In the twentieth-century American South, black religious institutions played key roles in shaping and reshaping urban landscapes. In doing so, these institutions made significant, but often overlooked, contributions to the "Long Civil Rights Movement." In Memphis, no church better exemplified the intimate intertwining of race, space, and religion than the Church of God in Christ (COGIC). The history of COGIC in Memphis complicates the assumption that the Civil Rights Movement dictated a simple move from segregated black space to racially integrated space and breaks down false spatial dichotomies such as black/white and religious/secular. Instead, COGIC built segregated worship space, moved into white residential space, adapted black religious space for overtly political purposes, and finally, claimed white secular space for black religious purposes. Alongside the properly celebrated deeds of national leaders, local reconfigurations of urban space by religious institutions deserve to be recognized as a prime factor in the long road to civil rights.
