San Antonio College Library

"When Joseph Nathaniel Beckles registered for the draft in 1942, he rejected the racial categories presented to him and persuaded the registrar to cross out the check mark she had placed next to Negro and substitute "Ethiopian Hebrew." "God did not make us Negroes," declared religious leaders in black communities of the early twentieth-century urban North. They insisted that so-called Negroes are, in reality, Ethiopian Hebrews, Asiatic Muslims, or...

"The sources of Martin Luther King, Jr.,'s phenomenal and prophetic impact on life in America and beyond have never been adequately understood. In this path-breaking volume, Lewis Baldwin traces King's vision and activism not to his formal philosophical and theological development but directly to his roots in Southern black culture, where King spent most of his 39 years. King's appropriation of the Bible, Gandhi, American participatory democracy,...

The Civil Rights Movement was not only an epochal social and political event but also a profound moral turning point in American history. Here, for the first time, social ethicist Ross examines the religiously motivated activism of black women in the movement and its moral import.

"In Faithful Vision, James W. Coleman places under his critical lens a wide array of African American novels written during the last half of the twentieth century. In doing so, he demonstrates that religious vision not only informs black literature but also serves as a foundation for black culture generally." "The Judeo-Christian tradition, according to Coleman, is the primary component of the African American spiritual perspective, though its syncretism...

The civil rights movement was arguably the most successful social movement in American history. In a provocative new assessment of its success, David Chappell argues that the story of civil rights is not a story of the ultimate triumph of liberal ideas after decades of gradual progress. Rather, it is a story of the power of religious tradition.