Black Theology and #BlackLivesMatter: The Contemporary Struggle for Freedom and Justice

This research work is about black women’s contribution in the struggle for black freedom in America as dramatized in Toni Morrison’s works. Drawing from the New Historicism, the psychological and sociological approaches which allow to enlighten a literary text within its socio-historical dimension, it purports to highlight strategies of revolt settled by black female characters against social injustices and discrimination in order to integrate the American society. The exploration of the selected narratives evidences the manifestations of black women’s struggle for black freedom; a revolt related to the history of America with abolitionists like Harriet Tubman called by ‘black Moses,’ Harriet Jacobs, Rosa Park to quote only some. Being the most vulnerable for ages in the practice of slavery, black women revolted and involved themselves into concrete actions to claim not only their identity as black people but also the right to be considered human beings as white people in the American soil. To get rid of the white system of slavery, black women inner motivation of revolt has been expressed by the psychological awake allowing them to act for their identity and freedom. This study finally shows not only the involvement of black women in the struggle for black freedom, but also the black women power in conflict regulation testimonies of which are substantial in the history of America.

Challenging Historical Iconography:A Look at Women's Everyday Political Mobilization Crystal R. Sanders (bio) Keisha N. Blain, Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. 255 pp. Figures, notes, and index. $34.95 Elizabeth Gillespie McRae, Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. xiv + 352 pp. Figures, notes, bibliography and index. $34.95 Rebecca Tuuri, Strategic Sisterhood: The National Council of Negro Women in the Black Freedom Struggle. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. xii + 313 pp. Figures, notes, bibliography and index. $29.95 Iconography in history can be a dangerous thing. It encourages the deification of men such as Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X as lone freedom fighters in the long civil rights movement. It codes Pan-African strategists as male and reduces the long and wide geographical arc of white supremacy to the actions of a few men such as George Wallace and Ross Barnett. The danger with historical iconography is that it leads to inaccurate and reductionist accounts of history. It often marginalizes women's leadership or excludes them altogether. Three recently published monographs about black and white women's everyday political mobilization, Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom; Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy; and Strategic Sisterhood: The National Council of Negro Women in the Black Freedom Struggle, push back against historical narratives that center exclusively on men. These works show that from civil rights struggles and massive resistance in the United States to global black nationalist movements, women have played pivotal roles. Together, the books complicate our understanding of gender and the ways in which women have attempted to make sense of the world they live in and transform. The works also challenge male-dominated narratives about civil rights activism, black emigration, and American conservatism. While these books are not the first [End Page 629] to put female actors at center stage, they expand our knowledge of women's political work in various arenas. In Strategic Sisterhood, Rebecca Tuuri introduced readers to the longstanding political and social justice work of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), an elite black women's organization formed by Mary McLeod Bethune in 1935. The esteemed black woman educator and activist sought to unite black women's sororities, professional organizations, and auxiliaries to improve black women and their communities. Under Bethune's tenure from 1935 until 1949, the council focused on obtaining federal government jobs and military opportunities for black women but failed to shed its elitist image. In addition to Bethune, other powerful black women who held NCNW leadership positions include Sadie Alexander, the first African American woman to receive a Ph.D. in economics in the United States, and Patricia Harris, the first African American woman to serve in a United States presidential cabinet and to serve as a United States ambassador. While NCNW membership has consisted mainly of middle-class black women, the council supported both moderate and radical black activism throughout the twentieth century, partnering both with interracial groups and groups committed to black separatism. While it is now expected that scholarship on the civil rights movement include the contributions of women, studies that focus on women's civil rights organizations remain rare. Historian Tiyi Morris's Womanpower Unlimited and the Black Freedom Struggle in Mississippi (2015) is one notable exception. Tuuri's scholarship on the NCNW, the largest black women's organization in the United States at the height of the civil rights, Black Power, and feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s, helps to fill the void and complicates traditional understandings of radical political organizing. Dorothy Height assumed the NCNW presidency in 1956 and used the position to ensure that black women's voices and perspectives were included in civil rights leadership gatherings throughout the 1960s. When March on Washington organizers denied women a major speaking role at the historic event in 1963, Height, under the auspices of the NCNW, organized a women's conference the very next day. She convened...

