Author: Alison M. Parker
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469659395
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 462
Book Description
Born into slavery during the Civil War, Mary Church Terrell (1863–1954) would become one of the most prominent activists of her time, with a career bridging the late nineteenth century to the civil rights movement of the 1950s. The first president of the National Association of Colored Women and a founding member of the NAACP, Terrell collaborated closely with the likes of Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, and W. E. B. Du Bois. Unceasing Militant is the first full-length biography of Terrell, bringing her vibrant voice and personality to life. Though most accounts of Terrell focus almost exclusively on her public activism, Alison M. Parker also looks at the often turbulent, unexplored moments in her life to provide a more complete account of a woman dedicated to changing the culture and institutions that perpetuated inequality throughout the United States. Drawing on newly discovered letters and diaries, Parker weaves together the joys and struggles of Terrell’s personal, private life with the challenges and achievements of her public, political career, producing a stunning portrait of an often-under recognized political leader.
Unceasing Militant
Author: Alison M. Parker
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469659395
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 462
Book Description
Born into slavery during the Civil War, Mary Church Terrell (1863–1954) would become one of the most prominent activists of her time, with a career bridging the late nineteenth century to the civil rights movement of the 1950s. The first president of the National Association of Colored Women and a founding member of the NAACP, Terrell collaborated closely with the likes of Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, and W. E. B. Du Bois. Unceasing Militant is the first full-length biography of Terrell, bringing her vibrant voice and personality to life. Though most accounts of Terrell focus almost exclusively on her public activism, Alison M. Parker also looks at the often turbulent, unexplored moments in her life to provide a more complete account of a woman dedicated to changing the culture and institutions that perpetuated inequality throughout the United States. Drawing on newly discovered letters and diaries, Parker weaves together the joys and struggles of Terrell’s personal, private life with the challenges and achievements of her public, political career, producing a stunning portrait of an often-under recognized political leader.
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469659395
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 462
Book Description
Born into slavery during the Civil War, Mary Church Terrell (1863–1954) would become one of the most prominent activists of her time, with a career bridging the late nineteenth century to the civil rights movement of the 1950s. The first president of the National Association of Colored Women and a founding member of the NAACP, Terrell collaborated closely with the likes of Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, and W. E. B. Du Bois. Unceasing Militant is the first full-length biography of Terrell, bringing her vibrant voice and personality to life. Though most accounts of Terrell focus almost exclusively on her public activism, Alison M. Parker also looks at the often turbulent, unexplored moments in her life to provide a more complete account of a woman dedicated to changing the culture and institutions that perpetuated inequality throughout the United States. Drawing on newly discovered letters and diaries, Parker weaves together the joys and struggles of Terrell’s personal, private life with the challenges and achievements of her public, political career, producing a stunning portrait of an often-under recognized political leader.
Fearless Women
Author: Elizabeth Cobbs
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674293347
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 481
Book Description
“A gripping panoramic history that pairs ingenious excavation with enlightening explanation to relight the fire of feminist political identity at the very moment when we need it most.”―Tiya Miles, author of All That She Carried “Fearless Women is so well-written, so well researched, and so engaging that you will find it of real value even as it tells some stories you thought you already knew...We should all welcome the hope that it bestows.” —Roberta Silman, Arts Fuse “An excellent and well-researched deep dive into the lives of women who insisted that they be considered an integral part of the American experience...This is an exciting and compelling read.” —New York Journal of Books When America became a nation, a woman had no legal existence beyond her husband. If he abused her, she couldn’t leave without abandoning her children. Abigail Adams tried to change this, reminding her husband John to “remember the ladies” when he wrote the Constitution. He simply laughed—and women have been fighting for their rights ever since. Fearless Women tells the story of women who dared to take destiny into their own hands. They were feminists and antifeminists, activists and homemakers, victims of abuse and pathbreaking professionals. Inspired by the nation’s ideals and fueled by an unshakeable sense of right and wrong, they wouldn’t take no for an answer. They fought for the right to learn, speak in public, vote, lobby the government, and own property. Some were passionate abolitionists. Others fought just to protect their own children. At every step, they faced fierce opposition. Elizabeth Cobbs gives voice to fearless women on both sides of the aisle, most of whom considered themselves patriots. Rich and poor, from all backgrounds and regions, they show that the women’s movement has never been an exclusive club.
