Religion in African American History

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith Weisenfeld
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Black People ◽  
African Methodist Episcopal ◽  
The United States ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Nation Of Islam ◽  
Spiritual Support ◽  
Methodist Episcopal

Dynamic and creative exchanges among different religions, including indigenous traditions, Protestant and Catholic Christianity, and Islam, all with developing theologies and institutions, fostered substantial collective religious and cultural identities within African American communities in the United States. The New World enslavement of diverse African peoples and the cultural encounter with Europeans and Native Americans produced distinctive religious perspectives that aided individuals and communities in persevering under the dehumanization of slavery and oppression. As African Americans embraced Christianity beginning in the 18th century, especially after 1770, they gathered in independent church communities and created larger denominational structures such as the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, and the National Baptist Convention. These churches and denominations became significant arenas for spiritual support, educational opportunity, economic development, and political activism. Black religious institutions served as contexts in which African Americans made meaning of the experience of enslavement, interpreted their relationship to Africa, and charted a vision for a collective future. The early 20th century saw the emergence of new religious opportunities as increasing numbers of African Americans turned to Holiness and Pentecostal churches, drawn by the focus on baptism in the Holy Spirit and enthusiastic worship that sometimes involved speaking in tongues. The Great Migration of southern blacks to southern and northern cities fostered the development of a variety of religious options outside of Christianity. Groups such as the Moorish Science Temple and the Nation of Islam, whose leaders taught that Islam was the true religion of people of African descent, and congregations of Ethiopian Hebrews promoting Judaism as the heritage of black people, were founded in this period. Early-20th-century African American religion was also marked by significant cultural developments as ministers, musicians, actors, and other performers turned to new media, such as radio, records, and film, to contribute to religious life. In the post–World War II era, religious contexts supported the emergence of the modern Civil Rights movement. Black religious leaders emerged as prominent spokespeople for the cause and others as vocal critics of the goal of racial integration, as in the case of the Nation of Islam and religious advocates of Black Power. The second half of the 20th century and the early 21st-first century saw new religious diversity as a result of immigration and cultural transformations within African American Christianity with the rise of megachurches and televangelism.

The Optics of Liberian Emigration

2020 ◽  
pp. 145-167
Author(s):  
Aston Gonzalez
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Black People ◽  
Black Americans ◽  
Political Leadership ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Colonization Society ◽  
Fugitive Slave

This chapter explores the life and work of Augustus Washington, the free African American photographer, who envisioned more rights and freedoms than those available in the United States. Anticipating a future in the United States bound by racial restraints, he packed up his successful photography studio in Hartford, Connecticut, and emigrated to Monrovia, Liberia. Washington worked closely with the American Colonization Society to convince black Americans to leave their homeland for Liberia and attempted to provoke viewers of his images to envision the potential of black rights in the United States that he enjoyed in Liberia. Washington’s images promulgating black Liberian political leadership and economic promise abroad offered a vision of freedom that belied a hierarchical, and often oppressive, Liberian society. In the wake of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, his images brought into focus the debates among African Americans about the uncertain, and perhaps imperiled, future of black people in the United States.

The Great Migrations and Black Urban Life in the United States, 1914–1970

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tyina Steptoe
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African Americans ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Black People ◽  
Black Population ◽  
The United States ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Urban Centers ◽  
Dramatic Shift ◽  
Agricultural Areas

During the 20th century, the black population of the United States transitioned from largely rural to mostly urban. In the early 1900s the majority of African Americans lived in rural, agricultural areas. Depictions of black people in popular culture often focused on pastoral settings, like the cotton fields of the rural South. But a dramatic shift occurred during the Great Migrations (1914–1930 and 1941–1970) when millions of rural black southerners relocated to US cities. Motivated by economic opportunities in urban industrial areas during World Wars I and II, African Americans opted to move to southern cities as well as to urban centers in the Northeast, Midwest, and West Coast. New communities emerged that contained black social and cultural institutions, and musical and literary expressions flourished. Black migrants who left the South exercised voting rights, sending the first black representatives to Congress in the 20th century. Migrants often referred to themselves as “New Negroes,” pointing to their social, political, and cultural achievements, as well as their use of armed self-defense during violent racial confrontations, as evidence of their new stance on race.

