African American Jeremiad Rev

David Howard-Pitney is Professor of History at De Anza College. He has worked at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers Project at Stanford University, and during 2000-2002 was a Commissioned Scholar for the Public Influences of African-American Churches Project of Morehouse College. His publications include Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and the Civil Rights Struggle of the 1950s and '60s.

"David Howard-Pitney contributes finely to understanding the cultural history of African American protest and accommodation in his African American Jeremiad….Pitney's work as a cultural historian is supremely evident in this volume. Among the overarching arguments he persuasively demonstrates (in departure from Wilson Moses) is that the African American jeremiad has not undergone a declension toward extinction but has, rather, periodically experienced a waning and resurgence, the latter of which characterizes its present course. Jesse Jackson and Alan Keyes, he explains, are key indicators of such. His discussion is detailed and analytically astute. In addition, he adds tremendous knowledge to the intellectual mapping of how the jeremiad has intersected with the social reality of race in American religious history. Readers from undergraduate students to advanced scholars will learn immensely from this work." -H-Net

• Preface and AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Civil Religion and the Anglo- and African American Jeremiads1. Frederick Douglass's Antebellum Jeremiad against Slavery and Racism2. The Brief Life of Douglass's "New Nation": From Emancipation-Reconstruction to Returning Declension, 1861-18953. The Jeremiad in the Age of Booker T.Washington: Washington versus Ida B.Wells, 1895-19154. Great Expectations:W. E. B. Du Bois's American Jeremiad in the Progressive Era5. Mary McLeod Bethune andW. E. B. Du Bois: Rising andWaning Hopes for America at Midcentury6. Martin Luther King, Jr., and America's Promise in the Second Reconstruction, 1955-19657. Malcolm X: Jeremiah to Blacks, Damner ofWhites-to the End?8. King's Radical Jeremiad, 1965-1968: America as the "Sick Society"Conclusion: The Enduring Black JeremiadNotesIndex