Newberry Seminar on Religion and Culture in the Americas with Isaiah Ellis

Daddy Mention’s Creation Story: Religion, Labor, and Racial Extraction in Jim Crow and New Deal Florida

Isaiah Ellis, Southern Methodist University

This paper examines Daddy Mention—a character whose stories circulated among Black Floridians who found themselves on the wrong side of the revolving door between free and unfree labor that characterized the racialized Jim Crow labor landscape. Anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston referenced Daddy mention alongside John Henry and Big John the Conqueror; according to Hurston, while those better-known trickster figures “compensated for the helplessness of the slave in the hands of the master… Daddy Mention does the same for the convict in the prison camp.” This paper focuses on an important moment in one Daddy Mention story, in which he recites a Creek and Cherokee creation story, situating its religious expression in the context of the economic environments and narrative demands of the New Deal-Era projects where Daddy Mention stories were recorded. The overlapping contexts of Indigenous religion, Black cultural expression, and economic extraction in the New Deal Era helped position Black religion as a defining feature of the US South whose history has been rendered almost exclusively in black and white.

About the Presenter

Isaiah Ellis is Assistant Professor of Urban Religions in the Religious Studies Department at Southern Methodist University. His research examines the mutually transformative relationship between economic environments and religious life in the nineteenth and twentieth century United States. His research and teaching are motivated by a curiosity about how people outside official channels of religious authority leverage religious narratives to enact and contest large-scale economic and infrastructural transformations. His first book, Apostles of Asphalt: The Religious Politics of Roadbuilding in the Jim Crow South, will be published by Columbia University Press in 2027.

This event is free, but all participants must register in advance. Space is limited, so please do not request a paper unless you plan to attend.