Locating the Civil Rights Movement: An Essay on the Deep South, Midwest, and Border South in Black Freedom Studies

Black Liberation Theology and the Lynching of Jesus

Reviewed by: God with Us: Lived Theology and the Freedom Struggle in Americus, Georgia, 1942–1976 by Ansley L. Quiros Tobin Miller Shearer God with Us: Lived Theology and the Freedom Struggle in Americus, Georgia, 1942–1976. By Ansley L. Quiros. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. Pp. xvi, 292. Paper, $29.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-4676-3; cloth, $90.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-4675-6.) Integrating theology into history requires formidable resources. At minimum, a mastery of theological nuance and a means of integrating belief with politics, society, and economics are necessary. If writing from an intersectional framework, the task only becomes more complex. Ansley L. Quiros models how to engage in such a demanding historical enterprise. Her examination of the theological skirmishes over civil rights in Americus, Georgia, deftly weaves together the stories of Clarence Jordan and Martin England’s Koinonia Farm, local white segregationists, and black congregations in the area. Rigorously researched, passionately written, and historically nuanced, God with Us: Lived Theology and the Freedom Struggle in Americus, Georgia, 1942–1976 contributes to our understanding of the religious forces at play in the South during the mid-twentieth-century phase of the long black freedom struggle. Although other scholars have explored similar territory, Quiros moves the conversation forward by braiding the perspectives of segregationists, integrationists, and the black church into a microhistory. Likewise, she is particularly adept at employing the “lived theology” framework to explore those various perspectives (p. 5). Quiros’s explanatory powers are evident throughout. When explicating her framework for analyzing religious forces, she states, “Simply put, [End Page 224] lived religion examines action to understand belief while lived theology examines belief to understand action” (p. 6). Elsewhere Quiros eschews caricature and stereotype. Witness, for instance, her commentary on white segregationists: “they emerge as people seeking to preserve their faith and their way of life from the outside incursions of Charles Darwin and Karl Marx, the National Council of Churches and the federal government” (p. 56). Yet some of Quiros’s historiographical analysis lacks the nuance she extends to her subjects. For instance, her claim that “historians’ marginalization of unsavory religious views has perpetuated an overly simplistic, triumphalist narrative of the civil rights movement” undervalues the robust scholarship that, somewhat ironically, she draws on to develop her own narrative (p. 4). The work of David L. Chappell, Carolyn Renee Dupont, Paul Harvey, Stephen Haynes, Charles Marsh, and many others have pushed back against this triumphalist narrative rather effectively. Still, Quiros makes her stakes clear. As she notes of the black freedom struggle, “It was not just civil rights but Christian orthodoxy that was at stake” (p. 5). Likewise, Quiros demonstrates that her treatment of religious forces in the civil rights movement shows that the struggle in Americus, as in many other parts of the South, was “one without a predestined victor” (p. 5). Those stakes are never more evident than in her treatment of the events at Koinonia Farm. To be certain, the book offers vivid portrayals of the segregationist theology that thrived at white congregations clustered around Lee Street in Americus; the black theology that flourished at Bethesda Baptist Church, Campbell Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church, and the smaller black churches in their orbit; and the integrationist theology that motivated the activists who participated in the kneel-ins at local segregated congregations. Yet the moments of highest drama emerge in the depictions of events at the integrationist experiment in “redemptive agriculture” practiced at Koinonia (p. 23). As much as the book seeks to balance the three theological streams of integration, segregation, and black theology, the Koinonia narrative runs widest. The cover’s feature photograph of the integrated Camp Koinonia establishes her core interest. Note also her high praise: Koinonia “was a prophetic ‘voice in the wilderness’ in the segregated South. It was a voice that would be misunderstood and suppressed, at times heard only by the sun high above” (p. 16). In the end, Quiros offers a well-written, theologically and historically sophisticated, and thoughtfully nuanced text, one that will appeal to those interested in the civil rights movement, religious studies, and the many dimensions of the struggle for freedom...

