Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920

by Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham

What Du Bois noted has gone largely unstudied until now. In this book, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham gives us our first full account of the crucial role of black women in making the church a powerful institution for social and political change in the black community. Between 1880 and 1920, the black church served as the most effective vehicle by which men and women alike, pushed down by racism and poverty, regrouped and rallied against emotional and physical defeat. Focusing on the National Baptist Convention, the largest religious movement among black Americans, Higginbotham shows us how women were largely responsible for making the church a force for self-help in the black community. In her account, we see how the efforts of women enabled the church to build schools, provide food and clothing to the poor, and offer a host of social welfare services. And we observe the challenges of black women to patriarchal theology. Class, race, and gender dynamics continually interact in Higginbotham's nuanced history. She depicts the cooperation, tension, and negotiation that characterized the relationship between men and women church leaders as well as the interaction of southern black and northern white women's groups.

Higginbotham's history is at once tough-minded and engaging. It portrays the lives of individuals within this movement as lucidly as it delineates feminist thinking and racial politics. She addresses the role of black Baptist women in contesting racism and sexism through a "politics of respectability" and in demanding civil rights, voting rights, equal employment, and educational opportunities.

Righteous Discontent finally assigns women their rightful place in the story of political and social activism in the black church. It is central to an understanding of African American social and cultural life and a critical chapter in the history of religion in America.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Religion, Race, Politics, Social Justice, Feminism

320 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 1993

About the author

Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Ph.D. (American History, University of Rochester, 1984; M.A., History, Howard University, 1974; B.A., History, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 1969), is the Victor S. Thomas Professor of History and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. She is currently chair of the Department of African and African American Studies and has held this position since 2006. Prior to Harvard, she taught on the full-time faculties of Dartmouth, the University of Maryland, and the University of Pennsylvania. In addition, she was a Visiting Professor at Princeton University and New York University.

Professor Higginbotham's writings span diverse fields—African American religious history, women's history, civil rights, constructions of racial and gender identity, electoral politics, and the intersection of theory and history.

In April 2003 she was chosen by Harvard University to be a Walter Channing Cabot Fellow in recognition of her achievements and scholarly eminence in the field of history. The Association for the Study of African American Life and History awarded her the Carter G. Woodson Scholars Medallion in October 2008, and the Urban League awarded her the Legend Award in August 2008.

Reviews

[Chanequa Walker-Barnes · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderful analysis of the women's movement in the Black Baptist church in the early 20th century. Higginbotham provides a definitive rejection of the oft-cited claim that Black women, especially Black Christian women, have taken a "race-first, gender-second" approach to social activism.

[Renita Weems · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am just getting around to rereading this book after having read it many years ago when it was first published. It was a watershed publication in 1994 that fundamentally reshaped understanding of Black women's religious agency by demonstrating Black women's central role in church leadership, activism, and social reform. Higginbotham shattered assumptions about the Black Church as a purely patriarchal institution. Her theorization of the "politics of respectability" illuminated how Black women strategically navigated intersecting oppressions through moral reform and racial uplift.

[Matthew Rohn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Clear history of women in the Black Baptist church during the nadir, and of the church itself. Essential for anyone interested in African American history or modern American religious history