This panel presents new research that explores the varieties of African American religious culture and political formation in the latter third of the twentieth century. These papers examine the formation of the Nation of Islam’s Temple #11 in Boston, Rev. Henry Mitchell’s embrace of reactionary conservative politics in the midst of the civil rights movement, and the contours of Black religious aesthetics in Majorette Dance at HBCUs, respectively. Taken together, they advance a complex view of the ways that African Americans have constructed and embodied religion, race, and political formation. How have Black religious communities defined and performed religious culture? What ideas and issues have influenced the range of diverse perspectives in Black religious politics? How might Black religious history be expanded and extended through analysis of embodied and kinesthetic elements?
In 1967, Black Baptist minister Rev. Henry Mitchell told Dr. King to “get the hell out” of Chicago because he “created hate.” Mitchell had no interest in marches or King’s demands to the federal government. This paper argues that as a fundamentalist minister and John Birch Society speaker, Mitchell described freedom as “individual responsibility” and “less government,” over and against Dr. Martin Luther King’s calls for federal intervention. Mitchell's vision of freedom reveals how he filtered Bircher conspiracy of communist infiltration of the federal government through a fundamentalist approach to the Bible that informed his politics of self-sufficiency, economic uplift, anti-communism, and nuclear family values. This paper shows how Mitchell sat at an unexplored intersection of Black fundamentalism and reactionary conservatism which offers new understandings of the American Conservative movement and its relationship with Black communities.
African American Islam deserves serious study as a unique reformist movement in Islam and as a vital development in African American religion. Temple #11’s founders were primarily musicians attracted to the Nation of Islam's mysticism, ethnic pride, and self-help programs for individual and community growth. The 1948 to 1998 growth of Boston’s Temple #11 illustrates Elijah Muhammad's religious, cultural, and economic impact on an African-American urban community. Temple #11 catalyzed a cultural transformation in which Boston’s Negro neighborhoods became an assertive African-American community. Symbolic of this process, a 2020 plebiscite renamed Roxbury’s Dudley Square Nubian Square, immortalizing the Dudley Square Nubian Notion business of Temple #11 pioneer Malik Abdal-Khallaq. This paper traces Temple #11's significance in Boston's Civil Rights and Black Power movements, Temple #11’s influence on the Black Theology movement, which revitalized African American Christianity, and its role in fostering the growth of Boston's Ahmadi and Orthodox Muslim communities.
Majorette dance at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) exists at the intersection of Black and religious aesthetics. Despite its prominence, it remains understudied and often reduced to spectacle. This paper uncovers its deeper structuring logics. Examining majorette dance within the Fifth Quarter, a post-game ritual where Black college bands engage in competitive play, I ask: How does majorette dance function as both a moving aesthetic and a movement aesthetic?
Emerging in 1968 amid the Black Arts Movement and second-wave feminism, majorette dance carries an embodied grammar that disrupts dominant aesthetic hierarchies. It demands social and spatial reconfiguration, queers the logics of the college football game, and shifts performance and gaze from the field to the stands. Building on Black feminist dance theories and Ashon Crawley’s study of Blackpentecostal aesthetics, I frame majorette stand routines as kinetic writing—an embodied archive and sacred performance practice that challenges dominant aesthetic frameworks.