Reviewed by: Battling the Plantation Mentality: Memphis and the Black Freedom Struggle Kenneth W. Goings Battling the Plantation Mentality: Memphis and the Black Freedom Struggle. By Laurie B. Green. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2007. Green's history of freedom struggles in Memphis, roughly from 1940 to the assassination of Dr. King, includes all the expected moments and movements from Boss Crump's role, to the desegregation campaigns, to the voting rights battles, to the students' activism of the late 1960s, and ending with the Sanitation Worker's Strike. She does a very good job of explaining this history. But what is truly of value are the roughly sixty interviews Green conducted for this study. They add a human dimension to what has become a familiar story and they remind us that it was ordinary, everyday people wanting to live with dignity and self-respect who really created the history of this period. A great example is the interview with Sally Turner, a retired factory worker, that opens the book. She relates what may seem like a minor grievance at first, but clearly is the kind of issue that was at the heart of the freedom struggles, that is, the struggle to live with dignity and self-respect. Ms. Turner notes, "The struggle was we didn't have a water fountain! No water fountain in 1965" (1). The reader will notice that the complaint was not about integrating the water fountain, but about providing a basic necessity of life. Instead of installing a water fountain, the factory foreman provided a bucket and a dipper—the same type of implements used in the fields back on the plantation and what most black people hoped they had left behind by moving to a city like Memphis. This first interview exemplifies several other themes at work in Green's well researched and well-documented work. First, this study is richly grounded in oral interviews of working-class African Americans in Memphis, not the middle class. Second, they allow those on the frontlines of this battle to tell their own stories of the everyday battles that had to be waged so that black people in Memphis in the mid-twentieth century could live with dignity and self-respect. The opening interview exemplifies another theme that is often overlooked and not much discussed when histories of the freedom struggles are written. The opposition was not static. As African Americans moved to express their grievances, the white opposition pushed back, as illustrated by the foremen adding another insult to an already degrading situation. Ms. Turner reminds us that not all the battles in this struggle were legislative; some were very personal. Additionally, these interviews allow Green to give much more space to the activities of women in Memphis. Most freedom struggle histories now give some attention to women; however, Green, largely through the interviews but also with other sources, is able to document the myriad campaigns carried out by women, from the fight for bathroom rights at the RCA plant to welfare rights fights, to public housing battles, to their often unheralded role in the Memphis Sanitation Workers strike. Green has done an excellent job of filling in a largely missing history of all the participants in the freedom struggles in Memphis. I would recommend this book to those interested in working class histories, the history of the Civil Rights Movement, and Black women's history. Kenneth W. Goings The Ohio State University Copyright © 2010 Mid-America American Studies Association

Religion & Literature 214 to elucidate Matthew Arnold’s view of “culture.” The upshot, that Dante “holds open the possibility that the imaginative contemplation of beauty may lead us however gently beyond itself to an encounter with what is real,” is well taken (150), but it would have been far more compelling had Wilson interpreted the poem, or even just a few of its arrestingly beautiful moments. Part III is concerned with truth and the ways in which “narrativity” and “rationality” relate to one another in its communication. Wilson thinks that the “conservative intellectual tradition” is distinct in not only “offering a narrative of its own,” but also in “defending story itself as the essential, unmatched means to knowledge about truth and goodness” (237). Here, Wilson defends the narrative form of the arts, against (post-)modern attempts to “liberate” art from the conditions of time and narrative, working through examples of the failure of those attempts to do more than make narrative “exogenous” to the works in question (256-57). In Wilson’s end is his beginning: the conservative intellectual tradition is the best hope for the recovery of the Christian Platonist worldview in which the vision of the soul is fundamentally ordered by, to, and from beauty to the recognition of a goodness and truth worth conserving and cultivating. Vision of the Soul merits the studied consideration of a wide audience, particularly those searching for a compelling case for conservatism, as well as those at the beginning of their intellectual journey. Students of literature, art, philosophy, and theology will find in Wilson’s Vision an insightful reflection on perennial questions besetting the human condition and a thoughtful engagement with some of the central texts that have informed the Christian Platonist tradition of inquiry into those questions. J. Columcille Dever University of Notre Dame Religion of the Field Negro: On Black Secularism and Black Theology Vincent W. Lloyd Fordham University Press, 2018. 1 + 285 pp. $105 hardcover, $30 paperback. Vincent W. Lloyd’s Religion of the Field Negro: On Black Secularism and Black Theology is a long overdue riposte to secularism’s encroachment upon the power of black theology. Lloyd joins a growing chorus of post-secular BOOK REVIEWS 215 scholars—notably Talal Asad and Saba Mahmood—whose investigations have unearthed the genealogy of secularism’s exclusionary management not only of religion but also of race. However, the book takes secular-minded critics, and black theologians, to task for allowing secularism to domesticate black theology. Malcolm X’s idea of the good “religion” of the field negro— the black masses in revolutionary struggle against white supremacy—thus becomes Lloyd’s starting point in resurrecting a black theology that takes seriously the oppression of African-Americans and all “blacks” (the weak, the marginal, the afflicted), under the “white” powers that be (the comfortable , the wealthy, the privileged). Lloyd contends that secularism today acts Much like the black liberal Protestantism of the Civil Rights era that succumbed to the bad “religion” of the house negro—the status quo of white supremacy—in bad faith as it co-opts black theology to make it speak on behalf of prevailing forms of multiculturalism and religious pluralism, but not to its most radical proposition: “God is black” (6). For Lloyd, “God is black” because God exists amongst all blacks, the poor and powerless. God’s blackness is antithetical to whiteness. Black theology, ergo, should renounce whiteness to truly worship God. Ultimately, Lloyd argues black theology must privilege the social criticism of white supremacy, as well as hold up the wisdom of blacks to reclaim a theological vision released from the disciplinary , secular logics of whiteness and oriented toward the liberation of all blacks by a black God. To do so, Lloyd defines black theology—and for him, “theology, properly understood, is black theology”—as “speaking more rightly and rigorously about God” (5, 6). To speak more “rigorously” identifies what God is not— whiteness. To speak more “rightly” articulates where God is—amongst blacks. Hence, Lloyd’s opening section focuses on various intellectuals— white and black, theological and non-theological—whose efforts to speak more “rigorously” and “rightly” come into tension with secular thought. Lloyd’s illuminating...

