Professor Clarence Taylor sheds some much-needed light on the rich intellectual and political tradition that lies in the black religious community. From the Pentecostalism of Bishop Smallwood Williams and the flamboyant leadership of the Reverend Al Sharpton, to the radical Presbyterianism of Milton Arthur Galamison and the controversial and mass-mobilization by Minister Louis Farrakhan, black religious leaders have figured prominently in the struggle for social equality in America.

Religion and spirituality have been key elements of African-American life since the earliest days of the slave trade

BLACK STARS Meet the black religious leaders who helpedshape the AfricanAmerican experience--from colonial to modern times * Absalom Jones * Richard Allen * Jarena Lee * Lemuel Haynes * Peter Williams Sr. * Peter Williams Jr. * John Marrant * Denmark Vesey * Sojourner Truth * Nat Turner * Maria Stewart * John Jasper * Alexander Crummell * Henry Highland Garnett * Henry McNeal Turner * Richard Henry Boyd * Bishop C. M. "Sweet Daddy" Grace * Vernon Johns * Elijah Muhammad * Howard Thurman * Adam Clayton Powell Jr. * Joseph E. Lowery * Malcolm X * Martin Luther King Jr. * Andrew J. Young * James L. Bevel * John Lewis * Prathia Hall Wynn * Jesse L. Jackson * Vashti Murphy McKenzie * Fredrick J. Streets * Al Sharpton * Renita J. Weems * T. D. Jakes

This interdisciplinary project features scholars in African-American Studies, Philosophy, Religious Studies, Women's Studies, History, Communication, Political Science, Social Work and Organizational Behavior.

James Lyles has written an absorbing memoir of his life, beginning as an impoverished child in Depression-era Arkansas and eventually becoming a highly educated and well-traveled religious leader of a major Protestant denomination. His story spans the most important era of African American advancement in the post-slavery period. He was an eyewitness as well as a participant in that half-century of the black liberation struggle... Growing up in rural Arkansas in the midst of the Great Depression, he describes an early life reminiscent of Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road of the 1930s and '40s. The account could serve as a documented history of African American life during that time. His narrative is written also against the backdrop of some of the most memorable civil rights incidents, such as the Little Rock High School integration riots and the killing of Emmett Till. Also, he relates in telling detail the little-reported story of the racial integration of Perkins School of Theology on the campus of Southern Methodist University--an event in which he was a participant. As an ordained clergyman, his adventures and misadventures, took him to small towns, large cities, college campuses, the armed forces, a foreign mission bureaucracy, and the continent of Africa, all of which he relates with remarkable candor. Jim Lyles's exciting memoir illustrates how many splendored a life of faith can be.

Until now, the public life of James Walker Hood (1831-1918), bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion (AMEZ) Church and a major political and religious leader of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth, has gone largely unexamined. For God and Race recovers the public career of Hood as a representative of the major builders of independent black Christianity during this period who understood faithfulness to God as inseparable from the quest for racial justice, and it explores Hood's role in the AMEZ Church, a denomination known for its singular success in promoting leadership for the abolitionist movement.