Paul Harvey illustrates how black Christian traditions provided theological, institutional, and personal strategies for cultural survival during bondage and into an era of partial freedom. At the same time, he covers the ongoing tug-of-war between themes of "respectability" versus practices derived from an African heritage; the adoption of Christianity by the majority; and the critique of the adoption of the "white man's religion" from the eighteenth century to the present. The book also covers internal cultural, gendered, and class divisions in churches that attracted congregants of widely disparate educational levels, incomes, and worship styles.Through the Storm, Through the Night provides a lively overview of the history of African American religion, beginning with the birth of African Christianity amidst the Transatlantic slave trade, and tracing the story through its growth in America. Paul Harvey successfully uses the history of African American religion to portray the complexity and humanity of the African American experience.
Paul Harvey is professor of history at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. He is the author of Redeeming the South: Religious Cultures and Racial Identities Among Southern Baptists, 1865–1925 and Freedom's Coming: Religious Culture and the Shaping of the South from the Civil War through the Civil Rights Era.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction: Themes in African American Religious History 1
Chapter 1 Middle Passage for the Gods: African and African American Religions from the Middle Passage to the Great Awakening 9
Chapter 2 The Birth of Afro-Christianity in the Slave Quarters and the Urban North, 1740-1831 29
Chapter 3 Through the Night: African American Religion in the Antebellum Era 49
Chapter 4 Day of Jubilee: Black Churches from Emancipation to the Era of Jim Crow 69
Chapter 5 Jesus on the Main Line: Black Christianity from the Great Migration through World War II 87
Chapter 6 Freedom's Main. Line: African American Christianity, Civil Rights, and Religious Pluralism 109
Epilogue: Righteous Anger and Visionary Dreams: Contemporary Black Religion, Politics, and Culture 133
Harvey provides an elegant and engaging introduction to the history of African American Christianity that charts the diversity of experience and expression among black Christians and illuminates the complex relationship between religion and race in American life.
Edward J. Blum
If you teach, study, practice, or care about African American religion, then this is the book for you. Paul Harvey provides an indispensable overview of black Christianity from the age of slavery to the ascendance of Obama. With it, Harvey offers a bevy of fascinating primary documents that range from Nat Turner's righteous rage to Mahalia Jackson's soulful songs. Through the Storm, Through the Night does it all with such clarity that even the most complex concepts make sense.
