The Social Gospel in Black and White
American Racial Reform, 1885-1912

Softcover, 445 pages, 6-1/8 x 9-1/4, 23 illustrations, notes, bibliography, index
Published Spring/Summer 1998
University of North Carolina Press

From the publisher:
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 sentiment foundered in the mid-1890s, Ralph Luker argues, a new generation of black and white reformers--many of them representatives of American social Christianity--explored a variety of solutions to the problem of racial conflict. Some of them helped to organize the Federal Council of Churches in 1909, while others returned to abolitionist and home missionary strategies in organizing the NAACP in 1910 and the National Urban League in 1911. A half century later, such organizations formed the institutional core of America's civil rights movement. Luker also shows that the black prophets of social Christianity who espoused theological personalism created an influential tradition that eventually produced Martin Luther King Jr.

About the author
Ralph E. Luker, adjunct professor of history at Morehouse College, is author of the Historical Dictionary of the Civil Rights Movement and editor of the memoirs of Mary White Ovington.

Contents
Preface

1. Introduction

Part I. The Decline of Nineteenth-Century Racial Reform
2. Christianizing the South
3. The Redemption of Africa
4. In Search of Civil Equity
5. The Savage End of an Era: Barbarism and Time Unredeemed

Part II. The Racial Mission Renewed
6. Education for Service
7. Urban Mission

Part III. Civil Wrongs, Civil Rights, and Theological Equations
8. A Prophetic Minority at the Nadir
9. A Prophetic Minority from the Nadir to the NAACP
10. Theologies of Race Relations
11. Conclusion

Notes
Bibliographical Essay
Index

Illustrations
Atticus G. Haygood
Mohonk Mountain House
White missionaries with African converts to Christianity
Henry Codman Potter
Henry McNeal Turner
George Washington Cable
Albion W. Tourgee
Ida B. Wells
Francis Greenwood Peabody
Booker T. Washington
Robert C. Ogden, William Howard Taft, Booker T. Washington, and Andrew Carnegie
Reverdy Ransom
Atlanta's First Congregational Church and Henry Hugh Proctor
Boston Guardian cartoon caricaturing Booker T. Washington and Northern allies
W. E. B. Du Bois
Washington Gladden
Josiah Strong
Josiah Royce
Edgar Gardner Murphy
Thomas Dixon, Jr.
Harlan Paul Douglass
Walter Rauschenbusch