Black Women and Religion during the Civil Rights Movement: An Interview with AnneMarie Mingo
In today’s post, Dr. Aaron Pride, Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at Lafayette College, interviews renowned scholar of religion Dr. AnneMarie Mingo about her first book. Dr. Mingo is an Associate Professor of Ethics, Culture, and Moral Leadership and the Director of the Metro-Urban Institute at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. She previously served as Assistant Professor of African American Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Penn State University, and an affiliate faculty member in the Rock Ethics Institute at Penn State. In 2018-2019 she was the Ella Baker Visiting Professor of Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Drawing on oral histories and ethnographies, her work in Social Ethics centers on the lived experiences of Black Churchwomen who were involved in the Civil Rights Movement. Her research interests include 20th and 21st Century Black Freedom Struggles with a specific focus on the U.S. Civil Rights Movement, South African Apartheid Movement, and global Movement for Black Lives, socio-religious activism of Black women, and theological and ethical influences in social movements. Have You Got Good Religion?: Black Women’s Faith, Courage, and Moral Leadership in the Civil Rights Movement was published with the University of Illinois Press in 2024.
She also writes in areas of Black Church activism, peace and reconciliation, and the influence of Black music and media on social activism. She is the founder of the Cultivating Courageous Resisters project that works collaboratively to expand the work and equip intergenerational religious activists to help meet critical contemporary needs for social justice.
Aaron Pride: In many respects Have You Got Good Religion? is a familial history. Can you share how your mother and aunt’s activism shaped your approach to writing this history?
AnneMarie Mingo: Thank you for this question, and this opportunity to share about Have You Got Good Religion?: Black Women’s Faith, Courage, and Moral Leadership in the Civil Rights Movement. As a child, my mother occasionally took me to have lunch in Woolworth’s dining area in my hometown of Gainesville, Florida. She told me we were there because we could sit in the booth and be served like everyone else, and she made sure I understood the significance of that seemingly normal experience by sharing about the sit-ins she and her older sister participated in in Tallahassee. As I would listen to my mom I learned that she and my aunt were afraid of my grandmother’s response if it was found out what they were downtown because my grandmother told them in no uncertain terms to not get involved with the sit-ins. My mom and aunt wanted life to change for Black people, so they were determined to do what they could and sat-in despite the fear. I have always been drawn to history, especially the resistance and resilience of Black people in the face of various forms of injustice, and while many are aware of the names of larger Black freedom struggle leaders and influencers, I am drawn to everyday women who stepped up and made a difference. At a very young age, I realized there were many women like my mother and my aunt whose actions created the conditions for me and others to live more fully and freely, and I wanted to research and write about them.
As you know, when you look at images from the historic Civil Rights Movement, you often see a lot of people, including many women and young people. I wanted to know who are the people in those images whose names are not generally known, but because of their courage–whether through a singular action or multiple ones–their impact was felt. I knew those unnamed faces archived in photographs and documentary films had a story to tell too. I also believed there was a faith component to this, so I asked questions to help me understand what it took for them to start and what it meant for them to keep going during the Civil Rights era. I wanted to understand what would allow women, like my mother and aunt, who did not have the partial protection of working for a civil rights organization to risk physical, economic, and other forms of retaliation for a potential–but not guaranteed–future with more justice and freedom.
By conducting oral history interviews with women who self-selected into my study by identifying as someone who was active during the Civil Rights Movement, I have been able to expand our collective archive and understanding of the everyday shapers of history beyond the gendered targeting of Black male media darlings during one pivotal period in U.S. history.
AP: One of the most interesting facets of Have You Got Good Religion? is its focus on African American women’s civil rights activism as a generational project and history. What were some of the challenges and limitations in writing a historical account of several interconnected generations of African American women activists?
AM: I see our lives and collective histories as interwoven, and I believe our past gives us lessons and insights into our present and guidance for our future. As a result, I knew I wanted to not only focus on Black religious women who were active in the historic Civil Rights Movement, but also women who were in positions of spiritual leadership in the current Movement for Black Lives. Although I did not know what I would learn, I believed there were continuities among the commitments of Black religious women to social and political change across multiple generations.
I find that there often remains a romanticization for many generations of a previous period’s level of activism that they admire. So when I talk with some people who are generally aware of the Civil Rights Movement but were not actively involved, they speak as if “everyone” was on the same page and moving forward with clarity and alignment on a singular goal during the 1950s and 1960s. Those same people are normally the ones who have offered misplaced critiques during the early days of the Movement for Black Lives because they assumed the people involved (often categorized as young people despite their ages) did not know what they were doing and were not clear about what they were seeking to accomplish. These folks had a limited vision of the reality of the Civil Rights Movement and were looking for a single male leader, causing them to miss the many local leaders who continue to do the activist work rooted in Black Lives Matter today. It was important for me to note that movements are local and national and a single leader with one common goal was not the case historically nor is it in the present moment. I hope that highlighting the places where different generations of Black women activists are in community with each other allows us to see our way forward toward greater freedom through multiple modes and levels of engagement as a productive goal.
Black women who are committed to justice rarely limit their interest or impact to their own generation. They learn from each other and keep doing the work. Current movement leaders have the benefit of scholarship that offers historical reflections on a Civil Rights Movement with peaks and valleys, celebrated leaders and lesser-known strategists, and insights into the nature of long Black struggles in the United States. I have been privileged to sit with younger leaders in the Movement for Black Lives who have studied and are applying the strategies of Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer, Dolores Huerta, and others. These leaders are in relationship with earlier generational movement women such as Ruby Sales and Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons and networked to groups with wisdom and a lasting commitment to justice such as the National Council of Elders. I knew I simply needed to ask good questions, observe their actions, learn from them, and share a potential path forward today through the book.
