Black Women’s Christian Activism : Seeking Social Justice in a Northern Suburb

Please allow me space: race and faith in the suburbs -- A great work for God and humanity: African American Christian women and organized social reform -- The home away from home: suffrage, war, and civic righteousness -- Unholy and unchristian attitude: interracial dialogue in segregated spaces, 1920-1937 -- Putting real American ideals in American life: church women and electoral politics -- Carthage must be destroyed: health, housing, and the new deal -- You just as well die with the ague as with the fever.

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When a domestic servant named Violet Johnson moved to the affluent white suburb of Summit, New Jersey in 1897, she became one of just barely 100 black residents in the town of 6000. In this avowedly liberal Protestant community, the very definition of 'the suburbs' depended on observance of unmarked and fluctuating race and class barriers. But Johnson did not intend to accept the status quo. Establishing a Baptist church a year later, a seemingly moderate act that would have implications far beyond weekly worship, Johnson challenged assumptions of gender and race, advocating for a politics of civic righteousness that would grant African Americans an equal place in a Christian nation. In 'Black Women's Christian Activism', Betty Livingston Adams examines the oft overlooked role of black women in the growth of northern suburbs and American Protestantism in the first half of the 20th century.

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