Black Women's Christian Activism: Seeking Social Justice in a Northern Suburb

Abstract

Betty Livingston Adams documents the intrepid leadership of the black Christian women instrumental in organizing resistance to the increasing entrenchment of segregation in the northern suburb of Summit, New Jersey, in the first half of the twentieth century. Adams sets out to illustrate the ways black women's “faith and willingness to assume responsibility mattered in the churches they established, the institutions they built, and the communities they sustained” (p. 1). She undoubtedly succeeds. Black Women's Christian Activism builds on classics such as Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham's Righteous Discontent (1993), Judith Weisenfeld's African American Women and Christian Activism (1997), and Bettye Collier-Thomas's Jesus, Jobs, and Justice (2010). Adams breaks new ground in her attention to non-elite women in a northern suburb. Her book extends the chronological scope for studies of suburbanization as a white racial project into the early twentieth century; expands the geographic scope of scholarship on Jim Crow segregation into the North; and, most importantly, centers the labors of black working women in literature on black Christian activism.