As a church dynasty, the Archibald J. Careys (Sr. and Jr.) of Chicago are arguably as significant as the Adam Clayton Powells of New York and the King-Williams clan of Atlanta, but they have attracted far less scholarly attention. This book will go far to remedy that lack, in a treatment that illumines much about African American church life and its connections with politics over a period of more than a century.

Dennis Dickerson is especially interested in the father's and son's use of the public square to benefit their African American constituents. He emphasizes various ideological sources for their do-good efforts: the eminently practical nature of Methodism from John Wesley onward, and the vision instilled by Social Gospel and black liberation theologies (although it was not, as the author states, Walter Rauschenbusch who pioneered the Social Gospel in New England during the 1870s; probably he means Washington Gladden). Still, the Carey's public square labors look quite secular, with only a slight religious and biblical patina distinguishing their rhetoric from that of a Thurgood Marshall. Dickerson asserts that their lives become more meaningful when we pay attention to their deeds as well as their words, in that Social Gospel, Wesleyan, and black liberationist tenets “become intrinsic to their public ministries and defined how they functioned in these roles” (12).

A deeper look into Dickerson's narrative shows that this last assertion is only partially true. It would be a mistake to portray the Careys in too altruistic a light; they also engaged in “shameless self-promotion . . . [and] yearned for position and power even when it harmed their broader efforts to benefit the black population” (13). Their wealth had its privileges: Archibald Carey, Jr.'s friendship with New York Congressman and Baptist pastor Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. at one time featured Carey's suggestion that both men, together with their wives, should “run up to Martha's Vineyard for a while” (72). The world inhabited by the Careys thus would be illumined not only by histories of civil rights movements but also by histories of African American elites such as Lawrence Graham's Our Kind of People: Inside America's Black Upper Class (New York: Harper Collins, 1999)—unfortunately, not in Dickerson's bibliography.

Roughly one third of the book recounts the life of Archibald Carey Sr. (1868–1931), nurtured in the warm bosom of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church in Georgia, was on the leading edge of the Great Migration of African Americans to urban areas of the North, arriving in Chicago in 1898. Carey Sr. was elected a bishop in the AME Church in 1920. A loyal Republican and friend of Chicago Mayor “Big Bill” Thompson, Carey had considerable clout in the Windy City. He was involved in a number of reform and benevolent activities, including arguing for greater participation by women in the leadership of his denomination, and coordinating relief for African American victims of the 1927 Mississippi River flooding. Dickerson also explores some problematic aspects of Carey's career, including sharp tactics aimed at his African American rivals and persistent allegations of corruption from his critics.

Despite never achieving the office of bishop held by his father, the life of Archibald Carey, Jr. (1908–1981) is more fascinating. The younger Carey was an AME minister who held important pastorates at Woodlawn Church and Quinn Chapel in Chicago. Carey was a mentor of Martin Luther King, Jr.; part of King's “I have a Dream speech” was influenced by Carey's 1952 speech at the Republican National Convention, where the latter first explored possible geographical referents for the phrase “from every mountainside, let freedom ring.”

While Carey greatly valued his pastoral work and attempted never to schedule himself away from town on Sundays, his political involvements come in for very extensive scrutiny in this volume. Nurtured in the Republican Party, he developed important friendships with Dwight Eisenhower, J. Edgar Hoover, and Illinois Senator Everett Dirksen, among others. With his prominent support for Eisenhower in 1952, he developed into a national figure, and during the Eisenhower administration, he served as alternate delegate to the United Nations, and later chair of the President's Committee on Government Employment Policy. Carey developed strong arguments as to why African Americans should vote Republican; for example, in the presidential election of 1952, he criticized Adlai Stevenson's selection of segregationist Alabama Senator John J. Sparkman as his running mate, calling that nomination “an insult to the people of my race group” (123). By the end of Eisenhower's second term, “Carey ranked Ike as better on civil rights than any other president since Abraham Lincoln” (145).

However, with the 1964 Republican presidential nomination of Barry Goldwater, a determined opponent of the Civil Rights Act, Carey had a change of heart and of party registration, becoming a Democrat, subsequently winning election as a judge in Cook County as a Democrat. By the mid-1960s, Dickerson writes, Carey's early commitment to civil rights causes had been largely eclipsed by self-promotion and an intense pursuit of public office.

Both for its exposition of black clergy's often stunning prophetic clarity in the public square and for its exploration of considerable ambiguities attendant upon their exercise of political power, this book is well worth the careful perusal of anyone interested in African American religion since emancipation.