Sussex historian wins book award
Jarod Roll (left) and Erik S. Gellman (right), winners of the 2012 H. L. Mitchell Award for their book
Aug
2
2013
Dr Jarod Roll, Senior Lecturer in American History, won the H. L. Mitchell Book Award for his second book, The Gospel of the Working-Class: Labor’s Southern Prophets in New Deal America.
Dr Roll and co-author Erik S. Gellman of Roosevelt University received the award at a ceremony at the 2012 annual meeting of the Southern Historical Association in Mobile, Alabama, on 3 and 4 November.
The Southern Historical Association awards the H. L. Mitchell Award for the best book on southern working-class history published in the preceding two years. The Gospel of the Working Class was published by the University of Illinois Press in 2011.
The Gospel of the Working Class traces the influence of two southern activist preachers, one black and one white, who used their ministry to organize the working class in the 1930s and 1940s across lines of gender, race, and geography. Owen Whitfield and Claude Williams, along with their wives, Zella Whitfield and Joyce Williams, drew on their bedrock religious beliefs to stir ordinary men and women to demand social and economic justice in the eras of the Great Depression, New Deal, and Second World War.
In chronicling the shifting contexts of the actions of Whitfield and Williams, The Gospel of the Working Class situates Christian theology within the struggles of some of America's most downtrodden workers, transforming the dominant narratives of the era and offering a fresh view of the promise and instability of religion and civil rights unionism.
The award committee praised the book for the way it “skillfully blends intellectual and labor history to yield new insight into the everyday struggles of both farm and industrial workers during the 1930s and 1940s. The lives of activist preachers Owen Whitfield and Claude Williams, as fluently woven together by Gellman and Roll, dramatize the personal sacrifices and public risks that go into building a grassroots movement. This book also sheds timely light on the role that religious ideology has played in mobilizing working-class Southerners to combat racism and inequality."
According to a recent review of the book in the American Historical Review, “this dual biography reveals the struggles of ordinary people in extraordinarily difficult times. Whitfield and Williams remind us that lives rarely conform to the expectations of those who live them or to the categories of the historians who analyze them. It is hard to imagine anyone who would not find much to learn from this story, and from the way that Gellman and Roll have told it.”
Dr Roll's first book, 2010's Spirit of Rebellion: Labor and religion in the new cotton south, won three awards: the 2011 Missouri History Book Award; the C. L. R. James Prize from the Working Class Studies Association; and the Herbert G. Gutman Prize from the Labor and Working-Class History Association.