The most extensive and best-known histories of African-American religion in America give short shrift to the role of African-American women in religion. In her exhaustive and monumental study, Collier-Thomas (Daughters of Thunder
) allows the strong voices of women as diverse as Ida B. Wells Barnett, Sarah Jane Woodson Early (the first black woman to serve on a faculty of an American university), and Mary McLeod Bethune to articulate the causes of liberation and justice in a culture where their race and sex continually called into question their self-understanding. Collier-Thomas demonstrates the ways black women have woven their faith into their daily experience and played central roles in developing African-American religion, politics, and public culture. By examining the histories of various organizations such as the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church’s Woman’s Home and Foreign Missionary Society, she shows how black women of faith created a network indispensable to the fight against racism, sexism, and poverty. Although her turgid and wooden prose and academic tone detract from the power of the book, Collier-Thomas’s study nevertheless offers a magisterial survey of a too-long neglected topic. (Feb.)
