Please make plans to join us next Thursday, February 15th, 12-1:15 p.m. in the Marty Center Seminar Room (Swift Hall, Second Floor), for our next workshop meeting of the quarter.
Presenter: Claire Hautot, Ph.D. Student, Religions in America
Title: “The Supreme Order of Evil”: Central Banking and the Theology of Sam Bowers
Abstract: In his book, God’s Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights, Charles Marsh wrote the most complete biographical work on Samuel Bowers to date, portraying Bowers as the “high priest of the anti-civil rights movement.” While Marsh was able to use a wealth of personal interviews and recollections from the Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi, he did not fully unpack the primacy of central banking in Bowers’ thinking. This paper aims to expand on the scholarship of Charles Marsh in order to foreground the central bank in Bowers’ religious beliefs through the inclusion of previously overlooked oral history material from the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. These oral history interviews show the importance of the central bank conspiracy as a key motivating factor for both Bowers’ militancy in the 1960s and his eventual retreat into passivity in the 1980s. It is my hope that this expanded scholarship will provide insight into the way that members of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan perceived the Civil Rights Movement and its significance for Mississippi.
There will be a formal response to the paper and lunch will be served.
The paper can be accessed and downloaded via the “Papers” tab (password protected) on the RAME Workshop website.
Please contact Joel (joelabrown@uchicago.edu) if you have any questions or trouble accessing the paper.