The Imposing Preacher: Samuel Dewitt Proctor and Black Public Faith. By Adam L. Bond. Minneapolis, Minn.: Fortress Press, 2013. xi + 245 pp. $29.00 paper.

Abstract

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)The Imposing Preacher: Samuel Dewitt Proctor and Black Public Faith . By Adam L. Bond . Minneapolis, Minn. : Fortress Press , 2013. xi + 245 pp. $29.00 paper.Book Reviews and NotesThe contribution of the black pastorate to America's social conscience is surely incalculable. Apart from the countless Sunday sermons preached from the pulpits of African-American congregations since even before the founding of the first African-American church in Philadelphia in 1787, the history of the black clergy has extended beyond the pulpit to include a public presence and social activism that emphasized black personhood from within the community and challenged the larger culture to reflect on, reassess, and ultimately reject its own prejudices, biases and, indeed, its racism. The civil rights era of the 1950s to 1960s represents perhaps the most visible era for the leadership of black pastors with names like King, Lowery and Abernathy proclaiming the gospel of social justice and driving the public dialog. And yet other voices unquestionably did contribute to the dialog and our understanding of the importance of the black civil rights movement in America is enriched that much more when such narratives emerge. Adam Bond's The Imposing Preacher: Samuel Dewitt Proctor and Black Public Faith presents the reader with just such a narrative, engaging the life and work of one of the more influential but less well-known figures in the modern post-civil rights era. Proctor's name emerges in only the most thorough analyses of the civil rights movement in America. And yet, he was close to Martin Luther King, Jr., served in the administration of the Peace Corps during the Kennedy administration, and was an advisor to Lyndon Johnson's Office of Economic Opportunity during his administration's War on Poverty. Proctor's was indeed a public faith and Bond contributes significantly to the scholarship providing a comprehensive study of the theological and ideological foundations to his thought and life.Bond introduces the reader to Proctor in fairly straightforward fashion. Key to his analysis is that Proctor represents a departure from the more frequently chronicled expressions of black theology. As such he positions him along a spectrum of more well-known figures and systems of thought. The writings of James Cone, for instance, represent the left on Bond's conceptual spectrum. Cone's is a black public theology steeped in the language of power and emancipation, advocating a strong emphasis on black consciousness and the right for blacks to free themselves from white oppression by whatever means black people deem necessary (12). The other end of the spectrum is represented the black evangelical and biblical literalist E.V. Hill who opposed the sometimes confrontational methods and aims of Cone, describing his work as blackism and deeming it essentially idolatrous (21). Proctor viewed himself as something of a bridge figure or pragmatic harmonizer (10) who aimed to uplift the condition of the black community in America, a condition he saw to be largely the byproduct of white privilege. Yet at the same time he saw that within the great documents and best spirit of the American system there existed the best possible means for bringing about this much-needed change.Chapters 2 and 3 are largely biographical in nature, chronicling the cultural and intellectual soil from which Proctor's ideas about the public nature of faith first took root. …