Mary R. Sawyer was a professor of religious studies at Iowa State University in Ames. She wrote the entry “National Conference of Black Christians” for the Encyclopedia of African and African-American Religions (Routledge, 2001). She has written about women’s leadership roles in the black church.

Aldon D. Morris is a professor of sociology and African-American studies at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. His classic book The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing for Change (Free Press, 1986) examines black church organization and influence on the civil rights movement.

Clayborne Carson is a Stanford University history professor and founding director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute. He is an expert on the interface between faith and social justice.

Quinton Hosford Dixie advised the makers of the PBS series “This Far by Faith” and, with Juan Williams, co-wrote the book of the same title. He also edited (with Cornel West) The Courage to Hope: From Black Suffering to Human Redemption (Beacon Press, 1999). Dixie teaches in the philosophy department of Indiana University-Purdue University, Fort Wayne. He […]

Vincent Wimbush is a religion professor at Claremont Graduate University. He also directs the Institute for Signifying Scriptures in Claremont, Calif. His three-year “African Americans and the Bible” research project was funded by the Ford Foundation and the Lilly Endowment.

Milton C. Sernett is a history professor in the African-American studies department of Syracuse University. He wrote Bound for the Promised Land: African American Religion and the Great Migration (Duke University Press, 1997) and has co-chaired the American Academy of Religion’s African American Religious History Group. He has retired from teaching.

Rosetta E. Ross is an associate professor of religion and chairs the department of philosophy and religious studies at Spelman College in Atlanta. An elder in the United Methodist Church, she writes and lectures widely about African-American religion and is treasurer of the Society for the Study of Black Religion. She is an expert on women […]

David Chappell is associate professor of history at the University of Arkansas and a historian of the American South, the civil rights movement and race relations in the United States. He is the author of A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow (University of North Carolina, 2004).

Lorraine Blackman, associate professor at the Indiana University School of Social Work, is director of the African American Family Life Education Program, an educational, research and service project that teaches family life skills.