A Long Reconstruction

by Paul William Harris

2022 · Oxford University Press

After slavery was abolished, how far would white America go toward including African Americans as full participants in the country's institutions? The Methodist Episcopal Church (the northern branch of the denomination created in an 1844 schism) faced a unique challenge when they went south in the wake of the Civil War. A Long Reconstruction details the denomination's journey with unification and justice. Decades after political Reconstruction ended in 1877, the Church's Black members and their white allies kept up a struggle against racial caste, but they encountered numerous disappointments as the Church, like the country as a whole, sought to restore unity among whites by downplaying issues of race.