religions Article Mothers of the Movement: Evangelicalism and Religious Experience in Black Women’s Activism Vaughn A. Booker Department of Religion and Program in African and African American Studies, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH 03755, USA;
[email protected] Abstract: This article centers Black religious women’s activist memoirs, including Mamie Till Mob- ley’s Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime that Changed America (2003) and Rep. Lucia Kay McBath’s Standing Our Ground: The Triumph of Faith over Gun Violence: A Mother’s Story (2018), to refocus the narrative of American Evangelicalism and politics around Black women’s authoritative narratives of religious experience, expression, mourning, and activism. These memoirs document personal transformation that surrounds racial violence against these Black women’s Black sons, Emmett Till (1941–1955) and Jordan Davis (1995–2012). Their religious orientations and experiences serve to chart their pursuit of meaning and mission in the face of American brutality. Centering religious experiences spotlights a tradition of Black religious women who view their Christian sal- vation as authorizing an ongoing personal relationship with God. Such relationships entail God’s ongoing communication with these Christian believers through signs, dreams, visions, and “chance” encounters with other people that they must interpret while relying on their knowledge of scripture. A focus on religious experience in the narratives of activist Black women helps to make significant their human conditions—the contexts that produce their co-constitutive expressions of religious and Citation: Booker, Vaughn A.. 2021. racial awakenings as they encounter anti-Black violence. In the memoirs of Till and McBath, their Mothers of the Movement: sons’ murders produce questions about the place of God in the midst of (Black) suffering and their Evangelicalism and Religious intuitive pursuit of God’s mission for them to lead the way in redressing racial injustice.