The Challenge of Joseph H. Jackson

This work succeeds brilliantly at humanizing a person usually demonized in African American history. Drawing from records no one else has used so extensively, Jared E. Alcántara recreates the world of an African American pastor at the center of the saga of the mid-century migration to the North, the building of one of the most important and influential congregations in the United States, and power struggles in the black Baptist convention. There is no other full-length work remotely like this covering this important but largely forgotten figure. * Paul Harvey, Distinguished Professor of History, University of Colorado Colorado Springs * Jared E. Alcántara has written a sensitive, balanced, and engaging biography of one of the most important religious figures of the twentieth century. Exhaustively researched and well-crafted, this book reveals J. H. Jackson in all his complexity, paradox, and prophetic vision, as Alcántara neither praises nor vilifies a man who often generated and was worthy of both. With The Challenge of Joseph H. Jackson, Alcántara has brought Jackson back from a puzzling fall into obscurity to his rightful place among America's greatest preachers and denominational leaders, broadening our understanding of the range of civil rights activism along the way. * Wallace Best, author of Langston's Salvation: American Religion and the Bard of Harlem *