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malady affecting black families’ lack of vitality.42 According to James Patterson, Moynihan, who was President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Assistant Secretary of Labor for Policy Planning and Research when the report was released, was motivated to look into the lives of black families partly because of his own childhood upbringing in poverty and the lack of a father in his life 43 At the same time, Moynihan was increasingly frustrated by the limitations of the labor department to provide assistance to families in need as the

employment rate continued to rise. He felt that “freedom was not enough” for blacks and argued that job programs, economic support, and attention to crime were crucial for black people to flourish. While Moynihan drew the early praise of some liberal whites and black pastors for his willingness to tackle issues disproportionately affecting African Americans, he also drew the criticism of black pastors for labeling the black family as pathological and suggesting that it instead parallel white families. Others criticized the lack of a concrete solution, the report’s jarring language, and Moynihan’s constant standardization of the white experience, which many recognized as unable to account for generations of discrimination and oppression.44 Patricia Hill Collins argues that rather than simply putting black sexuality in the limelight

42 James T. Patterson, Freedom is not Enough: The Movnihan Report and America’s Stmggle

over Black Family Life from LBJ to Obama (New York: Basic Books, 2010).

43 Ibid., 2-14.

again, the Moynihan Report “[located] the source of cultural difference in flawed gender relations providing] a powerful foundation for U.S. racism.”45

Indeed, it is amidst these assumptions of deviance that African

Americans have formed an identity that emerges at the intersection of black nationalism, race, sexuality, and an ongoing social oppression that has evolved for nearly 400 years. In the years following the end of the Civil War black churches served as a place where African Americans were able to find both a space and means of organizing collectively as citizens of the United States. Indeed, the black church— in some instances as as far back as slavery, but most especially after slavery— was not only a place to worship, but a centrifugal force of “identity and empowerment” for growing networks of activists, teachers, and civic leaders 46 From their early establishment black churches blurred the lines between the sacred and the secular, making the religious community a center for education, mobilization and resistance. As Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham has persuasively argued, self-help, self- reliance, and self-determination were essential in creating these post-

Emancipation churches that sought to challenge racial injustice and improve the welfare of African Americans as Reconstruction politics proved to blacks that they could not rely on the government or other public institutions for

45 Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 77.

46) See E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro Family in the United States (New York: Dryden, 1948; Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black

support.47 For blacks, the experience of American citizenship was a relative notion. Therefore the church became the arena through which identity formation for black communities occurred—an identity rooted in resistance from oppression and a consciousness of American citizenship lived through their status as minorities. This distinctive view of nationalism would evolve over the next 150 years as different perspectives emerged, but it would still retain a strong notion that the Africa American community was still a “nation within a nation,” especially when systemic racism limited full and equal participation in American society.48

At the same time, as Higginbotham notes, black Baptist churches were also a place in which gender and authority were negotiated. Black men were able to assert authority and leadership in their churches in ways that they could not during slavery.49 However, their leadership did not limit the

opportunity for women to contest men’s dominance as leaders.50 Women in these churches created a vast network of educational and social ministries through which they established their own standards for leadership and authority that did not undermine the work of men, but stood alongside them. These black female networks did not limit the authority of one sex as both

47 Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 3, 5. 48 Ibid., 47-8.

49 Ibid., 3.

50 Although the focus in this section is primarily on the Black Baptist Church, it serves as a representative of the African American Christian community, because by 1906 it was the largest denomination in the country. See Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent, 6-7.

sexes had the same desire to raise the level of racial consciousness,

solidarity, and uplift of the African American community. For women, however, this desire was expressed through improving the literacy rate, opening and supporting seminaries for women that taught them to read and embody a respectability that racism sought to deny them. At the same time, many recognized that they would never command the authority that men did, setting up a dynamic of gender relations that mirrored the white model of women as helpmeets with one important difference—these women were serving

alongside men outside of the traditional women’s sphere of the home. Leaders among these women taught young women what

Higginbotham called the “politics of respectability,” which included lessons on black history and on caring for the family— notions that would manifest again for a growing handful of adolescent rites of passage programs in black

churches in the 1990s.51 Although the model of black women in the church— Baptist, especially— resembled the respectable notions of white women, they were not mere emulations, as they were driven by racial uplift and equal participation in society and not simply by ideas of innocence and purity. Nevertheless, at the heart of black women’s desire for racial uplift was also a