Voices of the silenced : the responsible self in a marginalized community /

Trimiew takes H. Richard Niebuhr's influential model of the "responsible self" and applies it to three African American religious leaders: Bishop Henry McNeal Turner, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and Francis J. Grimk'e. But the well-documented argument quickly reverses direction: their lives are used to criticize the limitations of Niebuhr's model. Trimiew finds Niebuhr's "responsible self" too passive, too secure to serve as a model for marginalized people and their struggle for survival. He attaches particular significance to these three leaders' opposition to Booker T. Washington's accommodationism and to their common demand for full acknowledgement of their people's rights and dignity. Trimiew concludes with a sketchy political theory and moral theology based on meeting human rights and needs. The book everywhere presupposes the validity of liberationist analysis and its division of society into oppressor and oppressed, without attending to Niebuhr's criticism of it. Addressed to African Americans, it nevertheless presents nonblack Americans with an important opportunity to learn from African American theology and praxis, even if they may find themselves occasionally stereotyped in Trimiew's analysis. Strongly recommended. Upper-division undergraduate; graduate; faculty; general. G. E. Paul; Gustavus Adolphus College