The Great Awakening: Conversion and Fight for Freedom in African American Christianity 1734–1742

ABSTRACTThis article examines Ella Baker’s distinctive contributions to what she called the fight for full freedom. In particular, this article analyzes Baker’s 1969 speech, “The Black Woman in the Civil Rights Struggle.” This article contends that Baker’s rhetorical efforts allowed her to revitalize and rethink the Civil Rights Movement by positioning her audience as its leaders. By empowering her audience to be leaders and to take a personal stake in the fight for freedom, Baker promoted the continuation of the Civil Rights Movement by emphasizing the importance of individual action and the commitment to a larger communal struggle. This article enriches scholarship about the Civil Rights Movement, by highlighting how Civil Rights Movement rhetors used a wide array of appeals.

Reviewed by: Uplifting the People: Three Centuries of Black Baptists in Alabama Randal Maurice Jelks Uplifting the People: Three Centuries of Black Baptists in Alabama. By Wilson Fallin Jr.Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. 1997. Local and regional studies of African American institutions are important and there is nothing more understudied than African American churches. This is especially true of Baptist churches which were indigenously created institutions throughout the Caribbean and the American South beginning in the eighteenth century. Wilson Fallin's book Uplifting the People is therefore a welcome addition to the study of the African American Baptist church at the regional level. What is all the more interesting is that Fallin writes both as a historian and as a black Baptist clergyman from Alabama. Although being an "insider" does not necessarily give one more understanding when interpreting history than being an "outsider," he uses his unique knowledge to convey the story of Black Baptists in Alabama with critical insight about its past and deep care for the existing institution today. Though the idea of being uplifted has been scoffed at by a younger generation of historians and cultural studies analysis, Fallin interprets the idea of uplifting differently. He truly sees the work in terms of its spiritual component when American slaves reinterpreted Christianity through the lenses of African cultures and radical evangelicalism. The Afro-Baptist faith which slaves created sought to reshape the lives of its people not only politically, but also as persons with transcendent meaning. The uplift that Black Baptists sought was not one-dimensional but for the entire person. One could not be free from physical bonds of oppression without being called to be free to live in community as a brother or a sister in the love of God. And to this end, Wilson succeeds at narrating a rich history of Black Baptists in Alabama. Out of slavery, though economically impoverished, Black Baptists fostered churches, built associations, created schools, and promoted political and civic awareness. In fact, as Fallin points out it was based on the strength of the Black Baptists that the Civil Rights Movement, under the leadership of Baptist clergymen like the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, Ralph Abernathy, and Martin Luther King Jr. was to have its most successful campaigns in cities like Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma. There are only two quibbles that I have with this book. The first one is glaring. The central problem of the book are its citations, or should I say, the lack thereof. The key thing missing from this book are more detailed citations, especially about key issues and personalities. Simply put, the source material needed to be better documented. My second quibble is minor. Although Fallin discusses the rise of gospel music within the Baptist churches, he does not discuss the cultural impact that Alabama quartet singing had on America. Among African Americans, black Alabamians were widely known for their religious quartets, and it was black Alabama's northern bound children who urbanized [End Page 82] that tradition of singing into legendary Motown acts—the Supremes, the Temptations, the Four Tops, and the Jackson Five. Randal Maurice Jelks University of Kansas Copyright © 2008 Mid-America American Studies Association

“Down Where the South Begins”: Black Richmond Activism before the Modern Civil Rights Movement, 1899–1930

During a recent research trip to the Mississippi Department of Archives and History in Jackson, Mississippi, I studied photographs documenting the interiors of black homes from the early 1900s to the present. I was particularly interested in uses of religious art. Although I found little of what I was looking for, two archivists reminded me about a common feature of the visual culture of African-American domestic popular at mid-century and persisting in some rural areas today. These archivists, both middle-aged black women who had grown up in Mississippi, told me that during the 1950s and 1960s every black home, no matter how rich or poor, displayed two portraits next to one another in the kitchen or living room. One was of Jesus, the other of Martin Luther King, Jr. Finding images of Jesus and King tacked side-by-side to the walls of black homes fifty years ago would come as no surprise to David Chappell in his book about the role of religion in the civil rights movement, Stone of Hope. For this particular visual dimension of modern African-American symbolizes the key point to his work-that the integration of religion and politics among blacks laboring to overthrow the system of Jim Crow was a crucial reason for their many victories. King and his followers found a unifying sense of political purpose and a range of cultural resources in African-American churches that ultimately ensured their triumphs. By contrast, Chappell argues, segregationists failed to garner the popular support necessary to turn back threats to the southern way of life because they lacked the enthusiastic backing of most of their spiritual leaders; for them, religion was a source of dissent and fragmentation that undermined their defensive stand. As he puts it, The civil rights movement succeeded for many reasons. This book isolates and magnifies one reason that has received insufficient attention: black activists got strength from old-time religion, and white

