Black women made the civil rights movement happen–no surprise here!

Here’s an exciting new book examining the social influence of black Christian women in 20th (and 19th) century America.Like other recent analyses of the black church in America, the author ends her account with on a sober assessment of recent disengagement and a plea for re-engagement.

I was immediately reminded of Nancy F. Cott’s The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in New England, 1780 1835, which shows how women similarly laid the groundwork, through prayer, finances, and organization, for the Second Great Awakening, including the success of revivalist Charles G. Finney.

Bettye Collier-Thomas’ Jesus, Jobs and Justice is a tour de force for the study of women and religion.

It navigates within and beyond the walls of institutional religion to delineate the tremendous contributions of African American women of faith to the larger American project.

Collier-Thomas, professor of history at Temple University, makes the convincing argument that it was, indeed, the amazing networks of organizations that women developed in the 1920s and ’30s that laid the foundation for the success of the civil rights movement.