Content area
Full Text
Elevating the Race: Theophilus G. Steward, Black Theology, and the Making of an African American Civil Society, 1865-1924. By Albert G. Miller. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2003. xxiv + 216 pp. $28.00 cloth; $21.00 paper.
Albert Miller has written a compelling study of the life and varied public roles of Theophilus Gould Steward, a prominent minister, chaplain, writer, and educator in the African Methodist Episcopal church (AME). By exploring Steward's personal relationships, his interactions with prominent black leaders in his denomination and in the broader society, and his public work that challenged both white religious and secular leaders, Miller shows that Steward was a remarkably talented person with wide interests that extended beyond his specific denomination. Miller's book seeks to make more widely known Steward's religious and social influence. Steward's life has probably come to greater public awareness since the publication of William Seraile's Voice of Dissent: Theophilus Gould Steward and Black America (Brooklyn. N.Y.: Carlson, 1991). Although some readers may recognize Steward's End of the World (1888), which challenged the Anglo-Saxonism of white Congregationalist Josiah Strong's Our Country (1886), Miller treats his public influence over a much more extended period.
Miller argues that Steward's religious thought challenged the prevailing racist discourse of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and presented specific objections to black religious and secular institutions of his time. Drawing upon Cornel West's interpretation of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci's political thought, Miller contends that Steward functioned as an "organic intellectual" who linked the life of the mind to activism in public affairs. Steward is viewed as an early advocate of a "black theology" that was more relevant to a broader audience than the largely "intellectual enterprise" of the...