African American Religious History Research Articles

Voices of Black Folk: The Sermons of Rev. A. W. Nix, by Terri Brinegar

Voices of Black Folk: The Sermons of Rev. A. W. Nix, by Terri Brinegar

Review: The Aliites: Race and Law in the Religions of Noble Drew Ali, by Spencer Dew

Review: <i>The Aliites: Race and Law in the Religions of Noble Drew Ali</i>, by Spencer Dew

«Созерцавший Агнца Божия»: Джупитер Хэммон – первый чернокожий христианский поэт Америки

The role of Christianity as a factor that exerted a decisive influence over African American social and cultural history, is being debated time and again in the course of African American studies. The ambivalent attitude of the 18th –19th century Christian preachers and missionaries to slavery, egalitarian tendencies that combined with the idea of humility and resignation, led to contradictions and controversy in the evaluation of the role Christianity played in Afroamerica. The case of Jupiter Hammon (1711 –1806?), a preacher and the first Black Christian poet in America, illustrates the emergence of the basic topoi in the pre-war Blackamerican literary tradition: conversion to Christianity and literacy (enculturation) as two essential conditions for the acknowledgement of Black humanity and ability to integrate into the New World civilization. Jupiter Hammon refused to struggle against slavery; paradoxically, however, his work is an inherent part of both African American religious and cultural history and the New England Christian thought, that engendered Abolitionism and its most famous book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life among the Lowly (1852), based on the concept of the “religious genius” of the African and the “Black redemption” of the greatest American vice, slavery.

“A Rare Human Document”: LoBagola’s African American Humbug Religion

In this essay I present the case of Baltimore native Joseph Howard Lee, whose self-presentation in the 1920s and 1930s as the West African Jew Bata Kindai Amgoza ibn LoBagola, captured the attention of white American consumers of his lectures and writings that purported to offer insight into African religions, culture, and history. I propose that viewing his career not only as one of imposture, but also as involving religious humbug, brings his performative critique of white Christian America to the fore. Locating such religious humbug within the bounds of the study of religion in America challenges scholars to engage African American religious history in more complex ways than the conventional deployment of Black religion as moral prod to the conscience of white America.

“That’s Not How the Story Ends:” Vincent Harding’s Liberating Vision of African American Religious History

ABSTRACTA critical reappraisal of Vincent Harding’s transformative work as a preeminent historian of the African American freedom struggle is long overdue. Examining Harding’s major works – There Is A River (1981), Martin Luther King: The Inconvenient Hero (1996), and Hope and History (1990) – this paper focuses on Harding’s revisionist approach to US religious history by addressing three historiographical elements: radical reinterpretation of historical narrative from the perspective of the oppressed; the uses and abuses of biography in the historical representations of Dr. King in popular culture and collective memory; and articulation of a philosophy of history rooted in a theology of hope and human flourishing. This paper illustrates how Harding’s writings advance a liberating vision for history as both a discipline and discursive realm in service to social justice and human dignity.

“Queering” African American religious history

AbstractThis article raises questions about how scholars of African American religions and of Black Queer Studies have historically and historiographically rendered queer and transgender persons as being devoid of a religion of their choosing. It calls for research on LGBTQ+ persons in African American religious history and discusses the necessity of “queering” theories and methods in the study of African American religions. To do this, it traces a genealogy of historians of African American religious history “queering” the study of African American religions in order to analyze the state of the field and chart new directions for future study.

“Precious Lord”: Black Mother-Loss and the Roots of Modern Gospel

Thomas Dorsey’s 1932 gospel song Take My Hand, Precious Lord is one of modern gospel music’s most canonical works. Although its composition by Dorsey in the wake of his wife’s sudden death in childbirth is a widely known oral history, the cultural implications of a wider history of health care disparities in the US leading to higher rates of black maternal and infant mortality have not been seriously considered. This article studies the history of black maternal and infant mortality in Chicago during the Great Migration as it bears on the mournful sounds of the gospel blues and its gender-inflected beginnings. The history of early gospel, I argue, was profoundly influenced by black women’s sympathetic identification with the experiences of migration and mother-loss Nettie Dorsey’s death represents. While Thomas Dorsey is distinguished as “the father of gospel music,” Nettie Dorsey might be fruitfully imagined as the spectral “mother” of gospel in its mournful expressions of black women’s spiritual consciousness. As such, she stands in for an alternate history of modern gospel musicality, one helping African American religious and musical history see and hear better what Emily Lordi calls “black feminist resonance” in black musical production in the golden age of gospel.

