Black Power and African Diasporic Religions: The Spiritual and Cultural Trajectory of Black Empowerment, 1965-2015

This dissertation project centers on the overlooked work of activists whose organizing efforts during the Black Power era converged with their subsequent initiation into African diasporic religions like Haitian Vodou or Lucumí, the Cuban variant of the Yoruba religion. It examines the activists’ adoption of these religions and the effects their faiths had on their approaches to communal liberation. As such, it is the first historical study to systematically analyze African Americans’ involvement in African diasporic religions through the lens of their activism. The study integrates the histories of these activist-practitioners into the broader history of the Black liberation struggle in the United States. This dissertation project thus contributes to an increasing body of scholarship seeking to diversify our understanding of the religious influences on the Black liberation struggle beyond the scope of Black churches and mosques. Analytically, it tackles two major questions: first, by reconstructing the devotees’ Black Power activism, this study illustrates in what ways their time in the movement was formative for their decision to initiate into these religions. Here, I am not only referring to how their activism nurtured their interest to learn more about Africa and the diaspora but also to how their status as an often marginalized and vilified group of radical activists prepared them to become a religious minority within a racialized minority. Second, by examining the continuities and changes in their theoretical and practical work, this study illuminates the imprint their religions left on their personal lives as well as their activism. Knowing what inspired them to become religious vanguards helps us better account for variations in African American activism. At the same time, the interrogation of their religiously inspired activism renders new insight into the spiritual dimension of the long struggle for Black liberation and the evolution of increasingly popular religions in the United States.