A hallmark of American Black religion is its distinctive use of the Bible in creating community, resisting oppression, and fomenting social change. Stony the Road We Trod accomplishes this--and much more. This expanded edition contains a new introduction and three new essays that underscore the historic importance of this book for a new generation.

Bitter the Chastening Rod follows in the footsteps of the first collection of African American biblical interpretation, Stony the Road We Trod (1991). Nineteen Africana biblical scholars contribute cutting-edge essays reading Jesus, criminalization, the enslaved, and whitened interpretations of the enslaved. They present pedagogical strategies for teaching, hermeneutics, and bible translation that center Black Lives Matter and black culture. Biblical narratives, news media, and personal stories intertwine in critical discussions of black rage, protest, anti-blackness, and mothering in the context of black precarity.

“Stony the Road presents a bracing alternative to Trump-era white nationalism. . . . In our current politics we recognize African-American history—the spot under our country’s rug where the terrorism and injustices of white supremacy are habitually swept. Stony the Road lifts the rug." —Nell Irvin Painter, New York Times Book Review A profound new rendering of the struggle by African-Americans for equality after the Civil War and the violent counter-revolution that resubjugated them, by the bestselling author of The Black Church. The abolition of slavery in the aftermath of the Civil War is a familiar story, as is the civil rights revolution that transformed the nation after World War II. But the century in between remains a mystery: if emancipation sparked "a new birth of freedom" in Lincoln's America, why was it necessary to march in Martin Luther King, Jr.'s America? In this new book, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., one of our leading chroniclers of the African-American experience, seeks to answer that question in a history that moves from the Reconstruction Era to the "nadir" of the African-American experience under Jim Crow, through to World War I and the Harlem Renaissance. Through his close reading of the visual culture of this tragic era, Gates reveals the many faces of Jim Crow and how, together, they reinforced a stark color line between white and black Americans. Bringing a lifetime of wisdom to bear as a scholar, filmmaker, and public intellectual, Gates uncovers the roots of structural racism in our own time, while showing how African Americans after slavery combatted it by articulating a vision of a "New Negro" to force the nation to recognize their humanity and unique contributions to America as it hurtled toward the modern age. The story Gates tells begins with great hope, with the Emancipation Proclamation, Union victory, and the liberation of nearly 4 million enslaved African-Americans. Until 1877, the federal government, goaded by the activism of Frederick Douglass and many others, tried at various turns to sustain their new rights. But the terror unleashed by white paramilitary groups in the former Confederacy, combined with deteriorating economic conditions and a loss of Northern will, restored "home rule" to the South. The retreat from Reconstruction was followed by one of the most violent periods in our history, with thousands of black people murdered or lynched and many more afflicted by the degrading impositions of Jim Crow segregation. An essential tour through one of America's fundamental historical tragedies, Stony the Road is also a story of heroic resistance, as figures such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Ida B. Wells fought to create a counter-narrative, and culture, inside the lion's mouth. As sobering as this tale is, it also has within it the inspiration that comes with encountering the hopes our ancestors advanced against the longest odds.

Race, Racism, and the Biblical Narratives is a critical essay from Stony the Road We Trod: African American Biblical Interpretation written by the project's editor, Cain Hope Felder, now in a concise stand-alone book. In this important work, Felder clarifies the profound differences in racial attitudes in the biblical world and now. The book reveals the processes at work in both the New and Old Testaments that reflect ancient ambiguity about what we call race. Felder uncovers misuses of the biblical text (such as the so-called curse of Ham) in subsequent interpretation and shows how the Bible has been used to trivialize African contributions and demean and enslave Black people. Race, Racism, and the Biblical Narratives challenges scholars and church people alike to a deeper and more honest engagement with the biblical text.

The publication of Stony the Road We Trod thirty years ago marked the emergence of a critical mass of Black biblical scholars--as well as a distinct set of hermeneutical concerns. Combining sophisticated exegesis with special sensitivity to issues of race, class, and gender, the authors of this scholarly collection examine the nettling questions of biblical authority, Black and African people in biblical narratives, and the liberating aspects of Scripture. The original volume reshaped and redefined the questions, concerns, and scholarship that determine how the Bible is appropriated by the church, the academy, and the larger society today. To the original eleven essays this expanded edition adds a new introduction by Brian K. Blount and three new chapters by Kimberly D. Russaw, Shively T. J. Smith, and Jennifer T. Kaalund. Not only does Blount's new introduction access the impact of the first edition, but the new contributions extend the implications of Cain Hope Felder's vision for the book.

This pioneering commentary sets biblical interpretation firmly in the context of African American experience and concern. Cutting-edge scholarship that is in tune with African American churches calls into question many of the canons of traditional biblical research and highlights the role of the Bible in African American history, accenting themes of ethnicity, class, slavery, and African heritage as these play a role in Christian scripture and the Christian odyssey of an emancipated people. Contributors include the volume editors, Thomas Hoyt, Monya A. Stubbs, Vincent Wimbush, and sixteen other notable scholars.

What does it mean to be an American? The story of the African American past demonstrates the difficulty of answering this seemingly simple question. What does it mean to be an American? The story of the African American past demonstrates the difficulty of answering this seemingly simple question. If being "American" means living in a land of freedom and opportunity, what are we to make of those Americans who were enslaved and who have suffered from the limitations of second-class citizenship throughout their lives? African American history illuminates the United States' core paradoxes, inviting profound questions about what it means to be an American, a citizen, and a human being. This book considers how, for centuries, African Americans have fought for what the black feminist intellectual Anna Julia Cooper called "the cause of freedom." It begins in Jamestown in 1619, when the first shipment of enslaved Africans arrived in that settlement. It narrates the creation of a system of racialized chattel slavery, the eventual dismantling of that system in the national bloodletting of the Civil War, and the ways that civil rights disputes have continued to erupt in the more than 150 years since Emancipation. The Cause of Freedom carries forward to the Black Lives Matter movement, a grass-roots activist convulsion that declared that African Americans' present and past have value and meaning. At a moment when political debates grapple with the nation's obligation to acknowledge and perhaps even repair its original sin of racialized slavery, The Cause of Freedom tells a story about our capacity and willingness to realize the ideal articulated in the country's founding document, namely, that all people were created equal.