Posted Dec. 16, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
Hope in Alabama after the Civil War

By John Davis

UPLIFTING THE PEOPLE. By Wilson Fallin Jr. Alabama University Press, 332 pages, $39.95, hardcover.

With the end of the Civil War, slaves in Alabama were set free. Of course, freedom meant nothing for most. They were left adrift with no social services, no rights for the most part, no representation and no direction.

This did not mean, however, that they had no hope.

Wilson Fallin Jr., history professor at the University of Montevallo and Convention Historian of the National Baptist Convention USA, shows us how the Baptist Church served as almost a parallel society for the newly freed blacks, indeed had done so for some “three centuries of Black Baptists in Alabama.”

This is nothing if not fascinating reading about a part of our state’s history that is little known. We see in the black church one of the only avenues for expression, for in fact that is how the churches functioned.

Where white society left no avenue for advancement, in the Baptist church a man could seek out the path of being a preacher, and thus could learn and develop his abilities.