Reclaiming the Revolutionary

Reviewed by: Strategic Sisterhood: The National Council of Negro Women in the Black Freedom Struggle by Rebecca Tuuri Sariah Orocu Strategic Sisterhood: The National Council of Negro Women in the Black Freedom Struggle. By Rebecca Tuuri. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2018. 338 pp. $29.95. ISBN 978-1-4696-3890-4. When reflecting on the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s and 1970s, the largest Black women's organization at the time often remains unheard of or forgotten. The National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) fought and struggled against racism, poverty, and sexism, alongside other influential civil rights groups and leaders. Rebecca Tuuri's book, Strategic Sisterhood, accounts for this organization as well as the accomplishments and failures of the women who led it in their fight for equal rights. Tuuri starts by discussing the early history of the Council and its activism, which focused on placing Black women in positions of power throughout society along with lobbying for racial change. The Council initially tried to recruit women from lower classes into its organization. However, college-educated sorority women were its most pronounced members, and the organization's emphasis on networking and professionalism was unrealistic and unattainable for many impoverished women. The early composition of the membership hindered the group. Since the majority of the members were of a higher economic status, they struggled to advocate effectively and support Black women who fell below the poverty line. Dorothy Height was the group's president and most influential leader. She played a major role in the inclusion of Black women in the Civil Rights movement. Height was no stranger to racial discrimination, which in turn shaped her life in academia and activism. As a child she witnessed her mother, a trained nurse, experience professional and personal constraints that Black women all over America faced. Height grew up with these frustrations, and they fueled her desire to excel. Yet, Height also experienced racial discrimination in her academic career. In 1929, she was accepted into Barnard College [End Page 269] but was denied admittance on the basis that the school's quota of two Black women had already been met. Following her denial from Barnard, Height enrolled at New York University, where her academic excellence and achievements exposed her to social and political causes and led to her involvement in activism throughout her career. Another factor that influenced Height's equal rights work was her frustration with the disregard Black women faced from male civil rights activists. Tuuri notes an important event that triggered Height's mission was her exclusion from participating or speaking at the 1963 March on Washington, even though she was the president of the NCNW, the lone female-centered organization at the time. "Height argued that women's exclusion from the March on Washington leadership," Tuuri writes, "was 'vital to awakening the women's movement'" (34). Tuuri argues that, at that particular moment, Height was not particularly forthright about the sexism that she and other Black women encountered. Instead, "she looked for an alternative strategy to circumvent these limitations. There was still plenty to be done, with or without the support of men" (34). Height applied the mindset that change could be accomplished without relying on male support to further the mission of the NCNW. Tuuri highlights the shift in the NCNW towards a more discrete, but effective, method of activism. The Council applied a strategy of eliminating racism through the moral persuasion of whites, leading to an interracial delegation within the organization. The NCNW's first major project in this regard was Wednesdays in Mississippi (WIMS). Initially, white and Black women from the North traveled to Mississippi and spent three days observing the Jim Crow South and making connections with southern Black women. These visits exposed the rest of the nation to what was going on in segregated Mississippi, the most racially violent state in the country with the greatest number of known lynchings. Two-thirds of the members in WIMS were white and the remaining one-third Black, and it included upper- and middle-class northern women who were Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish. Tuuri examines the WIMS and NCNW strategies of cooperation across...