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674293347
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 481
Book Description
“A gripping panoramic history that pairs ingenious excavation with enlightening explanation to relight the fire of feminist political identity at the very moment when we need it most.”―Tiya Miles, author of All That She Carried “Fearless Women is so well-written, so well researched, and so engaging that you will find it of real value even as it tells some stories you thought you already knew...We should all welcome the hope that it bestows.” —Roberta Silman, Arts Fuse “An excellent and well-researched deep dive into the lives of women who insisted that they be considered an integral part of the American experience...This is an exciting and compelling read.” —New York Journal of Books When America became a nation, a woman had no legal existence beyond her husband. If he abused her, she couldn’t leave without abandoning her children. Abigail Adams tried to change this, reminding her husband John to “remember the ladies” when he wrote the Constitution. He simply laughed—and women have been fighting for their rights ever since. Fearless Women tells the story of women who dared to take destiny into their own hands. They were feminists and antifeminists, activists and homemakers, victims of abuse and pathbreaking professionals. Inspired by the nation’s ideals and fueled by an unshakeable sense of right and wrong, they wouldn’t take no for an answer. They fought for the right to learn, speak in public, vote, lobby the government, and own property. Some were passionate abolitionists. Others fought just to protect their own children. At every step, they faced fierce opposition. Elizabeth Cobbs gives voice to fearless women on both sides of the aisle, most of whom considered themselves patriots. Rich and poor, from all backgrounds and regions, they show that the women’s movement has never been an exclusive club.
A Colored Woman In A White World
Author: Mary Church Terrell
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538145987
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 507
Book Description
Though today she is little known, Mary Church Terrell (1863-1954) was one of the most remarkable women of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Active in both the civil rights movement and the campaign for women's suffrage, Terrell was a leading spokesperson for the National American Woman Suffrage Association, the first president of the National Association of Colored Women, and the first black woman appointed to the District of Columbia Board of Education and the American Association of University Women. She was also a charter member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. In this autobiography, originally published in 1940, Terrell describes the important events and people in her life.Terrell began her career as a teacher, first at Wilberforce College and then at a high school in Washington, D.C., where she met her future husband, Robert Heberton Terrell. After marriage, the women's suffrage movement attracted her interests and before long she became a prominent lecturer at both national and international forums on women's rights. A gifted speaker, she went on to pursue a career on the lecture circuit for close to thirty years, delivering addresses on the critical social issues of the day, including segregation, lynching, women's rights, the progress of black women, and various aspects of black history and culture. Her talents and many leadership positions brought her into close contact with influential black and white leaders, including Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Robert Ingersoll, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Jane Addams, and others.With a new introduction by Debra Newman Ham, professor of history at Morgan State University, this new edition of Mary Church Terrell's autobiography will be of interest to students and scholars of both women's studies and African American history.
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538145987
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 507
Book Description
Though today she is little known, Mary Church Terrell (1863-1954) was one of the most remarkable women of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Active in both the civil rights movement and the campaign for women's suffrage, Terrell was a leading spokesperson for the National American Woman Suffrage Association, the first president of the National Association of Colored Women, and the first black woman appointed to the District of Columbia Board of Education and the American Association of University Women. She was also a charter member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. In this autobiography, originally published in 1940, Terrell describes the important events and people in her life.Terrell began her career as a teacher, first at Wilberforce College and then at a high school in Washington, D.C., where she met her future husband, Robert Heberton Terrell. After marriage, the women's suffrage movement attracted her interests and before long she became a prominent lecturer at both national and international forums on women's rights. A gifted speaker, she went on to pursue a career on the lecture circuit for close to thirty years, delivering addresses on the critical social issues of the day, including segregation, lynching, women's rights, the progress of black women, and various aspects of black history and culture. Her talents and many leadership positions brought her into close contact with influential black and white leaders, including Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Robert Ingersoll, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Jane Addams, and others.With a new introduction by Debra Newman Ham, professor of history at Morgan State University, this new edition of Mary Church Terrell's autobiography will be of interest to students and scholars of both women's studies and African American history.