AP: In Have You Got Good Religion?, you draw on a variety of sources and historical documents to provide an account of the political activism of African American Christian women in the twentieth and twenty first centuries. Could you discuss how you decided which stories to include in the book?
AM: Deciding which stories to include or exclude in the book was a challenge in some ways and an easy decision in others. I conducted nearly fifty interviews with women and have hundreds of hours of materials from which to draw. Some of the women had never shared their stories of activism with family members or friends. As a result, my oral history interviews became a form of therapy for many of them as I created a safe space to recall both the traumas and triumphs of their choices during the civil rights era.
I used grounded theory as a part of my methodology, and once I started to see themes surface through my analysis of the interview transcripts, I chose to include stories of women that gave insight into three main virtue ethics I identified and theorized around from their lived experiences–Freedom Faith, Courageous Resistance, and Theo-Moral Imagination. When I was doing the initial research that led to what you read in Have You Got Good Religion?, I met Isabel Wilkerson at a book signing in Atlanta, and I told her what I was working on. She shared that I could take an approach similar to what she does in The Warmth of Other Suns and allow the stories of a few people to provide an arc of experiences representative of the many. I chose the women whose narratives shape the main aspects of the book because I wanted two representatives from each of the four churches where I conducted research (Ebenezer Baptist and Big Bethel AME in Atlanta, and Abyssinian Baptist and First AME Bethel in Harlem), and I wanted to show a geographical range through the women’s experiences by continuing to expand beyond the southern freedom narrative.
For the contemporary religious leaders, I drew mainly from women located on the East Coast and the Midwest who chose to engage with grassroots activism surrounding the murder of Michael Brown, which marks a moment in our recent history when Black Lives Matter began expanding nationally and internationally as an organizing justice framework.
As I have been lecturing about my book, I occasionally get asked questions from readers and others that bring illustrations to mind from the women that I have not included, but I am able to share verbally. Even though all of the women I interviewed provided consent for the use of their stories, and I wanted to show the women as complex people, not all of the things that were shared were relevant to the experiences connected to the Civil Rights Movement. Some parts of interviews will make their way into my next book project, so you have not heard the last from a few of these women.
AP: In recent years several books have explored the importance of historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) to liberation struggles in the African diaspora. Have You Got Good Religion? takes this discussion in a new direction by focusing on African American women at HBCUs and the role of this institution in fostering political activism. How do you think these institutions have shaped and informed the politics of African American women?
AM: As a graduate of Florida A&M University (FAMU), I know firsthand the importance of HBCUs as incubators of intelligence, refuges for resistance, and curators of creative solutions to our world’s problems. We spoke earlier of the influence of my mother and aunt, who are both graduates of FAMU, on my understanding of the Civil Rights Movement as a platform for courageous young women such as Wihelmina Jakes and Carrie Patterson from FAMU–whose socio-political resistance to the systems of Jim and Jane Crow led to bus boycotts in 1956–and the student leaders of the sit-ins in the early 1960s.
The overwhelming majority of the women in my research who attended college went to HBCUs, which of course was normal for the time period. Although the support for the women’s social and political activism varied greatly among HBCU Presidents–including those at Spelman and Albany State who actively restricted and officially banned participation in marches, protests, etc.–there were often supportive professors such as Howard Zinn and Pearlie Craft Dove, mentors like Ella Baker, and peers such as Diane Nash and Ruby Doris Smith-Robinson, each scholar-activists who inspired political education and involvement. For some of the women I interviewed, their political activism increased as they pushed back on local leaders in Georgia, Alabama, North Carolina, and other places whose decisions impacted their everyday ability to live fully and freely.
Bennett College President Dr. Willa B. Player, who I lift as a moral exemplar of courageous resistance in the book, stands out for her courage to resist local and state political expectations that she would censure her students. Instead she helped the Bennett Belles strategize, provided space for organizing, supported structures for maintaining a balance between the learning taking place the classroom and in the street. Dr. Player argued that students protests, sit-ins, voter registration and education efforts, and more marked practical applications of the liberal arts education that brought politics to life.
AP: In your scholarship, the moral and ethical posture of African American Christian women provides a foundation for political action and notions of social justice and equality. How do you understand the relationship between the Christian culture of African American women and the Black radical tradition and its secular adherents?
AM: Black Christian culture rooted in a radical Jesus who disrupted social systems that oppressed those who were marginalized has many attributes, and at its best, it is liberative and resistant to injustice at its core. This does not mean that all Black Churches are rooted in the moral and ethical posture that would lead to justice and equality through social and political action. As I note in the book, there has never been a time when ALL Black churches were aligned and working toward justice. In reality, the number is small.
I love that you ask about the Christian culture of African American women and the Black radical tradition because it implies what I found in my research–that there are distinctions between the Christian culture of whites and even that of African American men. Black liberation theology was generally articulated by James Cone and others as a Christian response to the Black Power Movement, but this was a gendered and classed response that early Womanist theologians challenged. I asked the women I interviewed to identify scriptures that reminded them of their time in the Civil Rights Movement, and through what they share, you see a different liberative theology as their understanding of God reflects the Divine presence within the struggle, not the deliverance from the struggle.
Theology is not universal but it is contextual, and beyond racialized contexts there are also gendered ones. The women in Have You Got Good Religion? reflect a lived Womanist theology that seeks the survival and wholeness of all people. The women draw from a vision of freedom and justice that God gives them, and they work to make it so. It is my hope that those who read my book will be inspired to do the same.
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