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THE ROLE OF THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN
CHURCH IN PROMOTING POST-CATASTROPHE RESILIENCE
Research by Drs. Andrew Billingsley and Patricia
Motes
Institute for Families in Society
The African-American church is a major source for
promoting spiritual and social support for individuals,
families and communities. Yet, how does the church
maintain its own resilience when faced with a crisis of
cataclysmic proportions such as Hurricane Katrina?
The storm came ashore on the Gulf Coast of Alabama,
Mississippi, and Louisiana, with unprecedented loss of
life and unparalleled physical, social and emotional
distress, as well as property damage and the destruction
of entire communities. The hurricane visited particular
devastation on the city of New Orleans, especially in
low-lying neighborhoods of the city’s Ninth Ward that
were populated primarily by African-Americans and the
institutions that served them. Prominent among the
institutions destroyed were African-American churches.
University of South Carolina researchers began their
study with five questions in mind: (1) What impact did
Hurricane Katrina have on African-American churches in
selected locations? (2) What are the manifest
(observable, physical effects) and latent (social and
emotional) effects? (3) How did churches respond to this
impact? (4) How do church leaders visualize the future?
(5) What were the roles of churches in receiving
communities? The researchers especially wanted to find
out how religious leaders saw the future. This measure
of resilience was surprisingly revealing. Revelations of
the assistance churches received from others, including
city, state, and federal governments, businesses, and
black and white churches, were impressive in positive
and negative ways.
In New Orleans, USC researchers were especially
interested in churches located in the Ninth Ward, while
maintaining awareness of churches in other areas, as
well. Their study included churches with pre-hurricane
memberships as small as 200 and mega-churches with
multiple sites where memberships ran as high as 10,000.
The research team’s informants (local and national) made
them keenly aware of the large black Catholic population
in New Orleans. While initially focused on Protestant
churches, the team expanded its study to include
Catholic parishes.
 Using an ethnographic case study design, the research
team consulted with knowledgeable informants to compile
a list of churches in the areas affected by Hurricane
Katrina, including Heidelberg, Mississippi, and New
Orleans, and a list of churches in communities where
thousands of people from the affected areas fled, such
as Houston, Texas, Memphis, Tennessee, and Columbia,
South Carolina. USC researchers made site visits to
these communities to conduct semi-structured interviews
with ministers and other church leaders. The research
design included retrospective and prospective accounts
of the impact of Hurricane Katrina.
Specifically, the research findings concluded that
before Hurricane Katrina, African-American churches in
the affected areas were prominent and functional
features of community life. The destruction of these
communities, including numerous churches and church
holdings, such as community centers, housing
developments, and graveyards, was rampant. Church
leaders and church members were displaced physically and
emotionally. Communities received support from public
and private sources, but churches are receiving
significant support from other church congregations,
across racial and denominational lines.
Political leadership was critical to the call for
public, private, faith-based, and other community
organizations to map and execute plans to support people
from the storm-impacted areas, according to USC
researchers. Church communities are providing financial
and other tangible support, such as holding rallies,
sharing pulpits, donating the use of church buildings,
and helping to rebuild sanctuaries. Many community
members expressed a renewal of community spirit and
community pride. Indicators of resilience and faith are
evident despite enormous death and suffering,
researchers discovered. And church leaders envision a
return of the power and presence of the African-American
church in these devastated areas.
This is an ongoing study that will ultimately be able to
apply a time-series design (capturing data during
emergency and early recovery and development phases)
using key informant interviews and survey methods. This
study is the basis for a major volume on church and
society that will build on earlier sociological studies
including The Negro Church, (Dubois, 1903), The Negro’s
Church (Mays, 1933), The Negro Church in America
(Frazier, 1964), The Black Church in the
African-American Experience, (Lincoln Mamiya, 1990), and
Mighty Like River (Billingsley, 1999).
The focus of USC researchers on the black church and
black/white church collaboration in this study together
with future studies will address how religion, racial,
and socioeconomic diversity can be encouraged and
discouraged in the face of local, national, and
international tensions. These studies will bring new
refinements to the association between social theory and
social research and how churches can both benefit from
it and contribute to it.
 Some of these communities will not be rebuilt; many
people will not return. The need for physical church
buildings will be reduced. Individuals, families,
community leaders, and ministers will evolve new ways of
“doing church.” These new ways will be influenced by
developing and expanded collaborations, researchers
predict. Society will benefit from these studies through
new knowledge that will inform and enhance collaboration
between governments and churches. The results of this
research will be disseminated in scholarly meetings,
teaching, and public discussions.
Biographies
Dr. Patricia Stone Motes is associate director and
research associate professor at the Institute for
Families in Society, University of South Carolina. She
has more than 20 years experience in program
development, program evaluation, and community-based
action research, with recent work in the area of
building community collaborative, over-representation
of minority youth in the juvenile justice system, and
the role of faith-based organizations in supporting
communities. Noted publications include research on
funding strategies for broad-based school-mental health
services, middle school climate, service system reform
through ecologically oriented school-based mental health
services, and the use of empowerment-evaluation
approaches with community-based organizations. She is
co-editor of the book, Empowering Community
Organizations: The Mediating Roles of Consultation and
Technical Assistance (in press) by Columbia
University Press.
Dr. Andrew Billingsley is professor of sociology and
African-American studies and is senior
scholar-in-residence at the Institute for Families in
Society. He is an emeritus professor and former chair of
family studies at the University of Maryland, and he has
also served as president of Morgan State University and
vice president for academic affairs at Howard
University. He is considered an expert in faith-based
influence within the African-American Diaspora and has
received many professional honors including the 1992
DuBois, Johnson, Frazier Award given by the American
Sociological Association, the 1990 Distinguished Scholar
Award given by the Association of Black Sociologists,
the 1989 Marie Peters Award given by the National
Council on Family Relations and the 1972 Distinguished
Speaker Award given by the National Association of Black
Social Workers. He is writing a book, Yearning to
Breathe Free: Robert Smalls of South Carolina and His
Families.”
Research Team/Collaborators:
Andrew Billingsley, Ph.D., Professor, Department of
Sociology, Institute for Families in Society, and
African-American Studies Program, University of South
Carolina.; Patricia Stone Motes, Ph.D., Research
Associate Professor, Institute for Families in Society,
University of South Carolina; Arlene Bowers Andrews,
Ph.D. Professor, School of Social Work and Director of
the Institute for Families in Society, University of
South Carolina; Kenneth Campbell, Ph.D., Associate
Professor, School of Journalism and Mass Communications,
University of South Carolina; Beverly Mason, Ph.D.
Professor and Chair, Department of Sociology, Xavier
University, and Affiliate Professor, Women‚’s Studies
Program, University of South Carolina; Kim Smith,
doctoral student, School of Journalism and Mass
Communications, University of South Carolina
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