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Religion

Stephen W. Angell
Genevieve Slomski

• Origins and History of African American Religious Traditions

• African American Female Religious Leadership

• African American Churches during Reconstruction

• African American Churches in the Twentieth Century

• Evolving Trends among African American Churches

• Religious Leaders

The first Africans who arrived on North American shores brought their own religious worldviews with them. While a minority had been Muslims or Christians prior to their kidnapping by slave traders, most adhered to their native African religions. Hundreds of different religions developed, but in general, the Africans believed that the world had been created by a high god who removed himself from direct intervention in worldly affairs after the act of creation.

ORIGINS AND HISTORY OF AFRICAN AMERICAN RELIGIOUS TRADITIONS

EARLY AFRICAN AMERICAN BELIEF SYSTEMS

In Africa, worshipers directed their prayers to intermediary spirits, chief among whom were their ancestors or the “living dead.” If proper offering was made to an ancestor, the individual would be blessed with great prosperity, but if the ancestor was slighted, misfortune would result. In addition, the Yorubas worshiped a variety of nature spirits, or orishas. These spirits often possessed their devotees, who then became mediums of their gods. This kind of spirit-possession is a prominent feature of some modern African American religions, such as Santeria, which recently has spread across large urban areas including Miami and New York. Also a part of the African worldview, especially among the Bakongo, was the practice of magic, variously known in the New World as obeah, vaudou (voodoo), or conjure. This magic, designed to help friends (myalism) or to hurt enemies (obeah), at one time was widely practiced by Africans throughout the Western Hemisphere.

The type of African spirituality that took root in North America merged elements from many African cultures. Since slave masters intentionally mixed Africans from many tribal backgrounds, no “pure” African religion preserving one tradition emerged. Nevertheless, the longstanding scholarly controversy over the degree to which African traditions have been retained in African-based religions is gradually being resolved in favor of those who see extensive survivals. In addition to singing, church music, and preaching style, aspects where an African influence has generally been conceded, scholars have made persuasive arguments for African survivals in family structure, funeral practices, church organization, and many other areas.

MISSIONARY EFFORTS BY CHRISTIANS

The first sustained effort at converting African Americans to Christianity was made by the Anglican Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, which sent

missionaries to North America in 1701. These missionaries had little success among the Africans; many mocked those who imitated the whites too closely and, thus, resisted the missionaries. In addition, white slave masters often resented losing slaves’ time to church services and feared that slaves would lay a claim to freedom through conversion. The numerous colonial laws, starting with Virginia in 1669, proclaiming that conversion failed to entitle slaves to freedom did not comfort some slave masters, who suspected that Christianity would undermine slave discipline—indeed, some remained unconvinced of the advisability of missionary efforts until emancipation occurred. On the other hand, some slave masters believed the Christianization of Africans to be justification for enslaving them.

Subsequent efforts to convert African Americans to Christianity were more successful. In his seven missionary tours throughout North America between 1742 and 1770, the spellbinding orator George Whitefield effected the conversions of large numbers of both black and white Americans. The ministry of Methodist circuit riders, such as Francis Asbury, was also well received by African Americans at the end of the eighteenth century. Baptist and Methodist churches were the most successful in attracting African American members. Since these churches did not require their ministers to be well educated, doors were opened for aspiring African American ministers, many of whom lived in states where teaching African Americans to read and write was forbidden by law. Furthermore, the Baptists and Methodists were not as hostile to the emotionalism of African American preachers and congregations as were more staid denominations, such as the Episcopalians. Finally, the anti-slavery stance of notable Methodist and Baptist leaders, such as John Wesley, Francis Asbury, and John Leland, and the greater degree of equality nurtured within many Baptist and Methodist congregations were attractive to African Americans.

EARLY CHRISTIAN CONGREGATIONS

Probably the first organizing effort by African Americans to bear fruit in an independent African American congregation was the Silver Bluff Baptist Church in South Carolina, which came into existence between 1773 and 1775. David George, an African American, and seven other men and women formed its organizing nucleus. George Liele, one of George’s associates, often preached at the Silver Bluff Church before emigrating to Jamaica in 1782. Andrew Bryan, one of Liele’s converts, founded the First African Baptist Church in Savannah, Georgia, in 1788.

Bryan’s life well represented the complex predicament faced by African American religious leaders in the antebellum South. In the early years of his ministry, Bryan was whipped and twice imprisoned by whites who feared him. But he bought his freedom, prospered, and eventually came to own much property, including eight slaves; his death in 1812 was mourned by blacks and whites alike. While many African American churches continued to be served by white ministers until 1865, African American pastors, licensed ministers, and exhorters ministering to African American Baptist and Methodist congregations were not at all unusual at this time, either in the South or the North.

BLACK CATHOLICS

Before the Civil War, African American Catholics were confined largely to Maryland and Louisiana. However, Catholics made greater efforts to convert African Americans after the Civil War. By the end of the nineteenth century, nearly 200,000 African American Catholics were worshiping in the United States, but more Protestant African American ministers existed than did African American priests in the Catholic churches.

DISCRIMINATION IN WHITE CHURCHES

While white preachers urged African Americans to convert, and many predominantly white congregations welcomed them into membership, racial prejudice was never absent from the religious scene. Although the level of discrimination varied from region to region and congregation to congregation, some factors were relatively constant.

One such factor was the relative paucity of ordained African American clergy. To take the Methodists as an example, some African American ministers were ordained as deacons within the Methodist Episcopal Church prior to 1820, but none in the following four decades. No African American Methodist minister was ordained by the Methodist Episcopal Church to the higher office of elder or consecrated as a bishop prior to the Civil War, unless he was willing to emigrate to Liberia.

Other discriminatory practices also formed part of the religious landscape. The Methodists and many other denominations tried to reserve the administration of sacraments as the exclusive province of white clergy. Segregated seating in churches was pervasive in both the North and the South. Church discipline was often unevenly applied. Of course, racial discrimination in the churches was only a small part of the much larger political and moral controversy over slavery.

Resistance to discrimination took many forms. In the North, Peter Spencer in Wilmington, Delaware, Richard Allen in Philadelphia, and James Varick in New York, led their African American followers out of white Methodist churches and set up independent African American congregations. In Allen’s case, his departure was preceded by a dramatic confrontation over segregated seating in Philadelphia’s white Methodist church. Each of these men then used his congregation as the nucleus of a new African American Methodist denomination—Spencer formed the African Union Church in 1807; Allen, the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) in 1816; and Varick, a denomination eventually called the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church (AME Zion) in 1821.

Meanwhile, in Charleston, South Carolina, a more explosive situation was taking shape. Morris Brown, an African American Methodist minister from Charleston, who had helped Richard Allen organize the African Methodist Episcopal Church, organized an independent African American Methodist church in his home city. The authorities harassed Brown’s church and sometimes arrested its leaders. Nevertheless, within a year, more than three-quarters of Charleston’s African American Methodists had united with him. The oppression of African Americans in Charleston was so severe that many members of Brown’s congregation, including prominent lay leaders, joined the insurrection planned by Denmark Vesey to take over the Charleston armory and, eventually, the whole environs of Charleston. The conspirators, apprehended before they could carry out their plans, testified that Brown had not known of their scheme, and the minister was allowed to move to Philadelphia, where Richard Allen made him the second bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church.

A few African Americans became acquiescent as a result of Christianity. One such example was Pierre Tous-saint, a black Haitian slave who fled in 1787 to New York with his white owners, the Berards, just prior to the

Haitian Revolution. In 1811, Mrs. Berard manumitted Toussaint on her deathbed. Over the next 40 years, Tous-saint became a notable philanthropist, contributing funds to the building of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. However, when the cathedral opened, Toussaint did not protest when a white usher refused to seat him for services. Some American Catholics recently revived the controversy over Toussaint, by campaigning for his canonization. Many African American Catholics have strongly objected, seeing Tous-saint as passive and servile and thus a poor candidate for sainthood.

EMANCIPATION EFFORTS OF AFRICAN AMERICAN CHURCH LEADERS

The mid-nineteenth century saw increased anti-slavery activity among many African American church leaders and members. Some gave qualified support to the gradual emancipation program sponsored by the American Colonization Society, which sought to encourage free African Americans to emigrate to Africa in order to Westernize and Christianize the Africans. Virginia Baptist pastor Lott Cary and Maryland Methodist minister Daniel Coker were the two most prominent African American religious leaders to emigrate to Africa in the 1820s. By the 1850s, enough African American Methodists were in Liberia for the Methodist Episcopal Church to consecrate an African American bishop, Francis Burns, to serve the Liberian churches. While some black Americans were emigrating to Africa, others emigrated to the West Indies—Episcopalian Bishop James T. Holly, for example, settled in Haiti to undertake missionary work.

Because of the extreme repression in the slave states, African Americans were unable to openly express their views on political issues. They were, however, often able to make their views clear; for example, a white minister who dwelled too long on the Biblical text that servants should obey their masters was apt to find his African American listeners deserting him. In addition, African American Christians often held secret meetings in “brush arbors,” rude structures made of pine boughs, or in the middle of the woods. There they could sing spirituals and pray openly for the quick advent of freedom. Slave revolts, on the other hand, provided a violent outbreak of dissent much feared by whites. The 1831 revolt of Nat Turner, a Baptist preacher, in Northampton County, Virginia, was suppressed only after tremendous bloodshed had been visited upon both African Americans and whites. Frightened whites in the South intensified their surveillance of African American churches in the aftermath of the Turner revolt. Even conservative African American preachers, such as Presbyterian John Chavis in North Carolina and the Baptist “Uncle Jack” in Virginia, were prohibited from preaching.

African American leaders in the North could afford to be more open and forthright in their political stance. Most rejected outright the views of the American Colonization Society in favor of the immediate abolition of slavery. Presbyterian minister Henry Highland Garnet was a prominent abolitionist, urging African American slaves in 1843 to “let your motto be RESISTANCE! RESISTANCE! RESISTANCE!” African Methodist Episcopal Bishop Daniel Payne and African Methodist Episcopal Zion Bishop Christopher Rush, both emigrants from the Carolinas to the North, were outspoken abolitionists who, after the mid-1840s, became the most prominent leaders in their respective churches.

Frederick Douglass was one of the few leading African American abolitionists who did not pursue a ministerial career, and even he had briefly served as an African Methodist Episcopal Zion preacher in New Bedford, Massachusetts. African American clergy were extraordinarily active in recruiting African American men to join the Union armies during the Civil War, after the Emancipation Proclamation opened up the possibility of military service to them. During the Civil War, nearly a dozen African American ministers, including the African Methodist Episcopal Church’s Henry McNeal Turner, served as chaplains to African American army regiments.

AFRICAN AMERICAN FEMALE RELIGIOUS LEADERSHIP

Early African American women ministers sometimes served as traveling evangelists, especially within African American denominations. While Sojourner Truth’s oratory has become appropriately famous, Maria Stewart, Jarena Lee, Zilpha Elaw, and other early nineteenth century women also spoke eloquently and, in Leeaposrsquo;s and Elaw’s cases, traveled widely and labored diligently. None of these women were ordained, but Elizabeth (no last name known), a former slave from Maryland whose ministry began in 1796, spoke for many female preachers when she was accused of preaching without a license: “If the Lord has ordained me, I need nothing better.” Rebecca Cox Jackson left the African Methodist Episcopal Church in the 1830s when she felt that men denied her the chance to exercise her ministry, and she eventually became head eldress of a predominantly African American Shaker community in Philadelphia.

During the postbellum years, some African American women sought and obtained formal ordination from their denominations. Sarah Ann Hughes, a successful North Carolina evangelist and pastor in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, was ordained by Bishop Henry McNeal Turner in 1885, but complaints from male pastors caused her ordination to be revoked two years later. The AME Church would not ordain another woman until 1948, when Rebecca Glover was ordained. Two women were ordained, however, by African Methodist Episcopal Zion bishops not long after the Hughes controversy—Mary J. Smalls in 1895 as a deacon and in 1898 as an elder, and also Julia A. J. Foote in 1894 and 1900, respectively. Pauli Murray, a distinguished lawyer and educator, in 1977 became the first African American woman to be ordained a priest in the predominantly white Episcopal Church. In 1989, Barbara Harris became the first woman bishop in the history of the Episcopal Church.

Throughout American history, many African American women exercised their ministry through para-ecclesiastical structures, such as women’s temperance and missionary societies, while others, such as Anna Cooper and the African Methodist Episcopal Church’s Frances Jackson Coppin, became renowned educators.

AFRICANS AMERICAN CHURCHES DURING RECONSTRUCTION

African American church membership grew explosively after the Civil War, especially in the South, where the African American clergy played a prominent part in the Reconstruction governments. African Methodist Episcopal minister Hiram Revels became the first African American to serve as a U.S. senator, when the Mississippi legislature sent him to Washington, D.C., in 1870. However, Revels was only the groundbreaker; many African American ministers went on to serve in the Congress or in their state governments. African American participation in Reconstruction politics was effective in large part because ministers in the AME and AME Zion Churches, and many African American Baptist ministers carefully and patiently educated their congregation members on every civic and political issue. (Although the newly established African American denomination, the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, largely stayed away from politics during Reconstruction.)

Even though African Americans were largely expelled from Southern state governments after the end of political Reconstruction in the 1870s, many African American ministers and laity continued to play an active political

role in such issues as temperance, often campaigning on behalf of prohibition referenda. The Southern white campaign of terror, lynching, and disfranchisement steadily reduced African American political power and participation, however, until the onset of mid-twentieth century civil rights movements.

AFRICAN AMERICAN CHURCHES’ RESPONSE TO SEGREGATION

As the system of racial segregation imposed in the 1880s and 1890s took hold, African American ministers coordinated a manifold response. First, they forthrightly challenged new segregation laws, engaging in civil disobedience and boycotts. For example, when the city of Nashville, Tennessee, segregated its street cars in 1906, influential Baptist minister R. H. Boyd led an African American boycott of the streetcars, even operating his own streetcar line for a time. No defeat was ever seen as final.

Second, African American ministers helped to nurture a separate set of African American institutions to serve African Americans excluded from white establishments. The Congregationalists, Baptists, and Northern Methodists established schools in the South for African Americans during Reconstruction, but the African Methodist Episcopal, African Methodist Episcopal Zion, and Christian Methodist Episcopal bishops forged ahead with the establishment of their own network of schools. The African American denominations also built up their publishing houses, and the books and periodicals that they published were vital to the black community. Virtually every institution with ties to African American communities received some support from African American churches.

