Black Women’s Christian Activism: Seeking Social Justice in a Northern Suburb

Amazon.com Price: $25.00 (as of 02/05/2019 19:52 PST- Details)

Categories: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Description

2017 Wilbur Non-Fiction Award Recipient


In Black Women’s Christian Activism, Betty Livingston Adams examines the oft overpassed role of non-elite black women in the growth of northern suburbs and American Protestantism in the first half of the twentieth century. 
 
When a domestic servant named Violet Johnson moved to the affluent white suburb of Summit, New Jersey in 1897, she became one in all just barely a hundred black residents in the town of six thousand. On this avowedly liberal Protestant community, the very definition of “the suburbs” depended on observance of unmarked and fluctuating race and class barriers. But Johnson didn’t intend to accept the established order. Establishing a Baptist church a year later, a seemingly moderate act that would have implications far beyond weekly worship, Johnson challenged assumptions of gender and race, advocating for a politics of civic righteousness that would grant African Americans an equal place in a Christian nation. Johnson’s story is powerful, but she used to be just one in every of the many working-class activists integral to the budding days of the civil rights movement.
 
Focusing at the strategies and organizational models church women employed in the fight for social justice, Adams tracks the intersections of politics and religion, race and gender, and place and space in a New York City suburb, a local example that offers new insights on northern racial oppression and civil rights protest. As this book makes clear, religion made a key difference in the lives and activism of odd black women who lived, worked, and worshiped at the margin throughout this tumultuous time.

Related products

Home » Shop » Books » Subjects » Arts and Photography » History and Criticism » History » Americas » United States » State and Local » Black Women’s Christian Activism: Seeking Social Justice in a Northern Suburb

Recent Products