Desegregationist Pan‐African Spiritual Strivings

This article argues that W. E. B. Du Bois grounded his seminal conceptualisation of “the Negro church” in a Pan‐Africanist challenge to how Christian reformers and missionaries' usage of “Darkest Africa” as a metaphor for modern urban vice and poverty denigrated Africa and the African diaspora while promoting a segregated, imperialist version of the social gospel. Du Bois indicated that to undo the logic of “Darkest Africa,” African American churches should cultivate Black “striving” for what he viewed as the overlapping ideals of Pan‐Africanism and civil rights in the United States. Through this “spiritual striving,” the Black church could be the wellspring of a desegregated, decolonised global civil society

African american · Civil rights · Diaspora · Metaphor · Poverty · Undo · African cultural and philosophical studies · Race, History, and American Society · Theological Perspectives and Practices