Third, some African American ministers believed that the civil rights retreats of the late nineteenth century should spur African Americans to leave the United States for a destination where their full civil rights would be respected. A “Back to Africa” movement grew to enable African Americans to find a home where they could run governments, banks, and businesses without interference from whites. Thus, Bishop Turner helped to organize a steamship line to carry African Americans back to Africa, and two shiploads of African American emigrants sailed to Liberia in 1895 and 1896 as a result of his efforts. Some African American church leaders, such as Christian Methodist Episcopal Bishop Lucius Holsey and AME Bishop Richard Cain, held views similar to those advocated by Turner, but many more church leaders opposed Turner’s emigrationism vigorously. Simultaneously, African American missionary work continued to occupy the attention of African Americans at the end of the nineteenth century. Under the guidance of Bishops Payne and Turner, for example, the African Methodist Episcopal Church had a vigorous missionary presence in Sierra Leone, Liberia, and South Africa.

AFRICAN AMERICAN CHURCHES IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

In the twentieth century, African American religious life was characterized by a far greater degree of diversity and pluralism. At the same time, traditional African American concerns, including the continuing quest for freedom and justice, were not only maintained but also strengthened. Pentecostalism, which burst on the American scene in 1906, became a major religious force within the African American community. William Joseph Seymour, a preacher and son of ex-slaves from Louisiana, led an extraordinary interracial revival in Los Angeles from 1906 to 1909 that enabled Pentecostalism to spread worldwide. The claim that all heavenly gifts that were available to early Christians, including faith healing and speaking in tongues, were available to modern Christians, gave great impetus to the movement. The Pentecostal-oriented Church of God in Christ, founded by Charles H. Mason, who attended Seymour’s revival, became the second largest African American denomination in the United States. In the latter part of the century, the charismatic or Neo-Pentecostal movement has revitalized many congregations within mainline African American denominations.

The liturgy of the African American churches was transformed with the introduction of gospel music in the early part of the twentieth century. Influenced by the work of such composers as Charles Tindley, Charles Price Jones, Lucie Campbell Williams and Thomas Dorsey, the new music enabled worshipers to praise God with rhythms and harmonies imported from more secular musical genres, such as blues and jazz. This new fusion sparked the creation of compositions that perhaps expressed the deep religious feelings of ordinary worshipers in the pews more appropriately than any previous music. New instruments were brought into the churches for the performance of these new musical compositions including guitars, drums, and, eventually, synthesizers and electronic instruments. This music initially encountered strong resistance in many African American congregations, but the popularity of such performers as Mahalia Jackson and the passage of time have enabled it to win a very wide acceptability. Church choirs and

ensembles, such as the Dixie Hummingbirds, helped to gain for gospel music an ever-increasing audience. While both Methodists and Baptists played a part in the spread of gospel music, the Holiness-Pentecostalist churches stemming from the 1906 revivals in Los Angeles played an especially important role in its increasing popularity.

The black nationalism of Bishop Turner came to full flower in the work of such men as Marcus Garvey (and his chaplain general, George A. McGuire), Elijah Muhammad, and Malcolm X. This black nationalism aided the growth of non-Christian religions, such as Islam and Black Judaism, within the African American community. Black nationalists often rejected Christianity as too complicit with slaveholding and racial oppression. A spectacular rise of storefront churches occurred, some of which were led by flamboyant showmen, such as Father Divine and “Sweet Daddy” Grace. Each of these trends has been significantly aided by the African American migrations after 1915 from Southern states to the North, which greatly strengthened African American communities.

A somewhat later migration from the Caribbean provided support for the growth of a diverse range of religions within the African American community including the Episcopal Church, Seventh-Day Adventism, Roman Catholicism, Rastafarianism, santeria, and voodoo. An early Caribbean migrant was Sarah Mae Manning, who brought up her son, Louis Eugene Wolcott, in Boston within the Episcopal Church. He later achieved fame as a Muslim under the name of Louis Farrakhan.

Many black ministers became advocates of a Social Gospel movement. One of the most famous was Rev. Ransom of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, who

came into prominence between 1901 and 1904 as pastor of an Institutional Church in Chicago. (Institutional churches provided a range of social services to needy members and neighbors, in addition to regular worship.) Social Gospellers highlighted the reality of collective, societal sin, such as the starvation of children and the denial of human rights, and maintained that Christian repentance of these sins must be followed by concrete actions to rectify injustice and to assist the poor. The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was profoundly influenced by this Social Gospel movement.

Many ministers and congregations maintained a kind of political involvement that built on a long tradition within the African American community and often with Social Gospel concerns in mind. Chicago AME minister Archibald Carey was a behind-the-scenes political organizer early in the twentieth century who effectively represented the interests of the African American community. New York’s Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and Floyd Flake and Atlanta’s Andrew Young and John Lewis were ministers who achieved election to the U.S. House of Representatives, with Powell rising to the chairmanship of the influential Education and Labor Committee during the 1960s.

Other African American ministers, including Malcolm X, Al Sharpton, and Calvin Butts, have played important roles as community organizers, although never serving in elective office. Jesse Jackson’s attempts to gain the Democratic nomination for president in 1984 and 1988 brought the electoral clout of the African American church into the spotlight. The African American church’s strong involvement in political, economic, and social affairs helps to point out its continuing and central relevance—even indispensability—within the national context.

The civil rights movement of the 1960s was deeply influenced by the African American church context from which its most prominent organizer, Martin Luther King Jr., sprang. Its demonstrations, speeches, and movement songs were suffused with biblical images drawn from the Book of Exodus and other parts of the Bible. It was their deep religious faith that made it possible for the movement to keep progressing along a nonviolent path, even when King’s home in Montgomery was firebombed or the Ninth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1963 also was bombed, with four young girls the casualties of that violence. In a significant sense, King inherited his activism from his father, Martin Luther King Sr., also a Baptist pastor, who had led rallies and economic boycotts against racial discrimination as far back as the 1930s.

But it is also worth recalling that many African American religious leaders in the 1960s thought that King’s brand of social activism was too radical. One of King’s most determined critics during the 1960s was the theologically conservative president of the National Baptist Convention of the U.S.A., Inc., Joseph H. Jackson. The attempt by King’s ministerial allies to unseat Jackson as president of the convention in 1960 and 1961 led to a schism, with King and his supporters forming a new denomination, the Progressive National Baptist Convention. King came under further criticism when, in 1967 and 1968, he made it clear that his advocacy of pacifism extended to opposition to U.S. military involvement in Vietnam.

The Black Theology movement, which grew rapidly after King’s assassination, attempted to fashion a critique of the prevalent Christian theology out of the materials that Malcolm X and the Black Power movement provided. African American theologians were skeptical of the integrationist and non-violent thrusts of the Civil Rights movement, calling the African American community toward greater pride in and reliance upon the community’s own cultural resources. One such theologian, Albert Cleage, pastor of the Shrine of the Black Madonna in Detroit, argued that Jesus was a black messiah and that his congregation should follow the teachings of Jehovah, a black god. “Almost everything you have heard about Christianity is essentially a lie,” he stated. Cleage was representative of many black theologians in arguing that black liberation should be seen as situated at the core of the Christian gospels. In the 1980s, African American women such as Jacquellyn Grant, Delores Williams, and Katie Cannon have formulated “womanist” theologies, which seek to combat the triple oppression of race, class, and gender suffered by most African American women.

FOLK ART OF PREACHING

In most African American congregations, sermonizing is an interpersonal skill that African Americans have elevated to the level of art with such notable elements as call and response and repetition of phrases. The exuberance of all participants is highly dependent upon the tradition within which one worships. For example, in the more highly liturgical traditions such as Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, sermons only tend to be instructional. By contrast, non-liturgical Protestant denominations, including Baptist and Pentecostal churches, tend to view sermons as verbal sacraments.

In the 1990s, nondenominational churches reached a new high in popularity, usually centered upon a solitary, charismatic figure. As the medium is the message, performance was as important as the words themselves. Among the most highly regarded “artists” were Gardner C. Taylor, pastor emeritus of Brooklyn, New York’s Concord Baptist Church of Christ; Barbara King, founder and minister of Atlanta’s nondenominational Hillside Chapel and Truth Center, Inc.; and James Forbes, senior minister of New York City’s Riverside Church. They were just a few of those who were earmarked as the great preachers of the late twentieth century. In 1996, both Forbes and Taylor were deemed two of the 12 most effective preachers by a Baylor University survey, and Taylor was named as one of President Bill Clinton’s favorite evangelists.

EVOLVING TRENDS AMONG AFRICAN AMERICAN CHURCHES

In the twenty-first century, African American religions are undergoing substantial changes. The religious searches of prosperous middle-class African Americans has brought about surging enrollment at African American mega-churches in many of the nation’s metropolitan areas, such

as Atlanta, Washington, D.C., and Dallas. A growing interest in do-it-yourself spirituality has greatly enlarged the readership of inspirational writers, such as Iyanla Vanzant and T.D. Jakes. There has been an unprecedented interest in racial reconciliation among conservative Christian churches, joining liberal Christians who have pioneered in this area since the 1960s, even while an upsurge in African American church burnings, especially in the rural South demonstrated that the nation still has much work to do in addressing racism. Muslim leader Louis Farrakhan achieved spectacular success with his Million Man March in October 1995, stressing such spiritual themes as atonement, but he has not fashioned an effective follow-up to this headline-grabbing event. Meanwhile, the urban poor, especially young African American men, seem to be staying away from the churches in ever-increasing numbers.

Large African American churches, such as the Ebenezer African Methodist Episcopal Church in Maryland with 12,000 members, have attracted the African American middle-class worshippers in unprecedented numbers. They have done so with very diverse offerings. For example, Ebenezer offers marriage counseling, workshops on financial planning, a ministry to lawyers and a socially involved, intellectually informed ministry. Many of the megachurch ministers, such as Ebenezer’s pastor and assistant pastor, have doctoral degrees. African American megachurch members reach out to young African American men who are still in poverty, even though their churches are often in the suburbs, miles away from inner city problems. Some African American churches have traditionally had large memberships, but the new megachurches feature younger pastors who have earned doctorates and are often still in their 30s or 40s. Unlike their white counterparts, African American megachurches often seek out social involvement and uplift with the poor. Other African American mega-churches can be found in such metropolitan areas as Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, and Memphis.

Increasingly, African American ministerial leadership is passing from those who were on the front lines of civil rights struggles in the 1960s to their children’s generation. Perhaps this reality is best symbolized by events in Atlanta in the late 1990s. In July 1997, 75-year-old Joseph Lowery, who had helped to found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with his colleagues Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph Abernathy, stepped down from the presidency of that organization. Meanwhile, Bernice King, who was five years old when her father was assassinated, has established a successful ministry at the Greater Rising Star Baptist Church in Atlanta. Similar to her father, she preaches a message of forgiveness and reconciliation, and she calls upon churches to commune and fellowship more across racial and ethnic lines. Meanwhile, Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Martin Luther King, Jr. previously preached, opened a new sanctuary seating 1,600 worshipers in March 1999. The old church building, only half as large, was taken over and maintained by the National Park Service.

AFRICAN AMERICAN CHURCHES ADDRESS SOCIAL ISSUES

On the whole, African American churches continue to address a wide variety of social problems affecting the African American community. Perhaps most urgently, many churches have strong anti-drug programs. Some congregations have undertaken vigorous action against crack houses. Parochial schools, feeding centers, and housing for senior citizens are also part of the African American church’s outreach to the community.

Many African American ministers have noted, however, the growing division of the African American community along lines of social class and have exhorted middle-class African Americans to give more generously to programs that aid the poor. James Cone, a leading African American theologian, has stated that African American churches need to devote less time and attention to institutional survival and more to finding ways to deal with such pressing issues as poverty, gang violence, and AIDS. In 1997, five historically African American denominations formed Revelation Corporation of America, a partnership between corporations, charities, and churches; the income from the corporation will be used to help to subsidize home ownership among moderate-income residents of big cities, such as Philadelphia and Memphis.

African American churches have been involved in a wide variety of ecumenical efforts with white churches. While mainline Christian organizations, such as the National Council of Churches of Christ, have been involved in efforts for human rights for all and interracial reconciliation since the 1960s, it has only been since the 1990s that evangelical Christian organizations have joined in similar movements.

In 1994, predominantly African American and predominantly white Pentecostalist churches formed an inter-racial umbrella organization for the first time. The Promise Keepers, a Christian men’s movement designed to motivate men to become better husbands and fathers, fully included African Americans in the staff and leadership of the organization. In June 1995, the Southern Baptist Convention adopted a resolution apologizing for its previous defense of slavery and “unwaveringly” denouncing “racism, in all its forms, as deplorable sin.”

The predominantly white National Association of Evangelicals and the National Black Evangelical Association agreed to hold their future meetings jointly. Still, some racial discontent continued to surface among evangelical Christians. The National Baptist Convention, U.S.A., Inc. withheld its support from one of the Reverend Billy Graham’s crusades because of Graham’s refusal to support affirmative action. In addition, E. Edward Jones, president of the National Baptist Convention of America, Inc., refused to accept the Southern Baptist Convention’s apology for slavery and racism, charging that the resolution was simply a cover for aggressive evangelism in the African American community that would draw members away from historically African American churches.

Dialogue among individual denominations continues to nurture the spirit of cooperation between them, with the result of establishing closer working relationships on the national and community levels. In June 1997, leaders of eight historically African American denominations met in Hampton, Virginia, in a week-long conference. The church leaders evinced a remarkable spirit of unity, but agreed to disagree on such issues as whether it could be the church’s responsibility to help redeem society by pursuing social and economic change, or the church was only responsible for the salvation of individual souls.

African American men from four Methodist denominations met in Atlanta in October 1998, addressing issues relating to families, male mentoring, and reconciliation between their various traditions. Bishops from these four denominations—the predominantly white United Methodist Church and three African American Methodist denominations, the African Methodist Episcopal, the African Methodist Episcopal Zion, and the Christian Methodist Episcopal Churches—continue to explore the possibility of a merger early in the twenty-first century.

In the era of the “megachurch,” storefront churches—historically, often the only place where African Americans could go for help in time of need—move against the trend toward massive congregations and televised sermons, offer Bible study and a sense of community in an intimate setting. An urban phenomenon, storefront churches are frequently created by unordained ministers and are independent of denominational hierarchies. Yet, these churches are often the lifeblood of urban communities plagued by violence and poverty. The social services and community outreach these churches offer to populations sometimes considered beyond help, pick up where the government leaves off.

African American churches also have found themselves compelled to address issues related to the multiethnic tensions of the 1990s. In the aftermath of the devastating arson attacks on black churches in 1996, white churches and African American churches joined together in some cities to offer workshops against racism. Leading African American pastors in Los Angeles have deplored both the violence of police revealed in the Rodney King incident and the violence of inner city rioters, while advocating urgent attention to the problems of inner-city residents. For example, James Lawson of the Holman United Methodist Church stated that those who burned buildings during the 1992 Los Angeles riots were“responding to a society of violence, not simply a society of racism,” and issued “a call to repent.” In Queens, New York, an African American Baptist congregation in 1991 warmly welcomed the opportunity to perform an ordination service for a Korean American minister, Chong S. Lee.

