Southern by the Grace of God:” Religion and Race in Hollywood’S South Since the 1960S

Northumbria Research Link Citation: Hunt, Megan (2016) “Southern by the grace of God:” religion and race in Hollywood’s South since the 1960s. Doctoral thesis, Northumbria University. This version was downloaded from Northumbria Research Link: http://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/32576/ Northumbria University has developed Northumbria Research Link (NRL) to enable users to access the University’s research output. Copyright © and moral rights for items on NRL are retained by the individual author(s) and/or other copyright owners. Single copies of full items can be reproduced, displayed or performed, and given to third parties in any format or medium for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge, provided the authors, title and full bibliographic details are given, as well as a hyperlink and/or URL to the original metadata page. The content must not be changed in any way. Full items must not be sold commercially in any format or medium without formal permission of the copyright holder. The full policy is available online: http://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/policies.html “Southern by the grace of God:” religion and race in Hollywood’s South since the 1960s. M. HUNT PhD, History: American Studies 1/1/2016 2 “Southern by the grace of God:” religion and race in Hollywood’s South since the 1960s. Megan Hunt A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the University of Northumbria at Newcastle for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Research undertaken in the Department of Humanities, Faculty of Arts, Design & Social Sciences. December 2016 3 4 Abstract This thesis examines the presentation and functions of Protestant Christianity in cinematic depictions of the American South, focusing primarily on Hollywood’s civil rights narratives, from the 1960s to the present. It argues that religion is an understudied signifier of the South on film, used to define the region’s presumed exceptionalism. Rooted in close textual analysis and primary research into the production and reception of over a dozen films, the thesis deploys methodologies drawn from history, film, literary, and cultural studies. It questions why scholars have seldom acknowledged the role of religion in popular, especially cinematic, constructions of the South, before providing detailed case studies of specific films that utilize southern religiosity to negotiate regional and national anxieties around race, class, and gender. Though scholars have recognized the intersections of race, class, and gender evident in the media’s construction of southern white segregationist, this thesis contends that religion adds further interrogative value to existing analyses of civil rights cinema in particular, and of Hollywood’s representations of southern race, class, and gender identities more generally. The thesis argues that the perceived religious zealotry of many segregationists supports Hollywood’s recurring presentation of the South as an irrational region, where religiosity and rabid racism cloud all judgment. The perceived ‘southernization’ of America through the culture wars of the late twentieth-century encouraged many Americans to reconsider the legacy of the civil rights era, a movement that was being concurrently reshaped in the popular imagination by Hollywood dramas such as Mississippi Burning, A Time to Kill, and Ghosts of Mississippi among many other films. Examining the presentation of both white and black Christianity in these films, the thesis illuminates how cinema has routinely fabricated a simplistic binary of good and evil that pits a noble, yet reductive and static, religious African American community against zealous white trash and fundamentalists operating on the margins of society. So often to blame for the incendiary racial violence that marks such movies, these white villains are often associated with fundamentalism, in both rhetoric and actions, enabling filmmakers to offer a clear culprit for the South’s, and therefore the nation’s, legacy of racial intolerance and violence. 5 6 Table of Contents Abstract 5 Acknowledgements 8 Candidate declaration 9 Introduction 11 Chapter 1: ‘Just [not] there’: searching for religion in southern studies.31 Chapter 2: ‘I ain’t no white trash piece of shit’: Cape Fear’s ‘monster of the South.’ 63 Chapter 3: Hollywood’s southern strategy: portraying white Christianity in civil rights melodramas. 102 Chapter 4: Protective fortress?: The southern black church in the civil rights drama. 