The Difference Denominations Made: Identifying the Black Church(es) and Black Religious Choices of the Early Republic

ABSTRACTScholars of African-American religious history have recently debated the significance of the black church in American history. Those that have, pro and con, have often considered the black church as a singular entity, despite the fact that African Americans affiliated with a number of different religious traditions under the umbrella of the black church. This article posits that it is useful to consider denominational and theological developments within different African-American churches. Doing so acknowledges plural creations and developments of black churches, rather than a singular black church, which better accounts for the historical experience of black religion. In this piece, I analyze four different denominational and theological traditions that blacks followed in the early Republic: the Anglican–Episcopalian, the Calvinist (Congregational–Presbyterian), the Methodist, and the Baptist. Each offered a unique ecclesiastical structure and set of theological assumptions within which black clergy and laity operated. Each required different levels of interaction with white coreligionists, and, although some tended to offer more direct opportunities for reform and resistance, all groups suffered differing constraints that limited such action. I argue that the two bodies connected to formalist traditions, the Episcopalian and Calvinist, were initially better developed despite their smaller size, and thus disproportionately shaped black community and reform efforts in the antebellum United States.

African American Religions, 1500–2000: Colonialism, Democracy, and Freedom

This ambitious book aims to reshape the field of African American religious history, long dominated by a narrative pointing toward freedom, civil rights, and justice. Johnson audaciously proposes to point it in another direction, toward empire, and by pointing in that direction he compels us to examine everything involved in the rise of the concept of race, corporate economic forms, and the rise of the modern nation-state. Race here is defined here as “colonial governance administered through the frame of essential differences among human populations” (p. 88). The book is not a narrative history of African American religions. Instead, it is a deliberately selective examination of key moments connecting the themes of colonialism, democracy, and freedom, with an emphasis on their intersections with a variety of African American religious traditions. The argument fundamentally challenges scholars in African American religious studies to foreground state power over alienated subjects rather than narrate stories of freedom from enslaving or colonizing powers. The subjects range from the interaction of African kingdoms and European slaving companies in West Africa to settler colonies in North America to nineteenth-century settler colonies in Liberia and elsewhere to Marcus Garvey and the dream of a black empire in the twentieth century to black “ethnic religions” such as the Moorish Science Temple to state-sponsored surveillance and harassment of civil rights activists to the national security state and the racialization of Islam over the last generation (p. 294). The scope is vast, the stories within them are compelling, the language is formal and sometimes highly theoretical, and the argument is astringent and relentlessly tough. The result is a landmark work in the field and the creation of a new paradigm that will initiate conversations and foster intense arguments.

Book Review: Julius H. Bailey. Down in the Valley: An Introduction to African American Religious History

Book Review: Julius H. Bailey. <i>Down in the Valley: An Introduction to African American Religious History</i>

“An Authentic Record of My Race”: Exploring the Popular Narratives of African American Religion in the Music of Duke Ellington

AbstractEdward Kennedy “Duke” Ellington (1899–1974) emerged within the jazz profession as a prominent exponent of Harlem Renaissance racial uplift ideals about incorporating African American culture into artistic production. Formed in the early twentieth century's middle-class black Protestant culture but not a churchgoer in adulthood, Ellington conveyed a nostalgic appreciation of African American Christianity whenever hewrote music to chronicle African American history. This prominent jazz musician's religious nostalgia resulted in compositions that conveyed to a broader American audience a portrait of African American religiosity that was constantly “classical” and static—not quite primitive, but never appreciated as a modern aspect of black culture.This article examines several Ellington compositions from the late 1920s through the 1960s that exemplify his deployment of popular representations of African American religious belief and practice. Through the short filmBlack and Tanin the 1920s, the satirical popular song “Is That Religion?” in the 1930s, the long-form symphonic movementBlack, Brown and Beigein the 1940s, the lyricism of “Come Sunday” in the 1950s, and the dramatic prose of “My People” in the 1960s, Ellington attempted to capture a portrait of black religious practice without recognition of contemporaneous developments in black Protestant Christianity in the twentieth century's middle decades. Although existing Ellington scholarship has covered his “Sacred Concerts” in the 1960s and 1970s, this article engages themes and representations in Ellington's work prefiguring the religious jazz that became popular with white liberal Protestants in America and Europe. This discussion of religious narratives in Ellington's compositions affords an opportunity to reflect upon the (un)intended consequences of progressive, sympathetic cultural production, particularly on the part of prominent African American historical figures in their time. Moreover, this article attempts to locate the jazz profession as a critical site for the examination of racial and religious representation in African American religious history.