Feminist Pragmatism and Social Rights
Author: Judy D. Whipps
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1666943231
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 341
Book Description
In an exploration of the little-told legacy of early feminist pragmatists who pioneered social rights in America, Feminist Pragmatism and Social Rights delves into the transformative efforts of trailblazing figures, including Jane Addams, Julia Lathrop, Florence Kelley, Grace Abbott, Mary Church Terrell, Mary McLeod Bethune, Emily Greene Balch, Molly Dewson, and Frances Perkins. As Judy D. Whipps reveals, these women created and led organizations that were prototypes for later federal programs. Their relentless advocacy reshaped U.S. politics and culture, from grassroots organizations to federal legislation, paving the way for constitutional recognition of social rights decades before the United Nation’s International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights. This book is the first to cast the philosophy behind these women’s political and judicial activism as feminist pragmatism. Each chapter illuminates their struggles and triumphs, from combating child labor to advancing women’s rights, and after their research gathered popular support for reform, they continued that work by writing drafts of legislation and legal briefs. This book not only chronicles a pivotal fifty-year movement but also serves as a poignant reminder of their enduring impact.
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1666943231
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 341
Book Description
In an exploration of the little-told legacy of early feminist pragmatists who pioneered social rights in America, Feminist Pragmatism and Social Rights delves into the transformative efforts of trailblazing figures, including Jane Addams, Julia Lathrop, Florence Kelley, Grace Abbott, Mary Church Terrell, Mary McLeod Bethune, Emily Greene Balch, Molly Dewson, and Frances Perkins. As Judy D. Whipps reveals, these women created and led organizations that were prototypes for later federal programs. Their relentless advocacy reshaped U.S. politics and culture, from grassroots organizations to federal legislation, paving the way for constitutional recognition of social rights decades before the United Nation’s International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights. This book is the first to cast the philosophy behind these women’s political and judicial activism as feminist pragmatism. Each chapter illuminates their struggles and triumphs, from combating child labor to advancing women’s rights, and after their research gathered popular support for reform, they continued that work by writing drafts of legislation and legal briefs. This book not only chronicles a pivotal fifty-year movement but also serves as a poignant reminder of their enduring impact.
Women Win the Vote!: 19 for the 19th Amendment
Author: Nancy B. Kennedy
Publisher: WW Norton
ISBN: 1324004169
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 192
Book Description
A bold new collection showcasing the trailblazing individuals who fought for women’s suffrage, honoring the Nineteenth Amendment’s centennial anniversary. On August 18, 1920, women in the United States secured their right to vote with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Their fight for suffrage took decades of campaigning and marching, protesting and picketing, speeches and imprisonments. Millions of women across the country gave their all to achieve victory. From Lucretia Mott, who stoked the first flames of the suffrage movement in the 1800s, to Alice Paul, the militant twentieth-century suffragist who helped clinch ratification, Women Win the Vote! maps the road to the Nineteenth Amendment through the lives of nineteen of these fierce and courageous women who paved the way. With vivid profiles of iconic figures like Sojourner Truth and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, as well as those who may be less well-known, like Mary Ann Shadd Cary and Adelina Otero-Warren, this vibrant collection celebrates the one hundredth anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment and the daring individuals who upended tradition to empower future generations of women.
