Book Description

In this second volume, David H. Bradley picks up the story of the African Methodist Episcopal Church Zion in 1873. From there he follows A. M. E. Zion’s growth through Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the Civil Rights Movement, showing the denomination’s special capacity for empowering lay people to be crucial to African American organization in the Civil Rights Movement. Throughout, Bradley explores the dynamics of organizational institutionalization in the midst of new growth and transformation through the Great Migration and the flowering of A. M. E. Zion churches in new African American communities on the West Coast.