Black History Month

In Gin, Jesus, and Jim Crow, Brendan J. J. Payne reveals how prohibition helped realign the racial and religious order in the South by linking restrictions on alcohol with political preaching and the disfranchisement of Black voters. While both sides invoked Christianity, prohibitionists redefined churches' doctrines, practices, and political engagement. White prohibitionists initially courted Black voters in the 1880s but soon dismissed them as hopelessly wet and sought to disfranchise them, stoking fears of drunken Black men defiling white women in their efforts to reframe alcohol restriction as a means of racial control. Later, as the alcohol industry grew desperate, it turned to Black voters, many of whom joined the brewers to preserve their voting rights and maintain personal liberties. Tracking southern debates about alcohol from the 1880s through the 1930s, Payne shows that prohibition only retreated from the region once the racial and religious order it helped enshrine had been secured.

Shively T. J. Smith reconsiders what is most distinct, troubling, and potentially thrilling about the often overlooked and dismissed book of 2 Peter. Using the rhetorical strategies of nineteenth-century African American women, including Ida B. Wells, Jarena Lee, Anna Julia Cooper, and others, Smith redefines the use of biblical citations, the language of justice and righteousness, and even the matter of pseudonymity in 2 Peter. She approaches 2 Peter as an instance of Christian cultural rhetoric that forges a particular kind of community identity and behavior. This pioneering study considers how 2 Peter cultivates the kind of human relations and attitudes that speak to the values of moral people seeking justice in the past as well as today.

Liberation Pedagogy places the work of Elijah Muhammad in an educational context. Drawing from concepts in critical educational theory it introduces to readers the contributions that Elijah Muhammad made to the education of oppressed people. This book offers a liberation pedagogy that educators can use to inspire students.

In Pentecostal Insight in a Segregated U.S. City, Frederick Klaits compares how members of one majority white and two African American churches in Buffalo, New York receive knowledge from God about their own and others' life circumstances. In the Pentecostal Christian faith, believers say that they acquire divinely inspired insights by developing a "relationship with God." But what makes these insights appear necessary? This book offers a novel approach to this question, arguing that the inspirations believers receive from God lead them to take critical stances on what they regard as ordinary understandings of space, time, care, and personal value. Using a shared Pentecostal language, believers occupying different positions within racial, class, and gender formations reflect in divergent ways on God's designs. In the process, they engage critically with late liberal imaginaries of eventfulness and vitality to envision possibilities of life in a highly unequal society. This text incorporates commentaries on Klaits' ethnography by LaShekia Chatman and Michael Richbart, junior scholars who have also studied and been part of Pentecostal communities in Buffalo.

In You Must Be Born Again: Phillis Wheatley as Prophetic Poet, the author argues that Phillis Wheatley is the mother of liberation theology. The author uses Wheatley's poetry and life experiences to create a portrait of Wheatley beyond that of a poet. Wheatley is described as both poet and visionary who wrestles with God during the creative process. The lyrical expressions of Wheatley's poetry unlock the spiritual impressions on her heart. The author sets up the racial dynamics of Wheatley's time and her engagement with those politics. As a preacher, Wheatley combats the immoral undercurrent that erodes the community's social, economic, and spiritual foundation as well as its political systems. The author positions Wheatley as one uniquely qualified to address the hypocrisy within her world and, by implication, present-day society by calling for immersion into a radical understanding of love and justice, resulting in a renewed hope for equality and a pathway toward equity.