Black ministers and congregations have been increasingly opening themselves to frank discussions of human sexuality, impelled in part by the public health threat posed by the AIDS crisis, which has hit African American communities especially hard. In 1999, 5,000 churches participated in the Black Church Week of Prayer for the Healing of AIDS, a 100% increase in only 10 years. Franklyn Richardson, senior pastor of Grace Baptist Church in Mount Vernon, New York, is one minister who has openly discussed AIDS with his congregation; Richardson’s brother died of AIDS in 1993. Some African American congregations are still uncomfortable, however, about augmenting their traditional advocacy of monogamy and premarital abstinence with encouragement for sexually active individuals to use condoms to protect themselves from sexually transmitted diseases. Often, African American ministers from conservative religious traditions (e.g., many Roman Catholics, Muslims, and Pentecostalists) are able to discuss this matter with their congregations only in an informal manner, if at all.

The cause of gender equality continues to make progress in African American churches. While two predominantly white denominations, the United Methodist and Protestant Episcopal Churches, have elevated African American women to the episcopacy in the past two decades, none of the largest historically African American denominations have done so. Nevertheless, women in some African American churches are achieving more prestigious ministerial assignments. Vashti McKenzie, a former model, disc jockey, and radio program director, has served as pastor of the Payne Memorial AME Church, an “old-line” church in Baltimore, since the early 1990s. Her innovative ministry, she says, is designed to “provide a message of hope for a hurting community.” More than 600 female pastors are ensconced in the African Methodist Episcopal Church.

Preaching the gospel in a faithful but relevant fashion remains the most important objective of black churches. In a recent survey, 22% of African American clergy considered the most important problem of the African American church to be “lack of evangelism in fulfilling its religious role.” That was more than twice the figure for any other problem identified. Ministerial training and financial support are other areas needing improvement in many African American churches. African American churches are not in danger of losing sight of their many, vital, and extremely significant functions, within both the black community and American society as a whole. It is safe to predict that the African American churches will continue to sustain and develop their important and prophetic witness.

MEMBERSHIP GROWTH WITHIN AFRICAN AMERICAN CHURCHES

While many African American Methodist and Baptist denominations have shown only limited membership growth, other African American denominations are showing marked membership increases. Foremost among these are the Pentecostalist churches, whose lively worship and extensive social ministries are attracting members from all classes within the African American community. The largest of these denominations, the Church of God in Christ, is now estimated to have over three million members. Charismatic congregations, also known as neo-Pentecostalist, within such mainline African American churches as the African Methodist Episcopal Church, are also thriving and for similar reasons.

Other groups that have made substantial membership gains among African Americans include the Roman Catholic and Episcopal Churches and Islam. While estimates differ, apparently more than 1.5 million African Americans now belong to the Roman Catholic Church, which has worked hard in recent years to be sensitive to their needs. In many inner cities, it has maintained churches and schools in predominantly African American neighborhoods, although closings, mostly for financial reasons, are increasing in such dioceses as Detroit. Moreover, the Roman Catholic Church has been receptive to some liturgical variation, allowing gospel choirs and African vestments for priests in African American churches. Nevertheless, Roman Catholics confront some serious problems in serving African American parishioners. Fewer than 300 of the 54,000 priests in the United States are African American, meaning that some African American congregations must be served by white priests. In 1989, George A. Stallings Jr., a priest in Washington, D.C., broke away from Catholicism, arguing that the Catholic Church was still racist and did not do enough for its African American members.

In such large cities as New York, Afro-Caribbean immigrants are swelling the ranks of the Episcopal Church. For example, a substantial majority of the 1,300 members of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Brooklyn are Caribbean immigrants. At least three Episcopal churches in New York City have escaped closing by church authorities because of the influx of members from the Caribbean. The Episcopal Church is not the only predominantly white denomination to seek to attract new immigrants of African descent to its pews. Presbyterian Church (USA) officials plan to increase their denomination’s ethnic minority membership to about 300,000, or about 10% of total membership, within the next seven years, in part by targeting their outreach to new immigrants of African descent.

Mainstream Islam, despite raising its own complexities, has also made large gains in the United States. Of the six million Muslims in this country, one million are believed to be African American. Most African American Muslims do not distinguish between people of different races and worship cordially side by side with recent Muslim immigrants from Asia and Africa. Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam, however, which retains Elijah Muhammad’s black separatist teachings, continues to maintain a devoted following. Farrakhan was embroiled in much controversy over the years as a result of his negative statements about Jews, Palestinian Arabs, and Asians.

Due to its conservative stance on gender issues, Islam has proven to be more popular among African American men than among African American women. Following Farrakhan’s successful Million Man March in 1995, he is able to fill the house, even in smaller cities such as Tallahassee, Florida, and hold his audiences spellbound for hours with a mixture of religious prophecy, candid social commentary, and moral exhortation for youth, but surprisingly the march did not achieve for him a sustained national presence. The chief organizer of the Million Man March, Benjamin Chavis Muhammad, converted to the Nation of Islam in April 1997, and then suffered the termination of his ministerial standing in his former denomination, the United Church of Christ.

Farrakhan, along with other prominent African Americans, including Senator Barack Obama (D–Illinois), marked the tenth anniversary of the Million Man March by staging a second march, the Millions More Movement, in Washington, D.C., in October 2005. African and Afro-Caribbean religions, such as the Yoruba worship of the spirits (orisha), Cuban santeria, and Haitian voodoo, have also been gaining ground in African American communities and on some African American college campuses. Caribbean immigrants to the United States have helped to stimulate the growth of these African-derived traditions. A typical Haitian American voodoo congregation in Brooklyn, New York, was the subject of Karen McCarthy Brown’s groundbreaking work Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn. Some African Americans in the United States are also attracted by the honor shown to ancestors in these African traditions. Iyanla Vanzant, brought up as a Christian but who later identified herself as a Yoruba priest-ess, has provided low-key advocacy of these traditions in her best-selling works.

SUCCESS AND FAILURE WITHIN AFRICAN AMERICAN CHURCHES

The most successful African American ministers today employ as many forms of media as possible in order to find and keep their audiences. T. D. Jakes, for example, might seem at first glance to be just a typical pastor of a mega-church, the Potter’s House in Dallas, with over 35,000 members. But what sets him above the crowd is his authorship of over one dozen books, many of them bestsellers, a popular program on the Black Entertainment Television (BET) cable network, and an active revival schedule that finds him packing venues such as Atlanta’s Georgia Dome. His popular Internet Web page makes his thought widely available to the computer literate. Some former Potter’s House members have been critical of the church, citing excessive control, legalism, and cult-like brainwashing techniques among its leadership.

Johnnie Coleman, pastor of the Christ Universal Temple, runs a seminary for pastors and has a radio ministry. Her fellow Chicagoan, Minister Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam, also gets his message out through radio broadcasts and an active publishing program, including a weekly newspaper, The Final Call, sold on street corners nationwide. While pastors continue to spread their ideas through sermons on cassette tapes and in print, the most successful find many more ways to reach out.

One prominent African American minister who has encountered some failures is Henry J. Lyons, a St. Petersburg, Florida, Baptist minister who in 1994 became president of the National Baptist Convention of the USA, Inc. On July 9, 1997, Lyons’s wife Deborah Lyons was arrested and charged with arson at a Florida home that her husband owned together with Bernice Edwards, director of public relations for his denomination and Henry Lyons’s alleged mistress. This eventually led to state and national criminal investigations and indictments against Henry Lyons. Florida authorities charged Lyons with racketeering and grand theft in February 1998. They alleged that he had misappropriated denominational funds and swindled millions of dollars from large corporations by selling bogus membership lists. Five months later, Lyons was indicted by the federal government on 56 counts of extortion, fraud, and tax evasion.

Lyons requested forgiveness from his local congregation and his denomination. On February 27, 1999, Lyons was convicted of all three counts brought against

him by the state of Florida. On March 16, 1999, he resigned his office as president of the National Baptist Convention, and S. C. Cureton assumed the post until new elections were held. Lyons then pleaded guilty to five charges brought by the federal government on the following day. He was sentenced to five and one half years in a federal penitentiary and had to return $214,500 of donations that he had not distributed.

INCREASE OF CHURCH BURNINGS IN THE SOUTH

African American churches in the South were literally under fire in the 1990s. These incidents of church arson invoked grievous memories of racist violence during the 1960s, particularly the bombing of Birmingham’s Sixth Street Baptist Church in which four small girls were killed on September 15, 1963. In 1996, the peak year, 119 of 297 churches affected by arson nationwide were predominantly African American. In other words, while African American churches constituted about 6% of the nation’s churches, more than 40% of arson cases occurred that year at African American churches.

In response, President Clinton declared the “investigation and prevention of church arsons to be a national priority.” In June 1996, President Clinton established the National Church Arson Task Force and proposed a three-pronged strategy that called for prosecution of the arsonists, the rebuilding of church edifices, and the prevention of additional fires. In addition, on July 3, he signed the Church Arson Prevention Act of 1996, which passed both chambers of the Congress unanimously.

Independently, Mac Charles Jones, associate general secretary for racial justice of the National Council of Churches of Christ, met with pastors of more than 30 burned-out churches and heard numerous stories of racist graffiti and threats issued against the pastors. African Americans concerned that the conflagrations were related took steps toward fighting the terrorism. To that end, the NAACP urged the Justice Department to investigate; in compliance, a full-scale civil rights investigation was initiated. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) also instituted a fund for the affected congregations.

Despite federal government involvement though, only 34% of the cases had been solved as of November 1998, and investigations continue as of 2007. (Those who have been charged with arson of African American churches have included 68 whites, 37 African Americans, and one Hispanic American.) In addition, neither the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) nor the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF)—which together have more than 200 agents on the case—have been able to find a common link among these crimes.

In 2006, three white university students at Birmingham-Southern, a Methodist-affiliated liberal arts college, gained national attention by setting fire to nine rural Alabama churches. Allegedly, five fires were set first as a “joke,” then the next four to lead the police astray. Five of the churches were white, and four were African American.

AFRICAN-AMERICAN CATHOLIC CONGREGATION

The Imani Temple, the first African-American Catholic Congregation, was founded in Washington, D.C., by George Augustus Stallings Jr., a former Roman Catholic priest, in July 1989. The schism occurred when Stallings performed a mass based on an experimental rite currently being used in Zaire, in defiance of the prohibition of his archbishop, James Hickey. This was the first schism from the Roman Catholic Church in the United States since 1904.

Stallings also voiced a number of criticisms of the Roman Catholic Church at the time of the schism: “There are not enough black priests, not enough black church members, and some of the relatively few black churches that exist are being closed and consolidated. The black experience and black needs are addressed minimally in church services and life.” He also asserted that “we could no longer afford to worship white gods in black houses.” Thirteen African American Catholic bishops issued a statement denouncing Stallings and accused him of expressing “personal disappointment [and] individually felt frustration” under the guise of charges of racism.

Black Catholic reactions to these developments were mixed. Many expressed sympathy for Stallings’s concerns, but were unwilling to leave the Roman Catholic Church. Stallings assumed the title of archbishop of Imani Temple in 1991 and, at the same time, ordained a woman to the priesthood of the African American Catholic Congregation. Stallings has also relaxed the Catholic teaching on abortion for his congregation members and has declared the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to be a saint.

In forming his denomination, he has experienced some setbacks. Several formerly close associates split with Stallings in 1991, alleging a lack of fiscal accountability in the church and accusing him of taking his liturgical innovations too far. In 1994, Stallings dedicated a new cathedral for his denomination in Washington, D.C. As of the same year, his denomination claimed 4,200 members in seven cities in the United States and in Lagos, Nigeria. As of 2007, there were 13 Imani temples under Stallings’ leadership.

AFRICAN METHODIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH

The African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church was founded in 1816 at a conference convened in Philadelphia by Richard Allen, who was elected as its first bishop. In the following years, it grew throughout the North and Midwest and, after the Civil War, expanded quickly throughout the South and the West. In 1991, the church claimed about 3.5 million members, about one million of whom are found in churches in Africa, South America, and the Caribbean as a result of successful missionary efforts. It oversees about 8,000 churches, and the AME Church sponsors seven colleges and two seminaries in the United States and several colleges and educational centers in Liberia and South Africa.

Payne Theological Seminary is located in Wilber-force, Ohio, at the site of the church’s oldest school, Wilberforce University, founded in 1856. Turner Theological Seminary is one of six schools that have joined to form the Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta. About one-third of local AME congregations sponsor low-income housing, schools, Job Corps programs, or care for senior citizens. The African Methodist Episcopal Church’s chief governing bodies are the General Conference, the Council of Bishops, and the General Board. It publishes the following periodicals: the Christian Recorder; the Voice of Missions, and the AME Church Review. In 2000, Rev. Vashti Murphy McKenzie was elected the church’s first woman bishop.

AFRICAN METHODIST EPISCOPAL ZION CHURCH

Originally known as the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church was founded in 1821 in New York City. James Varick was elected its first “superintendent”; the title of the presiding officer was later changed to bishop. In 1848, the word “Zion” was added to the name of this church in order to avoid confusion with that founded by Richard Allen. It grew slightly prior to 1860, but expanded quickly in such Southern states as North Carolina and Alabama after the Civil War.

As of 1997, the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church claimed approximately 1.3 million members, 100,000 of whom lived in Africa, England, India, South America, or the Caribbean. It possesses nearly 3,100 churches worldwide. The church supports three colleges, two of which are junior colleges, and one seminary. The four-year college and the seminary are Livingstone College and Hood Theological Seminary, both located in Salisbury, North Carolina. The denomination is governed by a general conference, a board of bishops, and a correctional council. Its publications include the weekly Star of Zion, the Quarterly Review, the monthly Missionary Seer, and the quarterly Church School Herald.

AFRICAN ORTHODOX CHURCH

The African Orthodox Church was founded in 1921 by Archbishop George Alexander McGuire, once a priest in the Protestant Episcopal Church. McGuire was the chaplain for Marcus Garvey’s United Negro Improvement Association, but Garvey soon disavowed his chaplain’s efforts to found a new denomination. This church is today an autonomous and independent body adhering to an “orthodox” confession of faith. Its nearly 5,100 members worship in some 17 churches.

AFRICAN THEOLOGICAL ARCHMINISTRY

In 1973, a group of African Americans founded a voodoo kingdom in South Carolina called Oyotunji. This kingdom was run by the leader of the African Theological Archministry, King Efuntola. The king and his followers relocated to South Carolina from Harlem, moving their Shango Temple to Beaufort County. The king received his voodoo training in Nigeria, and his followers worship various gods and deities that represent different forces in life. The affiliated membership of the group is estimated at 10,000.

AFRICAN UNION FIRST COLORED METHODIST PROTESTANT CHURCH, INC.

This denomination—the first independent African American denomination in the United States—was formed in 1866 by a merger of the African Union Church and the First Colored Methodist Protestant Church. The African Union Church traced its roots to a Union Church of Africans founded in 1813 by Peter Spencer in Wilmington, Delaware. This denomination includes 40 congregations in several states and has a membership of over 8,000.

