History of American Religion, 1865 to Present will consider the varieties of American religious experience while keeping in mind the importance of pluralism in the U.S. context.
As I read Righteous Discontent, I found it to be a compelling and useful work in that it cast light upon a little-recognized story of self-help and “uplift”. My one complaint with the book is that, in my opinion, it could have done without most of the first chapter. While the subsequent chapters were [...]
This is the story of self-help, the emergence of racial consciousness, and the quest for civil rights of women of the Afro-American Community in the States from 1880 through 1920. Most importantly, it is the history of the empowerment of Black women through their involvement in the Black Baptist Church and a description of the [...]
In Righteous Discontent, Higgenbotham characterizes the Black Baptist Church as a “dialogic” model of the public sphere in which black women, denied participation in the civil structures of American life, appropriated the language of the various institutions that denied them that participation, in order to discuss, debate and devise an agenda for their common [...]
W E. B. Du Bois disagreed with Booker T. Washington and contended that educated blacks would play a bigger role in leading improvements of civil liberties than the masses. Du Bois argued that the Talented Tenth in each society is the best and the brightest that leads its society to progress.
Higginbotham defines the “Female Talented Tenth” [...]
Higginbotham looks at the role of women in the black church between 1880-1920, because it was simultaneous to the women’s movements the “nadir” of American race relations (p.1). Higginbotham’s study “provides a vantage point for viewing the interplay of race, gender, class consciousness, for it presents the church, like the black community it mirrors, as [...]