In 1964, Muhammad Ali said of his decision to join the Nation of Islam: “I know where I’m going and I know the truth and I don’t have to be what you want me to be. I’m free to be what I want to be.”

This sentiment, the brash assertion of individual freedom, informs and empowers each of the four personalities profiled in this book. Randal Maurice Jelks shows that to understand the Black American experience beyond the larger narratives of enslavement, emancipation, and Black Lives Matter, we need to hear the individual stories. Drawing on his own experiences growing up as a religious African American, he shows that the inner history of Black Americans in the 20th century is a story worthy of telling.

This book explores the faith stories of four African Americans: Ethel Waters, Mary Lou Williams, Eldridge Cleaver, and Muhammad Ali. It examines their autobiographical writings, interviews, speeches, letters, and memorable performances to understand how each of these figures used religious faith publicly to reconcile deep personal struggles, voice their concerns for human dignity, and reinvent their public image. For them, liberation was not simply defined by material or legal wellbeing, but by a spiritual search for community and personal wholeness.

In this first full-length biography of Benjamin Mays (1894-1984), Randal Maurice Jelks chronicles the life of the man Martin Luther King Jr. called his “spiritual and intellectual father.” Dean of the Howard University School of Religion, president of Morehouse College, and mentor to influential black leaders, Mays had a profound impact on the education of the leadership of the black church and of a generation of activists, policymakers, and educators. Jelks argues that Mays’s ability to connect the message of Christianity with the responsibility to challenge injustice prepared the black church for its pivotal role in the civil rights movement.

From Mays’s humble origins in Epworth, South Carolina, through his doctoral education, his work with institutions such as the National Urban League, the NAACP, and the national YMCA movement, and his significant career in academia, Jelks creates a rich portrait of the man, the teacher, and the scholar. Benjamin Elijah Mays, Schoolmaster of the Movement is a powerful portrayal of one man’s faith, thought, and mentorship in bringing American apartheid to an end.

African Americans in the Furniture City is unique not only in terms of its subject, but also for its framing of the African American struggle for survival, civil rights, and community inside a discussion of the larger white community. Examining the African-American community of Grand Rapids, Michigan between 1850 and 1954, Randal Maurice Jelks uncovers the ways in which its members faced urbanization, responded to structural racism, developed in terms of occupations, and shaped their communal identities.

Focusing on the intersection of African Americans’ nineteenth-century cultural values and the changing social and political conditions in the first half of the twentieth century, Jelks pays particularly close attention to the religious community’s influence during their struggle toward a respectable social identity and fair treatment under the law. He explores how these competing values defined the community’s politics as it struggled to expand its freedoms and change its status as a subjugated racial minority.

Before the United States Supreme Court ruled against segregation in public schools, and before Rosa Parks refused to surrender her bus seat in Montgomery, Alabama, Jackie Robinson walked onto the diamond on April 15, 1947, as first baseman for the Brooklyn Dodgers, making history as the first African American to integrate Major League Baseball in the twentieth century. Today a national icon, Robinson was a complicated man who navigated an even more complicated world that both celebrated and despised him.

Many are familiar with Robinson as a baseball hero. Few, however, know of the inner turmoil that came with his historic status. Featuring piercing essays from a range of distinguished sportswriters, cultural critics, and scholars, this book explores Robinson’s perspectives and legacies on civil rights, sports, faith, youth, and nonviolence, while providing rare glimpses into the struggles and strength of one of the nation’s most athletically gifted and politically significant citizens. Featuring a foreword by celebrated directors and producers Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, and David McMahon, this volume recasts Jackie Robinson’s legacy and establishes how he set a precedent for future civil rights activism, from Black Lives Matter to Colin Kaepernick.

Three rich and engaging histories have stepped into the literary landscape and ask us to consider how class status webbed by gender, racism, and urbanization has proven to be such an ongoing struggle as seen through the lenses of Black America. Tanisha C. Ford’s Our Secret Society: Mollie Moon and the Glamour, Money, and Power Behind The Civil Rights Movement, Blair LM Kelley’s Black Folk: The Roots of the Working Class, and Victor Luckerson’s Built from the Fire: The Epic Story of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, America’s Black Wall Street: One Hundred Years in the Neighborhood That Refused to Be Erased ask us to consider what class means in describing the past and the present.

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ON MY MATERNAL grandmother’s mantel once sat photographs of the veterans in our family—her brother, my great-uncle, in his World War I doughboy uniform; one of my maternal uncles, a World War II veteran; and my mother, who joined the “desegregated” Women’s Army Corps (WAC) in 1954. At my paternal great-grandmother’s home, there was the photo of my father, who served in the “Forgotten War,” the Korean War, the precedent for Vietnam. And later came the photos of my older first cousins, who were Vietnam veterans.