149 Chapter 5: ‘They take the Bible literally you know:’ To Kill a Mockingbird and the origins of Hollywood’s secular civil rights hero. 190 Conclusion 236 Bibliography 246 7 Acknowledgements This thesis was made possible by a research studentship at Northumbria University. Having been warned of the solitary nature of PhD life, I am incredibly grateful for the friendships I have been able to forge here in the Glenamara Centre. I can only hope that future students recognize both the personal and professional significance of the networks and facilities I was lucky enough to benefit from. They are, after all, what we make them. My supervisors Prof. Brian Ward and Dr. Randall Stephens have been a constant source of enthusiasm and generosity. Their faith in my project has proven inspirational in many an existential crisis, and my shelves sag under the weight of all the books I will one day return to them. I am now paralyzed with hatred and remorse when faced with my numerous writer’s ‘tics,’ and have surely developed new ones to replace those that now seem so obvious. I am especially grateful to my examiners, Professor Tony Badger and Professor Sharon Monteith, who offered considerable feedback and constructive criticism during my Viva examination. It was a privilege to discuss my ideas with such esteemed colleagues. Extended thanks to Professor Monteith, in particular, for detailed written feedback, and for providing me with an annotated copy of the thesis. Such efforts reached far beyond my expectations and enabled me to direct my revisions with precision. On a more personal note, I am fortunate to have family and friends that have long supported my academic endeavors, and have even stopped asking when it will all be over. Special thanks go to my invaluable band of proofreaders: Megan Holman, Bethan Hunt, Nigel Hunt, and Nick Lanigan. Any errors or infelicities that remain are, of course, my own. Most of all, I would like to thank my parents for their numerous sacrifices in pursuit of my education and happiness. After all, who’d want to see New England in the Spring or navigate the Pacific Highway, when you can traverse the South via Amtrak in search of a Piggly Wiggly!? 8 Candidate declaration I declare that the work contained in this thesis has not been submitted for any other award and that it is all my own work. I also confirm that this work fully acknowledges opinions, ideas and contributions from the work of others. Any ethical clearance for the research in this thesis has been approved. Approval has been sought and granted by the Faculty Ethics Committee on February 25, 2014. I declare that the Word Count of this Thesis is 80, 438. Name: Megan Hunt Signature: Date: 27/09/2017 9 10 Introduction Acknowledging the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s as a pivotal moment in modern southern history, this thesis focuses primarily on Hollywood’s presentation of southern Protestantism in civil rights narratives, from the 1960s to the present. Though historians continue to debate the periodization and geographical specificity of the civil rights movement or era, most would agree that its ‘master narrative’ – ‘the one popularized by the media, national celebrations, and high school textbooks,’ according to Steven F. Lawson – starts with the 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education, which outlawed segregation in public schools, and ends with the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.1 It ‘contain[s] all the elements to inspire creative writers,’ Sharon Monteith writes: ‘courage in the face of violence, conflict in the face of social change, a moment in history when an old order fell.’2 It also offers the obvious heroes and villains so crucial to Hollywood’s simplified moral narratives, as bitter white southerners, embarrassing a nation under Cold War scrutiny, brutalize peaceful black activists. That the media has proven reluctant to reconfigure a master narrative that ‘no historian who has read the literature on civil rights since the mid-1970s’ would accept, according to Lawson, is testament to the power of consensus memory.3 As such, Leigh 1 Steven F. Lawson, ‘Long Origins of the Short Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968,’ in Freedom Rights: New Perspectives on the Civil Rights Movement, eds. Danielle L. McGuire & John Dittmer, (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2011), 10. 2 Sharon Monteith, ‘Civil Rights Movement Film,’ in, The Cambridge Companion to American Civil Rights Literature, ed. Julie Buckner Armstrong (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 123. It is important to note that Monteith submitted this essay to the publisher under the title ‘Civil Rights Fiction Film.’ Because of this alteration, the distinction between films documenting the civil rights movement as it occurred and those that reimagine its events or memory for entertainment is lost (in the title at least). For debates surrounding the periodization or geography of the civil rights movement, see Lawson, ‘Long Origins;’ Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, ‘The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,’ Journal of American History 91 (March 2005), 1233-63; Lawson, ‘Freedom Then, Freedom Now: The Historiography of the Civil Rights Movement,’ The American Historical Review, Vol. 96, No.2 (April 1991), 456-71; Thomas Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Random House, 2009); Jeanne Theoharis, ‘Hidden in Plain Sight: The Civil Rights Movement outside the South,’ in The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism, eds.

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