Augsburg Fortress

Witnessing and Testifying: Black Women, Religion, and Civil Rights

Witnessing and Testifying: Black Women, Religion, and Civil Rights

After a chapter exploring Black women's religious context and presenting early examples of this work by women of the ante-bellum and post-Reconstruction eras, Ross looks at seven civil rights activists who continue this tradition. They are Ella Josephine Baker, Septima Poinsette Clark, Fannie Lou Hamer, Victoria Way DeLee, Clara Muhammad, Diane Nash, and Ruby Doris Smith Robinson.

In a fascinating narrative style that draws on biography, social history, and original archival research, Ross shows how their moral formation and work reflect both womanist consciousness and practices of witness and testimony, both emergent from the black religious context.

Ross' major work is engrossing history and moving ethical challenge. Examining Black women's civil rights activism as religiously impelled moral practices brings a new insight to work on the movement and lifts up a paradigm for engagement in the mountainous challenges of contemporary social life.

  • This item is not returnable
  • Ships in 2 or more weeks
  • Quantity discount
    • # of Items Price
    • 1 to 9$32.00
    • 10 or more$24.00

$32.00

  • Publisher Fortress Press
  • Format Paperback
  • ISBN 9780800636036
  • Dimensions 6 x 9
  • Pages 312
  • Publication Date January 9, 2003

Endorsements

"This is an excellent example of womanist theological studies. Ross cogently argues the moral logic and religious convictions of seven African American women who played decisive roles in the Civil Rights Movement. Ross' lucid cognitive maps offer important and long overdue assessments of each woman's moral agency and the milieu in which she worked as a doer-of-justice. The force with which Ross clarifies concretely the race, sex, class indignities as they arise in the context of the Civil Rights Movement is of utmost importance. On the whole, a much needed testimony."
– Katie G. Cannon, Ph.D.
Annie Scales Rogers Professor of Christian Social Ethics, Union Theological Seminary-PSCE

"By examining the lives and faith of key Black women leaders, Rosetta Ross reminds us that Black women have never been afraid to step out in faith and to step up to the challenge a moral moment presents and to change things."
– Marian Wright Edelman, President, Children's Defense Fund
1