Red Summer and Early 20th-Century Race Massacres

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann V. Collins
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Racial Violence ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Racial Groups ◽  
Early 19Th Century

Between the turbulent months of April and October 1919, racial violence reached a peak in the United States. Some twenty-six white-on-black massacres took place across the country. Author and civil rights activist James Weldon Johnson dubbed this terrible period the Red Summer as a way to characterize pervasive racial hostility and for the blood spilled in its wake. Yet, racial violence has had a long and painful history in the United States. From the moment enslaved Africans arrived in the New World, whites strove cruelly and systematically to maintain power and control over their bodies and labor. Indeed, many interactions between ostensible racial groups have centered on white hostility. A type of brutality that proved especially vicious took the shape of white-on-black race massacres. First appearing in the early 19th century and fading by the end of World War II, whites used these types of disturbances to deny African Americans progress and freedom. Destruction of black communities, massive bloodshed, and lynchings characterized these occurrences. The early 20th century, and particularly the Red Summer, marked a critical moment in the history of race relations of the United States—one that proved deadly to African Americans.

Conclusion

2014 ◽  
pp. 115-118
Author(s):  
Eddie S. Glaude
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Black People ◽  
Religious Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
Religious Practices ◽  
American Religion ◽  
Cultural Inheritance ◽  
African American Religion

African Americans are generally more religious than other groups in the United States. But African American religion is much more than a description of how deeply religious African Americans are. The phrase helps to differentiate a particular set of religious practices from others that are invested in whiteness; it invokes a particular cultural inheritance that marks the unique journey of African Americans in the United States. African American religion is rooted in the sociopolitical realities that shape the experiences of black people in America, but this is not static or fixed. The ‘Conclusion’ suggests that African American religious life remains a powerful site for creative imaginings in a world still organized by race.

scholarly journals Black Protestants in a Catholic Land

2015 ◽  
Vol 89 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 258-288
Author(s):  
Christina Cecelia Davidson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
Dominican Republic ◽  
Black Church ◽  
African Methodist Episcopal ◽  
The United States ◽  
West Indians ◽  
Methodist Episcopal ◽  
American Immigrant ◽  
The Church

The African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, a black Church founded in the United States in 1816, was first established in eastern Haiti when over 6,000 black freemen emigrated from the United States to Hispaniola between 1824 and 1825. Almost a century later, the AME Church grew rapidly in the Dominican Republic as West Indians migrated to the Dominican southeast to work on sugar plantations. This article examines the links between African-American immigrant descendants, West Indians, and U.S.-based AME leaders between the years 1899–1916. In focusing on Afro-diasporic exchange in the Church and the hardships missionary leaders faced on the island, the article reveals the unequal power relations in the AME Church, demonstrates the significance of the southeast to Dominican AME history, and brings the Dominican Republic into larger discussions of Afro-diasporic exchange in the circum-Caribbean.

The Black Press

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kim Gallon
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Social Space ◽  
Black People ◽  
The United States ◽  
Black Press ◽  
Cultural Tradition ◽  
History Of ◽  
Freedom's Journal

The term “Black Press” is an umbrella term that includes a diverse set of publications that include a small number of religious and mostly secular magazines and newspapers published by Black people in the United States from 1827 to the present. While religious newspapers are an integral part of the Black Press cultural tradition, of particular interest is how papers outside of formal Black religious dominations and institutions negotiated their self-defined racial uplift mission with their desire to attract readers to purchase and read newspapers. This focus does not deny the tremendous significance of Black religious print culture and the role it played in conveying African American cultural expression. Nineteenth-century religious papers like the Christian Recorder (1852–) were instrumental to the publication of early Black literature. Focusing on a small number of religious publications, then, provides a window into how they worked in conjunction with secular newspapers to define Black life in the United States. A newspaper is defined as “Black” if the publisher and principal editor or editors characterized themselves as such. Immigrant and foreign-language Black newspapers published in the United States were closer to the immigrant press. The history of the Black Press in the United States is simultaneously rooted in uplift and protest against racial injustice. Two Black abolitionists—Presbyterian minister Samuel E. Cornish and John B. Russwurm, one of the nation’s first African American college graduates—created the first Black newspaper, Freedom’s Journal, in 1827 to promote self-help and respond to anti-Black attacks in white papers. The first issue of Freedom’s Journal famously related the sentiments of its founders: “We wish to plead our own cause. Too long have others spoken for us. Too long has the public been deceived by misrepresentations in things which concern us dearly.” Indeed, Cornish and Russwurm’s statements define close to 200 years of Black journalism that created the necessary political and social space for African Americans to recover their humanity. Despite the significant role the Black Press has and continues to play, to some degree, the cultural history of the Black Press is underexamined relative to the emphasis that historians place on the race advocacy and protest mission of African American newspapers. Close examination reveals that the Black Press’s power lay not only in its capacity to assert the rights and humanity of Black people through agitation but also in the ways it reinforced and amplified the unique and lively culture of African Americans. To this end, the Black Press created a countercultural public of Black peoples’ image and identity that was equally instrumental in refuting the discrimination they faced in American society.

