Date of Award
9-4-2015
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
History, MA
First Advisor
Sarah Wilkerson Freeman
Committee Members
Cherisse Jones-Branch; Gary Edwards
Call Number
LD 251.A566t 2015 C22
Abstract
This study is an examination of events in a particular time and place that contributes to a better understanding of a complex culture that allowed white Protestant tolerance and intolerance of other ethnicities, religious creeds, and social and political ideologies to exist in the same petri dish of the Jim Crow South. The Olivetan Benedictine Sisters of Jonesboro, Arkansas faced early Protestant opposition to their Catholic hospital shortly after its opening and again with the arrival of the 1920s Ku Klux Klan. The Sisters’ success provided the script for Reverend Luther Davis Summers, a reactionary Baptist fundamentalist who built a career on the sale of hatred and religion. Having devoted roughly fifty years to the Baptist cause, Summers utilized the pulpit to advance his agenda in incidents ranging from the Black Patch War in Kentucky and Tennessee to the demise of Commonwealth College, a suspected communist institution, in Mena, Arkansas. The case studies presented here illustrate the symbiotic relationship between tolerance and intolerance in the Jim Crow South. The establishment of a Catholic healthcare institution owned and operated by foreign Catholic nuns who asserted their independence demonstrated the tolerance that existed in Jonesboro while providing an opportunity for the expression of intolerance from such reactionary forces as Reverend Summers.
Rights Management
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Campbell, Monica, "Case Studies of Tolerance and Intolerance in Northeast Arkansas circa 1900-1970" (2015). Student Theses and Dissertations. 721.
https://arch.astate.edu/all-etd/721
