Federal Writers' Project – Life Histories/2023/Fall/Section20/Richard Lloyd

Richard Lloyd
Richard Lloyd was a Welsh-American preacher active in the rural south for much of the early 20th century. Born in Newtown, Wales, on June Sixth 1880, he lived in that country until 1904, when he emigrated to the United States and matriculated at the University of Chicago,  which was then only 14 years old. After five years at the University of Chicago, he began study at Crozer Theological Seminary in Upland, Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia, graduating in 1912. After graduating from Crozer, and being ordained in Chester, Pennsylvania, he met and married Macon Elizabeth Carver in Marion Station Maryland.

Over his career he held pastorates in several communities in rural Virginia.These included Cashville and Onley in Accomack County, and Scottsburg in Halifax County. He also served as a pastor in Escore. From 1921 to 1942, he served as the pastor of Mt. Carmel Baptist Church in Northampton County, North Carolina, on the Virginia border. As a seminary graduate, from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s eventual alma mater, he was more educated than most of his peers , a point of considerable pride for Mt. Carmel Baptist Church, with a member writing what follows in a 1947 popular history of the church “I feel that we can say without fear of contradiction that Mt. Carmel Church has been blessed for well over a century with the finest group of consecrated, well trained pastors that any rural church in America of like size has ever had.” He was remunerated to a degree consistent with this high regard and comparable with a freeholding farm family in the region , earning 108 dollars and forty-five cents in January of 1929 , however his later writings make note of the difficulties in obtaining that salary from a congregation in the throes of the Great Depression.

Mr. Lloyd unfortunately disappears from the record after leaving Mt. Carmel Baptist Church in 1942, however, his diary of some ten years was given over to the Writer’s Project for copying into his file during their 1939 interview with him. It reveals much of the daily work of a rural pastor, from checking on parishioners to engaging with the larger denomination at the state level,  including with faculty at what is now Wake Forest University, at that time still a college located east of Raleigh. He also speaks on the role of a pastor in rural churches, the various personalities which can dominate their meetings, and his own respect for the agrarian hardships of his region.

Land Tenancy and the Great Depression in Eastern North Carolina
While the Great Depression is generally held as extending from 1929 to the beginning of U.S. involvement in World War II, the South suffered throughout the 1920s, and was the site of incredible economic inequality even before the markets crashed. In 1929, members of landowning families, just less than one quarter of the population, held just less than 87% of the region’s wealth and the richest class, white landlords, had an average wealth 73 times that of the poorest, Black sharecroppers. The poorest families in the region lived on an annual cash income of $640.59, equivalent to $ 11,530.51 in September 2023 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator.

This striking inequality, while less pronounced in some regions of the South, was common enough to raise serious concerns among New Deal bureaucrats, who had in the mid-1930s established the Farm Security Administration, modeled in part off of agricultural reforms in the wake of the Mexican Revolution. Tore Olsson of the University of Tennessee writes "It may seem unexpected that a league of revolutionary peasants and a U.S. agricultural economist believed that they shared a common mission. Yet their perception of a shared project was not simply imagined. From the mid- 1930s through the end of World War II the U.S. and Mexican federal governments both waged campaigns to transform the political economy of their  respective countrysides."

These programs, however, were deeply flawed, providing relief to only a minuscule portion of the afflicted population and deeply angering Southern landowners. However, they led to a Democratic shift among poor Southerners both white and Black and presaged the Great Society of Lyndon B. Johnson. Thus throughout most of the early twentieth century Eastern North Carolina was dominated by poor farmers hit hard by the Great Depression.

The Great Depression and Southern Protestantism
During the Great Depression the American South underwent a religious transformation, with a shift away from mainline Protestant groups and towards Evangelical churches, especially among working class people. These more radical forms of Protestantism drew worshippers away from mainline churches as they struggled to provide effective relief and grappled with the federal government’s assumption of that role. On the other hand, Evangelical churches were often centers for organizing and labor resistance, indeed one Baptist church near Birmingham, Alabama, had for their pastor “a man who spoke at communist rallies, wrote for the local communist paper, and may have been a party member himself.” In the mill villages and mining camps of the region, church affiliation became a marker of social class “with Methodists and Presbyterians most frequently enrolling middle and upper classes, Baptists split, and pentecostal and holiness congregations tending toward lower class." These congregations were often demeaned for their embrace of dramatic and sometimes dangerous practices like the snake handling of Appalachian Pentecostalism. Even in the face of religious ridicule, Evangelical groups worked to provide mutual aid, filling the gap where federal and Mainline Protestant programs failed.