Monday, October 3, 2022, 11:30 AM – 1 PM EDT
Marla Frederick, Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Religion and Culture, Candler School of Theology
“The Courage to Build: Black Religion and the Development of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs)”
Religion scholars have long framed black religion as a paradigm that sits along a continuum between protest and accommodation. While the paradigm has been challenged as too binary, not giving space for nuance, overlap, and change over time, the fundamental idea that black religion embodies at least in part some element of protest remains. In his canonical book Black Religion and Black Radicalism, for example, Gayraud Wilmore frames black radicalism almost exclusively in terms of faith-inspired slave revolts and the movements for civil rights and black power. Education, strikingly, as protest, as radical, as counter to the established order, rarely shows up. In this presentation, Marla Frederick will reframe our understanding of the building of black educational institutions by black religious organizations (and white religious structures) as radical, counter-cultural, and central to the pursuit of justice sought by black religious leaders. Furthermore, she will contend that the ongoing struggle for their full and equitable funding is part and parcel of the ongoing work of justice we face today.