Virginia Broughton: The Life and Writings of a National Baptist Missionary ed. by Tomeiko Ashford Carter (review)

In this short collection, Tomeiko Ashford Carter highlights the religious and theological devotion and insights of Virginia Broughton, a home missionary from the National Baptist Convention around the turn of the twentieth century. The book gives a brief overview of Broughton's life in the introduction to provide context, focusing primarily on events most significant in spiritual formation and missionary work, such as her conversion experience as a child and her work writing for the National Baptist Union, the official newspaper of the National Baptist Convention. Carter is well aware of the literature on Broughton and chooses excerpts in order to fill a specific gap therein. She wants to show Broughton to be "a formidable religious scholar as well as a dedicated missionary" (xxxvii).

Carter accomplishes this goal by extracting and arranging portions of Broughton's work that best reveal her mind for theology and her heart for people. This volume debuts her first autobiography, A Brief Sketch of the Life and Labors of Mrs. V. W. Broughton, Bible Band Missionary, for Middle and West Tennessee (xxxvi). Published in 1895, it details her spiritual and civic development. Next, portions of a weekly Bible study series published in the Union, entitled Women's Work: As Gleaned from the Bible, are included. This is the first annotated, modern reprint of this material (xxxvi). Here, Broughton explores the lives of women in the Bible and seeks to inculcate black Christian women with the knowledge that their duty goes beyond the home into the church and government. The third chapter contains various articles from the Union, which tell the story of her involvement as a female leader with the National Baptist Convention. Carter includes another Bible study in chapter four, this one far more systematic than the one designed for a weekly newspaper. The book concludes with missionary accounts from the latter part of her career.

Carter arranges the works in chronological order, showcasing Broughton's role and growth as a leader in the black community of Tennessee. More importantly, however, is the manner in which the material is organized to demonstrate how this church woman's deep religious convictions shaped her understanding of the racial and gender issues of her day. The newspaper articles show Broughton dealing with race and gender issues in the church. By situating these between Bible studies and missionary reports, the book reveals Broughton's inner religious drive to help individuals and communities as one firmly rooted in a Christian understanding of inner change.

Both the Bible studies and the missionary reports are crucial in truly understanding this missionary. Rather than seeing external factors as the primary shapers of her religion, the collection successfully emphasizes the fact that Broughton's religion was the primary factor in how she responded to race and gender issues. Yes, there is a dialectical flow between the internal and external, but Christianity played the decisive role in how she conducted herself in public and in private. Broughton believed that no real social change could come without first equipping people, especially women, with biblical knowledge.

So, the volume does indeed present Broughton as a formidable religious scholar and dedicated missionary. But it also helps extend the interdisciplinary nature of historical study. It is precisely its strength in the area of religious history that should make the book important for social, black, gender, and New South historians. Scholars see Broughton as part of the religious tradition behind the civil rights movement, but this collection delves deeper to focus on a specific strand of female faithfulness within that tradition, a strand that should be recognized for its importance in the fabric of American history.