Introduction: James H. Cone and Black Theology in Africana Perspective

This special issue recognizes the fiftieth anniversary of Black Theology and Black Power. It foregrounds the intellectual legacy of James H. Cone himself. It also examines the broader scholarship on Africana religions that has emerged through the paradigm shifts that Black liberation theology embodies—liberationist political movements, Black consciousness, anticolonial movements, and religious activism rooted in social justice.

When James Hal Cone (1936–2018) first published Black Theology and Black Power in 1969, he launched a fundamental transformation in the study of race through its connection to the institutional life of religion, Black political insurgency, and the scholarly study of Black religious thought. As Cone often explained in retrospect, Black Theology and Black Power derived from his experience of "metanoia," a conversion to embracing a radical notion of Black identity manifested in a global Black consciousness movement, the soulful music of Billie Holiday, the rebellions underway in Black ghettoes, the prophetic theology of Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the unapologetic affirmation of Black identity and Black culture espoused by the Muslim minister Malik Shabazz (Malcolm X). Cone's work also connected to the global formations of anticolonialism that emphasized decolonizing the intellectual apparatus of Black scholars and affirming the aesthetic dimensions of Blackness—the Black Arts movement and such writers as Frantz Fanon exemplify the stakes of this radical transformation. This seminal text by Cone marked the rise of the modern liberation theology movement and established Black theology's radical departure from the epistemological norms of white theology. The transnational dynamics of Black theology also emerged in such movements as the anti-apartheid activism of Black theologians in South Africa.

Over the course of his career, Cone produced more than a dozen books attesting to the Black radical tradition's urgent significance for the social life of religious institutions and the intellectual imagination that might guide the scholarly study of Black religious thought, liberation imperatives, and Black culture. For decades now, divinity schools, seminaries, and departments of religious studies have incorporated theological accounts of race and social power into their curricula to train students to understand the nexus of religious thought, equity movements, and liberationist paradigms. Liberation theology broadly has produced this body of work in Latin America, among Black and Indigenous peoples in North America, and throughout Asia and Africa. More precisely, however, Cone's Black Theology and Black Power inaugurated this global movement of liberation theology.

Black liberation theology successfully wed the study of religion and racial justice through critiquing white power systems. As a half-century has now passed, it is fitting for the Journal of Africana Religions to spotlight both the historical significance of James H. Cone's work and the contemporary engagement of Africana religions scholarship with enduring issues of Black liberation and social justice. The essays in this roundtable include attention to the transnational dimensions of Black liberation theology, its historical emergence, and the implications for multiple alliances of social justice that advance a critique of power and that privilege accountability to marginalized communities. Each essay demonstrates in its own way why scholars must continue grappling with the way resistance to structural oppression shapes Africana religions.