This Far By Faith brings together a collection of essays on the religious identities and experiences of African-American women. Spanning from the period of slavery to the present, the essays profile American figures such as Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, and Willie Mae Ford Smith, exploring the role that religious institutions and impulses played in their lives.

From the earliest years of sound film in America, Hollywood studios and independent producers of "race films" for black audiences created stories featuring African American religious practices. In the first book to examine how the movies constructed images of African American religion, Judith Weisenfeld explores these cinematic representations and how they reflected and contributed to complicated discourses about race, the social and moral requirements of American citizenship, and the very nature of American identity.

Drawing on such textual sources as studio production files, censorship...

Demonstrates that the efforts to contest conventional racial categorization contributed to broader discussions in black America that still resonate today. When Joseph Nathaniel Beckles registered for the draft in the 1942, he rejected the racial categories presented to him and persuaded the registrar to cross out the check mark she had placed next to Negro and substitute "Ethiopian Hebrew." "God did not make us Negroes," declared religious leaders in black communities of the early twentieth-century urban North. They insisted that so-called Negroes are, in reality, Ethiopian Hebrews, Asiatic...