African American Religious History

A Documentary Witness

Milton C. Sernett

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 2000
• Print ISBN: 9780822324492, 9780822324263
• eBook ISBN: 9780822396031
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Social Sciences

This widely-heralded collection of remarkable documents offers a view of African American religious history from Africa and early America through Reconstruction to the rise of black nationalism, civil rights, and black theology of today. The documents—many of them rare, out-of-print, or difficult to find—include personal narratives, sermons, letters, protest pamphlets, early denominational histories, journalistic accounts, and theological statements. In this volume Olaudah Equiano describes Ibo religion. Lemuel Haynes gives a black Puritan's farewell. Nat Turner confesses. Jarena Lee becomes a female preacher among the African Methodists. Frederick Douglass discusses Christianity and slavery. Isaac Lane preaches among the freedmen. Nannie Helen Burroughs reports on the work of Baptist women. African Methodist bishops deliberate on the Great Migration. Bishop C. H. Mason tells of the Pentecostal experience. Mahalia Jackson recalls the glory of singing at the 1963 March on Washington. Martin Luther King, Jr. writes from the Birmingham jail.
Originally published in 1985, this expanded second edition includes new sources on women, African missions, and the Great Migration. Milton C. Sernett provides a general introduction as well as historical context and comment for each document.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Introduction
• I. From Africa Through Early America
• II. Slave Religion in the Antebellum South
• III. Black Churches North of Slavery and the Freedom Struggle
• IV. Freedom's Time of Trial: 1865-World War I
• V. From the Great Migration to World War II
• VI. Twentieth-Century Religious Alternatives
• VII. Civil Rights, Black Theology, and Beyond
• Index