This session showcases emerging scholarship in African American religious history through a series of six short presentations, each organized around primary sources that span archives, film, folklore, and oral history. Together, they expand the geographical, chronological, and methodological boundaries of the field. Topics range from Black Muslim women's institutional life in twentieth-century Boston and the sacred geographies of Black Christian nationalism in Detroit, to Black Catholic vocational education in Delaware, the performance of Christianity by the Mendi Africans in antebellum New England, creolized spiritual practice in Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust, and vernacular preaching in Zora Neale Hurston's Mules and Men.
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.