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Politics And Prayer In West Perrine, Florida : Civic Social Capital And The Black Church, Susan Oltman Fink

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis traces the mechanisms and sources responsible for the generation of civic social capital (a set of shared norms and values that promote cooperation between groups, enabling them to participate in the political process) by black churches in West Perrine, Florida. Data for this thesis includes over fifty interviews and participant observations, archival records, newspaper articles, and scholarly journals.

Despite the institutional racism of the first half of the twentieth century, many blacks and whites in Perrine developed levels of trust significant enough to form an integrated local governing body, evidence of high levels of csc. At mid-century, when …