Visions for the Field: An Intergenerational Fireside Chat on New Directions in African American Religious History

This paper is an excerpt of a dissertation chapter. I discuss why several Mendi Africans were paid to perform Christianity for multiracial audiences of eager Northerners in 1841. The Mendi had arrived in the United States in 1839 having been kidnapped and trafficked aboard the Spanish ship La Amistad. A two-year legal trial ensued, captivating the religious and racial interests of Northern spectators. During the trial, the Mendi’s abolitionist benefactors—known as the Amistad Committee—crowdfunded financial support for their catechism alongside support for their legal defense. After winning their freedom, the Amistad Committee devised a plan to capitalize the support of Northern Christians by touring  New England  to raise money for the Africans’ repatriation. The Committee told the press (and the Mendi) that the establishment of an American mission in Sierra Leone became a condition of their return. The Mendi’s Christianization  during their American residency transformed American evangelical interest in Africa. 

This presentation examines the archival memory of St. Joseph Catholic Church’s parochial school network in Wilmington and Clayton, Delaware (1880s–1900s), an understudied Black Catholic parish founded by Mill Hill (later Josephite) missionaries. Centering a focused set of primary sources, administrative reports by missionaries and Franciscan sisters, student enrollment records and photographs, and former students’ testimonies, I read these white-authored documents against the grain to recover Black Catholic perspectives on dual religious-vocational education modeled as a “Black Catholic Tuskegee.” This pedagogy catechized youth in orthodox faith while fostering trades for economic self-reliance, challenging racial stereotypes and asserting belonging amid racism and anti-Catholicism. By highlighting attached schools’ role in transmitting Black Catholic identity across Chesapeake missions, it expands African American religious historiography’s geographical boundaries and engages the 2026 theme “FUTURE/S,” illuminating contested racial-religious futurities forged by children as embodiments of community horizons beyond constraint.

This paper explores the theological geography of Albert Cleage, who rejected the "Old Black Theology" of distant heavenly reward in favor of a "Promised Land" in the here-and-now. While Cleage frequently defined this promised land as "more than geography"—emphasizing a state of being, racial solidarity, and nation-building—this paper argues that physical place remained central to his political theology. By analyzing Cleage’s Pan-Africanist vision of Africa as an ultimate homeland, alongside his specific ministry in Detroit, the paper demonstrates how localities functioned as "alternate Zions.” Specifically, Cleage’s designation of the Shrine of the Black Madonna at Linwood and Hogarth reveals how ritual was used to sacralize urban space. Ultimately, this paper contends that despite Cleage's rhetorical emphasis on a psychological state of being, Black Christian Nationalism was fundamentally a project of defining, creating, and defending sacred geographies.

This presentation examines Zora Neale Hurston’s Mules and Men as an archive of African American religious thought, arguing that Black folklore functions as a form of vernacular preaching. By reading folktales as proclamation through a “hermeneutic of otherwise,” the paper expands the historiography of African American religion beyond churches and pulpits to the everyday storytelling practices through which Black communities make meaning.

If Hajj City—as Boston was known in the late 1970s and early 1980s because of the number of local Black Muslims who completed the pilgrimage to Mecca—could talk, it would reveal how Islamic communities across the twentieth century become newly visible when traced through the long lives of Black Muslim women. This paper examines the life of Hajjah Raheemah Abdullah (1929–2019), a South Carolina–born migrant whose religious life spanned Methodist Christianity, the Nation of Islam, and Sunni orthodoxy. Drawing on personal archives, oral histories, newspapers, and pilgrimage records, the paper reconstructs how her life intersected with major transformations in American religious and social history, including the Great Migration and the development of Islam in Boston. By treating longevity as a unit of historical analysis, this study shows how Black Muslim women functioned as institutional mediators whose lives illuminate the formation and continuity of Islamic communities within twentieth-century American urban history.

Using Julie Dash’s film Daughters of the Dust, this paper illustrates how Nana Peazant’s practice of Hoodoo functions as an example of way-finding through creolized religious practices. According to Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return, there is a common experience within the diaspora of suffering from a fragmented and ruptured ancestral memory, which she names as the door of no return. I articulate the process of fragmentation that shapes the door of no return as creolization, using Edouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation. I suggest that creolized religious rituals can serve as a method of way-finding that are capable of transforming the possibility of one’s survival, by way of reclaiming connections to one’s ancestral community in the past, present, and future.  Though the door of no return, which was shaped by the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and chattel slavery, is fragmented; the significance of creolized religious practices as transformative and liberatory frameworks of survival, like Nana Peazant’s use of Hoodoo, must be seriously engaged.