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In the Reconstruction period, Black religion and politics intersected and fostered ideas about black interdependent independence in predominantly white churches. We see this form of black religious politics exemplified in the experiences and ideas of the Reverend George Freeman Bragg Jr., a Black Episcopal priest who was educated at the Branch Theological School (BTS) in Petersburg, Virginia. It was upon the foundation of Bragg's experiences at the BTS, established as a racially segregated alternative to the Protestant Episcopal Theological Seminary (in Alexandria, Virginia), and in the Readjuster Movement (a biracial political coalition that controlled Virginia's legislature from 1879–1885), that he wrote histories of Black people in the Episcopal Church, histories that extolled black leadership, the need for (white) economic support for but also autonomous action of black churches and black leaders, and the efficacy of the Episcopal Church as a political training ground for black church members. Bragg's case both demonstrates how broadening the definitions of black religion reconfigures studies of religion, reconstruction, and Blackness, and expands our notions of Black political critique as deriving from more than the familiar binaries of protest and accommodation.

Historians of religion and Reconstruction, particularly those who have centered African Americans in the post-emancipation South, have sharpened and enriched interpretations of the Reconstruction period by demonstrating churches centrality to the larger struggles of the period. Since these scholars have focused largely on religious institutions in the aftermath of the end of slavery, they have necessarily examined the issues of racism, interracial interactions, and racial identity formation. Scholarship on religion and race after emancipation has centered religious institutions in ways that have allowed the important theme of racial power to come to the forefront. [...]of Days (2016), Matthew Harper explores how Black Protestant Christians in North Carolina used their eschatological thoughts about the end times to interpret their political landscape and opportunities after emancipation.4 While the book focuses primarily on ideas, its key intervention lies in carefully examining biblical interpretation as a source of political inspiration, thereby bringing greater specificity to how Black religion influenced post-emancipation politics. [...]given that these organizations and opportunities long predated Reconstruction, the skills and political participation practices freedpeople demonstrated were longstanding. [...]these more recent examinations of religious spaces as political grounds build on earlier works that centered denominational missionary organizations' efforts to help freedpeople after emancipation.

This dissertation chronicles how black churches and religious institutions influenced freed people's strategies for political engagement after emancipation in Virginia. The study delves deeper than the depiction of churches and associations as political training grounds or vehicles for social cohesion by offering a more nuanced view of how the conventions, churches, schools and seminaries, shaped ideas about voting, interracial cooperation, gender roles and patronage politics. The study uses church and convention minutes, school records, personal papers, newspapers and government documents to picture the political, social and religious transformations that anchor this study. Beginning with the formation of regional and state church associations and culminating with the Readjuster movement, a political movement that effected Virginia's Reconstruction between 1879 and 1883, the study argues that black religious institutions were both powerful and vulnerable institutions. First advancing black political participation and faciliating interracial cooperation, black religious institutions later undermined these developments and in the process shaped specific gender roles for black men and women.

Denominational development of the Charleston Baptist Association (1752), the national Triennial Convention (1814), and the South Carolina Baptist State Association (1821) provides a backbone to the narrative. While South Carolina Baptists crafted a vision of Christian slavery that upheld obligations of paternalism and obedience under the umbrella of white supremacy, enslaved people expressed other ideas about Christianity, community, and social order. [...]Forging a Christian Order: South Carolina Baptists, Race, and Slavery, 1696-1860 pushes scholarship toward exploring the evolution of Christian slavery in terms of not just ideology but also the interpersonal interactions that undergirded it.

Building on the now outof-print archival and interpretive work of Howard Holman Bell, Philip S. Foner, and George E. Walker, as well as the many studies that have drawn on the antebellum and postbellum convention minutes, this volume advances arguments about nineteenth-century African American politics and the Colored Conventions themselves. In sum, The Colored Conventions Movement is a worthy addition to recent scholarship-such books as Martha S. Jones's Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (2018) and Kate Masur's Until Justice Be Done: America's First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction (2021)-that centers the roles that Black people played in pushing the United States to actualize its founding principles, by focusing on how they organized among and for themselves. Nicole Myers Turner NICOLE MYERS TURNER, assistant professor of religious studies at Yale University, is the author of Soul Liberty: The Evolution of Black Religious Politics in Postemancipation Virginia (University of North Carolina Press, 2020).