Publisher: WW Norton
ISBN: 1324004169
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 192
Book Description
A bold new collection showcasing the trailblazing individuals who fought for women’s suffrage, honoring the Nineteenth Amendment’s centennial anniversary. On August 18, 1920, women in the United States secured their right to vote with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Their fight for suffrage took decades of campaigning and marching, protesting and picketing, speeches and imprisonments. Millions of women across the country gave their all to achieve victory. From Lucretia Mott, who stoked the first flames of the suffrage movement in the 1800s, to Alice Paul, the militant twentieth-century suffragist who helped clinch ratification, Women Win the Vote! maps the road to the Nineteenth Amendment through the lives of nineteen of these fierce and courageous women who paved the way. With vivid profiles of iconic figures like Sojourner Truth and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, as well as those who may be less well-known, like Mary Ann Shadd Cary and Adelina Otero-Warren, this vibrant collection celebrates the one hundredth anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment and the daring individuals who upended tradition to empower future generations of women.
Fatal Denial
Author: Annie Menzel
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520297199
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 381
Book Description
Fatal Denial argues that over the past 150 years, US health authorities' explanations of and interventions into Black infant mortality have been characterized by the "biopolitics of racial innocence," a term describing the institutionalized mechanisms in health care and policy that have at once obscured, enabled, and perpetuated systemic infanticide by blaming Black mothers and communities themselves. Following Black feminist scholarship demonstrating that the commodification and theft of Black women's reproductive bodies, labors, and care is foundational to US racial capitalism, Annie Menzel posits that the polity has made Black infants vulnerable to preventable death. Drawing on key Black political thought and praxis around infant mortality--from W.E.B. Du Bois and Mary Church Terrell to Black midwives and birth workers--this work also tracks continued refusals to acknowledge this routinized reproductive violence, illuminating both a rich history of care and the possibility of more transformative futures.
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520297199
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 381
Book Description
Fatal Denial argues that over the past 150 years, US health authorities' explanations of and interventions into Black infant mortality have been characterized by the "biopolitics of racial innocence," a term describing the institutionalized mechanisms in health care and policy that have at once obscured, enabled, and perpetuated systemic infanticide by blaming Black mothers and communities themselves. Following Black feminist scholarship demonstrating that the commodification and theft of Black women's reproductive bodies, labors, and care is foundational to US racial capitalism, Annie Menzel posits that the polity has made Black infants vulnerable to preventable death. Drawing on key Black political thought and praxis around infant mortality--from W.E.B. Du Bois and Mary Church Terrell to Black midwives and birth workers--this work also tracks continued refusals to acknowledge this routinized reproductive violence, illuminating both a rich history of care and the possibility of more transformative futures.
The Routledge History of U.S. Foreign Relations
Author: Tyson Reeder
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000516636
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 467
Book Description
The Routledge History of U.S. Foreign Relations provides a comprehensive view of U.S. diplomacy and foreign affairs from the founding to the present. With contributions from recognized experts from around the world, this volume unveils America’s long and complicated history on the world stage. It presents the United States’ evolution from a weak player, even a European pawn, to a global hegemonic leader over the course of two and a half centuries. The contributors offer an expansive vision of U.S. foreign relations—from U.S.-Native American diplomacy in eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to the post-9/11 war on terror. They shed new light on well-known events and suggest future paths of research, and they capture lesser-known episodes that invite reconsideration of common assumptions about America’s place in the world. Bringing these discussions to a single forum, the book provides a strong reference source for scholars and students who seek to understand the broad themes and changing approaches to the field. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of U.S. history, political science, international relations, conflict resolution, and public policy, amongst other areas.
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000516636
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 467
Book Description
The Routledge History of U.S. Foreign Relations provides a comprehensive view of U.S. diplomacy and foreign affairs from the founding to the present. With contributions from recognized experts from around the world, this volume unveils America’s long and complicated history on the world stage. It presents the United States’ evolution from a weak player, even a European pawn, to a global hegemonic leader over the course of two and a half centuries. The contributors offer an expansive vision of U.S. foreign relations—from U.S.-Native American diplomacy in eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to the post-9/11 war on terror. They shed new light on well-known events and suggest future paths of research, and they capture lesser-known episodes that invite reconsideration of common assumptions about America’s place in the world. Bringing these discussions to a single forum, the book provides a strong reference source for scholars and students who seek to understand the broad themes and changing approaches to the field. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of U.S. history, political science, international relations, conflict resolution, and public policy, amongst other areas.