The Doubts of Their Fathers:The God Debate and the Conflict between African American Churches and Civil Rights Organizations between the World Wars Stephen Tuck (bio) In february 1923, William Pickens, the field secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), penned an article in the black radical journal The Messenger called "Things Nobody Believes." The nobody was anyone "with intelligence." The things included bible stories, creation, miracles, Christ's resurrection, Christian creeds, a material heaven, and hell—which was "a helluvanidea." Most Christian teaching was "superstitious buncombe," Pickens asserted, and any "man who believes anything simply because somebody believed it two or three thousand years ago, is an idiot."1 "Pickens Denies Resurrection" and "Dean Pickens Says There Is No Hell" were front-page headlines in African American newspapers.2 Born in South Carolina in 1881, the son of former slaves, Pickens was one of the most high-profile African American leaders of the era, a renowned educator, columnist, orator, and civil rights activist. The NAACP's press release for Pickens's appointment as field secretary in 1920 trumpeted, "No orator of the race is so well known to colored Americans as Mr. Pickens." Pickens published his second autobiography in 1923, his speeches attracted large audiences, and his postbag [End Page 625] was full of fan mail, including one poem that started with the somewhat predictable rhyme, "Pickens, you're the dickens."3 Outspoken, impulsive, and frequently combative, Pickens was quick to get into arguments with anyone who crossed his path, from Marcus Garvey to his daughter's dentist.4 Or as he put it to his NAACP colleague W. E. B. Du Bois in 1921, "I have heard of men without enemies and I have often wondered what they could be doing." High on Pickens's hit list were the superstitions and dogmas "that dispense with the necessity for reason or judgement," including the Christianity that was preached in—as Pickens put it—"the average Negro church."5 Pickens had, in fact, been active in African American church circles earlier in his career. In 1922, just the year before "Things Nobody Believes," he had been a speaker at the Bishops' Council of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. But from the publication of this article onward, the NAACP's main ambassador to local communities spoke out with the zeal of the convert that he was from his self-described traditional Baptist upbringing.6 Part of Pickens's critique was of the institution of the black church and its personnel. After a meeting in [End Page 626] Pennsylvania in 1923, Pickens complained to the NAACP head office, "'The preachers help here in the usual way—by not hindering much. … [T]hey do nothing to help.'"7 Pickens frequently lampooned black clergy for their immorality, too. "We ordinary sinners," he mocked in a newspaper column, "have not even a chance to hit the spotlight any longer."8 (He also condemned "Ku Kluxed pulpits" in white churches, where the Klan had bought preachers by making "donations."9) But Pickens argued that the problem with Christianity in the "average Negro church" was not just misguided behavior that needed reform but also misguided beliefs that needed debunking. For Pickens, these beliefs not only were out-of-date and irrational but also had practical, detrimental consequences for the struggle for equality and the state of the country. He was frustrated when people appealed to their maker rather than applying themselves to make society better.10 In articles and speeches, Pickens insisted that progress for African Americans would come through self-reliance and scientific thought.11 He also noted that white supremacists were quick to invoke the "God alibi." When people "drag God into the argument," he warned, "you can usually look out for some scoundrelism that could not get by on any real logic."12 "Things Nobody Believes" was a liberal theological position expressed with Pickens's characteristic gusto. But such a position, asserted Levi J. Coppin of Philadelphia, an influential AME bishop, "is out of harmony with the prevailing doctrine of the Christian Church." "So greatly at variance is his [Pickens's] credo from what is...

