Catégorie : African-American genealogies
African American theology is often traced back to the late 1960s, to the figure of James Cone, a black Methodist theologian who was greatly influenced by Malcolm X and the Black Power movement. Yet African American pastors and exegetes did not wait for the civil rights movement, or even for Garveyism, to propose a new reading of the Bible that would allow for a religious inversion of the stigma attached to people of color in the United States. In the nineteenth century, African American pastors and preachers, mostly Methodists or Baptists, sometimes Presbyterians, developed a “liberation theology,” first focused on the issue of slavery and its alleged religious underpinnings, and then, after the Emancipation Act of 1864, on the issue of color prejudice and the inferiority of the black race. These early African American counter-theologies had a considerable diffusion in the black communities of the United States and the Caribbean, well beyond the intellectual and theological circles.