APOSTOLIC OVERCOMING HOLY CHURCH OF GOD, INC.

This Pentecostal denomination, originally known as the Ethiopian Overcoming Holy Church, was incorporated in Alabama in 1920. Evangelistic in purpose, it emphasizes sanctification, holiness, and the power of divine healing. As of 1994, it claimed 173 churches and about 12,000 members.

BIBLE WAY CHURCH OF OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST WORLD WIDE, INC.

Founded in 1957, this Pentecostal tradition claimed 300 churches and 250,000 members as of 2006. It publishes The Bible News Voice biweekly.

BLACK JEWS

Nearly 100,000 African Americans consider themselves Jewish. Included among these are the Commandment Keepers, founded in Harlem in 1919 by a Nigerian man known as “Rabbi Matthew”; the Church of God and Saints in Christ founded in 1896 in Lawrence, Kansas, by William Crowdy; and the Church of God founded in Philadelphia by Prophet F. S. Cherry. In terms of doctrine, these groups share little more than a dislike of Christianity and an affection for the Old Testament. Some black Jews claim to be descended from the Falasha Jews of Ethiopia, who now reside in Israel. However, few black Jews are recognized as such by orthodox rabbis.

The Church of God and Saints of Christ is probably the largest of these groups, with more than 200 churches and a membership of 38,000. The World African Hebrew Israelite Community—a religious sect that believes blacks in the Western Hemisphere are the descendants of the original Hebrews and, as such, are the rightful heirs of the Holy Land of Israel—has 3,000 members throughout the United States and an additional 1,500 living in Israel. Since the late 1960s, they have been led by the spiritual leader Ben Ami Ben-Israel, formerly a Chicago bus driver named Ben Carter.

CHRISTIAN METHODIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH

The Christian Methodist Episcopal (CME) Church, known until 1954 as the Colored Methodist Church, is the third largest African American Methodist body in the United States. It was founded after the Civil War, when some African American Methodist churches desiring not to join the African Methodist Episcopal or African Methodist Episcopal Zion Churches successfully petitioned the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, for the right to form their own denomination. The first CME General Conference was held at Jackson, Tennessee, in 1870. There the church’s first two bishops, William H. Miles and Richard Vanderhorst, were elected.

In 1994, the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church estimated its membership at over one million persons, of whom 75,000 were located overseas. It possesses about 3,000 churches and maintains five church-affiliated colleges, as well as the Phillips School of Theology, a seminary that is part of the consortium known as the Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta. Its periodicals include the bimonthly Christian Index and the monthly Missionary Messenger.

CHURCH OF CHRIST (HOLINESS) U.S.A.

This denomination was organized in 1907 by Bishop Charles Price Jones, a renowned and prolific gospel song and hymn writer. The church traces its roots to an 1894 church established by Jones and C. H. Mason, but Jones and Mason parted company 13 years later after the two men disagreed about whether speaking in tongues was necessary to prove baptism of the Holy Spirit (Jones insisted that it was not). Some 160 churches and 9,300 members belong to this denomination, which upholds the possibility of sanctification and Christian perfection. The church operates Christ Missionary and Industrial College, in Jackson, Mississippi.

CHURCH OF GOD BY FAITH

This Pentecostal denomination was founded in Florida in 1914. Its membership is concentrated in the Southeast.

CHURCH OF GOD IN CHRIST

The Church of God in Christ (COGIC) was organized in 1894 by two former Baptist preachers, Charles H. Mason and C. P. Jones, and was initially strongest in Alabama, Mississippi, and Tennessee. Mason reorganized COGIC in 1907, when he and Jones parted on the issue of speaking in tongues. At that time, Mason was appointed “general overseer and chief apostle” of the Church, as well as its first bishop. It has subsequently expanded very rapidly throughout the United States, especially in African American neighborhoods in the inner cities.

As of 1991, COGIC claimed about 5.5 million members and 15,300 churches. It possesses bible colleges and a junior college, with plans for a university (All Saints University in Memphis) some time in the future. Its Charles H. Mason Theological Seminary is part of the Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta. It is governed by a general assembly, a general council of elders, the board of bishops, and the general board composed of 12 bishops elected by the general assembly to four-year terms. In 2000, Gilbert Earl Patterson was elected presiding bishop over the organization, the fastest-growing Christian group in the United States.

CHURCHES OF GOD, HOLINESS

This denomination was organized by K. H. Burruss in Georgia in 1914. It split off from the Church of Christ (Holiness) U.S.A. Membership in the group’s 40-odd churches totals some 25,000.

FIRE BAPTIZED HOLINESS CHURCH

This church was organized on an interracial basis as the Fire Baptized Holiness Association in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1898; its African American members formed the Fire Baptized Holiness Church in 1908. The church subscribes to standard Pentecostalist doctrines on divine healing, speaking in tongues, and sanctification. As of 1968, it had about 50 churches and a membership of about 9,000. In 2006, the church included about 160 congregations throughout the United States.

NATION OF ISLAM

After the death of Elijah Muhammad in 1975, his son Warith D. Muhammad assumed leadership of the movement. Warith Muhammad shifted dramatically away from his father’s teachings of black nationalism, stating that whites could become members. He sought to bring his movement in accord with Orthodox Islam, and he eventually succeeded, renaming the Nation of Islam as the World Community of Al-Islam in the West and then as the American Muslim Mission before the merger was accomplished.

Three other splinter groups formed, the largest headed by Louis Farrakhan, who split from Muhammad to reestablish the Nation of Islam on the basis of Elijah Muhammad’s original black separatist teachings. The remaining two traditions are led by John Farrakhan and Caliph Emmanuel A. Muhammad.

NATIONAL BAPTIST CONVENTION OF AMERICA, INC.

The National Baptist Convention of America was formed in 1915, as a result of a schism with the National Baptist Convention, USA, Inc. over the issue of control of the denominational publishing house. The supporters of Richard Henry Boyd, chairman of the board of the publishing house, established this convention when Boyd’s opponents had attempted unsuccessfully to bring the publishing house more firmly under denominational control. In 1987, it was said to possess 3.5 million members and 2,500 churches. However, more congregations split off in 1988 to form the National Missionary Baptist Association, when the new denomination also tried to assert control over its publishing house. It has missions in Jamaica, Panama, Haiti, the Virgin Islands, and Africa, and supports 15 colleges.

NATIONAL BAPTIST CONVENTION OF THE USA, INC.

The National Baptist Convention was formed in 1895, through the union of three smaller church organizations, the oldest of which had been founded only 15 years earlier: the Baptist Foreign Mission Convention of the U.S.A.; the American National Baptist Convention; and the National Baptist Educational Convention of the USA. The National Baptist Convention incorporated itself after a dispute over the publishing house led to a schism in 1915.

The National Baptist Convention, Inc., is governed by a 15-member board of directors and a nine-member executive board. It is a supporter of the American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville, Tennessee, and of six other colleges. Its publications include the semimonthly National Baptist Voice. The convention dedicated its World Center Headquarters in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1989. In 1994, Rev. Dr. Henry J. Lyons was elected as the sixth president of the National Baptists, the largest African American religious order in the United States. On March 16, 1999, Rev. Lyons resigned his office amidst serious state and federal charges against him. S.C. Careton assumed the post of president until new elections were held.

The National Baptist Convention, Inc., as of 1992, claimed 8.2 million members, 100,000 of whom were in foreign countries. Litigation documents concerning its former president, Rev. Lyons, however, established that the denomination’s membership in 1998 could be more accurately estimated at one million persons. It possesses 33,000 local churches.

NATIONAL MISSIONARY BAPTIST CONVENTION

Founded in 1988, this group boasted 3.2 million members in 1995 and more than 500 churches. Rev. W. T. Snead was elected president of the Convention in 1994. In 2006, Rev. C.C. Robertson was elected president.

NATIONAL PRIMITIVE BAPTIST CONVENTION OF AMERICA

African American and white Primitive Baptists separated after the Civil War. Although having long avowed opposition to church organization above the congregational level, it was not until 1907 that African American Primitive Baptists formed the National Primitive Baptist Convention. Each congregation is independent, and a decision by officials of a local church is final. Belief in “the particular election of a definite number of the human race” is included within its creed. In 1975, they possessed a membership of 250,000 in 606 churches. Elder Thomas W. Samuels was elected president in 1995.

PENTECOSTAL ASSEMBLIES OF THE WORLD, INC.

An estimated one million members belong to the 1,760 churches of an organization founded in 1906. The church holds that speaking in tongues is vital to spiritual rebirth and that believers should be baptized only in the name of Jesus. Since its origins, it has accepted the ordination of women in the ministry.

PROGRESSIVE NATIONAL BAPTIST CONVENTION, INC.

The Progressive National Baptist Convention, Inc. was formed in 1961, as a result of a schism in the National Baptist Convention of the U.S.A., Inc. The schism resulted from a dispute over leadership occasioned by differences over tactical strategies in the struggle for civil rights. Those committed to such tactics as nonviolent civil disobedience, including Martin Luther King Jr., left to form the new denomination. The convention’s motto is “Unity, Service, Fellowship, and Peace.” It is a financial supporter of six colleges. It has active missions in Haiti and Africa. The Convention claims 2.5 million members and more than 2,000 churches and is governed by a 60-member executive board headed by Rev. Bennett Smith Sr. In 2006, the church elected Rev. T. DeWitt Smith president. Although it has no publishing house of its own, it does publish a quarterly periodical titled the Baptist Progress.

RASTAFARIANS

Members of this religion regard the Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie, who died in 1975, a supreme being. Marcus Garvey, a Jamaican-born nationalist who advocated a back-to-Africa movement in the United States in the early 1920s, is also a central figure in the faith. Reggae musician Bob Marley, a Rastafarian, helped to increase the religion’s popularity in the United States.

Today, Rastas differ on specific dogma, but they basically believe that they are descended from black Hebrews exiled in Babylon and, therefore, are true Israelites. They also believe that Haile Selassie, whose name before ascending the throne was Lij Ras Tafari Makonnen, is the direct descendent of Solomon and Sheba, and that God is black. Most white men, they believe, have been worshipping a dead god and have attempted to teach the blacks to do likewise. They hold that the Bible was distorted by King James, and that the black race sinned and was punished by God with slavery. They view Ethiopia as Zion, the Western world as Babylon, and believe that one day they will return to Zion. They preach love, peace, and reconciliation between races, but warn that Armageddon is imminent.

Rastas do not vote, tend to be vegetarians, abhor alcohol, and wear their hair in long, uncombed plaits called dreadlocks. The hair is never cut, since it is part of the spirit, nor is it ever combed. Estimates of their numbers in the United States and around the world vary widely.

TRIUMPH THE CHURCH AND KINGDOM OF GOD IN CHRIST

Founded in 1902, this denomination is identified by their belief in the Pentecostal forms of baptism, but their rejection of speaking in tongues. The type of baptism ceremony in this church is called “fire-baptism.”

UNITED CHURCH OF JESUS CHRIST

The United Church of Jesus Christ split from the Church of God in Christ in 1945 over the issue of the Holy Trinity versus a theory of the “Oneness in Godhead,” which it follows. This splinter sect was named the Church of God in Christ (Apostolic) and was founded by Bishop Randolph Carr. In 1965, disputes over the lifestyle of Bishop Carr led Monroe Saunders and most of the church’s members to leave and found the present-day United Church of Jesus Christ. As of 2006, general minister and president was Rev. John H. Thomas.

RELIGIOUS LEADERS

(To locate biographical profiles more readily, please consult the index at the back of the book.)

JARAMOGI ABEBE AGYEMAN (1911–2000) Founder

Jaramogi Abebe Agyeman was born Albert Cleage Jr. in 1911, in Indianapolis, Indiana. His physician father relocated the family to Detroit a short time later, and Cleage undertook social work as a profession before earning a degree in divinity from Oberlin College in 1943. After his ordination, he headed Congregational churches in Kentucky and Massachusetts; Cleage’s work at the latter was notable for the community outreach and economic programs that he enacted. Returning to Detroit, the minister became head of a Presbyterian congregation that split off into its own church in 1953.

This fellowship, known as the Central United Church of Christ (CUCC), soon became a political powerhouse among Detroit’s increasingly significant African American community during the 1950s. Cleage’s growing interest in the Black Power movement of the 1960s—and especially the teachings of Nation of Islam leader Malcolm X—led the pastor to create a separate denomination from the CUCC in 1967, based on historical theories that Jesus was of African descent. The focal point of the church—and the symbolic gesture that attracted many to it—was a powerful 18-foot mural of the Black Madonna. The Black Christian Nationalist movement and its cornerstone congregation, the Shrine of the Black Madonna, soon became an influential religious, social, political, and economic force in the city.

Basing the church’s tenets on both teachings of visionaries, such as Malcolm X, Elijah Muhammad, and Marcus Garvey, Cleage preached economic self-sufficiency to his flock and put the words into action by the creation of numerous social service programs, including a community grocery outlet, in answer to the inflated prices then common to white-owned stores in the African American neighborhoods, and a bookstore stocked with the significant African nationalist literature of the day. The Shrine of the Black Madonna expanded into other American cities over the next several years, but the imprint it left on Detroit was perhaps Cleage’s most significant achievement.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, after contentious 1967 race riots put aside any hopes of smooth integration between a diminishing white population and an increasingly frustrated African American citizenry, Cleage and the church’s active membership were credited with helping elect numerous African American political leaders, judges, and school board members who remained a vital force in Detroit well into the 1990s. Cleage authored two books, The Black Messiah and Black Christian Nationalism, before taking the name Jaramogi Abebe Agyeman. Cleage died of heart disease on February 20, 2000, in Calhoun Falls, South Carolina, at the age of 88.

NOBLE DREW ALI (1886–1929) Religious Leader

Noble Drew Ali, originally named Timothy Drew, was born in North Carolina in 1886. He is principally important for his role in establishing the first North American religious movement combining black nationalist and Muslim themes with the rejection of Christianity as the religion of whites. In 1913, he established the first Moorish Science Temple in Newark, New Jersey. He taught that African Americans were “Asiatics” who had originally lived in Morocco before enslavement. Every people, including African Americans, needed land for themselves, he proclaimed, and North America, which he termed an “extension of the African continent,” was the proper home for African Americans. The holy book for the Moorish Science Temple was a “Holy Koran,” which was “divinely prepared by the Noble Prophet Drew Ali.” (This book should not be confused with the Q’uran of Islam.) Every member of the Temple carried a card stating that “we honor all the Divine Prophets, Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha and Confucius” and that “I am a citizen of the U.S.A.”

In the 1920s, the Moorish Science Temple expanded to Pittsburgh, Detroit, and Chicago. Noble Drew Ali also started several small businesses, which he ran together with his followers. In 1929, Drew Ali was stabbed to death in his Chicago office, in an apparent strife over the leadership of the Temple. The Moorish Science Temple survived Drew Ali’s death, but the Nation of Islam was able to attract some of its followers.

