“I Have Seen the Promised Land”
“I Have Seen the Promised Land”
The Persistence of Deliverance Politics, 1865–2008
Following emancipation, there was a marked divergence between black and white discourses. For African Americans, the Exodus story still functioned as a narrative frame through which to interpret their travails following the failure of Reconstruction. Some sought the Promised Land through migration to Kansas or the North, though the major mobilization of Exodus rhetoric would occur during the civil rights movement, especially in the speeches of Martin Luther King Jr. When Barack Obama ran for the presidency in 2008, he depicted African Americans as standing on the verge of Canaan. White statesmen over the course of the twentieth century were far less likely to cite the Exodus story, but traces of deliverance politics can still be found in their foreign policy pronouncements, as they yoked together Providence and liberation in time-honored fashion. By the twenty-first century, the Religious Right and the Religious Left were struggling for ownership of the Exodus narrative.
Keywords: civil rights movement, Martin Luther King Jr, American foreign policy, Religious Right
Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .
