A Leavening Force: African American Women and Christian Mission in the Civil Rights Era

Abstract

After Josephine Beckwith and DeLaris Johnson broke the color barrier at two southern missionary training schools in the 1940s and 50s, their religious vocations led them and other African American women on a trajectory of missionary service resonate with what we recognize today as civil rights activism. While histories of African American women's mission organizing and those of their civil rights organizing typically are framed as separate endeavors, this article teases out the previously unexamined overlaps and connections between black women's missionary efforts and civil rights activism in the 1940s and 50s. In doing so, it bridges a disjuncture in African American women's religious history, illuminating the ways beliefs about Christian mission shaped the community work of black missionary women so that narratives of civil rights organizing and Christian missions are no longer discrete categories but are seen in historical continuity. In shedding light on the ways mission organizing and service served as a site for cultivating leadership and engaging segregation and racism, a new vision and practice of mission for the civil rights era is revealed and our understandings of the religious lives and activism of African American women are greatly enriched and expanded.