Encyclopedia of Women and Religion in North America, Set

WOMEN OF ANABAPTIST TRADITIONS

262 l PROTESTANTISM—DENOMINATIONAL TRADITIONS tion, USA, Incorporated, the National Baptist Convention of America, the National Baptist Missionary Convention , the Progressive National Baptist Convention, the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church, and the Church of God in Christ. There were smaller denominations, such as the Mount Sinai Holy Church, but the preceding list of denominations contains well over three-fourths of all black women Christians in the United States. In the dawning years of the twenty-first century, the black community in the United States could relish advances in a number of areas: rising incomes for many, a higher percentage of home ownership, a political climate devoid of much of the race-baiting and hatred characteristic of many American communities only a few decades earlier, rising prominence in sports and entertainment , and in sum, a greater access to many social, economic, and political areas of American life long denied them. On the other hand, there persisted challenges , such as a continuance of poverty in certain sectors , racial prejudice and discrimination that were sometimes more insidious given their often “subtle” forms of expressions, inadequate education, lack of proper health care for many, high rates of divorce and children being reared in single-headed families, racial profiling, and violence. However long the march to full freedom, it was clear that African American Protestant women would be among the leaders facing the challenges and taking advantage of new opportunities, just as they had throughout American history. SOURCES: John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (1972). Cain Hope Felder, ed., Stony the Road We Trod: African American Biblical Interpretation (1991). John Hope Franklin and Alfred A. Moss, Jr., From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans, 8th ed. (2000). Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (1984). Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920 (1996). Herbert G. Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750–1925 (1976). Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (1993). Sylvia M. Jacobs, Black Americans and the Missionary Movement in Africa (1982). Dorothy Sharpe Johnson and Lula Goolsby Williams, Pioneering Women of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church (1996). Gerda Lerner, ed., Black Women in White America: A Documentary History (1972). C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence H. Mamiya, The Black Church in the African American Experience (1990). Susan Hill Lindley, “You Have Stept Out of Your Place”: A History of Women and Religion in America (1996). Bert J. Loewenburg and Ruth Bogin, eds., Black Women in Nineteenth Century America (1978). Sandy D. Martin, Black Baptists and African Missions: The Origins of a Movement, 1880–1915 (1989). Sandy D. Martin, For God and Race: The Religious Leadership of AMEZ Bishop James Walker Hood (1999). Patricia Morton, ed., Discovering the Women in Slavery: Emancipating Perspectives on the American Past (1996). Albert J. Raboteau, A Fire in the Bones: Reflections on African-American Religious History (1995). Belinda Robnett, How Long? How Long?: African-American Women in the Struggle for Civil Rights (1997). Rosemary R. Ruether and Rosemary Skinner Keller, eds., In Our Own Voices: Four Centuries of American Women’s Religious Writing (1995). Jack Salzman, David Lionel Smith, and Cornel West, eds., Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History, vol. 4 (1996). Milton C. Sernett, African American Religious History: Documentary Witness, 2nd ed. (1999). Frank M. Snowden, Jr., Blacks in Antiquity: Ethiopians in the Greco-Roman Experience (1970). William J. Walls, The African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church: Reality of the Black Church (1974). Judith Weisenfeld and Richard Newman, eds., This Far by Faith: Readings in African American Women’s Religious Biography (1996). WOMEN OF ANABAPTIST TRADITIONS Marlene Epp THE TERM ANABAPTIST is a sixteenth-century phenomenon but is often used in contemporary settings to refer to those groups that distinguish themselves by adherence to adult or “believers” versus infant baptism. Sixteenth-century religious authorities, both Protestant and Catholic, referred to certain radical offshoots of the Reformation as “ana-baptists” because of their practice of “rebaptizing” adult believers voluntarily. The largest Christian denominations in the United States and Canada that claim Anabaptist roots are the Mennonites, Amish, and Hutterites. Of these, the Mennonites are the largest, with about 415,000 members. Their name derives from the sixteenth-century Dutch Anabaptist leader Menno Simons...