Race, Religion, and Black Lives Matter: Essays on a Moment and a Movement (Black Lives and Liberation)

Book info: Race, Religion, and Black Lives Matter: Essays on a Moment and a Movement (Black Lives and Liberation) (Hardcover, 336 pages) – Vanderbilt University Press, 2021. Language: English.

Black Lives Matter, like its predecessor movements, embodies flesh and blood through local organizing, national and global protests, hunger strikes, and numerous acts of civil disobedience. Chants like “All night! All day! We’re gonna fight for Freddie Gray!” and “No justice, no fear! Sandra Bland is marching here!” give voice simultaneously to the rage, truth, hope, and insurgency that sustain BLM. While BLM has generously welcomed a broad group of individuals whom religious institutions have historically resisted or rejected, contrary to general perceptions, religion neither has been absent nor excluded from the movement’s activities. This volume has a simple, but far-reaching argument: religion is an important thread in BLM. To advance this claim, Race, Religion, and Black Lives Matter examines religion’s place in the movement through the lenses of history, politics, and culture. While this collection is not exhaustive or comprehensive in its coverage of religion and BLM, it selectively anthologizes unique aspects of Black religious history, thought, and culture in relation to political struggle in the contemporary era. The chapters aim to document historical change in light of current trends and current events. The contributors analyze religion and BLM in a current historical moment fraught with aggressive, fascist, authoritarian tendencies and one shaped by profound ingenuity, creativity, and insightful perspectives on Black history and culture.   Editorial Reviews Review "Race, Religion, and Black Lives Matter offers fresh perspectives on religious ideas and practices informing Black Lives Matter and contemporary politics, as well as posits novel understandings of race, religion, and politics in the United States in the twenty-first century."
—Corey D. B. Walker, Wake Forest Professor of the Humanities, Wake Forest University About the Author Phillip Luke Sinitiere is a professor of history at the College of Biblical Studies in Houston. He is also the scholar in residence at the W. E. B. Du Bois Center at UMass Amherst. He is the author of Salvation with a Smile: Joel Osteen, Lakewood Church, and American Christianity and the coeditor of Protest and Propaganda: W. E. B. Du Bois, The Crisis, and American History and Christians and the Color Line: Race and Religion after Divided by Faith.

Christopher Cameron is a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He is a founder of the African American Intellectual History Society, the author of To Plead Our Own Cause: African Americans in Massachusetts and the Making of the Antislavery Movement and Black Freethinkers: A History of African American Secularism, and a coeditor of New Perspectives on the Black Intellectual Tradition.