Reviewed by: Jim Crow Capital: Women and Black Freedom Struggles in Washington, D.C., 1920–1945 by Mary-Elizabeth B. Murphy Traci Parker Jim Crow Capital: Women and Black Freedom Struggles in Washington, D.C., 1920–1945. By Mary-Elizabeth B. Murphy. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. Pp. [xii], 280. Paper, $29.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-4672-5; cloth, $90.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-4671-8.) Embracing the long civil rights movement approach, the historian Mary-Elizabeth B. Murphy tells the story of African American women’s civil rights activism in early-twentieth-century Washington, D.C., which she aptly refers to as “Jim Crow Capital,” in Jim Crow Capital: Women and Black Freedom Struggles in Washington, D.C., 1920–1945. Murphy argues that, after World War I and the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, African American women waged a gamut of campaigns for voting and citizenship rights. These rights, which were conferred by local and federal laws in the 1860s, were abolished less than a decade later. Working in behalf of all African Americans, in and outside the nation’s capital, black women “crafted a broad vision of citizenship rights, maintaining that full equality would never be achieved until everyone was equal in the eyes of the law; each person had the opportunity to earn a just wage and live decently; America’s commemorative landscape celebrated the achievements of the nation’s diverse citizenry; and all women, men, and children lived free of the terrors of violence” (p. 2). African American women’s vision and activism, Murphy concludes, not only transformed the nation’s capital but also influenced the nature and direction of postwar black freedom struggles. Drawing largely on black organizational records and newspapers, Murphy meticulously traces in six chapters African American women’s shifting focus from national politics to local affairs. Each chapter examines these women’s use of social and political networks and organizations to try to pass (albeit unsuccessfully) a federal antilynching law, combat police brutality, secure economic justice and local suffrage, and end racial segregation and discrimination in public accommodations. The chapter on African American women’s campaign against police brutality is particularly timely and compelling. Using twenty-nine reported cases of violence against black women, Murphy reveals that, though the campaign was “not an exclusively women’s movement,” women successfully leveraged their “networks in neighborhood associations, the Phyllis Wheatley YWCA, fraternal orders, and political organizations. to make the city ‘Safe for Negro Womanhood’” (p. 79). As black women rallied against police violence, Murphy also notes, they began “to employ militant language, direct action resistance, and an unwavering quest for first-class citizenship” (p. 109). Arguably, Murphy makes her strongest case that black women in Washington laid the foundation for the civil rights movement in her final chapter. Here, she examines Howard University students’ 1943 sit-in movement and situates it within “a larger movement that included federal lobbying campaigns, protests against transportation segregation, and ongoing engagement with the memories of the Civil War” (p. 174). This sit-in movement, Murphy finds, “became affiliated with the Fellowship of Reconciliation of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) By uniting a local movement with a prominent, national civil rights organization, activists saw the black freedom struggle in Washington, D.C., as a model for the nation” (p. 190). [End Page 512] Some readers, however, may be left wanting a fuller interrogation of this local movement’s reach. What made the Washington sit-in movement “a model for the nation”? Was it the employment of this tactic in the consumer sphere and in the nation’s capital during World War II? Was it the convergence of the sit-in with other grassroots campaigns in Washington? Was it well received by African Americans in other cities—who were engaging similar battles—during and after the war? Nevertheless, Jim Crow Capital is a welcome addition to a growing body of literature on the black freedom movement and black Washington’s lives and labors in the early twentieth century. Murphy’s well-researched book reaffirms and expands our knowledge of the sacrifices, ingenuity, and activism of African American women who paved the way and shaped...

