Have You Got Good Religion? Black Women’s Faith, Courage, and Moral Leadership in the Civil Rights Movement

Mingo, an associate professor of ethics at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, debuts with a fine-grained study of the network of “ ‘everyday’ Black churchwomen”—including some from her own family—who took part in anti-segregation boycotts, sit-ins, and demonstrations during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s. According to Mingo, these women’s “lived religion” required them to work toward justice: God, for them, was “a divine living being... acting with and on behalf of those facing mistreatment and oppression.” Drawing from oral history interviews as well as historical and theological scholarship, Mingo braids in vivid profiles of women active in the movement, such as Rose Davis Schofield, a New Jersey activist inspired by her pastor as a teen to take part in NAACP civil disobedience (once chaining herself to other protestors in a New Jersey street), and constructs a liberative theology that she links to the present-day Black Lives Matter movement. She concludes that “the work of justice and social change was and is God’s work,” encapsulated in the question asked during the refrain of the civil rights anthem “Certainly Lord” (“Have you got good religion?”), which implores listeners “to critique not only what is verbalized in belief, but what is realized in action.” Marked by Mingo’s prodigious research and meticulous analysis, this is an excellent resource for historians, theologians, and religious activists. (Feb.)