Freethought Day commemorates an Oct. 12, 1692, evidentiary decision by William Phipps, governor of the Colony of Massachusetts, that ended the Salem witch trials. An outdoor observance marking the anniversary is held each year in Sacramento, Calif.

About.com cites a number of polls on Americans’ attitudes toward atheists.

Read a report giving more extensive details about the ARIS 2008 findings regarding “nones,” only a fraction of whom are atheists.

The 2008 American Religious Identification Survey found that about 12 percent of Americans say there is no God or it’s unknowable whether there is. The percentage of respondents who self-identified as atheists or agnostics, however, was much lower. The survey, conducted by researchers at Trinity College’s Program on Public Values, followed previous large-scale religious identification surveys in […]

See a Feb. 17, 2010, report titled “Religion Among the Millennials: Less Religiously Active but Fairly Traditional in Other Ways.” The report by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life says 26 percent of Millennial adults (defined as those born after 1980) have no religious affiliation. But in some other ways, their attitudes about religion resemble […]

Read a May 21, 2010, Gallup story about the decline in religious identity among Americans over time. Twenty-eight percent now say religion is largely out-of-date, the story says.

African American Studies and Research Center at Purdue University focuses on African Americans and their connections to the African Diaspora in the Caribbean and Latin America.

Center for Black Women in Church and Society at the Interdenominational Theological Center seeks to enhance the participation and relationship with African American women in church and society.

Center for the Study of African-American Politics at Oxford provides resources on African American society and culture throughout history. Contact through the website.