Black Baptist women used prayer as a disguised discourse of political resistance

Evidence

In 1920 the WC’s executive board repeated its call for prayer. The call, this time for a week of prayer including Thanksgiving day, revealed the black Baptist women’s appropriation of prayer itself as a discourse of resistance. Black Baptist women across the nation held meetings in homes and churches to pray for the end to mob violence. A white woman editor of the Swarthmore News printed the text of the black Baptist women’s call for prayer in her newspaper and implored whites to pray in support. The Woman’s Convention admitted the resistant politics implicit in their observance of prayer. Nannie Burroughs was quick to agree with a Florida newspaper that labeled the week of prayer against lynching a “clever and mischievous piece of propaganda” that permitted blacks to speak up in ways they would not otherwise dare to do openly. Burroughs explained: “How true! That is why all Christians pray. Their neighbors can or will not help them. God can and will. The Negro is praying because his case must go before the highest court. A just judge presides over it.” — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 1018

Categorization

• DEFINE: Shows how the politics of respectability’s pious surface could double as strategic cover for protest that could not be spoken directly.
• ADDENDUM: Connects to the article on ritual sacrifice as grief-love: the week of prayer is an embodied, collective ritualized lament that serves a political-stabilizing protest function.
• XREF: Echoes the Loud’n’clear point that religious language can be a sanctioned channel for otherwise dangerous speech—compare to how colonial subjects used ostensibly apolitical court petitions. — connects to: Black Baptist women strategically mixed war and domestic imagery to justify public activism — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 670; Black Baptist women mobilized a politics of respectability as resistance to consumer capitalism. — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 954; A female preacher led women’s collective prayer against prevailing custom (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Black Baptist women’s activism worked gradually and subversively, not through dramatic revolt #corroborates (0.90) — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 113
• A female preacher led women’s collective prayer against prevailing custom #exemplifies (0.85)
• Black Baptist women fused a rhetoric of war with one of domesticity #complicates (0.75) — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 670