Synopses & Reviews
In a major revision of accepted wisdom, this book, originally published by UNC Press in 1991, demonstrates that American social Christianity played an important role in racial reform during the period between Emancipation and the civil rights movement.
As organizations created by the heirs of antislavery sentiment foundered in the mid-1890s, Ralph Luker argues, a new generation of black and white reformersmany of them representatives of American social christianityexplored a variety of solutions to the problem of racial conflict. Some of them helped to organize the Federal Council of Churches in 1909, while others returned to abolitionist and home missionary strategies in organizing the NAACP in 1910 and the National Urban League in 1911. A half century later, such organizations formed the institutional core of America's civil rights movement. Luker also shows that the black prophets of social Christianity who espoused theological personalism created an influential tradition that eventually produced Martin Luther King Jr.
Review
[T]his is the most thorough study yet done of religion and racial reform in the Social Gospel era.
David W. Wills, Amherst College
Review
[M]akes a good case for broadening the definition of the Social Gospel to include the white and African-American reformers.
American Historical Review
Review
He presents the social gospel spokesmen in all their diversity, black and white, conservative and liberal, enthusiastic and agonizing.
Louis R. Harlan, University of Maryland at College Park
Review
[Luker] has given the proper prescription to cure the astigmatism of the historians looking at the social gospel.
Christian Century
Review
Massive, thoroughly documented, clearly written, [and] judicious.
Church History
Synopsis
Examines the impact of the new wave of black and white reformers, many of them social Christians, who struggled for solutions to America•s racial problems between 1885 and 1912.
About the Author
Ralph E. Luker, adjunct professor of history at Morehouse College, is author of the Historical Dictionary of the Civil Rights Movement and editor of the memoirs of Mary White Ovington.
Table of Contents
Contents
Preface
1. Introduction
Part I. The Decline of Nineteenth-Century Racial Reform
2. Christianizing the South
3. The Redemption of Africa
4. In Search of Civil Equity
5. The Savage End of an Era: Barbarism and Time Unredeemed
Part II. The Racial Mission Renewed
6. Education for Service
7. Urban Mission
Part III. Civil Wrongs, Civil Rights, and Theological Equations
8. A Prophetic Minority at the Nadir
9. A Prophetic Minority from the Nadir to the NAACP
10. Theologies of Race Relations
11. Conclusion
Notes
Bibliographical Essay
Index
Illustrations
Atticus G. Haygood
Mohonk Mountain House
White missionaries with African converts to Christianity
Henry Codman Potter
Henry McNeal Turner
George Washington Cable
Albion W. Tourgée
Ida B. Wells
Francis Greenwood Peabody
Booker T. Washington
Robert C. Ogden, William Howard Taft, Booker T. Washington, and Andrew Carnegie
Reverdy Ransom
Atlanta's First Congregational Church and Henry Hugh Proctor
Boston Guardian cartoon caricaturing Booker T. Washington and Northern allies
W. E. B. Du Bois
Washington Gladden
Josiah Strong
Josiah Royce
Edgar Gardner Murphy
Thomas Dixon, Jr.
Harlan Paul Douglass
Walter Rauschenbusch