NEWS FEATURE: `Daughters of Thunder’ preserves legacy of black women preachers

c. 1998 Religion News Service UNDATED _ Black folk idiom speaks of “sons of thunder,” those fiery preachers whose booming voices shook and shaped their communities. Now, historian Bettye Collier-Thomas has honored the black women ministers who risked ostracism, persecution and family opposition to speak from the pulpit. Some of the earliest of these women […]

c. 1998 Religion News Service

UNDATED _ Black folk idiom speaks of “sons of thunder,” those fiery preachers whose booming voices shook and shaped their communities.

Now, historian Bettye Collier-Thomas has honored the black women ministers who risked ostracism, persecution and family opposition to speak from the pulpit. Some of the earliest of these women preached even when they faced capture and being sold into slavery.


Collier-Thomas has collected 38 never-published sermons from 14 women who preached from 1850 to 1978. They make up the core of her new book, “Daughters of Thunder: Black Women Preachers and Their Sermons” (Jossey-Bass, $25). The Temple University professor said her own spiritual life has deepened as she unearthed these texts and reconstructed the lives of the women brave enough to deliver them.

“Most 19th- and many 20th-century black women preachers have gained little except scorn,” Collier-Thomas writes. “They have often been viewed as different, strange and, in some cases, crazed simply because they chose to preach. That they have pursued a ministry at all attests to their personal strength and their belief in themselves and in the Holy Ghost.”

Despite the obstacles, black women preachers aren’t nearly as scarce as the historical record might suggest.

“There are a lot of preaching women in this country,” Collier-Thomas said from her home in Cherry Hill, N.J. “I’m struck by all the people who tell me their grandmother was a preacher. Of course, their stories have been suppressed in the official church histories.”

The U.S. Bureau of the Census counted 49 black clergywomen in 1890. One hundred years later, it tallied 2,306. By contrast, the Census found 1,094 white clergywomen in 1890 and 30,205 in 1990.

When Collier-Thomas discovered the handwritten records of the black Methodist preachers’ annual conference in Washington, D.C., from 1872 to 1890, she spent four months culling through them.

“In 1890, after 18 years of meetings, the ministers addressed the question, `Is woman inferior to man?’ ” she writes. “The chairman of the meeting stated, `Sad as it may be, woman is as inferior to man as man is to God.’ This one statement summed up their beliefs about women’s status in the church and in society.”


For “Daughters of Thunder,” the sermons weren’t hard to pick. Often, they were the single surviving fragment from a lifetime of ministry, Collier-Thomas said. But together, the texts provide a sample of the moral, theological and social concerns of black women over almost 150 years.

These women preached on sanctification and salvation and advised their listeners on how to survive a chaotic and unjust society. They condemned both individual sin and societal oppression. And they spoke up strongly for black women.

“While never denying the reality of human suffering, these black preaching women offer powerful messages that all humans can overcome the imperfections of the world and, moreover, that all humans are called by God to overcome imperfections, both spiritual and temporal,” Collier-Thomas writes.

Many early black women preachers supported themselves as evangelists, taking advantage of the great migration when more than a million blacks moved North and West from 1916 to 1918.

Others simply went out and started their own houses of worship.

One of the women featured in “Daughters of Thunder” is the Rev. Mary G. Evans. She washed dishes to put herself through seminary at Wilberforce University in Wilberforce, Ohio, and in 1924 became the first black woman to earn a doctorate of divinity degree.

“I can still see Pastor Evans. I can still hear Pastor Evans. Oh, she was a powerful preacher,” said the Rev. Marvin A. McMickle, who leads Antioch Baptist Church in Cleveland. McMickle grew up in Evans’ Cosmopolitan Community Church in Chicago, which she pastored for 35 years.


McMickle said his own openness to women in the pulpit is linked to Evans. “If the first model of a minister you ever saw was a woman, why would it ever occur to you that a woman couldn’t pastor?” he asked.

Another important avenue for black women preachers was the Holiness movement, Collier-Thomas said. With its emphasis on the Holy Spirit, it empowered black women to preach who felt called by the spirit, free of questions of legitimacy.

“The egalitarianism of the Holiness camp meetings provided a stimulus for women and blacks to speak, shout and testify,” she writes.

These scholarly findings are absolutely vital in an arena in which academics know so little, said Jeanne Knoerle, program director in the religion division for the Lilly Endowment in Indianapolis.

“We know very little about women in the church and know even less about black churchwomen,” said Knoerle, whose endowment has awarded $550,000 to Collier-Thomas for her work. “We’ve had a very long-term interest in program grants to assist the black church and research grants to start to understand it. Bettye is part of the research.”

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One of the great moments in that research arrived a few years ago with the granddaughter of the Rev. Florence Spearing Randolph (1866-1951). Anise Johnson Ward took a plane from Houston to New Jersey, carrying to Collier-Thomas’ door a black Samsonite suitcase stuffed with her grandmother’s writings. Collier-Thomas spent three years with the contents spread on her basement floor, matching and assembling the sermons.


“I still have 75 pieces in a little envelope I wasn’t able to match,” Collier-Thomas said. “I am determined to resurrect this woman’s life and publish her 63 sermons. I think she’s that important.

“When I got the call from Anise, I literally screamed. I told her, `Yes, I know Florence Spearing Randolph! I’ll send you a plane ticket to come here.’ ”

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