Narratives of race provide frameworks for interpreting the role of people of color in the formation of religious movements, and thus for the remembered value of their leadership. These three papers critically analyze the remembered value of religious leaders on African American religious organizations, presenting the historical contribution to religious organizations and questioning narratives of race that undergird their remembered value. Leaders include Rebecca Jackson (a 19th-century Black Shaker Eldress), Louise Little, Betty Shabazz, and Safiya Bukhari (key figures in Black Islam and Black Nationalism), and Lauron William De Laurence (an occult publisher who influenced many Black religions the Nation of Islam and hoodoo).
In 1981, Jean Humez published the first widely available volume of the life writing of Rebecca Jackson, a 19th-century Black Shaker Eldress. Since then, public and academic scholars have written thoughtfully on Jackson’s visionary writing on race and gender. All (that I found) use Humez’s edited volume for their analysis; almost none attend to Humez’s editorial process. Surely this lack of attention to editing indicates a commitment to increasing public knowledge of Black religious women, without getting distracted by publication history. But Humez’s editing fundamentally changed Jackson’s work, changing spelling and punctuation, adding section breaks, and arranging disparate works in a single volume. In this talk, I ask how the editing of archival materials impacts our understanding of Black religious figures. Further, I ask how the reception and use of Humez’s volume reveals contemporary desires for cohesive historical narratives, and the stakes of this for histories of Black religious women.
This paper offers an intellectual history of Black Muslim thought that centers the distinctly feminist epistemologies of Black nationalist organizers Louise Little (1894-1989), Betty Shabazz (1934-1997), and Safiya Bukhari (1950-2003). Through archival research and close reading of posthumously published works, I trace the psychic, intuitive knowledge that Grenadian-born Garveyite activist Louise Little seeded in her son, Malcolm X; Betty Shabazz's use of channeling to refuse the secularization of Black nationalist thought post-1965 and frame Islam as a spiritual turn toward African indigeneity; and Safiya Bukhari’s reliance on co-conspiracy with the divine to liberate herself and her fellow Black Panther comrades from U.S. prisons. I argue that adding self-centered, felt, sensed, and intuited knowledge—alongside the read, ritualized, and revealed—complicates the standard narrative of Black Islam and Black Nationalism, as popularized by Malcolm X, and its equation with masculinist, top-down notions of religious authority and knowledge.
Drawing on newspaper archives and court records, this paper explores how (representations of) hypnotist and publisher Lauron William De Laurence (1868-1936) challenged and reinforced normative constructions of whiteness. De Laurence was the founder of De Laurence, Scott, and Co., an influential occult publishing house. De Laurence’s books are used in many Black religions and religious practices, including the Nation of Islam and hoodoo. This paper will first demonstrate that De Laurence had an immensely complex and ambiguous relationship to dominant US racial schemas, categories, and boundaries. Subsequently, this relationship will serve as “case study” to challenge and probe the often-held assumption—in academic and public domains—that occult praxis is by definition subversive, deviant, or rejected. This paper shows, in contrast, that (representations of) occult praxis can also form a locus for dominant norms, specifically normative constructs of whiteness.