After slavery was abolished, how far would white America go toward including African Americans as full participants in the country's institutions? Conventional historical timelines mark the end of Reconstruction in the year 1877, but the Methodist Episcopal Church continued to wrestle with issues of racial inclusion for decades after political support for racial reform had receded. An 1844 schism over slavery split Methodism into northern and southern branches, but Union victory in the Civil War provided the northern Methodists with the opportunity to send missionaries and teachers into the territory that had been occupied by the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. To a remarkable degree, the M.E. Church succeeded in appealing to freed slaves and white Unionists and thereby built up a biracial membership far surpassing that of any other Protestant denomination. A Long Reconstruction details the denomination's journey with unification and justice. African Americans who joined did so in a spirit of hope that through religious fellowship and cooperation they could gain respect and acceptance and ultimately assume a position of equality and brotherhood with whites. However, as segregation gradually took hold in the South, many northern Methodists evinced the same skepticism as white southerners about the fitness of African Americans for positions of authority and responsibility in an interracial setting. The African American membership was never without strong white allies who helped to sustain the Church's official stance against racial caste but, like the nation as a whole, the M.E. Church placed a growing priority on putting their broken union back together.

About the Author
Paul William Harris is the author of Nothing but Christ: Rufus Anderson and the Ideology of Protestant Foreign Missions. For thirty-two years, he was a faculty member at Minnesota State University Moorhead, where his teaching fields included African American history and the history of religion in the U.S. He received his B.A. in American Studies and History from the State University of New York at Binghamton and his M.A. and Ph.D. in American Culture from the University of Michigan.

Reviews
Deeply researched and clearly written, Harris traces the hopes for African Americans in the Methodist Episcopal Church after the Civil War (including at the time about one in five black Methodists). The author traces the story of the hopes for creating an interracial movement and eventually a reconciliation with the MEC, South, to (later) the realization that racial justice and racial reconciliation would be at odds. The story is a vital but relatively little-known one, and Harris's book should stand as the standard account. * Paul Harvey, Department of History, University of Colorado *
A Long Reconstruction explicates the largely untold story of African Americans within the Methodist Episcopal Church and in doing so, pushes us to rethink what we mean by the term "Black Church." Gracefully written and exhaustively researched, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in race and religion in the United. * Christopher Cameron, Professor of History, University of North Carolina at Charlotte States. *
In A Long Reconstruction, Harris relates the relationship between African Americans and the MEC over nine chapters. * Scott M.Anderson, Proceedings of the Wesley Historical Society *
A Long Reconstruction is a daring work that revisits the complexities of the Reconstruction era, as it exposes the complicated methodologies Black people were forced to utilize in order to benefit their communities. * Aaron M. Treadwell, Journal of Southern History *



Book Information
ISBN 9780197571828
Author Paul William Harris
Format Hardback
Page Count 344
Imprint Oxford University Press Inc
Publisher Oxford University Press Inc
Weight(grams) 599g
Dimensions(mm) 164mm * 242mm * 30mm