Rosetta Ross Summary

Improved Essays
Ross, Rosetta E. Witnessing and Testifying: Black Women, Religion, and Civil Rights. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003. Print.

Thesis:
Studies of the Civil Rights Movement that have treated religious self-understanding do not examine the role of an African American religious worldview and gendered; particularly Black women’s, interaction with Black religious traditions and institutions and with U.S. social life.

Substantive Questions:
1.) Would the Civils Right Movement been as successful without the assistance of Black religious women?
2.) How significant is the notion of survival and well-being to the constructs of activism?

Brief Summary: The author Rosetta Ross seeks to testify and explore black women’s religious context by looking at the background of several civil rights activist who continue the tradition of activism. Ross discusses the significance behind black women and religion. Elaborating upon the working forces of survival and liberation as the stepping stones to racial uplift and social responsibility. All while considering the moral practices behind black women and how religion impels them to face the gruesome challenges behind ultimate
…show more content…
2.) How significant is the employment of respectability in the meaning of being an activist?
Brief Summary: The author Evelyn Higginbotham examines how crucial the church is in the role of the black women. The church is a powerful institution for social and political change within the black community, and black women has express that through the essential politics of respectability. Higginbotham take the times to show how women are one of the biggest force behind the church, even as tensions rise between male religious leaders. The politics of respectability seek to teach the constructs behind moving forward in creating a different definition for how America view the black woman, and the black community.

Analysis &

Related Documents

  • Improved Essays

    As a category of American religious history, African-American religious life and the history behind it has often forgotten or briefly summarized in most historians’ work. Prior to the 1970’s, most history written on African-American religion was vague, often just trivial paragraphs in textbooks and considered irrelevant to our nation’s religious history. But as time progressed, history was revisited to show African-American’s having a more prominent voice in America’s religious culture. One historian, Ulrich Bonnell Phillips wrote one of the earliest collections of slave history and life, American Negro Slavery. This book, written in 1918, shaped the perception of what slavery was like for most who did not experience the institution, but…

    • 1639 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    Religious Experience of Native Americans The Native American religious experience from before the European presence to the 20th century underwent many transformations throughout its evolution. In the beginning, the Olmec and Mayan hierarchical civilizations believed their kings, who were also their religious leaders, were able to communicate with the Gods and ancestors. This demonstrated how the early Native Americans believed that supernatural forces existed. This belief in the supernatural led to the Native Americans developing a cultural relationship between themselves and nature, with the intent to maintain a harmonic balance between the spiritual and living world (Unit 1, Lecture 1).…

    • 1687 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Exam 1 In this essay I will be referring to the article, The Negro Church in America written by E. Franklin Frazier. I will be comparing the evolution and function of the Black Church in America with Emile Durkheim’s and Marx’s Theories of religion. I will do this by first providing the background of the African slaves that led to their loss of cultural identity. I will also describe both Emile Durkheim’s and Karl Marx’s theories of religion individually.…

    • 1164 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    History of United States is full of ups and downs. So many good things happened that improved the future of of the whole nation, but we cannot forget about the dark side. Wars, gender inequality, and racial discrimination make up the majority of negative aspects. People who are oppressed, abused, and minority look for escapes from their misery. One of those last resorts is religion.…

    • 939 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Author, Bettye Collier - Thomas, in her book, Daughters of Thunder and their Sermons, writes about “the history of African American preaching women and the issues and struggles they confronted in their efforts to function as ministers and to become ordained” (xv). Her writing suggests that we gain a deeper understanding of the history of the Black Church and African American women’s roles in light of its institution itself and powerful theology that propels it. Her study contributes to the purpose of my dissertation topic, because it clearly notes a century of African American women’s sermons, which brings me closer to developing a discourse on how the church portrays Black female characters, in American literature. Harris, Trudier.…

    • 1794 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    Eleanor Roosevelt once stated so cleverly, “A woman is like a tea bag - you can't tell how strong she is until you put her in hot water.” Women are nurturers of the world, yet they are underestimated in their preeminence. Their strength has been depreciated for centuries. Surprisingly, it has been during times where it seems their virtue would count the most-- times when slavery and racism existed in it’s entirety. Angela Y. Davis articulates in her essay, “The Black Woman in the Community of Slaves,” that without women, the end to slavery would have been intangible.…

    • 1262 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    No other event would be more uncomfortable, and that was why this one was perfect. A white, middle-class male attending a feminist African American event based around promoting the disrespectability of African American women towards white male figures in power. As the clock struck six, Dr. Brittney Cooper stepped onto the stage and opened her presentation, entitled Dis-Respectability: Towards A Ratchet Black Feminism. Nearly every other white male in the room seemed to visibly squirm in their seat. However, what followed was not a ninety-minute presentation on why white males need to be disrespected, but an enlightening dialogue about the failed efforts of African Americans to conform to white social constructs.…

