Race, Religion, and the Pulpit

Robert L. Bradby has long been regarded as a revered religious leader, a strategic political thinker, and a stubbornly enigmatic figure. In this biographical study, Julia Marie Robinson conveys a set of fresh insights on Bradby's life and times, particularly in her exploration of his Canadian origins and interracial identity as well as the flows of black peoples across the fluid U.S.–Canadian border. Robinson's volume makes a distinctive contribution to the ongoing debates about Bradby, to the history of Second Baptist, and to our understanding of the intellectual and political histories of religion in black urban life in places like Detroit.

~Angela D. Dillard, Professor, Afroamerican and African Studies and in the Residential College at the University of Michigan

Race, Religion, and the Pulpitis first and foremost a biography not just of one rather extraordinary man, the Reverend Bradby, but also of the city of Detroit at a time of great change and growth. Through the personal narrative of Bradby, we are able to appreciate the international and fluid character of vital cities like Detroit in the early twentieth century. We see that there was much movement between the U.S. and Canada for both black Americans and white Americans and that this ability to move and to seek new communities of support shaped self-identity and broader race relations alike. For any scholar who assumes that American racial categories were already determined by the turn of the century, Julia Marie Robinson offers a very different view.

~Heather Ann Thompson, Associate Professor of History, Department of African American Studies and Department of History, Temple University