Popular Beliefs and Superstitions by Newbell Niles Puckett

Get help with access Institutional accessĪccess to content on Oxford Academic is often provided through institutional subscriptions and purchases. He concluded that it hindered their mental, moral, and medicinal progress. This chapter argues that he considered the religion of Black rural “folk” to have developed in isolated from modern medicine as well as proper forms of family and sex. But Johnson recycled the racial logics that he sought to get away from by accenting their immoral sexual habits, “bad” family structure, and outmoded beliefs. Johnson joined the Rosenwald Fund in an effort to reform their folk religion by organizing the treatment program to extend modern healthcare to them.

Moreover, he concluded that their folk religion was outside modern health and familial structure. Rejecting racial traits, Johnson and his research team focused on the racial prejudice and cotton system that stunted not only their religion, but equally, their health maturation. Johnson concluded that these spiritual practices and social customs were indicators that these poor workers occupied a lower stage of mental and moral development. He and members affiliated with Fisk University documented the conjure practices and “social taboos” among tenant farmers and sharecroppers. A Black sociologist and chair of the Social Science Department at Fisk University, Johnson used the folk category to challenge the idea that America did not have a peasant class and a feudal order in the Jim Crow South.

Johnson within the Julius Rosenwald Fund and United States Public Health Service’s syphilis treatment program for tenant farmers and sharecroppers in Macon County, Alabama, during the early years of the Franklin D. Chapter 3 explores the fieldwork of Charles S.

Popular Beliefs and Superstitions by Newbell Niles Puckett