Theologies of Blackness with A Liberationist Bent

Abstract

The founders of Black theology were wrong to claim that Black Americans had never produced an important theologian. Black religious historian Joseph Washington pioneered this claim in 1964, contending that Black Christianity was a sub-Christian folk faith with no theology and no theologians. James Cone and J. Deotis Roberts took from Washington the threefold verdict that Black Protestantism is wholly different from White Protestantism, lacks any real basis in Reformation theology, and thus lacked theologians. This argument buttressed the assertion of Cone and Roberts that Black theology began with them; they had no theological predecessors. Cone became a towering figure by founding Black liberation theology, brilliantly expressing what it means to take blackness seriously on liberationist terms. His early framing argument, however, wrongly discounted Reverdy Ransom, Henry McNeal Turner, Mordecai Johnson, Benjamin E. Mays, Howard Thurman, and King—creative theological thinkers who thought through their blackness. They were not systematic theologians, but systematic theology is a Euro-academic enterprise, a point that Gayraud Wilmore and religious historian Charles Long pressed against Cone. Wilmore rightly implored Black theologians to stop saying that Black theology was invented in 1969, and wrongly steered three generations of students away from the Black social gospel tradition. Wilmore was Cone’s closest friend and toughest critic. He argued that Black theology should be a subordinate discipline within Black religious thought, not a normative Christian enterprise as with Cone, and that Black theology should appropriate the Black radical tradition. Dwight Hopkins, the leading second-generation Black theologian, got his bearings by fusing Cone and Wilmore.