Between Free Grace and Liberty

2021 ◽  
pp. 245-259
Author(s):  
Charrise Barron
Keyword(s):  
United States Of America ◽  
Black People ◽  
African Descent ◽  
African Methodist Episcopal ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Freedom ◽  
Methodist Episcopal ◽  
Music Making ◽  
Racial Injustice ◽  
Free Grace

African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Bishop Richard Allen’s hymnody, when coupled with his anti-racist activism and his encouragement of communal music-making in worship, evoked eschatological freedom from sin and called for socio-political freedom for people of African descent in the years following the founding of the United States of America. To fully comprehend Allen’s hymnody, one should consider the urgency he bore for freedom and justice for black people in America. Allen (1760–1831) first published a hymnal in 1801, followed by a revised edition in the same year; the included hymns articulate his belief that people could receive individual freedom from both sin and God’s wrath at the final judgement. Allen held to the evangelical hope of Christ’s return which would inaugurate the emancipation of all enslaved people; likewise, eschatological justice must include freedom from political bondage for people of African descent in America. While holding the expectation of eschatological freedom and justice, he adamantly pursued this political freedom during his lifetime, as evidenced in his theo-political writings against slavery and other forms of racial injustice. Consequently, While the lyrics in his 1801 hymnbooks do not explicitly speak against contemporaneous racial injustice, Allen’s life’s work and prose suggest that this is an integral part of the context for Allen’s compilation of eschatological hymnody.

African American Religions in the Nineteenth Century

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Suzanne Clark
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Black Church ◽  
African Methodist Episcopal ◽  
Abraham Lincoln ◽  
Methodist Episcopal ◽  
African American Religion ◽  
African Methodist Episcopal Church ◽  
Methodist Episcopal Church

The typical story of African American religions narrates the development and power of the Protestant black church, but shifting the focus to the long nineteenth century can reorient the significance of the story. The nineteenth century saw the boom of Christian conversions among African Americans, but it also was a century of religious diversity. All forms of African American religion frequently pushed against the dominance of whiteness. This included the harming and cursing element of Conjure and southern hoodoo, the casting of slaves as Old Israel awaiting their exodus from bondage, the communications between the spirit of Abraham Lincoln and Afro-Creoles in New Orleans, and the push for autonomy and leadership by Richard Allen and the rest of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. While many studies of African American religions in the nineteenth century overwhelmingly focus on Protestantism, this is only part of the story.

Religion, Race, and Humanism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony B. Pinn
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Richard Wright ◽  
Institutional Development ◽  
The United States ◽  
Unitarian Universalist ◽  
Racial Injustice ◽  
History Of ◽  
Lorraine Hansberry

This chapter explores the history of humanism within African American communities. It positions humanist thinking and humanism-inspired activism as a significant way in which people of African descent in the United States have addressed issues of racial injustice. Beginning with critiques of theism found within the blues, moving through developments such as the literature produced by Richard Wright, Lorraine Hansberry, and others, to political activists such as W. E. B. DuBois and A. Philip Randolph, to organized humanism in the form of African American involvement in the Unitarian Universalist Association, African Americans for Humanism, and so on, this chapter presents the historical and institutional development of African American humanism.

A Discussion of Ismail K. White and Chryl N. Laird’s Steadfast Democrats: How Social Forces Shape Black Political Behavior

2021 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 209-210
Author(s):  
Michael Leo Owens
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Political Behavior ◽  
Democratic Party ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Forces ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Behavioral Norm ◽  
Black Political Behavior

Charge: As Ismail K. White and Chryl N. Laird note, collectively more than 80% of African Americans self-identify as Democrats according to surveys, and no Republican presidential candidate has won more than 13% of the Black vote since 1968. This is true despite the fact that at the individual level many African Americans are increasingly politically moderate and even conservative. Against this backdrop, what explains the enduring nature of African American support for the Democratic Party? In Steadfast Democrats: How Social Forces Shape Black Political Behavior, White and Laird answer this question by developing the concept of “racialized social constraint,” a unifying behavioral norm meant to empower African Americans as a group and developed through a shared history of struggle against oppression and for freedom and equality. White and Laird consider the historical development of this norm, how it is enforced, and its efficacy both in creating party loyalty and as a path to Black political power in the United States. On the cusp of perhaps the most consequential presidential election in American history, one for which African American turnout was crucial, we asked a range of leading political scientists to assess the relative strengths, weaknesses, and ramifications of this argument.

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