Civil Rights Religion?

This article explores the historiography of the modern civil rights movement at the point where African American religious history and American political history intersect. Several scholars who have written about African American religion and politics during the 1950s and 1960s have wrestled with the significance of the appearance, characteristics, and motives of religions as expressions of political activism. By engaging how some scholars have created narrative portraits of organized African American religious women and men, I examine their stated and implicit definitions of African American religiosity, arguing that these definitions produce a historiographic portrait of religion as activism that refracts religious beliefs and practices through the lenses of social and political activism, thereby limiting the scholarly landscape of African American religious thought and expression in this period. I suggest the inclusion of recent works to broaden our sense of this period's religious landscape without dismissing the era's important politics.

The Autobiography and Interview of Jane Elizabeth Manning James

Although the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the LDS, or Mormon, Church) is generally omitted from African American religious history, people of African descent had always been able to join the church and, in small numbers, they did. The texts reprinted here document the life of one early black Mormon, Jane Elizabeth Manning James, a free black woman from Connecticut who converted to Mormonism in the early 1840s. Before she died, in Salt Lake City in 1908, Jane dictated an autobiography. She also gave an interview in 1905 concerning her memories of Joseph Smith, for whom she had worked as a servant in Illinois. These documents give us a new appreciation of the variety of religious options available to black people in the antebellum Northern United States and Canada during and after the second Great Awakening, and a new angle of vision on the politics of religious affiliation.

Invisible Women

In this essay I consider major themes in the scholarly treatment of African American women's religious history and explore how particular emphases in the broader field of African American religious history have marginalized women's experiences and contributions. I argue that mobilizing African American women's religious history and placing it at the center of our historical inquiry allows us to interrogate themes and foci that structure the accepted narrative of African American religious history. Moving beyond an approach that simply adds women to that accepted story, I suggest ways in which examining African American women's religious experiences might open up rich areas for research and new ways of conceiving the very shape of the field.

A Leavening Force: African American Women and Christian Mission in the Civil Rights Era

After Josephine Beckwith and DeLaris Johnson broke the color barrier at two southern missionary training schools in the 1940s and 50s, their religious vocations led them and other African American women on a trajectory of missionary service resonate with what we recognize today as civil rights activism. While histories of African American women's mission organizing and those of their civil rights organizing typically are framed as separate endeavors, this article teases out the previously unexamined overlaps and connections between black women's missionary efforts and civil rights activism in the 1940s and 50s. In doing so, it bridges a disjuncture in African American women's religious history, illuminating the ways beliefs about Christian mission shaped the community work of black missionary women so that narratives of civil rights organizing and Christian missions are no longer discrete categories but are seen in historical continuity. In shedding light on the ways mission organizing and service served as a site for cultivating leadership and engaging segregation and racism, a new vision and practice of mission for the civil rights era is revealed and our understandings of the religious lives and activism of African American women are greatly enriched and expanded.

The End of the “Black Church”: New Directions in African American Religious History - The Burden of Black Religion. By Curtis J. Evans. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. xx + 372 pp. $24.95 paper. - Your Spirits Walk Beside Us: The Politics of Black Religion. By Barbara Dianne Savage. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008. 360

The End of the “Black Church”: New Directions in African American Religious History - The Burden of Black Religion. By Curtis J. Evans. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. xx + 372 pp. 27.95 cloth. - Volume 78 Issue 3

Domesticity and Spirituality in African American Religious History and Ethnography

Domesticity and Spirituality in African American Religious History and Ethnography

In Their Own Words

ABSTRACT This article profiles the African American Christian collections of Howard University's Moorland Spingarn Research Center. The author develops the profile in three sections: first, a brief history of the Moorland Spingarn Research Center, second, an overview of the record types held in manuscript division of interest to scholars, researchers, and librarians documenting the African American Christian experience, and third, an argument for the importance of locating and preserving African American religious history.

African American religious history: a documentary witness

African American religious history: a documentary witness

A Fire in the Bones: Reflections on African-American Religious History.

A Fire in the Bones: Reflections on African-American Religious History.