Introduction: We Have Been Believers: Patterns of African-American Women's Religiosity

The religious lives of African-American women loom as a substantial and yet largely undiscovered terrain in the study of religion in America. As Margaret Walkers powerful poem, excerpted above, emphasizes, religious belief systems have assisted African-American women in centering themselves and their communities in times of hardship, and they have provided a language for expressing the joy and hope of better times. The study of African-American women and religion is also critical to broader understandings of religion in America. Dodson, then, emphasizes the social context of power, an issue to which we will return in discussing the ways in which religion served as a base for African-American women to challenge the prevailing social order. Sarah Rice relates the story of the conferring of the status of church mother on her in a small Baptist church in Jacksonville, Florida in the early 1950s.