In a major revision of accepted wisdom, this book, originally published by UNC Press in 1991, demonstrates that American social Christianity played an important role in racial reform during the period between Emancipation and the civil rights movement.As organizations created by the heirs of antislavery sentimentfoundered in the mid-1890s, Ralph Luker argues, a new generation of black and white reformers — many of them representatives of American social Christianity — explore...

The fiftieth anniversary of many major milestones in what is commonly called the African-American Civil Rights Movement was celebrated in 2013. Fifty years removed from the Birmingham campaign, the assassination of Medgar Evers, and the March on Washington and it is clear that the sacrifices borne by those generations in that decade were not in vain. Monuments, museums, and exhibitions across the world honor the men and women of the Movement and testify to their immeasurable role in redefi...

Martin Luther King, Jr.'s ideas—his call for racial equality, his faith in the ultimate triumph of justice, his insistence on the power of nonviolence to bring about a major transformation of American society—are as vital and timely as ever. The wealth of his writings, both published and unpublished, are now preserved in this authoritative, chronologically arranged, multi-volume edition.Volume Two begins with King's doctoral work at Boston University and ends with his firs...