A hallmark of American black religion is its distinctive use of the Bible in creating community, resisting oppression, and fomenting social change.

When Angelina Grimké pleads with her brother Henry not to punish a household slave, she does not anticipate her “stony road” ahead as a remarkably effective abolitionist speaker. Leaving behind their illustrious slave-holding family, she and her sister, Sarah, take their northern audiences by storm. Yet the very fact of their speaking in public, as women, doubles the opposition they face and leads them to become among the earliest American voices for women’s rights. As they and their fellow abolitionists experience violent riots and the burning of their lecture hall, they wonder if their efforts have been in vain. Romance and marriage lead them to a less public life, but in the aftermath of Emancipation and the Civil War, a formidable challenge awaits them in the discovery of their unknown nephews. After their father’s death and prior to the war, these promising nephews, children of Henry and his slave mistress, Nancy Weston, are enslaved by their half-brother. Mistreated, abused, and beaten nearly to death, they eventually escape and find their way north, seeking a full education. But will their eventual encounter with their abolitionist aunts redeem the suffering they and their mother experienced at the hands of their southern family?

“Stony the Road presents a bracing alternative to Trump-era white nationalism. . . . In our current politics we recognize African-American history—the spot under our country’s rug where the terrorism and injustices of white supremacy are habitually swept. Stony the Road lifts the rug." —Nell Irvin Painter, New York Times Book Review A profound new rendering of the struggle by African-Americans for equality after the Civil War and the violent counter-revolution that resubjugated them, by the bestselling author of The Black Church. The abolition of slavery in the aftermath of the Civil War is a familiar story, as is the civil rights revolution that transformed the nation after World War II. But the century in between remains a mystery: if emancipation sparked "a new birth of freedom" in Lincoln's America, why was it necessary to march in Martin Luther King, Jr.'s America? In this new book, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., one of our leading chroniclers of the African-American experience, seeks to answer that question in a history that moves from the Reconstruction Era to the "nadir" of the African-American experience under Jim Crow, through to World War I and the Harlem Renaissance. Through his close reading of the visual culture of this tragic era, Gates reveals the many faces of Jim Crow and how, together, they reinforced a stark color line between white and black Americans. Bringing a lifetime of wisdom to bear as a scholar, filmmaker, and public intellectual, Gates uncovers the roots of structural racism in our own time, while showing how African Americans after slavery combatted it by articulating a vision of a "New Negro" to force the nation to recognize their humanity and unique contributions to America as it hurtled toward the modern age. The story Gates tells begins with great hope, with the Emancipation Proclamation, Union victory, and the liberation of nearly 4 million enslaved African-Americans. Until 1877, the federal government, goaded by the activism of Frederick Douglass and many others, tried at various turns to sustain their new rights. But the terror unleashed by white paramilitary groups in the former Confederacy, combined with deteriorating economic conditions and a loss of Northern will, restored "home rule" to the South. The retreat from Reconstruction was followed by one of the most violent periods in our history, with thousands of black people murdered or lynched and many more afflicted by the degrading impositions of Jim Crow segregation. An essential tour through one of America's fundamental historical tragedies, Stony the Road is also a story of heroic resistance, as figures such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells fought to create a counter-narrative, and culture, inside the lion's mouth. As sobering as this tale is, it also has within it the inspiration that comes with encountering the hopes our ancestors advanced against the longest odds.

Bitter the Chastening Rod follows in the footsteps of the first collection of African American biblical interpretation, Stony the Road We Trod (1991). Nineteen Africana biblical scholars contribute cutting-edge essays reading Jesus, criminalization, the enslaved, and whitened interpretations of the enslaved. They present pedagogical strategies for teaching, hermeneutics, and bible translation that center Black Lives Matter and black culture. Biblical narratives, news media, and personal stories intertwine in critical discussions of black rage, protest, anti-blackness, and mothering in the context of black precarity.

True to Our Native Land is a pioneering commentary of the New Testament that sets biblical interpretation firmly in the context of African American experience and concern. The second edition includes updated commentaries and essays.

The Talking Book casts the Bible as the central character in a vivid portrait of black America, tracing the origins of African-American culture from slavery’s secluded forest prayer meetings to the bright lights and bold style of today’s hip-hop artists. The Bible has profoundly influenced African Americans throughout history. From a variety of perspectives this wide-ranging book is the first to explore the Bible’s role in the triumph of the black experience. Using the Bible as a foundation, African Americans shared religious beliefs, created their own music, and shaped the ultimate key to their freedom—literacy. Allen Callahan highlights the intersection of biblical images with African-American music, politics, religion, art, and literature. The author tells a moving story of a biblically informed African-American culture, identifying four major biblical images—Exile, Exodus, Ethiopia, and Emmanuel. He brings these themes to life in a unique African-American history that grows from the harsh experience of slavery into a rich culture that endures as one of the most important forces of twenty-first-century America.

Michael Brown offers an overview of the history of the development of African American and Afrocentric biblical interpretation. He then discusses how such scholarship began as an attempt to correct the biases African Americans perceived to be manifest in European and Euro-American biblical scholarship. This corrective, he says, quickly developed a life of its own, and Afrocentric biblical interpretation developed its own interpretive voice and style. Brown also examines Afrocentrism and the "blackening of the Bible," offering a critique of the color politics of Afrocentric criticism. He examines the evolution of womanism as a method of biblical interpretation, and explores and criticizes the ways that ideological and postcolonial criticism has contributed to Afrocentric biblical criticism. Finally, he presents the challenges he thinks confront the practice of such criticism, and he advances a new paradigm for the project that will put it in conversation with a wider audience of biblical scholars, classicists, historians, and theologians. Michael Joseph Brown is Assistant Professor of New Testament and Christian Origins, Candler School of theology, Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. He is the author of What They Don't Tell You: A Survivor's Guide to Academic Biblical Studies and The Lord's Prayer through North African Eyes: A Window into Early Christianity.