Divining America:
Religion in American History
Sponsored by the National Humanities Center, the Divining
America website includes subsidiary pages on several topics in African-American
religious history:
African-American Christianity, Part I: To the Civil War,
African American Christianity, Part II: From the Civil War to the Great
Migration, 1865-1920,
Islam in America: From African
Slaves to Malcolm X,
and Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association. Each page includes an
introductory essay and links to online resources, comprising many primary
sources.
The Church in the Southern Black Community
This website, a subsidiary collection of Documenting the
American South,
collects primary sources such as sermons, histories, autobiographies, photographs,
and other materials to trace “the way Southern African Americans experienced
and transformed Protestant Christianity into the central institution of
community life…[and] adapted evangelical Christianity, making it a metaphor for
freedom, community, and personal survival.” An introductory essay by professor Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp of
UNC-Chapel Hill presents a short history of the church in the southern Black
community. The collection may be
browsed alphabetically by author/organization, and images may be browsed by
subject. There is also a guide to
religious content in slave narratives. The main Documenting the American South website, with tabs at
the top of the page, includes alphabetical indexes for all the site’s
collections by author, title, Library of Congress subject heading, and geographic
area (state and North Carolina county).
Documents such as oral histories include text and streaming audio.
Wabash Center Internet Guide to Religion – African-Americans --- Religion
The African-American Religion page at the Wabash Center Internet Guide to
Religion lists a number of useful links.
Many of them are to courses in black religion, which are not directly
useful for research but may lead to other resources. There are also a number of denominational websites,
bibliographies, online references, essays, and other sources that may be useful
for research. As of this writing,
there is no particular organization to this list of sources, so it requires some
skimming.
Society for the Study of Black Religion
The website for the scholarly study of African American
religion includes information on the society’s annual conference, a list of
resources for research (slightly disorganized, and links open up into Word documents for some reason),
and the society’s newsletters, some with featured essays from the
annual conference.
