Black Women’s Faith and Moral Leadership in the Civil Rights Movement
In 2016, Margot Lee Shetterly published Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Who Helped Win the Space Race. Shetterly’s riveting narrative of the lives of a group of Black women mathematicians who worked at NASA during the space race in the 1960s became a best seller and inspired a film adaptation of the same name. Similar to Shetterly, AnneMarie Mingo’s Have You Got Good Religion?: Black Women’s Faith, Courage, and Moral Leadership in the Civil Rights Movement (University of Illinois Press, 2024) sets out to unearth hidden Black women activists. Reflecting on her mother’s activism, Mingo writes, “My mother is a civil rights activist, but like so many other women, her name and story are unknown in the narratives of civil rights in the United States” (3). This quote encapsulates one of the goals of her text: to explore the moral and religious motivations of Black women involved in the civil rights movement of the mid- twentieth century while illuminating the lives of those hidden figures who have contributed mightily to today’s Black freedom movements. Mingo, an associate professor of ethics, culture, and moral leadership at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, approaches the civil rights movement through the lens of Black women activists and their ethical motivations for protesting.
Have You Got Good Religion? serves as an account of the lesser-known history of Black women civil rights activists and as a socioreligious analysis of the moral vision and religious ethos of Black church women from this period. Mingo’s title, Have You Got Good Religion? is an ode to the role of Christian religiosity to the civil rights movement. She writes, “‘Have You Got Good Religion?’ is the refrain and more common name for the spiritual ‘Certainly Lord,’ which was often invoked in mass meetings during the Civil Rights Movement” (159). In making this observation, Mingo interweaves Christian religious traditions and practices into the formation and sustainment of civil rights protest. Have You Got Good Religion? approaches the civil rights movement from the perspective of Black church women and the moral reasoning and faith convictions that compelled them to participate in the movement.
Three main objectives guide Mingo’s scholarly arguments. First, she intends to “resurrect the role of Black Church activism during the longer period of the mid-1940s through the early 1970s” (10). Her aim is to complicate narratives of the civil rights movements that have paid greater attention to labor and leftist politics while less consideration has been given to Black church women. Second, Have You Got Good Religion? provides “new understandings of religious and moral motivations for social activism during the Civil Rights Movement” (6). Third, it retrieves “a lived religion from the experiences, songs, scriptures, and prayers that formed a critical engagement with God in moments of socioreligious contestation” (6). These three assertions sustain the main goal of the book—succinctly illuminating the role of Black church women in social justice movements and exploring the socioreligious imaginaries and faith considerations that accentuated their political activism.
In attempting to emphasize both the historical significance of Black church women’s participation in civil rights protest and their moral innerworkings, Have You Got Good Religion? utilized a two-pronged structure wherein each chapter concludes with a focus on a Black Christian woman activist as a moral exemplar “in what can be understood as a form of call-and-response” (11). The book’s five chapters each feature a historical framing that contextualizes the lives of the Black religious women under consideration and the process by which they became involved in racial protest and political activism. Mingo then offers the moral exemplar to demonstrate the application of the moral power and efficacy of African American Christian culture and its importance in Black social and political movements in the United States. By using this approach, Mingo effectively illuminates the historical contribution of Black religious women to Black freedom struggles. She also provides valuable insight into the theological and philosophical ideals that informed their vision of Christian morality.
Notwithstanding these strengths, Have You Got Good Religion? is somewhat limited by its exclusive focus on Black American Christian culture among college-educated Black women in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In this way, Mingo’s book is primarily an examination of the Christian religious culture of members of the Black elite or bourgeoisie. Her work thus presents an intriguing exploration as to why this specific group of Black women engaged in civil disobedience and protest. Part of the answer to this query, according to Mingo, is a sense of justice and collective responsibility that was infused and amplified by religious faith. But this same Christian consciousness also made Black church women in this study less inclined to embrace more militant tactics to achieve social and political equality. Relatedly, Have You Got Good Religion? does not delve deeply into the Black radical tradition or address issues related to the redistribution of economic resources in American society.
While the book does not offer much insight into the lives of working-class and poor Black church women or address radical political approaches, How You Got Good Religion? makes significant contributions in other ways. It connects Black American Christian culture to various institutions that contributed to Black freedom movements in the United States. Mingo’s analysis of the role of historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) for African American Christian women’s commitment to activism is one of the overall strengths of her text. The book also discusses African American women’s participation in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). With respect to SNCC, Mingo describes Black religious women eagerly joining and participating in various voter registration drives across the South while also recounting how these women did not embrace the more radical remedies for social change that transformed SNCC in the mid-1960s.
Mingo effectively demonstrates both the individual moral commitments of Black church women and how various institutional affiliations contributed to channeling this moral sensibility and notion of Christian duty into political action and racial protest.
Have You Got Good Religion? draws from a rich source base to craft a compelling narrative of civil rights activism. Mingo utilized ethnographic research and conducted interviews with several Black women featured in the book. In addition, she consulted newspapers and surveyed the historical literature on Black freedom struggles, Black womanist theology, and Black Christian ethics. She also drew from her family history and discussions with her relatives that participated in the civil rights movement in Florida. Drawing on these sources and evidence, Mingo analyzed the activism of Black Christian women through a series of theoretical lenses produced by scholars of religion and theology. In constructing her narrative in this manner, Have You Got Good Religion? illuminates the complexities of the moral and ethical universes that molded African American Christian women. This approach provides an in-depth and innovative treatment of Black Christian women’s theology and how it functioned within a liberation struggle.
In sum, Have You Got Good Religion? represents a significant contribution to religious studies, African American studies, and theology because of its attention to the political morality of African American church women. This work accentuates trends in scholarship on the African Diaspora that has centered Black women in historical narratives and theoretical discussions. Mingo’s work provides new directions for discussions on the relationship between racial protest and African American Christianity by exploring the role of this faith tradition in the Black Lives Matter movement and Black freedom movements in the twenty first century. In global Black thought, Have You Got Good Religion? provides an example of how Black communities have been able to appropriate religious traditions imposed on them and transform these cultural experiences into tools for freedom, resistance, and liberation across two centuries.
*This review was originally published in Global Black Thought, the official journal of the African American Intellectual History Society. Copyright © 2025 AAIHS.
Copyright © AAIHS. May not be reprinted without permission.