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Abstract
BIRTHING BLACK POWER:RELIGION, POSITIVE BLACK SELF-IDENTITY DEVELOPMENT AND
THE PECULIARITY OF AMERICAN CHRISTIANITY, 1878 – 1917
by
DARYL G. BLOODSAW
(Under the Direction of Sandy Dwayne Martin)
ABSTRACT
The Black Power Movement was a declarative and defining moment in positive Black self-identity, empowering Blacks to declare self-assuredly, “I’m Black and I’m proud!” This thesis examination identifies the post-Reconstruction era (1878 – 1917) as the incubator for positive Black self-identity that would birth the Black Power Movement a half-century later.
In the post-Reconstruction period, when the proverbial race furnace was turned up “seven times hotter,” and extermination was the order of the day, positive Black self-identity was forged. From “slave” to “colored,” to “Negro,” to “Afro-American,” to “Black” and “African American,” the identity crisis has ebbed and flowed with the untoward influences of the dominant white culture to label and define Blacks never as equal, but always as the “other” or “different” where different almost always connotes “less than.”
The burgeoning of Black Christianity buoyed Blacks and imbued them with a sense of self that refused to relent in the face of extreme racism and degradation. Given the history and centrality of faith in the Black community, this examination considers the impact of white Christianity, or “Amerianity,” on Black identity development and its belief in a celestial hierarchy in which whiteness is next to godliness and blackness is insuperably inferior.
Examples are offered to show the impact and influence of white Christianity through the words, thoughts, actions, and ministries of two of the founding fathers of the Southern Baptist Convention, capturing the essence of an enduring paternalistic theology and practice that bred civil Southern religion that is now the national civil religion in the United States. Conversely, to counter the deleterious tenets of Southern civil religion, representative examples are offered in Blacks who through Black Christianity demonstrated positive, Black self-identity using the acronym BRASH (Belongingness, Resistance, Agency, Syncretism, and Hope), laying the groundwork that would, a half-century later, produce the self-assuredness evidenced in the Black Power movement.