RICHARD ALLEN (1760–1831) Civil Rights Activist, Bishop

Born a slave in Philadelphia on February 14, 1760, Richard Allen converted to Christianity in 1777 and, soon thereafter, bought his freedom. He then traveled widely through the Middle Atlantic States as an exporter. Francis Asbury, the first bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church, asked Allen to join him as a traveling companion, stipulating that Allen would not be allowed to fraternize with slaves and would sometimes have to sleep in his carriage. Allen refused to accept such an offer, instead settling down in Philadelphia, where he helped to found the Free African Society, an African American society for religious fellowship and mutual aid.

One day in the early 1790s, Allen was worshipping in Philadelphia’s St. George’s Methodist Church when he was pulled off his knees during prayer by white deacons who insisted that Allen was sitting outside the area reserved for African Americans. Allen left, establishing his own church for Philadelphia’s African Americans in a converted blacksmith shop in 1794. White Methodists tried to exert their control over his church in various ways, which Allen resisted successfully. In 1816, after the Pennsylvania Supreme Court settled a suit over this church in Allen’s favor, Allen called for a conference of African American Methodists. The African Methodist Episcopal Church was founded at this conference, and Allen was consecrated as its first bishop.

Allen remained both religiously and politically active in his later years, and he was especially active in opposing schemes to colonize free African Americans in Africa.

CARL BEAN (1946?– ) Clergyman

Since 1985, Bishop Carl Bean, D.M., has been running two projects: the Minority AIDS Project (MAP) and the Unity Fellowship Church for African American gays and lesbians. Starting as a Bible study group, the church quickly took root, with chapters spreading to New York City, Detroit, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Dallas, and Seattle by 1996. Meanwhile, MAP has become the largest AIDS agency serving African Americans in the United States.

Born and raised as a Baptist in Baltimore, Bean was an avid churchgoer in his youth. He grew up singing gospel. In the early 1960s, he lived and performed in Harlem and appeared at the Apollo Theater. He also performed on stage, appearing on Broadway in a gospel revue, and became a recording artist before turning to a vocation in the ministry. Ordained a minister in 1982, Bean first chose to work in south-central Los Angeles.

Openly gay, Bean wanted to help liberate ostracized people of color—gay or straight—because he himself had once felt shunned by the church. Reaching out to the disenfranchised, Bean’s followers believe that “Love is for everyone.” In 1991, the fellowship embarked on a campaign to work with gangs. Often getting referrals from social workers, Bean’s congregation has earned a reputation for doing whatever is required to get people’s lives on track. From distributing cash grants for food and bills to paying for funerals, Unity Fellowship members give back to the community.

Bean has received numerous awards for his community work, including a NAACP Image Award in 1987; a Prophetic Witness Award in 1993 from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference; and a Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund Liberty Award in 1994.

SISTER THEA BOWMAN (1938–1990) Writer, Educator, Religious Leader

Born in Canton, Mississippi, in 1938, Thea Bowman, daughter of a medical doctor, joined the Roman Catholic Church at age 12 because of the Catholic education she had received. Three years later, she joined the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration. She was extensively educated, earning a Ph.D. in literature and linguistics and was a distinguished teacher who taught elementary and high schools, as well as at colleges. She helped to found the Institute of Black Catholic Studies at Xavier University and was a distinguished scholar known for her writings on Thomas More. But it is probably for the spiritual inspiration that she provided in numerous lectures, workshops and concerts that she will be best remembered. She said that she brought to her church “myself, my black self, all that I am, all that I have, all that I hope to become, my history, my culture, my experience, my African American song and dance and gesture and movement and teaching and preaching and healing.”

CALVIN O. BUTTS III (1949– ) Religious Leader

Calvin Butts spent the first eight years of his life on the Lower East Side of New York City, where he was born in 1949. In 1957, the family moved to Queens, New York. During the summer breaks from school, Butts’ parents would send him down South to stay with his grandmothers who lived near one another in rural Georgia. It was in these early formative years that Butts first became acquainted with church.

After graduating from Flushing High School, where he was class president his senior year, Butts was accepted to Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia. The year was 1967, an explosive time in the American civil rights struggle. At Morehouse, Butts attended lectures, rallies, and speeches by Martin Luther King Jr. and other African American leaders. Following one of these very emotional events, Butts found himself immersed in a riot and actually assisted in the firebombing of a local store. Shortly thereafter, he renounced his capitulation to violence.

Just before his graduation with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Morehouse College, Butts was approached by two young seminarians trying to recruit students for their school. Later, he would receive his master’s degree in divinity from Union Theological Seminary and his Doctor of Ministry degree in Church and Public Policy from Drew University, New Jersey.

While attending the seminary, Butts raised a few eyebrows through his controversial stance on homosexuality. He has since defended the social and civil rights of gays, which he had once denounced.

Butts was recruited as a junior minister in 1972 by William Epps. During this time, his responsibilities included making hospital visits and conducting funeral services. From the very beginning, though, Butts realized the Abyssinian pulpit provided a great foundation from which to preach. For instance, he was quite vocal in his opposition to police brutality, along with any other form of violence.

Since assuming the pastoral role at Harlem’s nationally renowned Abyssinian Baptist Church, which boasts more than 5,000 parishioners, Butts has also been involved in the community. He co-founded the Abyssinian Development Corporation, a community-based organization that has donated over $300 million in housing and commercial development in Harlem. He also assisted in establishing the Thurgood Marshall Academy of Learning and Social Change, a public school. Butts is also President of the State University of New York College in Old Westbury, New York, and is President of the Council of Churches of the City of New York. He has sat on the board of the Harlem Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA).

Butts has received numerous honors and awards for his service to the community, including the Louise Fisher Morris Humanitarian Award. His campaign to eliminate negative billboard advertising in Central Harlem and throughout New York City garnered national attention and sparked similar efforts throughout the country.

KATIE CANNON (1950– ) Presbyterian Minister, Educator, Feminist

Katie Cannon was born January 3, 1950, in Kannopolis, North Carolina. At the age of 12, she worked as a domestic alongside her aunt and later realized that her only way out of a life of menial labor was through education. As she approached adulthood, Cannon found that only two roads were available to most African American women in her community—they could work in the local mill or become a school teacher. The teachers that she knew played an important role in the early years of her life; she thrived in the supportive and protective environment of the academic environment, though the bite of racism was still all too real to her. African Americans were prohibited from public places, such as the library and the local pool, and Cannon was determined to escape.

Cannon enrolled in Barber-Scotia College in Concord, North Carolina, and participated in workshops and classes offered by the Presbyterian church. She graduated with a B.S. in 1971, after rising to the top of her senior class, making the dean’s list, and being named Miss Barber-Scotia. The following fall, Cannon went on to study at Johnson C. Smith Seminary of the Interdenominational Theological Center (ITC) in Atlanta, Georgia—one of the two accredited African American seminaries at the time. During her time there, Cannon was exposed to every aspect of the ministry. Majoring in Old Testament studies, she was only one of only four women in her class. Upon completion of her studies, Cannon received her master’s degree in divinity in 1974.

Cannon served as pastor at the Ascension Presbyterian Church in New York City for three years. Her work there was followed by an administrative position at the New York Theological Seminary, then, ready to resume her scholarly endeavors, Cannon decided to attend Union Theological Seminary in Richmond, Virginia, where she received her master’s degree in philosophy, as well as a Ph.D. in 1983. It was in New York City that she discovered feminism, studied Christian ethics, and began writing about black women.

Cannon served as the associate professor of Christian ethics at Philadelphia’s Temple University and has taught at the Episcopal Divinity School and New York Theological Seminary. She is the Annie Scales Rogers Professor of Christian Ethics at Union Theological Seminary. Cannon has written numerous articles and has published or edited a number of books, including Black Womanist Ethics (textbook, 1988);a compilation of previously published essays called Katie’s Canon: Womanism and the Soul of the Black Community (1997); and Teaching Preaching (2002).

JOHNNIE COLEMAN (c.1920– ) Religious Leader, Educator

The only child of John Haley and Lula Haley Parker, Johnnie Coleman was named after her father, who wanted a boy. Coleman grew up in Mississippi during the 1920s. A graduate Union Academy in Mississippi and then Wiley College in Texas, Coleman became and a school teacher in Mississippi and later moved to Chicago to teach. Coleman was diagnosed in 1953 with an incurable disease and told she had only six months to live. However, all of her symptoms disappeared by 1956—after she moved to Kansas City to study at the Unity School of Christianity. Nonetheless, Coleman suffered from racial discrimination at the Unity School. Only her threat to leave the school just short of graduation won her the ability to live on campus and eat in the campus cafeteria. Her south side Chicago church began as a study group in 1956 with only five members. In 1958, she named her church the Christ Universal Temple, and in 1963 she moved to the Chatham section of South Chicago.

In the early 1970s, she served as the first African American president of the Association of Unity Churches. Nevertheless, she still found racism too prevalent within the predominantly white denomination. Consequently, in 1974, she formed the Universal Foundation for Better Living, Inc., an association of churches devoted to the “positive thinking” derived from the New Thought movement. In the 1970s, she opened the Johnnie Coleman Institute to teach her doctrines derived from New Thought and, in the 1980s, began a broadcast ministry. Teaching her congregation members to discover the power of God within themselves, she has been a long-time advocate of Holy Materialism and Practical Christianity. By 1989, 23 churches belonged to the Universal Foundation, and her own congregation increased in size to 12,000 members.

JAMES H. CONE (1938– ) Author, Theologian, Educator

Born in Fordyce, Arkansas, in 1938, and was raised in Bearden, a small town. The segregation and racism Cone experienced and observed led him to question how the whites in the town could consider themselves good Christians. James Cone was called to the ministry at the age of 16 and became a pastor a year later. He received a B.A. from Philander Smith College, a B.D. from Garrett Evangelical Seminary, and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Northwestern University. After teaching at Philander Smith and Adrian Colleges, Cone moved to Union Theological Seminary in 1969, and later became the Charles A. Briggs Professor of Systematic Theology.

Cone is the author of numerous books, including Black Theology and Black Power (1969); The Spirituals and the Blues (1972); For My People: Black Theology and the Black Church (1984); Martin and Malcolm and America: A Dream or a Nightmare (1991); Black Theology (1993); Black Man Emerging (1999); and Risks of Faith (2001).

Perhaps more than any other African American theologian, Cone has provided a systematic exposition of the argument that since God, according to the Bible, is on the side of the poor and oppressed, that in the American context, God is siding with the black liberation struggle. He has made this argument using a diverse set of sources including the writings of modern European theologians such as Karl Barth and the writings and speeches of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. Cone has worked painstakingly for decades to build ties between black, feminist, and Third World liberation theologians.

SUZAN JOHNSON COOK (1957– ) Religious Leader, Author

Reverend Suzan Denise Johnson Cook was born on January 28, 1957, in New York City. She was raised in the Bronx, New York, and was a communications student at Emerson College in Boston when she went to Ghana as an exchange student. There she entertained notions of joining the ministry. She would later enroll at the United Theological Seminary, where she pursued a doctorate. Just as her role model, Presbyterian minister Katie Cannon, had found earlier, entering into the pastorship was a task rife with difficulty for a woman, but Cook carved a niche and persevered. Eager to assist other women in pursuing the ministry, she later directed Black Women in the Ministry, sponsored by the New York City Mission Society.

In 1983, Cook began 11 years of preaching at Mariner’s Temple, the oldest Baptist facility in Manhattan. Her rapport with the small congregation led her to become the first African American woman elected to senior pastor of a Baptist church in the United States. Her preaching skills won her recognition as one of the “Fifteen Greatest Black Women Preachers” by Ebony (Nov. 1997).

During her years with the church, membership swelled from 60 to more than 1,000 members. Cook became the first woman to be appointed chaplain of the New York City Police Department in 1990, when then-Mayor David Dinkins selected her. Three years later, President Bill Clinton chose her for a White House fellowship, the first female minister to be so recognized. She subsequently served on President Clinton’s National Advisory Board on Race.

Cook is the co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of JONCO Productions, Inc., a sales, management, and diversity firm that hosts a speaker’s bureau and media and book distributions. She also serves an advocate for children and youth and serves as the Executive Director of the Multi Ethnic Center for Children and Families. Cook lives in New York City with her husband and two sons.

Cook has authored a number of books and audio cassettes, including Wise Women Bearing Gifts: Joys and Struggles of Their Faith (1988); Preaching in Two Voices: Sermons on the Women in Jesus’s Life (1992); Too Blessed to Be Stressed (1998); Sister to Sister (audio cassette, 2003); Praying for the Men in Your Life (2003); and Live Like You’re Blessed (2006).

ALEXANDER CRUMMELL. SEEBLACK NATIONALISM CHAPTER.

WALLACE D. FARD (1877?–1934?) Religious Leader

W. D. Fard’s background is fiercely contested. According to the Nation of Islam, Fard was born in Mecca in 1877 to a black man named Alfonso and a Caucasian woman. Members of the Nation believed that Fard was highly educated, both in England and at the University of Southern California, and that he had been trained as an Arabian diplomat. The Federal Bureau of Investigation, however, contended that Fard was born in New Zealand or Oregon to either Hawaiian or Polynesian parents (possibly one parent was British), and that he was a convicted bootlegger during Prohibition. In 1926, he received a sentence of six months to six years for drug sales in California. Upon his release in 1929, he immediately headed for Detroit.

As a door-to-door salesman, Fard approached African Americans in Detroit, selling silk fabrics and raincoats. Soon he was advising his customers on their diet and health and teaching them about what he said was their true religion, the religion of black people in Africa and Asia. Here Fard was clearly influenced by the teachings of the Moorish Science Temple and by the Ahmaddiya Muslim movement, a Muslim splinter group that preached the imminent arrival of the Mahdi or Messiah. Fard told his listeners of the one true God, Allah. He presented himself as the intermediary between God and humanity. He claimed that Allah was soon to destroy the wicked white world and establish a heaven on earth for his followers. Fard taught his followers that they were not American, owed no allegiance to the American flag, and that they should discard their “slave names.” His mission, however, was to achieve “freedom, justice, and equality” for African Americans. He established a University of Islam to teach African Americans the truth about their past, and a paramilitary organization, the Fruit of Islam. Fard attracted numerous followers, perhaps as many as 8,000, within the African American community in Detroit. His most capable follower was a Georgia-born man named Elijah Poole, who was renamed Elijah Muhammad. In 1931, Fard designated Muhammad as his supreme minister.

The already considerable interest of Detroit police in Fard’s activities increased further when one of his followers, in November 1932, killed a white neighbor as a sacrifice to Allah. Fard strongly denied that he had ordered the killing, asserting that his teachings had been misunderstood. Still, the police, fearing the growing strength of Fard’s movement, put pressure on him to leave Detroit. Lowering his profile, Fard was able to remain in Detroit some months, transferring control of the movement to Elijah Muhammad during that time. But in May 1933, Fard was arrested for disturbing the peace, and he finally assented to demands from the police that he leave Detroit.

