Mahalia Jackson, (born October 26, 1911, New Orleans, Louisiana, U.S.—died January 27, 1972, Evergreen Park, near Chicago, Illinois), She was an American gospel music singer, known as the “Queen of Gospel Song.”

Jackson was brought up in a strict religious atmosphere. Her father’s family included several entertainers, but she was forced to confine her own musical activities to singing in the church choir and listening—surreptitiously—to recordings of Bessie Smith and Ida Cox as well as of Enrico Caruso.

When she was 16, she went to Chicago and joined the Greater Salem Baptist Church choir, where her remarkable contralto voice soon led to her selection as a soloist.

Jackson first came to wide public attention in the 1930s, when she participated in a cross-country gospel tour singing such songs as “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands” and “I Can Put My Trust in Jesus.” In 1934 her first recording, “God Gonna Separate the Wheat from the Tares,” was a success, leading to a series of other recordings. Jackson’s first great hit, “Move on Up a Little Higher,” appeared in 1945; it was especially important for its use of the “vamp,” an indefinitely repeated phrase (or chord pattern) that provides a foundation for solo improvisation. All the songs with which she was identified—including “I Believe,” “Just over the Hill,” “When I Wake Up in Glory,” and “Just a Little While to Stay Here”—were gospel songs, with texts drawn from biblical themes and strongly influenced by the harmonies, rhythms, and emotional force of blues.

Jackson refused to sing any but religious songs or indeed to sing at all in surroundings that she considered inappropriate. But she sang on the radio and on television and, starting in 1950, performed to overflow audiences in annual concerts at Carnegie Hall in New York City. Eight of Jackson’s records sold more than a million copies each.

Jackson was enormously popular abroad; her version of “Silent Night,” for example, was one of the all-time best-selling records in Denmark. She made a notable appearance at the Newport (Rhode Island) Jazz Festival in 1957—in a program devoted entirely, at her request, to gospel songs—and she sang at the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy in January 1961. In the 1950s and ’60s she was active in the civil rights movement; in 1963 she sang the old African American spiritual “I Been ’Buked and I Been Scorned” for a crowd of more than 200,000 in Washington, D.C., just before civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech.

By Vanessa Taylor

The “black church” is a term used to describe Protestant churches that have predominately black congregations. More broadly, the black church is both a specific religious culture and a socio-religious force that has shaped protest movements, such as the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

Origins of the Black Church

The black church in the United States can be traced back to chattel slavery in the 18th and 19th centuries. Enslaved Africans brought to the Americas a variety of religions, including traditional spiritual practices. But the system of slavery was built on the dehumanization and exploitation of enslaved people, and this could only be achieved by depriving slaves of meaningful connections to land, ancestry, and identity. The dominant white culture of the time accomplished this through a system of forced acculturation, which included forced religious conversion.

Missionaries would also use promises of freedom to convert enslaved Africans. Many enslaved people were told they could return to Africa as missionaries themselves if they converted. While it was easier for polytheistic beliefs to merge with Catholicism, which ruled in areas such as the Spanish colonies, than the Protestant Christian denominations that dominated early America, enslaved populations constantly read their own narratives into Christian texts and incorporated elements of their previous faiths into Christian frameworks. Out of this cultural and religious acculturation, early versions of the black church were born.

Exodus, The Curse of Ham and Black Theodicy

Black pastors and their congregations maintained their autonomy and identify by reading their own histories into Christian texts, unlocking new routes for self-realization. For example, many black churches identified with the Book of Exodus’s story of the prophet Moses leading the Israelites escape from slavery in Egypt. The story of Moses and his people spoke to hope, promise and the benevolence of a God which was otherwise absent in the systematic and oppressive structure of chattel slavery. White Christians worked to justify slavery through the employment of a white savior complex, which in addition to dehumanizing black people, infantilized them. They insisted that slavery was good for black people, because black people were inherently uncivilized. Some went so far as to claim that black people had been cursed and slavery was the necessary, God-intended punishment.

Seeking to maintain their own religious authority and identity, black scholars developed their own branch of theology. Black theodicy refers specifically to theology that answers for the reality of anti-blackness and the suffering of our ancestors. This is done in a number of ways, but primarily by re-examining suffering, the concept of free-will, and God’s omnibenevolence. Specifically, they examined the following question: If there is nothing that God does that is not good in and of itself, why would he inflict such immense pain and suffering on black people?

Questions like this one presented by black theodicy led to the development of another type of theology, which was still rooted in accounting for the suffering of black people. It is perhaps the most popular branch of black theology, even if its name is not always well known: Black Liberation Theology.

Black Liberation Theology and Civil Rights

Black Liberation Theology strove to incorporate Christian thought into the black community’s legacy as a “protest people.” By recognizing the social power of the church, along with the safety it offered within its four walls, the black community was able to explicitly bring God into the daily liberation struggle.

This was famously done within the Civil Rights Movement. Although Martin Luther King Jr. is most often associated with the black church in the context of civil rights, there were many organizations and leaders during that time who leveraged the church’s political power. And although King and other early civil rights leaders are now famous for their nonviolent, religiously-rooted tactics, not every member of the church embraced nonviolent resistance. On July 10, 1964, a group of Black men led by Earnest “Chilly Willy” Thomas and Frederick Douglas Kirkpatrick founded The Deacons For Defense and Justice in Jonesboro, Louisiana. The purpose of their organization? To protect members of the Congress For Racial Equity (CORE) against violence from the Ku Klux Klan.

The Deacons became one of the first visible self-defense forces in the South. Although self defense was not new, the Deacons were one of the first groups to embrace it as part of their mission.

The power of Black Liberation Theology within the black church did not go unnoticed. The church itself came to serve as a place of strategy, development and reprieve. It has also been a target of attacks by numerous hate groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan.

The history of the Black church is long and not over. Today, the church continues to redefine itself to meet the demands of new generations; there are those within its ranks who work to remove factors of social conservatism and align it with new movements. No matter what position it takes in the future, it cannot be denied that the black church has been a pivotal force within Black American communities for hundreds of years and those generational memories are not likely to fade.