Bloggers and professors at the African American Intellectual History Society have put together a timely project titled #CharlestonSyllabus that offers a comprehensive reading list of African American history and literature, with special attention to South Carolina and Charleston. Here’s the section of the list on race and religion:
Gayraud S. Wilmore, Black Religion and Black Radicalism: An Interpretation of the Religious History of African Americans (1963)
Marcus Garvey and Amy Jacques Garvey, The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey (1967)
Charles Wesley, Richard Allen: Apostle of Freedom (1969)
Carol V. R. George, Segregated Sabbaths: Richard Allen and the Emergence of Independent Black Churches, 1760-1840 (1973)
William R. Jones, Is God A White Racist?: A Preamble to Black Theology (1973)
Albert Raboteau, Slave Religion: The Invisible Institution in the Antebellum South (1978)
Leonardo Boff and Clodovis Boff, Introducing Liberation Theology (1987)
James Campbell, Songs of Zion: The African Methodist Church in the United States and South Africa (1995)
Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited (1996)
Allan D. Austin, African Muslims in Antebellum America: Transatlantic Stories and Spiritual Struggles (1997)
Paul Harvey, Redeeming the South: Religious Cultures and Racial Identities Among Southern Baptists, 1865-1925 (1997)
Eddie Glaude, Jr., Exodus! Religion, Race and Nation in Early 19th Century Black America (2000)
Albert Raboteau, Canaan Land: A Religious History of African Americans (2001)
Jason R. Young, Rituals of Resistance: African Atlantic Religion in Kongo and the Lowcountry South in the Era of Slavery (2007)
Richard Newman, Freedom’s Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers (2008)
J. Kameron Carter, Race: A Theological Account (2008)
Charles Reagan Wilson, Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920 (2009)
George C. Rable, God’s Almost Chosen Peoples: A Religious History of the American Civil War (2010)
Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (2010)
James H. Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (2011)
Rebecca Anne Goetz, The Baptism of Early Virginia: How Christianity Created Race (2012)
Edward J. Blum, The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America (2012)
I might especially recommend Albert Raboteau’s Slave Religion for readers wanting a classic introduction to the topic. ($9.99 on Kindle) The whole list is certainly worth perusing.
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