Through the Storm, Through the Night

Paul Harvey is professor of history at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. He is the author of Redeeming the South: Religious Cultures and Racial Identities Among Southern Baptists, 1865–1925 and Freedom's Coming: Religious Culture and the Shaping of the South from the Civil War through the Civil Rights Era.

• Introduction: Themes in African American Religious HistoryChapter 1: Middle Passage for the Gods: African and African American Religions from the Middle Passage to the Great AwakeningChapter 2: The Birth of Afro-Christianity in the Slave Quarters and the Urban North, 1740–1831Chapter 3: Through the Night: African American Religion in the Antebellum EraChapter 4: Day of Jubilee: Black Churches from Emancipation to the Era of Jim CrowChapter 5: Jesus on the Mainline: Black Christianity from the Great Migration through World War IIChapter 6: Freedom's Main Line: Black Christianity, Civil Rights, and Religious PluralismEpilogue: Righteous Anger and Visionary Dreams: Contemporary Black Politics, Religion, and CultureDocumentsBibliographic Essay

Books abound on the African American religious experience in the US, but Harvey's work is a welcome addition and succinct summary of its 400-year history. Typically in such short monographs, detail is sacrificed for brevity, but Harvey (history, Univ. of Colorado, Colorado Springs) packs great substance through insightful biographies and aptly summarized historical events. He argues against any uniform African American church or religious experience, as African Americans experienced varied contacts with Christianity and often mixed traditional African spiritualism and animistic beliefs. Unquestionably, religious beliefs infused the African American community with hope as they struggled through slavery, Jim Crow legislation, segregation, race-oriented violence, and the civil rights movement. Harvey concludes that though the church is still relevant and Christian denominations are still predominant in the African American community, 21st-century immigrants continue to challenge this narrative, as the Orisha traditions of West and Central Africans, Cuban Santería, Haitian Catholicism and Voodoo, Ethiopian Eastern Orthodoxy, and Islamic influences further heighten diversity. The author notes that clannish and local community traditions among these immigrants overshadow any presumed unity based on skin color. In summary, Harvey creates a broad panoramic of the African American religious experience and challenges future scholars to increase scholarly attention to this field. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries.