African-American Religious Leaders

Facts On File books are generally well researched, well written, and useful for libraries. This new volume in the A to Z of African Americans series is in the same tradition. More than 150 religious leaders are profiled here.

Entries are alphabetical (Abernathy, Ralph to Youngblood, Johnny Ray) and describe each person's early life, family, and involvement in religious and social issues. Most are about one page long and include recent reference books (often Gale titles), periodical articles, and Web sites for further reading. Attractive black-and-white photos illustrate about one-third of the articles.

Included are the names you'd expect–Jesse Jackson, Martin Luther King Jr., Elijah Muhammad, Adam Clayton Powell Jr and Sr.–along with important but lesser-known individuals such as Calvin Butts, Barbara Harris, Ben Chavis, and Lucy Smith. Others not usually thought of as religious leaders, among them George Foreman, Mahalia Jackson, Hiram Revels, and Sojourner Truth, are also profiled.

Several indexes make it possible to locate individuals by religious affiliation (including nondenominational Cornel West) and year of birth (1737 to 1962) as well as subject (Civil War, Million Man March, Morehouse College). Articles objectively describe even unpleasant events and situations. Some inevitable repetition between articles exists (for example, the 1787 remodeling of St. George's Episcopal Church in Philadelphia to provide separate seating for blacks is described in the entries on both Richard Allen and Absalom Jones), and of course many of the individuals may be found in other similar titles.

Since religious leaders are not commonly studied, this is probably not an essential purchase. It will be useful for high-school collections where brief biographies are well used as well as for public and undergraduate libraries. RBB

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