    • 1012 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    Immediately to “Black Theology and Black Power”, Cone writes and publishes “A Black Theology of Liberation”. There, he reflects his deep commitment to the black struggle for justice from the perspective of Christian theology, which helps African American to recognize that the gospel of Jesus is not only consistent with their struggle for liberation but has a meaning central to the twentieth century America. “Racism is a disease that perverts human sensitivity and distorts the intellect”. He accuses white theology of being racist and using this as a theological justification of the status quo. Here, Cone admits that his style of doing theology is more influenced by Malcolm X than for…

    • 1698 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Sojouner Truth, “Aren’t I a Woman” which holds the powerful, strong-minded, gave a speech that gives African American a sense of relief that they are well longing for. At the same time, they are presented on the knowledge of how African American women are faced with discrimination and inequality in America. I will discuss Sojouner Truth’s use of personal experiences to educate the emotional response from her response, the repetition in to build her arguments of the inequality amongst African Americans, and her biblical resources to get Christians to really take a closer look on the world we live in today. Sojouner Truth spoke to the Women’s Convention she wanted to establish a connection with her audience that black women are targeted in a way as if they’re not capable to do anything. The idea that men think women are beneath them is very unacceptable.…

    • 1154 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The study of any field should start with the earliest literature on the subject; this, in regards to the history of Christianity in the American South, is Kenneth K. Baily’s Southern White Protestantism in the Twentieth Century. Bailey offers a history of the South, focusing on the ideas of white society from the 1900s to the author’s present time-1964. When a study of any part of southern history takes place, some focus must be given to African American culture. This is especially true when focusing on Christianity, which Bailey fails to do. The black population has molded and influenced the southern culture as much as whites have.…

    • 841 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Isaac Washington Isaac Washington is a junior African-American student at Jefferson Davis High School, a school known for its academic excellence. When Isaac was a freshman, he was among a group of African-American students that was transferred to Jefferson Davis High School due to a court order to desegregate the metropolitan schools. Because of the desegregation of Jefferson Davis High School, Isaac’s pre-dominantly black school was shut and the students were bused long distances and spread out among the district’s white schools. Consequently, Isaac’s classmates have little connection with the school’s past and present; as they cannot participate extra-curricular activities due to the distance from their homes and the need to ride the…

    • 1573 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    What was the movement in 20th century that changed racial tensions in America forever? The Civil Rights Movement was the social mobilization and unification of different social movements across the country whose goals were to ensure the racial equality that every African-American had the right to regardless of race. If it wasn’t for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, American and Global history would’ve certainly been different up to the present as it most likely inspired other types of reformation in different parts of the globe. This paper will discuss the way African-American women contributed to the movement since the 19th century to the end of the 1960’s. However, women were not allowed to have a voice heard in society at the time and were…

    • 951 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    “The Black church has been an important institution in the Black community and a potent source in liberation theology, it has been less supportive to its lesbian members.” (Greene, p. 245) The Black churches are pushing a sense of heterosexuality to Queer African American woman that they will never be able to live to. Queer African American woman are constantly reminded when they come to Church, where they are supposed to find a sense of community, that they must engage in sex with other males to find a place within their own community. There is also a prevalence of male dominance in the Black church that has created the homophobia within the church.…

    • 1125 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    There are many concepts discussed within Dr. Maulana Karenga’s book Introduction to Black Studies, but I will be thoroughly discussing Black Studies as a discipline, Black Liberation Theology, Black Womanist Theology, Religious Thrusts, the wealth and income and its influence on political empowerment, the reversal of ghettoization problem, economic and political empowerment of African Americans, Black on Black crime, Post-Traumatic Slave Syndrome, and Psychopathic Personality (2010). Fundamentally, I will discuss the challenges Black Studies creates for the traditional American education. Black Studies challenges the traditional education in every way. It challenges the fact that all knowledge is based on one particular race—White.…

    • 1721 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Feminism fought for suffrage rights for white women, but never got involved in the civil rights movement to help guarantee black women social equality. So womanism looks out not only for women but also for the rights of women of color, who are sometimes a step behind white woman when it comes to social equality. Alice Walker in her first collection of non-fiction “In Search of our Mother’s Gardens: Womanist prose”, referred primarily to African-American women, but also for women in general. In her own words, she says: “A womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender.”…

    • 738 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays