The striking cover on Kerry Pimblott's fascinating and meticulously researched monograph depicts the activist John Lewis and two black youths ‘taking the knee’ – a powerful anti-racist gesture familiar to contemporary audiences through recent sporting fixtures and #BLM rallies. Yet this 1963 poster generated by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee – coupled with the slogan ‘Come let us build a new world together’ – has quite a different symbolic register. It depicts a ‘pray-in’, which gathered an intergenerational and cross-class coalition of black power activists and ecumenical Christians to denounce the racist, often brutal, and sometimes deadly segregationist practices within the small river city of Cairo, Illinois. This ‘kneel-in’ is just one example of the interwoven religious and political repertoires – coupled with call-and-response oratory, communal prayer, congregational workshop, gospel choirs and charismatic biblical sermonising – deployed by Cairo black activists to articulate demands and activate protest in the pursuit of civil rights and racial justice. Pimblott's powerful microhistory explores these innovative campaigns, the enabling financial and organisational infrastructures, and the religiously motivated urban ministers who catapulted this declining border town to national attention. Within this wonderfully written book, Pimblott situates Cairo as a key fault-line for the rise of white supremist actors resisting civil rights gains and a fulcrum for the formulation of a religiously-resourced black power movement within which black theology and black churches remained central.

Pimblott skilfully situates her revisionist critique of the often assumed ‘spiritual unmooring’ of civil rights agendas through the transition to separatist (and sometimes violent) black power movements within an impressively researched source base – encompassing archival repositories and printed ephemera, published pamphlets, media reportage, church accounts and participant interviews and correspondence. She demonstrates a masterly command of the civil rights historiography to ground her subtly subversive identification of a ‘sustained and pivotal role played by the black church and African American Christian discourses to movement mobilization in Cairo’ (p. 6) and thereby rupture previous civil rights/black nationalist distinctions and destabilise secularist interpretations. The result is not only a path-breaking contribution to modern religious history by integrating imperative questions about ethnicity and race with other intersectional concerns around belief, gender, class and generation, but also an absorbing and textured urban history charting local struggles across the middle decades of the twentieth century. Surveying the territory traversed from the nineteenth-century foundation of Cairo and its transformation through demographic shifts and widening economic inequalities, through to the pragmatic survivalist strategies that emerged during the period of Nixon's presidency, Pimblott offers a dynamic study of the fear, anxiety and turbulence of the black power years as well as the radical possibilities, creative resistance and unresolved issues underscored by this finely drawn, community organising case study.

Chapters iii and iv are especially impressive for their sophisticated and careful interrogation of grass-roots black theology and the mobilisation of church resources to sustain activist campaigns and coalition building. Within the Cairo United Front (an organisation bringing together diverse congregations, life stages and ideological orientations), Pimblott innovatively diagnoses the development of a distinctive grass-roots theology which contemporaries called ‘soulism’ or ‘soul power’ (p. 139). With Matthew xxv as its guiding manifesto and epithets such as ‘the gun for protection and the bible for direction’ (p. 144), the Revd Charles E. Koen told delegates at the 1970 Congress of African Peoples in Atlanta that ‘united under a banner of redefined, relevant Christianity’, a social gospel could be forged to embrace the ‘over-all struggle’ (p.105). When dialoguing contemporaneously with emerging organisations such as Concerned Clergy, Keon commended their efforts to allow ‘folks now [to] see the real image of Jesus, a walking Jesus, a street Jesus, an activist Christ, calling [us] … to follow him’ (p. 170). For a time, this unstudied form of black liberation theology bridged internal divisions between black Baptists, Presbyterians and Pentecostalists. Moreover, it also appealed more broadly to ecumenical partners within white, middle-class, mainline Episcopalian and Methodist Churches, who gave personnel, church spaces and institutional resources (amounting to over half a million dollars) to subsidise grass-roots organisers, to underwrite campaigns (for example, substandard housing; black microenterprises) and to fund civil rights legal cases.

Alongside these richly suggestive lines which could be fruitfully expanded upon and developed by other scholars of black freedom studies and contemporary religious history, a highlight of this study is the various biographical vignettes of a multi-generational, inclusive network of activists. These inspiring anti-racist advocates give Pimblott's analysis of the movement ‘personality’ and instantiate our understanding of their faith-based witness. The leadership of the former schoolteacher and long-time community organiser, Hattie Kenrick – whose courage and mentorship earned her the moniker ‘Mother of the Struggle’ – is compellingly chronicled and celebrated. Alongside militant clergymen such as the Revd Blaine Ramsey, Jr, and the (non-religious) alliance builders such as NAACP branch president Preston Ewing, we catch intriguing glimpses of other allies and enablers – such as the Catholic priest Gerald Montroy who weathered episcopal censure, and even police and vigilante gunfire, to act in solidarity with Cairo's black working class and commit his ministry and church premises to the cause.

Media commentators of the day puzzled over the reasons why a city of less than 10,000 people should dominate national headlines – unsure as to whether Cairo's acrimonious and increasingly homicidal ‘race relations’ landscape constituted ‘a “bizarre anomaly” or … [an] “ominous portent of the future”’ (p. 219). Irrespective of that adjudication, this localised, finely grained portrait has an unrivalled capacity to illuminate unappreciated theological continuities in the metamorphosis of the civil rights movement. Alongside this important intervention, it also leads the way for emerging research agenda in the US (and elsewhere) in taking seriously the contribution of Christian discourses and church resources to social equality and racial justice initiatives throughout the ‘long 1960s’ and beyond. Those ‘taking the knee’ today might be surprised by its resonances with this theologically inspired, black power pre-history.