“Tell Them We Are Singing for Jesus” explores the Christian missionary ideals and convictions that spawned the Fisk Jubilee Singers during the 1870s and guided the ensemble throughout its impressive US and European travels. This historic choral ensemble was sponsored by the American Missionary Association (AMA), the parent organization of Fisk University.

The Christian Methodist Episcopal Church was an important part of the historic freedom struggles of African Americans from Reconstruction to the Civil Rights movement. This fight for equality and freedom can be seen clearly in the denomination’s evolving social and ecumenical consciousness. The denomination’s very name changed from “Colored” to “Christian” in 1954, but the denomination did not join the struggle late. Rather, the CME was a critical participant from the days following the Civil War. At times, the Church was at odds with their white Methodist counterparts and in solidarity with other African-American denominations on issues of racial desegregation and the role of social protest in religion. Raymond Sommerville’s important book discusses the relationship between Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the CME. While King and others received most of the headlines during the Civil Rights Era, the CME proved to be involved at all levels and equally important in all they did. With its strategic location in the South and its long history of ecumenical involvement, the CME Church emerged as a leading advocate of ecumenical civil rights activism. Previous interpretations asserted that the CME was apolitical and accomodationist or that it was more progressive than it was. Sommerville presents a more nuanced account of how a church of largely former slaves emancipated itself from the constraints of white Methodist paternalism and Jim Crow racism to emerge as a progressive force of racial justice and ecumenism in the South and beyond. Sommerville examines major centers of the CME--Nashville, Birmingham, Memphis, Atlanta--and selected leaders in the South in charting the gradual metamorphosis of the former CME as a largely nonpolitical body of former slaves in 1870 to a more politically active denomination at the apex of the modern Civil Rights movement in the 1960s.

Study of black Baptists and their attempts to Christianize Africa.

Between 1788 and 1834 black Baptists formed their first distinctively black congregations and organized regional associations. By 1831, when an enslaved Baptist preacher named Nat Turner inspired an insurrection against slaveholders in Virginia, black Baptist had acquired “a peculiar and precarious religious freedom.” Turner’s rebellion and the black Baptist role in ending slavery in Jamaica brought restrictions on the movements of black preachers, but black Baptists continued to preach and to claim the freedom to worship as communities of believers.

Writers of church and mission history have devoted very few pages to George Liele’s ministry and most mentions ignore the global nature of his pioneer work, international influence, intelligence, and legacy. He launched a mission movement that reached from Georgia to Jamaica and from Jamaica to Sierra Leone and Nova Scotia—all before the pioneer work of William Carey, Adoniram Judson, Richard Allen, and Lott Cary. Beginning as a slave preacher, Liele learned the Baptist story and theology—a message he preached in South Carolina, Georgia, and Jamaica. In providing a comprehensive introduction to Liele’s life and work, this book draws readers into identifying with Liele and those who lived through a difficult historic period and who in the process developed a theology that guided them through the challenges of being a Christian leader in a slave society.

Back in print, revised, and enlarged to bring the discussion to the present, Manis shows how two conflicting civil religions emerged in the South during the civil rights movement, each with its own understanding of America's calling and destiny as a nation. Using black and white Baptists in the South as case studies, Manis interprets the civil rights movement as a civil religious conflict between Southerners with opposing understandings of America. Originally published in 1987, this new, expanded edition further argues that the civil rights movement and its opposition, with their conflicting images and hopes for America, foreshadowed the ongoing "culture wars" of recent days.

This study of a variety of theologians from diverse geographical, ethnic, cultural, and denominational backgrounds examines the question of divine suffering. Although initially dismissed, the notion of divine suffering has emerged as a critical question for contemporary Christian theology.

Like other Protestant organizations in the United States, the Christian Church was involved in the establishment of schools for African- Americans in the South in the years following the end of the Civil War. The most widely read books offering an interpretation of the history of this church tend to relegate the role of black people to passive recipients of white benevolence and largesse in this process of education reform. This book examines the agency of African-Americans in the founding of educational institutions for blacks associated with the Christian Church. The philosophical discourse within the Christian Church concerning the purpose, type, and control of these schools is examined as well as the prevailing racial assumptions and attitudes that informed each of these areas.

Frederick Douglass is remembered for his fiery rhetoric as an abolitionist, and his speeches, autobiographies, and editorials have been written of frequently, and recently he has been the subject of intellectual biographies. Williamson has written a provocative book using the insights of narrative ethics.