Resisting “Law and Order” in California: Howard Moore Jr., Angela Davis, and the Politics of Prison Radicalism

There has been much criticism – and an overall unfortunate dismissal – of William R. Jones' Is God A White Racist?: A Preamble to Black Theology (1973) in the literature of Black liberation theology. What is undertheorized, however, is the constructive possibilities of Jones' work. Analyzing the theological debate between Jones and James H. Cone provides us with the necessary material in order to construct a Black theology that commences with the assumptions of Jones' theodicy. I argue that theodicy is a useful “controlling category” for Black liberation theology, but only – and here I am following Kant – as a result of how its collapses rational arguments for believing in God/liberation. And it is precisely this failure that makes it profoundly useful as an avenue into understanding the contours of “Black faith” that undergirds Black liberation theology.

The media has played a fundamental role in American race relations since the days of slavery. The black press has been a source of protest against racial inequality and a disseminator of news and information for and about the black community from the time of its emergence in the early 19th century. However, for much of this history, black America remained largely invisible in mainstream journalism with only criminal activity ever reported on in the white press. It was not until the 1950s and 1960s that the media spotlight began to shine on America’s black citizens, illuminating the inequities they faced to a national and worldwide audience. The way in which the white press covered the struggle for black freedom defined its nature, chronology, and achievements in popular understanding and memory. For decades, this first draft of history influenced how scholars interpreted the civil rights movement. Despite a long history of individual and organized resistance to oppression, the movement is often conceived of beginning when the Montgomery Bus Boycott prompted reporters to make household names of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the male ministers who led the principal civil rights organizations in the following years. Yet in Montgomery and throughout the next decade, the community organizing of mostly women workers remained unseen. Imagery of police dogs and firehoses being used against peaceful demonstrators sparked outrage at the same time as ensuring that racism became associated with Southern bigotry rather than socioeconomic inequality. In recent years, new scholarship has sought to correct this distorted narrative and shed light on the media’s part in its creation. Scholars have also shown how an appreciation of the value of publicity in gaining support for the struggle for black freedom shaped the organizing of the civil rights movement. At the same time, coverage of the race issue determined the evolution of modern journalism, nowhere more so than in the development of its newest electronic iteration: television news. Furthermore, reporters played a large part in painting the Black Power era as a tragic coda to the civil rights story, where Martin Luther King’s integrationist dream was lost to militancy, madness, and mayhem. Twenty-first-century scholarship has highlighted the continuities and shared roots between the two movements, refuting the line in the sand drawn by the media between two mutually exclusive strategies of resistance. While Black Power activists decried their negative portrayals in the press, at the same time press coverage was fundamental to the creation of their image and the dissemination of their message. As such, any study of the struggle for black freedom and the media would be incomplete without considering how this relationship changed in the Black Power era. Moreover, entertainment is an important facet of any discussion of the media and civil rights. The black image in popular culture, one that was often portrayed by negative stereotypes with long histories, defined African Americans in the minds of many white Americans, intensifying racial disharmony. African Americans had little input toward or control over this imagery, as segregation within the entertainment industry barred them from writing or production roles. Representation in Hollywood and entertainment television, both onscreen and within the industry, formed a core plank of civil rights campaigning. This article’s review of scholarship will consider both entertainment and the news media in its discussion of civil rights and the media.

The Divided Mind of the Black Church: Theology, Piety, and Public Witness. By Raphael G.Warnock. New York: NYU Press, 276 pages

There is an upsurge of renewed interest in South Africa in Black Consciousness, Black theology and consequently in the work of Steven Bantu Biko who remains a central figure for a movement that now seems to inspire a new generation, especially pertaining to the raging debates on Africanity, decolonisation, and Africanisation. This author believes that this resurgence presents an historic moment that calls for a serious re-examination of Biko’s thought. Even though Biko’s reflections on Black theology per se were sparse, they are extremely important in my view, and open up new avenues for Black theological reflection and praxis as regards the fundamental questions of integrity and authenticity in global struggles for freedom, equity and dignity. It is my view that in these struggles Black liberation theology is not only relevant but necessary. This article discusses the contexts within which modern South African Black theology came into being, explores Biko’s definitions of Black theology, and the ways in which Biko’s understanding of Black theology searching for “a fighting God” and Black theology as “not a theology of absolutes” opens up the possibilities for enriching the meaning and relevance of Black theology today.