In May, Reverend William Barber addressed a crowd gathered in Memphis to honor the fiftieth anniversary of Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King's assassination. “We've got to hold up the banner,” he exhorted, “until every person has health care, we've got to hold it up until every child is lifted in love, we've got to hold it up until every job is a living-wage job, until every person in poverty has guaranteed subsistence.” (Barber, as quoted in Jelani Cobb, “William Barber takes on Race and Poverty in the Age of Trump,” The New Yorker, May 14, 2018.) This was a call not simply for a revival of salvific faith but the revival of the Christian duty to care for the least of these. Over the last few years, Reverend Barber has pressed these demands for a moral reformation of the nation and, in arguably one of the most ambitious and prophetic movements of the last several decades, resurrected King's Poor People's Campaign. But, according to esteemed religious historian Gary Dorrien, it is not simply King's mantle that Barber is carrying into the twenty-first century, it is also the black social gospel.

While the Social Gospel features prominently in the canon of American history, it is usually limited to white theologians—Walter Rauschenbusch and Washington Gladden‚ and white reformers—Jane Addams, Florence Kelley, Lillian Wald, and the like. Yet Dorrien, first in his 2015 work The New Abolition (Yale University Press) and now in Breaking White Supremacy, has broadened the notion of the social gospel to include the significant movements of black Americans to realize faith in action in American life. The black social gospel, Dorrien argues, “combined an emphasis on black dignity and personhood with protest activism for racial justice, a comprehensive social justice agenda, an insistence that authentic Christian faith is incompatible with racial prejudice, an emphasis on the social ethical teaching of Jesus, and an acceptance of modern scholarship and social consciousness” (3). In this way, it is a forgotten part of America's progressive tradition and also a thing unto itself, a tradition “more accomplished and influential than its famous white counterpart” (501). With roots in the church, the black social gospel is decidedly religious, steeped in Christian theology, but also “emphatically public and political.” (x) Breaking White Supremacy picks up the narrative where The New Abolition left off, culminating in the black social gospel's “shimmering heyday,” the civil rights movement, and its most prominent proponent, Martin Luther King Jr. (1).

Historians often note that King was a product of the black church (“In my heart I am fundamentally a Baptist preacher”) and of liberal theology and the doctrine of personalism, which he picked up at Crozer Theological Seminary. Dorrien affirms this interpretation, claiming that King fused these two spiritual streams to create a vibrant and comprehensive theology of protest. But, he notes, King was not the first to do so. Rather, King “stood in a tradition of black social gospel founders and mentors,” those who, like him, ” heard the prophetic gospel in the black church, who appropriated social gospel liberalism, who engaged Gandhi . . . and who called America to stop betraying its vaunted ideals” (22). In fact, Dorrien maintains, King was the “personification” of the black social gospel, the movement he led “incomprehensible” without considering the generation that preceded him. (3) This generation includes Mordecai Johnson, Benjamin Mays, Howard Thurman, George Kelsey, and others who Dorrien calls the “luminaries” of the black social gospel and who Dennis Dickerson has called (in a 2005 article in this publication) a “cadre of black religious intellectuals” (“African American Religious Intellectuals and the Theological Foundations of the Civil Rights Movement, 1930–55,” Church History 74, 2 [June 2005]: 217–235). In their lives and ideas, Dorrien has created a masterful genealogy of a black social gospel that resisted oppression and heresy. From Howard University's Journal of Religious Thought, to the Chicago School, to The Negro's God, to the Fellowship of Reconciliation, Dorrien has traced a through line of the black social gospel. Mining personal papers, theological treatises, and historical works, Dorrien has unearthed intellectual and religious influences that “kindled” the reform movements of Adam Clayton Powell, Pauli Murray, and, of course, Martin King. (17) While much of this has been explored in other works and excellent biographies of many of these reformers exist, Breaking White Supremacy offers an invaluable compilation, one that should inform historians, theologians and activists alike.

Dorrien's retelling, then, of the well-known story of King's education, of the struggles in Montgomery, Albany, and Birmingham, of John Lewis and James Farmer, and the Student Noviolent Coordinating Committee students, takes on new resonance, as deeply rooted the long tradition of the black religious protest. Dorrien does not hide his deep admiration for King and his perspective, claiming he “epitomized the black social gospel at its best and most radical” and is critical of Black Power and James Cone in particular, even as he acknowledges their influence. (441) His inclusion of Pauli Murray, the brilliant activist and first black woman to be ordained an Episcopal priest, stands out, as she “worked at the edges of the entire story,” as so many women did (470). By recounting the familiar story of midcentury protest, Dorrien shows that the black social gospel is enduring but not static.

Breaking White Supremacy is an important work that privileges the black social gospel, meticulously tracing its various expressions through the twentieth century, and examining its impact on the civil rights movement and on liberation theology. In it, Dorrien reminds readers of the significant intellectual, political and theological contributions of black Americans to historical reform movements and revives hope that such movements, like Reverend Barber's, might yet be possible.