Although scholars have recently sought to rectify the marginalization of Black Catholics in American religious studies, this article extends this effort into the nineteenth century, when northern dioceses first established parishes for “colored Catholics.” It argues that the establishment of these parishes, before both the Great Migration and the height of so-called ethnic parishes in the early twentieth century, reveals Black Catholics’ engagement in shaping the emerging institutionalization of American Catholicism, in an era long defined in scholarship by European immigration. It examines St. Peter Claver, Philadelphia’s first Black parish, and its role as host to the 1892 Colored Catholic Congress. Participants advocated for Black Catholic parishes while weighing the social and theological ambiguities of institutionalized racial separation as a pathway toward greater inclusion in the “universal” church. This article reorients the familiar story of nineteenth-century parish building through the lens of Black Catholicism to reveal its deeply debated racial nuances.

Between 1880 and 1920, African Americans and Armenians became people on the run, the targets of racial persecution by state-sanctioned merchants of terror. Black intellectual-activists saw in the massacre of Armenians powerful parallels with the escalation of lynching and other forms of domestic terrorism in the United States. This article examines how African Americans galvanized to the defense of embattled Armenians, warning that the “Armenian crisis” served as a clarion call that should dissuade White Americans from embracing lynching with greater zeal. Black intellectuals accused that so long as Americans lynched their own citizens with impunity, the United States stood no chance of being a moral beacon in foreign affairs. More, they insisted that Americans’ commitment to lynching placed the United States on the same trajectory as despotic states likes Germany, Imperial Russia, and Ottoman Turkey. Thus, in marshaling to save Armenians, African Americans rallied to save themselves.

In late October 1907, members of an African American religious order called the Council of God killed a White police officer outside their house of worship in New Orleans. This article recovers and analyzes the radical theology of the Council of God, situating it in the vibrant intellectual world of turn-of-the-century Black spirituality. The Council of God’s belief system was structured around resistance to white supremacy in general and resistance to police violence in particular. If the violence of Jim Crow policing shaped the Council of God’s theology, however, the reverse was equally true, as the New Orleans Police Department consistently used the specter of Black religious radicalism to call for increased funding and popular support. This article probes the relationship between religion, race, violence, and policing, offering new perspectives on the police power, Black religion, and African American armed self-defense in the era of Jim Crow.

Throughout the mid-1980s, the Nation of Islam—via its newspaper the Final Call—condemned American expansion of empire in the circum-Caribbean. Domestically, articles focused on President Ronald Reagan’s War on Drugs, characterizing it as a farce justifying the imprisonment and genocide of Black people. These were not separate thought experiments, however. For the Nation of Islam, the same racist, imperialist justifications served as the basis of both occupations, one foreign and one domestic. American military action abroad was simply a precursor to subjugation of Black America with tanks, guns, and bombs. This article explores this intellectual and internationalist discourse and the real solutions that emerged from it through the Nation of Islam’s Dopebusters program, which fought drugs and violence in Black communities. I argue that these tactics were a religio-political response, combining Islam, Black nationalism, internationalism, and anti-imperial discourses to translate theory and rhetoric into community action.

This article examines the conflict between two visions of Pan-Africanism and global economic integration in the late 1990s. On one side, many African political and economic elites allied with some Black leaders and groups in the United States to support legislation called the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA). This article argues that AGOA represented a form of neoliberal Pan-African politics, which posited that African freedom and prosperity required embracing global capitalism. Contesting this vision were progressive nonprofits, unions, and legislators in Africa and the United States. In the United States, these groups offered an alternative trade deal—the Human Rights, Opportunity, Partnership, and Empowerment Act. This bill, in turn, articulated a social democratic Pan-Africanist worldview and a challenge to global neoliberalism.