BLACK THEOLOGY. African Americans have a long, rich history of spiritually based advocacy for social change. African Americans read their religious texts through their experience. Consequently there is a long tradition of interpreting the Christian gospel in ways that reflect God's involvement in the struggles of oppressed peoples. This tradition is documented in several places, most notably in the life and work of David Walker (1785–1830), particularly in the classic Walker's Appeal in Four Articles (1829); Frederick Douglass (1817–1895); and Howard Thurman (1900–1981), particularly his classic text Jesus and the Disinherited (1949).

Black Theology as it is largely understood in the early twenty-first century refers to the movement initiated by James Cone (b. 1938) at Union Theological Seminary in New York and later taken up by his students and a successive generation of thinkers. It is a contextual liberation theology that draws its strength and focus from the historic African American struggle...