Huey P. Newton's powerful legacy to the Black Panther movement and the civil rights struggle has long been obscured. Conservatives harp on Newton's drug use and on the circumstances of his death in a crack-related shooting. Liberals romanticize his black revolutionary rhetoric and idealize his message. In Huey P. Newton: The Radical Theorist, Judson L. Jeffries considers the entire arc of Newton's political role and influence on civil rights history and African American thought. Jeffries argues that, contrary to popular belief, Newton was one of the most important political thinkers in the struggle for civil rights. Huey P. Newton's political career spanned two decades. Like many freedom fighters, he was a complex figure. His international reputation was forged as much from his passionate defense of black liberation as from his highly publicized confrontations with police. His courage to address police brutality won him admirers in ghettos, on college campuses, and in select Hollywood circles. Newton gave Black Power a compelling urgency and played a pivotal role in the politics of black America during the 1960s and 1970s. Few would deny that Newton's life (1942-1989) was strewn with incidences of violence and that his police record was long. But Newton's struggles with police took place in a rich and troubled context that included urban unrest, police brutality, government repression, and an intense debate over civil rights tactics. Stripped of history and interpretation, the violence of Newton's life brought emphatic indictments of him. Newton's death attracted widespread media attention. However, pundits offered little on Newton as freedom fighter or as theoretician and activist. Huey P. Newton: The Radical Theorist dispels myths about Newton's life, but the book is primarily an in-depth examination of Newton's ideas. By exploring this charismatic leader, Jeffries's book makes a valuable contribution to the scant literature on Newton, while also exposing the core tenets and evolving philosophies of the Black Panther Party. Judson L. Jeffries is an assistant professor of political science at Purdue University. He is the author of Virginia's Native Son: The Election and Administration of Governor L. Douglas Wilder (2000), and his work has been published in such periodicals as Western Journal of Black Studies, Journal of Political Science, and Ethnic and Racial Studies.

Sermons to Address Obesity in Partnership With African American and Latino Churches

New Day Begun presents the findings of the first major research project on black churches' civic involvement since C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya's landmark study Black Church in the African American Experience. Since the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Acts and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the scale and scope of African American churches' civic involvement have changed significantly: the number of African American clergy serving in elective and appointive offices has noticeably increased, as have joint efforts by black churches and government agencies to implement policies and programs. Filling a vacuum in knowledge about these important developments, New Day Begun assesses the social, political and ecclesiastical factors that have shaped black church responses to American civic and political life since the Civil Rights movement. This collection analyses the results of an unprecedented survey of nearly two thousand African American churches across the country conducted by The Public Influences of African-American Churches Project, which is based at Morehouse College. These essays-by political scientists, theologians, ethicists, and other social scientists-draw on the survey findings to analyze the social, historic, and institutional contexts of black church activism and to consider the theological and moral imperatives that have shaped black church approaches to civic life-including black civil religion and womanist and afro-centric critiques. They also look at a host of faith-based initiatives addressing economic development and the provision of social services. New Day Begun presents necessary new interpretations of how black churches have changed-and been changed by-contemporary American political culture. Its contributors include: Lewis Baldwin; Allison Calhoun-Brown; David D. Daniels, III; Walter Earl Fluker; C.R.D. Halisi; David Howard-Pitney; Michael Leo Owens; Samuel Roberts; David Ryden; Corwin Smidt; and R. Drew Smith.

Identifying health conditions, priorities, and relevant multilevel health promotion intervention strategies in African American churches: A faith community health needs assessment

Reviewed by: The American Civil Rights Movement, 1865–1950: Black Agency and People of Good Will by Russell Brooker David T. Ballantyne The American Civil Rights Movement, 1865–1950: Black Agency and People of Good Will. By Russell Brooker. ( Lanham, Md., and other cities: Lexington Books, 2017. Pp. xxx, 333. $100.00, ISBN 978-0-7391-7992-5.) Russell Brooker provides an accessible overview of the black freedom struggle from the Civil War to 1950. The American Civil Rights Movement, [End Page 771] 1865–1950: Black Agency and People of Good Will is a political science– influenced accompaniment to recent syntheses of the long black civil rights struggle, such as Stephen Tuck's We Ain't What We Ought to Be: The Black Freedom Struggle from Emancipation to Obama (Cambridge, Mass., 2010), though Brooker's account ends before African Americans made their most significant gains. His central argument concerns "people of good will"—black and white individuals who acted in African Americans' interests regardless of their motives. Black agency and pressure, not altruism, he contends, induced this conduct. The first half of his synthesis maps black activism alongside the behavior of these people of good will from 1865 to the racial nadir of the early twentieth century. The second half traces the struggle to 1950, when the southern caste system was "severely weakened" (p. xviii). The book concludes with an epilogue that reflects on connections between 1865 and 1950 and contemporary race relations. Brooker enumerates his major arguments at the outset, organizes chapters clearly, and writes in straightforward prose. He also quantifies shifting African American fortunes throughout his account, including helpful tables detailing Reconstruction-era African American college foundations, lynchings by race during "Redemption," twentieth-century black and white southern schooling data, and indices of the extent of racial segregation over time. Breaking with Tuck's nationally focused account and other scholarship examining racial unrest outside the South, Brooker portrays the civil rights struggle as a mostly southern phenomenon. His nonsouthern treatment includes shifting northern public opinion on race throughout the period, nationwide post–World War I race riots, legal decisions concerning racially restrictive covenants, and the activities of northern civil rights organizations in the South, not elsewhere. Yet while the North was a "safe haven" for African Americans in comparison with the Jim Crow South, the American civil rights struggle concerned more than destroying southern racial apartheid (p. xxi). Incorporating scholarship that examines nonsouthern civil rights struggles and that questions the nonsouthern racial consensus around the mid-twentieth century—like Thomas J. Sugrue's Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York, 2008)—would bring nuance to Brooker's analysis and enable him to explain with greater authority the subsequent nationwide white reaction to race that he hints at in the epilogue. Closer engagement with more recent historiography would also strengthen Brooker's discussion. First, Brooker'suse of civil rights movement to define activism between 1865 and 1950 welcomes a consideration of recent debates over the periodization of the civil rights movement—relevant works include Jacquelyn Dowd Hall's "The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past" (Journal of American History, 91 [March 2005], 1233–63) and Sundiata Cha-Jua and Clarence Lang's "The 'Long Movement' as Vampire: Temporal and Spatial Fallacies in Recent Black Freedom Studies" (Journal of African American History, 92 [Spring 2007], 265–88). Yet in Brooker'stelling, thisworkissimply "about the civil rights movement … before it [the term] got capitalized" (p. xii). Second, given the book's justifiable emphasis on the centrality of violence in infringing on black freedoms, recent military-focused Reconstruction scholarship [End Page 772] would offer a counterpoint to Brooker's argument on the use of force to preserve black rights. The book's later portion effectively details civil rights gains and organization through the 1940s. Though social, economic, intellectual, and political developments undoubtedly weakened Jim Crow segregation by midcentury, Brooker might have engaged with works that problematize the relationship between World War II–era and later civil rights activism, such as Robert Korstad and Nelson Lichtenstein's "Opportunities Found and Lost: Labor, Radicals, and the Early Civil Rights Movement" (Journal...