Poetry and the Built Environment
Author: Elizabeth Fowler
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192889001
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 289
Book Description
In Poetry and the Built Environment Elizabeth Fowler offers a new approach to criticism that recognises poetry as one among the arts of the built environment. Like gardens, sculptures, paintings, and architecture, poems are cultural artifacts designed to appeal to human bodies. The phrase "the flesh of art" signifies the sphere of interaction between us and such artifacts and signals the phenomenological nature of the approach. As we move through the built environment, we draw on our achieved expertise in negotiating its complex instructions to us. Art mobilizes this expertise, deploying sophisticated conventions and entangling the virtual with the real. As we engage with them, poems, like other artifacts, support skilled collaborations of the sensate (our perceiving flesh) and the sensible (the perceptible properties of the artifact), further developing our kinesthetic and cultural expertise. The notion of collaboration is important, because no matter how powerfully art twists our arms, moves, or injures us, there is always the interesting likelihood that our divergent bodies will contravene its instructions and take its insights somewhere new. In ten chapters, this book explores a range of works by poets Geoffrey Chaucer and John Milton to Seamus Heaney and Tracy K. Smith and by sculptors and architects from Jean de Touyl and Nicholas Stone to Antonin Merci? and Kara Walker. These studies model a practical criticism of the flesh of art that exposes its radiant invitations. The book's critical demonstrations partner with a theory of the central role of art in human culture. Sensory, emotional, and intellectual interactions with art enflesh and acculturate human beings, making art a primary means through which we orient ourselves in spatiality and work out our emplacements in the social world. This book about poetics takes place, in short, at the juncture between aesthetics and politics. It concludes with 43 theses in manifesto and includes many whole poems and 35 striking images. Poetry and the Built Environment insistently demonstrates art's ability to shape our understandings and practices of spatiality, movement, sensation, relation, and presence. In poetry, it argues, we see how, especially when the transparency and sensibleness of the world is under stress, art equips us with strategies for transformation.
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192889001
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 289
Book Description
In Poetry and the Built Environment Elizabeth Fowler offers a new approach to criticism that recognises poetry as one among the arts of the built environment. Like gardens, sculptures, paintings, and architecture, poems are cultural artifacts designed to appeal to human bodies. The phrase "the flesh of art" signifies the sphere of interaction between us and such artifacts and signals the phenomenological nature of the approach. As we move through the built environment, we draw on our achieved expertise in negotiating its complex instructions to us. Art mobilizes this expertise, deploying sophisticated conventions and entangling the virtual with the real. As we engage with them, poems, like other artifacts, support skilled collaborations of the sensate (our perceiving flesh) and the sensible (the perceptible properties of the artifact), further developing our kinesthetic and cultural expertise. The notion of collaboration is important, because no matter how powerfully art twists our arms, moves, or injures us, there is always the interesting likelihood that our divergent bodies will contravene its instructions and take its insights somewhere new. In ten chapters, this book explores a range of works by poets Geoffrey Chaucer and John Milton to Seamus Heaney and Tracy K. Smith and by sculptors and architects from Jean de Touyl and Nicholas Stone to Antonin Merci? and Kara Walker. These studies model a practical criticism of the flesh of art that exposes its radiant invitations. The book's critical demonstrations partner with a theory of the central role of art in human culture. Sensory, emotional, and intellectual interactions with art enflesh and acculturate human beings, making art a primary means through which we orient ourselves in spatiality and work out our emplacements in the social world. This book about poetics takes place, in short, at the juncture between aesthetics and politics. It concludes with 43 theses in manifesto and includes many whole poems and 35 striking images. Poetry and the Built Environment insistently demonstrates art's ability to shape our understandings and practices of spatiality, movement, sensation, relation, and presence. In poetry, it argues, we see how, especially when the transparency and sensibleness of the world is under stress, art equips us with strategies for transformation.
