The nine essays in Between fetters and freedom provide further evidence of the diversity of the African American Baptist experience. Although they will not reshape our understanding of black Baptists in a fundamental way, they add more nuance to the story. Five essays focus on Baptist organisations and identity, and the remainder on the leadership contributions of individuals to the Church or the civil rights movement. Inevitably, there is some variation in originality and analytical depth between contributions, and they are not linked together by overarching interpretive themes, approaches or arguments. Readers are more likely to consult the volume for an essay of particular interest than read it in its entirety.
Sandy Dwayne Martin's opening piece begins in 1850, before African American emancipation from slavery, and examines black Baptist interpretations of southern history in the remainder of the nineteenth century. Black Baptists, he finds, regarded emancipation, the Confederacy's defeat in the Civil War and Reconstruction as evidence of God working through history and a vindication of their faith. Even the white South's successful efforts to overturn Reconstruction state governments and impose sharecropping and disenfranchisement did not shake the ‘vindicated faith’ of black Baptists and other African American Christians (p. 20). They recognised that progress, although incomplete, had occurred. Chattel slavery had ended, and African Americans were able to expand and develop their own religious institutions. Black Baptist clergy interpreted the trials and hardships that African Americans endured in subsequent decades not as God abandoning them but as calling them back to righteousness and to their special role in the world.
While Martin focuses primarily on black distinctiveness, Charles F. Irons's study of North Carolina after emancipation addresses black Baptists who remained in white Churches for some, and in a handful of cases many, years after emancipation when most African Americans swiftly joined newly-formed black Churches. Irons challenges historians who portray ‘freedpeople who failed to join a black-controlled church immediately following the war as deficient, damaged, or unaware of their racial self-interest’ (p. 32). While he concedes that there were sometimes geographical patterns in black withdrawals from white Churches that reflected local conditions, such as the arrival of northern missionaries and Union soldiers, they do not, he maintains, explain why some blacks stayed in the same white-led Churches that other blacks left. Irons explains that ‘The promise of patronage or church property doubtless attracted some black churchgoers, while others sought security or acted on a commitment to Christian unity’ (p. 34). In reaching this conclusion, he relies mainly on the minute books of white-led congregations. While these documents provide information, of varying accuracy, about membership, withdrawals and transfers, they offer little insight into motivation, frequently leading Irons to speculate on a range of possibilities that reveal nothing about their relative significance.
Paul Harvey's contribution also examines diversity among African American Baptists, in particular differences and tensions between black Baptist convention, agency leaders and organisers who emphasised respectability and restraint in worship, and those black ministers and parishioners who were given to a more expressive folk worship style. Different conceptions of appropriate music were often central. However, increasingly from the 1920s gospel music became more widely accepted and popular ministers recorded their sermons for sale.
The remaining essays are divided between organisational and biographical studies. Eric Michael Washington discusses the development of African American Baptist missions to Africa in the nineteenth century. Beginning with Lott Carey, a former slave who went to Liberia in 1821, Washington argues, black Baptist missionaries and agencies were motivated by Ethiopianism, defined here as ‘a belief that God had decreed the redemption of Africa and included in that decree was the enslavement, emancipation, and emigration of persons of African descent in the United States of America’ (p. 86). However, Carey did not advocate or attempt to organise black migration, and Washington pays limited attention to studies of black nationalism that address Ethiopianism.
By contrast, April C. Armstrong examines the relationship between African American and white Baptist women's leaders Nannie Helen Burroughs and Annie Walker Armstrong, who cooperated to foster black female Baptist development in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although sincere in her commitment, A. W. Armstrong was condescending and paternalistic and did not share Burroughs's objections to segregation legislation.
While Burroughs found it politic to retreat from raising racial discrimination in her dealings with white female Baptist leaders, Alan Scot Willis finds that by the 1950s M. C. Allen, editor of the National Baptist Union Review, the paper of the second largest black Baptist denomination, the National Baptist Convention of America, regularly claimed ‘black racial superiority’ and asserted that black ‘spiritual superiority would be the salvation of the nation’ (p. 164). While Willis argues that Allen ‘anticipated … academic Afrocentrism’ (p. 164), a comparison with the Nation of Islam or Albert B. Cleage Jr might have been illuminating.
Unlike Allen, the civil rights movement, which features in three essays, rejected race superiority. Frustration at the hostility to civil rights direct action of the president of the National Baptist Convention, Inc. (NBC), Joseph H. Jackson, helped to fuel the creation of the breakaway Progressive National Baptist Convention in 1961, but Edward R. Crowther's essay reaffirms William D. Booth's argument that those who split from the NBC, the nation's largest black Baptist denomination, were motivated more by long festering discontent with Jackson's lengthy tenure in office.
In line with two decades of civil rights historiography, Courtney Pace Lyons stresses the significance of local female figures in the movement by offering a portrait of Prathia Hall's work in south-west Georgia in the early 1960s as a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Religion infused the work of Hall, the daughter of a Philadelphia Baptist minister, who was later ordained. Lyons's appreciation of Hall permeates the essay. Andrew M. Manis, the biographer of the Birmingham civil rights leader the Revd Fred Shuttlesworth, does not disguise his admiration for his subject as he describes Shuttlesworth's last days and attendance at his funeral in 2011. Full of personal reflections, Manis's essay is, however, an awkward fit for a scholarly collection.
