African American in The Books Store

Many black women will go to church all day every Sunday but won't take one day out of the year to get a Pap test and mammogram done. Yet that yearly doctor's visit could help save lives. Often the first people to pray when a serious illness strikes, black women may be the last to seek timely medical care. As a result, they are suffering with, and dying from, manageable illnesses such as heart disease, obesity, cancer, and diabetes more than any other group in the United States.

It doesn't have to be that way. Don't wait until a health emergency happens before turning to your faith and your physician. You can achieve optimal health by arming yourself with medical knowledge and a strong spiritual base. Research has proven that a well-nurtured spiritual self can help to replenish, rejuvenate, and safeguard your physical self.

Written by a prominent African-American OB/GYN and a highly respected journalist, Blessed Health is a personal health and spirituality guide for every stage of a black woman's life. Included here is important information on:

• How your body works, and what can be done to prevent or help solve common health problems, including pelvic infections and fibroid tumors

• How to find a doctor that ministers to your physical and emotional needs

• How to successfully cope with illness, from a faith perspective

• How spiritual wisdom and prayer can decrease the harmful effects of stress

• How best to take care of your breasts and reproductive organs, and decrease your risk of heart disease, diabetes, obesity, and cancer

What Du Bois noted has gone largely unstudied until now. In this book, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham gives us our first full account of the crucial role of black women in making the church a powerful institution for social and political change in the black community. Between 1880 and 1920, the black church served as the most effective vehicle by which men and women alike, pushed down by racism and poverty, regrouped and rallied against emotional and physical defeat. Focusing on the National Baptist Convention, the largest religious movement among black Americans, Higginbotham shows us how women were largely responsible for making the church a force for self-help in the black community. In her account, we see how the efforts of women enabled the church to build schools, provide food and clothing to the poor, and offer a host of social welfare services. And we observe the challenges of black women to patriarchal theology. Class, race, and gender dynamics continually interact in Higginbotham's nuanced history. She depicts the cooperation, tension, and negotiation that characterized the relationship between men and women church leaders as well as the interaction of southern black and northern white women's groups.

Higginbotham's history is at once tough-minded and engaging. It portrays the lives of individuals within this movement as lucidly as it delineates feminist thinking and racial politics. She addresses the role of black Baptist women in contesting racism and sexism through a "politics of respectability" and in demanding civil rights, voting rights, equal employment, and educational opportunities.

Righteous Discontent finally assigns women their rightful place in the story of political and social activism in the black church. It is central to an understanding of African American social and cultural life and a critical chapter in the history of religion in America.