Tangled Journeys
Author: Lori D. Ginzberg
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469679973
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 257
Book Description
In 1830 Richard Walpole Cogdell, a husband, father, and bank clerk in Charleston, South Carolina, purchased a fifteen-year-old enslaved girl, Sarah Martha Sanders. Before her death in 1850, she bore nine of his children, five of whom reached adulthood. In 1857, Cogdell and his enslaved children moved to Philadelphia, where he bought them a house and where they became, virtually overnight, part of the African American middle class. An ambitious historical narrative about the Sanders family, Tangled Journeys tells a multigenerational, multiracial story that is both traumatic and prosaic while forcing us to confront what was unseen, unheard, and undocumented in the archives, and thereby inviting us into the process of American history making itself.
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469679973
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 257
Book Description
In 1830 Richard Walpole Cogdell, a husband, father, and bank clerk in Charleston, South Carolina, purchased a fifteen-year-old enslaved girl, Sarah Martha Sanders. Before her death in 1850, she bore nine of his children, five of whom reached adulthood. In 1857, Cogdell and his enslaved children moved to Philadelphia, where he bought them a house and where they became, virtually overnight, part of the African American middle class. An ambitious historical narrative about the Sanders family, Tangled Journeys tells a multigenerational, multiracial story that is both traumatic and prosaic while forcing us to confront what was unseen, unheard, and undocumented in the archives, and thereby inviting us into the process of American history making itself.
Black Is a Church
Author: Josef Sorett
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190615133
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 257
Book Description
In Black is a Church, Josef Sorett maps the ways in which black American culture and identity have been animated by a particular set of Protestant ideas and practices in order to chart the mutually reinforcing discourses of racial authenticity and religious orthodoxy that have made Christianity essential to the very notion of blackness. In doing so, Sorett reveals the ways that Christianity, white supremacy, and colonialism coalesced in the modern category of "religion" and became formative to the emergence of black identity in North America. Black is a Church examines the surprising alliances, peculiar performances, and at times contradictory ideas and complex institutions that shape the contours of black life in the United States. The book begins by arguing that Afro-Protestantism has relied upon literary strategies to explain itself since the earliest years of its formation. Through an examination of slave narratives and spiritual autobiographies, it shows how Protestant Christianity was essential to the establishment of the earliest black literary forms. Sorett then follows Afro-Protestantism's heterodox history in the convergence of literature, politics, and religion at the end of the nineteenth century. And he shows how religious aspirations animated early calls for a "race literature" and "the color line" provided an organizing logic for religious innovations as divergent as pluralism and Pentecostalism. From the earliest literary productions of the eighteenth century to the #BlackLivesMatter movement in the twenty-first, religion--namely Protestant Christianity--is seen to be at the very center of black life in North America.
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190615133
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 257
Book Description
In Black is a Church, Josef Sorett maps the ways in which black American culture and identity have been animated by a particular set of Protestant ideas and practices in order to chart the mutually reinforcing discourses of racial authenticity and religious orthodoxy that have made Christianity essential to the very notion of blackness. In doing so, Sorett reveals the ways that Christianity, white supremacy, and colonialism coalesced in the modern category of "religion" and became formative to the emergence of black identity in North America. Black is a Church examines the surprising alliances, peculiar performances, and at times contradictory ideas and complex institutions that shape the contours of black life in the United States. The book begins by arguing that Afro-Protestantism has relied upon literary strategies to explain itself since the earliest years of its formation. Through an examination of slave narratives and spiritual autobiographies, it shows how Protestant Christianity was essential to the establishment of the earliest black literary forms. Sorett then follows Afro-Protestantism's heterodox history in the convergence of literature, politics, and religion at the end of the nineteenth century. And he shows how religious aspirations animated early calls for a "race literature" and "the color line" provided an organizing logic for religious innovations as divergent as pluralism and Pentecostalism. From the earliest literary productions of the eighteenth century to the #BlackLivesMatter movement in the twenty-first, religion--namely Protestant Christianity--is seen to be at the very center of black life in North America.