Best, Wallace D. 1960-

PERSONAL:

Born July 5, 1960. Education: Northwestern University, Ph.D., 2000.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Center for African American Studies, Princeton University, Stanhope Hall, Princeton, NJ 08544; Department of Religion, 1879 Hall, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, W.E.B. DuBois Institute for African and African American Research, fellow, 2003-04, Harvard Divinity School, assistant professor, beginning 2004; Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, professor, c. 2007—. Previously a fellow at Princeton University's Center for the Study of Religion and assistant professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. Has worked on public history projects, including two Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) documentaries, This far by Faith and Soldiers without Swords: The Black Press.

WRITINGS:

Passionately Human, No Less Divine: Religion and Culture in Black Chicago, 1915-1952, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 2005.

Contributor to books, including Repositioning North American Migration History: New Directions in Modern Continental Migration, Citizenship and Community, edited by Marc S. Rodriguez, University of Rochester Press, 2004; and Women and Religion in the African Diaspora: Knowledge, Power, and Performance, edited by R. Marie Griffith and Barbara Dianne Savage, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. Contributor to periodicals, including Religion and American Culture and the Harvard Divinity School Bulletin.

SIDELIGHTS:

Wallace D. Best is a historian who specializes in African American religious history. His research interests include the relationship between migration, urbanization, and religious transformation. His book Passionately Human, No Less Divine: Religion and Culture in Black Chicago, 1915-1952 describes how blacks from the American South traveled to Chicago during their Great Migration northward and subsequently brought about changes in African American religion in that city.

"The early historiography of African American religion emphasized structure over that of human agency," wrote Adam Stewart in a review of Passionately Hu-man, No Less Divine for the Journal of Southern Religion. "Indeed, until recent decades it has been the assumption of many scholars that black religion was primarily the result of African Americans' material conditions." Stewart noted that the book "serves as an important corrective to these ahistorical accounts, which ignore the important role that practitioners themselves have played in the construction of their own religious and cultural practices and identities."

Passionately Human, No Less Divine explores how religion and religious services changed in Chicago to reflect both life in the modern city and traditional Southern black religion. "Prior to 1915, established black Chicago churches placed great emphasis on preaching that was ‘orderly’ and worship that was ‘decorus,’" Best writes in his book, adding that "it was … the combined pressures of competition from other churches and from secular organizations for the attention of migrants who enjoyed ‘a more emotional ritual’ that persuaded many ministers of mainline African American Chicago churches to adopt … a ‘mixed type’ preaching style. Unlike the Southern sermonic tradition, which was often done entirely in dialect, a sermon of the mixed type basically attempted to appeal to ‘two classes’ of listeners in congregation: the intellectually inclined and those who felt compelled to express their emotions freely and demonstratively."

Best explores how African American women played a seminal role in bringing about changes in Chicago's black churches as a Southern folk sensibility was brought to the churches, which, as the author notes, still maintained aspects of their more staid and intellectual approach to worship. As a result, these migrants brought a change in the traditional views of what African American religion in a modern, urban environment was about by introducing religious customs from the religious past of the American South.

The author begins his book by providing a historical context for his examination of change in Chicago's African American churches. He then shows how worship practices and the structure of religious institutions were affected by black migrants from the South. Chapter three examines more closely the religious and social operations of these churches, pointing out that the church membership was not interested only in spiritual concepts but also in practical participation in the community. Chapter four focuses on how the tidal wave of migration produced vast numbers of African Americans from the South and how these growing ranks of migrants specifically influenced changes. In chapter five, the author recounts the history of one African American Protestant denomination, the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Chicago. He concludes with an examination of two female African American pastors, the Reverend Mary G. Evans and the Elder Lucy Smith, both of whom had tremendously popular ministries.

Noting that previous historical accounts of the Great Migration have emphasized the difficult aspects of this move, Journal of Church and State contributor Charles L. Glenn explained that traditionally "the story is told as a tragedy of frustration, discrimination, and personal and social disintegration," but that "Wallace Best has a different and more optimistic story to tell, that of the churches which the migrants founded or profoundly influenced, and the religious culture that they created." Writing in Church History, Anthea D. Butler called the book "a valuable monograph that makes an important contribution to the study of African American religion in Chicago during the Great Migration."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Best, Wallace D., Passionately Human, No Less Divine: Religion and Culture in Black Chicago, 1915-1952, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 2005.

PERIODICALS

Chronicle of Higher Education, July 20, 2007, Karen Birchard and John Gravois, "‘Creative Class’ Author Heads to the U. of Toronto; Harvard Divinity School Loses 5 Faculty Members; Chancellor of Fayetteville State U. Resigns."

Church History, March, 2007, Anthea D. Butler, review of Passionately Human, No Less Divine: Religion and Culture in Black Chicago, 1915-1952, p. 218.

Journal of African American History, winter, 2007, Barbara L. Green, review of Passionately Human, No Less Divine, p. 124.

Journal of Church and State, spring, 2006, Charles L. Glenn, review of Passionately Human, No Less Divine, p. 476.

ONLINE

Harvard University, Department of African and African American Studies Web site,http://aaas.fas.harvard.edu/ (July 14, 2008), faculty profile of author.

Journal of Southern Religion,http://jsr.fsu.edu/ (July 14, 2008), Adam Stewart, review of Passionately Human, No Less Divine.

Princeton University Web site,http://www.princeton.edu/ (July 14, 2008), faculty profile of author.