Fard’s later life is as mysterious as his early years. It is said that Fard moved to Chicago and that Elijah Muhammad kept in contact with him for about one year, but his whereabouts after June 1934, were unknown. Following Elijah Muhammad’s guidance, however, most members of the Nation of Islam, continued to regard Fard as Allah appearing in person to African Americans.

FATHER DIVINE (1879–1965) Religious Leader, Organization Executive/Founder

Father Divine was born George Baker in 1879 in Rockville, Maryland. In 1902, he moved to Baltimore. Baker visited California in 1906 and attended the Azusa Street Revival, which marked the beginning of Pentecostalism. The following year, after returning to Baltimore, Baker—under the moniker “The Messenger”—became associated with Sam Morris, a Pennsylvania African American man who called himself Father Jehovia, and John Hickerson, also known as Reverend Bishop St. John the Divine, in a house church. All three men had been influenced by the New Thought movement of the Unity Church and they considered themselves inwardly divine. After a series of personal and theological quarrels, the three men parted company in 1912.

In 1914, Baker moved to Valdosta, Georgia. Threatened by local authorities, Father Divine left Georgia the same year. After additional travels in the South, he settled in Brooklyn in 1917, where he worked as an “employment agent” for the few followers still loyal to him. His first marriage was to an African American woman named Peninniah, whom he apparently met while living in Brooklyn. Calling his meeting place “Heaven,” he soon attracted a larger following and moved to Sayville, Long Island, in 1919. It was at this time that Father Divine began to provide shelter and food to the poor and homeless.

Spiritually, Father Divine fostered what amounted to a massive cooperative agency, based on the communal spirit of the Last Supper. His movement practiced complete racial equality. Services included songs and impromptu sermons and were conducted without Scripture readings and the use of clergy. Once he was sentenced to six months in jail as a public nuisance, but the ensuing publicity only enhanced his popularity.

The Divine movement, a non-ritualistic cult whose followers worshiped their leader as God incarnate on earth, grew rapidly in the 1930s and 1940s, with Father Divine speaking out across the country and publicizing his views in New Day, a weekly magazine published by his organization. He set up “Peace Mission Kingdom” in the United States and throughout the world. After Peninniah’s death in 1946, Father Divine married his “Sweet Angel,” a 21-year old Canadian stenographer known thereafter as Mother Divine.

Father Divine died peacefully at Woodmont, an estate that he had acquired in the Philadelphia suburbs, and his wife pledged to continue the work of the movement.

LOUIS FARRAKHAN. SEEBLACK NATIONALISM CHAPTER.

ELIJAH JOHN FISHER (1858–1915) Community Activist, Minister

Elijah Fisher exemplifies the great charismatic African American preachers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who, with very little formal education, built large religious institutions, counseled racial pride, and expounded the cause of African Americans as a people.

Born in La Grange, Georgia, in 1858, the youngest of eight boys in a family of 17 children, Fisher’s father was an unordained preacher of a Baptist congregation that met in a white church. Fisher worked in a Baptist parsonage as a boy slave and was taught to read by a former house slave and a white missionary. In his teens, he worked in mines in Alabama and then as a butler, all the while studying theology on his own time. Though he lost a leg in an accident, Fisher became pastor of several small country churches in his early twenties and then, in 1889, of the Mount Olive Baptist Church in Atlanta. In that year, he enrolled in the Atlanta Baptist Seminary, passed his examinations, and went to preach in Nashville and then Chicago where he led the Olive Baptist Church from 1902 until his death.

Throughout his life, Fisher continued his studies, preached from coast to coast, and involved the churches in youth work, food programs for poor people, and African American businesses. An active member of the Republican Party, Fisher strongly criticized African Americans who advised their brethren to rely solely on the good will of whites and publicly criticized Booker T. Washington for not speaking out against lynching.

FLOYD FLAKE (1945– ) Religious Leader, Member of Congress

Born on January 30, 1945 in Los Angeles, Floyd Flake came from humble beginnings: he was one of 13 children, and his father was a janitor. He graduated with a B.A. degree from Wilberforce University in 1967 and an M.A. from Payne Theological Seminary in 1970. He subsequently worked as a social worker, marketing analyst, and the dean of students before being called to pastor Allen AME Church in Queens, New York, in 1976. The church prospered under his leadership, and by 1986, Allen AME had grown to include 6,000 members. Flake also founded a Christian school at Allen and headed the Allen Home Care Agency for the Elderly. In the latter role, he supervised the construction of a $12 million facility. In 1986, he ran as a Democrat and won a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives from the Sixth New York Congressional District. For 11 years, he served in Congress while remaining pastor of Allen AME Church. He was particularly interested in small business and affirmative action issues and was influential in securing federal government set-asides for minority-owned small businesses. In November 1997, he resigned his seat in Congress so that he could devote his full-time energies again to his church. He is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and is President of Wilber-force University in Wilberforce, Ohio. In 2006, Flake co-chaired Republican Ken Blackwell’s unsuccessful campaign for governor of Ohio.

HENRY HIGHLAND GARNET. SEEBLACK NATIONALISM CHAPTER.

“SWEET DADDY” GRACE (1881–1960) Religious Leader, Sales Agent

Born in 1881 in the Cape Verde Islands, Sweet Daddy Grace probably opened his first church in New Bedford, Massachusetts, in 1921, but his first success occurred five years later when he opened a church in Charlotte. Grace’s church, the United House of Prayer for All People, had an ecstatic worship style, where speaking in tongues was encouraged. Grace claimed great powers, including the power of faith healing, and he stated, “Grace has given God a vacation, and since God is on His vacation don’t worry Him . . . If you sin against God, Grace can save you, but if you sin against Grace, God cannot save you.” Even the numerous products that he sold, such as “Daddy Grace” coffee, tea, soaps, and hand creams, were reputed to have healing powers.

At the time of his death in 1960, the church had 375 branches and about 25,000 members nationwide.

BARBARA C. HARRIS (1930– ) Executive Director, Bishop, Deacon

Barbara Harris was born in Philadelphia in 1930. She graduated from Philadelphia High School for girls in 1948 and enrolled in college, but never completed her course work. She was hired by Joseph Baker Associates, a public relations firm, in 1958. In 1960, Harris married, but the marriage ended in divorce three years later. She actively participated in the struggle for civil rights and marched with Martin Luther King, Jr.

Harris, who felt a strong connection with the church she attended as a child—Saint Barnabas Episcopal Church, where her mother was choir director—was a strong advocate for women’s rights in the church, was ordained a deacon in the Protestant Episcopal Church in 1979 and a priest one year later. She served as the priest-in-charge of an Episcopalian Church in Norristown, Pennsylvania, the interim pastor of a church in Philadelphia, and the executive director of the publishing company associated with the Episcopal Church. In February 1989, she was consecrated as suffragan, or assistant bishop, for the diocese of Massachusetts. She thus became the first woman bishop in the history of the Episcopal Church. Although her appointment stirred much controversy among conservative members of the clergy, she received considerable support, despite the concerns of some that her views were too liberal. Her supporters said that despite the lack of a college degree or seminary training, she would broaden the outreach of her church. She remained a strong spokesperson for women in the clergy throughout her tenure as bishop. Harris retired in November 2002, shortly before she reached the mandatory retirement age of 72.

LEMUEL HAYNES. SEEAFRICANS IN AMERICA CHAPTER.

JAMES AUGUSTINE HEALY (1830–1900) Educator, Religious Leader

Born in 1830 in Macon, Georgia, James Augustine Healy was the son of an Irish planter, Michael Morris Healy, and a slave. Although born a slave, he later became the first African American Catholic bishop in the United States. (Healy’s brother, Patrick Francis Healy, was a Jesuit priest who served as president of Georgetown University from 1873 to 1882.) For 25 years, he presided over a diocese covering the states of Maine and New Hampshire. Healy received his education in the North, first at Franklin Park Quaker School in Burlington, New York, and later at Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. Healy graduated from the latter with first honors. Healy continued his studies abroad and was ordained in Paris at Notre Dame Cathedral in 1854. He then returned to the United States.

Pastor of a predominantly Irish congregation that was at first reluctant to accept him, Bishop Healy performed his priestly duties with devotion and eventually won the respect and admiration of his parishioners—particularly after performing in his office during a typhoid epidemic. Thereafter, he was made an assistant to Bishop John Fitzpatrick of Boston, who appointed him chancellor and entrusted him with a wide variety of additional responsibilities. In 1875, he was named bishop of Portland, Maine, and, in this capacity, he founded 60 parishes, as well as 18 schools. He died in Portland, Maine on August 5, 1900.

JOSEPH HENRY JACKSON (1904–1990) Organization Executive/Founder, Theologian, Civil Rights Activist

From 1953 to 1982, Joseph H. Jackson was the president of the National Baptist Convention, U.S.A., Inc., the third largest Protestant denomination in the United States and the largest of the predominantly African American churches. Born in Rudyard, Mississippi, in 1904, Jackson later held a B.A. from Jackson College, a M.A. from Creighton University, and a B.D. from Rochester Colgate School of Divinity. After acting as pastor of churches in Mississippi, Jackson accepted a call to pastor the historic Olivet Baptist Church in 1941. His role in the civil rights movement was a fairly conservative one. He was supportive of the efforts of Martin Luther King Jr. during the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955, but criticized the massive nonviolent civil disobedience campaigns of the early 1960s.

Jackson’s main emphasis was on the need for African Americans to build a viable economic base. His favorite slogan was “From Protest to Production.” He was supportive of Baptist missions in Africa and attempted to finance them by developing farmland in Liberia.

T. D. JAKES (1956– ) Religious Leader, Author

Thomas Dexter Jakes, a West Virginia native, was born June 9, 1957 in South Charleston, West Virginia, and came from a United Pentecostal background. He began his preaching while a student at West Virginia State University. After the chemical plant that employed him closed, and his father died of kidney disease, Jakes undertook ministry on a full-time basis. Initially, he ministered in Morganton, West Virginia, and then in Dallas, Texas, where the Potter’s House, his non-denominational mega-church congregation founded in 1996. His church has approximately 35,000 members. Jakes’ services and sermons are broadcast on several television networks, including Black Entertainment Television (BET).

Jakes, one of the most famous Pentecostal ministers in the United States, travels widely to undertake revival services. His revivals draw hundreds of thousands of attendees. Time Magazine named him as one of America’s 25 most influential evangelicals.

His books are largely aimed at encouraging and uplifting African American men and women. His two most popular books, which are filled with extensive passages from and interpretation of the Bible, are Woman, Thou Art Loosed (1996), which was made into a movie in 2004, and The Lady, Her Lover and Her Lord (1998). Other books include his self-empowerment book, He-Motions: Even Strong Men Struggle (2004), which was a bestseller; Ten Commandments of Working in a Hostile Environment (2005); Promises From God for Single Women (2005); and Not Easily Broken (novel, 2006). Jakes’ record label, Dexterity Sounds/EMI Gospel, won a Grammy Award in 2004 for Best Gospel Choir or Chorus Album, A Wing and a Prayer.

ABSALOM JONES (1746–1818) Religious Leader

Absalom Jones rose from slavery to become the first African American Episcopal priest and principal founder of St. Thomas, the first African American Episcopal church. Jones was born a slave in Sussex, Delaware, on

November 6, 1746. In 1762, his mother, five brothers, and sister were sold, and Jones was taken to Philadelphia, where he worked in a store and learned to write. In 1778, he began to ask to purchase his own freedom, but he was not manumitted until 1784.

Jones became a licensed Methodist lay preacher sometime around 1786, focusing on teaching and pastoral work. In May 1787, Jones joined African American religious leader Richard Allen and others in forming the Free African Society. The African Church of St. Thomas was later dedicated in 1794.

As the unofficial leader of the church, Jones seemed an obvious choice as a lay reader. After becoming lay reader in 1794, he was ordained deacon on August 6, 1795. Jones became the first African American Episcopal priest in 1804. He died in 1818.

LEONTINE T.C. KELLY (1920– ) Bishop

In 1984, the Western Jurisdictional Conference of the United Methodist Church elected Leontine T.C. Kelly the first African American woman bishop in any large U.S. denomination. Kelly was born in Washington, D.C., in 1920. She received a Master of Divinity degree from Union Theological Seminary in Richmond, Virginia, in 1969.

She served as a schoolteacher, pastor of Virginia churches, and a staff member of the Virginia Conference of Churches before being elected a bishop in the United Methodist Church in 1984. She presided over the California-Nevada conference, but resigned her office of bishop in 1989. Kelly been a civil and human rights activist and has taught at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California. She is married to James David Kelly and has four children. In 2000, Kelly was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, New York.

ISAAC LANE (1834–1937) Educational Administrator, Religious Leader

A great religious leader and educator whose life spanned more than a century, Isaac Lane was born a slave in Jackson, Tennessee, in 1834. Self-educated, in 1856 he was granted a license to exhort, a category assigned to African Americans who were forbidden to preach, in the Methodist Episcopal Church South. Lane was ordained a minister in 1865.

In 1873, he was made a bishop of the Colored Methodist Episcopal (CME) Church (now known as the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church) at a salary so low that he had to raise cotton to supplement his income and support his wife and 11 children. His missionary work was instrumental in establishing the CME Church in Louisiana and Texas. In the 1880s, he established Lane College in Jackson with $9,000 that he raised. He died in 1937.

JARENA LEE (1783–1849) Women’s Rights Activist, Minister

Born in 1783, in Cape May, New Jersey, Lee worked as a servant for a family that lived near Philadelphia. She had a conversion experience in 1804, but was unable to find a church with which to unite until she heard Richard Allen, founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, preach in Philadelphia. She experienced a call to preach in approximately 1808, and she sought permission to do so from Richard Allen on two occasions. On her first attempt in 1809, Allen refused her request. Eight years later, however, he granted it and licensed her as a preacher.

Subsequently, she traveled throughout the North and Midwest, and many of her listeners, especially women, were moved by her eloquent preaching. After Allen’s death in 1831, male African Methodist Episcopal preachers in Philadelphia attempted to deny her permission to preach from their pulpits, but she continued her ministry, despite such harassment.

In 1848, she attempted to form a connection of female African Methodist Episcopal preachers for mutual support, but her organization soon fell apart. Many African American women, especially within the African Methodist Episcopal Church, view Jarena Lee as a courageous foremother and a model for church activism.

