Have You Got Good Religion?

"AnneMarie Mingo’s Have You Got Good Religion? Black Women’s Faith, Courage, and Moral Leadership in the Civil Rights Movement makes connections to liberation thought and contemporary activism in ethical dispositions--freedom faith, courage, theo-moral imagination, and compulsion--of eight ‘ordinary church women’ in the Civil Rights Movement. Mingo chronicles stories that might be lost to history and offers models for others to follow. Both occur through intentional focus on women whom Mingo could see herself imitating ‘to take on similar risks for the sake of the good that I imagine for the world in which we live.’ Arguing the church women advanced a distinct ‘understanding of God and God’s relationship to humanity and other forms of creation,’ Mingo reasserts a foundational claim of liberation theology that God is on the side of the oppressed by using the double entendre ‘good’ in the book’s title and including a late chapter asking the question ‘Which Side Are You On?’ The text deftly asserts continuity of Black women’s historic liberation practices in Black Lives Matter Movement actors who use songs, scripture, sayings, sermons, speeches, and statements to live out a social ethic of compulsion that emerges through a divine calling identified by both church women in the Civil Rights Movement and Black Lives Matters Movement actors. Through assertion of continuity, this book translates in two directions--challenging doubters of the benefit of the Civil Rights Movement to see its connection to Black Lives Matter activism, and offering affirmation to mid-twentieth-century century activists that they are exemplars of the work twenty-first century activists carry on.”--Rosetta E. Ross, author of Witnessing and Testifying: Black Women, Religion, and Civil Rights