This sort of display was not unusual. All throughout my neighborhood, there were such shrines to love of the “fatherland,” which is the etymology of patriotism. Black, Brown, and Red folk exuded great pride that their fathers, daughters, mothers, and sons had served their country.

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The shape of the world does not permit us the luxury of an anemic democracy,” Martin Luther King, Jr. once stated. Nonviolence, he understood, has never been about the absence of force. It has always been about getting to the negotiating table without massive death and destruction as we see around the globe today. To build a stronger democratic coalition among the world’s people, we must all be equally outraged by the horror of Russian imperialism in Ukraine while recognizing the racism that persons of African descent have faced while attempting to escape the perils of war. While looking abroad, we must also look at home at the violence exercised by sick young men filled with white supremacist ideology. Democratic struggles are never about one kind of innocent victim, one kind of refugee, or one archetypical portrayal of public worthiness. A robust democratic understanding must link various struggles around the globe.

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AFRICA IS THE second largest continent in the world, yet often ignored but for crisis and disease. European cartographers shrank the physical size of the continent on their maps; the residents were interesting mainly because of their extractive value as labor. Howard French’s latest book, Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War, says there have always been histories of Africa, just ignored. I could not agree more.

In my hometown of New Orleans, Africa’s presence went largely unexplained. There was a gathering site named Congo Square, a community within Orleans Parish known as Algiers, and the Louisiana state penitentiary named Angola. West African words like banjo and gumbo were interspersed in everyday English. New Orleans is still one of the most explicitly African cities in North America, present in Louis Armstrong’s face, Mahalia Jackson’s timbre, the percussive piano of Fat Domino, the vaudevillian pageantry of the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club parade, the ceremonial spirit possession in holiness churches, the ritual of vodun, and the Second Line Funeral Parades.

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IN THE FALL OF 1970, when I entered high school in Chicago, I was introduced to Margaret Walker’s poetry through an anthology, Abraham Chapman’s edited collection Black Voices: An Anthology of Afro-American Literature. The volume included essays, novel chapters, poetry, and short stories of a considerable pantheon — Baldwin, Brooks, Du Bois, Evans, Hayden, Hughes, Petry, Walker, and so many more. A scholar of Jewish descent had edited what seemed to us a revolutionary volume as handy as Muhammad Speaks or the Black Panther Black Community News Service.

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Long before the Civil War, black abolitionists shared the consensus that violence would be necessary to end slavery. Unlike their white peers, their arguments were about when and how to use political violence, not if.

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Minna Salami’s Sensuous Knowledge: A Black Feminist Approach for Everyone is about gnosis, the Greek word for knowledge. The essence of this well-crafted, highly engaging, and readable text is that African women are the persons that should be centered as foundational to where societies form knowledge. This is especially true if societies aspire to be just and humane. Salami is correct.

The data on women throughout the African continent is shockingly disparate. Women throughout the continent face taxing conditions to say the least. Women throughout the continent overall are statistically at the bottom of all economic indices. How economic data are derived is also indicative overall of how little the status of women is valued as essential to the labor force and the agrarian economies that sustain the various regions on the continent. So, from the outset, let me say Salami is right in her determination to change how knowledge is assessed as she asks who, what and how we filter knowledge that leaves African women out of moral considerations or social recognition.

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The popular narrative regarding the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. is often reduced to a simplistic nonviolent morality play of bad white Southerners versus noble Black ones. But King and his compatriots were far more radical than that. They saw a greater democratic struggle, with Black Americans at the vanguard, well beyond our borders. They aligned with independence movements in Africa, Asia, South America and the Caribbean.

King’s global perspective is seldom mentioned when we honor him during this national holiday. Principally, he viewed his fight and struggles abroad as demands to expand democracy: the right to govern oneself, the right of a people to choose who they’re governed by and how they might participate in democracy and the right to an economy that sustains people.

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IN 1970, I ATTENDED summer school at Carter G. Woodson Junior High on Third Street across from the Magnolia Projects in the city of New Orleans. Architecturally, Woodson was a modernist structure, dedicated on October 11, 1954, six months after the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Between 1940 and 1960, high schools and junior highs were built with the intent of keeping the regime of separate but equal intact.

When Haiti makes the headlines of The New York Times, it is always in “crisis.” The recent story written by Kirk Simple is headlined “‘There is No Hope’: Crisis Pushes Haiti to Brink of Collapse.”However, the article fails to decipher just who and what is behind the crisis. Instead, Haiti’s citizens come across as simply some “ungovernable” and “irrational” Black people, just like those in many other majority Black, particularly African, countries are frequently depicted. This is a problem more broadly in American news outlets in their representations of Black-led nations like Haiti, and as media watchdogs point out, is not a new phenomenon.

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