Black Catholicism

On the Novel and Civic Myth

Racial Formation and Re-formation in Twentieth-Century Civil Rights Movements Joseph R. Stuart (bio) Backroads Pragmatists: Mexico's Melting Pot and Civil Rights in the United States. By Ruben Flores. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014. 353 pages. $29.95 (paper). Building a Latino Civil Rights Movement: Puerto Ricans, African Americans, and the Pursuit of Racial Justice in New York City. By Sonia Song-Ha Lee. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014. xi + 332 pages. $34.95 (paper). The Jim Crow Routine: Everyday Performances of Race, Civil Rights, and Segregation in Mississippi. By Stephen A. Berrey. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. xci + 331 pages. $29.95 (paper). Race, Religion, and Civil Rights: Asian Students on the West Coast, 1900–1968. By Stephanie Hinnershitz. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015. 268 pages. $28.95 (paper). The Revolution Has Come: Black Power, Gender, and the Black Panther Party in Oakland. By Robyn C. Spencer. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. 260 pages. $24.95 (paper). At the close of her landmark article "The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past," the historian Jacquelyn Dowd Hall asks, "How can we make ourselves heard without reducing history to the formulaic mantras on which political narratives usually rely?" Too often, Hall argues, the ways that individuals and social structures work for or against certain groups remain "invisible to citizens trained in not seeing and in thinking exclusively ahistorical, personal terms."1 Scholars must nuance and complicate readers' oversimplified views of the civil rights movement by helping them recognize how individuals and organizations foment social, political, economic, and racial change. The past will always be used politically; it is up to those of us [End Page 291] who research and write history to reveal the messy combination of individual agency and societal structures that create the racial, gendered, political, and economic ecospheres Americans inhabit. The five books under review here affirm that civil rights histories did not begin with the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education or end with Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1968 assassination, and that race in civil rights movements went beyond the oversimplified black–white binary. But more than this, these five scholars make larger arguments about civil rights movements in the United States by highlighting the ways that racial formation and identification informed social movements from the 1930s to the 1970s and from California to New York City. Sonia Song-Ha Lee's Building a Latino Civil Rights Movement examines "the political world in which Puerto Ricans and African Americans conceptualized their racial and ethnic identities" in response to New York City's long civil rights movement (3). Lee argues that, although that two groups frequently lived in geographic proximity and faced similar discrimination, they were not natural allies. Americans defined Puerto Ricans as a racially "in-between" people, neither white nor black (unsurprisingly, they fought to be identified with whites rather than African Americans). Despite that preference, twentieth-century sociologists and anthropologists from Oscar Lewis to Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Nathan Glazer identified Puerto Ricans through a racialized "culture of poverty," as did government programs, which linked Puerto Ricans with African Americans. Over time, however, many Puerto Ricans began to work with African Americans for civil rights in matters of antipoverty policy. Indeed, one of Lee's great contributions, building on the historiographical trend toward examining interracial political coalitions after World War II, is her exploration of the ways that politics and class created common ground for members of different racial groups within civil rights movements. Despite their shared economic disenfranchisement, New York's Puerto Ricans did not fight for political, social, and labor gains using the tactics embraced by African Americans before World War II. For instance, Lee shows that black and Puerto Rican members followed different paths in the struggle for justice in the workplace in the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU). Puerto Ricans' fragile status in the United States made them less willing to incur the wrath of their union bosses. African Americans, who did not fear deportation or other punitive measures, fought vocally for labor rights and used their connections to black community and...