GEORGE LIELE (1750–1820) Educator, Religious Leader

Born a slave in Virginia around 1750, George Liele was sold to a slave owner in Georgia. He experienced a Christian conversion after hearing a sermon by Matthew Moore, a white preacher, in 1773. Liele began conducting worship services on nearby plantations and, with Moore’s sponsorship, soon became the first ordained African American Baptist preacher in America. Liele’s slave master, Henry Sharp, granted him his freedom before Sharp was killed in the American Revolution. Liele preached at the Silver Bluff Baptist Church in Silver Bluff, South Carolina, probably the first independent African American congregation formed in North America, as well as a location outside Savannah. One of his notable converts was Andrew Bryan, who founded the First African Baptist Church in Savannah.

Some whites attempted to re-enslave Liele, but a British officer in Savannah ensured that he would maintain his freedom. Liele emigrated to Jamaica in 1784, where he started a school and preached to a small Baptist congregation in Kingston. Liele married a woman that he converted in Savannah, and his four American-born children accompanied him to Jamaica.

EUGENE A. MARINO (1934–2000) Archbishop

Born May 29, 1934, in Biloxi, Mississippi, Eugene Marino received his training at Epiphany Apostolic College and St. Joseph Seminary. He was ordained to the priesthood in 1962. The next year, Marino was made director of St. Joseph Seminary. He also continued his educational studies at Catholic University, Loyola University, and Fordham University, where he earned a master’s degree of arts in 1967.

In 1971, Marino was named vicar general of the Josephites and served as an auxiliary bishop in Washington, D.C., after his ordination to the episcopate in 1974. Marino became the first African American Roman Catholic archbishop in 1988, when he was appointed to preside over the Atlanta archdiocese. He retired in 1990, in the midst of sex scandal, when an affair he was having with a woman was exposed. In 1993, ex-bishop Marino and Vicki Long, the woman in question, reunited and began a life together.

On November 12, 2000, in Manhasset, New York, Marino died of an apparent heart attack. He was 66.

CHARLES H. MASON (1866–1961) Religious Leader

Born in 1866 to former slaves on a farm outside Memphis, Tennessee, Charles Mason was converted at the age of 14 and joined a Missionary Baptist church. Mason obtained a preaching license from the Missionary Baptists in 1893 and, in the same year, he claimed to have the experience of entire sanctification, thus aligning himself with the Holiness movement. He had little formal education beyond a brief period of study at the Arkansas Bible College.

In 1895, the Baptists expelled him because of his beliefs on sanctification. Mason then held holiness revivals in Mississippi with the help of Charles Price Jones, a prolific writer of hymns and gospel songs, and others. In Lexington, Mississippi, his meetings were held in an abandoned cotton gin house. Despite an armed attack, probably by hostile African Americans, he achieved much success and many new converts with his revival preaching. In 1897, Mason and Jones founded a new Holiness church and called it the Church of God in Christ; they worked together harmoniously over the next decade.

In 1907, Mason attended the Azusa Street Revival conducted by William Seymour in Los Angeles, and he received the gift of speaking in tongues. He believed that the ability to speak in tongues was a necessary precondition for baptism of the Spirit. He and Jones disagreed on this point and parted company. Mason reformed the Church of God in Christ along the lines of his new spiritual insights. Over the next four decades, Mason, as bishop, general overseer, and “chief apostle,” shepherded his denomination through a period of tremendous growth. He traveled extensively, preaching at revivals throughout the United States and the world. He was imprisoned for making pacifist statements during World War I. He died in 1961.

VASHTI MURPHY MCKENZIE (1947– ) Clergy

Vashti Murphy was born on May 30, 1947, and raised in Baltimore, Maryland. She attended Morgan State University until her junior year, when she married professional basketball player Stan McKenzie. Following a brief period in Phoenix, the couple returned to the Baltimore area. Vashti Murphy McKenzie completed her bachelor’s degree at the University of Maryland. After graduation, she worked as a fashion model and a newspaper, radio, and television journalist.

In her late 30s, McKenzie realized that she was called to preach. With the support of her husband and three children, she enrolled in the Howard University School of Divinity, eventually earning a Master of Divinity degree. McKenzie later earned a Doctor of Ministry degree from United Theological Seminary in Dayton, Ohio.

After her graduation from Howard, McKenzie was assigned to a small church in Chesapeake City, Maryland. In 1990, she became the first female pastor of Baltimore’s Payne Memorial African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. One of the few female senior pastors in the AME church at the time, McKenzie had to overcome the all too familiar obstacle of sexism in her first years at the church. During her tenure, the church grew from just over 300 members to nearly 1,700, and established 15 new ministries. McKenzie worked to help the church erase a longstanding division between itself and the community. The congregation’s non-profit community service agency, Payne Memorial Outreach, Inc., built many successful community programs, including summer youth camps, a food pantry, and a job service that supported more than 1,000 clients.

On July 11, 2000, McKenzie was elected as the first female bishop in the 213 year history of the AME church. As bishop, McKenzie leads the 18th Episcopal District in Southeast Africa. The district covers Lesotho, Botswana, Mozambique and Swaziland. In her capacity as bishop, McKenzie planned to address issues including the AIDS crisis, economic development, church membership, and educational development.

McKenzie is the author of Not Without a Struggle: Leadership Development for African American Women in Ministry (1996); Strength in the Struggle: Leadership Development for Women (2001); and Journey to the Well (2002). She is the recipient of numerous awards and honors by a number of civic, educational, business, and governmental leaders. She was named in Ebony magazine’s “Year of the Black Woman” issue in 1992 and as one of the “15 Greatest African-American Female Preachers” by the magazine in 1997; receiving a letter of commendation from the United Nations High Commission for Refugees for Payne Memorial AME church’s support of the “Love Baton Project” in 1996; and delivering the closing day invocation at the 2000 Democratic National Convention.

WILLIAM HENRY MILES (1828–1892) Religious Leader

Born a slave in Kentucky in 1828, Miles was manumitted by his owner in her will. He joined the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, and soon perceived a call to preach. In 1859, he was ordained a deacon. Uncertain about church affiliation after the war, he investigated the possibility of joining the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, but soon thought better of it. Thus, he remained a preacher in the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, until its African American members, those who had decided not to join the African Methodist Episcopal or African Methodist Episcopal Zion Churches, were allowed to form a separate denomination, the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church.

At the initial General Conference of the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church in 1870, Miles was elected one of the denomination’s first two bishops. He was an active advocate of African American colleges, especially those affiliated with the CME Church, such as Lane College in Jackson, Tennessee, and Paine Seminary in Atlanta, Georgia. He died in 1892.

AVA MUHAMMAD (1951– ) Religious Leader

Born in 1951, Ava Muhammad grew up in a middle-class Methodist home in Columbus, Ohio. After graduating from the Georgetown University Law Center in 1975, she became a criminal defense attorney. In 1979, Muhammad was diagnosed with cancer. She began searching for spiritual support, looking first to the church of her youth, but ultimately converting to Islam after hearing Louis Farrakhan speak in New York City.

After joining the Nation of Islam in 1981, Muhammad began to work as Farrakhan’s attorney. She defended him in 1986 when he was arrested following his return from a visit to Libya, on which President Ronald Reagan had placed a travel ban. In another high-profile case, she won a defamation lawsuit against the New York Post,which in a 1994 story implicated Farrakhan in the assassination of Malcolm X. In addition to her legal work, Muhammad gained prominence and recognition throughout the Nation of Islam, despite the limitations it had historically placed on women. She authored the book, The Myths and Misconceptions of the Role of Women in Islam in 1996, and the following year was a key speaker at the Million Women March, speaking on the topic, “The Further Development of Black Women Who Are or Wish to Become Professionals, Entrepreneurs, and/or Politicians.”

On July 28, 1998, Muhammad was appointed by Louis Farrakhan as Southern Regional Minister with the Nation of Islam. In this role, Muhammad became the first woman in Islam’s 1,400-year history to be appointed to a leadership position of the cloth. She has published a number of books, including A New Unit of Measurement; Good Health: The Key to Happiness; The Force and Power of Being; The Power of Family; Weapons of Self Destruction; Real Love; and Queen of the Planet Earth: The Birth and Rise of the Original Woman. She serves as the national spokeswoman for the Nation of Islam.

ELIJAH MUHAMMAD. SEEBLACK NATIONALISM CHAPTER.

KHALLID ABDUL MUHAMMAD. SEEBLACK NATIONALISM CHAPTER.

HAROLD ROBERT PERRY (1916–1991) Educator, Religious Leader

Harold Robert Perry was consecrated a bishop of New Orleans on January 6, 1966—and thus became the first African American Catholic bishop in the United States in the twentieth century. One of six children, Perry was born the son of a rice mill worker and a domestic cook in Lake Charles, Louisiana, in 1916. He entered the Divine Word Seminary in Mississippi at the age of 13, was ordained a priest in 1944, and spent the next 14 years in parish work.

In 1958, he was appointed rector of the seminary. Louisiana has the largest concentration of African American Catholics in the South, some 200,000 in all. In 1989, Perry was one of 13 African American bishops serving Catholic parishes around the nation. He died on July 17, 1991.

ADAM CLAYTON POWELL SR. (1865–1953) Religious Leader, Community Activist

Adam Clayton Powell Sr., father of the late U.S. representative from Harlem, was largely responsible for building the Abyssinian Baptist Church into one of the most celebrated African American congregations in the world. Born in Virginia in 1865, Powell attended school locally and, between sessions, worked in the coal mines of West Virginia. After deciding to enter the ministry, he began his studies at Wayland Academy (now Virginia Union University), working his way through as a janitor and waiter. He later attended the Yale University School of Divinity and served as pastor of the Immanuel Baptist Church in New Haven.

Powell became pastor of Abyssinian in 1908, when it had a membership of only 1,600 and was fiscally indebted by over $100,000. By 1921, the church had not been made solvent, but was able to move into a $350,000 Gothic structure. (This is its present location on 138th Street in Harlem.) During the Depression, Powell opened soup kitchens for Harlem residents and served thousands of meals. Later, he and his son campaigned vigorously to expand job opportunities and city services in Harlem. Powell retired from Abyssinian in 1937 and died in 1953.

FREDERICK K.C. PRICE (1932– ) Clergy, Author

Born on January 3, 1932, in Santa Monica, California, Frederick K.C. Price began preaching in a Baptist church in 1955 while also working as a paper cutter. He moved on to pastor African Methodist Episcopal (AME) and Presbyterian churches before finally joining the Christian and Missionary Alliance at West Washington Community Church in 1965. It was not until 1970, when he experienced a “baptism of the Holy Spirit,” that Price felt satisfied with the direction of his ministry.

In 1973, Price and 300 parishioners moved from West Washington to establish the Crenshaw Christian Center in Inglewood, California. Membership at the church began to grow exponentially as more and more people became interested in Price’s neo-Pentecostal message, defined, in part, by speaking in tongues, healing, and prosperity teachings. Price began broadcasting a radio program, Ever Increasing Faith, in the mid 1970s, and soon expanded to television. By the early 1980s, the program was broadcast to five major U.S. cities. In 1981, the church purchased the former campus of Pepperdine University and began construction of the 10,146-seat FaithDome, which was dedicated in 1990. By 1999, Ever Increasing Faith aired on more than 100 television stations and 42 radio stations, reaching 33 million households in the United States and other nations. The Crenshaw Center’s congregation had grown to include an estimated 22,000 members by 2002.

Price, who had completed two years of study at Los Angeles City College, returned to school at the Friends International Christian University in Merced, California, earning a bachelor’s degree in 1978, a Doctor of Ministry degree in 1988, and a Ph.D. in Religious Studies in 1992. He has authored more than 50 books, including the popular How Faith Works. Price received an honorary diploma from Rhema Bible Training Center in 1976, and an honorary Doctorate of Divinity from Oral Roberts University in 1982. In 1998, Price received the Horatio Alger Award and the Kelly Miller Smith Interfaith Award from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

JOSEPH CHARLES PRICE (1854–1893) Civil Rights Activist, Minister, Prohibitionist

Born in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, in 1854 to a free mother, Price was educated in the school established for freed African Americans, and later at Shaw and Lincoln universities, graduating from the latter in 1879. At age 21, he was licensed to preach in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, and he received the ordination of elder six years later. Price was renowned for the eloquence of his public addresses.

It was Price who was the most responsible for the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church’s success in establishing a church college—Livingstone College in North Carolina—after ministers in that denomination had failed in several previous attempts.

As president of Livingstone College, he quickly gave his school a solid grounding, both academically and financially. For example, he raised $10,000 for his school during a lecture tour of England. He was an active participant in politics, campaigned for civil rights and prohibition, and assumed such offices as chairman of the Citizens’ Equal Rights Association of Washington, D.C. He died from kidney failure in 1893.

WILLIAM JOSEPH SEYMOUR (1870–1922) Civil Rights Activist, Religious Leader

Born in Centerville, Louisiana, in 1870 to parents who had been slaves, Seymour taught himself to read and write. In 1900, Seymour encountered the prominent promoter of Holiness doctrine, Martin Knapp, and studied under him. He then suffered a bout of smallpox that left him blind in one eye. He was ordained as an evangelist by the Evening Light Saints, a group that eventually became known by the title Church of God (Anderson, Indiana). Moving to Houston, he sat immediately outside the door of white evangelist Charles Parham’s segregated classroom, while Parham lectured on Christian doctrine and, especially, on the importance of speaking in tongues.

In 1906, Seymour moved to Los Angeles to pastor a small African American Holiness church, but his congregation, opposed to Seymour’s contention that speaking in tongues was a very important part of Christian experience, dismissed him after one week. Seymour continued to hold religious meetings, attracting an interracial audience. A widely publicized outburst of speaking in tongues brought him an even larger audience, so he moved his Apostolic Faith Gospel Mission to a former AME Church building on Azusa Street.

The extremely successful meetings that he held before ecstatic, interracial throngs of listeners over the next three years have been universally acknowledged as the beginnings of modern Pentecostalism, both in the United States and around the world. Seymour was greatly saddened when the racial unity displayed in the early stages of Pentecostalism began to break apart under the pressures exerted by racial discrimination in the nation at large. He was holding services at the Azusa Street mission until his death in 1922.

AL SHARPTON. SEECIVIL RIGHTS CHAPTER.

FRED SHUTTLESWORTH. SEECIVIL RIGHTS CHAPTER.

AMANDA BERRY SMITH (1837–1915) Organization Executive/Founder, Evangelist/Missionary

Born in Long Green, Maryland, in 1837, Smith was manumitted during her childhood after her father paid for her freedom. She had a spiritual conversion experience in 1856 and began attending religious meetings faithfully. She resisted identification with any single denomination, and her religious practice was most strongly influenced by Quakers and Methodists. Attendance at the religious meetings of white evangelists Phoebe Palmer and John Inskip introduced her to Holiness doctrine, and she experienced entire sanctification in 1868. Her husband died the following year, and Smith soon became a full-time traveling evangelist. She never sought to breach the barriers against women’s ordination erected by male preachers, stating that the calling she had received directly from God was justification enough for her ministry.

