Since the era of slavery and continuing through the present, Black women have articulated a vision of freedom, equality, anti-racism, and racial uplift, drawing from Scripture to sustain their work of promoting equal rights for African Americans. From the early female abolitionists such as Maria Stewart, Sojourner Truth, and Harriet Tubman, to the anti-lynching activists Ida B. Wells and Mary Talbert, to the twentieth-century civil rights activists Ella Josephine Baker and Septima Clark, and countless others, these “churchwomen” actively challenged the status quo that relegated Black women to the least empowered positions in the social order. In their effort to address slavery, segregation, violence, disenfranchisement, and civil rights, these women moved audiences toward social reform with stirring speeches; cultivated activism by establishing clubs and councils; and held key leadership positions in political organizations including the the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA). We seek papers from any theoretical or critical perspective that analyzes the ways in which these or other Black women activists employed their religious or spiritual authority to effect radical social change in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries.

Submission Guidelines
This panel will be a part of the 47th Annual NeMLA Convention, March 17 to 20, 2016, in Hartford, CT.
Interested authors should submit abstracts of no more than 250 words through the CFP list on NeMLA's website https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/15704. Submissions must also include the author's full name, email address and institutional affiliation.
Submissions must be received by September 30, 2015.
Accepted panelists must be members of NeMLA by December 1, 2015, and register for the conference by the same date in order to present. Participants may only deliver one paper at the conference.
Inquiries (but not proposals) should be sent to Jami Carlacio (jcarlacio@bmcc.cuny.edu)