Bailey, Julius H.

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Bailey, Julius H.

PERSONAL:

Education: Occidental College, B.A., 1993; University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, M.A., 1996, Ph.D., 2003.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Religious Studies Department, University of Redlands, 1200 E. Colton Ave., P.O. Box 3080, Redlands, CA 92373-0999. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Kenyon College, Gambier, OH, instructor, 2000-01; University of the Redlands, Redlands, CA, assistant professor, 2001-07, associate professor of religion, 2007—.

MEMBER:

American Academy of Religion, American Historical Association, American Society of Church History, American Studies Association, National Association of African American Studies.

WRITINGS:

Around the Family Altar: Domesticity in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, 1865-1900, University Press of Florida (Gainesville, FL), 2005.

Contributor to Organizing Black America: An Encyclopedia of African American Associations, Routledge, 2001; Encyclopedia of Fundamentalism, Routledge, 2001; Encyclopedia of Slave Resistance and Rebellion, Greenwood Press, 2007; and African American National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2008. Contributor to academic journals, including Council of the Societies for the Study of Religion Bulletin and Journal of the American Academy of Religion.

SIDELIGHTS:

Julius H. Bailey's first book, Around the Family Altar: Domesticity in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, 1865-1900, focuses on how religious leaders dealt with the changes facing African American families following emancipation. Having previously been denied the right to live together on their own, millions of former slaves began searching for lost family members in an attempt to reconstruct some semblance of family life. The leaders of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church, Bailey maintains, developed new domestic ideals adapted from white Protestant notions of family, especially ideas about childrearing. The nuclear family was revered, with fathers leading worship practices and mothers nurturing the religious and moral development of their children. The author refers to the Christian Recorder, the AME church's official paper, and the philosophies of the paper's editors and the AME bishops. Notably, much of the AME literature was concerned with the glorification of motherhood and venerated the idea of raising their children to be the future pillars of African American society. This idea was at odds with the "race woman" image common in other sectors of Reconstruction society. Largely ignored by the AME leaders was the reality of black women's lives—they had to work—and adhering to a middle-class ideal was not possible. But many church leaders argued that middle-class values were necessary to prove that African Americans were capable of developing the strong family ties previously denied them—something many former slave owners doubted.

Reviewing the book for Humanities and Social Sciences Online, James Ivy noted that Bailey describes the church leaders' ideas regarding family, but not how those ideals played out in church members' lives. Nevertheless, he called the book "a unique contribution to the history of the African American family." Ernest M. Limbo, writing in the Journal of Southern History, declared that "Bailey successfully describes the evolving ideal of domesticity that AME leaders promoted in the last half of the nineteenth century…. His descriptions and speculations about the motivations of the men who made these arguments—whether altruistic and overt or self-serving and covert—are well crafted and mostly convincing…. Bailey has laid the groundwork for future inquiries examining the domestic life of black Protestants after the Civil War." Some reviewers felt that Bailey did not address the reality of family life during the time, but Lewis V. Baldwin, writing in Church History, called Around the Family Altar "an impressive little book, remarkable for its range, richness, and balance of analysis."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Catholic Historical Review, April, 2007, Jualynne E. Dodson, review of Around the Family Altar: Domesticity in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, 1865-1900, p. 452.

Church History, September, 2006, Lewis V. Baldwin, review of Around the Family Altar, p. 684.

Journal of African American History, fall, 2006, Jualynne E. Dodson, review of Around the Family Altar, p. 476.

Journal of American Ethnic History, fall, 2006, Kathleen Graces-Foley, review of Around the Family Altar, p. 89.

Journal of American History, September, 2006, Wallace D. Best, review of Around the Family Altar, p. 543.

Journal of Southern History, November, 2006, Ernest M. Limbo, review of Around the Family Altar, p. 963.

Radical History Review, fall, 2007, Anthony Michael Petro, review of Around the Family Altar, p. 260.