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).

Katie Geneva Cannon is president of the Society for the Study of Black Religion. She was the first black woman ordained in the United Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), and she is Annie Scales Rogers Professor of Christian Ethics at Union Theological Seminary and Presbyterian School of Christian Education in Richmond, Va. Her areas of expertise are womanist theology, […]

This Far by Faith is a 2003 six-hour PBS television series that traced the role of religion in the lives of African-Americans. Its website includes background, experts and other resources.

The University of North Carolina’s digital archive, “Documenting the American South,” includes a history on the southern black community and documentation of the past.

Read a brief history and review of scholarly surveys on community outreach by black churches, by John J. DiIulio Jr. at the Manhattan Institute Web site.

Read the three-part essay about African Americans and religion in the nineteenth century written by Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp, associate professor of religious studies and American studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

The Hartford Seminary’s Encyclopedia of Religion and Society posts an article on “African American Religious Experience,” edited by William H. Swatos Jr.