If the Civil Rights Movement is `dead,'(1) and if it gave us nothing else, it gave us each other forever, wrote Alice Walker her first published essay, 1967 (Gardens 128). Her statement is true for Walker as an African American woman and as a writer. The Movement reaffirmed African Americans' connection to each other as a people and to their history of struggle against oppression. The Movement also allowed Walker to claim her self--she has described herself as to by the Movement--and to claim the lives of African American women of the rural South as the subject of her fiction (Gardens 122). Walker grew up rural Georgia, and, as a student at Spelman College from 1961 to 1962., she became involved the Atlanta Movement, working at voter registration and participating marches and demonstrations (J. Hams 33). Inspired by Martin Luther King, Jr., who urged civil rights workers to `Go back to Mississippi ... go back to Georgia,' his speech during the March on Washington 1963, she returned to the South for two summers and went to live Mississippi during the late 1960s and early 1970s, working at voter registration, teaching Headstart teachers and writing stories about rural southern black women. (Gardens 163, 27). Participation the Civil Rights Movement was central to Walker's life not only as a young woman but also as a young writer. She has written about the Movement some of her early poems, short stories, essays, and briefly her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland (1970), but Meridian (1976) is her novel of the Civil Rights Movement. Meridian is more than a novel about the Civil Rights Movement, and critics have focused on many aspects of this complex work.(2) But I would like to focus on Meridian as a novel of the Civil Rights Movement and try to show how Walker used her experience the Movement and the experience of others of her generation to deal with the social, political and philosophical issues raised by the Movement, issues that continue to engage us today. Other critics have focused on the Civil Rights Movement discussing Meridian,(3) but they do not discuss the connection between Walker's experience the Movement and the novel. Alice Walker is the only major African American woman writer who came of age during the Civil Rights Movement and participated it and the only one to write a novel about the Civil Rights Movement.(4) By 1970, when Walker began to write Meridian (J. Harris 33), the Civil Rights Movement, which offered the hope of Freedom Now! and the ideal and practice of nonviolence and and White Together, had been declared dead. Many young blacks had given up on white Americans and on nonviolence, because of their experience of white racist violence and intransigence the Civil Rights Movement. As early as 1963, Anne Moody, a young black woman active the Movement Mississippi, began to question everything I had ever believed in and to think Nonviolence is through, after a black church Birmingham, Alabama was bombed by racist whites and four young girls attending Sunday school were killed (Moody 320, 319). Despite the Movement, 1970 the United States continued to be racially divided and violent against black people. By 1970, some people, who called themselves black nationalists or black militants, and whose slogan had become Power, urged black women, who had struggled for their freedom along with black men the Civil Rights Movement, to subordinate themselves to black men, to make themselves less, for the good of their people. In an essay published 1973, while she was writing Meridian, Alice Walker quotes Barbara Sizemore, writing The Black Scholar, on the new `nationalist woman': `Her main goal is to inspire and encourage man and his children. Sisters this movement must beg for permission to speak and function as servants to men.' (qtd. Gardens 169). Both Walker and Sizemore viewed this development the freedom struggle with dismay. …

Historically, Black (or African American) churches have played a central role as a center of religious and political life and also as a provider of human services and a healing community. This article examined the extent to which African American churches in 1 Northeastern urban environment are involved in the delivery of health and human service programs to their communities. It also explored how comfortable Black clergy are in referring their parishioners to the formal mental health system and identified the actual level of referrals. In addition, the analyses considered the individual and organizational characteristics that predict variations in the levels of support services and the likelihood of referral. Analyses revealed that African American churches deliver a broad range of services to the community. More than two thirds of the clergy feel comfortable in making a referral to a mental health agency or professional, and more than half have actually made a referral. Both service delivery and referral levels varied by several clergy and congregational characteristics. The implications of these findings for research and health policy are considered.