Some years ago when I was delving into archives doing research for my book, The Burden of Black Religion (which is mistakenly called the The Problem of Black Religion in a footnote in Laurie Maffly-Kipp's book), I came across a number of narrative histories of black achievements, unusual chronologies of eminent black leaders, and a host of other forms of black literature that did not quite fit into the kind of story that I was exploring. It seems that Maffly-Kipp has not only identified the genre and audience of this kind of writing, but has also brought it out of obscurity and identified its historical significance. This monograph is a rich and unusual kind of narrative, but precisely that which is needed at this moment in our understanding of African American history. Maffly-Kipp identifies these collective narratives as “shards of memory” gathered up to restore meaning and purpose to the lives of black Americans (3). She argues that these narratives were rooted in a worldview that “was at once thoroughly Protestant and thoroughly African American” (283).

The book examines the communal narratives of African Americans from the late eighteenth century to the 1920s. Though a narrative and chronological approach frames the book, Maffly-Kipp seems particularly interested in explicating a number of themes that preoccupied these authors. Some of these included attempts by black narrators to detect and record the hand of providence in history, especially as it revealed and made sense of the meaning of black suffering from slavery to the violence of Jim Crow segregation; the actual and imagined relationship between blacks in the United States to the broader African diaspora, with a special focus on ancient African history and the significance of the Haitian Revolution of the nineteenth century and its aftermath; the varying ways that African American male Protestants sought to craft “race histories” to counter racist white images of blacks and to create a collective black identity, a “Negro race”; and the partial silencing of black female voices in these “race histories.” One of the more important contributions of Maffly-Kipp's book is its attention to the development and influence of print culture among northern African Americans. This rich analysis of cultural production and the dissemination of prescriptive reading habits for blacks is especially illuminating in its treatment of the ways in which the Bible and Protestant traditions shaped African American reinterpretations and understandings of world and American history.

Maffly-Kipp reminds us that “African Americans did not always conceive of race as the most salient feature of their understanding” (10). She demonstrates this crucial point especially in her description (in her second chapter) of the fierce debates black leaders engaged in over divisions within the Christian fold. With so many persisting contemporary casual references to “the black church,” this book lucidly and compellingly shows how a “black Christianity,” that is, the emergence of separate racial churches, “became a problem to be explained rather than a freedom to be celebrated” (73). Based on my research, criticisms of black churches in the 1920s and 1930s, usually by, though not limited to, secular leaders outside the churches and the proliferation of black churches and the participation of blacks in every variety of Protestant denomination or sect (and growth among black Catholics) led to increasingly loud and dour lamentations over this perceived threat to the unity and potential cooperative work of “the race.” Thus it is quite remarkable that the figures in Maffly-Kipp's narrative celebrated their distinctive version (that is, their particular denomination and its history) of the Protestant faith and thereby in many instances “Christianity community had a significance that extended beyond the needs of the individual or the racial collective to an awareness of a shared spiritual past and future” (68–69). These collective denominational narratives, while enfolding blacks within a broader Christian narrative beyond their particular denominational loyalties, revealed the fractures and divisions within black communities. In a necessary reminder to those who work in the field of African American religious history, Maffly-Kipp notes: “Racial oppression was a constant in the lives of black church members and authors, and much of the time white society really was Pharaoh or Rome. But such politicized readings can be misleading, for they ignore both the persistence of white participation in black church life and the intraracial conflict among African-American Protestants over deep-seated organizational differences” (78).

Although I am in substantial agreement with most of the claims that Maffly-Kipp makes in her work and I am convinced by her argument that W. E. B. Du Bois and other African American leaders working in fields such as history were very much indebted to the African American Christian tradition that she explores, I am more inclined to think that the specific kind of project that Du Bois (and a few other leaders) undertook, particularly with regard to their conceptualization of the “Negro Church,” represented a new development and a significant departure from the communal narratives that Maffly-Kipp so astutely investigates. Her very narrative suggests that though there was a degree of omission and silencing in these newer works, especially to the extent that they neglected discussions of Protestant religion, they had different objectives in view. As she rightly notes, many of these newer historical studies “increasingly marginalized religious experience and assertions of divine causality,” which is not surprising given their training in the professional disciplines of history and sociology (278). But I am not sure that Maffly-Kipp's argument that their (unacknowledged) indebtedness to these older narratives adequately explains what they were seeking to advance in their new social context, although she does make the important observation that these leaders saw value in urban churches as agents of uplift, philanthropy, and voluntarism—which, it seems to me, in part explains how churches now figured and were explained in these newer narratives.

Yet, there is very little to quibble with in a book of this kind. It is a work of recovery, introducing us to a forgotten “race literature” that was deeply formative in shaping and forming African Americans self- and group perceptions. Fundamentally, these forms of history, these race narratives, were about the present and the future, and “were designed to liberate [black Americans] from the present time and place by connecting them with the past and future and with sites outside their imperfect society” (281). While Maffly-Kipp makes a powerful case for how these race histories were intended to function by their narrators, one wonders if any literature of racial vindication that must constantly affirm and reaffirm a venerable history and the basic humanity of blacks and that had repeatedly to counter a mass of racist images could ever effectively carry such a heavy burden of enabling a people to “rise above [themselves] and this world to an unmoving vantage point” (281).