The Black Church in the Twentieth Century

The Great Migration moved Black Americans out of the rural South in enormous numbers, and the church moved with them: congregations founded in the North and in the cities, and a whole religious culture remade in a generation. The Church of God in Christ, which took its Pentecostal turn in 1907 out of Memphis, rose fast and became one of the century's major bodies. The National Baptist Convention split in 1915. From the 1950s the congregations were the civil-rights movement's infrastructure: Martin Luther King Jr and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, founded in 1957, worked out of them, and much of what survives of that movement's own voice is sermons. At the end of the 1960s James Cone published the founding works of Black theology, in 1969 and 1970, and opened a field in the seminaries that had not existed before them.