PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewA welcome addition to a public conversation ... Neither as rigorously argued as Sean Wilentz’s No Property in Man nor as original as Manisha Sinha’s The Slave’s Cause, Larson’s sober new book nevertheless repays reading, for it has a good deal to teach those who want to see the American story in overly simplistic terms.
Henry Louis Gates Jr.
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewTo tell the story of the Black church is something of a risk even to a scholar as secure as Gates, for voices in the arena of racial justice have long diminished religion as overly safe and accommodationist ... Yet Gates writes here as a historian, and the historian can chronicle progress, assess its origins and commemorate its course while noting its incompleteness. \'Violent insurrection would have been a form of racial suicide; insurrection meant death,\' Gates writes. So Black Americans used what was at hand (faith and religiously based appeals and action) in the struggle for freedom ... Relying heavily on the voices of myriad scholars and clergy members (often combined in the same person, like Kelly Brown Douglas or Jonathan L. Walton), Gates traces the story back even before Jamestown ... In Gates’s telling, the Black church, too, shines bright even as the nation itself moves uncertainly through the gloaming, seeking justice on earth — as it is in heaven.
