Gary Dorrien, “The New Abolition: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Black Social Gospel” (Yale UP, 2018)

New Books in African American Studies · Apr 18, 2018 · 1h 6m

The black social gospel–formulated and given voice by abolitionists and post-reconstruction Black men and women–took the United States by storm in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Black Christians were not the only ones involved in the black social gospel, though. Rev. Dr. Gary Dorrien’s The New Abolition: W.E.B Du Bois and the Black Social Gospel (Yale University Press, 2018) argues that although Du Bois would not consider himself a black social gospel adherent, he was affected by the tradition and came to realize its importance in the milieu of social democracy. Dorrien uses…