From 1878 to 1890, Smith worked as a missionary in England, Ireland, Scotland, India, and Liberia. A Methodist bishop who heard her preach in India stated that he “had never known anyone who could draw and hold so large an audience as Mrs. Smith.” On her return to the United States in 1890, she preached widely and wrote her autobiography in 1893, an extremely detailed work now regarded as a classic. Her last 20 years were devoted to the construction and management of the Amanda Smith Orphan’s Home for Colored Children in Illinois. She died in 1915.

STEPHEN GILL SPOTTSWOOD (1897–1974) Organization Executive/ Founder, Religious Leader, Civil Rights Activist

Bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church from 1952 to 1972 and board chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People from 1961 until his death in 1974, Bishop Spottswood embodied the religious faith and intellectual incisiveness that has produced so many effective African American religious activists.

Spottswood was born in Boston on July 18, 1897, attended Albright College, Gordon Divinity School, and then received a Ph.D. in divinity from Yale University. As a religious leader, Bishop Spottswood was president of the Ohio Council of Churches and served on the boards of numerous interfaith conferences, as well as heading the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church.

His activity with the NAACP started in 1919, when he joined the organization. He was appointed to the national board in 1955. In 1971, he became the center of a political storm when he chastised the Nixon administration for its policies toward African Americans and refused, under strong pressure from the administration, to retract his comments. He died on December 1, 1974.

GEORGE AUGUSTUS STALLINGS JR. (1948– ) Theologian

Born on March 17, 1948, in New Bern, North Carolina, Stallings is the eldest of six children. He received his B.A. from St. Pius X Seminary in 1970. He received his B.S. in theology from the University of St. Thomas Aquinas in 1973 and his M.A. in pastoral theology the following year. In 1975, he was granted a licentiate in sacred theology by the University of St. Thomas Aquinas. In 1974, Stallings was ordained and was named pastor of St. Teresa of Avila

Church, located in one of Washington, D.C.’s poorest African American neighborhoods, in 1976.

While pastor at St. Teresa, Stallings stressed that the contributions of Africans and African Americans to Christianity should be recognized and that the needs of African Americans must be addressed by the Catholic Church. In an effort to confront what he considered the Catholic Church’s racial insensitivity, he made use of what is known as the “Rite of Zaire,” incorporated jazz and gospel music to the Mass, and added readings by celebrated African American writers to the liturgy. For these actions, Stallings received much criticism. In 1988, he was removed from St. Teresa of Avila and named head of evangelism for Washington, D.C.

In 1989, Stallings, still convinced that the Catholic Church was not meeting the cultural, spiritual, and social needs of African American Catholics, announced that he would leave the diocese to found a new congregation, the Imani Temple African-American Catholic Congregation, headquartered in Washington, D.C. Stallings not only advocated that priests be allowed to marry but also believed that women should be able to serve as priests. In 1990, Stallings was excommunicated from the Roman Catholic Church. In 1991, he ordained former Roman Catholic nun Rose Vernell as a priest in his church. The congregation’s membership was estimated at 3,500 members. Since 1989, Stallings has established 13 Imani Temples throughout the United States. In 2002, Stallings and his wife, Sayomi, became parents for the first time.

Stallings is the author of I Am . . . Living in the Rhythm of the God Within: In the Key of G Minor (2003) and is working on a children’s book and his autobiography, Confessions of a Renegade Priest. He is in demand as a speaker both nationally and internationally.

LEON H. SULLIVAN. SEECIVIL RIGHTS CHAPTER.

GARDNER C. TAYLOR (1918– ) Civil Rights Activist, Religious Leader, Community Activist

Reverend Taylor is widely regarded as the dean of the nation’s African American preachers. He received a B.A. degree from Leland College in 1937 and a B.D. degree from the Oberlin Graduate School of Theology in 1940. Taylor has long been a community activist. He demonstrated for civil rights and suffered arrest for civil disobedience with Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1960s, and he introduced Nelson Mandela to a New York audience in 1990.

He is a trusted counselor to former New York mayor David Dinkins. Taylor served on the New York City Board of Education, is the past president of the New York Council of Churches, and the past vice president of the Urban League in New York City. After 42 years as pastor of the Concord Baptist Church in Brooklyn, which became the most prestigious African American church in the United States, Taylor resigned his post in 1990. In 2000, United States President Bill Clinton awarded Taylor the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award.

Taylor is considered by some to be the greatest living African American preacher. In 2007, at the age of 88, Taylor is a guest lecturer in great demand throughout the United States. He has been the recipient of more than 100 honorary degrees and is the author of the six-volume series, The Words of Gardner Taylor.

HOWARD THURMAN (1899–1981) Author, Theologian, Civil Rights Activist, Educator

Born in Daytona Beach, Florida, on November 18, 1899, Thurman studied at Morehouse College, Rochester Theological Center, and Haverford College. Thurman, named by Life magazine as one of the 12 great preachers of the twentieth century, served as a pastor to a Baptist church in Ohio and, from 1944 to 1953, to an interracial and interdenominational Fellowship church that he founded in San Francisco. He also served as dean of the chapel at Howard University from 1932 to 1944, as well as Boston University from 1953 until his retirement.

Thurman was one of the leading theologians of his time, writing The Negro Spiritual Speaks of Life and Death and about his opposition to segregation and support of the civil rights movement in This Luminous Darkness. Altogether, he authored 19 books including an autobiography published in 1979. He died on April 10, 1981.

SOJOURNER TRUTH (c.1797–1883) Orator, Women’s Rights Activist

Isabella Baumfree (or Bomefree) was born about 1797 on the estate of Colonel Johannes Hardenburgh (or Hard-enbergh) in Swartekill, a Dutch settlement in New York state. Isabella was owned by Hardenburgh, as were her parents, Elizabeth and James Baumfree. Her mother was thought to have pure Guinea Coast ancestry. Until she was nine years old, Isabella spoke only Dutch, but her master died, and she was sold to Colonel Hardenburgh’s son, Charles, who mistreated her. She was an intelligent child and learned English quickly.

After Charles Hardenburgh died in 1808, Isabella was sold to John Neely, who whipped her mercilessly. It was during this time that Isabella turned to religion to ease her suffering. She was sold again to Martinus Schryver, a tavern owner, then in 1810 to John Dumont of New Paltz, New York. At the Dumont estate, she fell in love with a slave named Robert, but he was not owned by Dumont and was driven off the estate. She gave birth to a daughter a short time later. She was married off to an older man, a fisherman named Thomas, about 1817, and had four more children with him. She remained with the Dumont family until about 1827, when she escaped after she was not freed as promised by Dumont. After praying for guidance, she found a home with Isaac Van Wagenen (or Wagener) and his wife, a kind couple for whom she worked.

It was when she was working in this household that she had a life-altering religious experience and was inspired to preach. She attended the local Methodist church until 1829, when she left town with a white evangelical teacher. Isabella’s reputation as an inspirational preacher spread, and she began working as a housekeeper for a fundamentalist religious reformer named Elijah Pierson and his group of followers. Pierson died in 1834, and Isabella was implicated in his death but was later acquitted.

She moved to New York City, but wanted to make her way as a traveling preacher. She changed her name to Sojourner Truth in 1843 and traveled to Massachusetts, where she met many famous abolitionists, including Frederick Douglass. She dictated her memoirs to a member of the Northampton Association of Education and Industry, and her book, The Narrative of Sojourner Truth, was published in 1850. After the publication, she was in demand as a speaker. She later moved to a small town near Battle Creek, Michigan, to live among a community of Spiritualists, who shared her values and beliefs.

Both intelligent and fiercely dedicated to the cause of freedom, Sojourner Truth was one of the most famous anti-slavery speakers of her time and preached in both white and black churches. There were many attempts to silence her, however, and she was beaten and stoned for her beliefs. The news of her speeches spread throughout the North as well as the South, and in 1864, she addressed an audience at the White House, with President Abraham Lincoln in attendance.

Sojourner Truth died on November 26, 1883, at her home in Battle Creek, Michigan.

HENRY MCNEAL TURNER (1834–1915) Religious leader, Activist

Henry Turner was born in Newberry Courthouse, South Carolina, in 1834. Although Turner’s parents, Sarah Greer and Hardy Turner, were not slaves, in his childhood, Turner was forced to work among slaves in the local cotton plantation. He learned to read and write as an adolescent. After his religious conversion at a Methodist revival, he vowed to become a preacher. In 1853, he obtained his preacher’s license and was recruited as an itinerant minister for the Methodist Episcopal Church.

In 1858, he was sent to Baltimore, where he studied Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and theology at Trinity College. In 1860, he moved to Washington, where he became the pastor of Union Bethal Church. He became politically active and played a part in organizing the First Regimen of U.S. Colored Troops in 1983. Turner gained national attention when Abraham Lincoln appointed him the regiment’s army chaplain—he was the first black army chaplain in U.S. history.

After the American Civil War, Turner moved to Georgia to work with the Freeman’s Bureau. Over the next few years, he established the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Georgia. He worked tirelessly on behalf of former slaves.

In 1867, Georgia was readmitted to the Union, and in April, elections were held for governor and state legislators. Turner and 31 other black men were elected, despite the political dominance of conservative white men. Turner was embittered by white members of the Republican Party who refused to support pro-black legislation. He accused the whites of treachery and led a walk-out of black legislators.

Turner later retired from political life and returned to his religious duties full-time. He strongly advocated black pride and encouraged blacks to reject the white church’s teachings on black racial inferiority. He also helped to organize the International Migration Society, which promoted a return of African Americans to Africa, and established two newspapers to further the cause. His efforts, however, met with little success.

In 1880, Turner was appointed Bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Georgia, and in 1885, he published The Genius and Theory of Methodist Polity, a guide to church policies and practices. Turner was married four times.

Turner died on May 8, 1915, in Windsor, Canada, while traveling on church-related business.

IYANLA VANZANT (1954– ) Author, Yoruba Priestess, Lawyer

Vanzant is the author of several books on spirituality that have been named BlackBoard Book of the Year. Her books include Tapping the Power Within (1992), Acts of Faith (1993), Interiors: A Black Woman’s Healing (1995), Value in the Valley (1995), The Spirit of a Man (1996), In the Meantime (1998), One Day My Soul Just Opened Up (1998), Yesterday, I Cried (1999), Until Today! (2000), Living Through the Meantime (2001), and Up from Here (2002). Her own life has served as an inspiration for many of her readers, as it has furnished rich material for her books. Her mother died when she was two years old, and she suffered from rape, spousal abuse, and nervous breakdowns. Yet, she managed to turn her life around. Her years of dependence on welfare ended in 1978, when she matriculated in Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn and subsequently in law school. She served as a public defender in Philadelphia, but left that career behind for public speaking and writing self-help books.

She is currently the director of Inner Visions Worldwide, Inc. Spiritual Life Maintenance Center, headquartered in Silver Spring, Maryland, where she conducts workshops and classes and dedicates herself to the spiritual empowerment of African American women and men as well as all people. She is also in great demand as a public speaker. Brought up in the Baptist and Pentecostalist faiths, she has since been initiated as a Yoruba priestess. Her writings and teachings draw widely from such diverse sources as African spirituality, Christianity, New Thought, and such Eastern religions as Buddhism.

JAMES VARICK (1750–1827) Abolitionist, Bishop, Deacon

Born near Newburgh, New York, around 1750, to a slave mother, Varick was a leader in the movement among African American Methodists in New York to set up a separate congregation. This was accomplished with the formation of the Zion Church in 1796. Ten years later, Varick was ordained a deacon by Bishop Francis Asbury. Varick sought to obtain full ordination as elder for himself and other African American ministers and would have preferred to have received such an ordination within the Methodist Episcopal Church, but this did not prove possible. He did not favor joining Richard Allen’s African Methodist Episcopal Church, especially since Allen had been attempting to set up a New York congregation considered by Varick as in competition with the Zion Church.

Eventually, Varick participated in setting up the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, and he was elected the first superintendent or bishop. He was also deeply involved in issues relating to freedom and human rights, preaching against the slave trade in 1808 and subscribing to the first newspaper in the United States owned by African Americans, Freedom’s Journal. He died on July 22, 1827.

CORNEL WEST (1953– ) Scholar, Educator, Social Critic, Author

The grandson of Rev. Clifton L. West Sr., pastor of the Tulsa Metropolitan Baptist Church, Cornel West was born on June 2, 1953, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. West developed skills of critical thinking and political action almost from birth. By age 17, he was enrolled as an undergraduate student at Harvard. Taking eight courses per semester during his junior year, he was able to graduate magna cum laude one year early. He received an A.B. in Near Eastern languages and literature in 1973. Immediately afterward, he completed his M.A. (1975) and Ph.D. (1980) at Princeton University.

Professor of religion and director of Afro-American Studies at Princeton University, Cornel West’s analytical speeches and writing on issues of morality, race relations, cultural diversity, and progressive politics have made him a keeper of the prophetic African American religious tradition. West has taught the philosophy of religion at both Union Theological Seminary (1977–1983, 1988) and Yale Divinity School (1984–1987). In 1994, he joined Harvard’s faculty, but returned permanently to Princeton in 2002 after a public rift with Harvard’s president. A complex individual, he juggles his theological concerns with his political convictions. West serves dual roles as prophet and intellectual within and beyond the African American community. His writings combine a castigation for moral failure with an optimism that insists on the possibility—through struggle—of making a world of stricter morality real.

West’s first books were published in the early 1980s, but he wrote many of them in the late 1970s. In the early 1980s, he encountered the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), an organization that shaped the version of democratic socialism that he would subsequently adopt and promote in his works. Those include Black Theology and Marxist Thought (1979), Prophesy Deliverance! An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity (1982), and The Ethical Dimensions of Marxist Thought (1991). West’s impassioned and insightful writings also make a resounding appeal for cross-cultural tolerance and unity, while urging individuals to recognize the power of diversity within a society. Following those lines are such works as: Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life, which he co-edited with Bell Hooks in 1991; Beyond Eurocentrism and Multiculturalism (1993); Race Matters (1993), perhaps his best known book; and Jews & Blacks: The Hard Hunt for Common Ground, co-written with Michael Lerner in 1995. He worked with Lerner on another book in 1996, Jews & Blacks: A Dialogue on Race, Religion, and Culture in America.

Throughout the 1990s, West teamed up with other well-known public figures to produce books, such as The Future of the Race (with Henry Louis Gates Jr., 1996), Death Blossoms: Reflections from a Prisoner of Conscience (with Mumia Abu-Jamal, 1997), The Future of American Progressivism: An Initiative for Political and Economic Reform (with Roberto Mangabeira Unger, 1998), The War Against Parents: What We Can Do for America’s Beleaguered Moms and Dads (with Sylvia Ann Hewlett, 1998), The African-American Century: How Black Americans Have Shaped Our Country (with Gates, 2000). He also published Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism in 2004.

During his career, West has been the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including the National Book Award in 1993 for Beyond Eurocentrism and Multiculturalism.