Duke University Press, 1995

In God’s Trombones (1927) James Weldon Johnson pays eloquent tribute to the sustaining presence of black ministers for their parishioners, both during slavery and following it. William Faulkner concludes The Sound and the Fury (1929) by reaffirming the spiritual presence of the black preacher, showing the black church as the last bastion of Christianity in the modern South. After the years following the Civil War denied African Americans the full benefits of their emancipation, some African American writers questioned the role black ministers had played in the progress of their race, but few would contest that their role was major.