More than simply ushers and Sunday School teachers, the women of Harlems Abyssinian Baptist Church were influential leaders in the congregations of Reverend Adam Clayton Powell Senior and Junior. Church Ladies: Untold Stories of Harlem Women in the Powell Era explores these womens lives at the church and their roles in a Northern civil rights movement that took them and their pastor, the fiery Powell Junior, from protests for jobs on Harlems 125th Street in the 1930s to demonstrations for justice in the halls of the United States Congress in the 1960s.
Testimony from over a dozen little-recognized women paints a vivid picture of that historic church and the struggles against Jim Crow in New York City and beyond. Their stories also shed light on Congressman Powells social and legislative impact on the American nation during a time of strict racial segregation and unchecked racial violence. It was time when the Church ladies and all of black America whispered and shouted, Give em hell, Adam!
Over de auteur
Martia G. Goodson, Ph D, is an American historian specializing in African American oral history. She authored Chronicles of Faith: the Autobiography of Frederick. D. Patterson and has written numerous articles for academic and professional journals and magazines on black oral history. She is the author of New York’s African Burial Ground, an official guide to the cemetery of fifteen thousand Africans enslaved in colonial Lower Manhattan. After a career teaching at Baruch College-CUNY, Dr. Goodson is completing a second book on the burial ground and a book of stories from formerly enslaved black people in Tennessee and Kentucky. She enjoys interviewing and photography and lives in Bronx, New York.