Sublime

Most African Americans have had at least two life-altering experiences that are burned into their memory—the moment they realized they were black and the moment they realized that was a problem.

In the context of the Negro problem neither whites nor blacks, for excellent reasons of their own, have the faintest desire to look back; but I think that the past is all that makes the present coherent, and further, that the past will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly.

The third fact is that Jesus was a member of a minority group in the midst of a larger dominant and controlling group. In 63 B.C.…

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Black slaves rejected biblical traditions which whites used to justify slavery—such as the so-called curse of Ham (Gen. 9:24–27), the story of Cain (Gen. 4:1–16), and the sayings that admonished slaves to be obedient to their earthly masters (Eph. 6:5–8, Col. 3:22–25, I Pet. 18–25, I Tim. 6:1–2, Titus 2:9–10, and Philem). They turned instead to the

A very simple illustration is the operation of Jim Crow travel in trains in the southern part of the United States. On such a train the porter, when he is not in line of duty, may ride only in the Jim Crow coach—for the train porter is a Negro. But the members of the train crew who are not Negroes—the conductor, brakeman, baggageman—when they are n

This will be a theme of my book: modern theologies of the New Testament were failures from a Christian point of view precisely because what they ended up offering was bad history, bad theology, or both.

of the land. Here theologians recognize the passionate character of theological language. It is a language of celebration and joy that the freedom promised is already present in the community's struggle for liberation.

This is the position of the disinherited in every age. What must be the attitude toward the rulers, the controllers of political,

the Kerner Commission, which found no political conspiracy behind the urban riots of 1967, and traced them primarily to racial deprivation. “What white Americans have never fully understood—but what the Negro can never forget—is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto,” declared the report. “White institutions created it, white instit