksburg: Virginia Agricultural Experiment Station, 1929); and Richardson, Harry V., Dark Glory: A Picture of the Church among Negroes in the Rural South (New York: Friendship Press, 1947 Google Scholar).

86. Clark Gilpin, W., A Preface to Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 97–98 Google Scholar.

87. Mathews was one of the leading defenders of liberal Protestantism and of a social form of Christianity.

88. Gilpin, , A Preface to Theology, 98 Google Scholar; and Sernett, , Bound for the Promised Land, 228–30Google Scholar.

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94. Beside the standard works on religion and the many analyses of the cultural and social context of the 1920s, see Dumenil, , Modern Temper, and also Hoffman, Frederick J., The Twenties: American Writing in the Postwar Decade, rev. ed. (New York: Free Press, 1965 Google Scholar).